This Monday, state secretary Bijlevelt of interior affairs finally decided that any current type of voting computer is not safe enough for elections. This decision is not a surprise for anyone who's followed along with the wedonttrustvotingcomputers.nl action group, but it's the first time the government has acknowledged the full problem. This means that on the next "election" at October 10th here in Utrecht, already the red pencils will be recovered from their long time storage. Most interesting about this whole discussion is the question I only see asked sparingly:

What problem are voting computers trying to solve?

As a data point: on the last general elections, the Amsterdam district finished their counts of pen-and-paper voting before midnight on election day.

Yesterday my new NAS arrived, to replace my aging and failing hacked Linkstation. As part of the bundle I also received a Roku SoundBridge, which was a nice surprise. Basically, it's a consumer-orientated device which plays music from iTunes or Internet radio, which you would plug into a hifi or powered speakers. I'd heard of these before but I've been using my old ThinkPad X22 for this duty for a while now, and MPD has served me well. I thought I'd give it a go, and I'm actually really impressed with it. Physically the SoundBridge is pretty good looking: a sliver and black ten inch cylinder about two inches in diameter, with a large LCD panel on the front. When turned on it found my wireless network, asked for the WEP key, and promptly upgraded its firmware. Once all that was done, it let me select from two libraries: Vicky's Music or Internet Radio. Vicky was running iTunes on her laptop which exports the library over DAAP, so I listened to Tori Amos whilst I explored the Internet Radio options. Then I listened to the most excellent Groove Salad on SomaFM (apparently the #4 station on the Roku Radio charts). At this point I discovered that there was a SoundBridge link in Epiphany, the SoundBridge uses mDNS to publish the web control panel: a useful application of clue from Roku. Then it just got better. The SoundBridge will stream from DAAP and UPnP servers (they pimp mt-daapd and SlimServer), and announces the web interface over mDNS and UPnP. There is a web site which indexes Internet radio streams, currently it has over 5000 entries. This site uses a Java applet (currently only tested in Windows though, I haven't installed Java yet) to talk to your SoundBridge so it can show the currently playing station and tell it to play another station. Then I discovered this in the manual.

Geeks - read this. The M-bridge has a command line interface that you can telnet to for piddling abut. You will need to telnet to port 4444. Type "?" at the command prompt to see a list of commands. ... M-bridge has a built-in UPnP AV "media renderer". This protocol can be used to control the M-bridge from your own software.

The SoundBridge supports both a custom protocol (documented in a 200-page PDF) and the standard UPnP protocol for controlling it. They even documented the signals the remote control uses. This is probably one of the most hackable "consumer" devices I've seen for a long time, short of the N800. Well done Roku, you've created a damn neat product which actually does just work out of the box. NP: theJazz, Internet radio

I am currently considering what to do regarding a Zope server that I have converted to Xen. To best manage the servers I want to split the Zope instances into different DomU’s based on organisational boundaries. One reason for doing this is so that each sys-admin will only be granted access to the Zope instance that they run so that they can’t accidentally break anyone else’s configuration. Another reason is to give the same benefit in the situation where one sys-admin runs multiple instances, if a sys-admin is asked to do some work by user A and breaks something else running for user A then I think that user A will understand that when you request changes there is a small risk of things going wrong. If a sys-admin is doing work for user A and accidentally breaks something for user B then they won’t expect any great understanding because user B wanted nothing to be touched! Some people who are involved with the server are hesitant about my ideas because the machine has limited RAM (12G maximum for the server before memory upgrades become unreasonably expensive) and they believe that Zope needs a lot of RAM and will run inefficiently without it. Currently it seems that every Zope instance has 100M of memory allocated by a parent process running as root (of which 5.5M is resident) and ~500M allocated by a child process running as user “zope” (of which ~250M is resident). So it seems that each DomU would need a minimum of 255M of RAM plus the memory required for Apache and other system services with the ideal being about 600M. This means that I could (in theory at least) have something like 18 DomU’s for running Zope instances with Squid running as a front-end cache for all of them in Dom0. What I am wondering about is how much memory Zope really needs, could I get better performance out of Zope if I allowed it to use more RAM? The next issue is regarding Squid. I need to have multiple IP addresses used for the services due to administrative issues (each group wants to have their own IP), having Squid listen on multiple addresses should not be a big deal (but I’ve never set up Squid in a front-end proxy manner so there may be hidden problems). I also need to have some https operations on the same IP addresses. I am considering giving none of the Xen DomU’s public IP addresses and just using Net Filter to DNAT the connections to the right machines (a quick test indicates that if the DomU in question has no publicly visible IP address and routes the packets to the Dom0 then a simple DNAT in the PREROUTING table does the job). Is there anything else I should be considering when dividing a server for running Zope under Xen? Is it worth considering a single Apache instance that talks to multiple Zope instances in different DomU’s?

