Kiwis have to be one of the cutest birds of all time. A bit chubby and clumsy looking, they are (to me, at least), walking, breathing icon of furry cuteness. Truth be told, I did not see one live in action during my recent trip to New Zealand, but I did see a Weka bird which is pretty similar. (Micah and I just consulted the Internets and agreed that we did in fact see cherubic Kiwi not a Weka. In fact, Micah almost ran one over on the west coast of the southern island but his quick reflexes born from years of saving servers while typing saved the bird. So as you can tell by now I finally got to go to New Zealand for a few weeks, even able to travel the south island before attending THE Linux conference of the region, LCA where I gave a talk (video to be posted when available). I jumped at the opportunity and was thrilled to find out that I could actually spend some time traveling around before the intense week long conference. So on January 5th I headed down with Micah to what I have found out is one of the windiest cities on earth ( Windy Wellington ) for a few days before heading to the south island to do a loop on the northern half of the island. I wanted to conquer the mountains made famous by a certain set of movies, but last semester was all about sitting in front of the computer, a sort of agonizing life of the mind, which did not prepare me physically for mountain trekking or as it call it there, tramping. So we decided to stick close to the coast (with one transalpine train that serenaded us through some awesome mountain passes) and hike along the coast, snorkel and swim, and kayak. After Andrew showed us around Wellington, we headed to the sea town of Kaikoura brimming with sea life, such as seals, dolphins, and birds. The two highlights there were our snorkeling trip and a hike along the peninsula. Originally we were going to go diving but I arrived to NZ with a head cold so we opted for the sinus friendlier version and snorkeled in the massive kelp forest, which was strikingly beautiful (I am used to tropical reefs and waters). There happened to be a lot of seals and given their curious nature, they would dart over right next to you and play. One seal I called him the twirler was chubby and mellow and twirled next to me for a long while. The lady seals were sleeker and faster and liked to dive deep down and the zoom up and surprise you. As someone who has spent a lot of time underwater, I found it fun and weird to be with animals that pay attention to you given that most of the sea life ignores you. The hike in Kaikoura was fantastic as well. You go high on a bluff and stare down at this water sparkling with the most beautiful blue hues brought out even more majestically by the white rocks. If I were to go back I would hike along the water and up above on the bluff. After a brief stopover in Christchurch to visit a friend, we took the transalpine train (across Arthur s pass) which was superbly beautiful and arrived on the west coast whose seas are far more rough, rocky, andtemperamental than on the east coast. The vegetation is lush as lush can be and you get the feeling that dinosaurs would have been a happy lot in these parts. The cool part about this area are the many rivers that feed into the ocean (we spent an afternoon swimming and exploring the caves in one) and then what are called the pancake rocks, which are odd geological creatures that really amaze. We then made our way to the Marlborough Sounds area, which includes the city of Nelson (apparently the sunniest in New Zealand) as well as many olive and grape vineyards in outlying areas. We spent some time in the Alpine lakes region hiking but more of the time on the coast. The highlight for me and it is a place I would love to go back to is the Abel Tasman National Park. We spent time hiking and kayaking there and you can even hike down the coast for 5-6 days (there are excellent camping facilities along the way). The coast is simply majestic with alpine like forest conditions (unfortunately a cool old tree whose name I can t remember is no longer common). This forest is situated along the most stunning waters, an electric but totally clear turquoise blue deceivingly inviting because the water was quite cold (but not as cold as the Oregon coast over the summer, which I went swimming in only once after weeks of bike travel). Along with the blue, parts of the coastal waters were a stunning clear green that I have never seen despite my many sea travels. If you ever plan on going to the South Island, I would not miss this area and might even try to spend a few days or more hiking the coastal trails and listening to the cool-as/sweet as birds, one of which has double vocal cords so it sings what sounds to be like totally electronic bird calls. We returned via the same ferry a massive 7 story ship from Picton to Wellington but the conditions were far far worse during our return trip. When we got out of the sounds, we hit the Cook Straight, notorious for being rough and tumble. And indeed, once we hit the waves, I felt like I was no longer in a boat but amusement park ride, the bow of the ship thrown high only to fall hard on upon the waves. It was sort of fun or fun for about 10 minutes until people, most especially kids, started yaking all over the place. It was really the most flagrant yakfest I have ever experienced (I mean it is a 7 story ferry, you can fit a lot of people on that boat) and that made the sail particularly difficult. I have pretty strong sea legs, never once getting sick sick during the year I spent at sea but massive yaking will bring out the sea sick feeling in even the hardiest of sea souls and I was thrilled to arrive in Wellington. Wellington is the only large city I spent any considerable time in and it is a pretty awesome one. The city center area is flat and by the water, with a magnificent area filled with museums, the national library, parks, breweries, and piers where kids like to jump off high things. The botanical gardens were the most beautiful I have been to and since I am a flower nut, I was in high heaven. In this area there are a ridiculous number of great coffee shops (NYC has a thing or two to learn as we don t have enough, I suspect it has something to do with insane real estate prices). The city is surrounded by hills populated by houses, some of the precipitously perched on cliffs that require lifts to get to! It was a wonderful home base for what was a sweet as conference (as they would say down there). And I hope to write about it sometime soon.

