Albert writes about software development and how much teamwork is used [1]. He makes an interesting clash of analogies by suggesting that it’s not a “team sport” because “its not like commercial fishing where many hands are used to pull in the net at the same time“. I think that software development for any non-trivial project is a team sport. You don’t have the same level of direct coordination as required for pulling in a net (or the rugby scrum [2] to use a sporting analogy), but that doesn’t stop it being a team effort. Some parts of team development projects are like a relay event, in corporate environments the work is done in parallel simply because everyone is working the same hours but in free software development projects the work is often serialised. I think that it’s often more effective to serialise some work, if someone is actively working on one sections of code it may save time to avoid working in that area until they are finished. There is little benefit in writing code to old interfaces. Some parts of team projects have specialised skill areas (EG debugging, skills in particular programming languages, and graphical design). Soccer is one sport where different rules apply to different players (the goal keeper can use their hands). In ice-hockey the protective clothing used by the goal keeper is considerably different from that used by other players. In most team sports where the aim is to put a ball through a goal at one end (EG basketball and all versions of football) there seems to be some degree of specialisation, some players are dedicated to scoring goals while others are dedicated to defense. The fielding team in cricket has every player assigned to a different part of the field - with slight differences in the skills required. Then there is the issue of large projects such as Linux distributions. It seems to me that a Linux distribution will always comprise multiple teams as well as some individual projects. Maybe we could consider Linux distributions (and distributions of the other free OSs) to be similar to countries that compete in the Olympics. The culture of the Free Software (or Open Source if that’s your idea) community can be compared to the Olympic Spirit. Of course the Olympic idea that people should come together in peace for the Olympic Games and that it’s about honor not money is pretty much dead. Maybe the Free Software development processes should be compared to an ideal of what sporting contests would be if there weren’t unreasonable amounts of money (and therefore corruption) involved. Of course no analogy is perfect and there are many ways in which this one breaks down. One of which is the cooperation between distributions. There is a lot of private discussion between developers of various distributions and upstream developers about how to plan new features. It’s not uncommon for developers to announce certain development decisions as soon as they are made to help other distributions make decisions - for a developer in a distribution project if there is an issue which doesn’t matter much to you or your users then it’s often good to strive for compatibility with other distributions. When users advocate new features or changes they sometimes try multiple distributions. It’s not uncommon for a feature request to be rejected by one distribution and then accepted by another. Once a feature is included in a major distribution the upstream developer is more likely to accept it due to it’s wide testing. Then when the feature is in upstream it’s almost certain to be included in all other distributions. I often recommend that when someone disagrees with one of their bugs being closed as “not a bug” that they try reproducing it in another distribution and reporting it there. As a side note, the criteria for reporting a bug in any free software distribution is that you can describe it in a way that allows other people to reproduce it - whether it’s a bug that afflicts you every day or whether you installed the distribution for the sole purpose of reporting the bug in a new forum is not relevant. As a general rule I recommend that you not have the same bug report open in more than one distribution at any time (if you notice a bug reported in multiple distributions then please add a note to each bug report so that work can be coordinated). As a general rule the only situation where I will open the same bug in multiple forums is if I have been told that the responsible person or people in one forum are unwilling or unable to fix it. Finally, the people who consider that they don’t need to be a team player because they do their coding alone might want to consider Qmail. Dan Bernstein is a great coder and Qmail is by most metrics a fine piece of software, in terms of security Qmail is as good as it gets! If Dan was more of a team player then I believe that his mail server would have been much more successful (in terms of the number of sites using it). However I do understand his desire to have a great deal of control over his software.

• [1] http://www.docunext.com/blog/2008/04/13/the-people-who-live-on-planet-debian/


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(rugby)

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The delays in granting accounts have other effects on Debian as a whole, besides possibly dissuading people from joining.
The constant stream of sponsoring requests from people who are stuck in the final stages of NM are impeding sponsoring generally. DM is not a complete solution because a lot of these uploads are QA uploads - very useful they are too. It's just that there is no good reason why the nearly-DD's preparing the QA upload should even need a sponsor when the only thing preventing them making the upload themselves is a bottleneck in Debian that hasn't changed or improved in what seems like years.
Personally, I don't see evidence of people being dissuaded from joining - I've advocated a couple of new people recently and I know a few more who are prepared to do what is necessary to become a DD. However, I do not think it is right that existing DDs are expected to sponsor uploads from people who have passed all the hurdles of NM and are simply waiting for another DD to do an administrative task.
To echo Lucas, Debian cannot afford to impede recruitment. Debian also cannot afford to distract the existing manpower with increasing amounts of "workarounds" that fail to fix the problem.
Creating the accounts for new NMs should be considered in a similar manner to an RC bug - if the regular DD cannot find time to do it within a particular timeframe, then the task must be opened up to others who have the time to get it done. With RC bugs, we have NMUs. With NM, we need assistants to be given whatever access is necessary to step in and prevent backlogs.

