This weekend will see the second Bug Squashing Party hosted in Utrecht, this time to help get Debian Lenny released. Stichting NLnet has generously provided funding for the cost of food and drink. For all details see the wiki page.

Recently I read about a cool bugfix for gdb in the Novell bugtracker on planet.gnome.org. I ported the fix to the ubuntu gdb package, and Martin Pitt promptly extended it to have an amd64 fix as well. I thought I would provide the enhanced patch back to the Novell bugtracker. This required creating new Novell login as my old CNE details are so far back I can't remember them at all. However, hard-stop when I saw this at the bottom of the form: "By completing this form, I am giving Novell and/or Novell's partners permission to contact me regarding Novell products and services." No thank you, I don't want to be contacted. WTF.

The most dynamic segment of the software industry that I'm aware of is web programming. Flamewars rage about frameworks and browsers and standards and whatnot, and the openness of the whole thing feels like some of the things that made me fall in love with computing as a whole and Free Software in particular. The problem with all that openness is that it's rather difficult to navigate. Aside from the obvious issues with browser incompatibilities, there's an enormous amount of software solutions on the server side, spanning languages, libraries, and frameworks. Each one is an ecosystem to itself, often being large and complicated.

This makes it rather difficult to do certain aspects of web programming well. You are constantly switching between tools and languages, as well as coding paradigms, in order to build a web app in full. You'll be writing HTML, CSS, and Javascript on the client side, each with its own peculiarities. On the server side you'll probably have settled on one language with its own very different varieties of coding style and patterns. Some, like Ruby on Rails, are their own unique brand of language that makes you work both in the DSL (Rails in this case) and the parent language (Ruby here). Template engines often will do the same thing, such as in the case of Django.

It's pretty obvious that having to juggle all these tools places a fairly large burden on the coder. Much to their credit, it's not difficult to work in any of these languages, but to work in them at a high level becomes more difficult the deeper and wider the software stack reaches. You get this a bit in systems programming, juggling C/C++ with a build system and a scripting language, but that's usually it. You can get that number of moving parts just on the client side of the web with HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Something interesting that seems to be happening is that people are moving to decrease this cognitive burden. One good example is the Google Web Toolkit which lets you write all your AJAXy client-side stuff in Java, and let it get compiled in to Javascript. That way you cut the languages you have to work in. A similar concept is behind Microsoft allowing Ruby (and Python, if I've heard correctly) in Silverlight. Alternately, you can bring Javascript (back) to the server side, which is the motivation behind Helma and Rhino on Rails (the latter of which I hope sees the light of day).

Personally, I'm rooting for Javascript to not become an assembly language, but to take over the server side again. It's a capable and powerful language (much better than Java in my opinion), and we're collectively leveraging it very poorly. Rhino is interesting and has enormous potential, but it needs library binds in the worst way. Currently it's basically using Javascript to write Java, which is rather atrocious (COBOL in any language, etc) but with some Javascript-style wrappers around the Java classes it could be phenomenal. Alternately, there's Spidermonkey, which could be wrapped in a more capable shell with a good FFI, and we could easily have wrappers to our favorite Free Software libraries. This project seems far along here, but it's currently very windows-centric.

There's a lot of potential here though. Unifying the development language for both web and system apps would benefit the Free Software desktop, and give us the ability to better integrate our stuff with the web. One of the best things about Free Software is that it dropped the barrier to entry in software development. I think we can repeat that success again here.

Today is World Environment Day 2008 and also Recycle Week in the UK. Locally, our poor recycling record has attracted attention. The main Somerset CC area averages 50% recycling and composting, while North Somerset only does 36%. This will cost us money, as explained under the subtly-titled local newspaper article 'REDUCE WASTE NOW OR FACE A 12M FINE' It's very annoying to read a Conservative councillor say

"The message we really have to get out to people is that this is their problem too."