Many have commented on the event. As I noted in a reply to Romain Beauxis s post, the only reason Google was the default search engine in Ubuntu, and is still in other distros is because Mozilla has a revenue deal with Google. Which means that actually, Mozilla might be getting money from Debian, Ubuntu and other distros users actions on the Google search engine. (maybe not from Debian, though, because of the search url including iceweasel instead of firefox). Now, at least, Ubuntu will be the one getting the money. One has to know that these revenue deals probably don t cost a dime to Google and Microsoft (through Yahoo), because they may be transferring revenue they get from the extra advertising revenue they can get from these users being using their search engine as default. Anyways, much more interesting to know is how Google is going to react on other services: some core functionalities of Firefox (geolocation, safe browsing) are based on Google services. These are actually a possible problem for Debian, depending on the agreement between Mozilla and Google, and I have yet to address the RC bug I filed on my own package about these. Now, since Google is going to get less advertising revenue from Ubuntu users in favour of one of its competitor, why should they provide the geolocation and safe browsing to these users ?

Only few days ago a long-standing bug in coreboot, the Free Software x86 BIOS/fimware project, has been fixed: Adding support for a laptop/notebook. The code was developed by coresystems GmbH (thanks a lot!). Quoting from the announcement:

coreboot is running on a multitude of different computers, ranging from tiny embedded systems as small as the palm of your hand over desktop and server systems to super computers with thousands of nodes. However, one might say that in the area of mobile computers coreboot has to catch up, compared to its support of other devices. Thus, I am especially glad to announce that coresystems GmbH is releasing coreboot for the Roda RK886EX a.k.a Rocky III+ notebook today. It's a rugged notebook, protected against shock, vibration, dust and humidity:
http://www.roda-computer.com/en/products/notebooks/rocky-iii-rk886ex.html We have been testing various Linux distributions as well as Windows XP and Windows 7 booting on this nice notebook. I want to sincerely thank those who made this project possible with their funding:

• secunet Security Networks AG
• Bundesamt f r Sicherheit in der Informationstechnologie (Federal Office for Information Security, BSI)

A big thank you also goes to everyone who worked with coresystems on this project.

The committed patch series includes improved support for the Intel i945 / ICH7 chipset (which was also written by coresystems), the SMSC LPC47N227 Super I/O, the Texas Instruments Cardbus+Firewire bridge TI PCI7420, and finally the Renesas M3885x Embedded Controller (EC). Btw, the latter, the so-called embedded controller (sometimes integrated in the Super I/O, sometimes it's an extra chip) is one of the major problems for coreboot support on laptops. They are almost always undocumented (i.e., no public datasheets are available), but they have low-level control over power/battery management, early power-up sequence, and often include keyboard controller functionality and other important stuff. Luckily, for this notebook an EC datasheet is available. Checkout the coreboot EC support code for the Renesas M3885x for an impression of what this stuff is all about. Anyway, there is hope that this laptop will only be the first in a row of multiple supported ones in the future. Interested developers and contributors are of course always welcome on the coreboot mailing list :-)

Slaughter

I received my first patch to slaughter today, which made me happy. (I've made a new release including it, and updated the list of primitives to actually document the file-deletion facilities which previously I'd omitted to avoid encouraging mass-breakage.)

Signing Binaries

Andrew Pollock mentions that the days of elfsign might be numbered. This is a shame because I've always liked the idea of signing binaries. Once upon a time, in the 2.4.x days, I wrote a kernel patch which would refuse to execute non-signed binaries. (This was mostly a waste of time; since it denied the execution of shell scripts. Which meant that the system init scripts mostly failed. My solution in the end was to only modprobe my module once the system was up and running, and hope for the best ...) Right now, having performed only a quick search, I don't see anything like that at the moment.

