Don Marti writes about the idea of setting a Troll-bit on forum posts such that every reply would also be flagged. I’ve been thinking about how to solve such issues for mailing lists. I think that the way to do this is to create a new list for every contentious topic and automatically subscribe everyone who posted to the thread after the messages that were flagged as being too far off-topic. After that time anyone who tries to post to the main list with a matching subject or a header indicating that the message is a reply to an off-topic message would have their message redirected to the new list - and they would be automatically subscribed. This would keep the off-topic messages away from the main list and also serve as a minor dis-incentive for people to post to threads that start going off-topic as most people won’t want to be subscribed to the new list for off-topic messages. However such messages would still be archived (in a different section) so if the moderator mis-classified a thread it could still be reviewed by other people. Also when moderating such threads it would be interesting to experiment with consensus moderation of posts. If N subscribers of the list who post regularly use a web form to indicate that a certain post was too far off-topic and should spawn a new list then that could happen. I agree with Joey Hess’ rant about forums, so solving a problem for forums is not of interest to me, but hacking on a list server is something that I would do if I had enough spare time.

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What’s the single biggest advancement Linux has brought to the industry? It’s an interesting question, and one that in my opinion has a very simple answer: Package management—or, more specifically, the ability to install and upgrade software over the network in a seamlessly integrated fashion—along with the distributed development model package management enabled. It used to be that operating systems were big, monolithic products, and applications were big, monolithic products you put on top of them. If you wanted to deploy, say, a web application, you sourced the middleware stack (which itself was probably several big products too), you sourced the operating system, and you (often painfully) had to integrate the two yourself (or pay a big company lots of money to do it for you). These days, you increasingly just “apt-get install whatever“. In this world, where does the operating system end and the application begin? The line is increasingly blurred—for when applications are deployed using an OS facility, seamlessly integrated with the OS itself, is the result an application or a feature of the operating system? In fact, in a very real way, all software looks to become part of the operating system—or, at least, this has certainly been the trend in the Linux world. What does this shift mean to the industry? For one thing, those of us that build operating systems as monolithic products have to change—it’s what users expect, and with a componentized operating system rather than a wad of stuff, it becomes far easier to push new innovations out into the marketplace and generally evolve the OS over time. Indeed, refashioning Solaris as a “distro” is the essence of Project Indiana—and package management is the key technology that will hold it all together. So, the next time you read about how Project Indiana aims to make Solaris more “Linux-like”, keep in mind that what we’re actually “copying” is the distro model, not Linux itself—which, after all, is a kernel, and has nothing to do with the package management and so forth the distros (you know, like Debian) built above it. This, better than anything else, highlights the opportunity for Solaris: What people really know when they say they know “Linux” is the environment that exists around the Linux kernel—the distro—all of which Solaris can deliver, and more.

As posted earlier on the rather recently announced CRANberries feed (that is generated and hosted on my box) covering CRAN package updates, my main server bit the dust. The hard disk no longer wants to talk to any of its lvm partitions, leaving me without /usr, /var/, /var/local/, /home, /srv. Fortunately, most of this was backed-up but now I have to go through reconfiguring the replacement machine I already set up. Not fun. If anybody has tips on recovering the lvm partitions, I'm all ears. /etc/lvm/ seems fine if that helps as a starting point.

A politician named Ron Paul is running for the Republican party nomination for president. Tech Crunch has an article about his Web 2.0 based campaign which also includes a link to a google interview with him. Here’s the good things about him:

• He strongly defends the constitution and the rule of law, so he’s not a totally bad guy (unlike many of the current politicians who believe that the US president should be able to do whatever he wishes).

He wants to refrain from “helping” other countries with their “defense” - such help from the US has caused most of the wars and terrorism around the world since WW2.

He wants to reduce military spending to 1/3 current levels (he could reduce it to 1/10 current levels and still be able to prevent a combined attack by Russia and China).

He wants to restore liberty.

He seems to be in support of repealing most drug laws - but his statements weren’t clear.

