Man, I totally missed the announcement that Netscape.com now supports OpenID. This is pretty great -- Netscape is probably the biggest OpenID consumer on the Web, after Technorati. And Technorati only uses OpenID for a few limited purposes. Good news for Netscape.com and for OpenID. tags: openid netscape consumer

Science of Sleep I just finished watching The Science of Sleep. I liked the animation, and the writing -- the ambiguity of the sleeping state and the waking state. And I like Gael Garc a Bernal. But I also realized that films about people on the brink of mental illness are really distressing for me. Otherwise, it was a good movie. tags: science of sleep film

Speaking of sleep I've been finding the Nokia N800 really difficult to use as a mobile computer -- or, rather, as a mobile toy. I haven't been getting as good WiFi coverage with it as I'd like, when taking it around, so it's not that fun to play with. I took it to the bank so I'd have something to do while waiting in line, and I couldn't get a network connection. So yesterday I imported my OPML feed from Sage into the RSS reader on the N800. I figured that even without connectivity I'd have something to read on the computer. But my feeds (about 20-30; is that a lot?) slowed down the N800 to a crawl. When I rebooted the machine, it got in the same boot loop it had problems with before, and wouldn't start. I had to re-flash the hard drive again, but luckily this time around I had a recent backup. Unluckily, it doesn't seem to want to restore the backup. It's frustrating. tags: n800 opml boot

AFD So, there's not one but two April Fools Day articles on Wikitravel. Last year, we had an excellent guide to San Serriffe posted, but I think this year's joke guides to Earth (for aliens) and Hell (for everyone) are pretty good, too. tags: april fools day wikitravel

I just got finished with a design upgrade of certifi.ca, the browser-certs-based OpenID provider I started a month ago. The site was using the crufty old out-of-the-box design that came with the Open Source software it's based on. But I had Montreal designer Sarven Capadisli do a graphical makeover, and now the site looks really good (I think). tags: sarven certifi.ca openid ssl

Trailer Park Boys I watched the Trailer Park Boys: The Movie earlier tonight, over pizza with Maj and AJ. It was great -- I really like the TPB. tags: trailer park boys movie

As there are now tow legacy versions of the NVIDIA drivers the question comes up, "What do we call this new one?"

Here is a poll where you can give me feedback on the issue.

In just a few hours, I’m hopping on Emirates flight EK433 from Auckland to Singpore, to start the first leg of my trip to Dublin. I’ll be travelling for pretty much the next month, so if you’re trying to get hold of me please don’t be offended if I take several days to reply. Kat and I have setup another blog to detail our travels, and I’ll try and keep this blog free of too much personal stuff so as to not clutter the various planets that it is syndicated to. If you’re interested in our travels and what we are up to then head over to http://www.mattandkatbrown.com. There is also a calendar at mattandkatbrown.com if you’re wanting to try and meet up with me for keysigning, etc.

Mh… I tested today again cipux, a admintool which one of the two tools which will replace our(Debian-edu) old admintool wlus . I started last week to test it and most of the errors I announced last week are fixed. But here the new report: The CipUX team fixed many issues I mentioned the last time… but there are still very hugh errors for productive software :S During the installation an the run of cipux_setup -s I recognised an error in the script: it uses wrong options for an other subinstallation script of cipux. The cookie handling is mostly fixed but in some scripts I still got this nice picture.. Apparently there are still hugh errors in the cookie handling. Furthermore it was not possible to edit the user data (e.g. full name, …. ) in the useradmin, it allows only to add users, resetting the passwords and deleting them. I think this is not enough for an admintool as we need it in debian-edu as a replacement for webmin/wlus. While searching for editing the users data I clicked on “Userselfadmin” and … got a error 404.. this script does not exist. So here is also no possibility to change the user details. I noticed something strange… there are many groups for users, e.g: assistant, teacher, tutor, … but I don’t find an group for students, quite strange. I asked upstream but until one week I got no answer. :S Because I was a bit frustrated I want to have a look on one of the other features of cipux.. the internetadmin. It should be possible to forbid a user or a complete group the internet access…this is the theorie. When I clicked on the internetadmin-button I got the cookie error mentioned above. Mh… so it is not possible to forbid your pupils to go into the internet. :S Another important feature we need for DebianEdu. Okay… the other things works. ;-) As a conclusion: Upstream works hard on fixing the errors I found last time, but there are still hugh errors which can be found by testing the software a bit. Atm I would suggest them to work on it and don’t upload to Debian-Edu since I think many features they have in theory doesn’t work properly and are not well tested.