• elfsign will let you store a binaries MD5 hash.
• bsign will let you sign a binary with a GPG key.

But where is the kernel patch to only execute such hashed/signed binaries, preventing the execution of random shell scripts and potentially trojaned binaries? Without that I think signing binaries is a crazyish thing to do. Sure you can test that a file hasn't been modified, but even without those tools you can do the same thing via md5sums. (ObRandom: Clearly if you mass-modify all your binaries the system md5sums database will be trashed.)

Perl UTF

I've received a bug report against chronicle, my blog compiler. It seems that some versions of perl fail to run this:

     #
     #  Run the command, reading stdout.
     #
    open( FILTER, "$cmd ;utf8" ) or
       die "Failed to run filter: $!";

Removing the ;utf8 filter allows things to work, but will trash any UTF-8 characters from the output - so that's a nasty solution. I'm not sure what the sane solution is here, so I'm going to sit on it for a few days and continue to write test scripts.

ObSubject: 300

Last night here at BSP I released nagios-plugins (1.4.14-1), which has a couple of fixes and enhancements. For more information, see the changelog.
The main change may, that with this version, the package should be installable on non-linux archs, where iputils-ping is not available. The downside of using inetutils-ping is, that its behavior is different from iputils-ping. As result of this, check_ping will timeout much often, even if there isn t any problem and you will have false positives. As suggested long ago, at least on this archs, you should consider to replace the use of check_ping with check_icmp.

Debian BSP in Tokyo. Looking at packages... most of time spent with catching up with recent pbuilder changes and fixing cowbuilder / qemubuilder to go along with it.

Among the many columns and lesser sections of my favorite national newspaper I enjoy reading the Centenaria column Notes published one hundred years ago in Mexico City local newspapers. A couple of decades ago, we started having policletos on the streets "Polic as bicicletos". Cops on bikes. I don't know if we had policletos as a continuous presence before that, but I do remember it being somewhat controversial in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Anyway, this snippet (and sadly I cannot capture the 1910 writing style in English) was a joy to read:

January 18, 1910 Good results of using bicycles for surveillance As we have come to know, the service the first-class policemen are doing on bike, mainly during night time, has yielded great results, as the street policemen often fell asleep and woke up upon hearing a horse approaching, which does not happen anymore because the first-class policemen make much quicker rounds, and before the street policemen even think of it, their superior is standing in front of them. It also seems that robberies, so frequent during the nights, have ceased because the burglars, hastily breaking the locks, are caught by the bike-riding policemen, given the machines barely make any noise, and besides, they cannot run away because they are chased with no effort.

The culture of freedom lies in the details Here is an interesting blog post by Bradley Kuhn about Ubuntu, Debian, and (warning: my interpretation ahead) the culture of freedom. While reading it, I had kinda moment of truth, because just yesterday I was musing with Mehdi and Lucas on the fact that Debian is basically the only remaining distribution among the mainstream ones (if that means something) that is free from the ground up, including its infrastructure. We "just" seek hardware via donations and then we run, thanks to the amazing work of DSA, our own free infrastructure on top of it. Let's cherish this value! Thanks to Roberto Di Cosmo for the pointer to Bradley's post. Update: there's a thread on the ubuntu-devel mailing list about Bradley's post.

My mutt said this last night:

 894   + Jan 15 Archive Adminis (0,4K) ipcfg_0.1_amd64.changes ACCEPTED

This obviously means that if you wish to use it, you no longer need to go through git; you can just add experimental to sources.list and run 'apt-get install ipcfg'. A few notes, though:

• I missed a few build-dependencies, so it's only available on amd64 for now. Yes, I should use pbuilder more (I did for the 0.3 upload, which went in today).
• The documentation is somewhat lacking. I just found out that the documentation isn't actually installed in the binary package, so you have to download the source package (or check out the git repository). This will be fixed for the next release. The documentation also currently consists of a few .txt files rather than (a) proper man page(s). This will likely take some more time.
• ipcfg Conflicts:, Replaces: and Provides: ifupdown. This is because there is no proper virtual package name for it to conflict/replace/provide. I have filed a bug, #554194, against debian policy, to request it be made, but so far this is not yet finished (and indeed was somewhat dead during the period that I had no time to work on ipcfg). This may confuse some packages that really do depend on ifupdown.
• ifdown works, but not reliably so. This will be my next main point of focus.
• If you use the insserv automatic ordering system for initscripts, then you must either purge ifupdown or remove its initscript before installing ipcfg; otherwise, the availability of two initscripts that provide network configuration will confuse the hell out of insserv.