We know it's a bloody problem. Have you tried to use your stupid recycling system? Criticism of the stupid collections is strangely absent from the local Lib-Dem's Mid table place shouldn't be good enough when it comes to recycling (Mike Bell) and I can't even find recycling mentioned on local Labour sites - I think those two groups may have been in coalition when the stupid system was introduced. It's left to local residents to explain the problem. Local waste collections have been simplified recently but it still seems bloody awkward, taking different types of waste to different places. The most recent edition of the council's North Somerset Life magazine explained that they don't collect plastic bottles from the doorstep because it would add 10 per year to our local tax. I'm damn sure it already costs me more than that to store them and ferry them into town over a year. The only people rewarded by saving that 10 seem to be those who live near the town centre collection point, drive to that Tesco anyway, or don't recycle plastics. Why reward them? Speaking of Tesco... those national and local favourites have applied to build Two more Tesco stores for Weston [The Weston Mercury] including one directly opposite another supermarket. The application number is 08/P/1230/F if you want to respond. The planning system seems my main chance to protect my local environment at the moment. Next Monday evening at 7.30pm, 08/P/1070/F - Erection of 5 storey building to provide 14 flats, restaurant and office with basement parking following demolition of restaurant will be considered by a Kewstoke village council planning meeting in the village hall. As I understand it, the public may make statements at the start of the meeting and 2 Kewstoke Road is currently the Castle.

I’m currently deciding where to get a Xen DomU hosted. It will be used for a new project that I’m about to start which will take more bandwidth than my current ISP is prepared to offer (or at least they would want me to start paying and serious bandwidth is expensive in Australia). Below is a table of the options I’ve seriously considered so far (I rejected Dreamhost based on their reputation and some other virtual hosts were obviously not able to compare with the prices of the ones in the table). For each ISP I listed the two cheapest options, as I want to save money I’ll probably go for the cheapest option at the ISP I choose but want the option of upgrading if I need more. I’m not sure how much storage I need, I think that 4.5G is probably not enough and even 6G might get tight. Also of course it depends on how many friends I share the server with. Quantact has a reasonable cheap option for $15, but the $25 option is expensive and has little RAM. Probably 192M of RAM would be the minimum if I’m going to share the machine with two or more friends (to share the costs). VPSland would have rated well if it wasn’t for the fact that they once unexpectedly deleted a DomU belonging to a client (they claimed that the bill wasn’t paid) and had no backups. Disabling a service when a bill is not paid is fair, charging extra for the “service” of reenabling it is acceptable, but just deleting it with no backups is unacceptable. But as I’m planning on serving mostly static data this won’t necessarily rule them out of consideration. It seems that linode and slicehost are the best options (Slicehost seems the most clueful and Linode might be the second most). Does anyone have suggestions about other Xen servers that I haven’t considered? XenEurope seems interesting. One benefit that they have is being based in the Netherlands which has a strong rule of law (unlike the increasingly corrupt US). A disadvantage is that the Euro is a strong currency and is expected to get even stronger. Services paid in Euros should be expected to cost more in future when paid in Australian dollars, while services paid in US dollars should be expected to cost less. Gandi.net has an interesting approach, they divide a server into 64 “shares” and then you can buy as many as you want (up to 16 shares for 1/4 of a server) for your server. If at any time you run out of bandwidth then you just buy more shares. They also limit bandwidth by guaranteed transfer rate (in multiples of 3Mb/s) instead of limiting the overall data transferred on a per-monthly basis (as most providers do). They don’t mention whether you can burst above that 3Mb/s limit - while 3Mb/s for 24*7 is a significant amount of data transfer it isn’t that much if you have a 200MB file that will be downloaded a few times a day while interactive tasks are also in progress (something that may be typical usage for my server). Of course other providers generally don’t provide any information on how fast data can be transferred and will often be smaller than 3Mb/s. Also if anyone who I know wants to share access to a server then please contact me via private mail.

ISP	RAM	Disk	Bandwidth (per month)	Price $US
Linode	360M	10G	200GB	$20
Linode	540M	15G	300GB	$30
Slicehost	256M	10G	100GB	$20
Slicehost	512M	20G	200GB	$38
VPSLand	192M	6G	150GB	$16
VPSLand	288M	8G	200GB	$22
Quantact	96M	4.5G	96GB	$15
Quantact	128M	6G	128GB	$25
rimuhosting	96M	4G	30G	$20
XenEurope	128M	10G	100G	$16 (E10)
XenEurope	256M	20G	150G	$28 (E17.50)
Gandi.net	256M	5G	3Mb/s	$7.50 or E6

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Here's a selection of pictures from a recent visit to the Efteling.

Click the icons for full versions or view full set. I'm still planning on making yet another web photo album software of my own based on a revolutionary idea. Maybe I will actually do it sometime, who knows.

