Michael Hirschorn in this month’s Atlantic reduces my generation’s entire cultural zeitgeist to a single word: quirk.

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It s easy for David Cross s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the 90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn t mean you should.

Hirschorn makes a fair point which, I think, can be restated that much of the content I enjoy is really just candy. The Atlantic seems to have recently figured out its readership (or at least figured out me). Hard to Swallow (by B.R. Myers, who more typically writes about Korean issues) is a pointed moral critique of modern food lovers (chowhounds?) and food writing (including Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, much read by my contemporaries). If I weren’t already a vegetarian, I might take umbrage. “Insider baseball” pieces on Karl Rove and Michael Gerson are also excellent, and in the case of the former quite timely. To wrap up this encomium, props to the magazine for its clean new website design, which I believe premiered today, and for including an embedded Youtube video in the online version of the quirk article.

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I finally uploaded the first release of WebKit to unstable. It will obviously need to go through NEW first, which might take some time. There still is work to do, first of which being to correctly setup the git repositories. For the moment, there is only a git repository following upstream svn available on git.d.o. The branches are a bit messy, though ; I have to figure out why git-svn insists on randomly recreating the master branch… I supposedly removed the master branch to have the svn branch follow the git-svn remote. Anyways, once it is sorted out, I’ll set up a special branch to create our tarballs and from which we’d derive the debian branch (or not, this is not decided yet). This special branch will be a copy of the upstream branch with some stuff removed (see debian/copyright in the current packages source for a list of these). Speaking of the package source, since NEW is not available, I made the packages sources and binaries available on gluck. An important note: the version I uploaded is made from revision 24735 of upstream svn repository, which is from July 27. Unfortunately, to be able to build the first version of epiphany that includes webkit embedding (2.19.6) as is, webkit_gtk_page_can_go_forward and webkit_gtk_page_can_go_backward are needed, and these, while available in the API headers, only appeared in the source code on July 30. However, I built a hacked epiphany with calls to these functions removed (which means back and forward buttons won’t work properly), and made it available on gluck too. Be aware this version requires glib and gtk from experimental, which, I’ve been said, made all gtk/glib warnings fatal. That means all applications that usually fill your .xsession-errors log file are likely to crash with these versions. You’ll note integration is not yet perfect, biggest misfeature being the scrollbars missing, and some glitches such as the user agent (it is hardcoded in WebKit :-/), and the about window still saying it is based on Gecko ;) I’ll try to push a new version of WebKit soon enough. Stay tuned.

Protx, a payment service, installed a major update on 1 August. They'd warned us about this in newsletters and we were prepared. We paid a bit towards another company's development of the protx_form module for OSCommerce to meet the updates and generally clean it up. This went slightly wrong in three ways. Firstly, protx went down for longer than expected, ultimately generating an apology from the MD. Not much we could do about that. Secondly, protx started rejecting commas in amounts. GB uses commas in between thousands, so this meant none of our British-localised shops could process orders over 1000. Ow. The Protx VSP Form docs still shows commas in the Amount examples, so I suspect that change was unintented. I've sent Protx Support an email to ask. I was offline, but Paul installed a fix before I got back. Finally, the mainline protx_form module has updated to v1.17 to include these changes and more (see Payment Modules forum threads), but our developer hasn't uploaded their work yet, so we're stuck up a branch and someone needs to merge. I hope it won't be us, as I can already see conflicting changes. What should I have done differently? Is it time to find a new payment provider? Should I insist that we publish paid developments ourselves as soon as possible? (2007-08-16: 1 comment)

When are two identical changes the same, and when aren't they? Theres a little bit of debate started by Andrew Cowie posting about unmixing the paint. Matt Palmer followed up with a claim that a particular technique used by Andrew is dangerous, and finally Andrew Bennetts makes the point that text conflicts are a small subset of merge conflicts. That said, one critical task for a version control system is the merge command. Lets define merge at a human level as "reproduce the changes made in branch A in my branch B". There are a lot of taste choices that can be made without breaking this definition. For instance, merge that combines all the individual changes into one - losing the individual commit deltas meets this description. So does a merge which requires all text conflicts to be resolved during the merge commands execution, or one that does not give a human a chance to review the merged tree before recording it as a commit. So if the goal of merge is to reproduce these other changes, then we are essentially trying to infer what the *change* was. For example, in an ideal world, merging a branch that changes all "log messages of floating points to 6 digit scale." would know enough to catch all new log messages added in my branch, regardless of language, actual api used etc etc. But that is fantasy at the moment. The best we can do today depends on how we capture the change. For instance, Darcs allows some changes to be captured as symbol changing patches, and others as regular textual diffs. So the problem about whether arriving at the same result can be rephrased 'when is arriving at the same result correct or incorrect'. For instance, if I write a patch and put it up as plain text on a website, then two people developing $foo download it and apply it, they have duplicate changes but its clearly correct that a merge between them should not error on this. On the other hand, the example Andrew Bennetts quotes in his post is a valid example of two people making the same change, but the line needing a change during the merge to remain correct. Here's another, example though. If I commit something faulty to my branch, and you pull from me before I fix it. Then while I fix the bug, you also fix it - the same way. That is another example of no-conflict being correct. If its possible for either answer - conflict, or do not conflict - to be correct, then what should a VCS author do? There are several choices here:

• Always conflict
• Never conflict conflict
• Conflict based on a heuristic

I think that our job is to assess what the maximum harm from choosing the wrong default is, and the likely hood of that occuring, and then make a choice. Short of fantasy no merge is, in general, definately good or bad - your QA process (such as an automatic test suite) needs to run regardless of the VCS's logic. The risk of a bad merge is relatively low, because you should be testing, and if the merge is wrong you can just not commit it, or roll it back. So our job in merge is to make it likely as possible that your test suite will pass when you have done the merge, without further human work. This is very different to trying to always conflict whenever we cannot be 100% sure that the text is what a human would have created. Its actually harder to take this approach than conflicting - conflicting is easy.

I read an interesting post on Advogato about IT recruiting agencies (along with an interesting preface about medical treatment for broken ribs). Their report closely mirrored my experience in many ways. Here are what I consider to be the main points for a job applicant dealing with recruiters:

1. Ask more than you believe that you are worth - the worst they can do is say “no” (and you will feel like a fool if the agency pays you less than half what the client pays because you didn’t ask for enough).


2. Put lots of terms in your CV that will work for grep or other searches. A human who reads your CV will know that if you describe 3 years of Linux sys-admin experience that you can do BASH shell scripting and sys-admin work on other versions of Unix. But if a search doesn’t match it then the typical recruiting agent won’t offer you the position. I have idly considered saying things like “Perl (not Pearl) experience” to catch mis-spelled grep operations.


3. Recruiting agents will frequently demand that you re-write your CV to match a position that they have open, they will say things such as “you claim 3 years of shell scripting and Perl experience but I don’t see that on your CV” and insist that you re-write it to give more emphasis to that area.


4. Most recruiting agents are compulsive liars and don’t understand computers, you have to deal with the fact that to get most of the better paying positions you need to have an incompetent liar represent you. Avoid the stupid liars though. For example I once refused to deal with an agent who told me about his plans for stealing the CV database from the agency he worked for and selling it to another agency - not because he was shifty in every possible way, but because he was so stupid as to boast about such things immediately after meeting me on a train.


5. Expect that recruiting agents won’t understand the technology. If you politely and subtly offer to assist them in writing a letter to a client recommending you then they will often accept. Why would they go to the effort of assessing your skills and writing a short letter to the client describing how good you are when you can do that for them? On one particularly amusing occasion I was applying for a position with IBM and the recruiting agent had been supplied with a short quiz of technical skills to assess all applicants - they gave me the answer sheet and asked me to self-assess (I got 100% - but it was an easy test and I would have got the same result anyway).


6. Some levels of stupidity are so great that you should avoid dealing with the agent (and possibly the agency that employs them). Being unable to view a HTML file is one criteria I have used since 1999 (every OS since about 1998 came with a web browser built in). Another example is an agent who tried to convince me that “.au” is not a valid suffix for an email address (I was applying for a sys-admin job with an ISP). Job adverts that mis-spell terms (such as Perl spelled at Pearl) are also a warning sign.


7. Gossip is important to your business! Some agencies will pay you what you earn and merely terminate your contract when things go wrong. Other agencies will refuse to pay you when things go bad, or even demand that paid money be returned and threaten legal action. Talk to other contract workers in your region and learn the goss about the bad agencies. Also track agency name changes, when a bad agency changes name don’t be fooled.