And in case you wonder why the hell I went from 0.1 to 0.3:

ipcfg (0.2) experimental; urgency=low
  * Rebuild without .git directory. D'oh.
 -- Wouter Verhelst <wouter>  Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:43:09 +0100

srsly

It seems that I m not blogging as often as I was some months ago. The main reason is microblogging, which is somehow quicker, even though briefer. It is also less informative, I guess, because 140 characters is a very limited length. Probably because of that, a friend of mine asked me to write a proper blog entry about this, and I think that he s probably right. openFrameworks is an open source toolkit, released under the MIT license, written in C++ and designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation. According to its authors, it was developed for folks using computers for creative, artistic expression, and who would like low level access to the data inside of media in order manipulate, analyze or explore. I attended a short course in openFrameworks some months ago, and decided that if I wanted to experiment with it, I should somehow structure the building process of the library a bit, remove the dependency on FMOD, which is not DFSG-free, even though that might require remove the whole audio subsystem, make it buildable without Code::Blocks, and hopefully build some more-or-less proper packages. I ve also added some pkg-config files, so that it becomes easier to build projects based in openFrameworks (as easy as g++ source.cpp -o test $(pkg-config openframeworks openframeworks-addons cflags libs) ). Even though the packages are still not as good as they should, they re absolutely usable right now. I ve uploaded them, as well as their dependencies, to my Ubuntu PPA (although I m using those packages in my Debian), in case that someone is interested. I ve also uploaded a couple of tiny examples (the second one downloaded from here) of openFrameworks.

The weather in January in the UK is normally very drab, and this January has been no exception. Despite this I've found myself uncharactistically upbeat. I'm enjoying work, I've got a lot to do, and I feel like I'm making real progress in "real life" too. (It's a shame Debian has taken a back seat for the time being...) This morning was marginally less drab.

Magnus Larsson gave an interesting TED talk about using bacteria to transform dunes into architecture [1]. The concept of making a wall across Africa to stop sand dunes from overtaking farm land is obviously a good one, the idea of using bacteria to convert sand into sandstone to do so cheaply is also good. But making that into houses seems a little risky. I wouldn t want to live under shifting sand with only bacteria generated sandstone to protect me. Cory Doctorow gave an interesting speech titled How to Destroy the Book , here is the transcript [2]. He talks about how much he loves books and described his opposition to the DRM people who want to destroy the book culture. Sendmail has a DKIM Wizard for generating ADSP (Domain Signing Policy) records [3]. If I knew that ADSP records were so easy to implement then I would have used them a year ago! Loretta Napoleoni gave an insightful TED talk about the economics of terrorism [4]. Apparently the US dollar used to be THE currency for international crime, when the PATRIOT act was passed it s anti-money-laundering provisions encouraged many shady people to invest in Euros instead and thus led to the devaluation of the US currency. It s also interesting to note that terrorist organisations are driven by economics, if only we could prevent them from making money Ryan Lobo gave an interesting TED talk about his photographic work [5]. The effectiveness of the all-women peace-keeping force is noteworthy. The part about the Liberian war criminal who has become an evangelical Christian and who now tours Liberia begging forgiveness from his victims (and their relatives in the case of the people he murdered). Should someone like that be permitted to remain free if his victims forgive him? Charles Stross has an appealing vision for how Apple and Google can destroy the current mobile telephony market [6]. I can t wait for the mobile phone market to be entirely replaced by mobile VOIP devices! James Geary gave an interesting TED talk about metaphors [7]. The benefits of metaphors in poetry are well known (particularly in lyrics), but the impact of metaphors in influencing stock market predictions surprised me. Shaffi Mather gave an interesting TED talk about his company that makes money from fighting corruption [8]. Instead of paying a bribe you can pay his company to force the official(s) in question to do the right thing. Apparently the cost of doing so tends to be less than 10% the cost of the bribe if you know what you are doing. His previous company was an ambulance service that charges what the patient can afford is also interesting. John Robb wrote an interesting article about lottery winners and griefers [9]. He suggests that publishing the names, addresses, etc of rich people will be a new trend in Griefing. One thing I ve been wondering about is the value of the HR database at a typical corporation. A single database typically contains the home addresses, phone numbers, and salaries of all the employees. It would be very easy to do an SQL dump and store it on a USB flash device to carry out of the office. Then it could be sold to the highest bidder. They could probably make a market in the private data about rich people in the same way that there is currently a market for credit card data maybe they have already done this but it s kept quiet to stop others from implementing the same idea. Michael Smith wrote an interesting article for the Washington Times about home schooling and socialisation [10]. It seems that people who were home schooled as children tend to be more academically successful and involved in civic life as well as being happier and having career success. Richard Seager wrote an interesting article for American Scientist about ocean currents and heat transfer from the tropics [11]. It seems that when the ocean currents shut down the UK and other parts of northern Europe won t be getting a mini ice-age. Ian Lance Taylor (most known for the gold linker) has written a good summary of the situation in regard to climate change and what must be done about it [12]. The Wrath of the Killdozer article about how one angry man converted a bulldozer into a tank [13]. This wasn t a big bulldozer (every mining company has bigger ones) and he didn t have any serious weapons (only rifles). Imagine what terrorists could do if they started with a mining vehicle and serious weapons Simon Singh has written about being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association [14]. The BCA didn t like his article criticising chiropractors for claiming to be able to treat many conditions unrelated to the spine. Remember, chiropractors are not doctors all they can do is alleviate some back problems. See a GP if you have any medical condition that doesn t involve a sore back or neck. Avoid uppity chiropracters who claim to be able to cure all ills. Nicholas D. Kristof wrote an interesting article for the New York times about how happy the people in Costa Rica are [15]. He claims that the Costa Rican government s decision in 1949 to dissolve it s armed forces and invest the money in education is the root cause of the happy population. Maybe if the US government would scale back military spending the US population could be as happy as the Costa Ricans. While there are good arguments for having some sort of military, there are no good arguments for spending more money on the military than the rest of the world combined (as the US does).

