So, uhm, somebody around here must have felt inspired by the French, because this very morning I noticed in the bus a note announcing a strike starting tomorrow. It will last a week. The disagreement seems to come from a difference in salaries between the workers of the company that connects Alicante with nearby towns, La Alcoyana, and the company that runs buses within the city, Masatusa. Accoring to this article (in Spanish), in La Alcoyana they earn up to a 40% less. This seems to happen because Alicante’s Town Council is responsible for transports within town, but it’s the Regional Government that regulates how La Alcoyana should operate. They say they will keep a 60% of the buses, which sounds like a lot to me (how much is it in France, Christian?). We’ll see how it goes.

It's official: I'm beginning to be a bit overloaded. Luk gently asked me about my status in the (stable) release management team. That just made a bit more guilty not doing that I'd like to do. Current TODO list involves:

• release awesome 2.0-rc1 and update website and documentation for it;
• work on rebuildd, finish and polish 0.3 version;
• run a full rebuild of the Debian archive to test rebuldd 0.3, do some QA work;
• update mod_defensible to fix problem with udns timeout;
• work on Debian release management, at least rewrite lost script for (old-)proposed-updates which were on ries'
• work on Debian Xen;
• handle a lot of waiting task on my network/servers.

Now, the thing that will help: I'm house moving this week-end with no (real) Internet connection yet. I only managed to establish a VPN over port 53/udp on a hotspot from a pub near my new apartment with 25-30 KB/s bandwidth, which is better than nothing actually.

• awesome* is asking me a lot of time right now, and since it's my last launched project, I am motivated and have a lot of idea, so I like to hack on him right now. I think I will have to postpone future release to not forget other things.

I'm going to see what happens by the end of the year and if I'm able to catch up with everything. Otherwise I might need to drop some things Life is too short.

Is anyone else getting pingbacks from sites consisting entirely of formulaic posts like

"/foo/ /posted-phrase/ today on /title/ - here's a /summary-phrase/ : /quote/"

? I've been rejecting that style of comments because I think sooner or later those sites will be identified as sploggers (spam bloggers) and get penalised in site ranking systems. Another alternative is that once they build enough links, they'll start linking to their paymasters or replace the site with less mundane content. It's a tough call - I've only been seeing such sites for about a month and I usually like the idea of turning spammers to our own ends and these do increase a site's comment count and relevant link network - but I'm a bit worried how these will turn out. Have you seen this style of comments? What are you doing with them? (2007-11-15: 1 comment)

* Sometime ago, I thought, we should have T-shirt for Debian Project Day. I asked Pradeepto and he literally dragged me in pool of thoughts and he started things that had very happy end. Thanks to everybody who contribute so far. The design will be simple Debian logo plus ‘debian/rules’ below it (as we are going to lower the cost!). If you feel, if you can contribute in this, you have limited time! I should have blogged this earlier

As many of you probably know, the vi editor has two main modes, and switching back to command mode requires sending the Escape character. This can be achieved either by using the Esc key (the top left key on most keyboards) or by using CTRL-[. The latter has the advantage that the [ key is much closer to the home row than the Esc key, and is thus faster to type. Despite that, pretty much all the vi users I know still use Esc, and I wonder why. I've heard that on some keyboard layouts (like the French azerty), CTRL-[ is actually impossible to type, but in my experience many Free Software people (like me) use the US layout even though it's not their local layout.

So if you have a few seconds, I'd appreciate your feedback (via a comment on this post, or an email). You have the following options:

• #1: vi (or a derivative like vim) is my main editor, and I use CTRL-[.
• #2: vi (or a derivative like vim) is my main editor but I use the Esc key even though CTRL-[ is easy to type on my layout.
• #3: vi (or a derivative like vim) is my main editor but CTRL-[ is too hard to type on my layout.
• #4: I use another editor as my main editor.
• #5: I have no idea what you're talking about, but I wish to state that I will vote for helix in the 2008 DPL elections.

Thanks!

Update: problem fixed, thanks for the comments; it was MTU related issues.

Note: This is a long post, but I expect it to bring in some questions for many Linux people; I advise you to read this when you have enough time.


After the last events related to connectivity at home which have been lasting since Thursday evening and the weird fact that it seems that NAT doesn't work at home, but does at work for the same setup, I called the ISP's support and wasted 15 minutes trying to convince them at least to send a technical team with another modem just to test if that is the reason for the breakage.

