For about nine years, my domain deuxchevaux.org was hosted (which means web, DNS and a catchall e-mail forward) by Internett at Saarbr cken. Although it was a sponsered hosting without much support I was quite happy with their service. But especially my ideas and demands regarding spam filtering grew out of the possibilities of a mass hosting solution. Since I run my own web, mail and name servers for a while now, it was no question that also deuxchevaux.org should become self-hosted. Since I run a root-server at Hetzner and their “robot” also offers domain handling, I planned to transfer deuxchevaux.org to them. Therefore I first had to register my two DNS servers (sym.noone.org and virt.noone.org) with them. In the documentation there was a note that for .org domains, name servers in a .org domain have to be registered with the same registrar. And just a few hours after registering the name servers via their web interface I got a mail from Hetzner Support that the domain of my name servers are not registered with Hetzner and so I cannot use them form .org domains. Asking for the cause of this rule, I got the answer that this is a rule by Hetzner’s upstream registrar, Cronos AG. Well, since I don’t understand such arbitrarily looking rules, I was looking around for another registrar with usable web interface. On the DaLUG mailing list, someone recommended eDNS. Since their single user account is free of setup and monthly fees, I signed up with them and started playing around with their web interface. When I tried to transfer deuxchevaux.org using the Auth-Code, I got the response that the transfer failed and when I clicked on “Details”, I got “$VAR1 = [];” as detailed information about the failure. Data::Dumper says hello. I wrote them and asked if they can tell me, what that should mean last Thursday and got no answer so far. I don’t think, I’ll register domains with them anymore. So where to try it now? Someone recommended GoDaddy, but I neither like their website (way too much targeted on beginners and mainstream) nor do I want to apply for a credit card or a PayPal account to be able to pay their bills. So a bill from my UML hoster Korypet (aka VD Server) caught my eye: They were lowering prices for registrations at some top level domains (and in comparison to the recent lowerings at eDNS the new prices also apply to existing contracts) including .at and .org (and I only have .at, .ch and .org domains). I didn’t knew they also do domains outside of selling them in packages with UML hosts. So I wrote to Korypet support, if they offer a web interface for domain handling and got a reply less than two hours later: Not yet, but they’re working on it. Until then, I can request domain handling tasks by e-mail to their support. Since I know their UML managing web interface – which works fine – and since I’m happy with their support, service and prices since years (I’m customer there since 2003), I replied with all the necessary data for the transfer. Well, the transfer failed, too. But in comparsion to Hetzner or eDNS, they made the effort to exactly find out, what happened. So what did happen? The rule which the Hetzner support guy told me that it was from their upstream registrar wasn’t from there but from Public Internet Registry (PIR) itself. And the rule seems to match not that often, so that many people involved in domain registration don’t know about it (and usually neither understand its existence when they hear about it). Also I have no understanding for this harassment and so I felt the strong urge to get one over on them. Korypet suggested several solutions fitting my needs (i.e. the usage of my DNS servers for my domains). They even offered A records under some of their PIR registrered domains pointing to the IP addresses of my DNS servers for no fee, but luckily some A records under my own .ch domain sufficed. So the transfer was successful on Friday evening, 6pm local time, my own mail server (running Postfix) was happily rejecting a lot of spam to (and even from) non-existing users (which came in over the catch-all before) as well as hosts greeting with not fully qualified or invalid HELOs and greylisting others via David Schweikert’s Postgrey. The number of accepted mails and recognized spam sunk immediately by approximately factor four on the whole mail server, although deuxchevaux.org isn’t the only domain that receives mail there (but was the only one which had a catch-all before). So in the long run, I’ll probably move all .org and .at domains over to Korypet since they have not only fair prices but also a competent and individual support. (And yes, this is a recommendation. ;-)

This is the first link to the Taft Hill Neighborhood Association. Probably only of interest if you live on or near Taft Hill Park/Terrace in Roslindale, Massachusetts, but I’ve got to get it out there somehow. This was also my first experience with the Google Maps API. It took about two minutes to figure out, except that the syntax to display a “hybrid mode” map was not trivial to find. For the record, it turns out the answer was:

map.setCenter(new GLatLng(latitude, longitude), zoom, G_HYBRID_MAP);

Let’s see how long it takes for my new email address to start receiving spam.

