During my previous adventures with the Debian archive, I found that two packages in the archive use bzip2 compression inside the .deb instead of the traditional gzip compression, so I decided to try it out on emacs-snapshot (one of my larger packages). The combined size of the deb files goes from 36764KB to 33880KB, a 2884KB (7.8%) difference. It also makes both lintian and linda unhappy, the former gives me the following error:

E: emacs-snapshot-nox: deb-data-member-wrongly-compressed
N:
N:   The binary package contains a data member not compressed with gzip.
N:   From dpkg-dev 1.11 on, you can configure the way the data tarball is
N:   compressed. Though this is possible, you are not allowed to use it
N:   before dpkg 1.11 (or later) enters stable.

and linda just bombs:

E: emacs-snapshot-common; Package uses a newer feature of dpkg.
 This package uses a data.tar, or data.tar.bz2 member of the .deb. This
 was introduced in dpkg 1.11, but is not allowed to be used until dpkg
 1.11 or later hits stable.
File ...3_all.deb failed to process: Level 2 unpacking failed:
Could not unpack data tarball

Etch was released with dpkg 1.13.25, so bzip2 compression is probably allowed now. But is a 7.8% saving worth the incompatibility price? I'm not sure.

As many readers of this blog know, I tend not to shy away from writing about my mother s struggle with Alzheimers. But in the last 6 months and especially since I paid my last visit to my mother, I have found it much harder to sit and write about her current state of affairs. If we think of Alzheimers as a journey to a new place, she is almost at the point of reaching that place of great loneliness and inhospitality, which is not only new and different both for her and those around her but is a virtual prison, for it rarely allows you to leave and visit the places of your past. More than ever, her memory and understanding of her life as she (as I and many others), once knew it, is fading fast; Of course, this was to be expected but it is quite difficult to imagine what it will be like until the actual experience unmistakably knocks on the door of present time and unfortunately, when it knocks, you can t do anything but open the door and let it in. Unsurprisingly, it is incredibly difficult to witness and interact with a person who is losing most all recollections, the stuff of which, you come to realize, is what defines a person and allows you to more or less have the opportunity to seamlessly interact with him or her. In the last number of months, I have perhaps been more silent than usual because there is only so much I can and want to think about when it comes to my mother s decline. I talk to her nearly every day and I have decided for now, that is enough. But I am retreating out of my silence after reading a refreshingly honest, though still somewhat timid piece on Alzheimer in the NYTimes, entitled Zen and the Art of Coping With Alzheimer s
The piece is striking because it offers a more realistic portrayal of the disease than most mainstream media accounts and it provides some really sound advice about the importance of just letting go and going with the flow when interacting with those with Alzheimers. At the same time, it lacks a certain window into just how disheartening and hard it can be to witness the decline, and how hard it can be to manage those conversations and interactions. On the whole, I try to go with the flow. For example, I recently returned from a visit and soon after I left, my mother forgot I was even there. She started to ask me over and over again when I was coming home for a visit and when I told her I was just there, her semi-humorous reaction was well, why didn t anyone tell me? (and then proceeded to castigate her caretaker for not telling her!!). Perhaps I did not stay long enough, or perhaps her lack of recall would happen no matter what. To hear she forgot shook me hard and deeply. The first time I realized she could not remember I had just visited, I was able to jog her memory by listing off all that we did together. Finally, when I mentioned that I bought a new refrigerator while in PR, something clicked. She is still worried about money, so buying a refrigerator was enough to remind her I had spent a lot of money. But after it was clear that she felt quite bad about not remembering, I knew that was the first and last time I would try to jog her memory. Instead, I will merge and mold my reality to her reality, as much as I can and assure her that I will soon visit.
(more…)

