Search Results: "ag"

6 February 2012

Michal Čihař: Back from FOSDEM

Yet another FOSDEM is behind us and I'd like to thank all people organizing it. It was a great event as usual. This year there were some changes - the conference grew and there was an extra building. This is great, but on the other side, there were more tracks to follow and occasionally I wanted to be in four places at once, what is of course not manageable. Combined with quite freezing weather (well it was still much warmer than it is now in Prague), moving from one side of campus to another was not that comfortable as in last years, but there is not much man can do with that. And the biggest change for me - I did not manage beer event this year. We enjoyed great team dinner on Friday evening and while it ended, I was too lazy to move to crowded beer event and rather enjoyed bed in my hotel.

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Cyril Brulebois: dpkg with multiarch, a new hope

dpkg was uploaded to experimental a few times lately, let s sum it up quickly:
  1. It started with my NMU on 2012-01-31, since I hadn t received any reasons not to upload (except NACK , which doesn t count as such in my book).
  2. It got reverted a few minutes after that.
  3. Since this was getting nowhere, the Debian Technical Committee finally got involved, and voted in a few days only (wow, thanks!) for an it s time to experiment decision.
  4. A new dpkg upload to experimental finally happened. One shall note the prominent This is a WIP release, command line interfaces will change. notice.
I ve updated my previous dpkg with multiarch page accordingly, only keeping the interesting bits. Playing around with grep-aptavail -F Multi-Arch $i -sPackage (with $i being same or foreign), I found some bugs: Also, some wishlist bugs (keeping the prominent notice in mind): Finally, one dpkg improvement and one possible dpkg bug:

5 February 2012

Russell Coker: Reliability of RAID

ZDNet has an insightful article by Robin Harris predicting the demise of RAID-6 due to the probability of read errors [1]. Basically as drives get larger the probability of hitting a read error during reconstruction increases and therefore you need to have more redundancy to deal with this. He suggests that as of 2009 drives were too big for a reasonable person to rely on correct reads from all remaining drives after one drive failed (in the case of RAID-5) and that in 2019 there will be a similar issue with RAID-6. Of course most systems in the field aren t using even RAID-6. All the most economical hosting options involve just RAID-1 and RAID-5 is still fairly popular with small servers. With RAID-1 and RAID-5 you have a serious problem when (not if) a disk returns random or outdated data and says that it is correct, you have no way of knowing which of the disks in the set has good data and which has bad data. For RAID-5 it will be theoretically possible to reconstruct the data in some situations by determining which disk should have it s data discarded to give a result that passes higher level checks (EG fsck or application data consistency), but this is probably only viable in extreme cases (EG one disk returns only corrupt data for all reads). For the common case of a RAID-1 array if one disk returns a few bad sectors then probably most people will just hope that it doesn t hit something important. The case of Linux software RAID-1 is of interest to me because that is used by many of my servers. Robin has also written about some NetApp research into the incidence of read errors which indicates that 8.5% of consumer disks had such errors during the 32 month study period [2]. This is a concern as I run enough RAID-1 systems with consumer disks that it is very improbable that I m not getting such errors. So the question is, how can I discover such errors and fix them? In Debian the mdadm package does a monthly scan of all software RAID devices to try and find such inconsistencies, but it doesn t send an email to alert the sysadmin! I have filed Debian bug #658701 with a patch to make mdadm send email about this. But this really isn t going to help a lot as the email will be sent AFTER the kernel has synchronised the data with a 50% chance of overwriting the last copy of good data with the bad data! Also the kernel code doesn t seem to tell userspace which disk had the wrong data in a 3-disk mirror (and presumably a RAID-6 works in the same way) so even if the data can be corrected I won t know which disk is failing. Another problem with RAID checking is the fact that it will inherently take a long time and in practice can take a lot longer than necessary. For example I run some systems with LVM on RAID-1 on which only a fraction of the VG capacity is used, in one case the kernel will check 2.7TB of RAID even when there s only 470G in use! The BTRFS Filesystem The btrfs Wiki is currently at btrfs.ipv5.de as the kernel.org wikis are apparently still read-only since the compromise [3]. BTRFS is noteworthy for doing checksums on data and metadata and for having internal support for RAID. So if two disks in a BTRFS RAID-1 disagree then the one with valid checksums will be taken as correct! I ve just done a quick test of this. I created a filesystem with the command mkfs.btrfs -m raid1 -d raid1 /dev/vg0/raid? and copied /dev/urandom to it until it was full. I then used dd to copy /dev/urandom to some parts of /dev/vg0/raidb while reading files from the mounted filesystem that worked correctly although I was disappointed that it didn t report any errors, I had hoped that it would read half the data from each device and fix some errors on the fly. Then I ran the command btrfs scrub start . and it gave lots of verbose errors in the kernel message log telling me which device had errors and where the errors are. I was a little disappointed that the command btrfs scrub status . just gave me a count of the corrected errors and didn t mention which device had the errors. It seems to me that BTRFS is going to be a much better option than Linux software RAID once it is stable enough to use in production. I am considering upgrading one of my less important servers to Debian/Unstable to test out BTRFS in this configuration. BTRFS is rumored to have performance problems, I will test this but don t have time to do so right now. Anyway I m not always particularly concerned about performance, I have some systems where reliability is important enough to justify a performance loss. BTRFS and Xen The system with the 2.7TB RAID-1 is a Xen server and LVM volumes on that RAID are used for the block devices of the Xen DomUs. It seems obvious that I could create a single BTRFS filesystem for such a machine that uses both disks in a RAID-1 configuration and then use files on the BTRFS filesystem for Xen block devices. But that would give a lot of overhead of having a filesystem within a filesystem. So I am considering using two LVM volume groups, one for each disk. Then for each DomU which does anything disk intensive I can export two LVs, one from each physical disk and then run BTRFS inside the DomU. The down-side of this is that each DomU will need to scrub the devices and monitor the kernel log for checksum errors. Among other things I will have to back-port the BTRFS tools to CentOS 4. This will be more difficult to manage than just having an LVM VG running on a RAID-1 array and giving each DomU a couple of LVs for storage. BTRFS and DRBD The combination of BTRFS RAID-1 and DRBD is going to be a difficult one. The obvious way of doing it would be to run DRBD over loopback devices that use large files on a BTRFS filesystem. That gives the overhead of a filesystem in a filesystem as well as the DRBD overhead. It would be nice if BTRFS supported more than two copies of mirrored data. Then instead of DRBD over RAID-1 I could have two servers that each have two devices exported via NBD and BTRFS could store the data on all four devices. With that configuration I could lose an entire server and get a read error without losing any data! Comparing Risks I don t want to use BTRFS in production now because of the risk of bugs. While it s unlikely to have really serious bugs it s theoretically possible that as bug could deny access to data until kernel code is fixed and it s also possible (although less likely) that a bug could result in data being overwritten such that it can never be recovered. But for the current configuration (Ext4 on Linux software RAID-1) it s almost certain that I will lose small amounts of data and it s most probable that I have silently lost data on many occasions without realising. Related posts:
  1. Some RAID Issues I just read an interesting paper titled An Analysis of...
  2. ECC RAM is more useful than RAID A common myth in the computer industry seems to be...
  3. Software vs Hardware RAID Should you use software or hardware RAID? Many people claim...

Steve Kemp: Some domains just don't learn

For the past few years the anti-spam system I run has been based on a simplified version of something I previously ran commercially. Although the code is similar in intent there were both explicit feature removals, and simplifications made. Last month I re-implimented domain-blacklisting - because a single company keeps ignoring requests to remove me. So LinkedIn.com if you're reading this: I've also implemented TLD-blacklisting which has been useful.
TLD-blacklisting in my world is not about blocking mail from foo@bar.ph (whether in the envelope sender, or the from: header), instead it is about matching the reverse DNS of the connecting client. If I recieve a connection from 1.2.3.4 and the reverse DNS of that IP address matches, say, /\.sa$/i then I default to denying it. My real list is longer, and handled via files: 
steve@steve:~$ ls /srv/_global_/blacklisted/tld/ -C
ar  br  cn  eg  hr  in  kr  lv  mn  np  ph  ro  sg  tg  ua  ve  zw
aw  cc  cy  gm  hu  is  kz  ma  my  nu  pk  rs  sk  th  ug  vn
be  ch  cz  gr  id  it  lk  md  mz  nz  pl  ru  su  tr  uy  ws
bg  cl  ec  hk  il  ke  lt  mk  no  om  pt  sa  sy  tw  uz  za
On average I'm rejecting about 2500 messagse a day at SMTP-time, and 30 messages, or so, hit my SPAM folder after being filtered with CRM114 after being accepted for delivery. (They are largely from @hotmail and @yahoo, along with random compromised machines. The amount of times I see a single mail from a host with RDNS mysql.example.org is staggering.). (Still looking forward to the development of Haraka, a node.js version of qpsmtpd.) ObQuote: "Mr. Mystery Guest? Are you still there? " - Die Hard

