Search Results: "will"

20 February 2008

Jeff Bailey: Met with the surgeon.

Angie, Leif and I met with one the two surgeons who will be doing the work. I s'pose it's good and bad that the co-director of the UCSF Spine Centre, Dr. Mummaneni is personally taking on the case. Good that I'll have the best possible care; Bad that I'm apparently interesting enough to warrant it.

Meeting with him was matter of fact. He talked about how he'll approach the surgery (from the back, since the placement of my aortic arch and innominant vein would make coming through the front problematic). It looks like I'll have rods and screws from T1-T6, with a cage replacing the vertebra at least at T3 and possibly at T4. People don't usually do that much movement in their thoracic back so, ongoing, his opinion was that I largely won't notice it.

In hospital-time will depend on whether or not the surgery can be done in one shot. Because of the trickiness of the area, it may not be possible to get it entirely from the back, and he'll do two surgeries rather than one if that can avoid me winding up in a wheelchair. Ideally, there's one surgery, and a week later I'm home and able to take care of myself. The way they take the tumor out in a couple pieces is known as "en bloc spondylectomy", but may not be possible with the way the spinal nerve is being pinched. He described the surgery itself, and the simple version is "remove one or two vertebra, replace them with cages, stabilize the surrounding area". Yay to the Black and Decker surgical division.

He'll be assisted by Dr. Chau for spinal cord monitoring and the rest of the surgery.

The last thing they did as I left the hospital last Saturday was a full body CT scan with contrast, and the radiologists have declared that that they see no additional tumors in the body. I'll visit with an oncologist to do some final tests, but consistently the answer is coming back that this isn't cancer, it's more likely an isolated mutation. Dr. Mummaneni doesn't feel that this is a side effect of sitting at a computer since I was 3 years old, any of the car accidents, or being hit across the back with a flute case in grade 9.

I did ask if I'll set off metal detectors at airports after this, and apparently the titanium used doesn't do that.

So, erm. What are the risks? Honestly, pretty consistently less than doing nothing. Having this thing would eventually result in paralysis anyway, and aside from the usually OMG-they're-cutting-me-open-anything-could-happen type of things that don't keep me from biking to work on a regular basis, all the other options are "And life improves from here". Informed consent means that I have statistics in my head that I'd rather not dwell on and a laundry list of things to panic about when I wake up in the middle of the night but those really are just nerves acting up and stress wanting to come out. Nothing wrong with any of that.

Surgery is booked for March 3rd. We'd hoped to go to Vancouver for Leif's birthday around then, but I've been asked not to fly. Rapid pressure changes apparently will aggravate what's there now.

I feel good about this. I'm back to pretty much 100% after the hospital time last week, and noticed that after the embolism that I'm moving a bit freer than I was before. That's enough to start the optimism going already. We've also twiddled my medicine for every 8 hours rather than 6, which will help me sleep better, and reduced it, which will help me feel better.

Having time-frames and knowing that I'm in good hands is a lovely place to be after all that.

19 February 2008

Filip Van Raemdonck: Two no more

Mid august, “responsability” will get a new meaning: my wife is into the 15th week of our third pregnancy.
We actually already should've become parents last november, but almost halfway through the first pregnancy the child had stopped growing and was diagnosed with trisomy 13, because of a hereditary Robertsonian translocation that Veerle turned out to be having. Short of waiting for the pregnancy to spontaneously abort, the only way to deliver the child was induced labour. We already knew from the karyogram that had uncovered the trisomy syndrome that it was a boy, though it was impossible to see that. The little fellow was about two thirds the length he should've been, and weighed about one third the normal weight.

We visited a fertility clinic a few weeks afterwards, but were told that the actual chance of us getting a healthy baby was a lot higher when we would naturally conceive than through in vitro fertilization. The only advantage of the latter method would be near elimination of the 50% chance to a failed pregnancy of natural conception. (For clarification: due to the translocation, there's a two-in-four chance that a conceived child carries an incorrect number of chromosomes; such embryos have a near-zero chance of making it through the pregnancy)

By the end of summer, Veerle was pregnant again. This time however it lasted for only seven weeks, after which the foetus died. Examination of a tissue sample again uncovered trisomy 13 syndrome. And it was again a boy.

