Search Results: "Martin"

24 January 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Freezing reporters

It's not like it was a first, but -20 degrees Celsius in Berlin this morning is not what I like to wake up to. Standing at the station and waiting for a delayed train, I come to realise that I do not appreciate public radio stations airing in public space. I mean, if I am not allowed to smoke in public space because it annoys bystanders, I should not have to listen to the crap they play in the radio. And I firmly believe that reporters who joke about how the listeners are probably freezing their asses off on air should be dumped in liquid nitrogen and then reformed with a sledgehammer. Happy Tuesday to y'all.

Andrew Pollock: [life] Making like a tourist

Had a busy couple of weekends with Rick visiting and us doing much sightseeing. I've been too busy to blog. The weekend before the one just gone was a long one on account of Martin Luther King Day on the Monday. We spent Saturday in San Francisco, Rick and I at Camp Sysadmin, as previously mentioned, and Sarah pottered around on her own (photos here). On Sunday, Rick and I went for a reasonable (28 kilometre) bike ride around the part of the bay accessible from the Stevens Creek Trail in the morning, and in the afternoon we all drove into the hills to check out the Lick Observatory. You can see the observatory as a little bump on the top of the mountains on a clear day, but it's deceptively further away than you think, because it's actually on top of the second line of mountains, not the first. We didn't expect to find ice and snow or for it to be zero degrees (Celsius) at the summit. We made it up just before 5pm, which was closing time, so we'll have to go again earlier in the day (and more appropriately attired) to check it out more thoroughly. Some photos here. On the Monday, we did a bit of a group outing with a few other people from work, including Tanya, who is visiting from the Dublin office and also in extreme tourist mode. We took a Caltrain in to Millbrae, and then switched to the BART for the remainder of the journey. Finally, we took a cable car from Powell station over to Fishermen's Wharf, where we wandered about for a bit, and then had a nice $11 cruise on the bay for an hour and a half, which went around Alcatraz and under the Gold Gate bridge. After that we caught another cable car back downtown, wandered around for a bit, and then met up with a few more people from work for a beer, and then had dinner at a nice Irish pub that we found. Photos from that outing here. On the Saturday of the weekend just gone, we drove to Monterey, mainly with the aim to hire Segways and fang around on them. Mission accomplished, and it was very affordable too. I think we'll definitely do that again. We also need to visit the aquarium. I really liked Monterey. It reminded me a lot of Berry, on the New South Wales south coast. Photos here. Finally, on Sunday (i.e. yesterday), we drove back to San Francisco, where Sarah, Rick and Tanya did the Alcatraz cruise/tour thing, and I spent most of the time riding the cable cars and street cars. The $10 day pass purchased on the cable cars is great value, as it seems to be valid on all of the San Francisco Municipal Railway (affectionately known as the "muni"). In the afternoon, we all went on a bus tour of San Francisco (the same one Michael and I did in July, but with a different driver, and slightly different route). Finally, we had a really nice dinner at an Afghani restaurant a few doors down from the backpacker's hostel that Tanya was staying in. Photos from the day here. Rick flew out tonight, and hopefully had a good time while he was here. We're certainly feeling a bit weary from all the sightseeing, but having visitors is always a good excuse to get out and do it. Next weekend, our friend Brett is visiting from Canada. No rest, I tell ya...

23 January 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Lufthansa and Swiss

It was a long fight that Lufthansa fought before they were allowed to swallow Swiss, the second try at a Swiss national airline after the horrendous management mistakes by the SwissAir board. But they won: at the end of March 2006, the merger is supposed to be complete. Sitting once again on a flight to Berlin, operated by Swiss, I am beginning to wonder whether this merger will be completed in time. I am undoubtedly spoiled as a regular Lufthansa flyer, so several things annoy me every time I fly Swiss (economy class, of course):

  • After boarding is complete, I sometimes walk to the business class purser and ask for today's paper. Since I usually fly in the evenings, Lufthansa stewards never deny this request for they are not going to need the paper anymore -- there's nothing more boring than old news. On Swiss flights, I always get a categorical "no" as the answer, the reason being that only business class passengers get papers. It's worth to note that Lufthansa has shelves with papers in the gate area, so I only rarely have to ask the in-flight crew, usually only when the Financial Times wasn't available for grabs. Swiss doesn't consider this an important service.