Something I want to add to a post by Slyvian LeGall - motivation does not have to disappear during the wait.
I was lucky, my advocate is project-lead for a Debian sub-project (Emdebian in this case) and I was able to contribute to Emdebian before my DD status was completed. This included uploads to Emdebian that Debian people could use. It included policy decisions, infrastructure development and programming of bespoke utilities.
i.e. my interest was maintained because I had an outlet and an encouraging, supportive, advocate.
When a DD advocates a particular person in NM, there should be some common ground, some experience of working with that person and it should be possible to find a way to maintain a working relationship within that environment.
My experience of the end of NM was one of increasing responsibility, increasing activity, increasing motivation and constant affirmation and assistance from my advocate and others in the sub-project.
So a big thank you to Wookey and debian-embedded in general. It bodes well for the other prospective DD's currently being mentored and encouraged through NM within Emdebian itself.
(Mind you, my NM timescale shows that I didn't wait anywhere near as long as the current delays.)
I fully appreciate that the horrendous delays currently being inflicted on people in NM and upon Debian in general are abominable. If there are ways that existing teams in Debian can adopt and encourage these prospective developers, it can only help in keeping these people interested. It may be a more productive way of helping with the NM problems than just carping on a blog.

This morning, I just wasted two hours of my life trying to deal with a bill with AT&T. I am a work-at-home employee, and my company has a contract with AT&T so that when I deal 1-700-xxx-xxxx, I can reach the internal corporate phone network. In addition, long distance calls on my home office line are billed to the company at the pre-negotiated corporate rates. I also had a (long-dormant) AT&T long distance account, dating from before I started working at this company. Starting at the beginning of the year, that account grew a $18 monthly fee. When I tried to make it go away, the AT&T consumer side of the house said that according to Verizon, that was because I had my long distance service through AT&T. Which was true, in a sense — AT&T was providing my service, but through a corporate account. But the consumer side of AT&T didn’t understand that, and were in my opinion, willfully ignorant. Several phone calls later, I got the 1-800 number for the AT&T corporate side of the house, and those folks said they couldn’t look at consumer/personal AT&T accounts, and implied it was my fault that I had both accounts on the line. (This took over an hour while the support person tried multiple things, all of which was not helpful at all.) I finally googled for AT&T CEO’s office, and found a number on the consumerist.com web site that claimed to be the AT&T CEO’s office. It had long since been directed to a help center, but after I told my tale, I was quickly transferred to an executive customer support person, who was able to fix the problem in ten minutes. The only questions remaining are: 1) Why can’t the different parts of AT&T talk to one another?
2) Will this problem really be solved, or will I see another bill in a month or two and have to spend more time dealing with this mess all over again?
3) When will VOIP services put AT&T long distance out of its misery? (Given the absolute frustration of this morning, this can’t happen soon enough.)
4) Will AT&T compensate me for two hours of frustration and of my life that I will never get back. (Not bloody likely.) One thing is for certain, it will be a long, long, LONG time before I will ever voluntarily choose AT&T to provide service for just about anything. Even an iPhone wouldn’t be enough inducement….

I spend too much of my time trying to talk with people who don't want to discuss, yet somehow I won't stop. I keep hoping that things like suggesting good advice on meeting scheduling will avoid them repeating old mistakes. The most extreme life-and-death example is probably trying to help with Kewstoke Toll Road, where people still speed and someone crashed off again last night (although I don't know what caused last night's crash - could have been a simple accident). Of course, it's better to talk with people who have asked questions and want to hear the answer. I'm currently involved in several groups like that and it makes me much happier [4HWW]. I've even made a confidentiality agreement [Network Blogging article] about one group because I really like the organiser and want to help them, but I've yet to see changes happen because of it and that's probably about all I can write here, which does rather suck. But talking of changes that make me happy, I spotted that Bristol Wireless has now gone further than TTLLP by deciding to change people away from Microsoft Windows when they find it:-