Now it's the third pregnancy, and almost three weeks ago a chorionic villus sampling was performed to determine if this time the child would be healthy. Although a FISH (“fluorescent in situ hybridization”) test performed in the first two days showed no sign of problems, it was only after the liberating phonecall that came in yesterday that we could take a deep breath and smile. The baby has inherited the Robertsonian translocation though, but that doesn't lessen our joy.

As a side effect of the karyogram, we also know the gender weeks before ultrasound might reveal it. However, I haven't secured the necessary permit to disclose this information. I'll tell everyone in half a year from now...

John Goerzen: Registrar Dynadot Conspires to Help Take Down Wikileaks?

Yesterday, Wired ran a story on the Cayman Islands bank that got Wikileaks.org blocked. This story said, in part:

When the bank's lawyers indicated they would be filing a suit, she asked them to tell her where so that Wikileaks could find an attorney in the appropriate jurisdiction to represent it. She says the lawyers refused to tell her. Two and a half weeks later, the bank filed a restraining order against Dynadot and Wikileaks in San Francisco. Wikileaks received notice only a few hours before the case went to a judge who accepted the agreement between Dynadot and the bank.


(emphasis mine)

Now, Dynadot and this Cayman Islands bank apparently had an agreement to block wikileaks.org already. Not only did Dynadot effectively take wikileaks.org down, but also they "lock(ed) the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar." The U.S. Disctrict Court for Northern California issued this injunction without ever giving Wikileaks a chance to respond. The bank only filed the request against Dynadot. Apparently Wikileaks received notification that this was going to happen only 6 hours before the hearing (an incredibly short time in legal terms), nowhere near enough time to prepare a case.

Now, the reason I post this is because I have looked at Dynadot as a registrar before. They have good prices and a whois privacy service that makes sense: where you remain the owner of record, making it easier if you need to transfer the domain or prove your ownership of it.

But before signing up, I read their AUP carefully. Among many alarming things, I noticed this paragraph:

You further agree that Dynadot, in its sole discretion and without liability to You for any resulting loss or damages, may take immediate corrective action, including, but not limited to, removal of all or a portion of Your domain services and/or deletion, suspension, cancellation, termination, or other interruption of domain services or Your customer account with Dynadot, at any time during the term of this Agreement, in the event of notice of any possible violation of this Agreement by You or Your end users, or if such service or account is used in association with morally objectionable activities, or for any reason whatsoever. In such cases, any and all fees paid to Dynadot will be non-refundable and ineligible for account credit.


So, I thought I would write to them about it. Here is an excerpt from their response:

We always conduct an investigation before taking action against a domain. We will give you a chance to respond to the complaints.


From Wired's story, it doesn't look like that really happened. The US Government has already issued advisories about Cayman Islands banks, and it is unclear (to me at least) what law Wikileaks broke, or how Dynadot could find their actions of exposing fraud "morally objectionable". What's more, collaborating with the bank to get a takedown order written, but not talking to Wikileaks, seems to go against their statements to me (assuming again that the Wired story is accurate).
Here is my entire mail. You may also find archive.org's copy of the AUP from last July to be helpful. (I wrote the email in November, and they've added some sections since then, so the section numbers don't necessarily match up)

Subject: Re: SITE: Questions about your AUP
From: Dynadot Info <info@dynadot.com>
Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 13:42 -0800
To: jgoerzen@complete.org

Hello,
Thank you for your email. Responses are below.
Best Regards,
Dynadot Staff
--------------------------------------------------
DYNADOT... $8.99 domain names... $1/mo. web hosting
http://www.dynadot.com

Hi,
I currently have several domains being hosted with Gandi.  I have long been looking for someone that can provide a level of privacy for my whois data in a sane way.  I think Dynadot is the first I've seen that looks like it can do that and still be affordable.
In preparation to transfer over a first test domain, I read your AUP and frankly am quite troubled by what I saw.  I hope that you can allay my fears.
In section 4 of part 2, the last paragraph states that Dynadot "for any reason whatsoever" may delete, cancel, or terminate my domain services or customer account.  It also lists "notice of possible violation" as a justification for that.  That makes me even more nervous -- any random person could send you an email claiming something nefarious is happing with my domain name, and I'm agreeing to just let you delete it because of that?


