Just as I promised yesterday, I pushed a new git repo with my fork of the tool I used to migrate my old Mephisto blog to this new WordPress one. I forked because the tool have not worked the first time. First of all, I was missing uuidtools gem, and to install it would be a pain inside the jail system I used to run my blog. Too much trouble just to get a UUID we can get by other means so I just added an environment variable UUIDGEN anyone can use to point to a tool to do the job. I know this have performance implications, but I am not talking about 10-thousand entries Then, I found out that, for some odd reason I still have to understand, WordPress was cutting my articles everytime it read a character. I could study the subject, but I just added a #gsub in mephisto-to-wxr code and moved on. I was about to remove it from the repo, but I left it there since it could help other people. Also, since there might be other similar occurrences, leaving it there serves as a heads up. Also, I added support for Categories and Tags to mephisto-to-wxr, that seemed to be limitedly accepted (I translated Mephisto Sections into WordPress Categories). All other activities were just clean-up. That tool generated a .WXR with all the articles and comments from my Mephisto blog. Everything I had to do was import it using WordPress import tool.

It has been months since I last put something here, so I think that requires a quick catchup.

I have an old motherboard that requires creating a DOS boot floppy in order to upgrade its BIOS. Fortunately, it's not too hard to do this with FreeDOS and a USB stick.

The instructions below are based on an FDos wiki article.

Downloading the dependenciesThe first step is to download the required files from your motherboard manufacturer:

• the latest BIOS image
• the BIOS flashing program

and then install the tools you'll need:

apt-get install makebootfat syslinux

Preparing the "floppy" imageStart by collecting all of the files you need to install FreeDOS on the USB stick:

cd /tmp

wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/commandx.zip
wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/kernels.zip
wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/substx.zip
wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/unstablx.zip

for ZIP in *.zip; do unzip $ZIP; done

cp ./source/ukernel/boot/fat16.bin  .
cp ./source/ukernel/boot/fat12.bin .
cp ./source/ukernel/boot/fat32lba.bin .

cp /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin .

and then create a directory for the files that will end up in the root directory of the "floppy":

mkdir /tmp/fs-root
cp ./bin/command.com /tmp/fs-root/
cp ./bin/kernel.sys  /tmp/fs-root/

and copy the BIOS image and update program into that same directory (/tmp/fs-root/).

Creating a bootable USB stickPlug in a FAT-formatted USB stick and look for the device it uses (/dev/sdb in the example below).

Finally, run makebootfat:

/usr/bin/makebootfat -o /dev/sdb -E 255 -1 fat12.bin -2 fat16.bin -3 fat32lba.bin -m mbr.bin /tmp/fs-root

I'm happy to announce that cluster-glue 1.0.9+hg2665-1~bpo60+1 is available in the backports repository for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 ("Squeeze"). I uploaded the backport-version right after the package got migrated from unstable to testing last night. This version of cluster-glue fixes a nasty bug in the IPMI STONITH resource agent, so everybody is highly advised to update to this version to make sure that STONITH via IPMI works as expected.

I'm happy to announce that cluster-glue 1.0.9+hg2665-1~bpo60+1 is available in the backports repository for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 ("Squeeze"). I uploaded the backport-version right after the package got migrated from unstable to testing last night. This version of cluster-glue fixes a nasty bug in the IPMI STONITH resource agent, so everybody is highly advised to update to this version to make sure that STONITH via IPMI works as expected.

Continuing with fast release pace for Weblate, I've just released version 0.5. It brings lot of bug fixes (thanks for everybody who has provided feedback), lot of new translations (thanks to translators) and as a special bonus it can use few machine translation services. Full list of changes for 0.5:

• Support for machine translation using following online services:
  • Apertium
  • Microsoft Translator
  • MyMemory
• Several new translations.
• Improved merging of upstream changes.
• Better handle concurrent git pull and translation.
• Propagating works for fuzzy changes as well.
• Propagating works also for file upload.
• Fixed file downloads while using FastCGI (and possibly others).

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is now also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

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Justin TV is a streaming service that uses the broken flash concept in order to allow you to view channels.