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I’ve just come across this article from Marc Andreessen about hiring. It raises some interesting points about the hiring process, which he bases in three criteria. Drive

I like to see what someone has done. Not been involved in, or been part of, or watched happen, or was hanging around when it happened. If you’re a programmer: the open source project to which you’ve made major contributions. Something. If you can’t find anything — if a candidate has just followed the rules their whole lives, showed up for the right classes and the right tests and the right career opportunities without achieving something distinct and notable, relative to their starting point — then they probably aren’t driven. And you’re not going to change them. Motivating people who are fundamentally unmotivated is not easy.

Curiosity

Sit a programmer candidate for an Internet company down and ask them about the ten most interesting things happening in Internet software. REST vs SOAP, the new Facebook API, whether Ruby on Rails is scalable, what do you think of Sun’s new Java-based scripting language, Google’s widgets API, Amazon S3, etc. If the candidate loves their field, they’ll have informed opinions on many of these topics. That’s what you want.

Ethics

Pick a topic you know intimately and ask the candidate increasingly esoteric questions until they don’t know the answer.
They’ll either say they don’t know, or they’ll try to bullshit you.
Guess what. If they bullshit you during the hiring process, they’ll bullshit you once they’re onboard.

He also links to Software Interview, a site which lists questions and answers that several companies use in their hiring processes.

In my last post about Heartbeat I gave an example of a script to start and stop a cluster service. In that post I omitted to mention that the script goes in the directory /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat. To actually use the script you need to write some XML configuration to tell Heartbeat which parameters should be passed to it via environment variables and which nodes may be candidates to run it. In the below example the type of web means that the script /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/web will be called to do the work. The id attributes are all arbitrary, but you want to decide on some sort of consistent naming scheme. I have decided to name web server instances web-X where X is the IP address used for providing the service. The nvpair element contains a configuration option that will be passed to the script as an environment variable. The name of ip means that the environment variable will be named OCF_RESKEY_ip. Naming of such variables is arbitrary and a script may take many variables. A well written script (which incidentally does not mean my previous blog post) will have an option meta-data to give XML output describing all the variables that it accepts. An example of this can be seen by the command /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/IPaddr2 meta-data. In the XML the resources section (as specified by --obj_type resources on the cibadmin command-line) describes resources that the Heartbeat system will run. The constraints section specifies a set of rules that determine where they will run. If the symmetric-cluster attribute in the cluster_property_set is set to true then resources will be permitted to run anywhere, if it is set to false then a resource will not run anywhere unless there is a constraint specifying that it should do so - which means that there must be at least one constraint rule for every resource that is permitted to run. In the below example I have constraint rules for the service giving node-0 and node-1 a priority of 9000 for running the service. In a future post I will describe the cluster_property_set and how it affects calculations of where resources should run.
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All doom and gloom? far away from that.

The good:

* Arm port is now third most popular port according to popcon.
* This mostly thanks to the popularity of Linksys NSLU-2, a tiny 80 computer able to run Debian. Do you have a old pentium sucking up electricity in your closet? Do a service to earth and replace it with a NSLU-2!
* Armel (Arm EABI) is now at "63.41% up-to-date. That's 4515 packages built out of 7121". See the fancy Graph for the progress. Catching up sid has been achieved with just two buildd's (Thecus N2100) in my apartment and Aurelien Jarno building selected packages. Plus of course pioneering work from Lennert Buytenhek and people who created EABI in upstream.
* All core packages except apt (which hasn't seen a upload to sid since etch) have now armel support in official Debian packages.
* the old arm port has started catching up in up-to-dateness again, now that all buildd's have a recent enough kernel for glibc 2.5 (2.6.12+)

The bad:

* We need someone to take responsibility on the toolchain for arm. Java is semi broken on arm, Fortran, Java and objc need work for armel.
* There is still communications problems. It took quite a while to find out why glibc 2.5 doesn't work on some buildd's.
* People have lost interest in Bigendian arm port after nslu-2 started working with the regular Little-Endian arm port. General consensus is that bigendian port would only matter for highend networking gear.