Of course, talking to the ISP support and trying to convince them that there might be a problem on their side since NAT works with another provider but doesn't with them, was fruitless.

Tonight I was stuck and tried another approach, convinced I would confirm my suspicion that there is something wrong on ISP's side. Still I am not yet sure what to conclude from what happened.


So, to get a better view of what is going on, I'll describe the setup I have and what are its limitations and characteristics. People in a hurry can skip to the paragraph starting with "I tested" and stare in wonder at will.


So the connection I have is done through a DSL modem which gets the MAC of the network card connected to it and exposes that as its own to the ISP's network. This MAC seems to be quite persistent and special measures must be taken in order to be able to use another NIC to connect. The modem (or probably some machine in ISP's; the IP is 10.10.0.1) offers a DHCP address and everything should work fine.

Because of this "your MAC is my MAC" issue, when I connected the first time, I used an USB NIC since a broken router or some temporary failure would have allowed me to use the Internet connection directly from my laptop. I can say this decision has proven in time to be wise.

The router I used until now is a NSLU2 with Debian installed on it. The built in network interface always faced the internal network.

The router (which I call ritter) served as a NAT router for two machines inside the network, my laptop and my apartment mate's laptop. All until last Thursday, after which it never got back properly.



I tested (doing NAT on my laptop; the laptop shouldn't have been affected by the power problems):

• with ritter behind the laptop NAT, at home
  
• with two different virtual machines as NAT "clients", at home
  
• with ritter behind the laptop NAT, at work
• with a virtual machine as NAT client, at home
• directly from the laptop
• NAT made through a SNAT rule
• NAT made through a MASQUERADING rule
• with TTL mangled (increased by one, although is was never in the ballpark of a low TTL)

Of course, I have n-checked that /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward was set to 1, the tables had policy ACCEPT and there were no extra rules, except the basic NAT-ting stuff, the routes were correctly set on both the clients and the machine doing the NAT.


All I could see is that:

1. the machine doing the NAT was always working fine
2. at work all NAT clients worked fine
   
3. at home any of the NAT "clients" were
1. able to resolve addresses while the DNS server was in ISP territory and another LAN
2. ping the outside world (if ping was available - in D-I is not)
3. hanging when trying to get a http page
4. telnet-ting directly to the port 80 was ok (but I didn't try to "GET / HTTP/1.0")

So after all of this, I was thinking of trying to see if a new client (the laptop of my apartment mate, a Windows XP machine) would work using the connection at home. It didn't work.

Then I thought of trying to do "Internet Connection Sharing" as is called in Windows. Of course, there was some pain to find Windows XP drivers for the ASIX AX88172 network card (remember, the modem needed to see the MAC of that NIC), but I managed to find the proper one.


And, almost sure the NAT wouldn't work for this case either, I configured the new connection as a shared one. I didn't even disabled the firewall, as I was thinking I could take those down gradually.

I wasn't expecting this, not even by pure chance, but my laptop which was a NAT "client" now was able to browse, ping and do whatever was normal through NAT, while the Windows machine was doing the "Connection sharing".

I was utterly flabbergasted. And that was just the beginning.

I was expecting that the problem coincidentally went away, but after a minute I was proven otherwise. It still didn't work with Linux as the NAT-ting machine. I connected back the USB NIC to the Windows machine and I saw the same thing. NAT was just working.


At that point I was to observe an even more shocking fact: the IP that the Windows machine got was different from the one the Linux machine received, in spite of the fact that the network card was the same, so it would have made sense to get the same one. More than that, the IP that the Windows machine got was from an entirely different network, although it was a valid IP belonging to my ISP.

I was thinking that one reason why it works with Windows might be that there could be some TCP protocol twist that is differently implemented in Windows and the equipment from my ISP gets along better with the Windows network stack.


As a way to test that, I am thinking of forcing somehow the IP on the Linux machine to see if anything changes. But before doing that, I felt the urge to post these, maybe some kind soul will shed some light on this issue for me or drop a hint.

Another reason might be different DHCP servers answering, but I don't know how I can see in Windows who offered the lease.


If anyone has any clue why these weird things happen, please drop a line. I would greatly appreciate it. TIA.