Unfortunately it's the only source of Arabic movies, series and shows.

I wrote a GStreamer source that retrieves the channel information and uses libRTMP to connect to the Justin streaming server. The rest is handled by GStreamer ;-)

If you want to watch http://www.justin.tv/ammartv for example, you simply do

The 2nd plugin is a Totem plugin that indirectly utilizes the GStreamer source.
Given a language code (ar or en or ...), it will download the list of channels in that language and shows them in Totem's side panel. One can then easily double click on a channel and simply watch it. I originally wanted to do the Totem plugin in python but the inability to do asynchronous callback based HTTP requests prevented me :-(

Be warned that the code is of course a bit buggy and needs a lot of cleanups, it's been years since I coded anything in Gtk and that Justin might find out and either block the source somehow or even change the protocol but let's wait until that happens ;-) read more

For some years I have had my Internet gateway/firewall system in a cupboard in my bedroom. While I don t mind some computer noise (I ve slept near a server for most of the last 22 years) it s good to have it as quiet as possible so getting rid of the hard drive is desirable. I considered buying an IDE flash drive, but I d like to continue my trend of not paying for hardware so I chose to use some USB flash devices that HP was giving away at a seminar (thanks HP as an aside the P3 system is an old Compaq Desktop system). So I ve got one 4G USB device for root and one for Squid. For the past few months I ve had /var/spool/squid be a USB flash device. I considered using RAID-0 for that filesystem because the computer is a P3 and only has USB 1.2 and thus a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 1.5MB/s and a maximum real-world rate of about 1MB/s. But my ADSL connection doesn t seem able to sustain much more than 1MB/s and Squid doesn t write data synchronously so in all my tests the USB speed hasn t affected HTTP performance. One issue that has delayed my move to all USB is the difficulty of booting as the P3 system in question doesn t support booting from USB. I considered creating a boot CD that loads the kernel from the USB device, but that seemed a little painful and also relies on the CD-ROM drive working which isn t a great idea for a system that runs 24*7 in a dusty cupboard. I ended up using GRUB on the IDE hard drive to load the kernel and initrd and then mount a USB device as root, this seems to work and the command hdparm -S6 /dev/sda in /etc/rc.local makes the hard drive go to sleep once the system is booted. The only technical parts of the process were putting in the UUIDs of the filesystems in /etc/fstab (because I can t be sure which USB device will be found first) and creating a new initramfs with modules for USB storage listed in /etc/initramfs-tools/modules so that a USB device could be the root filesystem. The firewall system is now a bit quieter and based on my last tests of hard drive power use will probably dissipate about 5-7W less heat. The next thing to do is wait and see if it keeps running or falls over. ;) Related posts:

1. flash for main storage I was in a discussion about flash on a closed...
2. Flash Storage and Servers In the comments on my post about the Dell PowerEdge...
3. IDE DMA and Flash I ve just been working with a Flash device used as...

Last saturday, I took an exam. Today, I noticed that I passed it (dutch): I am now a tennis official. Spooky. The exam itself wasn't all that difficult. There was a course two weeks ago in which the relevant rules were explained, and there was some preparation material on the vtv website that we were told to go through. In other news, I'm also running for DPL again. While that isn't a new job yet, it may become one. After having gone through the whole thing three times now, I must say that getting my platform written was never this difficult; I've been working at the text for quite some time now. Here's for hoping third time's a charm...

For a while now the git repository used for packaging WebKitGTK+ has been broken. Broken as in nobody was able to clone it. In addition to that, the packaging workflow had been changing over time, from a track-upstream-git/patches applied one to a import-orig-only/patches-not-applied one. After spending some more time trying to unbreak the repository for the third time I decided it might be a good time for a clean up. I created a new repository, imported all upstream versions for series 1.2.x (which is in squeeze), 1.6.x (unstable), and 1.7.x (experimental). I also imported packaging-related commis for those versions using git format-patch and black magic. One of the good things about doing this move, and which should make hacking the WebKitGTK+ debian package more pleasant and accessible can be seen here:
kov@goiaba ~/s/debian-webkit> du -sh webkit/.git webkit.old/.git
27M webkit/.git
1.6G webkit.old/.git
If you care about the old repository, it s on git.webkit.org still, named old-webkit.git. Enjoy!