  • Cheap economy tickets are not rebookable. However, I cannot afford to spend twice or thrice the amount for a ticket, just to be flexible. I have often arrived at airports early. If I am on a Lufthansa flight, I can usually get switched to an earlier flight for free, or for the rebooking fee of 35 EUR. Swiss has never made a compromise. I have had to spend additional nights in a place just because there weren't any seats in my booking class, even though the flight was nearly empty. I know that Swiss is actually performing according to the rules. But one reason why I like Lufthansa so much is because they often bend the rules to please their passengers, no matter whether they are students or high-shot managers. Since Swiss wants to see themselves as the luxury airline, they have no concept of people who can't afford to pay shitloads. Typical Swiss, in some ways.

  • Lufthansa serves meals even on short flights if you fly between 18:00 and 21:00 hours. Swiss offers sandwiches whose consistency suggest they should be used to lessen the impact in case the airplane goes down, not eaten.

  • Lufthansa has great Florida orange juice. Swiss has some cheap crap from the supermarket.

  • Lufthansa serves free alcoholic beverages (incl. beer). Swiss charges Swiss prices (4 EUR for a 0,33 litre can of beer).

I suppose I could list more examples, but then I'd just get more aggrevated. Thus, instead, I ask the crew for another sandwich, in case they have any leftover. Who cares about cushiony sandwiches when you're hungry, right? "I am sorry, we cannot give out more than one sandwich per passenger" This is the last flight of the day to or from Berlin. Are you going to recycle the sandwich and serve it to the morning passengers? Another fun tale about Swiss: their homepage is utter crap. First, it thinks I am Italian, despite my browser sending en,de,fr as preferred languages. Second, there's no way to change the language, it seems. And third, see for yourself: book a ticket to Budapest this coming weekend and state you are a student. You'll be asked to pay 150% of the price that a regular (non-student) passenger would pay for the same flight. So, Lufthansa, are you aware of the amount of homework you have to do?

21 January 2006

Martin Michlmayr: NSLU2 Debian porting work, NSLU2 core

<p> The Linksys NSLU2 is a sub-$100 ARM based gadget that allows you to connect storage (in the form of a USB disk) to the network. The <a href = "http://www.nslu2-linux.org/">NSLU2-Linux project</a> is working on technical development (including 2.6 support), and provides technical information and alternative firmware images. There has been some interest in get Debian properly working and the project kindly donated a NSLU2 to me so I can help out with debian-installer porting and other Debian related work that needs to be done. While my work hasn't been fully completed yet I have made good progress in the last few weeks since I got the NSLU2 and yesterday I found myself invited to the NSLU2-Linux core team. </p> <!-- time: 2006-01-21 03:52:24 +0000 -->

20 January 2006

Martin F. Krafft: alias grep=vim ... ?

I love: regular expressions and vim I hate: regular expressions of sed and grep I adore: vim's enhanced regular expressions I want: to be able to use vim from the command line to do advanced searches across sets of files, like: 
# find "foo" followed by whitespace and "bar", even across lines
$ vim $SOMETHING 'g/foo\_s*bar/'
# words ending in "bar"
$ vim $SOMETHING 'g/bar\>/'
# words starting with "foo"
$ vim $SOMETHING 'g/\<foo/'
... and more. What does $SOMETHING have to be set to? Update: Neil Moore suggests the following shell function: 
vgrep ()  
  local S="$1"; shift
  vim -es +"argdo g/$S" +':q!' "$@"
This works. I shall be posting any improvements I make over the next couple of weeks in another blog post. If there are any. But I suppose options like -i and -v might be good to have.

Martin F. Krafft: Sacrilege!