Okay, I messed it up. Recently released 1.14.0 still had some artefacts from SMS handling cleanup and it should be fixed now. Besides this, experimental (not tested) support for OBEX on Siemens phones has been added and Motorola users should be finally able to get their messages. Full list of changes:

• Configurable MySQL socket path.
• More extensive SMS PDU parser tests.
• Experimental support for OBEX in Siemens.
• Support for listing messages using CMGL (bug #408).
• Parse T630 reply on CPBR (bug #420).
• Fix buffer overflows in PDU decoder.
• Properly catch invalid PDU data received from phone.
• Handle more OBEX error codes.
• Handle vCards from Yahoo and Evolution (bug #424).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/ I will try to stabilise to 1.15.0 as soon as possible, what effectively means feature freeze from now, so this testing series should be shorter than usual.

For a while I’ve been trying to find some easy way to keep a few machines I admin behaving the way I want them too with minimal effort. They don’t really need much maintenance – but I would like something to help keep them all in sync. Basically, something like FAI, but much, much simpler – ideally something that takes five minutes to understand, and another five minutes to deploy; and leave the more complicated and powerful tools for when they’re actually needed. I figured what I really want was just a simple way to make a meta-package – one that doesn’t really provide any functionality, just tells apt/dpkg what I want installed (via Depends), and what I don’t want installed (via Conflicts) and adds any extra configuration stuff or local scripts that I decide I want. But doing that with a real Debian package is harder than I’m really comfortable with – I don’t want to have to worry about potential lintian errors, or rules files and debhelper commands, or writing a Makefile to get my files installed or whatever, I want something more trivial than that. Looking for meta-package creators, the only one I spotted that I thought looked likely was cdd-dev, described as “Custom Debian Distributions common files for developing meta packages”. Unfortunately it seems to just provide templates, which makes things quicker, but no less complex. Fortunately equivs (“Circumvent Debian package dependencies”) is actually used for metapackages these days, according to its maintainer on IRC and its long description:

This package provides a tool to create Debian packages that only contain dependency information. One use for this is to create a metapackage: a package whose sole purpose is to declare dependencies and conflicts on other packages so that these will be automatically installed, upgraded, or removed. Another use is to circumvent dependency checking. […]

That turned out to work much better than I remembered (from whenever I last tried it – back in ‘99 I guess?), with the only drawback being that I couldn’t add files easily. But that’s just a matter of creating a patch to equivs, which I then won’t have to worry about again. So having done that, I can now create a metapackage to do whatever I want by creating a file like:

Suite: client
Section: misc
Priority: standard
Package: ajs-client-stuff
Version: 20071114.1
Maintainer: Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au>
Description: Metapackage for aj's client computers
 Depends on necessary packages, etc.
File: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/client.list
 deb http://mirror.localnet/debian etch main contrib non-free
 deb http://mirror.localnet/debian etch-proposed-updates main contrib non-free
 .
 deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
File: postinst
 #!/bin/sh -e
 .
 apt-key add - <<EOF
 [output of gpg --armour --export $KEY]
 EOF
 .
 ##DEBHELPER##

debhelper kindly takes care of getting the permissions right for me, and equivs will generate a full source package if I tell it to, which I can just upload to mini-dinstall and have a regular Debian repository just by writing a text file and running equivs-build. And my metapackage can add dependencies, conflicts, apt sources, cronjobs, scripts, configuration files, documentation, or whatever I happen to want – which means I can make it automatically update itself, and thus install any dependencies or remove any conflicts, which then means that modifying the config on all the machines is just a matter of updating the metapackage. And new installs is (hopefully) just a matter of doing a standard install and then adding the metapackage. Perfect. …even if it is really little more than a reinvention of rpm’s .spec files. :)

I was viewing one of my most favorite speakers today, Lawrence Lessig, talk about copyright, giving a speech that is very similar to one that I have heard a few times online, but Lessig presents it so well that I end up watching it over and over again. This particular speech was given at TED. The nice thing about coming across a TED talk is that it is almost always enlightening in some way. Lessig's speech is enlightening enough, and it reminded me that I should watch something of his since he has switched to fighting corruption instead of copyright.