Recently I accidentally flooded Planet Debian with my blog feed. This was an accident caused by some of my older blog entries not having valid "Date:" headers. (I use chronicle which parses simple text files to build a blog, and if there is no Date: header present in entries it uses the CTIME of the file(s).) So why did my CTIMEs get lost? Short version I had a drive failure and a PSU failure which lead to me rebuilding a few things and cloning a fresh copy of my blog to ~/hg/blog/. My host is now once again OK, but during the pain the on-board sound started to die. Horribly crackly and sounding bad. I figure the PSU might have caused some collateral damage, but so far thats the only sign I see. I disabled the on-board sound and ordered a cheap USB sound device which now provides me with perfect sound under the Squeeze release of Debian GNU/Linux. In the past I've ranted about GNU/Linux sound. So I think it is only fair to say this time things worked perfectly - I plugged in the device, it was visible in the output of dmesg, and /proc/asound/cards and suddenly everything just worked. Playing music (mpd + sonata) worked immediately, and when I decided to try playing a movie with xine just for fun sound was mixed appropriately - such that I could hear both "song" + "movie" at the same time. Woo. (I'm not sure if I should try using pulse-audio, or similar black magic. Right now I've just got ALSA running.) Anyway as part of the re-deployment of my desktop I generated and pass-phrased a new SSH key, and then deployed that with my slaughter tool. My various websites all run under their own UID on my remote host, and a reverse-proxy redirects connections. So far example I have a Unix "s-stolen" user for the site stolen-souls.com, a s-tasteful user for the site tasteful.xxx, etc. (Right now I cannot remember why I gave each "webserver user" an "s-" prefix, but it made sense at the time!) Anyway once I'd fixed up SSH keys I went on a spree of tidying up and built a bunch of meta-packages to make it a little more straightforward to re-deploy hosts in the future. I'm quite pleased with the way those turned out to be useful. Finally I decided to do something radical. I installed the bluetile window manager, which allows you to toggle between "tiling" and "normal" modes. This is my first foray into tiling window managers, but it seems to be going well. I've got the hang of resizing via the keyboard and tweaked a couple of virtual desktops so I can work well both at home and on my work machine. (I suspect I will eventually migrate to awesome, or similar, this is very much a deliberate "ease myself into it" step.) ObQuote: "Being Swedish, the walk from the bathroom to her room didn't need to be a modest one. " - Cashback.

We in Debian-IN team where maintaining ttf-indic-fonts a set of fonts for all Indian language fonts from various origin. This package used to build around 7 to 10 binary package of different Indian language. The source package ttf-indic-fonts was itself a mess. It was a native package it was mixing all fonts with active upstream and inactive upstream together which was hard to maintain. Last April I transitioned this package from old packaging style (which version I don't remember) to dh7 standard. At the same time bubulle asked me it would be great if I can rename the package to Fonts team new packaging policy Even though I was just beginning with Debian packaging I dared to propose a draft :) Well it was in May and now its March 2012 almost one year over and We have successfully finished the transition and Kartik uploaded all packages to Debian. Now Debian-IN team maintains 62 packages and me? Yeah my package count jumped from 12 to 38! Almost close to close to number of packages Kartik is maintaining :) Please do the testing report any bugs! Cya

We in Debian-IN team where maintaining ttf-indic-fonts a set of fonts for all Indian language fonts from various origin. This package used to build around 7 to 10 binary package of different Indian language. The source package ttf-indic-fonts was itself a mess. It was a native package it was mixing all fonts with active upstream and inactive upstream together which was hard to maintain. Last April I transitioned this package from old packaging style (which version I don't remember) to dh7 standard. At the same time bubulle asked me it would be great if I can rename the package to Fonts team new packaging policy Even though I was just beginning with Debian packaging I dared to propose a draft :) Well it was in May and now its March 2012 almost one year over and We have successfully finished the transition and Kartik uploaded all packages to Debian. Now Debian-IN team maintains 62 packages and me? Yeah my package count jumped from 12 to 38! Almost close to close to number of packages Kartik is maintaining :) Please do the testing report any bugs! Cya