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html
• [2] http://thevarsity.ca/articles/23855
• [3] http://www.sendmail.org/dkim/wizard
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/loretta_napoleoni_the_intricate_economics_of_terrorism.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/ryan_lobo_through_the_lens_of_compassion.html
• [6] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/12/21st_century_phone.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/james_geary_metaphorically_speaking.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/shaffi_mather_a_new_way_to_fight_corruption.html
• [9] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/01/journal-ultimate-griefing-in-a-lottery-economy.html
• [10] http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/13/home-schooling-socialization-not-problem/
• [11] http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.999,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx
• [12] http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/296
• [13] http://www.damninteresting.com/the-wrath-of-the-killdozer
• [14] http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/340
• [15] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/opinion/07kristof.html

NZZ Folio, the monthly that comes with my newspaper, had this topic in its January edition, sparking a few thoughts about capital punishment. Why am I against capital punishment? Primarily, because no justice system will ever be safe (make no mistakes, know no abuse.) Then there is the fact that life is something special and isn't ours to take away, but on the other hand, we assume that it's ok for us to judge that somebody should be locked in the rest of his life, and I'm not quite sure how big that difference is. Ok, I one thought. Everything else I was going to write was just technical stuff on the execution of death penalty, which I have established I'm against. This engineer's brain can't stop thinking yes but what if ...