"all Windows stuff must be gone from the premises [...] no longer help do callers favours with broken Windows machines, apart from fixing them properly and permanently by installing Debian"

at their March meeting. Well done, BW! After a request, I finally put four photos from Social Source South West (which was hosted by BW) online, which reminded me to subscribe to watfordgap's travels. Disappointingly, on my first read, it promotes the Suppliers Directory developed by Lasa. That directory is a big problem because it creates a silly barrier to entry which hinders new social enterprises and cooperatives. At a time where most non-profit software is unsustainable and needs to change, requiring three referees is a way to obstruct change. Also, persuading three people to support their work is no substitute for supplier evaluation. Any non-profits who want to lead their sector should approach ICT suppliers directly. The article also mentions Experts Online which is even more short-sighted about computing: "both PC and Mac" indeed! What about GNU/Linux, thin clients, and other changes which are already making a big difference to some non-profits...? But here I go again, talking to a brick wall. I expressed these concerns when that Directory started and it didn't do any good then, so I doubt they'll change it now, near the end of its life. So I'm going to move on. There are lots of people emailing who want to hear from me, so it's time to concentrate on talking with people who do want to listen. If you want to discuss this with me, visit my website for the comments form (click the title or look for a "view original post" link, depending what site you're reading).

Even if i don't like talking about this in public, Lucas Nussbaum blog entry decides me to write this, because I, too, agree that the Debian accounts and keyring situation is severely hurting Debian, and that a solution needs to be found RSN. I wish to be more clear on some of my positions concerning this. First of all, I am actually being hit by a "GPG key expired" status that prevents me to vote and upload packages. It is a little bit my fault because 1) i set an expiration date on my GPG and 2) i only update this expiration date in keyring.debian.org less than 1 month before it expires -- but it was more than 3 months ago... I have pinged different people since then to get the keyring updated without success. I have reuploaded my key without expiration date, and now i know that things can take a long time inside Debian (2nd rank after waiting for my own Debian account creation). Another point is concerning DM (Debian Maintainer). I was against the proposal when it was voted, because i was thinking it will create a "sub" status of Debian Developper (i.e people which are in between debian users and debian developers). I have changed my mind concerning this point the DM process is lightweight and everything seems to be faster with it. This is a really good points for DM (and jetring). I am also considering to sponsor myself to apply to DM, in order to have a non-expired GPG key somewhere. Last but not least, i met several French NM at DebConf 7 (Kibi, Goneri...). At that time, i didn't know them. Since DC7, I have seen them working on different parts of Debian. I think it is a shame to make them wait so long. It is really the best way to make their motivations disappear. Looking back at my own situation, i realize that i was more active before my account creation. This is probably because it takes a long time to process, and i loose hope in a possible account creation. I am now more active in Debian, but still not doing as much as i want to. I don't know the best solution to solve this problem. I tend to think that some key people should delegate their work to other DD (within a team ?). Last year at DC7, Sam Hocevar was already discussing this problem with the people involved in Account Creation. I don't know what was the result of this discussion... Hope, this post will help to show that this problem is important.

It happens that when I get burnt out by Debian (I might blog about that later, but then I just might not) I am forced to face the real world just to learn that Debian was not so bad to begin with. Oh, the irony! I need to smoke more so that I spend less time involved in this crap nobody can change. It is hard enough to change Debian, I don't even want to think about the rest.

If you want to understand the world crisis you are living in...

• Watch Money as Debt, an animated documentary by Paul Grignon, that will make you want to cry (torrent here)


• Then read Why the US is collapsing by Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party.


• I can also suggest Maxed Out on Credit, an independent documentary that chronicles abusive practices in the credit card industry (torrent here)


• The end of Suburbia on peak oil and its implications on the suburban lifestyle, which I have recommended before (torrent here)


• For a nice piece of "fiction" turn to Fast Food Nation. There's shit in your meat, but that's ok as long as you cook it! (torrent here)


• If you can read Spanish, there's a great article about the housing bubble, the credit crunch and how they affect you (on top of not being able to access decent housing at prices that have anything to do with your earnings), even if you don't live in the USA or Madrid ;) The article was written by Leopoldo Abad a, although I first saw it on Nacho Giral's blog: Explicaci n a la crisis financiera que nos azota

It seems spring has finally arrived in northern Germany and I'm laying in bed, trying to get rid of a flu. So in case you are waiting for something from me, you will have to wait a bit longer :-(

Plans for today: stay in bed most of the time, eat properly, walk the dog twice more and do the monthly upload of debian-edu-doc.