Around two years ago, the OECD presented a study on residential bandwitdth available per country that triggered quite a bit of debate all over the world I have seen at least criticism to it in Mexico, in the USA and in Australia. It's very easy to take a simplified view of a statistic and bitch on how sorry the state of our country is. In our case, the outcry was that Mexico was the lowest of all of the OECD countries, and I have seen this repeated on so many topics that it what surprises me is that people keep getting surprised at it! OECD does not represent the 200 countries in this world (only the top 30, and the meaning of "top" is not unambiguous). I found this graph that helps me illustrate this point: While that graphic is part of a report illustrating how sorry the USA should be for their low position, it shows the OECD member countries. And yes, the only country Mexico could be compared in general terms from those in the list is Turkey. Coherently, they are located at positions 28 and 30. But what prompted me into writing this post? That some weeks ago I was reading a viewpoint article at the Communications of the ACM magazine: What gets measured gets done: Stop focusing on irrelevant broadband metrics, by Scott Wallsten (might be behind a paywall for you If you are interested, I can share a copy with you, just ask me by email). Wallsten's article contains the following graph: I found it pretty telling that, although Mexico sits at the extreme of the graph (and the height of our bar makes it very hard to get a real value out of this particular rendering), our ISPs join a very select group of countries (Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ireland, in my very subjective measure) by delivering what they promise. In 2010, the dominant broadband offering was 1Mbps, although higher options have long existed. I always got basically the 100% of what my ISP (Telmex) has promised, even though I have always had the cheapest package available. Some months ago, I got a call announcing we were being pushed 5x into the future, and starting right then, I had a 5Mbps connection. And although I didn't really expect it to be true, I have had a clean 6Mbps (yes, 6 instead of 5) connection. So, that's it. This post contains no hidden truths, but just what grabbed my attention from a series of data points :-)

Attachment	Size
Residential Internet speed comparison per country (2010)	397.15 KB
Measured and advertised download speeds (in kbps)	252.86 KB

Summary The JSON License may seem interesting, but it a bad license, both non-free and ambiguous: do not use it. If you are the author of a piece of software that uses JSMin or its PHP port, consider dropping that non-free part or at least rendering it optional.The JSON license Do you know the JSON License? It is a software license inspired by the MIT/Expat license with one additional morality clause:

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

Non-free For novices that clause can be perceived as a good idea serving a noble goal. But the problem here is that is would make your software non-free. Indeed, there are two common definitions of free software: the FSF definition, and the Debian Free Software Guidelines, also known as the Open Source Definition. Basically, both definitions indicate that to be free, a piece of software must be usable with no restrictions, and forbidding evil uses is such a restriction. Specifically, it violates:

• the FSF's zeroth liberty: A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). [ ]
• the DFSG/OSD sixth point: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.

Ambiguous In addition to these incompatibilities to being free, this morality clause implies additional problems, the most important one being that it is ambiguous, which is very bad for a license clause: who exactly defines what is Good and what is Evil? If it is the author, then this clause could be used for arbitrarily forbidding any use; it it is the licensee, then this clause it as good as void. Do not use it For all these reasons, the JSON License with that infamous morality clause is not suitable for free software, so if you plan to use that license for your work, please consider these suggestions: 1. do not; 2. do not, really; 3. if still in doubt, refer to point 1. There are several standard free software licenses, the closest one being the MIT/Expat one, that you should consider instead. Now, if you really want to be considered as non-free, and rejected by Debian, Red Hat/Fedora, Google Code and more generally any free software distributor, this is the way to go. On thing worth noting is that this morality clause only annoys free software distributors, that are certainly not doing Evil, but will not prevent any evil person to do Evil things with your software. To encourage people to do Good rather than Evil, it would be better to formulate that clause as a suggestion rather than an order:

The Software should rather be used for Good, not Evil.