A few days ago, I was comparing vim to emacs. What a sacrilege! Especially after I found the problem: 
cirrus:~/.var/vim> ls -l
drwxrwx---  2 madduck madduck        6 2005-09-27 14:54 view/
-rw-------  1 madduck madduck 198580452 2006-01-20 21:12 viminfo
-rw-------  1 madduck madduck 182227200 2006-01-20 18:35 viminfo.tmp
-rw-------  1 madduck madduck        0 2006-01-20 18:35 viminfx.tmp
-rw-------  1 madduck madduck        0 2006-01-20 18:34 viminfy.tmp
-rw-------  1 madduck madduck        0 2006-01-20 18:33 viminfz.tmp
So something corrupted viminfo, vim's scratchpad, which explains it all. Thanks to those who have expressed their condolescences.

19 January 2006

Martin F. Krafft: GMX sells registered mail as security feature

My brother wanted to send me a sensitive document, so he followed the suggestion by his provider (GMX) to use their feature called "registered mail") ("Einschreiben"). Here's how it works:
  1. The sender composes an Email and checks the option "registered mail"
  2. GMX stores the email on their servers, generates an access code, and sends the access code with a URL to the intended recipient -- plain text, of course.
  3. The recipient surfs to the URL and accepts (or declines).
  4. GMX then acknowledges acceptance to the sender and forwards the email to the original recipient address -- plain text, of course.
I suppose the feature does what the name suggests, namely to offer the sender a way to check whether the recipient has received the email. What pisses me off is that they sell it as a way to securely send emails on the Internet. I think providers spreading fud like this should have their "licence" revoked and be condemned to practice encryption with an abacus over a 2400 baud modem line! PS: If this isn't bad, the email sent to the intended recipient doesn't properly encode special characters in the headers, which is why some content scanners (like my amavisd-new) will discard or bounce it.

17 January 2006

Martin F. Krafft: My first public interview ...

... went online today. Thanks to Sal Cangeloso of XYZ Computing for a very pleasant experience!

12 January 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Vim is now like Emacs

No wonder my system was swapping like mad. I only have 512 Mb, so when I started 4 vim instances, the system became unusable: 
lapse:~> ps up 18139
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
madduck  18139  2.6 26.8 225460 214645 pts/10  S+   01:23   0:01 vim
                         ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^
I don't claim I understand memory management. But what the heck is going on? If I start vim without my configuration (vim -u NONE), the problem goes away. However, starting vim on another machine (remote, via non-X-forwarding SSH) with the same configuration, it uses a few megabytes, no more.

11 January 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Herd of Electric Sheep DoS German ISP Giant

Please, T-Offline, if you cannot administer DNS servers, maybe you should stop destroying the German ISP market? 
lapse:~> host -t aaaa ethereal.net.nyud.net. 217.237.151.97
ethereal.net.nyud.net AAAA record not found
  at www-proxy.M1.srv.t-online.de,
  server failure
Server failure? Fuck off! What's even worse is that one single request causes their servers to send back about 1'500 ServFail messages. And all this just because electricsheep uses curl, which tries IPv6 before it falls back to IPv4. How na ve.

Lars Wirzenius: Debian: On using phones

Martin Krafft asks why some people don't like telephones. I'm one such person. Telephones are error-prone, low-bandwidth and high latency communication media that still require real-time response. I like having a conversation face to face, but using a telephone cuts out almost all the bandwidth from that, so that you can only rely on voice, and not even the full spectrum of that. What with a limited spectrum of frequences, low sound volume even at the highest setting (I have bad hearing), strange accents, and generally abysmal sound quality (background noise makes it almost impossible to hear what the other person is saying), it takes a lot of time to get anything settled over the phone. IRC, for example, is in many ways similar, but it differs from a telephone in two different aspects: you don't need to react within seconds, and messages get through loud and clear (well, big-fonted and clear). Even if a telephone call may be shorter than an IRC discussion, it requires much more effort to happen, and on the whole is not as productive. This doesn't mean I'd refuse to discuss something over the phone, but I'd really, really rather not.