We always conduct an investigation before taking action against a domain. We will give you a chance to respond to the complaints. 

A very similar clause appears in section 7 of part 1 ("cancellation of services").  It goes on to cast a very broad net around objectionable material and says that Dynadot decides what's objectionable.  Now, if you go to my website at www.complete.org or blog at changelog.complete.org, you'll see I'm an upstanding netizen.  But the AUP says that things that "are designed to or effectively... embarrass" third parties could get my domain cancelled.  So if I post a review of Vista that says I think Microsoft did a poor job of engineering, would my account be yanked if one of their engineers complained?  What if I (legally!) linked to a Comedy Central sketch using real TV footage to mock George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton?


The cases you described above would never happen with us. Complaining about Microsoft or making fun of George Bush are protected free speech. The service agreement is designed to give us some flexibility in dealing with customers that break the law. 

I'm particularly concerned about this because apparently DynaDot felt it worthwhile to try to take down the website of someone that found a security hole: http://www.jhuskisson.com/friends/dynadot-fights-back-bans-nick-from-everything
While I wouldn't condone step-by-step cracking instructions in most cases, this is concerning to me.


He was posting a step by step guide to hacking our website, which is illegal. The hack did not work, but we noticed an upsurge in strange activity in our logs, so we requested the hacking guide be taken down. 

Finally, item (i) under the Domain Privacy Service section says that you could immediately reveal all my information upon the receipt of merely a *claim* (not even a court order), even if it's invalid.  But I thought that NOT doing this was what you were saying made your service better, over at http://www.dynadot.com/resource/article/qa.html?aid=0


Once again we need to build some flexibility into our service agreement to deal with people who use their domains for criminal activity. Otherwise we could be liable for the damages that they cause to others. So far, we have never dropped anyones privacy except in the few cases we were forced to by a FBI subpoena.

I know this is a long message, and I appreciate your time.  I really do want to use your service, but -- no offense intended -- I want to make sure I'm not dealing with scammers first, and from reading the AUP, I'm not so sure!


No offence taken. I will email our counsel to see if we can tighten up the agreement a bit. 

-- John Goerzen

18 February 2008

Sylvain Le Gall: ocamlcore.org ongoing progress

With a small team, we are setting up ocamlcore.org. For now the site is quite experimental. This site should help OCaml developpers to have a common place to share their coding experience with other. This includes, but is not limited to, a planet and a forge. I think that we will be able to finish the setup of the planet quite soon, but i am uncertain about the forge settings, which is far more complicated. However, this is a great experiment, because i never have really try to set up this kind of things... I think this week (and this week-end) will help us achieve a great part of the settings of ocamlcore.org. We will have occasions to meet face to face with Stefano Zacchiroli and Romain Beauxis, either here in Paris or at FOSDEM.

Filip Van Raemdonck: PHP and SSL with Lighttpd on Debian Etch

First, a question: dear lazyweb, how do I completely disable non-SSL access with lighttpd? I can't seem to find how to have a lighttpd SSL-only configuration. (and only binding port 80 on localhost does not count for an answer)

On to the subject. While it's easy to add SSL to lighttpd and enable PHP (through fastcgi) — and Debian makes it even easier with it's lighty-enable-mod tool — if you only do it once in a blue moon then it's not exactly resident knowledge. So here are the steps to do it, on Debian Etch:
  1. apt-get the lighttpd, php4-cgi or php5-cgi, and openssl packages
  2. lighty-enable-mod fastcgi
  3. if using php5, update the path to the cgi binary in /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-fastcgi.conf (it's preconfigured for php4)
  4. lighty-enable-mod ssl
  5. update the path to the SSL certificate in /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-ssl.conf
  6. restart the lighttpd server
That's all there is to it. Well, strictly speaking there's a step 4a: install a certificate; but that's arguably not a part of the configuration process.
(for reference: openssl req -new -x509 -keyout /etc/lighttpd/selfcert.pem -out /etc/lighttpd/selfcert.pem -days 365 -nodes will generate a self-signed certificate)

Rob Bradford: Clutter 0.6 packages

Since Clutter 0.6 was released today i’ve been building packages like mad. You can fetch them for the components released today (core, cairo, gst and gtk) from the OH repository at debian.o-hand.com. This includes packages built for Ubuntu ‘gutsy’ and Debian unstable. Packages for the bindings will also be uploaded when the new versions are released over the coming days.