Growing up in Eugene, Oregon, which like Berkeley or Boulder could have the label "People's Republic of" applied to it, I always thought of "business friendly", as something along the lines of helping huge corporations avoid laws against pollution, or other antisocial behavior. Only after moving to Europe did I begin to get an idea of what the very positive side of "business friendly" is in the US. Truth be told, all countries tend to protect their 'big players' to some degree, be it the US propping up creaking airlines after September 11th, Italy finding various clever ways to get around rules about funding Fiat and Alitalia, or France finding it in their 'national interests' to discourage a potential bid for Danone (yogurt!) by PepsiCo. Some are better or worse (the UK has been pretty good about not interfering), but there is a tendency to want to intervene. Leaving be the discussion over whether those sorts of policies are good, bad, or ugly, the biggest difference between continental Europe and the US is the ease with which new companies - 'startups' can be created and enter a market. As a first hand example, I decided this summer to create DedaSys as a real company in order to better separate my business and personal financial dealings. Were I to do that in Italy or Austria, we would be talking about fees upwards of 3000 Euros (about 4000 dollars at market rates), which is a great deal of money for something that is not making a lot of it at this point in time. Contrast this with what it took to create a Limited Liability Company (LLC) in Oregon, my home state. To have things done up professionally, it's certainly possible to lay down a bit of cash there too, but by trading my time for money, and with the assistance of some nolo.com books about the creation and maintenance of an LLC, I was able to register DedaSys with the state of Oregon for the grand total of 55 dollars, and was actually able to complete the process remotely from Austria prior to going home on vacation, where I did the only thing I needed to do in person: open a bank account. So it costs 1% of what it costs in Italy or Austria to open a company that provides limited liability... a very impressive difference, especially to a small, new company that does not have the connections a Ford or a Fiat will likely have to enable it to deal with all the other paperwork, rules, and regulations to deal with. Add to that a culture of greater risk taking (meaning also more acceptance of failure), better funding opportunities, and... one comes to the conclusion that Paul Graham is right. It's a pity, because the people in Europe are top notch. In Italy alone, I know a bunch of really bright hackers. Granted, some of them aren't interested, and are probably better off not starting a company or otherwise dealing with the business side of the equation, but it's always nice to have that opportunity. In closing, here is another example of bureaucracy in action, from my personal on line journal about life in Italy, and now Austria, which I recently revamped by moving it to the Typo platform: Confronting the bureaucratic beast - registering an Italian domain Two months to accomplish what can be done in ten minutes with a .com!

I've just finished releasing new versions of all modules related to my Summer of Code project, the Bug Triage and Forward Tool. If my mentor doesn't find any serious bug, these will be the last releases under the SoC flag. Thanks again, Google, for this great program and the progress it brings to Free Software.

The releases:

bzutils 0.2:

• Announcement
• Source .tar.gz

btsutils 0.3:

• Announcement
• Source .tar.gz

bug-triage 0.2.2:

• Announcement
• Source .tar.gz

Debian packages should hit the archive as soon as they get evaluated and sponsored. Of course, a full status report will also be posted during the evaluation time.

How to get rid of most spam on Alioth mailing lists.

Until some Debian developer implements this idea in the BTS, the mailing list and in PTS, the quantities of spam that people get on the mail addresses they expose in the Debian world, the spam will keep on coming in huge quantities. I don't care that there will always be spam, I care that the amount of spam would be lower or probably nonexistent for one time sending (I sent just one mail to the BTS from two different mail addresses and it was enough to get huge amounts of spam on them).


The Debian Games Team's ML has suffered for a while, back in 2006, from spam bombing.
We thought that the easiest method to get rid of spam is to requires registration in order to be able to send mails to the list.

That was a big mistake because, as some people suspect, mails from the BTS needed to be allowed in and the reporters got an automated reply saying that the mail is waiting for approval, etc, etc - plain rude, people send you bug reports and you say "You are not listed, bla, bla bla". We changed the setting not to send any automatic reply and people were more content.

But still, we had to hand approve or white list valid mails/addresses. That worked for a while, but once the mail ended up on spammer lists, the thing blew out of proportions. We were desperate. We tweaked the settings of the lists in different ways, but in the end we ended up in having such a broken setup that we had to approve white listed addresses.

That did for me. I had to do something. So I started working on the ML setup and basically I did the following things to get rid of spam:

• anything coming from white listed mail addresses was approved
• black listed mails (bellsouth is one of those) is rejected (or should be)
• anything that came from the BTS (there are some nice headers that the BTS puts) and was evaluated as ham with a score of 0 (there is a field for that, too - some field has Spam=No, Score=...) was allowed
• anything that came from the BTS that was Spam=No with a score above 0 was held for moderation
• anything else is held for moderation

This solution allowed us to lighten the burden of manually white listing every email address that ever sent valid mails to the BTS and to focus only on real spam.