Another nice thing about the TED talks is that they are all sitting on the same site - so they are all interlinked with similar topics and they also include the new videos which are being posted fairly often. Sometimes I don't have time to watch more than one talk, but today I was blessed with a surfeit of time, so I clicked on another link which interested me. This talk was from Dan Gilbert and was coarsely about happiness, and more importantly synthetic happiness and how our brains work. It started with talk about the foundation of our evolved brains, of which the most important fact was considered the Impact Bias. Gilbert talked about the Impact bias as a primary result of the evolution of the mind from earlier man to modern man - it is the ability of our mind to predict the future without actually trying it. It is the reason why you have an aversion to a food that you haven't even eaten or don't think you will like a movie that isn't even released, or the opposite. I believe that the impact bias is very important to the psychology of human beings - while it may not actually be very important to the state of the world that you eat a pastrami sandwich today instead of a salad, it must mean something to you, or your life will end up seeming meaningless and insignificant. Gilbert focuses on the impact bias in the dual - that choices that we are given to make ourselves will eventually have an effect on our overall happiness. The experiments explained in the video show that, if a choice has been made, the user is more likely to be happy with that choice later, especially if the choice is an irreversible decision. In the talk he talks about simulated happiness and actual happiness, and that the mind is incredible at simulating happiness when placed in a situation where it did not come out for the better - some famous examples include people who are in jail for long times feeling that they are better for their incarceration after being released (or even while incarcerated). One important part which I think wasn't really touched upon by Gilbert was the fact that while the mind can produce synthetic happiness, in the long run the difference between synthetic and "real" happiness is actually rather small - over the long run all the happiness produced tends to even out, and the mind doesn't distinguish about really being happy or not. For a third point, it is a very interesting conclusion (and probably a significant jump) that most people strive to be happy overall, and most people succeed. This means that even though there are people in many different levels of happiness from an outside perspective, it is worthless to look at someone who is rich and happy and someone who is poor and happy and say that one must be happier than the other because they have more of the "real" and less of the synthetic happiness. Happiness is not a zero-sum game - everyone can be happy all of the time, and noone loses out. This may be an interesting ideal to reach for and may seem impossible to achieve considering all of the hate and rage which exists in the world today, but I believe that it is even possible yet - especially considering this "Happiness Bias" which seems to exist within everyone.

Today, when walking through some Wammu/Gammu bugs, I came to conclusion that the spam changed some people to behave insane. The email field in bug tracker is there to allow developer to contact you, for example when he makes a fix for issue you reported and wants you to test it. Entering addresses as ones at TrashMail which will vanish soon (the bug I'm talking about is two days old, what I feel is good enough reaction time from my side), will not help anybody. Thank you firebird76 (whatever your real name is) for realizing how people are stupid. PS: I use Mantis bug tracker, which I believe does not expose email addresses to anyone besides privileged users.

Looking Back The past year has very much changed my life. A long time ago (around the beginning of this year) I have written that I have met Lucy. That happened over a year ago. In fact, it is just few weeks since it was a year. Lucy wrote me a beautiful letter at that time, picturing some of the moments in our life. I am very grateful for that letter. I am also much happier ever since I met her. Of course, there were problems (and there are problems)… None the less, life is fairly easy, and I am staggering on the path to becoming a better person. Lucy is a great help in that respect. Many things have straightened out over that year. A few got a little more wrinkled, but often due to smiles and seldom due to frowns. I have also mostly fixed the long-standing issue of a place to sleep and live in Brno, having recently moved in. I now live near the school (~15 minute walk, maybe less when in a little hurry), more or less in the city centre, with great connectivity to most of the places I need to visit. The previous place is just too remote for me. The new one is also a better building, or so I think, not a concrete-and-iron from-a-single-template building so typical of the socialist era, but solid brick building with high ceilings and thick walls. And it gives a much homelier feeling too. And what am I doing lately? Well, day job and school (both study and TA and research) take a fair amount of time, the rest I divide among Lucy, friends, learning to play the recorder, reading, writing and the many other things I (try to) do. I have even started to practice embouchure and breathing with an oboe (double) reed (and also with Lucy’s instrument). The idea is that i have the intention to get a bassoon (which is a double-reed as well) and start to learn and practice. And I also hope, that the practice from oboe will give me a head start to that. Maybe even that I could play both. I know that I won’t ever become a very good player, but I want to at least try. And I want to have some fun with it, too (it is great to be able to play an instrument, however impractical the woodwinds are, e.g. compared to guitar, which is probably much more social… one day, I may learn that too, though; wink). I still believe that with enough determination, i could become a semi-decent amateur. Call me foolish if you like, that is how I am. I have also considered blogging technicalities, and I probably will, if i find the time for that. It may also help me sorting things out. Probably need to consult the various people I work with, what they think about that, though.