/me sadly waves to KiBi - do what is good for you & have some fun!

It has now been more than 4 months since the last Debian developer account was created. 18 contributors have been through all steps, and are simply waiting for this simple administrative task to be done. We are sending a terrible message to potential contributors. We have strong requirements on the technical level of our developers. During the new maintainer process, we ask them to answer about 80 questions about Debian. We ask them to do grunt work. We review their reports twice (New Maintainers’ Front Desk, then Debian Account Manager). But even after we are totally satisfied about what they did, even after they became more qualified than many of our current DDs, we ask them to wait for months, so that the only person allowed to create accounts can finally do his “job”. It discourages the contributors currently in the NM process. I’ve seen several signs of frustration, or even depression. Some of them reduce their involvement in Debian, so we lose them before they even became Debian developers. Some of them consider resigning from the NM process. We should all feel guilty about that. But it also discourages people from joining Debian. Instead, they go to other more welcoming projects, which is totally understandable. Debian isn’t the only distribution with developers from the community those days. There’s Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE. Some of those have nice programs for new contributors, like “school” sessions. Sure, Debian is the “biggest” distribution without a company behind it. But is independance worth all the trouble? Of course, we have Debian Maintainers. DM is great for people who want to work on their packages. But, when we are trying to release lenny, we need more: people who are going to go through RC bugs, submitting patches. Who are going to do QA work. In short: people who care more about the whole distribution. Can we afford not recruiting anybody? Can we run Debian with the current manpower? I don’t think so. There are more than 550 RC bugs in lenny, many packages are currently blocked from migrating to lenny because they are RC-buggy, and many packages are orphaned or neglected. There are also a lot of bugs which haven’t been filed yet (I asked for help with running piuparts, which would probably result in 100-200 new RC bugs, but nobody had time to help). Most of the work that needs to be done is not rocket science. We could use a lot more manpower. Currently, the same small set of developers is doing most of the grunt work. They will get tired too. So, what can we do, as simple developers? There’s no magic solution, but we can try a few things.

1. It seems that some people disagree that there’s a problem. Let’s prove them wrong: we could start a blog meme with “I, too, agree that the Debian accounts and keyring situation is severely hurting Debian, and that a solution needs to be found RSN.” It’s not going to solve the problem by itself, but it will at least show that we consider it very important. Pressure could help.
2. We could start discussing solutions together. Our newly elected DPL said that he would talk with the problematic teams to determine how the situation could be improved. Unfortunately, this has been tried in the past (and failed). It might work this time, of course, but we could prepare a backup plan. So let’s find one or two good plans, and vote on them. (I liked the idea of giving accounts creation/management to DSA. After all, it’s only an sysadmin task once the report has been approved by FD and DAM.)
3. We could push forward Josip Rodin’s proposal about infrastructure teams. It might not solve the DAM problem immediately, but would probably help avoid similar problems in the future.

Notes:
1. Maybe the 18 waiting accounts will be created today or tomorrow. Even if that happens, it won’t solve anything. Waiting 4 months for a simple administrative task is not acceptable, and we need to fix that problem anyway.
2. Account creation is not the only problem. Some people have been unable to upload packages or to vote for the DPL election, because their PGP key expired, and nobody updated it even if they have been asking for more than 4 months.

I install quite a number of internet gateway machines for one of my clients. While eventually he will probably move to using an ASUS EeePC [1] or something similar, the current plan is to keep using desktop PCs (unfortunately server-class machines make too much noise). P4 machines use an unreasonable amount of power and don’t seem worth getting second-hand. P3 machines are the most power efficient machines that have been commodity PCs (with keyboard and monitor), see my computer power use document for an example [2]. So what I would like is to get a dozen name-brand P3 systems at a reasonable price. Currently the only companies I can find selling such machines are charging ridiculous prices (such as $300) with the aim of reaming corporations who want to complete a set of old machines rather than upgrading them all. Most online auctions etc are selling P4 and Celeron 2GHz as the minimum hardware. The Celeron machines are better than P4 (at around 50W) but not as good as P3 (at less than 40W). If you read this post and are in Melbourne, Australia and have a name-brand P3 desktop system that you want to sell then let me know. If you have any suggestions of how to buy such machines then I’m interested in advice.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/01/23/asus-eeepc-as-a-router/