10 January 2006

Martin F. Krafft: We're cool

And we did it again (previous message). W00t! I find it curious that Ubuntu isn't mentioned. Either they are really a desktop distro, or their apache servers announce themselves with a Debian signature. Keep it coming, girls and guys! We have reason(s) to be proud! Apparently this was on DWN long ago, but I only just saw it. No reason not to be proud again, now is it? Right, Ari? Right, Joe?

Martin F. Krafft: Scared of telephones?

Since I shouldn't be typing too much, I have resorted to the telephone on numerous occasions in the last four months, calling Debian folks to discuss issues -- after all, I don't want to let go of this project, especially since it's now the topic of my doctorate thesis [*]. Strangely though (or not), I have found that more than two thirds of the developers I tried to reach seem to be scared of the phone. I always explain my situation and request number and a convenient time to call, but most of the time I get no answer back. If I do get an answer back, it's usually along the lines of "I prefer IRC" or the like. Only rarely did people actually agree to confer on the phone with me. What is it about telephones? I am paying the bill, and it's surely a good medium to discuss specific issues. Are Debian developers scared of this communication medium? Or do people simply not want to speak to me?
[*]to set things straight with Wouter's post: I thought it kind of sounded like I was going to present my doctoral thesis at FOSDEM 2006. Unfortunately, that is not (yet) the case. My proposal was accepted, but I haven't been able to start yet, so what I was planning to do for the conference was to pick two ideas I had for Debian workflow improvement and present them alongside a short overview of the current workflow. This fulfills two goals for me. One, I am forced to write down these ideas, and two, I get them out into the open for people to discuss, develop, and/or slam them.

Martin F. Krafft: Planet value

I find that posts like this really add value to the planet. I hope ibid won't regret it in the morning.

9 January 2006

Wouter Verhelst: Prospective talks for the Debian Devroom @ FOSDEM2006

By request: Here's a list of people who've confirmed they're going to give a talk in the Debian Devroom at the next FOSDEM. This list isn't final yet (there are some more people who've asked for a time slot but did not confirm yet; and I didn't assign slots yet, either) but it might be interesting for those who are coming to have a preview of the subjects that will be available. Well then.
Lars Wirzenius: Nobody expects the Finnish Inquisition: Confessions of a package torturer
Piuparts tests that .deb packages can be installed, upgraded, and removed without problems. Lars uses it to torture all the packages he can get his hands on. This talk will explain how to use it on your packages before uploading them, and thus improving their quality and not having them suffer in Lars's hands.
Martin Zobel-Helas: Debian-Volatile - behind the scenes
This talk will give an overview of how packages are handled for Debian-volatile; what changes are allowed, how security is handled.
Martin F. Krafft: Improving workflow in Debian through process integration
This talk will be about the same subject as Martin's doctorate thesis. The abstract for that is:
This research paper/project details the technical challenges the Debian project faces as it continues its tremendous growth in size and popularity. It describes a research endeavour designed to increase the use of version control within the project for improved coordination of globally distributed teams of volunteers working on the software packages that make up the system. The research primarily focuses on the integration and consolidation of the involved processes. With tools already available for some parts of these processes as well as the coordination of teams, the goal is not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to reuse and improve these tools, to better integrate them, and to make them more accessible by providing abstraction wrappers with interfaces intuitive to Debian developers. It is further the intent for these tools to be optional and fully compatible to existing practices, thus not forcing developers to adapt. The research starts with process analysis and studies of the work habits on the side of the developers, and targets the final output of tools, which implement improved workflow in Debian package management through meaningful integration of existing (and proven) methods
Enrico Zini: Debtags, and what you can do with it today
This talk will introduce the Debtags project, what it has accomplished so far and the wonderful advanced tools that are now available, using debtags, to make sense of the huge package archive.
Bill Allombert: Inside the Debian menu system
The debian menu system transparently keeps the menus in sync with the list of installed applications; so transparently, in fact, that a lot of developers do not know how the system really works. This talk will detail the various components of the system, what the technical challenges are and how they are solved.
Frans J. Pop: Debian Installer internals
An introduction to the inner workings of Debian Installer. Starting with what happens when the installer boots, the talk will go on to discuss how the dynamic menu structure allows the installer to be adapted for different architectures and installation methods. Other subjects will include the special nature of udebs, the contents of a D-I initrd, how cdebconf knits everything together and allows the use of different frontends, preseeding and the use of hooks. If time allows, a short introduction into the build system and CD building may be provided. Some knowledge of Debian package management (like priorities and dependencies) is assumed in this talk.
Aurelien Jarno: The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port of Debian using the FreeBSD kernel and a GNU libc library. It is currently the most advanced non-Linux port in terms of packages ported.
This talk gives an overview of GNU/kFreeBSD, and a quick comparison between the FreeBSD and the Linux kernel, to give users the necessary information to let them find how the FreeBSD kernel could fill their needs. It then describes the status of the port and the choices made concerning the architecture of the port (libc, threading library, etc.). It will continue by giving the various ways to try out this port and to give help, giving pointers to useful documentation and some useful hints.
Best portability practices are also covered, for both the Debian packaging and the upstream code. It will be based on real examples of non-portable code, and will show the best way to change it into portable code.
Summing the times that people gave me, I'll have anywhere between 5h25 and 6h00 of talks already, and two more people who've shown real interest in doing something in the Debian devroom (but who haven't sent me the information I ask for to be able to confirm their talk; please do so!). I'll probably get 9 hours in all (10 if I squeeze a little bit; but then I might have some issues with the key signing party, which I'm also co-organizing), so there is still some time left for interested parties. However, if you're interested in giving a talk, you shouldn't wait too long anymore!