Michal Čihař: phpMyAdmin goes github

Yesterday we did held phpMyAdmin team meeting and we discussed several things for project future. One of discussed things was to move our repositories to github for easier collaboration and management of private repositories. After some discussions we've decided to go for it. As I write this blog, all repositories are being pushed there and once all developers will get their access rights there, we will move completely. But even right now, you can fork us on github, the code is already there and will be updated obsessionally until we fully move there.

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Petter Reinholdtsen: Saving power with Debian Edu / Skolelinux using shutdown-at-night

Since the Lenny version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux, a feature to save power have been included. It is as simple as it is practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again in the morning. This is done using the shutdown-at-night Debian package. To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts. For Debian Edu, this is done in LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and shut it down if it is. If the hardware in question is supported by the nvram-wakeup package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +- 10 minutes. If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to try to turn on the client. The wake-on-lan option is only documented and not enabled by default in Debian Edu. It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like the common setup for a classroom. The nvram-wakeup method only work for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock. I've seen old machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot. If you have one of those, you have to turn on the computer manually. The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can also be used outside the Debian Edu environment. For those without a central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file /etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night to enable it. Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?

John Goerzen: Rain, A Funeral, and Excitement

Rain Friday was something of a rare day for February in Kansas. Starting at about 2AM, the wind picked up, blowing so hard that our windows rattled. That part isn t so rare. Then the cold rain started, dropping almost 2.5 throughout the day. As I worked, I had the blinds on the windows open, but they didn t let in very much light. Still, the wind had calmed down, so the intermittent rain outside was peaceful. Jacob went out to play for a little while, so every so often I saw a warmly-dressed and excited-looking 5-year-old run past my window. A little while after he came in, I told Jacob, I saw you playing outside. His response: Oh good! I got wet! Which, despite the fact that it was about 50 degrees, seemed to excite him. After the blustery start, the calm, slow, and peaceful rain was a pleasant thing to see throughout the day. Funeral My great aunt Alice Goerzen passed away last Sunday. So today, for the third time in a little over a year, I was at the funeral of a Goerzen relative and neighbor. Alice s husband, Milt, passed away in late 2010, and it was while I was at his funeral that Jacob got run over by a tractor. That memory certainly came back to me today. But I think I should set the stage and explain what funerals are like in this small, rural Kansas community. At the church, while people file in, family and close friends generally defined as loosely as desired meet in some other room before the funeral. Memories may be shared, or songs sung, or maybe just a brief meditation or prayer. Then the man from the funeral home there s only one in town will step in. Ivan Miller owned the business for decades, and although he s now retired, his replacement seems pretty similar. Kindly, respectful, and pretty much unchanging. This group then files into the church sanctuary to sit up front, while the rest of the congregation is standing and music is played. We typically sing some hymns, hear memories from the family, a message from a pastor, and then do downstairs for faspa: an light meal with coffee, zwieback, funeral cheese , and some relishes and dessert. You can, by the way, go to the local grocery store and find a product labeled funeral cheese . It s a sharp cheddar, sliced thick and cut into pie piece-shaped wedges. After everyone has picked up their food, microphones are passed around, and anybody that wants to can share memories and stories. These are often hilarious, or touching, and can be more random than anyone could expect. Today we heard a lot about how Aunt Alice loved her flowers and garden. We even saw a video of her giving a tour of her garden, with Milt s mower in the background occasionally accidentally causing a distraction (or maybe it wasn t so accidental; he d never miss an opportunity to cause some mischief ) I tend to think of attending funerals around here as a good time. Sadness is inevitable, but there are so many amazing stories that it is hard to leave feeling sad. Excitement This afternoon, Jacob found me in the office and as he often does, said, Dad, I want to do something with you. Usually I ask him what he d like to do, but his first instinct is usually to ask for watching train videos on Youtube. So sometimes I make other suggestions. Today we played hide and seek with radios, in which the person that is counting is supposed to radio to the other person when they are done. Today was the first time that Jacob came up with the trick of talking into the radio while I was hiding so he could hear where I was. I was sort of proud of him, and he failed to completely hide his smile when I told him I had to turn off my radio or else he d find me too fast. Then later, we played with Jacob s computer, a Linux-based command-line-only machine. I have set up a few shell scripts and aliases for him. Since it doesn t play videos, he doesn t use it as much as he does mine, but it is really fun to watch how his interaction with it changes as he gets older. He can now read amazingly well for a 5-year-old, and is starting to learn how to spell. He loves word games, writing, and typing. I thought I would install an ASCII art program for him. I told Jacob I had some ideas for a new game, and he was irresistibly intrigued. I offered him a choice between figlet and toilet. And, as is probably no surprise to anyone with a 5-year-old, he chose toilet based on its name, Jacob and Oliver both loved typing things and seeing them displayed bigger. I showed Jacob how I could make a freight train by typing ,<@-[]-(*)-@> (that s the comma-shaped snowplow, engine, boxcar [], tank car (*), and caboose @>). Then toilet drew them big, and though abstract, caused great excitement. I hooked up one of the speech synthesizers in Debian to a simple shell script named talk , which is a huge hit with the boys. They enjoy typing in nonsense and hearing the funny result, or in typing in real words and hearing how the computer says them right (or doesn t). All told, we had a good hour s worth of excitement up there.