When applying for a position advertised by an agency you will ideally start by seeing an advert with a phone number and an email address. The best strategy in that case seems to be to send your CV with a brief cover letter and then about 5 minutes after your mail server sends the message to their mail server you phone them. I found that I got a significantly higher success rate (in terms of having the agent send my CV to the client) if I phoned them when my CV arrived. Sometimes a fax number is advertised, unless there is some problem that prevents sending a document via email (such as the agency having a broken mail server) then do not FAX them. A faxed document will have to be faxed on to the client and will look bad after the double-fax operation and will prevent the agent from grepping it. Rumor has it that agents will often post fake adverts for the purpose of collecting CVs (so that they can boast to clients In most situations a recruiting agent should insist on meeting you for an interview before sending your CV to a client. The only exception is if you are applying for a job in another country. Meeting an agent at a restaurant or other public place is not uncommon (often they want to meet you while travelling between other locations and sometimes their main office is not in a good location). I suspect that some agencies start with a “virtual office” and perform all their interviews in public places (this doesn’t mean that they will do a worse job than the more established agencies). If an agent is prepared to recommend you to a client without meeting you then they are not doing their job properly. It used to be that there were enough agencies pretending to do their job that you could ignore the agencies that will recommend any unseen candidate. But now an increasing number of agencies do this and if you want a contract you may have to deal with them. When an agency has a fancy office keep in mind that they paid for it by taking money from people like you! For contract work a recruiting agent is not your friend, they make their money by getting you to accept less money than the client pays them - the less they pay you the more money they make. A common claim is “we only take a fixed percentage of what the client pays”, but when you ask what that percentage is they refuse to answer - I guess that the fixed percentage is 50% or as close to it as they can manage.

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I read an interesting post on Advogato about IT recruiting agencies (along with an interesting preface about medical treatment for broken ribs). Their report closely mirrored my experience in many ways. Here are what I consider to be the main points for a job applicant dealing with recruiters:

1. Ask more than you believe that you are worth - the worst they can do is say “no” (and you will feel like a fool if the agency pays you less than half what the client pays because you didn’t ask for enough).


2. Put lots of terms in your CV that will work for grep or other searches. A human who reads your CV will know that if you describe 3 years of Linux sys-admin experience that you can do BASH shell scripting and sys-admin work on other versions of Unix. But if a search doesn’t match it then the typical recruiting agent won’t offer you the position. I have idly considered saying things like “Perl (not Pearl) experience” to catch mis-spelled grep operations.


3. Recruiting agents will frequently demand that you re-write your CV to match a position that they have open, they will say things such as “you claim 3 years of shell scripting and Perl experience but I don’t see that on your CV” and insist that you re-write it to give more emphasis to that area.


4. Most recruiting agents are compulsive liars and don’t understand computers, you have to deal with the fact that to get most of the better paying positions you need to have an incompetent liar represent you. Avoid the stupid liars though. For example I once refused to deal with an agent who told me about his plans for stealing the CV database from the agency he worked for and selling it to another agency - not because he was shifty in every possible way, but because he was so stupid as to boast about such things immediately after meeting me on a train.


5. Expect that recruiting agents won’t understand the technology. If you politely and subtly offer to assist them in writing a letter to a client recommending you then they will often accept. Why would they go to the effort of assessing your skills and writing a short letter to the client describing how good you are when you can do that for them? On one particularly amusing occasion I was applying for a position with IBM and the recruiting agent had been supplied with a short quiz of technical skills to assess all applicants - they gave me the answer sheet and asked me to self-assess (I got 100% - but it was an easy test and I would have got the same result anyway).


6. Some levels of stupidity are so great that you should avoid dealing with the agent (and possibly the agency that employs them). Being unable to view a HTML file is one criteria I have used since 1999 (every OS since about 1998 came with a web browser built in). Another example is an agent who tried to convince me that “.au” is not a valid suffix for an email address (I was applying for a sys-admin job with an ISP). Job adverts that mis-spell terms (such as Perl spelled at Pearl) are also a warning sign.


7. Gossip is important to your business! Some agencies will pay you what you earn and merely terminate your contract when things go wrong. Other agencies will refuse to pay you when things go bad, or even demand that paid money be returned and threaten legal action. Talk to other contract workers in your region and learn the goss about the bad agencies. Also track agency name changes, when a bad agency changes name don’t be fooled.

When applying for a position advertised by an agency you will ideally start by seeing an advert with a phone number and an email address. The best strategy in that case seems to be to send your CV with a brief cover letter and then about 5 minutes after your mail server sends the message to their mail server you phone them. I found that I got a significantly higher success rate (in terms of having the agent send my CV to the client) if I phoned them when my CV arrived. Sometimes a fax number is advertised, unless there is some problem that prevents sending a document via email (such as the agency having a broken mail server) then do not FAX them. A faxed document will have to be faxed on to the client and will look bad after the double-fax operation and will prevent the agent from grepping it. Rumor has it that agents will often post fake adverts for the purpose of collecting CVs (so that they can boast to clients In most situations a recruiting agent should insist on meeting you for an interview before sending your CV to a client. The only exception is if you are applying for a job in another country. Meeting an agent at a restaurant or other public place is not uncommon (often they want to meet you while travelling between other locations and sometimes their main office is not in a good location). I suspect that some agencies start with a “virtual office” and perform all their interviews in public places (this doesn’t mean that they will do a worse job than the more established agencies). If an agent is prepared to recommend you to a client without meeting you then they are not doing their job properly. It used to be that there were enough agencies pretending to do their job that you could ignore the agencies that will recommend any unseen candidate. But now an increasing number of agencies do this and if you want a contract you may have to deal with them. When an agency has a fancy office keep in mind that they paid for it by taking money from people like you! For contract work a recruiting agent is not your friend, they make their money by getting you to accept less money than the client pays them - the less they pay you the more money they make. A common claim is “we only take a fixed percentage of what the client pays”, but when you ask what that percentage is they refuse to answer - I guess that the fixed percentage is 50% or as close to it as they can manage.