Stefano Zacchiroli: galax in debian

Galax in Debian version 0.9.9 in experimental / NEW Executive summary: Galax (a fast XQuery implementation with support for static typing) is now in Debian. After my introductory post on XQuery and how to use it in Debian I've got motivated again in finishing the Debian packaging of Galax. (Or was the motivation coming from the fact that Saxon-B is terribly slow and also the annoying thought that one has to pay for extra-optimizations and static typing?) Galax, on the contrary, is really fast, Schema-aware, and supports static typing out of the box (you won't discover too late that you've added an integer to a string-valued node). Galax is now (almost) in Debian: yesterday I've uploaded version 0.9.9 to experimental, but of course it will need to pass through NEW before being available to the public. In the meantime it is available from my repository, here's the needed sources.list line: 
deb http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian unstable main
in case you wanna look at the source package you can do one of: 
$ dget http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian/pool/galax_0.9.9-1.dsc
$ debcheckout svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-ocaml-maint/trunk/packages/galax/trunk
Getting started with Galax Mini howto for evaluating XQuery queries with Galax: 
# aptitude install galax
$ cat sample.xq 
<bookshelf>
  for $book in doc('books.xml')//book
  where
    some $surname in $book/author/last
    satisfies $surname eq "Stevens"
  return <title>   xs:string($book/title)   </title>  
</bookshelf>
$ head -n 7 books.xml 
<bib>
  <book year="1994">
    <title>TCP/IP Illustrated</title>
    <author><last>Stevens</last><first>W.</first></author>
    <publisher>Addison-Wesley</publisher>
    <price>65.95</price>
  </book> 
$ galax-run sample.xq   xmllint --format -
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<bookshelf>
  <title>TCP/IP Illustrated</title>
  <title>Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment</title>
</bookshelf>
The galax-doc package contains much more documentation of course ... I m going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting
PS this evening I'll travel to Paris, where I'll be for a week, moving to FOSDEM for the week-end. Drop me a note if you want to get in touch for beer/keysigning/whatever.

Remi Vanicat: Who is playing with my cpufreq parameter?

I’ve a problem for some time: something seem to be changing my cpu frequency behind my back, and I don’t know what is doing it. It happen when the computer is doing cpu intensive mostly non interactive thing, as watching certain .avi with some codec. The change of cpufreq is relay a problem because then the cpu became to slow to decode the film at the speed I need to see it. So, what happen ?
If I use the ondemand governor, it seem that it will eventually believe that I do not demand cpu anymore, slow down to 800Mhz, and one cannot look at the film anymore…
If I use the userspace governor, setting the frequency to the max available value, well, the frequency will eventually change to something smaller. It will even lower the max frequency… Worst still, cpufreq setting won’t change to what I want if I ask for it: 
# cpufreq-info && echo && cpufreq-set --max 2GHz && cpufreq-set -f 2GHz && LC_ALL=C cpufreq-info
cpufrequtils 002: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2006
Report errors and bugs to linux@brodo.de, please.
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: powernow-k8
  CPUs which need to switch frequency at the same time: 0
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 2.00 GHz
  available frequency steps: 2.00 GHz, 1.80 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 800 MHz
  available cpufreq governors: userspace, powersave, ondemand, conservative, performance
  current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 1.20 GHz.
                  The governor "userspace" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 800 MHz (asserted by call to hardware).
cpufrequtils 002: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2006
Report errors and bugs to linux@brodo.de, please.
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: powernow-k8
  CPUs which need to switch frequency at the same time: 0
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 2.00 GHz
  available frequency steps: 2.00 GHz, 1.80 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 800 MHz
  available cpufreq governors: userspace, powersave, ondemand, conservative, performance
  current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 1.20 GHz.
                  The governor "userspace" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 800 MHz (asserted by call to hardware).
Not only my setting have been changed, But they won’t change back to what I want. I have to wait sometime, before demanding cpufreq-set to change my setting if I want them obeyed.