Try it your self on your lists, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Skype seems slowly to recover from yesterdays blackout.However, it doesn't look to me as if they've actually solved the problem. I assume they've just added a workaround (e.g. maybe using DNS to locate good servers?) that help recovering. At least when enough people download the new version.If you look at the graphs at Njanjan.to and 85qm.de, then they still look far from healthy.I'm not talking about the mere numbers - Skype reports about 3 Million users connected, which would mean 1 out of 3 regular users is back. But I'm talking about the shape of the curve. During regular operations, the curve used to be smooth. Which is easy to explain: by some million users going online and offline indepentenly, it all smoothens out. The curve goes up when people start working in a densely populated area and goes down when they go to bed. But if you look at the graphs for the past few hours parts of the Skype P2P network still appear to get disconnected and reconnected. They cerainly didn't flip a switch and people could connect again. The service still appears to be going up and down.To me, that indicates that they actually didn't solve the problem, but just found a way to make the problems not take down the whole network, while parts still drop off now and then.Just my guesses, though. And Skype will not tell the truth either, you bet. (You might want to skim over the presentation "Silver Needle In The Skype" [PDF], about the inner workings of Skype, their obfuscation technologies and how far they go at hiding what their software is actually doing)P.S. I've read in a blog that Skype might right now only allow one connection per IP. That would even more support the rumors that they're actually trying to defend against an attack on their network (and using the IP limit to slow down the attacks?)P.P.S. Another interesting note: the Skype stats on the Skype website report 5.5 Million connected users - my Skype client reports 3.7 Million. Which number is correct?

I decided to play with Devel::REPL which looks to be exactly what I need to enhance my Perl Console. That module is not packaged in Debian, then I started packaging it with the help of the Debian Perl Group (big thanks go to Damyan Ivanov for his help). The day was pretty productive and we’re almost done now, as you can see in this tomboy note: PS MadCoder: I’m sorry dude, I’m still speaking about Perl

An interesting article on Time today: Failing Our Geniuses about how the most talented students are being sidelined by current education policy. Some choice bits:

Since well before the Bush Administration began using the impossibly sunny term "no child left behind," those who write education policy in the U.S. have worried most about kids at the bottom, stragglers of impoverished means or IQs. But surprisingly, gifted students drop out at the same rates as nongifted kids--about 5% of both populations leave school early. Later in life, according to the scholarly Handbook of Gifted Education, up to one-fifth of dropouts test in the gifted range.

It can't make sense to spend 10 times as much to try to bring low-achieving students to mere proficiency as we do to nurture those with the greatest potential.

We take for granted that those with IQs at least three standard deviations below the mean (those who score 55 or lower on IQ tests) require "special" education. But students with IQs that are at least three standard deviations above the mean (145 or higher) often have just as much trouble interacting with average kids and learning at an average pace. Shouldn't we do something special for them as well?

In a no-child-left-behind conception of public education, lifting everyone up to a minimum level is more important than allowing students to excel to their limit. It has become more important for schools to identify deficiencies than to cultivate gifts. Odd though it seems for a law written and enacted during a Republican Administration, the social impulse behind No Child Left Behind is radically egalitarian. It has forced schools to deeply subsidize the education of the least gifted, and gifted programs have suffered. The year after the President signed the law in 2002, Illinois cut $16 million from gifted education; Michigan cut funding from $5 million to $500,000. Federal spending declined from $11.3 million in 2002 to $7.6 million this year.

At debconf7, I brought my (brand-new) flute, and urged other people to bring their instruments, too; and on tuesday, we had some fun playing together. As we were playing, people started entering, and suddenly we had an audience. What fun. Anyway. Dave Noble had the idea of videotaping most of it, and this ended up being uploaded to the meetings archive along with the other videos. As I checked today, the high-quality version has been uploaded as well. Which is way cool. Thanks, videoteam!

Something I often hear from people that talk about Linux on the desktop is this: people want to be able to go to the store, buy hardware, and be confident that it will Just Work.

I would like to point out that things are rarely this simple on Windows. And, in fact, things are often simpler on Linux these days.