Andrew Pollock: [life] An outing on the light rail

Today, we took a day off unpacking and ventured to San Jose on the light rail, of which Whisman station is an easy walk from our place. It was quite a fun outing. An adult "single trip" ticket cost $1.75, and was a good 2 hours travel. So technically, if you could get to where you were going and back again in 2 hours, more power to you. The light rail itself is like a hybrid tram/train sort of thing. It's two cars long, and sometimes goes onto the road, and other times is separate to the road (but always on rails). It stops only when required to pick up passengers, or when a passenger on board indicates they'd like to get off, so presumably this makes the timetable as variable as a bus. On the way to San Jose it didn't stop at a lot of stations. It also has cool bike racks on board. You stow your bike vertically, hanging it from the front wheel. I foresee a few further-afield cycling excursions in the future. The trip to downtown San Jose took about 50 minutes each way, and took us through a real who's who of Silicon Valley. We saw so many names... In San Jose, we popped into The Tech, just to see if it was open next Monday (Martin Luther King holiday), as we will have a guest with us, and discovered that today had free entry as SBC was paying for everyone to come in, so we thought we might as well go in, being free and all. There seemed to be a few more exhibits on line compared to last time I went with Michael, and Sarah enjoyed herself. We also had the obligatory Segway ride, and then headed home.

8 January 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Gmail sucks stinky goblin toes

I have used up my Gmail space. What now? I decide to delete the oldest few thousand mails. But how? The UI clearly sucks for this purpose (who needs to delete with 2 Gb of space?), but Gmail fortunately allows POP3 access. So I put together this script as a quick hack (thanks Clint for the tip about coproc -- bash does not seem to be able to do this...): 
#!/bin/zsh -e
send()
 
  echo $@ >&p
  echo "sending: $@" >&2
 
recv()
 
  read line <&p
  echo "received: $line" >&2
  echo $line
 
coproc openssl s_client -connect pop.googlemail.com:995
while ! recv   grep -q '^\+OK'; do sleep 0.001; done
send user $1
recv > /dev/null
send pass $2
recv > /dev/null
send stat
set --  recv 
for i in  1..$2 ; do
  send dele $i
  recv > /dev/null
done
send quit
recv > /dev/null
exit 0
and off I go. The POP3 server only ever gives you access to a few hundreds of your mails, so I figured I'd just call this script a couple of times, until my inbox would be a little less full. (I should have used python and a POP3 module for this. :)) Yeah, but forget it. Deleting messages from the POP server doesn't delete the messages from the inbox. Not even If I set it in my preferences. Great. New Gmail account created, my mission: fill their servers to the brim. Update: apparently the bug has been fixed. Now messages deleted via POP3 are moved to the trash, where they remain for 30 days, or until I manually delete them. Magnificent, back to the old problem. Will you please give me 5Gb additional space, Google?