In the past I have spent about 18 months living in hotels with a couple of months of breaks in between. I have previously written about it in terms of living in London hotels [1], but I have been asked for more generic advice. Firstly the amount of possessions that you may have when living in hotels is seriously limited. For ease of travel you want to restrict yourself to one suitcase for checked luggage and one for carry-on luggage. Hotels often have short-term storage space for possessions of guests, so having a second suitcase of items that are not worth stealing (clothes and books) may be an option. But consumer electronics devices other than a single laptop computer are not an option. I read an interesting blog post on ZenHabits.net titled Minimalist Fun: The 100 Things Challenge [2] which advocates counting and limiting the number of possessions you own. When living in hotels if I considered my books as one collection and my clothes as another (having never been interested in trendy clothes they count as utilitarian items for work or leisure not objects that I seek to own) and as my mobile phone was a tool for work and my computer gear was strictly limited to items that were needed for work (and thus “tools”) my only possessions were a digital camera and some bottles of liquor! The lack of ability to accumulate possessions may be considered as an advantage or a disadvantage depending on what your aims are. If you are moving to another country for work there are three ways of doing it. The easiest is to be a permanent employee of a company that assigns you to work there - in which case they will probably pay to transport your stuff when you buy or rent a house. If you are a looking for new employment (either contract or permanent) in another country then you can either find the work before moving or after arriving there. Finding work before arriving in the country is difficult and generally only works for short-term contracts. So it’s most likely that you will either be looking for work immediately after arriving or after a short contract. In either case having better mobility increases your employment options - why restrict yourself to one city or region when you can choose from all jobs in an entire country or (in the case of the EU) half of a continent! The career benefits of being able to accept any job anywhere in the world at short notice are significant! There are situations where an employer will pay hotel bills. One example was when I was working for a London based company and they assigned us to work at the other side of London. My colleagues complained and the company paid for hotel bills for everyone Sunday night to Thursday night inclusive as well as an extra hour of pay per day as compensation for the inconvenience. For me of course one hotel was as good as another so it just meant that my employer was covering 5/7 of my living expenses. Then I had a meeting with the hotel manager and pointed out that having me check out every Friday would be bad for them as the hotel was mostly empty on the weekend and suggested that they make me a deal for the other two days - I ended up paying something like one night of hotel fees per week! If I had rented an apartment I would have still been paying the full rent (which while less than 30 days hotel fees per month would have been considerably more than 4 or 5 days of hotel fees per month). If you live in a hotel then there is always some sort of deal that can be arranged. Apart from certain busy days (such as around the Christmas and new-year time) they always want long-term guests and will be willing to reduce the price, give free dinner or drinks from the bar, etc. The cost of living in a hotel at times such as Christmas may be as much as five times the regular rate. That is a further incentive to visit friends or relatives at Christmas. If you can’t visit your family (which may be difficult if they live on the other side of the world) then finding a friend who has a spare room might be an option.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/05/living-in-hotels/


• [2] http://zenhabits.net/2007/09/minimalist-fun-the-100-things-challenge/

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Today I was reminded about a thought I was having earlier this year by a twitter from Garrick Van Buren about the new ultra-thin MacBooks. It seems altogether likely that the next laptop computer that I buy will have no moving parts. Currently the only moving parts in the MacBook that I have now are in the optical drive, the fan, and the hard drive. This is of course not counting the moving parts which I move myself - the buttons to actually interact with it and the lid. Apparently the optical drive in the laptop is going the way of the floppy drive in laptops, so there is only the fan for the CPU and the hard drive. Hard drives are also heading toward the realm of non-moving parts with solid state drives gaining acceptance and size. You can now get a 32GB solid state flash drive for pretty cheap, and they are sure to go in the direction all storage goes - faster, larger, and cheaper. That only leaves the fan which cools the CPU. It is not impossible to run a high-end computer without a fan nowadays, but unfortunately the heatsinks required in order to keep the most crucial part of the computer without burning up. The OLPC hardware is already in some ways the wave of the future - there are no moving parts at all. Unfortunately it is also completely underpowered and it's not possible to run a ton of programs on it. I'm not sure that a solid-state laptop for the general public will ever be possible with the general increase in computing power, but if it happens, I would bet it happens in the next 5 years.

People will be pointing out that the optical drive being missing is a new and novel concept and that Apple is pushing the boundaries of laptops, but they are hardly the first ones to ship a laptop without a optical drive. The world of sub notebooks have been taking out the optical drive in their smaller models for a while now. One model that I've seen around quite a bit is the Sony PictureBook which got quite a lot of press because it featured the Transmeta Crusoe chip. There are also a number of other sub notebooks which don't have a drive. However, I don't believe that the drives will be replaced by flash drives or network installs - there will always be a need for boot media for completely broken computers. The common solution in the sub notebook world is to just have a drive which attaches when it's needed, in the mode of the first drives. The solution which uses flash drives is not likely to happen anytime soon - software isn't getting any smaller, and the cost of flash media isn't falling quickly enough to catch up with the cost-effectiveness of pressing CDs.