The future:

* More supported devices. Now we support NSLU-2, Thecus N2100 and a few related IOP based devices plus netwinders. Arm boasts their partners shipped 2450 Million units based Arm technology in 2006. Would you like to run Debian on your brand new scsi RAID card? mp3 player? Cellphone? Internet Tablet? Washing machine? Your choice!
* Better recovery options. Many arm devices are headless, and if it crashes or doesn't boot, figuring out what went wrong is tricky. This is not really arm specific, but comes up often enough in debian-arm list.
* Anti-bloat festival. Many arm devices have very little storage and RAM available. To run debian on these, we need to figure out who to get rid of extra FAT. Less bloated software is everyones advantage.

Quick poll: What do you think of when you hear the name “OpenSolaris”? It’s an operating system? The community version of Solaris? Right? Not quite. Like Linux, OpenSolaris is a kernel. Except that it’s more than a kernel. Or, rather, more than a kernel but not quite a complete operating system. Are you confused yet? This comment from a recent Register article sums up the problem quite nicely:

If you go to the OpenSolaris web site, all bright eyed and eager to download a new operating system, you will walk away in bitter disappointment. Sure, it says the word “open” in two dozen languages on the web page, but when you go hunting for an installer disk to download, suddenly you are cast into a maze. Nevada builds? What the hell is Nevada? Oh, it’s what they’re calling the OpenSolaris code base. You’ll need to download these components and build them. Well, how do I install it? Oh, you can’t do that, you need to have a Solaris machine up already to build on. But you can get started if you go to Sun’s site and download their Solaris Express Enterprise Pro Champion Edition (after dutifully registering), and then enjoy that pleasant install experience. And when that’s done, you still have the work ahead of you of getting ON (what the hell is that? Oh, OS and Network. Sorry, I don’t work at Sun) built and updated. Did I miss anything? We haven’t gotten to packages to make the system usable yet.

Now, I’m willing to wager most of you reading this have probably heard about DTrace, ZFS, Zones, and the other great stuff Solaris has to offer, not to mention that Solaris is about as enterprise grade as they come, having been at the heart of the data center longer than many of the alternatives have even existed. And don’t forget about more mundane but critical things like backward compatibility, where Solaris has excelled for a very long time. But how many of you have actually experienced this great stuff first hand? How many hands go down if you’re under 30 and don’t remember the Sun workstation—i.e., you’re one of the many for whom Linux = Unix for as long as you’ve been in the computer business? How many of you would take Solaris for a spin if doing so was as easy as, say, downloading the latest version of Ubuntu and installing it? In other words, with all the buzz about making Solaris more familiar to Linux users, it turns out the widest part of the familiarity gap isn’t even technological. So, how do we bridge it? We need to make “OpenSolaris” something you can touch, something you can “Download Now!” and run on your laptop to try out the latest and greatest from the OpenSolaris community. We need to clearly articulate the link between Solaris and OpenSolaris in ways the industry understands—namely, that OpenSolaris is the rapidly moving version that delivers the latest innovations, and that Solaris is the enterprise-grade, supported-for-many-years, backward-compatibility- guaranteed version for the data center. Furthermore, the link needs to be more than just “OpenSolaris as upstream for Solaris”. Given how many more copies of Fedora and Ubuntu are running in the world than the enterprise Linuxes, there is significant opportunity here if we can get the model right. In short, to make OpenSolaris (and, by extension, Solaris) more familiar to Linux users, the first thing we need to do is make it a “distro” in the Linux sense of the word. After all, when people say they know “Linux”, that’s what they’re talking about—how many people really care about the Linux kernel underneath? What they care about is the GNU tools, the desktop, the development environment, and all the other things their favorite distro bundles—and the package system that holds it all together. There’s no reason in the world why (Open)Solaris can’t deliver those same things. Oh yeah, and DTrace, ZFS, Zones, enterprise grade security/scalability/performance/etc., backward compatibility, etc. too. Put this way, it’s easy to imagine what OpenSolaris needs to look like. That’s why the issues here are not primarily technological. This is the essence of the Project Indiana you’ve read so much about in the past several weeks. Our goal is to create a binary distribution of OpenSolaris that simultaneously delivers what people have come to expect from “Linux” alongside the great stuff that make Solaris unique. What comes next? We’re working that out in real time. If you’re interested in following along, participating, or just giving us your two cents, I encourage you to join the indiana-discuss mailing list we just created. We’re particularly interested in hearing from you if you consider yourself a “Linux user” and have been interested in taking Solaris for a spin but, for whatever reason, have considered the gap too wide. What would it take to get you running Solaris?