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

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he is not my president I hereby declare that he is not my president, no matter of what (country, largest television group, football team, ...). While I'm at it, I also declare myself SABDPTIC (Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator Pro Tempore of the (Debian) Italian Cabal). Empowered by this charge I also declare that he is not the president of the various members of the (Debian) Italian Cabal either. I will not accept any counter statement, as I'm now the dictator. Now that I've declared this, I can happily resign from my role of dictator. Thanks for all the support messages I've received today by fellows around the world. Saddened. PS (ikiwiki permitting) the hyperlinks to my new non-president in this post are a good example of the usage of the rel="nofollow" microformat.

I don't think any of these are mine, but this needs to be published to the general public (at least until it rests on AlumNit).

Poo Alliterations
- The Earl of Excrement
- The Duke of Dung
- The Prince of Poop
- The Sultan of Shit
- The Father of Feces
- The Matriarch of Merde
- The Steward of Stink
- The Dignitary of Dangleberries
- The Grand Poohbah of Grand Poo
- The Tyrant of Turd
- The Shogun of Scheisse
- The Baron of Bowels
- The Cardinal of Crap
- The Director of Dump
- The Surveyor of Stool
- The Lord of the Log
- The Crown Prince of Cow Patties
- The Royal Archbishop of Road Apples
- The Duchess of Droppings
- The Princess of Poodie
- The Legionnaire of Loaf
- The Supervisor of Stinkers
- The Pharaoh of Floaters
- The Magnate of Manure
- The Tycoon of TCPDumps
- The Czar of Czesspools
- The Mogul of Bowel Movements
- The Ruler of the Runs
- The Dean of Diarrhea
- The Royal Ringleader of Rump Raisins
- The Denizen of Doo-doo
- The Emperor of Evacuations
- The Headmaster of Horrible Odors
- The Titan of the Trots
- The King of Klingons
- The Big Boss of Bum Beans
- The Taskmaster of Turtleheads
- The Supervising Sovereign of Sewer Serpents
- The Colonel of Colon Cobras
- The Nobleman of Number Two
- The Top Dog of Toilet Twinkies
- The Kingpin of Keester Cakes
- The Shepherd of Sea Pickles
- The Head Navigator of Heinie Nuggets
- Rectal Representative
- The Commander of Cow Pie
- The First Mate of Fecal Matter
- The Creator of Cloth Touchers
- The Protector of Porcelan
- The Theologian of the Throne
- The God of Grunts
- The Small Insignificant Yodeling President of Shit in your Pants
- The Diaper Destroyer
- The Loader of Loincloths
- The Pontiff of Plum Pudding
- The Daiymo of Dysentery
- The Master of Montezuma's revenge
- The Squire of Squirts
- The [Weaver] of [WvLog]s
- The Primary Contact of Pudding Cookies
- The Best Producer of Brown Puddles
- The Senior Partner of Steaming Piles
- The Fine Baker of Fudge Brownies
- The Sheriff of Stench
- The Don of the Deuce
- The Torrid Putrid Tainted Pervert of Two-Ply Toilet Paper
- The Sacred Monarch of Skid Marks
- The Main Scientist of Microfeceological Studies
- The G.I. Joe of Gastro Intestinal Journeys
- The Premier of Polyps
- The Brigadier General of Bedpan Gold
- The Plunger Pilot
- The Specialist of Splashers
- The Foreman of Fake Farts
- The Ambassador's Under-Secretary of Astounding Unearthly Scents
- The Old Man and the Sea of Odiferous Monsters in the Sink
- The Bafflingly Blunt and Blasphemous Bearer of Big Bad Beastly Booty Burdens
- The Crisp Pungence of Chain Pooping
- The Goddess of Groundhogging
- The Burly Bobby's Brief Battle with Brim Blasting Bowel Bombs
- The Nasty Neighbour's Noisy and Nefarious Neglect of Normal Nasal Niceties
- The Judge Jury and Executor of Jolly Jumper Excrement
- The Forwarder of the Forwarded
- The Wizard of the Water-closet
- The Grunting Lobber of Great Logs
- The Annoyingly Arrogant Architect of Awful and Abhorrent yet Amazingly Aerodynamic Anal Atrocities
- The Dark, Dangerous and Delusional Dealer of Death-Defying Doses of Disturbingly Decadent Dung
- The Shakespeare of Sinfully Smelly and Supremely Scary Scripture with Soggy Stains and Screaming Splashes
- The Wise but Weakened Warlord Whose Willful Wrath Was Wholly Wrought With Wicked and Wretched Winds from Within
- The Languid and Lackluster Legend of the Little Log from the Loo and its Lavish Life of Luxury in a Lasagna
- The Kahuna of Kaka
- The Emergency Evacuator of Enraged Entrails
- The Squire of Sultry Stinknuggets
- The Deadening Discomfort of a Dearth of Dumps
- The Far From Favourable Fragrance of Four Fragments of Fantastically Fresh Feces
- The Principal of Prodigiously Putrid Pellets
- The Markedly Morose Maintenance of Maniacally Mounded Midden Movements and Mostly Meaty Meals Mysteriously Made Mushy
- The Crass and Cranky Coroner Connecting Clues Concerning a Cornucopia of Casualties Caused by a Crude Cluster of Completely Contemptible Colon Concoctions
- The Thinking Thoughts of a Thinker
- The Horrible, Hubristic Heathen Hoarding Hoary Humps of Hideousness Hailing from His Huge Hairy Heinie in His Harmfully Heady Hovel
- Inane Writings on Irritated Wreathing of the Incubator of Wrath
- That Special Numbness from Sniffing Noodled Stink Nougat
- The Moral Sanctity of the Mystery Shit
- The Ornery Opressor's Opulent Outpost Overseeing the Ordinary Occupants' Outrageous and Ongoing Observance Of an Occasional but Offensive Orgy Of Offal
- The Rector of Relief
- The Rectal Regurgitator
- The Shit Squat
- The Smelly Surprise
- The World Wide Wisdom
- The Slayer Supreme of System Shock