Here's the example that prompted this post.

I have a computer that's about 4 years old. It's my main desktop machine at home. It was still fast enough for me, but has been developing all sorts of weird behaviors. Certain USB ports stopped working altogether a few months ago. Then it started hanging during POST whenever I'd try to reboot -- but would still boot OK about 80% of the time after a power cycle. Then it started randomly losing contact with my USB mouse until a reboot. And the last straw was when the display started randomly going out. I've told everyone that my machine has cancer and is slowly dying.

The case is a pretty nice full tower -- solid and sturdy. I have an 160GB IDE drive in it. So I figured I will upgrade the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and add a 500GB SATA drive since they're so cheap these days and I'm running out of space. I'd also have to buy a new video card since my old one was AGP and the new motherboard only has PCI Express for video. So about $700 later from Newegg (I got a Core 2 Duo E6750), the parts arrived.

I spent some time installing it all. The motherboard had only one IDE channel, and I didn't have any IDE cable long enough to connect both the IDE hard disk and the optical drive, so I popped in an old Maxtor/Promise PCI Ultra133 controller I had sitting around to use with the DVD burner.

Now, to recap, the hardware that the OS would see as new/different is: CPU, RAM, IDE controller, SATA controller, Promise IDE controller, integrated NIC, sound, video.

Then the magic smoke test.

I turned on the machine. Grub appeared. Linux started booting.

Even though I had switched from the default Debian "supports everything" kernel to a K7 kernel, it still booted.

And every single piece of hardware was supported immediately. There was no "add new hardware" wizard that popped up, no "I've found new hardware" boxes. It just worked, silently, with no need to tell me anything or have me click on anything.

Only one piece required configuration: the NIC, thanks to some udev design flaws (it got renamed from eth0 to eth1 by udev). That took 20 seconds. Debian saw the IDE HDD, the SATA drive, the Promise controller, the DVD burner, the video card, the sound, and it all worked automatically. And Debian is not even a distro that occurs to a lot of people when they think of great hardware support.

Now let's turn to Windows.

The Windows Nightmare

I have a legal copy of Windows XP Home that was preinstalled on the machine when I got it. I resized its partition down to about 20GB so that I could use 140GB for Linux. I use it rarely, primarily for gaming, and I've bought about 3 games in the last 4 years. I usually disconnect the network when I boot to Windows, though I do keep it current with updates.

I did some research on what Windows was going to do when I replace the hardware. The general consensus from people on the 'net is that you can't just replace a motherboard and expect everything to be happy. There were generally three different approaches suggested: 1) don't even try, just reinstall; 2) do a rescue install after you move over; and 3) use sysprep. The rescue install has to be done by booting from an XP install CD, then picking a rescue install option somewhere. It will overwrite your installed Windows with the version from the CD. That means that I'd have to re-apply SP2, though bits of it that didn't get overwritten would still be on the hard disk, and who knows what would happen to the registry.

Option #3 was to download sysprep (must have the Genuine Disadvantage ActiveX to get the free download from MS). Sysprep is designed to be used just prior to taking an image with ghost for replication. It removes the hardware-specific config (but not the drivers), as well as the product key, from the machine, but otherwise leaves it untouched. On the next boot, you get the "Welcome to XP" wizard.

One other strike against #2 is that Compaq "helpfully" didn't ship any install CDs with the machine. Under Windows, they did have a "create rescue CD" tool, which burned 7 CDs for me. But they are full Compaq-specific CDs, not one of them an XP CD, *AND* they check on boot to see if you're using the same Compaq motherboard, and exit if not. Highly useless.

So I went with sysprep. Before my new hardware even arrived, I downloaded the Windows drivers for all of it. I burned them to a CD, and installed as many as I could on the system in advance. About half of them refused to install since the new hardware wasn't there yet. I then took a raw image of the partition with dd, just in case. Finally, right before I swapped the hardware, I ran sysprep and let it shut down the machine.

So after the new hardware was installed came the adventure.

Windows booted to the "welcome to XP" thingy. The video, keyboard, mouse, and IDE HDD worked. That's about it.