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

Some weeks ago we started developing KTrace, a graphical KDE frontend for strace. We quickly managed to have something which worked, but development stalled after that. Today we are holding the first KTrace developers meeting to make some decisions about the next features that will be coded. If you want to propose a feature that you would like to see in KTrace (or just a better name proposal), feel free to write a comment

These days I tries to remaster ?OpenSuse 10.2 in order to put several own packages onto the DVD and customise some settings here for Oscar. This DVD should install itself without any questions correctly configured. First of all, the only way to control the autoinstallation is to use autoyast. And in order to use autoyast you've to create an xml file which specific settings in it. ?OpenSuse has an own tool for creation of this xml file: Start ?YaST2 and select the Autoyast module there and then create a reference profile from the running system. (Then simply save this file created by autoyast itself and perform an xml check on this file... you'll see that this check will raise errors.. argh Okay. the next thing is: If you want to use the autoyast gui to select additional packages, your package selection from the last time is purged... so you must every time the complete bunch of packages.... this sucks! Mh... let's see how this will continue.. but I know that remastering a Debian DVD is much easier

Hey, version 0.2 of the Perl Console is out. I found Gunnar’s comment in my first blog entry pretty relevant: providing only a scalar output isn’t user friendly; but freezing the console with either YAML or Data::Dumper would at best satisfy half of the user base. Hence comes the “preferences” idea. The console allows the user to choose either a value or another for a given preference. No big deal there, but it’s clearly the best thing to do for the output issue. In version 0.2, the user can enter something like that to change the output mode:

:set output = yaml

If the user wants to know what are the possible values for the preference “output” he can enter the following command:

:help output

Of course, the help engine reads dynamically the preferences definition, in order not to display outdated information (code changes, you know that!). So, in short, what’s new in 0.2:

• Complete rewrite of the program in object-oriented Perl
• support for preferences (user can set preferences)
• preference “output” added, with 3 values possible: scalar (default), yaml, dumper
• help engine added

The tarball is there, next step is the debian package (ITP already sent).

I've just put 2 and 2 together and maybe I got 5. What do you think of this hypothesis? The effect is lots of spam with From-lines starting akst... Is the cause Alex King's Share This? It seems Time for Blogging asked "A Losing Battle with Blog Comment Spam? Is Share This Plugin at Fault?" but I see nothing relevant on WordPress: Support: Plugins and Hacks: Alex King's Share-This about exploits. I can't see how to exploit the current version to send mail, but I think I can see an exploit for an older version. Also, if you'd got a redirect script into someone's comments, you could use Share This to collect marks.

I have previously blogged about Ethernet bonding on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now I have a need to do the same thing on Debian Etch - to have multiple Ethernet links for redundancy so that if one breaks the system keeps working. The first thing to do on Debian is to install the package ifenslave-2.6 which provides the utility to manage the bond device. Then create the file /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond with the following contents for a network that has 10.0.0.1 as either a reliable host or important router. Note that this will use ARP to ping the router every 2000ms, you could use a lower value for a faster failover or a higher value
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=1 arp_interval=2000 arp_ip_target=10.0.0.1 If you want to monitor link status then you can use the following options line instead, however I couldn’t test this because the MII link monitoring doesn’t seem to work correctly on my hardware (there are many Ethernet devices that don’t work well in this regard):
options bond0 mode=0 miimon=100 Then edit the file /etc/network/interfaces and inset something like the following (as a replacement for the configuration of eth0 that you might currently be using). Note that XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX must be replaced by the hardware address of one of the interfaces that are being bonded or by a locally administered address (see this Wikipedia page for details). If you don’t specify the Ethernet address then it will default to the address of the first interface that is enslaved. This might not sound like a problem, however if the machine boots and a hardware failure is experienced which makes the primary Ethernet device not visible to the OS (IE the PCI card is dead but not killing the machine) then the hardware address of the bond would change, this might cause problems with other parts of your network infrastructure.
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1 There is some special support for bonding in the Debian ifup and ifdown utilities. The following will give the same result as the above in /etc/network/interfaces:
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether 00:02:55:E1:36:32
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
slaves eth0 eth1 The special file /proc/net/bonding/bond0 can be used to view the current configuration of the bond0 device. In theory it should be possible to use bonding on a workstation with DHCP, but in my brief attempts I have not got it working - any comments from people who have this working would be appreciated. The first pre-requisite of doing so is to use either MII monitoring or broadcast (mode 3), I experimented with using options bond0 mode=3 in /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond but found that it took too long to get the bond working and dhclient timed out. Thanks for the howtoforge.com article and the linuxhorizon.ro article that helped me discover some aspects of this. Update: Thanks to Guus Sliepen on the debian-devel mailing list for giving an example of the slaves directive as part of an example of bridging and bonding in response to this question.