A service script for Heartbeat needs to support at least three operations, start, stop, and status. The operations will return 0 on success, 7 on failure (which in the case of the monitor script means that the service is not running) and any other value to indicate that something has gone wrong. In the second half of this post (not in the feed) I have included an example service script. It is a very brief script and does not support some of the optional parameters (monitor, validate-all, and meta-data). So this script is not of a quality that would be accepted for inclusion in a Heartbeat release but is adequate to demonstrate the concepts. The XML configuration for a service can have an arbitrary set of name-value pairs, and they are passed to the script as environment variables. For example the below script expects that the XML configuration item named ip will have the IP address used by the service, my script receives this as a variable named OCF_RESKEY_ip. My script doesn’t use the address, it merely allows it to be inherited by the IPaddr2 script (which is part of the Heartbeat distribution) and that script assigns the address to an Ethernet interface. The script is for testing Heartbeat, it mounts a filesystem and starts Apache (which is configured to serve web pages from the filesystem in question on the IP address supplied by the ip parameter). For test purposes the script looks for a file named /root/fail, if this file exists then the status check will always abort. An aborting status script means that Heartbeat can not be certain that the node in question has released all resources that it was using for the service. This means that Heartbeat will have to kill the node via the STONITH service. Such test scripts are the only way to test that STONITH works, and I believe that it’s a necessary part of pre-production testing of a Heartbeat cluster. Update: Made it display error messages in all cases and also reformatted it for better cut/paste.
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Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Sucede que entro en las sastrer as y en los cines
marchito, impenetrable, como un cisne de fieltro
Navegando en un agua de origen y ceniza.

El olor de las peluquer as me hace llorar a gritos.
S lo quiero un descanso de piedras o de lana,
s lo quiero no ver establecimientos ni jardines,
ni mercader as, ni anteojos, ni ascensores.

Sucede que me canso de mis pies y mis u as
y mi pelo y mi sombra.
Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.

Sin embargo ser a delicioso
asustar a un notario con un lirio cortado
o dar muerte a una monja con un golpe de oreja.
Ser a bello
ir por las calles con un cuchillo verde
y dando gritos hasta morir de fr o

No quiero seguir siendo ra z en las tinieblas,
vacilante, extendido, tiritando de sue o,
hacia abajo, en las tapias mojadas de la tierra,
absorbiendo y pensando, comiendo cada d a.

No quiero para m tantas desgracias.
No quiero continuar de ra z y de tumba,
de subterr neo solo, de bodega con muertos
ateridos, muri ndome de pena.

Por eso el d a lunes arde como el petr leo
cuando me ve llegar con mi cara de c rcel,
y a lla en su transcurso como una rueda herida,
y da pasos de sangre caliente hacia la noche.

Y me empuja a ciertos rincones, a ciertas casas h medas,
a hospitales donde los huesos salen por la ventana,
a ciertas zapater as con olor a vinagre,
a calles espantosas como grietas.