Mohammed Sameer: multi-gnome-terminal is back to life.

OK. This is the beauty of FOSS. The project has been dead upstream for a while now. It survived until it was removed from lenny.

Now me and 2 other users decided to adapt it. port it or rewrite it in gtk2.

We are having a discussion about the whole situation.

To anyone still using multi-gnome-terminal: Please share with us the features you were actually using. These are the ones more likely to be implemented and no new features will probably be added, maybe help us coding and/or testing or participate in the discussions. read more

Eddy Petri&#537;or: [VCS/SCM] same language, different lingo

When people say "lightweight branches":
  • In git lingo, most likely they will think about the fact that you don't need a different directory to switch to a different branch.
  • In subversion lingo, they will probably mean that the cost of making a branch in the repository does not impose an expensive operation
  • In bzr lingo, it seems they mean a repository with short history (aka shallow copy, for most other people)
  • it seems that mercurial refers to git's meaning as "named branches" (not sure about this); not sure if mercurial documentation refers to anything else as "lightweight branches"

Export means:
  • for subversion: to create a working copy without any meta information
  • for mercurial/hg: "The act of exporting a changeset generates an augmented patch file that describes the change."
  • for git, it seems to be a useless 'cp -r' operation
There are several other differences in the VCS/SCM lingo paralel uses, if you want to look closely, but these are enough for now...

No wonder we have communication problems and people don't grasp the power of a new tool when it changes the meaning of previously used terms.

William Pitcock: projectM running on GTK not SDL.

Spent some time tonight “porting” projectM’s SDL implementation to GTK (via GtkGLExt). This requires GtkGLExt 1.2.0 or later (since earlier ones may be buggyish, I don’t know for certain). I did it by implementing it as a GTK+ widget. It is subclassed from a GtkDrawingArea which has been hijacked by GtkGLExt for OpenGL rendering. Then I added various methods, etcetera. The current code is in Audacious HG. However, Debian did not have a recent enough GtkGLExt, and the maintainer has been MIA since 2004 (even unacknowledged NMUs since 2006). So, I intend to hijack the package. Sometime soon I will break this widget out into a separate library, libGTKProjectM, so that other interested parties might be able to integrate it into their programs.

Russell Coker: Oracle Unbreakable Linux

Matt Bottrell writes about the Oracle Linux offerings presented at LCA 2008 [1] The one thing that Oracle does which I really object to is the “unbreakable” part of their advertising. They have pictures of penguins in armour and the only reasonable assumption is that their system is more secure in some way. As far as I am aware they offer no security features other than those which are available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Fedora. The unbreakable claims were also made before Oracle even had their own Linux distribution, which gave them even less reason for the claims. If someone is going to be given credit for making Linux unbreakable then the contributors list for the SE Linux project [2] is one possible starting point. Another possibility is that credit could be given to Red Hat for introducing so many security features to the mainstream Linux users before any other distribution. In terms of improving the security of databases it’s probably best to give credit to Kaigai Kohei and the PostgreSQL team for Security Enhanced PostgreSQL [3]. I believe that NEC also deserves some credit for sponsoring Kaigai’s work, I am not sure whether NEC directly sponsored his recent work on SE-PostgreSQL but they certainly sponsored his past work (and are credited on the NSA web site for this). Oracle’s Linux distribution is based on CentOS and/or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The situation with RHEL is that the source is freely available to everyone but binaries are only available to people who pay for support. CentOS is a free recompile of RHEL and a good choice of a distribution if you want a server with long-term support and don’t want to pay Red Hat (I run many servers on CentOS). While Matt gets most things right in his post there is one statement that I believe to be wrong, he writes “One of the craziest statements I heard during the talk was that Oracle will only support their products running under a VM if it’s within Oracle VM“. My knowledge of Xen causes me to have great concerns about reliability. My conversations with MySQL people about how intensive database servers are and how they can reveal bugs in the OS and hardware are backed up by my own experience in benchmarking systems. Therefore I think it’s quite reasonable to decline to support software running under someone else’s Xen build in the same way as you might refuse to support software running under a different kernel version (for exactly the same reasons). Matt however goes on to make some very reasonable requests of Oracle. The demand for native packages of Oracle is significant, I can’t imagine official Debian package support appearing in the near future, but RPM support for RHEL etc would make things easier for everyone (including Oracle). A better installation process for Oracle would also be a good thing. My observation is that most Oracle installations are not used for intensive work and use database features that are a sub-set of what MySQL offers. I’ve seen a few Oracle installations which have no more than three tables! The installation and management of Oracle is a significant cost factor. For example I used to work for a company that employed a full-time Oracle DBA for a database with only a few tables and very small amounts of access (he spent most of his time watching videos of fights and car crashes that he downloaded from the net). Adding one extra salary for a database is a significant expense (although the huge Oracle license fees may make it seem insignificant).