I read The Iliad recently; see my review of it here. This article isn t about The Iliad, but about Shmoop s coverage of it. I have never been a person who puts much stock on study guides before, and my own prejudice is that they have probably earned their reputation as useful for little more than a tool to help students pass exams without reading the material. However, I felt rather unequal to reading The Iliad; after all, it has been many years since I had been exposed to Greek mythology, and even then it was very brief. I had remembered from Amazon s blog that they are offering some of the classics with a Shmoop study guide built in. I figured the $2.39 would be worth it. But I m not sure it was. The resulting ebook has two sections: the main text, and the Shmoop overview. The overview contains essentially the information available for free on their site. This information is pretty good. It has some overviews of the entire book, plus summaries of each chapter. They helpfully provide the backstory in the chapter summaries, so I know why certain gods are on the side of the Trojans and the others on the side of the Achaeans. It helped me figure out the point to some of the actions described on the text. These are linked to at the beginning of each book (chapter) of the Iliad, which was a bit inconvenient because I prefer to read them after reading the main text. Nevertheless, it wasn t a big problem. The summaries were written colloquially, sometimes too much so. I grinned as the less grabbin , more stabbin summary of the Achaeans being told to salvage armor from the dead later and keep fighting now. I cringed as no way Jose , and rolled my eyes as it described how one of the heroes got owned . That would have been less clear than the original for many. I would probably have given the Shmoop edition 4 or 5 stars on Amazon were it not for numerous boneheaded mistakes they made. The commentary uses one translation (Lattimore), while the included text uses a different one (Butler). That s bad enough, but it gets worse: Lattimore uses the Greek names for the gods and heroes, while Butler uses the Roman ones. So you can be reading through the text, learning about Jove, Ulysses, Juno, and Mars. But the commentary refers instead to Zeus, Odysseus, Hera, and Ares. Now, some might have memorized the Greek and Roman names for everyone, but then such people probably aren t wanting a study guide. I finally had to print out a page to help me understand the study guide. That is terrible, and completely inexcusable. They should have used the same translation for the text as the commentary, or at least have provided parenthetical notes throughout the commentary. Next, they really did a poor job of the main text itself. They have apparently grabbed the Butler ASCII text from Project Gutenberg, and cut and pasted it into some editor. I say this because each line renders as a paragraph; that is, the text doesn t reflow to fit the screen as every single other book does. Worse, it s too wide for the Kindle. So you get one line full width, the next only half as wide as the display (some of the first having wrapped), then the next full width again, on down. Butler is a prose, not a poetic, translation, so this is pointless. Moreover, the line endings are exactly where they are at Project Gutenberg. So, what we have here is that somebody at Shmoop cut and pasted from their own website and Project Gutenberg, and nobody bothered to check if the resulting product was crap. At least with the new Kindle firmware you can read in landscape mode to prevent most of the lines from wrapping. Still, I m very annoyed at this. There are other flaws. They highlighted some passages in the text. Clicking on them goes to some commentary about it. OK, fine. But why are some passages highlighted in the text, and some mentioned in the chapter summary? There seemed no rhyme or reason. The highlighted passages commentary was iffy in quality. Sometimes it was useful, and sometimes it asked a question of the sort I might expect in a jr. high English question When has pride helped you in your life? or some such. Worse, not all of the highlights linked to the correct place, and they also suffered from the Greek/Roman name issue. In all, Shmoop has helped me understand The Iliad and place it in context. But they need to spend a lot more effort on copyediting. Even a couple of hours of someone actually looking at their Kindle product on an actual Kindle would have immediately shown these problems. They could have made a far better product with a few hours more effort.

I have been pondering the idea behind this article for a while, and finally had a bit of time to implement it. The basic idea is this: certain platforms have higher costs in terms of memory per concurrent connection. Those translate into increased costs in dollar terms.
Nota Bene: Having run LangPop.com for some time, I'm used to people getting hot and bothered about this or that aspect of statistics that are rough in nature, so I'm going to try and address those issues from the start, with more detail below.

• Constructive criticism is welcome. I expect to utilize it to revisit these results and improve them. Frothing at the mouth is not welcome.
• There is something of a "comparing apples and oranges" problem inherent in doing these sorts of comparisons. As an example, Rails gives you a huge amount of functionality "out of the box", whereas Mochiweb does much less. More on that below.
• I am not familiar with all of these systems: meaning that I may not have configured them as I should have. Helpful suggestions are, of course, welcome. Links to source code are provided below.
• You can likely handle many more 'users' than concurrent connections, which means multiple browsers connecting to the site at the same time.
• Programmer costs are probably higher than anything else, so more productive platforms can save a great deal of money, which more than makes up for the cost of extra memory. There's a reason that most people, outside of Google and Yahoo and sites like that, don't use much C for their web applications. Indeed, I use Rails myself, even though it uses a lot of memory and isn't terribly fast: I'd rather get sites out there, see how they do, and then worry about optimizing them (which is of course quite possible in Rails).

Methodology All tests were run like so: my new laptop with two cores and four gigs of memory was used as a server, and my older laptop was used to run the ab (Apache Benchmark) program - they're connected via ethernet. I built up to successive levels of concurrency, running first 1 concurrent connection, 2, 10, and so on and so forth. The "server" computer is running Ubuntu 9.10, "karmic". Platforms The platforms I tested:

• Apache 2.2, running the worker MPM, serving static files.
• Nginx 0.7.62, serving static files.
• Mochiweb from svn (revision 125), serving static files.
• Jetty 6.1.20-2, serving static files.
• Rails 2.3.5, serving up a simple template with the current date and time.
• PHP 5.2.10.dfsg.1-2ubuntu6.3, serving up a single php file that prints the current date and time.
• Django 1.1.1-1ubuntu1, serving up a template with the date and time.
• Mochiweb, serving a simple template (erltl) with the date and time.
• Jetty, serving a simple .war file containing a JSP file, with, as clever observers will have surmised, the date and time.