I went through the "welcome to XP wizard". But the network didn't work yet, so I couldn't activate it. So I popped my handy driver CD in the drive. But what's this? Windows doesn't recognize the DVD drive because it doesn't have drivers for this Promise controller that came out in, what, 2001? Sigh. Downloaded the drivers with the imac, copy them to a CF card, plug the USB CF reader into Windows.

While I was doing that, about 6 "found new hardware" dialogs got queued up. Not one of them could actually find a driver for my hardware, but that didn't prevent Windows from making me click through them all.

So, install Promise driver from CF card, reboot. Click through new hardware dialogs again. Install network driver, reboot, click through dialogs. Install sound driver. Install Intel "chipset" driver, click through dialogs. Reboot. Install SATA driver. Reboot.

So the hardware appears to all be working by this point, though I have a Creative volume control (from the old hardware) and a Realtek one in the tray. Minor annoyance to deal with later.

Now I have to re-activate XP. I dutifully key in the magic string from the sticker on my case. Surprise surprise, the Internet-based activation fails because my hardware is different. So I have to call the 800 number. I have to read in 7 blocks of 6 digits, one block at a time. Then I answer some questions: have I activated Windows before, have I changed hardware, was the old hardware defective (yes, yes, and yes). Then I get 7 blocks of 6 digits read to me. Finally Windows is activated. PHEW! Why they couldn't ask those questions with the online tool is beyond me.

Anyhow. Linux took me 20 seconds to get working. Windows, about 2 hours, plus another 2 hours for prep and research.

I did zero prep for Linux. I made one config change (GUI users could have just configured their machine to use eth1).

Other cool Linux HW features

Say you buy a new printer and want to get it set up. On Windows, you insert the CD, let it install 200MB of print drivers plus ads plus crap plus add something to your taskbar plus who knows what else. Probably reboot. Then the printer might actually print.

On Debian, you plug in the printer to the USB port. You type printconf. 5 seconds later, your printer works.

I have been unpleasantly surprised lately by just how difficult hardware support in Windows really is, especially since everyone keeps saying how good it is. It's not good. Debian's is better, in my opinion.

Now that CUPS 1.3 has built in zeroconf support, it is easier than ever to provide print service to Windows machines. You don’t even need Samba anymore. Here’s a quick way to setup a CUPS print server and a Windows client: On the server side First you need to install CUPS 1.3 or higher on your print server and setup the printer (the web interface makes this task dead easy). Zeroconf isn’t enabled by default so you have to browse the CUPS admin page (http://localhost:631/admin if you’re running it on localhost) and enable the “Share published printers connected to this system” option. “Change Settings” will restart CUPS and your printer should be instantly visible to zeroconf-aware applications in the local network. If you can’t or don’t want to use the web interface (which is the easiest way though), you can edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and replace the line Listen localhost:631 with Port 631 and add the line BrowseAddress @LOCAL Now save the changes and restart CUPS and you’re done. On the client side Since most Linux distributions and MacOS support zeroconf out of the box, I’ll just explain how to setup the Windows client. On the Windows side you’ll need to install Bonjour for Windows which is freely available on apple.com. Bonjour for Windows will enable Multicast DNS (mDNS) and DNS based Service Discovery (DNS-SD) on your Windows machine. Once it is installed, you can start the printer helper application provided by bonjour which will guide you through the process of installing the network printer. The only problem here was that although it correctly identified my printer, it only let me chose between a generic postscript and a PCL driver. Both were not working correctly so I had to manually change the driver for this printer to HP LaserJet 4 Plus (which is my printer) after the setup via the printer properties, where all other printer drivers where available again. That’s it! Now you should be able to print on every zeroconf aware operating system connected to your network. Oh, one final warning: With this setup, everybody in the LAN will be able to print without prior authentication. This should be what you want in most cases when running a home LAN or a small business LAN anyways, but it’s certainly not so cool when strangers have access to your network. The whole setup process took like 15 minutes today. I remember me a few years ago, not being very experienced with Samba and CUPS wasting a whole weekend to achieve the same result. Thanks apple for making life a bit easier again!