4 February 2012

Paul Tagliamonte: Mapping the Ubuntu Community

In playing with some tools I ve run into at $work, I ve tried loading in some Ubuntu datasets in some fun and interesting ways. Today, I ve chosen to map all Ubuntu Members with a public lat/lon, sized by Karma. The sizes relate to if the Karma is greater then: 1: 10 2: 50 3: 100 4: 500 5: 1000 6: 2000 7: 7000 8: 15000 9: 25000 10: 50000 So, without further adieu, here re some maps! UK US EU EEU SA Globe

Carl Chenet: FOSDEM 2012

See you there!

Stefano Zacchiroli: bits from the DPL for January 2012

Fresh from the oven, monthly report of what I've been working on as DPL during January 2012.
Dear Developers,
here is another monthly report of what happened in DPL-land, this time for January 2012. There's quite a bit to report about --- including an insane amount of legal-ish stuff --- so please bear with me. Or not. Legal stuff Most of the above wouldn't have been possible without the precious help of folks at SFLC working for SPI and Debian. Be sure to thank SFLC for what they're doing for us and many other Free Software projects. Coordination Nobody stepped up to coordinate the artwork collection for Wheezy I've mentioned last month, so I've tried to do a little bit of that myself. The -publicity team is now preparing the call for artwork and hopefully we'll send it out RSN. In case you want to help, there is still a lot of room for that; just show up on the debian-desktop mailing list. Sprints A Debian Med sprint has happened in January, and Andreas Tille has provided a nice and detailed report about it. Some more sprints are forthcoming this spring, how about yours? Money Important stuff going on Other important stuff has been going on in various area of the project in January. I'd like to point your attention to a couple of things: Miscellanea In the unlikely case you've read thus far, thanks for your attention! Happy Debian hacking.
PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

Christian Perrier: Debian Installer fully translated into Kannada

I imagine my readers (except those from India) : "Kannada, WTF"? No, this is not about D-I being translated into the variants of English and French spoken with a funny accent in a very big country located north of the United States of America, where they play ice hockey against mooses, wearing red policemen suits, with fur hats and drinking maple syrup. Kannada is the official language of the state of Karnataka, in southern India. The state that has Bangalore, the IT-leading city in India as capital. Kannada is spoken by about 45 million people, roughly the population of Spain. And, since yesterday, thanks to a local group lead by Vikram Vincent, Debian Installer is fully translated to Kannada. As of now, this is the 5th complete language of India along with Gujarati (46M speakers as first language), Hindi (180M, though some references mention 550M), Marathi (68M) and Tamil (62M). Other supported languages of India are Telugu (99% translated, 70M), Bengali (95%, 71M plus 110M in Bangladesh), Punjabi (91%, 28M) and Malayalam (86%, 36M). As you see, translators in India are really incredibly active and the free software community over there deserves some big light. We don't have many opportunities to meet up as traveling is not easy for contributors in India because, among other problems, of visa regulations for Indian citizens in many so-called western countries. So, really, I wanted to thank them again for this work.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Third beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze

I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and publish the third beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze. If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and installing new machines, check it out. If you need a software solution for your school, check it out too. The full announcement is available on the project announcement list. I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list): The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home. I will use it look for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the final Squeeze release is published. Next weekend the project organise a developer gathering in Oslo. We will continue the work on the Squeeze version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version. Perhaps I will see you there?