Hay p jaros de color de azufre y horribles intestinos
colgando de las puertas de las casas que odio,
hay dentaduras olvidadas en una cafetera,
hay espejos
que debieran haber llorado de verg enza y espanto,
hay paraguas en todas partes, y venenos, y ombligos.
Yo paseo con calma, con ojos, con zapatos,
con furia, con olvido,
paso, cruzo oficinas y tiendas de ortopedia,
y patios donde hay ropas colgadas de un alambre:
calzoncillos, toallas y camisas que lloran
lentas l grimas sucias.


Pablo Neruda

On our recent visit to Paris, we also went to La grande picerie de Paris (Rue de S vres), a supermarket-style store selling only very good food products. Highly recommended. On the cheese department, a cheese was on sale called Mimolette Hollandaise, in an Edam-style spherical shape and with a strange orange colour. I was quite surprised since I didn't expect to have to go abroad to discover a new kind of Dutch cheese. Of course I bought a piece. At home the cheese encyclopedia brought more clarity. In the 17th century, Colbert forbade the import of foreign diary products into France. The French who loved the Dutch Edam, simply started to produce their own copy, intended to be identical to the Dutch variety. It took until 1935 to officialise the Mimolette through a treaty between the Dutch and French. And the taste? It tastes good, it indeed resembles old Edam very well, albeit a bit more salty.

Dear Lazyweb, some time ago I got a new notebook, a HP nw9440. It’s all nice and great and stuff and does what I want. Except two little things that I couldn’t fix yet, but maybe you have some suggestions? The first is only a little bit annoying. X does not like DPMS after a suspend/resume cycle. Running

xset dpms force off

will turn off the display, but the next acpi event received (according to acpi_listen) turns it on again. Restarting acpid fixes this, until next resume/suspend. For some reason the restart trick only works if done some time after the whole resume finished. Adding it to the scripts so its done automagically doesn’t fix this. The second thing, mostly time consuming, is the fact that this laptop does not like Suspend-to-RAM, so only Suspend-to-Disk working. It happily suspends to ram and goes to sleep and it also gets back on. Just that it doesnt turn the display back on, no matter what I try. I tried all combinations of options for s2ram I could find, nothing. Is there someone out there that has the same laptop and got it to suspend to ram and can tell me what screw he had to jump on? Update: Looks like the first problem is fixed in Xorg upstream.. Just that it didn’t got into etch anymore. Looking at xserver-xorg that probably means updating to sid right now, which I don’t want to do. So well, lets wait until a newer version is in lenny, maybe someone backports Xorg at some point? :)

The linux.conf.au 2008 Call for PapersPresentations is now open. We're accepting submissions from now until July 20th, 2007; you'll be notified in early September of the paper committee's decision.

Go check out the announcement, and start thinking of cool talk ideas. Once you've got to that stage, be sure to read mbp's How to get a conference abstract accepted, and Mary's Getting a talk into linux.conf.au (not just because she's a co-chair of the paper committee).

This year, we've introduced one optional step: a video submission. If you think that you're a great speaker, and if only we could see you, we'd say yes instantly, then grab a camera, and convince us. :)

Also, if you're interested in running a mini-conf before the main conference, we're also taking proposals for mini-confs.

See you in Melbourne!

Jun 7 13:35:14 magellan gdm[4893]: gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Schwerwiegender X-Fehler - :0 wird neu gestartet Happened during a demonstration of GNOME 2.18 on my notebook...

Read Limes & Lycopene, the regularly updated blog of nutritionist Kathryn Elliott. It regularly has interesting and healthy recipes, discussions of current food-related news and fads, and Kathryn has recently started up "Q & A Thursday", where you can ask questions throughout the week and get a big dump of interesting answers each Thursday. My favourite from today's burst is "What should your dinner plate look like?" (apart from flat and round, of course...) In the recipe arena, I can't recommend the Pumpkin and Cinnamon Ristto highly enough -- it is absolutely delicious.