A lot of people seem to post their votes onto planet these days. More so than 2 or 3 years ago. I'm still not going to post the full details, but here's my usual summary, based on the debate and the platforms.

Above None Of The Above

• Sam Hocevar - I share his view of the problems, although I don't agree with all the suggested actions. A bit quirky, but seems nice enough.
• Aigars Mahinovs - I think he could be an accountable and fair DPL. Has ideas - not all good ideas and I don't like the aim of releasing less often - but I can't see him driving on if he's getting flamed to a well-done crisp. A leader more than a ruler.
• Gustavo Franco - nice guy, but maybe I just think that because I've had more direct contact with him than other candidates recently. I agree with most of his views of the problems, except Ubuntu and the tattoo. Maybe too inexperienced for this time.
• Raphael Hertzog - I think the team model is a good idea for the size of the project now and it learns from past attempts.

Borderline

• Wouter Verhelst - I'd be voting mainly based on what I've seen of him. I don't want to vote for someone standing with a low-detail platform, as that's just scary. Even when people break promises, it's hard enough to remove them. The debate did give a bit more detail. I fear the adoption of ESR-style "authority follows responsibility" - that's just impractical for parts of the debian infrastructure.
• Simon Richter - Generally OK, but I'm worried by the cutting it fine with the platform, not posting any rebuttals and being late for the debate because one battery went flat.

Below NOTA

• Steve McIntyre - This won't surprise anyone: it's because of the manner in which the Debian UK Society retail business was started; but also the trial misadvertised as mediation of the d-i conflict. I shudder to think what social conformance tests he wants in NM.
• Anthony Towns - last year I didn't vote for this politician (while correct in one way, most DDs have never even seen me in a mediation situation and he didn't have the courage to cc me on that email) because I thought that email suggested he'd be a terrible DPL. This year, he's demonstrated how terrible and the platform and debate suggests he hasn't even noticed: he thinks he's been a successful leader, despite the recall vote. One or two interesting ideas, but not enough to overcome that. His rebuttal seems to utterly miss Sam Hocevar's point about how being not-evil (Corporate Social Responsibility, as seen in the private sector) is different from actively being good (Concern for Community, as seen in the third sector): is that being dense or devious?

So, how wrong am I this year? Is there more trouble ahead?

Today, I first fix debian/copyright file in libjazzy-java as it was rejected by ftp-masters. Then, I started to work on packaging jboss-hibernate in Debian. Marcus Better already filed some ITP's and I'm using them, change the owner when I'm ready to work on a package and upload it. #385569: ITP: jboss-hibernate -- object/relational persistence service for Java The good thing with the way Marcus worked is he filed ITP's and then send 'block' instructions to BTS, so it's easy to see what should be packaged first:

read more

A relatively recent addition to the Google range is Google Docs. I'll be testing it shortly, but I see it has already suffered google's usual security/privacy bugs Apart from encouraging the larger Atom feed format, dropping RDF support and unreliable alternatives to its eyetests, Blogger is one of Google's best services. The basic service seems to work in a half-decent manner. Of course, it still has bugs and that let someone post a hoax Google news release Google's search results are still unstable: here's a consultant spotting lots of turbulance in the results. If Google's actions were unfair and harmed your performance, you can't touch them, as kinderstart discovered (but that ruling might be an interesting reference for other ratings sites, so there's a silver lining). The site complains constantly that I don't let it rampage through my browser and I haven't downloaded the latest from Adobe. It's a bit less annoying now that ytplay is available, but it shows that Google doesn't care much for free software support. An interesting twist has been Viacom suing Google for a billion dollars and calling them all sorts of names. (Beware bias in the BBC reporting on this, as BBC just signed up for Google-YouTube [BBC] - is there a monopoly that the BBC won't befriend?) Adwords and adsense looks like some of Google's top mass-market money-makers. I have mixed reports about them, including some of my customers that are happy to use them, and others that get results like this commenter at Problogger which suggests that adsense referrals maybe don't always report accurately. There is also a privacy/trust problem with having one company seeing so much of the world's searches. This was the basis for a recent Ask.com ad campaign (nice idea, shame about the microsite's poor accessibility and various other things - it gave one Google-worker a good laugh and got better commentary from Susan Hallam Communications). Privacy bodies backed Google's step towards allowing user privacy [BBC] but there's more that should be done. That's enough for now. I've got some more positive news which I'll post along with the Docs review.


- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
e0acebd2-71f1-4df8-ae4d-50355ad7aa81
[ 6 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 6 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 3 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 3 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 2 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 4 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 1 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 6 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 5 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My rationale follows, if you care... I've been pondering how to vote for well over a week, and I'm still not entirely happy that the ballot I've chosen accurately expresses my wishes, but it's the best approximation of them that I can come up with at this time. My dilemma has two parts

1. I don’t think the current office of the DPL is effective, due to how it is viewed by a significant proportion of the project (if not an outright majority), so regardless of how much I might like the goals and ideas proposed by an individual candidate I’m very pessimistic that being electing as DPL will actually bring those things to pass.
2. Much of what will make a good DPL is about how a specific set of ideas and goals will be put into action, and how interpersonal relationships between the DPL and various parties will be managed. This comes down to the personal character, experience and leadership skills of the candidate While I can form some level of an opinion about each of these aspects from mailing list archives, and IRC, etc. I don’t really feel comfortable making judgements in these areas until I’ve actually met them in real life. Too many people come across badly in the (severely limited) online communication methods we use, and are actually very decent reasonable people in real life. Out of the candidates, AJ is the only one that I’ve ever actually met and talked to.

Given these problems, my first step in choosing how to vote was to eliminate those candidates who I will rank below NOTA based on their published platforms. I have nothing personal against any of these three people, but given the other possible candidates I think that we’d be better off having another election than just electing one of these three for the sake of it.

• Wouter Verhelst - Wouter’s platform lacks any detail that tells me what he stands for or where he wants to see Debian go. Wouter’s platform also seems very conflict averse, it favours discussion and agreement over making hard decisions. I think Debian needs to make some hard decisions and the project leader needs to be someone who is able to willing handle (civilised) conflict.
• Aigars Mahinovs - Most of the topics that Aigars proposes to work on do not make my list of the most important issues for Debian to solve, and as others have pointed out, are possible better dealt with by other organisations.
• Simon Richter - Simon doesn’t actually state what he wants to achieve as DPL or where he sees Debian’s future direction as being, other than some vague hints that he is against projects that are similar to ‘dunc-tank’ and that we need a common goal. Stating what that common goal should be, would have lifted this above NOTA.

That leaves five remaining candidates:

• Anthony Towns - AJ gets my top ranking because I think that having some consistency in the DPL is a worthwhile goal. While I think that the whole Dunc-tank fiasco could have been managed much, much better, there were obviously hostile factions that would have made anything AJ did look bad. AJ’s platform seems to mostly involve him leading infrastructural improvements (good) and encouraging others to work on things that they want to see changed (also good). The one area where I possibly disagree with Anthony is around what the DPL role should look like. Anthony appears happy with the current state of the DPL office, I think that some significant changes are needed. However that’s going to require constitutional changes, so I’m not going to rank Anthony down on that basis alone.
• Steve McIntyre - Steve comes second primarily because he’s implicitly endorsed by AJ and everything that I’ve seen online related to Steve suggests that he is a level-headed, decent individual with good leadership skills. If I can’t have consistency in the DPL office via AJ, then Steve would definitely be the next choice. Steve’s platform also doesn’t contain anything that I disagree with.
• Sam Hocevar and Gustavo Franco - Sam and Gustavo are ranked equally based purely on the basis of their (relatively similar) platforms containing lots of great ideas and vision for Debian that I agree with. I don’t for a minute think that they will be able to achieve all of it, but at least by providing clear goals and a mandate for implementing them we might be able to start down the track of regaining some common purpose as a project. I have some reservations about Sam’s style based on what I’ve read in archive, but seeing as I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to people I haven’t personally met, I’m going to assume, that if elected Sam will be a great DPL.
• Rapha l Hertzog - Rapha l gets my final vote above NOTA to indicate that I support the idea of a board governing Debian, but that I don’t think his particular proposal is the correct way for the board to run. If Rapha l were to win, I wouldn’t object to him placing his suggested board in ‘office’ for the upcoming year, but I hope that a major piece of their workload would be to lead the discussion, drafting and passing of a constitutional change to replace the DPL with an elected board with rotating terms of reasonable length (2-3) years.

*yawn* It’s made me tired writing all of that out. Maybe sometime soon I should explain in more detail exactly what parts of Debian’s governance model I think need changing or maybe I need to wait until I’ve achieved a few more technical things and gained enough respect before anyone will listen to my opinions…

TurboGears RemoteForm tip In case your RemoteForm misteriously behaves like a normal HTTP form, refreshing the page on submit, and the only hint that there's something wrong is this bit in the Iceweasel's error console:

Errore: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure
code: 0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.open]"
nsresult: "0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE)"  location: "JS frame ::
javascript: eval(__firebugTemp__); :: anonymous :: line 1"  data: no]

the problem can just be a missing action= attribute to the form. I found out after:

1. reading the TurboGears remoteform wiki: "For some reason, the RemoteForm is acting like a regular html form, serving up a new page instead of performing the replacements we're looking for. I'll update this page as soon as I figure out why this is happening."
2. finding this page on Google and meditating for a while while staring at it. I don't speak German, but often enough I manage to solve problems after meditating over Google results in all sorts of languages unknown or unreadable to me. I will call this practice Webomancy.