After shutdown of the old L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET the IP address formerly associated with it, the IP continued to answere requests. More informations can be found at the ICANN Blog
UPDATE: Before bothering around, if you read the ICANN Blog, you realize that the issue was fixed very shortly. The whole problem is, that the file of the root DNS servers have to be keeped up to date. This issue should be fixed by operator of resolving nameservers (usually your ISP). A goody will be, to have this fixed by the next point release of debian, but it is NOT security critical.
Thanks Thijs for make me sensible that my article may misslead people who are not reading the referenced document.
UPDATE 2: A more technical description can also be found at Renesys Blog and a disussion how it is related to debian.

Tonight at the Halfking is a reading by the author of American Nerd, a book that will be high on my reading list (and who knows, maybe I will assign in my course on hackers, as you know, hacking is related to nerd culture too

As I said a month ago, my main server Delmak was dying. Well it still runs (proof: you could read this blog some days ago). Thanks to friends I host for free, they've kindly given enough money to buy a brand new server (C2D E8400, 4 GB RAM, 2x500 GB RAID 1) in order to replace the good old Delmak. This new box has been named Prometheus after the only BC-303 class battleship ever built. Delmak was used to mainly run as a Web, mail and databases server. I decided to do use this server switch to change the server software I use. The first mail server I setup was based on Exim 3, courier- imap,pop -ssl, with userdb files. That was... rough. Later I switched to Exim 4, using vexim, and MySQL as a back-end. That was something like 3 years ago I guess. Since then I never really touched that back. I added spamassassin and clamav filtering some months after, because some users asked for it. That's all. So this week, I decided to switch away from this configuration. I do not understand Exim anymore anyway, so I decided to use Postfix which I often use and administrate at work. Obviously, I also now use PostgreSQL as database back-end, since it rocks, and since Postfixadmin supports it. By the way, be aware that the Debian package of postfixadmin is crappy (the configuration file is readable by anyone by default, with the database password in it). I also set up postgrey which is quite nice and efficient. Well, then was time for amavisd-new installation, but I did not do it. Seriously, amavisd-new configuration is a bloody mess, as the language it is written in (yes, Perl). So I switched to dspam which I heard is nice. Well, it seems to be for now, since it even supports clamav daemon usage directly, which is very very nice because that means I do not have to set up another thing for that. I also switched from courier to dovecot, mainly because the latter seems to be faster and lighter. I then changed the default virtual_transport to Dovecot LDA. The main advantage of this is that the LDA updates the Dovecot index while delivering. It also supports quota, which I do not use and plug-ins, like the Sieve language for mail filtering. So I decided to change my procmailrc to a new Sieve filter. My procmailrc is quite small since I only use regex to match lists and some mail address, so it has only something like 12 rules. And well, I did not do it since I discovered after some googling that Dovecot implementation of Sieve is grabbed from Cyrus which does not support variables for now. That means that the following procmailrc code:

:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-.+@lists.debian.org>
* ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-\/[^@]+
list-debian-$MATCH/

which will translate to:

require [ "regex", "variables", "fileinto" ]
if header :regex "X-Mailing-List" "<debian-(.+)@"
 
    fileinto "lists.debian.$ 1 ";
    stop;
 

But that won't work since Dovecot Sieve implementation does not support "variables". Well, since I'm not ready to list all the lists I'm subscribed to, Sieve is a no-go for now. I'll stick with procmail.

gnupg (1.4.6-3) unstable; urgency=low * Adopt package. Thanks to James Troup for his work in the far past.
Thanks to NMU'ers Bastian and Thijs. (Closes: #476418)
* Co-maintainers wanted.
* Don't build-dep on pcap on non-linux-archs. (Closes: #357267) -- Sune Vuorela Sat, 17 May 2008 15:42:55 +0200 TODO:

• Coordinate with release-team and d-i what changes can still be done before lenny
• Look at the new upstream version
• Get a alioth project and host stuff in a version control system
• Decide on version control system
• Get a team and figure out team workflow
• Look at this newfangled packaging thing called debhelper
• Make all bugs either closed or forwarded

So - anyone interested?

For a project I was looking for a way to use GNU Mailman for mailinglist management (especially its powerful web based moderation, bounce handling and attachment scrubbing features) but storing the mailinglist member information in a SQL database. That's useful when you want to relate mailinglist members to extra information already in a database and functionality on an interactive website, and it's possible on a per-mailinglist basis. This turned out to be not very difficult but just not that clearly documented. What I used:

• Mailman. I used the 2.1.x version packaged in Debian etch: an "open" system is just one apt-get away!
• The MySQL Member Adaptor available from rezo.net. There are several versions of MySQLMemberAdaptor around the web, but this one seems the most recent.