Here’s the bad:

• He wants to remove income tax and give the smallest possible government - no consumer protection laws among other things.

He thinks that hospitals should be run by churches and have no government funded medical system.

He doesn’t want restrictions on pharmacists who refuse to sell certain drugs (IE the contraceptive pill) - but with no restrictions on who can be a pharmacist such things could be bought without prescription even…

Here’s the ugly:

• He claims that guns on planes might have prevented 9-11.

Still, he’s a lot better than any other Republican who seems to be in the running.

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Starting tomorrow I will be on vacation until the 28th of July. Excellent! So if you expect some thing from me, just keep it on hold until the next month :-P .

One week of sunbathing on the Bulgarian seaside. You might ask why Bulgaria and not Romania since both have access to the same sea?

It appears that my predictions about the price of a ticket for a vacation on the Romanian sea side exceeding the price of one in Bulgaria or Greece (including transport) came true (Some might say this was the case last year, too, but this year is more obvious). I'll see if the services will be better, afaik, they should be.

Hewlet-Packard is sponsoring the recycling of old computers in Victoria, Australia in a program named Byteback - note that they accept all brands of computer and charge nothing to accept the e-waste. This is a really good thing, I’ll start saving up my old computer parts to deliver to them! Is there a directory of computer recycling plants that accept old hardware for no charge? If you know of one in your area then please blog about it and send a track-back to my post.

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For part of Stage 11, I watched the new Tour live coverage on Sat.1 who bought the German rights. When Sat.1 is busy, Pro7 will cover it. The two stations are owned by the same company, along with Kabel1, N24 and 9Live. The coverage was OK - the same French pictures as everyone else, but fewer extra features than ARD/ZDF. Commentary was a bit pedestrian, but that's like ZDF. I like Eurosport's commentary much more. International Herald Tribune reports that Eurosport's ratings tripled for stage 10 which is unsurprising. Eurosport and Sat.1 both seem to be on the same ~30% of German DVB-T as well as DVB-S. In comments on my last post about this, Thomas asked:

"You don't read German papers, do you?"

No. I've not even tried to buy one since moving to this village.

"I do, and I'm neither outraged nor surprised. It is a fairly logical step in light of the debate and the public reception of the tour, cycling pros, and Team T-Mobile in particular."

Is it public reception? Around 50% of those polled by ZDF disagreed with the decision (according to the IHT link above). Given all the ZDF spin on this, that's shockingly low. Is this driven by the silly debate of Bundestag members, rather than public opinion? (I've still not forgiven them for booting Eurosport off of ZDFvision. CDU seem to like messing ARD/ZDF about.) Are German papers in a feeding frenzy? In some days, they'll move onto football or boxing or something else. Get this in context: it's not like the old scandals where we had pro teams or wives being caught with car boots full of drug kits.

"I'd also bet that T-Mobile will quit as a sponsor."

It didn't seem like that from TV interviews, but I guess they wouldn't say yet. I think if they were going to jump ship, they would have done it after last year's worse problems. AIUI, their contract expires 2010 anyway and I wonder whether all the good publicity from their tour outing in England will help them stay until then.

"Some things belong in pharmacology textbooks and not on TV screens."

Does this mean drugs or incomplete drug tests? ;-)

"If I paid German TV fees, I'd be outraged that this comes that late. But then, I know better and don't have a TV in the first place."

Oh, well! Then I guess nothing would convince you to watch the tour! Philipp Kern commented:

"they did not threaten for a year actually. After the big doping scandal some months ago they explicitly announced that they will drop the Tour de France if a new doping case pops up. Granted, the person in question did dope before the Tour."

We don't know that yet - only one sample has been tested so far and even then, this test is controversial and has been successfully appealed against before. It's only a case. Also, maybe it wasn't the TdF, but here's a comment about ARD in 2006 threatening to drop cycling (scroll to 25.10.).

"The argumentation is that the Tour should not be a contest of the best doping substances like it could have been the last years. But I am probably biased because I don't watch the Tour, or sports in general."