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I got a little older yesterday. I'm 26 now. It was a fun day. It started out by going to the Federal Police to get my temporary id. The agents who register foreigners are on strike for the last week or so, but there was someone there dealing with the registration. So my name got put in a big book and I've got a piece of paper that will let me back into the country next week.

Now for the actual birthday. A bunch of use went out to a place called Pinguin (yes, Penguin in Portuguese). We had some chopp, some very good garlic bread. Then since it was my birthday we got a cotton candy cake, and a nice little Penguin!

After quite a few struggles with power supplies, serial cables, the never-ending pain of minicom and the (almost) solved pain of ethernet over usb, my recently received Balloon3 board it up and running. (i.e. recent = less than 12hrs old. 8 hours of that was spent trying to work if I had a compatible power supply and it's been running for nearly 3 hours already). I can ssh into it from anywhere on the network, I have the basic system installed and I've set the date and time.
The task ahead is now clear:

1. Continue to work with Guillem to merge dpkg-cross into dpkg so that the dpkg-cross transition can release the rewritten apt-cross and the dependent emdebian-tools


2. Test and fix the Emdebian rootfs packages to at least support login to a chroot on the Balloon (which I've called genesis.codehelp)


3. Simplify the installation with sensible defaults in the Emdebian packages and improvements to the emdebian-tools scripts that create and could install the chroot itself


4. Document the process for the CELF tutorial in Austria in 30 days time.

Busy, busy . . .

Another nice new feature with debtree 0.7.0. The new version supports an option max-depth that can be used to limit the depth of a graph. I think debtree now supports all the ways to reduce the complexity of dependency graphs that can realistically be implemented in shell. A nice side-effect of this change is that it made it possible to also render other nodes in the graphs more consistently. Suggested packages now also have the diamond shape. And in sets of alternative dependencies "end" packages and unknown packages are now always marked as such. I also moved the previously hardcoded lists of "end" and "skip" packages to configuration files. These are managed using ucf which means that merging local changes with "upstream" updates in new releases will hopefully be relatively painless. If you have suggestions of packages to add to these lists, feel free to submit them. Please mail me both the command for the graph you'd like to reduce and the packages you're proposing to add to the lists. I have one issue left I'd like to implement: displaying alternative "Provides". And then I think its time to try to get debtree ported to C++.

---

P.S. You may encounter #443179 when using ucf. I've submitted a patch (several actually; the first two had a high "brown paper bag" ratio) that makes use of debconf's Choices-C feature, which should avoid this particular issue for future releases. Besides the mentioned advantage for substitution in templates of variables that need to be translated, Choices-C also allows developers to define a set of short aliases for choices that make the values used in a configuration script independent of the actual strings that are displayed to users. I doubt this feature is well known outside the D-I team. It was implemented in both debconf and cdebconf.

This evening I renamed a number of UWCS’s mailing lists for a few reasons, mostly due to the annoying ambiguity of the old names. Mailman doesn’t make this particularly easy - this how you can do it under Etch;

1. First, define variables to avoid stupid mistakes:

   $ OLD=old-list-name
   $ NEW=new-list-name
   $ set -u

2. Next, take down Mailman and do a quick sanity check. The MTA should queue any incoming mails when qrunner stops responding.