Bartosz Fe&#324;ski: Quick howto for the most stable Linux kernel with Zenbook

Quick howto for everyone having Asus UX31e aka Zenbook and wants the most stable vanilla kernel with long-time battery life and working touchpad made by Sentelic.
This should work for every Debian based distro, but has been tested only on the latest Linux Mint 12 (aka Lisa).
Tutorial is aimed mainly at beginners and should work in a copy&paste manner. Of course you have to change every occurence of linux-3.2.4 to whichever version you re going to install.
Just make sure that all commands are entered in the correct directories, prompts should look similar to these from examples.
You will need about 10GB of free disk space. Let s install some dependencies first: 
fenio@zenbook ~ $ sudo apt-get install build-essential kernel-package fakeroot libncurses5-dev git iasl
Now let s download and unpack the latest kernel (3.2.4 at the time it was written): 
fenio@fenio ~ $ mkdir kernel
fenio@fenio ~ $ cd kernel
fenio@fenio ~/kernel $ wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/linux-3.2.4.tar.bz2
fenio@fenio ~/kernel $ tar jxvf linux-3.2.4.tar.bz2
Now we take current kernel configuration and put in the kernel tree: 
fenio@fenio ~/kernel $ cp /boot/config- uname -r  linux-3.2.4/.config
Now we have to download the latest driver for Sentelic touchpad (this is why we needed git as a dependency): 
fenio@fenio ~/kernel $ git clone git://github.com/saaros/sentelic.git
fenio@fenio ~/kernel $ cp sentelic/src/sentelic.* linux-3.2.4/drivers/input/mouse/
It s time to fix broken DSDT table (part of ACPI). This is why we had iasl in dependencies. 
fenio@fenio ~/kernel $ wget http://files.benesovi.eu/ux31e/ux31e_dsdt.dsl
fenio@fenio ~/kernel $ iasl -tc ux31e_dsdt.dsl
And include it in our kernel configuration: 
fenio@fenio ~/kernel $ sed -ie 's/# CONFIG_ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT is not set/CONFIG_ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT=y/g' linux-3.2.4/.config 
fenio@fenio ~/kernel $ sed -ie "s@CONFIG_ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT_FILE.*@CONFIG_ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT_FILE=\" pwd /ux31e_dsdt.hex\"@g" linux-3.2.4/.config
Now ensure that all our options are set up correctly (you can change some other options if you want).
If you don t want to change anything then simply exit saving configuration. 
fenio@fenio ~/kernel $ cd linux-3.2.4/
fenio@fenio ~/kernel/linux-3.2.4 $ make menuconfig
We re ready to start compilation now! 
fenio@fenio ~/kernel/linux-3.2.4 $ fakeroot make-kpkg clean
fenio@fenio ~/kernel/linux-3.2.4 $ fakeroot make-kpkg --jobs=4 --initrd --append-to-version=-fenio --revision=20120204 kernel_image kernel_headers modules_image
Of course you can change append-to-version option for something own. In the meantime (kernel compilations takes about one hour) you can modify Grub options to enable powersaving features RC6: 
fenio@zenbook ~ $ sudo sed -ie 's/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=.*/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="i915.powersave=1 i915.semaphores=1 i915.i915_enable_rc6=1"/g' /etc/default/grub
Be sure to do that before installation of kernel, otherwise you will have to run update-grub. After compilation you can finally install your new kernel: 
fenio@zenbook ~/kernel/linux-3.2.4 $ sudo dpkg -i ../*.deb
Reboot and you re done! Feel free to comment this tutorial if something went wrong.

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Enjoying FOSDEM

Again, as usual in last few years, I'm spending first weekend in February in Brussels, where FOSDEM is happening. This year we've again decided to do make this team meeting for phpMyAdmin, so people from five countries and three continents came to one conference to discuss future development and other stuff. But of course this is not only thing I'm going to do here. I came with openSUSE folks, where we've brought lot of beer, some DVDs and hardware to show. You're welcome to check it out. And of course there is about 430 talks to visit during weekend :-).