No more biased than ARD/ZDF's producers, it seems. In an interview on itv4, a ZDF producer said they would drop any sporting event with a doping problem like cycling. So, if ZDF have dropped cycling for 1 in 189 participants being accused of doping, then if any footballer is accused of drugs offences, they cannot show any matches involving them. If you want to take football off ZDF, you know what to do... Thijs Kinkhorst reports in "Too much testosterone" that NOS also continues coverage, like our itv. Good on them. Let's applaud any drug cheats getting caught and punished, after we're reasonably sure.

According to Jurij Smakov's announcement, the Debian port for 32bit SPARC machines is about to be retired. This is really sad in my opinion, as we should rather support more architectures instead of less architectures. After all, Debian is "The Universal Operating System" [1]. Now, I know that my opinion doesn't matter much in this case, but many other people who own sparc32 boxes seem to feel the same, judging from the thread which was started by the announcement. Also, I do realize that nobody wants to retire the port just for fun. To my understanding there is one major problem which needs to be sorted out in order to "save" the sparc32 support in Debian (and also in Linux!): There is no Linux kernel maintainer for the sparc32 Linux code at the moment! This seems to be the root of the whole problem. It makes maintaining a Debian port for sparc32 really hard, as you can surely imagine. Also, there seem to be too few people who actively work on the surrounding toolchain stuff (gcc, binutils, etc) which is also very important. My suggestion would be to not drop the Debian support for now, but rather set the status to "needs help" or something and actively search for contributors and/or maintainers. Heck, list it on Unmaintained Free Software, or write a "call for help" Slashdot article, post the issue on all Linux-/Debian-/SPARC-related mailing lists etc. etc. (or write funny blog posts, heh). I guess if two or three experienced SPARC developers would step up and take care of the kernel and toolchain maintenance for sparc32, there would be no reason to drop it anytime soon. Anyone?

Daniel Martin commented:

"Often, dustups like these are the result of upstream not caring about one or more of the following: 1) Licenses. Many people will release code with no license attached to it at all, which means (Thanks to the wonders of the Berne convention) that no one else can distribute it. 2) Patent restrictions (the gif patent issue is now dead, but there's still patents on some other graphic formats) 3) Restrictions against selling the software for commercial gain, using the software in the military, in biotech, etc. The netpbm copyright file seems to include instances of each of these. I don't know how it escalated into being unable to build based on upstream."

Thanks for the info. I'm still surprised debian doesn't keep a (maybe big) patchset rather than a fork on this one. I don't remember what put me off it, but maybe imagemagick isn't so bad...

What should have been a routine “remove DIMMs and run memtest until things work” procedure to solve a memory error became a lot more complex due to poor error handling in Xen. The following error occured because the tdb database /var/lib/xenstored/tdb was corrupt. To fix it you must rm the file and kill the xenstored process (which will otherwise recreate the file with the same corrupt data). It took me a few hours to work this out. # xm create -c smtp
Using config file “/etc/xen/smtp”.
Error: (28, ‘No space left on device, while writing /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/
18/768/online : 1′) Strangely the command “/etc/init.d/xend restart” does not restart xenstore or xenconsole (which is why running “/etc/init.d/xend stop” before rm’ing the file didn’t do any good). After fixing the above problem I encountered the following error condition. It seems that there is no support for restarting daemons such as xenstored. So I had to reboot the machine. After that it worked. # xm create -c smtp
Using config file “/etc/xen/smtp”.
Error: Device 0 (vif) could not be connected. Hotplug scripts not working. I’ve filed Debian bug 433780 about this.

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My nomination for the best use of the phrase “a retarded ponens/tollens showdown”:

Here is what you do not do. You do not start with a mystifying conditional like If the universe is only physical (or whatever), then there is no free will, because how do you know that? You don t. But you may think you do and so you get caught in a retarded ponens/tollens showdown: the universe is physical, ergo no free will, or free will, so the universe is not physical. But, again, through what method of divination do we validate this conditional? None. Because we already know it is false.