This explanation assumes you know how to work with Mailman in a regular setup, and things like creating databases and users under MySQL. Take the following steps:

1. Install and set up mailman as you would otherwise.
2. Put the MysqlMemberships.py file into the dir that is Mailman's base, this normally already has files like MemberAdaptor.py in it. For Debian this is /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman. You only need to add MysqlMemberships.py, the other files from rezo.net are not needed.
3. The create table query in MysqlMemberships.py does not work with MySQL 5, I had to apply this patch which I've sent to MySQLMembership's author in the meantime. This patch has been applied by Fil.
4. Create a database and a MySQL user, and add that information into your mm_cfg.py, like this:

   MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_NAME = "mailman"
   MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_USER = "mailman"
   MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_PASS = "somethingrandom"
   MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_HOST = "localhost"
   MYSQL_MEMBER_TABLE_TYPE = "wide"        # wide means one table per list, flat = one large table

5. Create a mailinglist like your normally would (e.g. via newlist). To enable the MySQL backend for just that list, create a file extend.py under /var/lib/mailman/lists/listname with the following content:

   from Mailman.MysqlMemberships import MysqlMemberships
   def extend(list):
           list._memberadaptor = MysqlMemberships(list)
   

   (whitespace is significant in Python).
6. It should work now! Upon receiving the first request for your list, the database table will be created automatically, which you can then populate. You may need to restart the mailman qrunner after you make further changes to your setup.

My previous entry features the first ever comment on this blog to arrive over IPv6. Fantastic! I guess this will be the final breakthrough that the protocol needed!!

A survey has shown that 16% of youth doesn't know why we're celebrating the 5th of May. According to quality news show Editie NL, this is a worrying fact. Well, is it? I find it rather reassuring that appearently 84% of the younger generation do know that 5 May is about the libration from German occupation (I remember now that I forgot to thank the Canadiens when I was there two weeks ago). 16% is not much: if you get a 16% discount you're usually not making a great deal. Actually, I would be very surprised of a survey that would show that less than 16% of people are completely ignorant of the world around them. These same people probably would't know the connection between the colour of the national team's shirts and the royal house, or be able to tell whether St Nicolaas is a protestant or catholic. Or the ones that claim money because -6 is larger than -5. Every country has its fair share of "challenged" people. Also in recent news is that Barack Obama is losing votes because he admitted to eating rucola (arugula) from time to time. Voter's "reasoning" boils down to "if I don't know what that is, then a president that eats it can't be trusted". It gets even more sad when you realise that these people probably do know it, but don't realise they call it rocket. Great way to lose votes.

A survey has shown that 16% of youth doesn't know why we're celebrating the 5th of May. According to quality news show Editie NL, this is a worrying fact. Well, is it? I find it rather reassuring that appearently 84% of the younger generation do know that 5 May is about the libration from German occupation (I remember now that I forgot to thank the Canadiens when I was there two weeks ago). 16% is not much: if you get a 16% discount you're usually not making a great deal. Actually, I would be very surprised of a survey that would show that less than 16% of people are completely ignorant of the world around them. These same people probably would't know the connection between the colour of the national team's shirts and the royal house, or be able to tell whether St Nicolaas is a protestant or catholic. Or the ones that claim money because -6 is larger than -5. Every country has its fair share of "challenged" people. Also in recent news is that Barack Obama is losing votes because he admitted to eating rucola (arugula) from time to time. Voter's "reasoning" boils down to "if I don't know what that is, then a president that eats it can't be trusted". It gets even more sad when you realise that these people probably do know it, but don't realise they call it rocket. Great way to lose votes.

In the last leg of what has been marathon traveling over the last two months, I'm going to be heading back to San Francisco to give two talks at CommunityOne. CommunityOne is a new one-day conference that Sun is putting on -- along side it's massive JavaOne conference -- that focuses on free software, open source, and non-Sun projects. I'm going to be there talking about free software and free culture. I will be giving updated versions of the two talks that I have at the FSF members meetings over first two years. In the first talk, I'll be making the case for a strong free culture movement and in the second I'll be talking about liberating network services. If you will be at the conference, or just in the Bay area, and would like to meet up, I'll be in the area for most of a week and would love to arrange something. Just get in contact.

Thijs, how about creating two planets, one for Debian content and one for non-Debian content, and merge them on a third planet, which gets to be called planet.debian.org?