As stated above, it's pretty obvious that using Rails or Django for something so simple is overkill: Better Tests for the Future I would like to run similar tests with a more realistic application, but I simply don't have the time or expertise to sit down and write a blog, say, for all of the above platforms. If I can find a few volunteers, I'd be happy to discuss some rough ideas about what those tests ought to look like. Some ideas:

• They should test the application framework with a realistic, real world type of example.
• The data store should figure as little as possible - I want to concentrate on testing the application platform for the time being, rather than Postgres vs Sqlite vs Redis. Sqlite would probably be a good choice to utilize for the data store.
• Since this first test is so minimalistic, I think a second one ought to be fairly inclusive, making use of a fair amount of what the larger systems like Rails, Django and PHP offer.
• I'd also be interested in seeing other languages/platforms.
• The Holy Grail would be to script all these tests so that they're very easy to run repeatably.

Results With that out of the way, I do think the results are meaningful, and reflect something of what I've seen on various platforms in the real world. First of all, here we look at the total "VSZ" (as ps puts it) or Virtual Size of the process(es) in memory. Much of this might be shared, between libraries, and "copy on write" where applicable. The results are impressive: Rails, followed by Django and PHP eats up a lot of memory for each new concurrent connection. Rails, which I know fairly well, most likely suffers from several problems: 1) it includes a lot of code. That's actually a good thing if you're building a reasonably sized app that makes use of all it has to offer. 2) Its garbage collector doesn't play well with "copy on write". Which is what "Enterprise Ruby" aims to fix. Django and PHP are also fairly large, capable platforms when compared to something small and light like mochiweb. That said, excuses aside, Erlang and Mochiweb are very impressive in how little additional memory they utilize when additional concurrent connections are thrown at them. I was also impressed with Jetty. I don't have a lot of experience with Java on the web (I work more with J2ME for mobile phones), so I expected something a bit more "bloated", which is the reputation Java has. As we'll see below, Jetty does take up a lot of initial memory, but subsequent concurrent connections appear to not take up much. Of course, this is also likely another 'apples and oranges' comparison and it would be good to utilize a complete Java framework, rather than just a tiny web app with one JSP file. So what's this mean in real world terms of dollars and cents? As your Rails application gets more popular, you're going to have to invest relatively more money to make it scale, in terms of memory. For this comparison, I utilized the bytes/dollar that I'm getting for my Linode, which works out to 18,889,040.85 ($79.95 for 1440 MB a month). As we can see, to have a similar amount of concurrent users is essentially free for Mochiweb, whereas with Rails, it has a significant cost. This information is particularly relevant when deciding how to monetize a site: with Erlang and Jetty it would appear that scaling up to lots of users is relatively cheap, so even a small amount of revenue per user per month is going to be a profit, whereas with Rails, scaling up to huge numbers of users is going to be more expensive, so revenue streams such as advertising may not be as viable. It's worth noting that 37 signals, the company that created Rails, is a vocal supporter of charging money for products. There's another interesting statistic that I wanted to include as well. The previous graph shows the average cost per additional concurrent user, but this one shows how much the platform costs (using when there is just one user, so it acts as a sort of baseline: As we can see, Jetty is particularly expensive from this point of view. The default settings (on Ubuntu) seem to indicate that, for instance, the basic $20 a month Linode package would not be sufficient to run Jetty, plus a database, plus other software. I think that the Apache Worker number is off a bit, and may reflect settings made to handle a large number of connections, or perhaps a different MPM would make sense. Source Code / Spreadsheet The spreadsheet I put together is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0An76R90VwaRodElEYjVYQXpFRmtreGV3MEtsaWYzbXc&hl=en And the source code (admittedly not terribly well organized) is here: http://github.com/davidw/marginalmemory/

(a review of Homer s Iliad)

Here, therefore, huge and mighty warrior though you be, here shall you die. - Homer (The Iliad)

And with that formidable quote, I begin my review of The Iliad. I shall not exhaust you with a rehashing of the plot; that you can find on Wikipedia. Nor shall I be spending page upon page of analyzing the beautiful imagery, the implications of our understanding of fate and destiny, or all the other things that compel English majors to write page after page on the topic. Nor even shall I try to decipher whether it is a piece of history or a piece of legend. Rather, I intend to talk about why I read it: it s a really good story.

Sing to me, O goddess Muse, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, which brought countless ills upon the Acheans.