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Being a good Debian user

Notes: the bulk of this article was written on the 17th; updates were added in later; this article is really long, you might want to read it in more sessions

Debian's arm port uses hardfloat. This means that apps like rrdtool (graph function) take ages to run because there is no floating point unit. In order to make this faster you'll want to use soft-float emulation. But this support needs to be present in all depended upon libs, including libc, which is an ABI incompatible change which would break all binaries. I can't use the yet-in-development-and-unofficial armel port since the machine has to be up and running almost 24/7 and I can't afford downtime.

So what to do?

Well, obviously use another soft-float enable libc, like uclibc, in parallel withe the hrad-float enabled libc. Debian Sid contains uclibc development libs, but building the whole toolchain is a pain. There is no real support in the distro itself and building on the arm machine is kind of out of the question. I tried a little in a debootstrapped chroot on the native machine, but this was a pain and I was stuck tring to figure out how to disable whitles and bells for rrdtool since I didn't needed any of the perl, tcl or python support. So I stopped, went to bed and decided I'll continue the next day (the day I wrote the biggest part of this article). The future looked dark, trying to build a softfloat uclibc rrdtool on a system that wasn't prepared for that and from which softfloat was pulled away somewhere during etch's development stage....

Deciding to go with the competition - native building

From link to link I found out that gentoo has arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc port, among others, so I decided to use that on the target machine (a NSLU2) in a chroot. Well I stumbled on the low computing power, when I tryed to emerge sync the tree. I gave up un that and tried to use emerge-websync. It looked better, but I didn't got too far with this either since the machine ended up being overloaded, with figures varying from 3 to 8 for the load average (all of them).

Deciding to go with the competition - cross building

It was time to bring in the big guns and I decided I was going to crossbuild those binaries, probably statically since it meant lower risk for things to break on the target machine.


Since I observed that gentoo has a nice tool called crossdev which actually uses emerge (the equivalent of dpkg+apt in Debian world) to make the cross chain tool and saw that they have some really good documentation and a development version of an arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc, I decided I could .

So I went on and downloaded the latest stage3 tarball for x86 (so I can have a gentoo system to start with), made all the necessary things and created a gentoo chroot. I emerge sync-ed, updated portage, installed crossdev (following the nice instructions on the gentoo embedded site about the subject). This took a while, but it went like a breeze. I made the necessary arangements to be able to cross build packages (setting SYSROOT, making that nice xmerge script).

As my goal was to make an arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc binary for rrdtool I tried directly to xmerge rrdtool (of course, first just pretended -p).

Finding bugs in the packages

First bug

All went fine until I found freetype which for some weird reason detected the i486-pc-linux-gnu-gcc compiler as i486-pc-linux-gnu (observe the missing trailing -gcc). I looked over the logs and determined that the CC_BUILD environment variable was not set. So exported CC_BUILD=i486-pc-linux-gnu-gcc and xmerged the library.

(While trying to fix this issue I entered #gentoo-embedded on freenode and actually met Yuri Vasilev, whom I had met in Edinburgh, at DebConf. Look for the video about Ligusk if you are interested about his project to make a Debian like distribution based on Gentoo. It was nice to meet a friendly "face" - as much you can say that online.)


I reported the bug (already there is a patch, I haven't tested, but looks ok) and the workaround in the gentoo bugzilla... after creating an account, since I never used that BTS before.

Second bug

Next pain was libart_lgpl whose upstream, for some comfortability reason chose to detect the target type sizes (and basically ignoring inttypes.h) with a small program which was built with the cross compiler which later was supposed to be ran on the host. I don't think is necessary to say that i failed, of course, since the binary was an ARM binary, while the host was an x86 machine. Yupee! not.