   $ sudo /etc/init.d/mailman
   $ sudo sh -c "[[ -a /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/$ NEW  ]] && echo '*** That mailing list name already exists. *** '"

3. Now move the list data and regenerate the archives for that list:

   $ sudo mv /var/lib/mailman/lists/$ OLD  /var/lib/mailman/lists/$ NEW 
   $ sudo mv /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/$ OLD  /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/$ NEW 
   $ sudo mv /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/$ OLD .mbox /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/$ NEW .mbox
   $ sudo mv /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/$ NEW .mbox/$ OLD .mbox /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/$ NEW .mbox/$ NEW .mbox
   $ sudo /var/lib/mailman/bin/arch $ NEW 

4. You should probably provide legacy aliases:

   $ cp /etc/aliases  mktemp aliases-backup.XXXX 
   $ printf "\n# '$ OLD ' -> '$ NEW ' mailing list rename \n"   sudo tee --append /etc/aliases
   $ echo "$ OLD : $ NEW "   sudo tee --append /etc/aliases
   $ for SUFFIX in admin bounces confirm join leave owner request subscribe unsubscribe; do echo "$ OLD -$ SUFFIX : $ NEW -$ SUFFIX "   sudo tee --append /etc/aliases; done

5. Now go to the administrator interface and change:
   • General / real_name: NEW
   • General / subject_prefix: “[NEW] ” (or similar)
   • Privacy / Recipient filters / acceptable_aliases: Add OLD
6. Now, bring everything back online with:

   $ sudo newaliases
   $ sudo /var/lib/mailman/bin/genaliases
   $ sudo /etc/init.d/mailman start

7. For bonus points, generate yourself Apache redirect for the new name:

   $ echo "RewriteRule ^/([^/]*)/$ OLD ($ (/.*)) /$1/$ NEW $2$3 [R=301,L]"

Ta-da, nice new names. You will need to warn your users as their filtering will have now broken.

On Wednesday 17th October the majority of my belongings will leave Norwich, to arrive in Castlerock at some point the next week (exact day to be confirmed). I will then start work for 3par as a software developer in Belfast on Monday 29th. It's been 6 years since we moved to Norwich and I'll be sad to leave it, and all the friends I've made here, behind. I'd have stayed a bit longer but 3par were keen for me to get started. I imagine I'll be in the Fat Cat on Saturday 13th if people are around. And I expect visited in NI once we get settled in!

Just a note on the 2038 overflow post, libqof1 has had this support since v0.7.0 which was included in the Etch release.
pilot-qof (>=0.1.1) uses 64bit times from libqof1 and also made the Etch release so dates on all devices supported by pilot-link in Etch can be handled as true 64bit values already, as long as the relevant date is part of the main 4 Palm applets, calendar (datebook/appointments), expenses, tasks and contacts(addresses).
Note that although the Palm 'contacts' applet supports birthday reminders, this extension of the contacts database is not supported by pilot-link because it has yet to be reverse engineered. All dates entered into tasks, expenses and calendar are supported so if you create genuine appointments for each birthday (instead of using the Palm reminder support in Contacts), these appointment dates will be safe from overflow until long after our Sun has died, at which point dates based on the rotation of the Earth become irrelevant anyway.

(Sometimes, it would have been handy to have 48bit systems - if everyone adopts 64bit time, someone is going to have to come up with a calendar *not* based on the rotation of a planet or any other object as all physical matter - even the universe as we know it - becomes temporary on a 64bit timescale. It is hard enough to grasp geological time, let alone 64bit time.)

Adrian (also sent by email):
Re: 2038 issues on mobile platforms.

It is possible to handle 64bit time on 32bit systems. I got disillusioned with the libglib2.0-0 support (GDate) and I already had a library capable of 64bit mathematics (libqof1) so I wrote QofDate and QofTime that can handle true 64bit date and time calculations, formatting and scanning on 32bit or 64bit installations. I estimate that this gives us enough capacity to handle time for a couple of dozen times the age of the universe to nanosecond precision. The maths can also go backwards as far as it can go forwards so it could handle the date of the Big Bang with nanosecond precision too - if anybody actually works that out.