To follow up on my early post Christopher Hitchens v. God, Jonah at the Frontal Cortex has some insightful comments on religion and secularism. The money quote:

When people like Dawkins attack wimpy agnostics or moderate believers, they forget that many atheists aren’t uber-rationalists. They carry around tarot cards, not The Selfish Gene.

Jonah also makes a good point that science and religion may not have irreconcilable differences:

It’s important to note that science isn’t necessarily in conflict with our need to believe in some sort of mystery. Modern science, after all, has discovered some of the craziest ideas around, from the principles of quantum physics to the fact that our head holds a trillion cells trafficking in minor jolts of electricity. These ideas are both materialist and mysterious, since they hint at a universe that exceeds the current capacities of our imagination. What Hamlet said to Horatio is still true.

This sort of analysis seems to me far more nuanced and interesting than that advanced by what I’ll call the “vulgar atheists” — Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, et al.

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As you might already know: there is the G8 summit in Heiligendamm taking place, which is near Rostock - the place where I live.
Although there were some street fights between violent opponents (hiding in the mass of other demonstrants) and the Police, it's been quite silent so far. The summit begins today and apparently the demos and actions against the summit are starting as well.
When driving around (work/home) you can see Police everyone: at the train station, on bigger crossroads, on bridges, under bridges, driving around, etc...
It's like you're living in a police state.

I get to reinvent the wheel, this time in C++, and thanks to templates, with as many corners as I want. Increasing the instantiation depth shall make it round.

Since etch php is compiled with large file support. This breakes binary compatibility to other packages, which are commonly not compiled with LFS and leads into trouble with 3rd party extensions, cause these are precompiled against the ABI of upstream and LFS not turned on. One example is Zend Optimizer. You may say this will only hit closed source applications, but if these are customer requirements, you have to solve the issue in some way.
You can do this by compiling your php and all extension from source without LFS enabled, but here you have to care about bugs, regressions and exploits for your own.
An other solution is to rebuild the packages from etch with LFS disabled. I’ve done this with the source packages of php4 and php5 from etch. Additionaly I did backport php-suhosin from unstable against this php packages for php4 and php5. Packages are available at http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/archive/special/ or via

deb http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian etch-special-cyconet main non-free contrib If there are any DSA popping up, you can expect updates with a short delay. Please keep in mind, that you cant install php extension directly from etch. You need to rebuild them against php[45]-dev with disabled LFS. Other php packages may apear later. backports, Debian, opensource, Packaging, PHP, planet