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17 February 2008

Russell Coker: Laptop vs Book Weight

Matt Bottrell wrote an interesting and informative post about laptops for school kids [1]. His conclusion is that based on technical features the OLPC machine is best suited for primary school children and one of the ASUS EeePC, the Intel Classmate, and the Everex Cloudbook would be best suited for high-school students. The Asus EeePC [2] is a good option, it runs a variant of Debian and the Debian Eeepc Team are active in getting full Debian support for it [3]. The Intel Classmate [4] has a choice of Windows XP, Mandriva, and Metasys Classmate. The web page says that it’s designed “for primary students (ages 5-14)“, so I think that Matt made a mistake in listing this as a possibility for high-schools, of course when running Mandriva it could have software installed for any age group but the hardware design may be better suited to younger children. The Everex Cloudbook [5] runs the GOS Rocket [6] OS which seems to be an Ubuntu variant with an Enlightenment based GUI and a configuration aimed at using Google services (blogger, gmail, etc). Configuring Ubuntu to suit your needs is easy enough (it’s based on Debian). Note that Matt did not mention where one might purchase a Cloudbook in Australia and I don’t recall seeing one on any of my many window-shopping expeditions to Australian consumer electronics stores, while the EeePC is widely available (except when sold out). But I’m sure that if the government wanted to place an order for a couple of million units then Everex would ramp up production quickly enough. Matt made one statement that I strongly disagree with, he wrote “A traditional notebook is far too heavy for high-school kids to lug around“. To test this theory I searched for some high-school text books and a set of scales. A year 11 Maths A text book from ~1988 weighed 600g and the pair of year 12 Maths A and Maths B texts weighed 1.6Kg. When I was at high-school the day was divided into seven “periods”, some classes took two periods so four different classes which required text books (or other books) was typical. Carrying 3Kg of books to school would not be uncommon for year 12 students. The Lenovo T series (advertised as “premier performance” and the model I personally prefer) is listed as having a starting weight of 2.1Kg (which presumably doesn’t include the power pack). My Thinkpad T series (from about 2004) weighs about 2.4Kg according to my kitchen scales and has a battery weighing just over 400g. My practice for a long time was to own a spare power pack for my Thinkpad so that I could leave it at work (saving 400g when travelling to and from work). I have also had the practice of buying a spare battery when I buy a Thinkpad (you need a spare battery for a long trip). So if I had really wanted to save weight I could have left a battery at work and reduced by travel weight by another 400g (with the cost being that I couldn’t use it when on a train or bus). A spare power pack is not overly expensive. In the usual case students would only need a battery when at school (it’s a little known fact that Thinkpads work perfectly without a battery plugged in). So if a student had a power pack at home as well as one at school and if they left their battery at school and they owned one of the latest Thinkpad T series (listed with a starting weight of 2.1Kg) then their travel weight might be about 1.7Kg. If the majority of school texts could be stored on their laptop then the result of using a Thinkpad T series would be a significant weight reduction! If the students were using a Thinkpad X series (more expensive so maybe not a good option) then the list weight is 1.57Kg and the travel weight might be as low as 1.3Kg (at a rough estimate). The EeePC offers significant benefits for school use, it is light, cheap (children tend to break or lose things more frequently than adults so you should budget for buying two of anything that they use), and having no hard drive (flash storage) it should cope well with being dropped. The screen on the EeePC is unreasonably small buy Asus could release a new model with a bigger screen (they may do this in the future anyway or a government contract could encourage them to do it sooner). I agree that the EeePC or the Everex Cloudbook is probably the best option for high-school students, but I can’t agree with any claim about a traditional laptop being too heavy, the only reason for excluding a traditional laptop is that those new ultra-lights are better. Another reason that might be cited for not using laptops is the cost. While prices of $1000 or more for a traditional laptop are rather expensive, the $500 for an EeePC is not that expensive - and the government could surely negotiate a better deal, I would be surprised if they couldn’t get the price down to $350 by some bargaining and by removing the middle-man. A careful child could use the same laptop for the entire duration of high-school and their parents would incur less expense than they currently would spend on text books. As for the current lack of electronic text books. Currently when the education department selects a book it’s a license to print money for the author and publisher. All that the education department has to do is to declare that they will do a deal with the first company to release their books under a creative commons license. The idea would be that an author (or publishing company) would get paid a fixed sum of money for a CC release of a text book which would then be available for use by anyone anywhere in the world. World-wide free distribution would be no loss to the author (each country tends to have unique books anyway) but would be a good act of charity from our government to developing countries. Once books were available under a creative commons license (without the “no modifications” clause) they could be freely improved by anyone. Improving text books for younger students could be a good school project. Update: Thanks to Steve Walsh for pointing out that the Classmate can run Linux. It’s a pity that he didn’t link to my post so that his readers could see what he was referring to. I take it as a good sign of the quality of my posts that such small errors get pointed out.