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I have previously blogged about Ethernet bonding on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now I have a need to do the same thing on Debian Etch - to have multiple Ethernet links for redundancy so that if one breaks the system keeps working. The first thing to do on Debian is to install the package ifenslave-2.6 which provides the utility to manage the bond device. Then create the file /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond with the following contents for a network that has 10.0.0.1 as either a reliable host or important router. Note that this will use ARP to ping the router every 2000ms, you could use a lower value for a faster failover or a higher value
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=1 arp_interval=2000 arp_ip_target=10.0.0.1 If you want to monitor link status then you can use the following options line instead, however I couldn’t test this because the MII link monitoring doesn’t seem to work correctly on my hardware (there are many Ethernet devices that don’t work well in this regard):
options bond0 mode=0 miimon=100 Then edit the file /etc/network/interfaces and inset something like the following (as a replacement for the configuration of eth0 that you might currently be using). Note that XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX must be replaced by the hardware address of one of the interfaces that are being bonded or by a locally administered address (see this Wikipedia page for details). If you don’t specify the Ethernet address then it will default to the address of the first interface that is enslaved. This might not sound like a problem, however if the machine boots and a hardware failure is experienced which makes the primary Ethernet device not visible to the OS (IE the PCI card is dead but not killing the machine) then the hardware address of the bond would change, this might cause problems with other parts of your network infrastructure.
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1 There is some special support for bonding in the Debian ifup and ifdown utilities. The following will give the same result as the above in /etc/network/interfaces:
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether 00:02:55:E1:36:32
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
slaves eth0 eth1 The special file /proc/net/bonding/bond0 can be used to view the current configuration of the bond0 device. In theory it should be possible to use bonding on a workstation with DHCP, but in my brief attempts I have not got it working - any comments from people who have this working would be appreciated. The first pre-requisite of doing so is to use either MII monitoring or broadcast (mode 3), I experimented with using options bond0 mode=3 in /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond but found that it took too long to get the bond working and dhclient timed out. Thanks for the howtoforge.com article and the linuxhorizon.ro article that helped me discover some aspects of this. Update: Thanks to Guus Sliepen on the debian-devel mailing list for giving an example of the slaves directive as part of an example of bridging and bonding in response to this question.