The JSMin case This infamous JSON License is known to be used by JSMin and its PHP port. If you are a Web application author, be careful when embedded external content, since it can render you whole piece of software non-free! If you are using JSMin, I would suggest that you drop it, or at least make it optional by using a conditional (if JSMin is here, use it, otherwise do nothing) so that distributors such as Debian can expurgate that non-free part.

I have just bought our plane tickets to Managua, so I can finally say this: Yes, many of you will ask what happened, I was bragging everywhere I wanted to go by land, driving from Mexico City to Managua. I'd love to, and I'm sure it's completely doable... But we have family issues to attend on July 21, in Argentina. So we will have a beautiful flight schedule (and carbon footprint) for this July:

June 30

Mexico San Salvador Managua, 17:35-20:30. Yes, this means I will not be in Mexico to cast my vote on July 1st. Well, I had already accepted this would happen... And the price difference was quite sensible.

July 15

Managua San Jos Mexico, 16:25-22:20

July 16

Mexico Santiago Buenos Aires (AEP), 20:30-09:55

July 23

Buenos Aires (EZE) Lima Mexico, 08:35-19:00

Several people have asked me on the best airline options for this trip. In our case, to Managua, it was with TACA, US$518 total. You can get tickets for ~US$30 less, but the flight goes through Panama instead of San Salvador, for an extra 1000Km And instead of ~3hr it makes slightly over 6. Yes, on our way back we will be routed a bit South to San Jos , but it's not as bad, and it's for a very short layover. For Argentina? Well, we have always found LAN to be the cheapest and most convenient. This time, TACA/Avianca was a very close second, which lost due to almost doubling the flight+layover time Why aren't we taking a Mexico Managua Buenos Aires flight instead? Because it's ~US$150 more expensive per person. Not *that* much, but still some money. And by returning to Mexico and having a night at home, we will save us the hassle of carrying Winter clothes to Nicaragua and Summer clothes to Argentina. Oh, and if you are planning on dropping by home while we are away and robbing all of our stuff: There's not that much to take from there, and we have already arranged for somebody to be there while we are away. But thanks for thinking about us, anyway! [update] And what about DebConf12 registration? When is the system opening for us all to register? Soon, dear friends, we are talking about some related issues, and you will have your registrationi open soon.

The next day was reserved for seeing Mostar. I could leave my luggage at the hotel, so I first went to the train station. The train station was rather large and impressive, in spite of only two trains per day and direction. However, the train station was closed at that time, so no ticket purchase yet. Into the historic city of Mostar: Visiting the Ottoman House was interesting, as well as climbing on the tower of one mosque. In the city, many houses still had effects of shelters and gun shots from the war. (At least) One of the trees in the pedestrian area had many shots as well.
river Neretva within the city of Mostar
City of Mostar from the mosque tower
Ottoman House and bird nests within Seeing Stari Most, the old (or rather: rebuilt) bridge was nice, as well as the masses of people looking there. However, the area with many tourists was quite small. Whereas Stari Most was shoot down during the war, there was a small sister bridge which survived the war damaged but still existed. However, that bridge collapsed during one high water afterwards but had also been rebuilt.
Stari Most with tourists, sister bridge of Stari Most without tourists and houses along the river Below Stari Most, there was an area that looked like a nice picknick-place to look at the bridge and old city, but it was obviously unmaintained since some time. Same at other places: Really great, but many of them unmaintained (as in "too less money", not as in "vandalized"). Soon in the afternoon, most tourists disappeared, so I had the chance to look at the city with only few tourists arround before I had to leave for the train. Walking around Mostar, I meet a few people who were in Germany before, for work, studying or school. The city was quite fascinating - in some way reminded me of 20 years ago. I saw a few more nice vegetables, like kiwis. Mostar wasn't as tourismn-oriented as I would have expected from the monuments available to see there. All people were very nice and friendly, and in the cafes around there was free wifi. A nice place, but also depressing when thinking how much better it could be.

Tired of using curl to debug webapps? Looks quite complicated and for sure it is error prone. This looks much better, and I ve just created package with this useful tool. It s called httpie and is already in NEW queue. Besides simplifying syntax it has also color output which makes results more readable. For the impatient I put this package also on my people.d.o page.