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Lior Kaplan: Openoffice.org bug triage


Lior: “My name is Lior, and it has been 6 months since my last bug triage.”
Support group: “we love you Lior…”
While I was thinking of doing another openoffice.org bug triage for version 2.2.1, version 2.3.1 had already entered testing. Meaning the versions in testing/unstable are very similar. This also means users can easily test a fairly recent version of openoffice.org without running unstable… So, I’m glad to announce the beginning of (my) 2nd openoffice.org bug triage. This triage targets 285 bugs out of 330 open oo.org bugs. The selected bug are ones which were reported against versions lower the 2.3.1 or have no version information at all. The goal of the triage isn’t to close as much bugs as possible, but to get all the bugs updated with recent version. Hoping “not relevant any more” will be the answer for most pings. Last time about 1/3 of the bugs were reported as already fixed / not relevant any more. For those of you who will get one of my pings, please don’t forget to send you current openoffice.org version info. I know some of you don’t necessary agree with this method for closing bugs, as it allegedly puts the burden of testing and updating bug information on the users/reporter than upstream. While I partially agree, I don’t see how can teams with so much bugs can handle all the bugs themselves without having someone doing a full time job on this issue (any volunteers ?). People wish to review the progress of the triage (or even help…) can check the triage bugs list. p.s. Seems I was too slow with this triage, version 2.4.0~rc1 is already in unstable… p.s. 2 It’s been only 4 moths since my last triage…

Neil Williams: Monitoring long running processes via ssh

I'm trying to work out how to monitor a remote script - in this case a mass build script. The script itself is trivial - a simple for loop in perl. It calls a script from emdebian-tools that calls a variety of other scripts and programs.
What's the best way for me to monitor that script from another machine on the network?
Yes, 'ps wax' is usable but not particularly friendly - the script has to work its way through a list of packages that need building. I want to know which package is being built at the time and the 'ps' output does show this information but only if you recognise parts of the build process for particular packages.
I thought about getting the script to output the current package name to some file in /var/ but that seems a bit of a hack (it's a userspace command and should not need to use sudo or require particular permission setups). Sending email is overkill. A file in /tmp/ is possible, true, but that means adapting the script itself. I'd like a solution that could work with (almost) any package, including binaries, without altering the source code. I've also thought of running the script within screen but then when the machine is in the middle of a compilation, it isn't easy to work out which package is actually being built just from the gcc output, plus there is the continual problem that screen doesn't support scrollback.
I have a feeling this is a potential reinventing the wheel problem so I'm looking for ideas.