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I'm worried that my Debian Planet credentials are a bit weak, so have a technical post rather than one discussing the fact I'm unemployed in 3 days, or that I'm going back to NI for a week after that to try and get the new house sorted. Oh. Wait. Ooops. Anyway. While I still have easy datacentre access to my colo box (the.earth.li) I thought it might be a good time to think about upgrading it. The most limited resource has been disk space; it was a Dell 2550, so dual PIII-1GHz + 2GB RAM which is nice, but SCSI hotswap drive bays. So nice disk, but anything large is expensive. I think SATA has come along nicely, so was happy to change over to using that instead. As it turned out the old machine was over 5 years old (doesn't time fly!) so there's been a disk performance boost anyway from using new technology. I ended up buying the new machine from Sentral - their website isn't great, but they're very helpful by email and Black Cat had bought machines from them in the past with no problems. It's a Core2Duo E6600 with 4GB RAM and 2 * 750GB Seagate ES SATA II drives in hot swap bays. I pondered a quad core chip and an extra drive (there are 4 bays total), but decided I didn't really need them at present and keeping power consumption down was a good idea. Last time I upgraded the I just did a straight copy of the data over to the new disks. This time there were a couple of things that meant I didn't want to do this. Firstly, I decided to go 64 bit. The chip can do it, I have 4GB RAM, it seemed like a good idea. That meant a dpkg --get-selections on the old box followed by a dpkg --set-selections on the new one, followed by an apt-get dselect-upgrade. Is there a way I could have kept my aptitude knowledge about auto installed packages? I did have a look, but didn't see anything obvious. That gave me the same packages. I also installed ia32-libs to ease the transition for my users who had self compiled bits. Then I had to copy the rest of the data over. /home was easy enough, plus a few other filesystems that didn't have packaged data on them. I manually reviewed changes in /etc but there wasn't anything non obvious thankfully. /var was trickier. I was pleased to discover that Mailman config appears to cross archs quite happily. A pg_dumpall did the trick for PostgreSQL. Rebuilding the overview database for inn took all night. Maybe I should move away from tradspool. There were a few other things to fix up (I hate Berkeley DB), but by and large it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Oh, except that copying that much data across takes a long time. And rsync isn't that much help when the data includes lots of mail folders, some of which are over 1G big (and receiving mail, so constantly changing). I'd started out with a 100M link between the old and new machines, as I hit the e1000 Tx Unit Hang bug. Disabling the power management solved that, giving a 1G link. Still took ages. The second major change with the new box is I've decided to go Xen. That should let me hand out machine slices to users who want to do weird stuff, without me really having to support them. And allow me to throw up test machines when I need to. This was actually really easy to install. I did a basic etch install onto a 2G partition, installed xen-linux-system-2.6.18-4-xen-amd64 and then rebooted and had a dom0 up and running. I gave the main VDS (ie replacement the) a 600G partition, access to both processor cores and 2G of RAM - ie still quite a few more resources than it used to have. Then it got a bit tricky. I wanted lvm to be available within the VDS. So I did all the VG creation and a base install (using debootstrap) from the dom0, then added a filter to /etc/lvm/lvm.conf to exclude /dev/md2 (the 600G partition). And tried to boot the domU. Which was fine, until it tried to mount the root fs at which point the initramfs complained it couldn't find / and bombed out to a shell. The confusing bit was that doing vgcreate -a y found and brought up the lvm partitions fine, at which point the rest of the boot process would complete. Very odd. Much digging eventually led me to discover that the LVM initramfs script only gets run if the specified root partition has a - in it. Argh! I prefer the format /dev/<vgname>/<lvname>, but once I changed to /dev/mapper/<vgname>-<lvname> it all worked fine. The new machine has been in service for the past week and so far it all seems fine. I don't notice the fact it's a Xen instance and it still feels quite nippy. Plus the extra disk space is great as I don't have to worry so much about things getting full. Yet. I haven't noticed a change with the 64 bit side either, but I think on a server that's going to be much more the case - I haven't moved my desktop to 64 bit primarily due to the lack of Flash and Java plugins (I don't see the point of a chroot as there's not really a pressing reason to go 64 bit if it's going to be hassle). I threw up another domU instance to test out some bits and that went smoothly too (I'm using an LVM VG on the dom0 to share out to the other domUs, which will all have a less complicated setup than the main one). So all in all I'm pleased with both the hardware, and the software - I hadn't expected setting it up to be so easy. My last Xen experience was under sarge where it hadn't all been integrated in the same way as it is under etch. Oh, one other thing I did; I rebuilt the AMD64 netinst Etch CD to output to the serial console for both isolinux and the actual installer. And then did the install over the serial console, even though the machine was beside me. The CD is still in the machine which means that I have a fallback if it all falls over horribly - I can access the BIOS, tell the machine to boot from CD and then hopefully prod and see what the issue is. Or even do a complete reinstall if necessary. It was surprising easy to modify - I just had to edit isolinux/isolinux.cfg and add SERIAL 0 9600 at the start and then console=ttyS0,9600 cdrom-detect/eject=false to the append lines for kernel parameters. Definitely worth considering if you have a colo box properly serial consoled up.

Sound Juicer "G D M F S O B" 2.19.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

• When removing sources be more paranoid. I hope this fixes the many-duplicated crasher
• Translate the program description (#450161, Gabor Kelemen)
• Bump libmusicbrainz requirement

I recently bought a Fujitsu-Siemens LIFEBOOK S-4572 (sub)notebook on eBay for less than 150 Euros, a really great little machine. It's a Pentium III, 750 MHz, 256 MB RAM (the chipset cannot handle more than that unfortunately), 12.1" screen, ethernet, 2x USB 1.1, CD-ROM/DVD reader + CD-ROM writer, PCMCIA, IrDA, modem, and a 15 GB hard drive. No floppy, no serial ports, no parallel port. There's no wireless builtin, but I use a cheapo PCMCIA adapter. The greatest feature compared to all other laptops I previously owned is that the battery life is really great, it lasts almost 3 hours (compare that to 45 minutes on my current "main" laptop). I'm running Debian unstable on the box (of course). Here's the Linux support status as far as I have tested things: Networking Works out of the box using the e100 driver. Sound Works out of the box using the snd_intel8x0 driver. X11 Works out of the box, using either the vesa or the ati driver (at a max. resolution of 1024x768). Touchpad Works out of the box. Using the Option "SHMConfig" "on" line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf's InputDevice section (using the synaptics driver) also works fine and allows you to scroll using the touchpad, e.g. in a browser. More info in the SynapticsTouchpad page on the Debian wiki. CDROM, DVD Reading CD-ROMs and DVDs as well as burning CD-ROMs works fine. I don't think the drive is capable of writing DVDs. External VGA Displaying the screen contents on an external VGA monitor (or beamer) works just fine, switching is done using Fn+F10. PCMCIA Works fine, tested using the Sitecom WL-112 wireless card. The driver installation for that is straight-forward, too:

$ apt-get install rt2500-source
$ m-a a-i rt2500-source
$ dpkg -i /usr/src/rt2500*deb

Special keys All the Fn-keys work fine (brightness, volume, etc.). There are five other special keys (for starting a browser or something) which I haven't tested, but I don't really care... USB Works fine, but it's only USB 1.1, so some higher-speed devices will not work (DVB-T USB devices for example; PCMCIA DVB-T adapters might work). IrDA, Modem Untested, I don't care. Powersaving, Suspend to RAM It seems this CPU (Pentium III, Coppermine) doesn't support frequency scaling, so cpufreq-set doesn't work. I'm using laptop-mode-tools to improve battery life a bit more, though. Also, Suspend-to-RAM works fine out of the box:

$ apt-get install hibernate
$ hibernate-ram

I haven't tested Suspend-to-Disk yet, but I'm not sure it'll work anyway, as I'm using a dm-crypt'ed disk (+ LVM), as with all my boxes. lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 82440MX Host Bridge [8086:7194] (rev 01)
00:00.1 Multimedia audio controller [0401]: Intel Corporation 82440MX AC'97 Audio Controller [8086:7195]
00:00.2 Modem [0703]: Intel Corporation 82440MX AC'97 Modem Controller [8086:7196]
00:07.0 Bridge [0680]: Intel Corporation 82440MX ISA Bridge [8086:7198] (rev 01)
00:07.1 IDE interface [0101]: Intel Corporation 82440MX EIDE Controller [8086:7199]
00:07.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82440MX USB Universal Host Controller [8086:719a]
00:07.3 Bridge [0680]: Intel Corporation 82440MX Power Management Controller [8086:719b]
00:12.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] [8086:1229] (rev 09)
00:13.0 CardBus bridge [0607]: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6933/711E1 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller [1217:6933] (rev 02)
00:13.1 CardBus bridge [0607]: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6933/711E1 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller [1217:6933] (rev 02)
00:14.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility P/M [1002:4c52] (rev 64)
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: RaLink RT2500 802.11g Cardbus/mini-PCI [1814:0201] (rev 01)

Other resources

• Linux on a Fujitsu Siemens S-4572 notebook
• Linux on the Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S-4572 Laptop
• LCO's Notebook: Fujitsu-Siemens S Series Lifebook S-4572
• FreeBSD on the Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S-4572
• Gentoo on Fujitsu Siemens s4572

I'm really considering making this my "main" box even though it's a bit older/slower, as my current laptop with 45 minutes battery life is a major pain when travelling...

One thing i love about munin is the simpleness with which you can enhance it. I got a new ADSL Modem for my internet connection a few days ago, as I will upgrade the connection soon and the old stuff wouldn’t be able to handle the new settings. And this new modem appears to have a webinterface. Totally useless with a password protection - you can’t do anything there, just look at one info screen. Well, this screen provides a summary of the connection, which is the connection speed, signal noise ratio and attenuation, splitted by up- and downlink. Getting nice munin graphs out of this is plain simple. I bet it could be done without the additional perl module usage, but I didn’t care about that, its simple enough the way it is and just works: In case you got one of those “Telekom Speedport 200” AKA “Tecom Tiny Bridge DSL Modem” too you may want to fetch the script and have fun. Just link it into the munin plugins dir as dsl_[rate snr attenuation] and restart munin-node. A few mins later graphs should appear. In case you improve it (its a quick hack only) I would love to get some patches. :)

When I got myself a widescreen LCD monitor, it didn't quite work as expected. The image showed up on the screen, but squeezed down to the wrong format. Fixing it was not trivial. Apparently, X uses the video mode supplied by the monitor through EDID, but the video mode is wrong. Whether this is because the monitor sends the wrong information, or because of a limitation in the EDID format, I don't know. Anyway, here's how I got it working. Note that I have an Intel graphics card and I use the new "intel" video driver. It might not work for your particular configuration. First, I generated a modeline with the cvt command. CVT means "Coordinated Video Timing", and it's some kind of VESA standard. Run the cvt command with the horizontal and vertical resolution as arguments:

$ cvt 1680 1050
# 1680x1050 59.95 Hz (CVT 1.76MA) hsync: 65.29 kHz; pclk: 146.25 MHz
Modeline "1680x1050_60.00"  146.25  1680 1784 1960 2240  1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync

Now, put the modeline in the Monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "Generic Monitor"
    # 1680x1050 59.95 Hz (CVT 1.76MA) hsync: 65.29 kHz; pclk: 146.25 MHz
    Modeline "1680x1050_60.00"  146.25  1680 1784 1960 2240  1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync
    #
    Option "Preferred Mode" "1680x1050_60.00"
EndSection

The Preferred Mode option is needed so that the mode is actually chosen. In my case, I have a laptop, so there's also a built-in display, but the mode will not be used on it (the card knows the supported resolutions somehow). In order to be able to switch to a higher resolution when initially using a lower one, the framebuffer needs to be initialized to be big enough. This can be done in the Display subsection:

Section "Screen"
    ...
    SubSection "Display"
        Virtual 1680 1050
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Here's an interesting thing: the old Modes directives are not needed anymore. They are ignored by the intel driver. You only need one generic Display subsection. That's about it. The display should work automatically if it is connected when X is started. If it is connected afterwards, you can enable it with:

xrandr --output VGA --auto

It can be disabled with:

xrandr --output VGA --off

At least when running Gnome, the window manager automatically fits everything to the right screen size. See the xrandr(1) manual page for more options.

The gloom from my last entry has more or less lifted. To refresh, my desktop died shortly after a lightning storm; no definite cause and effect relationship, but a strong correlation. I shut it down, and after the next reboot I got scary errors all over the place, starting with this disclaimer:

HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor

Now, that may be true, or it may not be. Certainly the disclaimer is sensible, since machine checks are usually caused by failing components. And it persisted for most of a day every time I tried to boot the machine, but there was quickly a new addition: different scary errors on ata1. And it got rapidly worse. On Friday morning, having let the machine cool and relax overnight, I brought it up on a rescue CD and could get at /boot (a separate partition), but not at /etc (from inside my RAID/LVM setup). I went out and bought a new SATA drive and attempted to recover /boot onto it, but I had waited too long; at this point I could still get at the partition table, but not the contents of /boot. Some things to note here.

• As far as I know, you still need a separate /boot if your root uses RAID + LVM.
• Therefore your /boot is obviously not backed up by your carefully constructed RAID.
• But that’s fine because all that really mattered was your kernels, and you have them still lying around on your mirrored disk. Right?
• Of course, right. But dynamically generated initrds, while technically awesome, are awkward to recreate from a rescue CD. Especially a 32-bit rescue CD when your root filesystem is all 64-bit.
• It can’t be hard to find a rescue CD with a 64-bit kernel, right? No, not right either. I did eventually find a 50MB Gentoo install CD that worked serviceably well.
• Your laptop has a convenient CD burner, right? No, not right, turns out it doesn’t write CDs after all. Oh well, Windows file sharing plus the wireless plus the Mac Mini in the other room… there you go.
• You didn’t need anything else from /boot, right? Like your carefully constructed voodoo incantation to boot Windows… whoops… hopefully you remember how that worked…

So, after some futzing around I was able to boot the Gentoo rescue CD, partition the new hard drive, mount the remaining disk in degraded mode, reinstall the handy Debian packages of my kernels, have it magically recreate ramdisks, and then reinstall grub. By the way, --no-floppy obviously means something different to grub than it does to me, as most of the reinstalling grub process was still spent waiting for my non-existant fd0 to time out. Then I added the new disk to the array, let it reconstruct for two hours, and rebooted. Lo and behold… no more machine checks! I am a happy camper. Despite the tribulations above I came out remarkably well, since I seem to have lost nothing but my grub menu.lst file. And now I have rdiff-backup configured to back up /boot onto the array in case I ever need to do this again.

Hah! Usually I don't like to post when I'm travelling so that I don't advertise when a good place to break into my house is. But hey, since we don't actually live anywhere anymore...

Angie, Leif and I are at Opus and ConCentric cooking with Chris Wulff and Sera Star! We're having lots of fun. Everyone's giving Leif all the lovin' he wants, and there's still time for both swimming, worships, and all the cooking that needs to happen. After the chaos that was last year's kitchen, it's not hard to improve on it, but I think we're managing to recreate the type of kitchen environments that got me into hanging out in the kitchen in the first place.

I miss lots of you who are usually here but aren't this year. Hugs&Love to y'all!