I'll be using this library in Emdebian to provide support for 64bit maths for gpe-expenses and the pre-alpha gpe-cash (stripped out gnucash for embedded devices) so at least your financial records will be safe.
http://cashutil.sourceforge.net/gpecash.php
http://gpe-expenses.sourceforge.net/

"QofTime is a lot like the unix 'struct timespec' except that it uses a
64-bit signed int to store the seconds. This should adequately cover
dates in the distant future as well as the distant past, as long as
these are not more than a couple of dozen times the age of the
universe. Values of this type can range from -9,223,372,036,854,775,808
to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807."

http://qof.sourceforge.net/doxy/group__QOFTIME.html#gb93e930907d0e2eba07b1fa7496e7822
http://qof.sourceforge.net/doxy/group__QOFTIME.html

QofTime is defined as 64bit on all systems and will not overflow until
the year 292,471,208,679 (not counting leap years). i.e. approx.
9223372036854775808 / (60*60*24*365). This also means that some values
of QofTime cannot be converted to a time_t on systems where time_t is
defined as 32bit.

http://qof.sourceforge.net/doxy/group__Date.html

A QofDate is theoretically able to go forward to the year
292,471,206,707 AD and back to the year 292,471,206,708 BC. Whether
such dates actually exist is outside the scope of this documentation.

http://packages.debian.org/sid/libqof-doc
http://packages.debian.org/sid/libqof1

So we finally need 64 bit CPUs in all our gadgets! (After having seen OpenXchange's SyncML code fail horribly on dates that are beyond 2038, which is something you quickly arrive at if people enter birthdays as repeating appointments until infinity.) Update: Neil Williams has some related information.

Recently I was talking to an employee at Safeway (an Australian supermarket chain) about Linux etc. He seemed interested in attending a meeting of my local LUG (which incidentally happens on the campus of the university where he studies). I have had a few conversations like that and it seems that it would be good to have some LUG business-cards. It shouldn’t be difficult to make something that is similar in concept to the Debian business cards [1] for use by a Linux Users Group (LUG). That way when you tell someone about Linux you can hand them a card that has your name and email address along with the web site for your local LUG. In other news I will be attending a meeting of the Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) [2] this evening and will have some Fair Trade Chocolate [3] to give away to people who arrive early. The chocolate in question is now sold by Safeway for a mere $4 per 100g (not much more expensive than the regular chocolate).

• [1] http://www.debian.org/events/materials/business-cards/


• [2] http://www.luv.asn.au/


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2006/08/23/fair-trade-is-the-linux-way/

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Looking at the web stats, I noticed, that quite a lot of people find something relevant to "environmental" on my pages. As I was not aware of anything related here, I tried that in Google. To my surprise all results are in demo for Ukolovnik. Well I do not want to add any anti spam technique to this simple tool as it will be usually password protected. And this is exactly what I did with demo for now. So if you want to use it, you need to login with user demo and password demo. I hope this will prevent spammers from using this demo, otherwise I would probably have to close it.

Just read that after 6 years the leader(Judd Vinet) of the ArchLinux distribution will step down from his role.

he reason for this is that I do not have the time to devote towards a leadership role in a project the size of Arch Linux, and Arch deserves someone who does.

Referring to his post the new leader will be Aaron Griffin.

[via archlinux.org]

SatelliteForCaravans is one of my regular references for setting up satellite systems, but that's for when the caravan is stationary, not moving. So, I'm rather stumped by this question - Patrick asked:

"Hey, glad I found your site. I was hoping you could provide us with some knowledge and point us in the right direction(s). Even though our products get installed on yachts, entertainment systems are new to us. We have clients that travel all over Europe and the other continents. I've poked around several of the websites you listed as resources, but not sure where to go next. What systems are out there that will allow traveling boats to pick up both free and paid sat TV all over Europe, both standard and HD, if not other large geographic regions of the world? Minimal equipment is a big deal. Thanks."