I've made a new release of the chronicle blog compiler. There are a couple of minor changes to the variables exported to the theme templates, as contributed by MJ Ray, and a new spooling system. This works in a simple fashion, and allows you to queue up posts. For example If you write a new entry containing the psuedo-header "Publish: 20th April 2008" and you have a crontab entry containing this:

  chronicle-spooler
    --spool-dir=~/blog/spool/  \
    --live-dir=~/blog/data/  \
    --post-move='cd ~/blog && make upload'

It works as expected. When you call this on the 20th April the file will be moved from ~/blog/spool into ~/blog/data, and your blog will be rebuilt & uploaded. The implementation was different than the original suggestion, but is nice and clean, and can be used to do other things with a little bit of effort. Anyway if you see this entry the spooling system is working! ObQuote: 30 Days of Night.

I've bought a new hard drive for my laptop recently because I finally got fed up of my constantly-full disk. Having to browse around in $HOME looking for stuff which can be safely deleted just because I want to run fetchmail (and that would fill up my disk) just sucks. So, after getting a cheapo 160 GB 2.5" disk (the old one was 80 GB), I had to move all my data to the new disk. As I didn't want to re-install from scratch I started with dd'ing the whole disk over to the new one (using a live CD and an external USB hard-drive enclosure). This took pretty long, but went fine otherwise. The new disk then contained all my partitions (hda1-hda3) and also GRUB in the MBR etc., as expected, but was still only 80 GB in size, of course. So the first step is to enlarge the hda3 partition, which is a dm-crypt volume that contains various LVM logical volumes (for /home, /usr, /var, swap, etc.), each of them using the ext3 filesystem (except for the swap volume, of course). 0. Perform backups, boot from a live CD Important: If you plan to perform any of these steps, make sure you have recent backups! I take no responsibility for any data loss you might experience. You have been warned! First off, you should boot from a live CD which has all the tools you'll need, including cryptsetup, LVM tools, resize2fs, etc. You can use the nice grml live CD for instance. 1. Resize partition This sounds scary (and it is!), but the way I enlarged the encrypted hda3 partition was by first deleting it via fdisk. First, issue the "p" command in fdisk, write down the exact start cylinder of hda3. Then delete hda3. Now create a new hda3 partition which starts at exactly the same cylinder as the old hda3 but is larger, i.e. in my case it has ca. 80 GB additional space. Your data will still be there if you don't screw up, and the partition is bigger now. Using something like gparted will likely not work as expected, as the partition is encrypted! 2. Resize dm-crypt volume Nothing to be done, it seems dm-crypt automatically adapts and notices that the partition is bigger. Just "open" the encrypted volume using cryptsetup now:

  $ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/hda3 foo

3. Resize LVM physical volume Next step is to tell LVM about the new space. We first resize the LVM physical volume on the foo "partition".