Having monitoring for dualstack connectivity in place helps a lot. Unfortunately in most cases we are running also services we want to offer dualstacked. In the past we just monitored in those cases IPv4 only or created a separate check for the same service on IPv6. This is a bit messy and I was looking for something to check services via IPv4 and IPv6. Digging my most boring search engine doesn t help much here. So I was talking with some people more involved into the core Icinga/Nagios stuff. Seems there is actually the best solution to use check_multi. As we have the command definition for check_multi_icinga already in place, I created a check_smtp_dualstack.cmd for monitoring a dualstacked SMTP service

command[ IPv4 ] = check_smtp -4 -H $HOSTADDRESS$
command[ IPv6 ] = check_smtp -6 -H $HOSTADDRESS6$
state [ CRITICAL ] = COUNT(CRITICAL) > 1
state [ WARNING ] = COUNT(WARNING) > 0 COUNT(CRITICAL) > 0
state [ UNKNOWN ] = COUNT(UNKNOWN) > 1 A simple SMTP service definition does the trick (don t forget address6 in host definition)

define service
use generic-service ; Name of service template to use
host_name localhost
service_description SMTP
check_command check_multi_icinga! check_smtp_dualstack.cmd !'-r 1+2+4+8
Okay .. that looks nice, but only at the first view. Imagining what we are actually running as service checks, it seems we just need for every unique service check a new cmd-file for check_multi as I didn t found a way to generalize the whole stuff yet. Does anybody know a way to pass commands for check_multi via service definitions? Something like:

define service
[...]
check_command check_multi_icinga! check_general_dualstack.cmd !'check_smtp -p 666 ! -r 1+2+4+8
[...]

Since some ages we are deploying IPv6 in our network and also for some selected services. Some days ago we discovered, that anybody has enabled accidentally a router advertisement daemon in a network where this shouldn t happen. As result of this, IPv6 enabled systems got (additional) IPv6 adresses and some services where using this new learned addresses as source address when sending out replies. Maybe this doesn t sound so harmful on the first view. But some services rely on a correct source address when getting a reply for a request (for example dns resolver library). To be aware of the issue, that a service maybe available via IPv4 but not via IPv6 or vica versa, a dualstacked monitoring needs to be in place for dualstacked services. Looking into the issue, I stumbled upon Michael Friedrichs HowTo about Dualstacked monitoring with Icinga. Luckily we have the full software stack in place on Squeeze (with squeeze-backport). As icinga and nagios-plugins was in installed already, I just needed to fetch check_multi.

aptitude install -t squeeze-backports nagios-plugin-check-multi Now a new check command is needed, I created the following:

define command
command_name check_multi_icinga
command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_multi \
-f /etc/check_multi/$ARG1$ $ARG2$ $ARG3$ $ARG4$ \
-s objects_cache=/var/cache/icinga/objects.cache \
-s status_dat=/var/cache/icinga/status.dat \
-s HOSTADDRESS=$HOSTADDRESS$ -s HOSTADDRESS6=$HOSTADDRESS6$
For monitoring connectivity I created check_host_alive_dualstack.cmd

command[ IPv4 ] = check_ping -4 -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -w 5000.0,100% -c 5000.0,100% -p 5
command[ IPv6 ] = check_ping -6 -H $HOSTADDRESS6$ -w 5000.0,100% -c 5000.0,100% -p 5
state [ CRITICAL ] = COUNT(CRITICAL) > 1
state [ WARNING ] = COUNT(WARNING) > 0 COUNT(CRITICAL) > 0
state [ UNKNOWN ] = COUNT(UNKNOWN) > 1 Now we just need to replace the check-host-alive command and add a value for address6 on the host as the following

define host
use generic-host ; Name of host template to use
host_name localhost
alias localhost
address 127.0.0.1
address6 ::1
check_command check_multi_icinga! check_host_alive_dualstack.cmd !'-r 1+2+4+8
Reloading icinga should you show something like this:
Now we have general connectivity of our dualstacked systems monitored.