Ok, so it's just the interpreter, which is hardly surprising. With an entirely new GUI API, that may require some more effort... we'll see. But for now, this will have to do:

BlueTooth I've just ordered a bluetooth adapter with the intention that my desktop machine will automatically screensaver & lock when I leave my desk. This looks trivial. As does setting my gaim status automatically. The challenge is to send a message to my work chatroom, via jabber, when the same thing happens. I think this should be straightfoward via xmpp but we shall see. I guess run-parts invoked upon /etc/presence/present & /etc/presece/absent or similar. Guitar Amps I have a "rare" (read limited edition) Marshall Jubilee Mini-Stack I'm trying to sell. From 198x. But I have no idea what the current price should be .. My google-fu is weak this week, or I'd know. The biggest issue is that I've found listings which just say "Call for price". Or expired Ebay auctions. I guess there can't be too many around so the price should be "high". But at the same time there can't be a huge market for them, so the price should be "low"... Complicating that is the fact that the buyer would have to be extremely local - as shipping isn't a realistic option. The cab + 2xspeaker combo is >1m high. Now what are the chances that somebody reading this would know how much one "should" cost..? ho hum. Still life is good, and that is the main thing.

The Mozilla Foundation is funding Codethink to investigate the feasibility of moving the GNOME accessibilty infrastructure, AT-SPI, to use D-Bus as its underlying IPC rather than CORBA. You can follow the investigation as it progresses on the GNOME Wiki Hopefully our findings will show that D-Bus is more than up for the job, paving the way to a true cross desktop accessibility infrastructure!

Yesterday, when I posted the list of talks that I'll be giving this week, I forgot to mention that I will be giving a Cluedump at MIT tonight organized by SIPB. It will be in the form of a simple hands-on workshop to teach folks how make Debian or Ubuntu packages. The session is not aimed at teaching folks to make policy compliant packages or how to pass Debian's NM process but rather to be more of an, "Everything a Sysadmin Needs to Know about Debian and Ubuntu Packages," style introduction. The talk is tonight, November 12, 2007, at 20:30 at MIT in room 56-114. Feel free to read the longer description and to show up if you're interested.

Video introducing it: http://youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg SDK is available, and all free software (or will be shortly, at least): http://code.google.com/android/ The GUI API is not like MIDP2.0, so it's not compatible with existing J2ME apps, like Hecl. Hrmph. Seems like Java 5 constructs are supported (I also wonder what those hex addresses are doing in there): http://code.google.com/android/intro/hello-android.html In any case, very interesting, and very cool. It certainly changes things a lot, though - until this becomes commonplace, it will just add to the number of platforms that need to be supported, which might actually make life tougher for a while. All things considered, though, you can't complain about getting something that cool under an open source license!

Kicking ass in an unflat world is The Economist's take on recent efforts in the world of business books. As the creator of Squeezed Books, their opinion was of interest to me. As is often the case, they don't disappoint, with lines like

Things to bear in mind as you do, he says, include the need for your company to have purpose, to seek out ideas from the fringes, and to embrace the democratising power of the internet none of which will be news to anyone who has been in business for more than a few minutes.

What really caught me eye, though, was this:

There is also growing demand from overloaded executives for shorter books. So in January Harvard will launch a new hardback series, Memo to the CEO , covering subjects such as lessons from private equity and the future of strategy. Each book will be about 100 pages long and will cost $20. In a similar vein, Harvard has adopted the approach taken by iTunes to pop albums, and has started to sell individual chapters of books online an idea that has been a hit with academics in particular.

A lot of good business books take a sensible central idea, and then proceed to fluff it up to a length where it can be published as a book. Often, this makes for a good read, as the anecdotes and case studies and whatnot are interesting, but for those in a hurry, or simply wanting to know what the basic point of the book is about, it's just padding. So, it looks as if the idea behind Squeezed Books is a good one, now I just need to get better at attracting more people to contribute summaries, and discuss the books on the site. One thing I've done to that end is stipulate that the summaries are available, unless otherwise noted, under a creative commons license.