  $ pvresize /dev/mapper/foo

That will use all newly-available space for the volume. 4. Resize LVM logical volume Now we can pump the new space into any of the logical volumes (or into multiple ones). I only increased one logical volume, my /home:

  $ lvresize -L +74 GB /dev/vg-whole/lv-home

5. Resize ext3 filesystem The final step is to resize the ext3 filesystem on the lv-home logical volume (after running the obligatory fsck -n). I first used ext2resize, but that failed horribly:

  $ fsck -n /dev/vg-whole/lv-home
  $ ext2resize /dev/vg-whole/lv-home
  error: Invalid argument: seeking to 3258921205760

This seems to be a known bug, ext2resize apparently cannot handle large disks or something, and as I found out a few minutes later it's pretty much deprecated anyway. The better solution is to use resize2fs:

  $ fsck -n /dev/vg-whole/lv-home
  $ resize2fs /dev/vg-whole/lv-home

That's it. We can now reboot the system from disk and enjoy ca. 80 GB of additional hard drive space. Yay!

I don't know if androids dream of electric sheep, but I've certainly been losing a lot of sleep over Google's Android, and am glad that the Android Developer Challenge is winding up, as I've been doing all Android, all the time for the past month or so. I have greatly enjoyed working with Android, as it's much more capable than Java ME. It's still very much a work in progress, and only time will tell if Google and their partners are able to best current mobile programming systems... or if the web will simply obviate the whole thing, as it's doing in many other areas. Win or lose, I will continue to support Android as a platform that Hecl runs on, but in the meantime, I hope to go back and look at some less future-oriented code and get back to some Java ME work. More on that soon... In any case, here's hoping that the contest judges see the value in bringing a scripting language to mobile phones! I also hope to see actual hardware soon, as I'm really looking forward to getting my own Android phone.

I got my FON router delivered to my house about 2-3 months ago, but I didn't realize what it was until I was cleaning up my office to leave for Buenos Aires. Glad to have a project, I set it up on my home network while I was waiting for the taxi to the airport. I've only really started playing with it since we got back. FON is an international effort, originally based in Spain, to share extra network capacity with roaming wireless users. You set up a router in your home (or wherever), and any other FON user can connect to the Internet through your network. Conversely, you can connect on any other FON network. There is a lot of grass-rootsiness to FON, but it's a commercial project, which turns some people off. I originally heard of FON at Wikimania 2007, where FON provided wireless routers for each attendee's room. It was a nice service, although the doubled-up ESSIDs were kind of confusing at the time. They make a lot more sense for home use. I was impressed by how many FON spots there are on the Montreal/Plateau (see http://maps.fon.com/ for details); about one ever 2-6 blocks in any direction. I think there's an opportunity here to see a higher concentration, though. I'd love to see co peration between FON and, say, le Sans Fil, possibly involving the Ville de Montr al. Apparently there are already FON cities in different parts of Europe, so it's not impossible. I think FON is an interested development for WiFi -- a hybrid between community-based initiatives and a commercial venture. I'm not sure if it will be successful, but I think it's a step in the right direction. tags: fon wifi wireless network

My legs hurt. It hurts to sit. It hurts to stand. It hurts to walk. $DEITY knows what it will feel like to ride my bike. How did I do this? It wasn't some bizarre biking accident. I was laying cables under the floor between the two offices at the opposite corners of my building yesterday. I lifted three floorboards and four carpets and drilled one hole. Afterwards, I rebuilt some shelves. How did that hurt my legs??? Today is Blogger Appreciation Day [UNOFFICIAL] so I'd like to thank Steve for Chronicle which is now powering this blog instead of the old homebrew. Meanwhile, messages that came in while I was AFK included a strange one from Paul, Steve being elected as Debian Project Leader (well done!), 'Free Software in Ethics and Practice' - Richard Stallman, Thursday 1st May, Interview: How a hacker became a freedom fighter From New Scientist Print Edition, Understanding Design & Computers: Notes from an Introduction to OpenMoko, by Ole Tange for UKUUG Finally, in a cycling and cooperatives cross-over, this article on Hammond's crash also mentions the other two Brits, who ride for cooperative teams. I watched the race, but didn't see much of them.