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Christian Perrier: 2012 update 8 for Debian Installer localization

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files): Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.): Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader) Full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for 17 languages: Bulgarian, Czech, German, Esperanto, Spanish, Persian, French, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Dutch, <Polish, Portuguese,="" Russian,="" Slovak,="" Turkish="" Simplified="" Chinese="">

3 February 2012

Andrew Pollock: [life] Zoe at 21 months

Wow, a lot happens in 3 months. I'm sure I've missed something... I think the biggest achievement would be toilet training. Zoe's been using the toilet for some time now, but still wearing diapers, and just after Christmas (when she was sick and vomited on the carpet) we figured we had nothing to lose, so we ditched the diapers. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of accidents she's had since then. I'm really happy to have this out of the way so early. Using a toilet away from home is still more of a challenge, but she seems to have very good bladder control, and fairly predictable bowel movements. Speaking of sick, she was the sickest she's ever been around Christmas time. It coincided with her top canines finally coming through. She had a cold, which progressed into an ear infection, and she had this dreadful persistent dry cough, which then progressed into a dreadful productive wet cough. You knew she was really sick because she was extremely cuddly and lethargic. Since around that time, her sleep has gone completely to hell. We've had some really bad nights where she'll wake up after a couple of hours of going down for bed, or for a while, she was reliably waking up at 4am and taking a good couple of hours to settle back down. Lately she's been sleeping through again, but waking up at 6am instead of the usual 7-7:30am. We bought a clock that changes colour at programmable times, so we're trying to train her that if she wakes up and the clock isn't green yet, she should try and go back to sleep. Not a huge amount of success there yet. Christmas itself was good, but fairly quiet because Zoe was sick. Sarah managed to get a fabulous photo with Santa, which just fills me joy every time I look at it. We had some friends around for Christmas dinner, and Zoe vomited all over her new Cabbage Patch Kid doll and I think she threw up a couple more times between that day and the day after, so that wasn't much fun. She's becoming more and more independent. "Zoe do it" is the most frequent thing out of her mouth, but fortunately she still accepts help as well. We've also been getting plenty of sneak previews of the Terrible Twos. Fortunately they're pretty short-lived, but it's definitely going to be a challenge to my patience. We'd been intending to keep Zoe rear-facing in the car until she was 2, which is the current recommendation over here, but I caved in recently when she was getting in the car and refusing the sit down (she'd stand up facing forwards and it was next to impossible to rectify the situation). After she did this to me a few times when I took her out in the car, I had enough and turned the car seat around. It's improved things a bit, but she still has her moments. We also changed her day care, from the one day a week at a home day care, to two days a week at a commercial place. We were becoming more and more unhappy with the existing day care, and so decided to move her. It's a lot more money, but after just a week, we were seeing a noticeable change (for the better) in Zoe's response to going to day care, and she seemed to have picked up a bunch of new skills as well (sitting crossing her legs, holding a crayon like a pencil). The place she's in now is pretty new and very shiny. There's a couple of kids in her class that she knows from the local park, so overall it's looking like money well spent and definitely a change for the better. Zoe had her first hair cut last weekend, and it was fairly uneventful. We went to this cute place in Palo Alto called Snipits, which was ludicrously expensive and I'd only ever take Zoe there for her first haircut. There was another kid there who was screaming bloody murder, and I think that unsettled Zoe more than anything else, so she was a bit uncomfortable to start with, but once the hairdresser put an Elmo DVD on, it was all good. Sarah's Mum is coming over to visit for a couple of weeks in a couple of weeks time, so Zoe will be very happy to see her Nana. They're going to go on a cruise out of New Orleans down to Mexico and part of the Caribbean. Unfortunately I'm too busy at work at the moment to burn a week, so I'll just take a four-day weekend and check out New Orleans with them when they get back from the cruise.

Lisandro Dami&aacute;n Nicanor P&eacute;rez Meyer: The license mess with serial port Qt-based libs

I am currently working on a Qt-based app that needs to communicate through the serial port. Apart from all the benefits that a normal lib with a serial port implementation will bring in this case, having a Qt-based serial port lib would make even more sense, as it should be as multiplatform as possible and use the signal/slot mechanism. Also it should have a DFSG-compatible license, so I can package it for Debian, of course :-)

So I have found two libs which seemed to have the above mentioned features: QExtSerialPort and QSerialPort.