Ok, two bugs, no softfloat rrdtool yet. I reported this second bug and tried to work around the issue. Since I didn't really used too much a gentoo system, I wanted to know details and what possibilities I had. I got some really nice tips from "solar" (aka Ned Ludd) on #gentoo-embedded. He pointed out that while building a package one can press CTRL+z, do some stuff, like altering the Makefile.in file in the build directory and then fg back. Ok, cool.

All I need now is somebody with direct access to an arm machine that can compile and run for me the program in question. seanius on #debian-devel was kind enough to do this for me and, to my surprize, I got the same output header file as I got in the host x86 chroot. But that detail is not important, let's just compile that rrdtool. Well, first libart_lgpl...

Ok, I CTRL+Z-ed the build process just after the configure stage ended, cd-ed into the build directory, I tampered with the Makefile.in file and changed that line from

./gen_art_config > gen_art_config.h

into

cp /gen_art_config.h.arm gen_art_config.h

Haha! In your face! Ok, nasty did was done so I fg-ed and went on confident that I will get my hands on that rrdtool very soon. The package build ended succesfully, without any other suprizes, so I went for the graal!


xmerging rrdtool, the bugs don't stop

xmerge -v rrdtool

Bla, bla, bla.... bla, bla, bla, what do you know, there are a few IEEE math function tests in the configuration script of rrdtool. They failed. I don't know why, but I have a feeling that this should be happening on softfloat or even maybe the rrdtool source is not that cross compile aware. I didn't care that much, so I did what I knew best, tampering with an ongoing build.

This time is was a little bit harder to catch since I had to wait for the source to unpack (well, there is a larger frame, but that is the rough timing) and at that moment CTRL+Z the build.

I didn't had much time to waste, so after looking shortly over the tests I realized I should just ignore the error and look for the "failing command" that was interrupting my beloved build. Muhahah!

Thank God for verbose error messages, I could find the place fast and chaged the two "exit 1" statements into two harmless 'echo "Ignoring IEEE math errors"', sic. I had to do this a few times since I got the timping wrong, at some point I got the syntax wrong (at which point I remembered the cp trick I did earlier and saved the modified file in /configure.rrdtool )...

xmerging rrdtool and the 4th bug

After passing past this stage, I got a compilation error which, judging from the command, meant that the linker tried to link the target (arm) binary against the host (x86) libraries.

Oooook, this is not going to stop me! I look at the Makefile.in to try understand why this happened and then realized it wasn't worth it for me to try to fix it the right way. So I cheated once again! Muhaha, I just ran some useful commands which I'll let you feast your eyes to:

ln -sf /usr/arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc/usr/lib/libart_lgpl_2.so /usr/lib/
ln -sf /usr/arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc/usr/lib/libpng12.a /usr/lib/
ln -sf /usr/arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc/usr/lib/libfreetype.so /usr/lib/

Ok, good to go. Of course, I had to stop again the build to copy the "fixed" configure script that ignored IEEE math errors, but that is already history.

And, believe it or not, actually the build succeded. I had a cross built rrdtool using shared libraries built against softfloat ucllibc. No guarantees about its correctness, but it built!

This is when I decided to start writing this article.

Still there are things to do

I will have to do a few things before being happy about the victory:

• check that all the resulted binaries are indeed ARM ELF files, and not Intel x86. It appears the shared libs are already.
• done, they are (checked the next day)
• figure out qpkg (is a utility from portage-utils which seems to be a way to make binary packages) to package somehow the result of this work or maybe just ignore it and use plain cp
• see how I can fit together both the softfloat uclibc binaries and the native debian binaries on the same filesystem, including ld.so configuration...
• but I fear this will be a nightmare, so I might decide to go with static compilation of rrdtool, which I don't think it will be quite straight forward given the experiences describe above; there could be also the size issue to take into account, and since the NSLU2 has only 32MB of RAM, this could be problematic
• I think I'll have to use a statically linked binary after all (note added late, the second day)
  