Any suggestions? (2007-10-04: 2 comments)

I’ve just started getting a lot of traffic referred by live.com. It seems that my post Porn for Children [1] is the second link returned from a live.com search for “porn” and my post Porn vs Rape [2] is the third link. These results occur in two of the three settings for “safe search” (the most safe one doesn’t return any matches for a query about “porn”). A query for “porn” and “research” (which would reasonably be expected to match a blog post concerning scientific research made my page the 8th listing (behind http://www.news.com.au/404, http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/404, and http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/404). It seems strange that a query which should match my page gives it a lower ranking than three 404 error pages while a query which shouldn’t match my page (no-one who searches for “porn” on it’s own wants to read about scientific research) gives it a high ranking. One very interesting thing about the live.com search is that it doesn’t filter out some of the least effective ways of gaming search engines. For example the URL http://gra.sdsu.edu/research.php has a huge number of links to porn pages and pages that apparently sell illegal pharmecuticals) that are not visible (view page source to see them). The links that I tested were all broken so it seems that the other sites (including http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hraaa, http://base.rutgers.edu/pgforms, http://www.wccs.edu/employees, http://base.rutgers.edu/mirna, http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/jperezc/students/oalamra, and http://institute.beacon.edu/), were cleaned up long ago. There is probably some money to be made in running a service that downloads all content from a web site and/or has a firewall device that sniffs all content that is sent out and makes sure that it seems to be what is intended (about half the URLs in question appear to relate to content that is illegal under US law). As an aside, I did a few other live.com searches for various sites and the word “porn” and found one Australian university running a forum with somewhat broken HTTP authentication that has some interesting posts about porn etc. I’m not going to provide a link because the content didn’t appear to violate Australian law and you expect some off-topic content on a forum. But to be fair, live.com have significantly improved their service since last time I tested it [3]. Now a search for “bonnie” or “bonnie++” will give me the top two spots which is far better than the previous situation. Although I have to admit that the Google result of not giving me a high ranking for “bonnie” is probably better.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/12/porn-for-children/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/07/30/porn-vs-rape/


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/04/02/livecom-malware/

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I had one of these devices collecting dust in my basement. I finally got around to reverse engineering a userspace driver for it, which was much easier than I expected. It just shows up as a usb->serial device, and it was mostly a matter of of watching the serial line while hitting buttons. I have started to figure out some of what I need to know to communicate with it in the other direction in order to do stuff like turn on the lights and manipulate the lcd displays. That stuff is not yet, however, functional, but in the spirit of "release early, release often", I've uploaded a 0.0.1 release to the project page on sourceforge. Also included is a python extension which allows you to register callbacks for the various controls on the device. After I get the leds and lcds working, I think the next step will be to write a program to generate synthetic MIDI events when the device is manipulated so I can hook the thing up to something like mixxx. Hopefully someone else has one of these kicking around and might also find this work useful!

I had one of these devices collecting dust in my basement. I finally got around to reverse engineering a userspace driver for it, which was much easier than I expected. It just shows up as a usb->serial device, and it was mostly a matter of of watching the serial line while hitting buttons. I have started to figure out some of what I need to know to communicate with it in the other direction in order to do stuff like turn on the lights and manipulate the lcd displays. That stuff is not yet, however, functional, but in the spirit of "release early, release often", I've uploaded a 0.0.1 release to the project page on sourceforge. Also included is a python extension which allows you to register callbacks for the various controls on the device. After I get the leds and lcds working, I think the next step will be to write a program to generate synthetic MIDI events when the device is manipulated so I can hook the thing up to something like mixxx. Hopefully someone else has one of these kicking around and might also find this work useful!

19h57:

Subject: Bug#444747: Acknowledgement (git-mergetool completion missing)

Thank you for the problem report you have sent regarding Debian.
This is an automatically generated reply, to let you know your message has
been received.  It is being forwarded to the package maintainers and other
interested parties for their attention; they will reply in due course.

Your message has been sent to the package maintainer(s):
 Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org>

21h24:

Subject: Bug#444747: fixed in zsh 4.3.4-19

This is an automatic notification regarding your Bug report
which was filed against the zsh package:

#444747: git-mergetool completion missing

It has been closed by Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org>.