For some time I have been running Google Adsense adverts on my blog. Not long after I started running the adverts the revenue exceeded the amount of money I pay for net access, so it’s worth having. I recently increased the amount of advertising by including an advert in the middle of the post and received one negative comment from a reader who doesn’t like reading content with adverts in the middle. I have just changed my advertising to have that advert spot in question be before the start of the content rather than in the middle (I’m not sure if that will make them more or less happy). It seems expected nowadays that there will be a moderate amount of advertising on all web sites which have good content and don’t charge membership fees, many of my blog posts cite as references pages on web servers run by media companies that have significant amounts of advertising. Chris Samuel is considering implementing advertising [1] and is planning to not display adverts to “friends” (which means people who have commented or who are referred by social media sites). One significant problem with this idea is that sometimes the adverts become part of the blog conversation. Google adverts give an idea of which of the things that people are prepared to pay money for are considered by the Google algorithm to be related to the post in question. In my experience it’s not uncommon for people who comment on blog posts (both through the blog interface and through private correspondence) to reference the contents of adverts. Also while writing this post I updated my post about car sharing because I discovered a third car-share company through the adverts on my own blog [2]. I know one professional journalist who blocks the adverts on his own site so that his writing will not be biased (or be perceived to be biased) by his advertisers (which makes sense given his situation), but for my situation it clearly makes sense to review the advertised offerings of all three companies that compete in this space in Melbourne and there is no potential for bias (incidentally all three of them are advertising on my blog post). A problem with giving a different version of the content for friends (in the more traditional meaning of the word - as opposed to using the word to mean people who have visited your blog in a certain way) is that they will not be able to correctly review your web site. I regularly notify friends and people who do worthy things of deficiencies that I discover in their web sites and occasionally receive such notifications from other people. I don’t want to have bugs in my site concealed from friendly people who would like to help me out and displayed to random people who don’t care and will respond by visiting another site. When such things are discussed one topic that is mentioned is putting advertising in an RSS feed. I have no plans to do this, such RSS advertising would not be acceptable to Planet installations, but it would not be technically challenging to give an advert free feed to Planets but give adverts to everyone else. I think that most people who read my blog through RSS feeds will see adverts when they want to comment on my posts or when they want to forward the URLs or reference them in their own blog posts (always click on the permalink before forwarding - when a blogger messes up their permalinks it’s embarrassing if you forward them without checking). So I encourage Chris to put adverts on his blog and to show them to me.

• [1] http://www.csamuel.org/2008/04/13/pondering-adverts-feedback-sought


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/04/13/car-sharing-in-melbourne/

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Once again, I'm sitting in an airport (CDG) and enjoying the benefits of IP over DNS to bypass the outraegous rates for wireless access (about 10 euros for 1h if that didn't change since last year). Actually, having IP over DNS work is pretty simple. What you need is:

• A domain that you control (ie you can create en entry in it)
• A server running DNS services on the Internet, preferrably with a static IP address, preferrably with no need of external DNS services
• Appropriate software

"Appropriate software" here is, IMHO, the iodine package in Debian. There's nothing as easy to setup as it is. There is no package for etch, AFAIK, but backporting it is straightforward. You then need to create an entry in your foo.bar domain, such as "tunnel.foo.bar" and have it point to your static address. Then you run iodine on that server, listening to port 53 (with a configured password). That creates a virtual interfaces with something like 10.0.0.1 as address. When you need IP over DNS access with your roaming laptop, all you need is to connect to the expensive network, then launch iodine and provide it two parameters: the "tunnel.foo.bar" address and a local address (for instance 10.0.0.2). If everything works well, you'll be prompted for the password and voil . You have a tunnel between your local 10.0.0.2 address and the remote 10.0.0.1. The rest is a matter of network routing and you can now access the entire Internet through your remote server with no charge. The entire traffic goes through DNS requests to the local DNS server. That can be fairly slow but all a geek needs is receiving/sending mail and remote SSH access, right? This doesn't work in every place, unfortunately. Many wireless providers block such traffic in some way. But, at least in A roports de Paris, I can promise that will work..:-)