As I d be reading it, I d think to myself: Ah ha! Now here we finally have a section of the story that doesn t speak to modern life. Perhaps it was a section the fear of being enslaved or butchered by conquerors, or about pride leading both sides to fight a war they need not have, or a graphic description of a spear going clear through someone s head or neck. And then, I d have to sit and think. Are we really so far removed from that? Here we are, in a supposedly civilized world. We use remotely-operated drones to drop bombs on people, and think it naught but regrettable collateral damage when the brains and intestines of dozens of innocent victims are scattered about, killing them, all for the chance of killing one enemy. But we aren t the only ones to blame; we live in a world in which killing the innocent is often the goal. People fly airplanes into skyscrapers, drop atomic weapons to flatten entire cities, and kill noncombatants in terrible numbers. And for what? A little power, some prestige, some riches, some vengeance, some wounded pride? Slavery is not dead, either. We that can happily afford Internet access most likely abhor the thought. What, though, can we make of the fact that people are starving in this world in record numbers? That our actions may literally wipe some nations off the map? Are those people as free as we are? Do our actions repress them? I suspect you can t read the Iliad without being at least a bit introspective.

Fear, O Achilles, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable

One of the great things about reading the Iliad is that I can learn about the culture of the ancient civilizations. Now, of course, one can read about this in history books and Wikipedia. But reading some dry sentence is different from reading a powerful story written by and for them. I know that the Iliad isn t exactly a work of history, but it sure shows what made people tick: their religion, their morals, their behavior, and what they valued. I feel that I finally have some sort of insight into their society, and I am glad of it.

The day that robs a child of his parents severs him from his own kind; his head is bowed, his cheeks are wet with tears, and he will go about destitute among the friends of his father, plucking one by the cloak and another by the shirt. Some one or other of these may so far pity him as to hold the cup for a moment towards him and let him moisten his lips, but he must not drink enough to wet the roof of his mouth; then one whose parents are alive will drive him from the table with blows and angry words.

There are gory battle scenes in the Iliad, but then there are also heart-wrenching tender moments: when Hector leaves his wife to go fight, for instance, and worries about the future of his child if he should die. That s not to say I found the entire story riveting. I would have liked it to be 1/3 shorter. The battle just dragged on and on. And yet, I will grant that there was some purpose served by that: it fatigued me as a reader, which perhaps gave me a small sense of the fatigue felt by the participants in the story.

Why, pray, must the Argives needs fight the Trojans? What made the son of Atreus gather the host and bring them?

A question that was never answered, for either side: why are we so foolish that we must go to war? One tragedy among many is that neither side got smart about it until way too late, if ever they did at all. I read The Illiad in the Butler translation, which overall I liked. Some of these quotes, however, use the Lattimore one. This completes the first item on my 2010 reading list. I leave you with this powerful hope for the future, written almost three thousand years ago. Despite my criticisms above, we have made a lot of progress, haven t we? What a beautiful ideal it is, and what a long ways we have yet to walk.

I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals, and gall, which makes a man grow angry for all his great mind, that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man s heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.

Sing to me, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, that one day his story may speak less to our hearts, for then will we have outgrown it.

Thanks to Joey Hess for the request to set up tor bridges. I wholeheartedly agree, and recommend the video he points to. I've installed a Tor bridge at home, and recommend others to do so. For the most part, I'm not politically active at the moment - I'm doing a PhD Part-time, and thats consuming all my "spare" time, other than work and family. Just given a blog site, however, one subject strikes me as very important - free speech. Hence the side links to Amnesty International, etc. In Ireland this campaign has a particular focus at the moment - the Repeal of the Blasphemy Law. This law came into effect in Ireland this January. While the government claims that this law will 'never be used', its bad in several ways. Firstly, it promotes the ideas of censorship as a method of hiding social issues, and secondly it may actually be used, as pointed out in : <object height="300" width="400"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5196379&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="300" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5196379&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400"></embed></object>Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime from Limerick Blogger on Vimeo. Basically, with Europe-wide arrest warrants, if two European countries have criminal blasphemy laws, then someone may be extradited to face prosecution in another country. While the Irish government says they will never prosecute, they open the possibility of say, Irish citizens being extradited to Greece to safe prosecution for blasphemy. On a wider level, I recommend Index on Censorship. It keeps documenting the cost of censorship around the world, and has been instrumental in campaigning for Libel reform in the UK, which is ncreasingly important for open scientific discussion. Tags censorhip, free-speech, politics

A clear announcement went out in plenty of time and the meeting agenda is already posted for Wednesday s SPI board IRC meeting which will be at 2100 UTC (an hour later than recently). As I write this, it s a pretty lean meeting, though I guess that s understandable when the run-up included holidays for most people. What do you think SPI s new year resolutions should be?