QExtSerialPort seems to be the most recommended lib in the web. It features polled and signal-based functionality; it uses Qt's standard types inheriting QIODevice. But it does not states the license in any file within the source code. The original project page at SourceForge says it's in public domain. And the newer project page at Google code says it's under the new BSD license. I have asked in the mailing list for a clarification. So far nothing has changed (although in further threads the authors showed some willing to change this). And then I got to the point of finding a bug, but I don't want to spend time to track it down and make a patch without a clear license.

QSerialPort it's another lib with more or less the same features as QExtSerialPort. It's main LICENSE file says it's under the LGPL2, but licensecheck will say that the present files are LGPL3. Also, on reviewing the code, I found some minor stuff that could be improved. Well, I could contact the author and see if [s]he would receive the patches... but his site seems down. And I could not find a real-person's name in the code so far :-/

So I made a last attempt to try to get QExtSerialPort in a suitable license. If it doesn't suceed, I think I'll have to start writing one myself. The downside: I only use Linux, so there will be no multiplatform features unless someone else contributes it. Of course, if you have another option or any idea to share, I'll be happy to know it :-)

By the way, this should be my first post on Planet Debian in english, so hello planet!

Joey Hess: more on ghc filename encodings

My last post missed an important thing about GHC 7.4's handling of encodings for FileName. It can in fact be safe to use FilePath to write a command like rm. This is because GHC internally uses a special encoding for FilePath data, that is documented to allow "arbitrary undecodable bytes to be round-tripped through it". (It seems to do this by encoding the undecodable bytes as very high unicode code points.) So, when presented with a filename that cannot be decoded using utf-8 (or whatever the system encoding is), it still handles it, and using the resulting FilePath will in fact operate on the right file. Whew! Moral of the story is that if you're going to be using GHC 7.4 to read or write filenames from a pipe, or a file, you need to arrange for the Handle you're reading or writing to use this special encoding too. I use this to set up my Handles: 
import System.IO
import GHC.IO.Encoding
import GHC.IO.Handle
fileEncoding :: Handle -> IO ()
fileEncoding h = hSetEncoding h =<< getFileSystemEncoding
Even if you're only going to write a FilePath to stdout, you need to do this. Otherwise, your program will crash on some filenames! This doesn't seem quite right to me, but I hesitate to file a bug report. (And this is not a new problem in GHC anyway.) If I did, it would have this testcase: 
# touch "me "
# LANG=C ghc
Prelude> :m System.Directory
Prelude System.Directory> mapM_ putStrLn =<< getDirectoryContents "."
me*** Exception: <stdout>: hPutChar: invalid argument (invalid character)
Since git-annex reads lots of filenames from git commands and other places, I had to deal with this extensively. Unfortunatly I have not found a way to read Text from a Handle using the fileSystemEncoding. So I'm stuck with slow Strings. But, it does seem to work now.
PS: I found a bug in GHC 7.4 today where one of those famous Haskell immutable values seems to get well, mutated. Specifically a [FilePath] that is non-empty at the top of a function ends up empty at the bottom. Unless IO is done involving it at the top. Really. Hope to develop a test case soon. Happily, the code that triggered it did so while working around a bug in GHC that is fixed in 7.4. Language bugs.. gotta love em.

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl: Release Critical Bug report for Week 05

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:
In Total:1447
Affecting Wheezy:865
Wheezy only:170
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:695
Of these 695 bugs, the following tags are set:
Pending in Wheezy:46
Patched in Wheezy:91
Duplicates in Wheezy:42
Can be fixed in a security Update:18
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:15
Claimed in Wheezy:0
Delayed in Wheezy:8
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:44
Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 482 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 767 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