One situation that you will occasionally encounter when running a Heartbeat cluster is a need to prevent a STONITH of a node. As documented in my previous post about testing STONITH the ability to STONITH nodes is very important in an operating cluster. However when the sys-admin is performing maintenance on the system or programmers are working on a development or test system it can be rather annoying. One example of where STONITH is undesired is when upgrading packages of software related to the cluster services. If during a package upgrade the data files and programs related to the OCF script are not synchronised (EG you have two programs that interact and upgrading one requires upgrading the other) at the moment that the status operation is run then an error may occur which may trigger a STONITH. Another possibility is that if using small systems for testing or development (EG running a cluster under Xen with minimal RAM assigned to each node) then a package upgrade may cause the system to thrash which might then cause a timeout of the status scripts (a problem I encounter when upgrading my Xen test instances that have 64M of RAM). If a STONITH occurs during the process of a package upgrade then you are likely to have consistency problems with the OS due to RPM and DPKG not correctly calling fsync(), this can cause the OCF scripts to always fail to run the status command which can cause an infinite loop of the cluster nodes in question being STONITHed. Incidentally the best way to test for this (given the problems of a STONITH sometimes losing log data) is to boot the node in question without Heartbeat running and then run the OCF status commands manually (I previously documented three ways of doing this). Of course the ideal (and recommended) way of solving this problem is to migrate all services from a node using the crm_resource program. But in a test or development situation you may forget to migrate all services or simply forget to run the migration before the package upgrade starts. In that case the best thing to do is to be able to remove the ability to call STONITH . For my testing I use Xen and have the nodes ssh to the Dom0 to call STONITH, so all I have to do to remove the STONITH ability is to stop the ssh daemon on the Dom0. For a more serious test network (EG using IPMI or an equivalent technology to perform a hardware STONITH as well as ssh for OS level STONITH on a private network) a viable option might be to shut down the switch port used for such operations - shutting down switch ports is not a nice thing to do, but to allow you to continue work on a development environment without hassle it’s a reasonable hack. When choosing your method of STONITH it’s probably worth considering what the possibilities are for temporarily disabling it - preferably without having to walk to the server room.

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Every two weeks i get this:

$ xterm &
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: Maximum number of clients reached
xterm Xt error: Can't open display: :0.0

and it looks that something eats up the possible number of Clients:

$ xlsclients wc -l
56

when i restart X i can open about 100 xterms until i reach the error message.

ideas?

When you're reporting a bug on a piece of free software, starting it out with the word "stupid" might not be an ideal way to make your bug rise to the top of the priority queue. It's not a nice thing to wake up to, believe me. When someone has responded to a question you have about a website, pointing you to the page you could not find; mailing them privately with the command "Fix it" might also be less than ideal. Especially when you're just randomly assuming they can "Fix it". Especially when you've not checked to see if it has already been fixed. (Unless you're a pointy-haired boss; then this behavior is expected.) It's not a nice way to end the day.