• see if the rrdtool binary really works and if all the work payed off, performance wise - it should, taking into account what I have heard from wookey during the debconf7 talk about the armel (warning, 73MB ogg file) port
• be happy with the solution I got or wait for the Debian armel port to catch up and switch to that asap
• if I'll have to do the switch I'll probably think of ways of migrating the whole system from arm to armel, and not to reinstall everything; this might prove useful for the whole debian armel port, when people are working on migration plans, since arm will be deprecated in favour of armel

… is that more than one are likely to have the same crazy ideas. When I started to play with xulrunner, which according to my oldest post in the xulrunner category would be near 2 years ago, I had this crazy idea (and here, when I say crazy, I almost think dumb) that it would be neat to have a window manager based on libxul, being able to display both “native” windows and XUL or HTML windows. Indeed, it would be neat, as in web-2.0-hype or i-can-use-gmail-directly. But that would be so much impossible to secure, and introduce so many different new ways to compromise users… Guess what… It now exists. Update: Waw, the GUADEC keynote slides are really full of crap. My favorite ones are about “The Fox” : Good engineering practices and Small, extensible core.

It's good if you bring out a maintenance release of a certain specific software package that you maintain, if it segfaults on startup when a new feature is used. It's pretty silly if that new version still segfaults if and only if that very same feature is used. What do you mean, testing? Anyway, today I released NBD 2.9.6 that fixes those issues. And I extended the tests that are ran as part of 'make distcheck' so that it won't be segfaulting on startup anymore next time I do a release. Silly me.

Not so long time ago i used to be a hardcore photography taker. I would carry a camera everywhere i went, and took hundreds of pictures. I even had a darkroom where to develop my b&w films. But digital came, and it was easier to shoot, check, re-shoot, erase,… you know, all the “benefits” you get with a digital: you care less what you are shooting because it is inexpensive to erase what went not-so-good. It all started again getting into shape last month, before our trip to Spain and France, when i gave my girlfriend my Polaroid camera. She was amazed and bought some film for it. In Barcelona we found a lomography shop, where i purchased a fisheye2 camera. And it finally happened 2 weeks ago when i revisited a flickr.com page of a guy who lives in NY and takes pictures daily. I was amazed, and following some links i ended up learning about Lomography.com and the Lomo LC-A’s. It was monday last week when i purchased a sealed, unused Lomo LC-A for 80e and few hours later i had my first film in several years in the shop for development. Now it is 2 weeks later (almost) and i have purchased few other items: a wide angle for my serviced old Pentax ME-1, few 120 rolls for my Yashica D, some more 35mm rolls for it (i will mod the case with some foam to insert 35mm rolls and take full 3.8×6 takes), an Olympus XA, a Minox 35ML and a couple of old FEDs. All together for less than 350e. My flicker page already reflects the activity i have been enjoying here and there. I admit it needs some cleanup, some pro upgrade and some descriptions added, but with time i will get there.

(no, not the animals, but web crawlers!)For a pet project of mine, I've recently been spidering the web a bit myself. So far, I've processed over 100.000 websites. The machine doing the spidering is an old K6-450, so it's not particularly fast...My spider is downloading the web pages HTML, and eventually some framesets (but at most 1 level deep). It's using text contents, image 'alt' attributes, title and some meta tags. The text contents are tokenized and stemmed.This results in some fun numbers:

• The average web page uses about 194 different words.
• The average token (after stemming!) is 6.8 characters long

Each of the web pages I'm spidering has about 6.4 categories assigned to it. I'll be using this training set to train an AI to classify web sites.(I've also started a web page for the project, but it's still pretty much empty so far, not worth looking.)

Admittedly I’ve not been working much on Webconverger in the past couple of weeks. Sorry about that. However yesterday I started plugging away at a couple of things and this morning I have had a couple of business enquiries! Goes to show you’ve got to show some activity in the project otherwise people won’t contribute. I’ve been dragging my heels the last weeks as I am starting to realise a Webconverger image for each locale is too hard on my computing resources. So I am working on getting all the iceweasel-l10n-*, myspell-* etc. things in one CD. And dropping http://download.webconverger.com/i18n. Users will have to enter in locale definition in manually, else please purchase a customized CD. Ok, I’ve just released 2.26 which is now double the size with all the locales & dictionaries I could find crammed in there. Also I re-enabled printing. Download the Webconverger Web kiosk and tell me what you think. There is a Debian installer mode (for hard drive installs) I am experimenting with, so Webconverger will be less of a LiveCD/USB, and more of a “distribution”.