Update:
The closest process output I can use is ps wfh which at least collates all the processes started by the top level script into one tree. I've worked out why the info I wanted was not being shown - the call from perl was exec() not system(). Doh! Ne'er mind. ps wfh will be enough for what I need - but I will need to adapt the wrapper after all. Thanks to all those who posted comments.

Neil Williams: Monitoring long running scripts via ssh

I'm trying to work out how to monitor a remote script - in this case a mass build script. The script itself is trivial - a simple for loop in perl. It calls a script from emdebian-tools that calls a variety of other scripts and programs.
What's the best way for me to monitor that script from another machine on the network?
Yes, 'ps wax' is usable but not particularly friendly - the script has to work its way through a list of packages that need building. I want to know which package is being built at the time and the 'ps' output does show this information but only if you recognise parts of the build process for particular packages.
I thought about getting the script to output the current package name to some file in /var/ but that seems a bit of a hack (it's a userspace command and should not need to use sudo or require particular permission setups). Sending email is overkill. A file in /tmp/ is possible, true, but that means adapting the script itself. I'd like a solution that could work with (almost) any package, including binaries, without altering the source code. I've also thought of running the script within screen but then when the machine is in the middle of a compilation, it isn't easy to work out which package is actually being built just from the gcc output, plus there is the continual problem that screen doesn't support scrollback.
I have a feeling this is a potential reinventing the wheel problem so I'm looking for ideas.

MJ Ray: KUDOS?

On Thursday 14 February, there was an IRC meeting for a new Koha Users group. The log is saved on the usual site. I'm not at all clear what the motive for forming another formal group is, as will be clear if you read the log - it doesn't really need a formal group taking membership fees to arrange meetings and seminars, does it?Collective commissioning of new features would be a good reason IMO, but only some attendees seemed to want that. Others seemed quite vocal against cooperating on feature commissions, which surprised me.

Norbert Tretkowski: MySQL 5.0.51a-1 uploaded to Debian

Last week I uploaded MySQL 5.0.51a-1 to Debian unstable. Usually not worth a separate blog entry, but in this release I included the patch for MySQL bug #4541, which was opened more than three years ago. The problem results in an error like this, e.g. when migrating a database from latin1 to utf8:
Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes
The patch from Ingo Str wing now included in Debian raises the maximum key length to 4005 bytes or 1001 UTF-8 characters. It will not go into the official MySQL source repositories because it results in bigger buffers and as such increases memory footprint and decreases performance. See the bugreport for further details.

Update: After some criticism from MySQL (see comments) I decided to disable the patch in the default builds with the next upload, but still ship it in the source package.

Martin F. Krafft: How long will this last?

At Melbourne Tullamarine airport today, I was asked to present the credit card used to book my flights as a security measure to be able to fly Bangkok-Zurich. I did not need the card for the Melbourne-Bangkok leg. Unfortunately, I left the card at home for various reasons. In the end, they just issued both boarding passes anyway. I was not allowed to take the throw-away wooden chopsticks that came with my Pad Thai lunch through the security checkpoint. For dinner on the airplane to Bangkok, we were given plastic knives and metal forks. For dinner on the second trip, we got metal knives. At Bangkok airport, I had to pass a security checkpoint changing planes. They confiscated the plastic water bottle which was given to me on the flight from Melbourne (the bottle said Thai airlines on the label). The lady in front of me was using one of those telescopic walking sticks, she apparently had a bad leg. They didn t even bother asking about the stick, which she ran through the x-ray. Terrorists don t have bad legs, nor know how to pretend. How long are we going to put up with this bullshit? NP: The Flower Kings: Stardust We Are

16 February 2008

Jeff Bailey: I'm home.

I'm home and doing well. They were able to embolize, so surgery will happen in the next couple of weeks. We're sitting down with the surgeon on Tuesday to learn what the surgery will actually be, recovery times, etc. I'll do another update then.

Thanks for the posts and thoughts, everyone. It's meant a lot to me.

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