Side note: According to the Skype RSS data feed, right now 174086 user are online. That less than 10% of the usual numbers, isn't it? To me, that's more than a few users.Skype is harmful. Here's the explantaion why:Skype uses P2P technology where it is not needed. There are parts of VoIP where it does make sense (when a direct connection is possible, transfer the data directly between clients), but pretty much any VoIP software does that.And there are parts, where it doesn't make sense. This includes not accessing the login servers directly, but trying to use other Skype users as proxies.Now what I've seen happening in some networks is the following: Skype fails to login directly, so it starts connecting random peers it has seen before. It keeps a list of 200 peers for that in the registry. So when it fails to connect, it will try contacting these 200 peers instead. Now if you have multiple users sharing your connection, let's say 10 and a cheap router with limited memory, 2000 connections is a lot to keep track of. It might start losing other connections. Such as your mail an web connections.This is exactly what I've seen today: the internet connection becoming pretty much unuseable (single packets would work fine, but not TCP/IP transfers of more than a few kb). When we found out it might be due to Skype malfunctioning, and gave the order for everyone to shut down Skype (which didn't work anyway, so people quickly complied), Internet became useable again. Let me emphasize that: it wasn't a bandwidth issue, but it was just the sheer number of connections opened by Skype that caused more important connections to be dropped by the routers.So why is Skype not using proper servers, like MSN, AIM and ICQ do? Because they're cheapskates. It's cheaper for them to let others use your bandwidth instead of having to provide enough to handle all the data. The other reason is that it's harder for system administrators to deny access to Skype, if any other Skype user can proxy your access to the actual login server. But if you want/need a central user registry, you can't rely on a true P2P system. It's bound to get disconnected at some point.And yes, this especially means that Skype is not a good idea in a corporate environment with a large number of users. The skype approach works well for a single user at home, but the Skype networking behaviour can take down your routers if you have too many users running Skype at the same time. Other software choices, such as the standardized, vendor independant SIP protocol for VoIP, however would even allow you to setup a proper VoIP telephone system, with conference rooms, complex call routing, dictionaries, callback, routing to ATM or mobiles, complex voice mail systems, you name it. Skype is designed for single home users, not for company use.P.S. Am I the only one who thinks the Skype UI is crap? No groups (at least not in my version, which is the latest there is for Linux), and totally idiotic button placement (like this ugly 'add' button I'm pretty much never ever, and a floding-up button next to it with the options, quit and recent chats (do they have anything in common?) hidden in there. How about using a menu bar like everybody else? How about organizing functionality in a human-comprehendable way?P.P.S. What I guess has happened: somehow, most nodes (especially super nodes) got convined that the actual login servers are bad. As long, as some still had the connection, login still worked. At least sometimes (many probably experienced an unstable Skype connection before they could no longer login). But at a certain point, a large part of the network got separated from the login nodes and started routing requests around chaotically, trying to find the actual login server. The only way they have for fixing it, is slowly convincing and nodes on the perimeter of the P2P network about the proper location for the login servers, and that way spreading the correct information around again. Or shipping a new version which will re-inject this information in clients again. Just my guesses.P.P.P.S. It would be interesting to know what had caused this. If it was some kind of subtle attack on the network. Like someone trying to convince supernodes that the login servers are bad and untrustworthy or something. Maybe just by sending spoofed bad data packets from the login servers IP or so.P^4.S. Interesting graph on the number of Skype users logged in. Still going down.

Now my fvwm is segfaulting almost at each startup. Seriously, there's great software everywhere, but still no good window manager (I know, I tested almost them all). Life sucks.

Eurosport are broadcasting the Vuelta a Burgos at 19 east until Saturday. This can be an interesting race for seeing how well the ProTour teams are recovering from the Tour de France, ready for the Vuelta a Espa a. Barloworld's TdF revelation Juan Mauricio Soler has a 17-second lead into tomorrow's individual time trial. The 69th Volta a Portugal finished yesterday with an ~50-minute individual time trial that saw the lead change hands and Xavier Tondo of LA/MSS take the General Classification by a little under a minute. RTP's coverage was strangely subdued. It seemed like they only had cameras around the finish line, not on motorbikes following the riders. The bad weather may have caused that, though. Meanwhile, the Deutschland-Tour 2007 is broadcast to Europe until Saturday on ARD at 19 east and 13 east. Gerald Ciolek of T-Mobile won his second stage in a row today, while CSC's ever-popular Jens Voigt remains in yellow. Individual time trial there too tomorrow. ARD's coverage has been very swish so far this year. Widescreen with informative graphics, although the commentary is still a bit subdued for my taste. Overall, it's a shame there's not more airtime given to it.

You're 14 today. In Canada you have just reached age of consent and your tarot card would be Temperance. Yeah! (I could hardly wait) NP: The Penguin Cafe Orchestra: A History

Two weeks ago I started my new job at the Formal Methods research group of the Department of Mathematics of Computer Science at the Eindhoven University of Technology. So, what have I been up to until now? Well, as you can imagine it takes some time to settle down. I got a room with two other PhD students. I have installed my new (and fast!) computer with Debian Sid and am very happy about it. I have created my academic website using Webgen (like I do with all my sites), attempting to have it look the same as the main university site. I think I have succeeded. Next to the settling down I have been meeting all the people of our group and reading a lot of papers in my future area of research. What will I be doing the next few weeks then? For the moment I’ll continue to do a lot of reading. My research is in the area of the automata theory and the process algebra and ways to combine them. Besides reading up on that I will be continuing upon my master project and try to get the result published. Also, my first conference has been planned! Yay! From September 2 till September 8 I will be in Lisbon to attend the CONCUR 2007 conference and also have a look around town, of course.