A common meme is that the media is biased towards the political left. This meme was deliberately created to encourage well-meaning journalists to be more generous in their reporting of Neo-Cons in a misguided attempt at being fair and also as a mechanism for refuting criticism of any media reports that criticise Neo-Cons. The ABC has been criticised for being biased towards the left as part of this attack on fair media and have recently demonstrated that they are in fact biased towards the Neo-Con ideas by airing a pseudo-documentary about climate change The Great Global Warming Swindle. The fake documentary has been refuted by many scientists, here is one by George Monbiot published in The Age. I wonder whether this blog post will get Google adverts related to Nostradamus and UFOs - I’m sure that the google search engine has worked out that cranks are interested in that fake-doco.

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Just a few hours before the public release of the portal we work on one of the cluster machines get overloaded by issues no relevant for the point. The fact is once the machine started to not answer properly so it was fenced by some other node, but the problem was once this automatic action was held, the whole 6 machines GFS cluster went down letting all the machines unusable.

This, in addition to all of the previous issues we suffered on GFS, made us really thinking about purging GFS in favor of NFS. It was no an easy decision as it was fully against all our previous decisions but we weren't confident about GFS in the production systems. So we migrated it in a time record configuring everything by night so at six o'clock service would be held properly. And we managed to fulfill this purpose. We made it!

We are now tired after about 27 continuous working hours but the overall result was quite acceptable. I'm still proud about or design (not so much about my own decissions) which allowed us to make this king of changes so quickly.

But you can be sure I don't think we will never again think about installing GFS on any system as it seems not being production suitable (as RedHat even says so). And it is not only because the buggy GFS2 (at least, at present date) but for the sensation of instability all over the time we had it installed.

So in a few hours our architecture has been changed, but it was setup for the very moment we were accepting requests.

As if being hospitalised after crashing into a spectator wasn't enough, Patrick Sinkewitz has been told he's tested non-negative for testosterone. I think that is the same test that Floyd Landis failed, which I'm still unsure about. In an outrageous move, ARD/ZDF (visible at 19 and 13 east) have stopped live tour coverage "until clarification of the Patrik Sinkewitz case" whatever that means. Will they resume if it the second test is positive too? I doubt it. If I remember correctly, ARD/ZDF have been threatening to drop the Tour de France for at least a year and maybe more. Finally, they get an excuse to replace proper tour coverage with more cheap, bland daytime TV like Z-list interviews, soaps and cookery shows - or continuous criticism of the Tour de France, like they had today. In the Expatica report, ZDF chief producer Nikolaus Brender said:

"We can't screen an event involving some teams and riders under suspicion of doping."

(That's strange. Of course they can. They have before and I bet they'll still show motorsport, football, horse-racing, golf, wrestling, and so on if they get them. They just don't want to show cycling.)

"We want to show by this gesture that we're ready to support cycling only if it's clean, that's to say without banned doping sustances."

(That's actually quite a high standard: over 180 participants, none of them cheating. That's a lot harder than 20 drivers or 30 footballers all being clean - even then, they don't always manage it and I don't see ARD/ZDF dropping those sports every time one player is accused of doping. Never mind all the smaller cheating attempts which are easier in many other sports than cycling.)

"It's a warning to cycling and to every other sport,"

It's a warning that ARD/ZDF's TV producers are short-sighted and don't care about the viewers. At least Eurosport Germany continues with live coverage every day! Let's keep watching and see how the chips fall for Sinkewitz. Are ARD/ZDF fee-payers raising hell about this absurd decision? I hope so.