Martin F. Krafft: Secure (!) APT updates

Andrew, your method leaves you and your system wide open to MITM attacks. All I need to do is poison your DNS cache at the right moment, and you'll trust my key (apologies to ari for misattribution in a previous edition of this post; thanks to dato for letting me know). I strongly suggest going via gnupg and verifying the fingerprint as well as the signatures on the key. You can use this page to help you verify these data (although the current lack of SSL doesn't really add a benefit, I am working on it). Here's what I usually do: 
cirrus:~> GET http://ftp-master.debian.org/ziyi_key_2006.asc   gpg --import
gpg: key 2D230C5F: public key "Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (2006)
  <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1
cirrus:~> gpg --check-sigs --fingerprint 2D230C5F
pub   1024D/2D230C5F 2006-01-03 [expires: 2007-02-07]
      Key fingerprint = 0847 50FC 01A6 D388 A643  D869 0109 0831 2D23 0C5F
uid   Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (2006) <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>
sig!3        2D230C5F 2006-01-03  Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key
                                  (2006) <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>
sig!         2A4E3EAA 2006-01-03  Anthony Towns <aj<@t>azure.humbug.org.au>
sig!         4F368D5D 2006-01-03  Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key
                                  (2005) <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>
sig!         29982E5A 2006-01-04  Steve Langasek <vorlon<@t>dodds.net>
sig!         FD6645AB 2006-01-04  Ryan Murray <rmurray<@t>cyberhqz.com>
sig!         AB2A91F5 2006-01-04  James Troup <james<@t>nocrew.org>
and then I check the trust path from my key to at least one of the keys used to sign the archive key. Only if I find an acceptable path will I then tell APT to trust the key: 
cirrus:~> gpg --export -a 2D230C5F   sudo apt-key add -
Ok
Note that the key is signed with the previous archive key, so theoretically you can just build on your previous trust. Until Debian finally gets a proper PKI in place, this seems like the best way to do it.

Philipp Kern: Plone 2.1

I had my first contact with Plone on Friday and I immediately started to use it, i.e. Plone 2.1, for one of the homepages I administrate. It is the best free CMS I encountered by now. I figured that customisation is very easy, and their acknowledgment of accessibility and clean HTML is pretty nice. Zope is, despite of what I thought from my other contacts with it, quite nice in terms of usability. But I really have to thank Debian’s Zope team and Fabio Tranchitella for their easy-to-use packages. I’m now running Zope 2.8 running on Debian Sarge just fine, with very few efforts of backporting. However, Martin, you need to compare Ruby on Rails rather to Zope CMF than to Plone itself. Rails is only a framework, whereas Plone is a fully featured CMS on top of CMF. As far as I know, such a featureful and free CMS has yet to be built on top of Rails.

Martin F. Krafft: Tendonitis, Epicondylitis, whatever -- potential escape to Asia

The epicondylitis gave way again to symptoms of tendonitis just before Christmas, and now it's back. I am switching therapist yet again, this time going for massages of the shoulder region, as well as accupuncture. Apparently, my back is in really bad shape, but the therapist is optimistic. In a week, he says, things should be going up again. One interesting thing he pointed out is that I always seem to be lifting my shoulders, so most of the problem's solution will be to learn to relax the shoulder region. In only hope he's right. I am beginning to disapprove of my endless vacation in which I cannot do what I want. On a related note, I am plotting a new trip to Southeast Asia in April. If I am cured by then, it's a wonderful vacation. If not, it'll get me further away from the keys. Any idea where to go to? Northern Laos and Myanmar are my candidates, but I am not sure about the bird flu problems in this region. Same thing for China, which I'd really like to visit soon. Feedback welcome!

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