A friend recommended me Steve Miller and Sharon Lee’s Liaden books. The first question, reading order, was not very easy to find an answer to. I went with publication order within the Agent of Change sequence – Agent of Change, Conflict of Honors, Carpe Diem, Plan B, and I Dare. In retrospect it would have been better to start with Conflict of Honors followed by Agent of Change, as this corresponds to story chronology, and AoC and CD have the same protagonists while CoH doesn’t. The story speed between Plan B and I Dare was too fast to break the sequence, but it might have made the latter book fuller if I had read the first batch of prequels Local Custom and Scout’s Progress before it. The second prequel sequence Crystal Soldier and Crystal Dragon works well at any point in the series, as does the third (single-book) prequel sequence Balance of Trade. I’m still reading Fledgling and the first short story collection. Confusing? I thought so, but it definitely is worth the investment. Instead of all the usual superlatives, I’ll say something unique to this series: These books changed my perspective in that I now cannot read (in any fiction) about a character bowing without asking in my head “in which mode, dammit!?”. (Update on 8th June: The friend referred to above, after reading this section, said (I paraphrase): “In the peculiar mode of humans, of course”.) The Liaden books are romances in a (very good) science-fictional setting. With two exceptions, each book creates at least one new lifetime romantic pairing, and they’re in my opinion convincing romances. One of the exceptions deepens one of the earlier relationships, so there is no lack of romance there. The only place I know where one can get all the novels reliably is Webscriptions, as e-books. Some of the paper books seem to be hard to find, and the recent closing down of the main publisher Meisha Merlin cannot help there. * * * The promotional material for The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle includes a quote by Robert Heinlein: Possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read. It is hard for me to disagree with that statement (including the qualifier, in all honesty), having recently read this book. Mote is a complex first-contact story, set in Pournelle’s alternate history (originally future history) universe. It begins in the year 3017. The recently created Second Empire of Man gets a visit from the aliens, leading to a counter-visit by humans to the aliens’ star system. The aliens seem friendly, but are they? What could they possibly be hiding? In retrospect, the Moties remind me (in style, not in detail) of Orson Scott Card’s Piggies (Speaker for the Dead and sequels); I would be surprised if Card had not read this book before writing his. The sequel, The Gripping Hand is not the masterpiece that Mote is, but I had no trouble enjoying it. The solution to the Motie problem has held for decades, but it won’t hold forever, and it might actually be breaking down now. The mission: save both humans and Moties from an eventual assured mutual destruction. * * * I actually started reading Pournelle’s alternate/future history from the cronological beginning. This is another series where reading order becomes a complicated matter, as many of the books tell parallel subthreads of the story; and it becomes even more complicated by the fact that there is an omnibus edition in which the story is told in chronological order, this having been accomplished by breaking the books down into chunks and then arranging the chunks in chronological order. My reading order went as follows: West of Honor, The Mercenary, Prince of Mercenaries, Go Tell the Spartans and Prince of Sparta. This is a good reading order; my only problem with it is that the protagonist of West of Honor fails to appear in most of the other books. The following is not in my opinion a real spoiler, even though it reveals certain key events of the series. The premise is that sometime between the 1970’s and the early decades of the 21st Century the United States and the Soviet Union form a union, called the CoDominium, which dominates the international politics of the Earth for most of the 21st Century. In early 21st Century, faster-than-light travel is discovered, and the CoDominium starts to colonise other star systems, first with voluntary colonists and then with convicts and involuntary colonists. The series takes place in the final decades of CoDominium, and focuses on the actions of one John Christian Falkenberg (though he is not the protagonist of all the books), first as an officer in the CoDominium (extraterrestrial) military, and then as the Colonel of a mercenary outfit, Falkenberg’s Legion. The Legion is at the center of events that eventually (after the events described in these books) leads to the creation of the first Empire of Man. The books are entertaining military science fiction, solid, enjoyable journeyman pieces.

Elver convinced me to start blogging again. This time, instead of bothering with setting up my own blog engine, I decided to go back and try Blogger again. Hacking the CSS template to match my regular website took even less time than I expected. Elver took the opportunity to ask his pal X-G for a second opinion on the current template. The result is what you see. Here I go again, blogging in excess. A new blogation.

Amaya talks about a case where an upstream developer contributed a patch to the Debian package of his software. I'll take this opportunity to mention a couple of positive experiences of my own:

• CUPS-PDF is a CUPS backend to generate PDF documents instead of printing out hard copies. Given my complete ignorance of CUPS internals, I figured that I would kindly ask upstream to subscribe himself to the PTS, just in case an RC bug would rear its ugly head. Volker immediately agreed and, sure enough, someone filed a number of RC bugs resulting from an audit they had performed. Volker replied and argued every point with the submitter by himself, then promptly released a new tarball which included all the fixes. This is the best case of collaborative maintenance I've encountered so far: Volker maintains his code and I maintain the Debian package. Everybody wins.
• Ispell-et is an Estonian wordlist from which all 3 dictionary variants (aspell, ispell, myspell) are generated, plus an hyphenation pattern for OpenOffice, which upstream also uses to generate compound words. Jaak is a linguistic technology developer whose extremely busy schedule leaves very little time for hobbies. However, the appearance of my package in the Debian repository renewed his interest in maintaining his wordlist. He promptly reviewed my package and suggested a couple of fixes to improve the quality of the dictionary generation process. He also proposed further improvements to eventually generate Hunspell dictionaries as well. Once again, everybody wins.

Wouldn't it be great if all upstream developers subscribed to the Debian PTS for their software and answered bugs related to the codebase themselves?