Russell Coker: A Computer Conference on a Cruise Ship

After LCA [1] there was a discussion about possible locations for future conferences, most of the messages in the discussion were jokes or suggestions that don t seriously apply to LCA. So I ll add my suggestion for conferences other than LCA. I ve previously written generally about the issue of conferences at sea [2]. I don t think that LCA would be suitable for running at sea because delegates have specific expectations for LCA which are quite different to what a cruise ship can offer, so I don t think it makes sense to change LCA which is working well as it is. However there are lots of other possible computer conferences which could suite a cruise ship. Price Price is a major factor in running a conference, so obviously getting a cheap cruise price is very important. Here is a link for Vacations To Go which shows cruises from the Australia/NZ region which are of at least 5 nights and cost no more than $800 [3]. The cheapest entry at this moment is $609 for 5 nights and the cheapest on a per-night basis is an 8 night cruise for $779. The cheapest cruise currently on offer which allows a conference similar to LCA is 7 nights for $699. The prices should be regarded as rough approximations as some cruises have some mandatory extra fees and the prices are quoted in US dollars and subject to currency fluctuations. Note that those prices are for dual-occupancy cabins, this can be a double or a twin configuration. Some cruise ships have cabins for 3 or 4 people that are cheaper, but if you have a cabin for a single person then the rate is almost the same as for having two people. The price for LCA accommodation including breakfast was $78 per night for a single room or $92 for a double room. Then lunch cost a minimum of $10 and for dinner there was $80 for the penguin dinner and probably about $20 for dinner every other night. That gave an overall cost for a 6 night stay (which is probably the minimum for someone who lives further away than Melbourne) in Ballarat of 6*78+6*10+5*20+80==$708. For a double room that would be 6*92+6*10+5*20+2*80==$872. Even if we don t count the fact that the Australian dollar is worth more than the US dollar it is obvious that on the basis of accommodation and food two people sharing a twin cabin on a cruise ship could pay LESS than two people in single rooms at the Ballarat University dorms! Now sharing a cabin isn t so great, but the upside is that cruise ships have excellent food and lots of other entertainment options. I previously reviewed the food on the Dawn Princess and determined that it s better than the food I would expect to get if I spent the cost of the cruise on dinner at land based restaurants [4]. I have been led to believe that the use of ship conference facilities is typically free for any organisation that books a sufficient number of cabins. So there s no reason why the conference admission fees should be any greater than for a land based conference. Advantages A common problem with conferences is finding suitable dining options. Most people want to eat with other delegates but finding restaurants that have sufficient space and which are conveniently located is difficult at best and often impossible. On a cruise ship everything is within a short walk and the restaurants are big, usually be at least one restaurant will hold 500 people. The fact that you have to reserve times for the Main Dining Room makes it more difficult to miss one s colleagues. Everything on a cruise ship is luxurious. There are lots of good locations for BoFs, pools, cafes, restaurants, and bars. Basically the ship is filled with comfortable places for groups of people to sit down. A cruise ship typically has a main theater with more than 700 seats more than large enough for most conferences I ve attended. It s common for the size of a conference to be limited to the size of the main theater that is used, for a cruise ship this will probably be less of a problem than for most other conference venues. Disadvantages The first disadvantage of running a computer conference on a cruise ship is the almost total lack of net access. The costs for net access are more expensive than most delegates will pay. Probably many delegates would check their email but it wouldn t be practical for people to download source code, browse Wikipedia, and use the Internet in other ways related to the conference. It would be practical to have mirrors of Wikipedia, the source of several distributions of Linux, and other big things of common interest. Another possible problem is the fact that you need to book it well in advance to avoid the risk of selling out (there is no option to stay at a different hotel). An established conference with financial backing could just pay to reserve the cabins. But when starting a new conference this could be a problem. Alcohol is rather expensive on cruise ships. But getting really drunk isn t compatible with learning about computer science anyway. Finally the requirement to have at least two people in a cabin for good rates is a serious issue. The upside of this is that people travelling with their SO would find that it works really well (regardless of whether the SO is a delegate or not). But anyone who s not travelling with their SO and doesn t want to share with a friend will have to either pay a lot more or skip the conference. Conclusion I think that there is a good potential for running a computer conference around the Australia/NZ region on a cruise ship. It won t be overly expensive for delegates and the facilities that are provided are good. The trade-off for solitary travelers of having to share a cabin (or pay more) for getting much better food and leisure facilities will be appreciated by many people (and admittedly hated by some). Some people won t appreciate the option of swimming, but even if you consider the cruise ship to be just a floating collection of restaurants and cabins it s still fairly luxurious and beats the heck out of most conferences I ve attended. If you are considering the possibility of running a conference then I think that a cruise ship should be considered. VacationsToGo.com is the best site I ve found for cheap cruise prices, their large group department has experience handling groups of more than 500 people so I think that anyone who wants to run a new conference in/around Australia should give them a call. Also cruise ships travel around the world, so the same thing can be done in other countries but at a different time of year. The economic factors will differ by country though. Cruise ships probably aren t a cheap option for a conference in some other countries. Related posts:
  1. My First Cruise A few weeks ago I went on my first cruise,...
  2. Cruises It seems that in theory cruises can make for quite...
  3. Creating a Micro Conference The TEDxVolcano The TED conference franchise has been extended to...

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