The xend config looks like this:

playground:~# grep -v ^# /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp
(network-script ‘network-bridge netdev=dummy0′)
(vif-script vif-bridge)
(dom0-min-mem 196)
(dom0-cpus 0) Creating volume group for Xen domU (/dev/hdb2 was allready created with id 8e):

playground:~# pvcreate /dev/hdb2
Physical volume “/dev/hdb2″ successfully created
playground:~# vgcreate xen-vol /dev/hdb2
Volume group “xen-vol” successfully created
playground:~# vgscan
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while…
Found volume group “xen-vol” using metadata type lvm2 Creating first domU:

playground:~# xen-create-image –ip 192.168.222.50 –hostname xetch.blubb.cyconet.org
General Infomation
——————–
Hostname : xetch.blubb.cyconet.org
Distribution : etch
Fileystem Type : ext3
Size Information
—————-
Image size : 4Gb
Swap size : 1024Mb
Image type : full
Memory size : 128Mb
Kernel path : /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686
Initrd path : /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686
Networking Information
———————-
IP Address 1 : 192.168.222.50
Netmask : 255.255.255.0
Gateway : 192.168.222.1
Creating ext3 filesystem on /dev/xen-vol/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org-disk
Done
Installing your system with debootstrap mirror ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/
Done
Running hooks
Done
No role script specified. Skipping
Creating Xen configuration file
Done
Setting up root password
Enter new UNIX password:
etype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
All done
Logfile produced at:
/var/log/xen-tools/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.log Add the following to /etc/network/interfaces:

auto dummy0
iface dummy0 inet static
address 192.168.222.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.222.0
broadcast 192.168.222.255 Bringing up network interface, restarting xen and starting the domU:

playground:~# ifup dummy0
playground:~# /etc/init.d/xendomains stop
playground:~# /etc/init.d/xend restart
playground:~# /etc/init.d/xendomains start
playground:~# xm create xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg -c
Using config file “/etc/xen/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg”.
… If you want to autostart your domUs, you have to symlink the configfile to /etc/xen/auto:

playground:~# mkdir /etc/xen/auto/
playground:~# ln -s /etc/xen/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg /etc/xen/auto/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg Debian, Linux, opensource, planet, xen

I just received a question about SE Linux via email. As I don't want to post private messages containing material that's globally useful I'll answer through my blog:

> other than strict and targeted policies......other policies like
> RBAC, MCS, Type Enforcement are also there....how are these policies
> implemented

The two main policies are the strict policy and the targeted policy. The strict policy is the earliest and was originally known as the sample policy (but was given the name "strict" after targeted was developed).

The strict policy aims to give minimal privileges to all daemons. The targeted policy aims to restrict the programs that are most vulnerable (network facing daemons) and not restrict other programs (for ease of use). There is currently work in progress on combining those policies so the person who compiles the policy can determine which features of strict they desire.

RBAC means Role Based Access Control. The strict policy assigns users to roles and the role then limits the set of domains that can be entered. For example the user_r role does not permit the sysadm_t domain so a user who is only permitted to enter the user_r role can not perform sys-admin tasks. Like many terms RBAC is used in different manners, some people consider that it means direct control by role (EG role user_r can not write to /dev/hda), while SE Linux has a more indirect use of roles (role user_r can not run programs in domain sysadm_t or any other domain that allows writing to type fixed_disk_device_t - the type for /dev/hda). You may consider that the strict policy supports RBAC depending on which definition of the term you use.

Generally the targeted policy is not considered to support RBAC, although if you consider a role to merely be a container for a set of accesses that are permitted then a SE Linux domain could be considered a in the RBAC sense. I don't think of targeted policy as being a RBAC implementation because all user sessions run in the domain unconfined_t which has no restriction. I think that to be considered RBAC a system must confine user logins.

Type enforcement is the primary access control mechanism for SE Linux. Every object that a process may access (including other processes) has a type assigned to it. The type of a process is known as a domain. The system has a policy database which for every combination of domain, type, and object class (which is one of dir, file, blk_file, etc - all the different types of object that a process may access) specifies whether the action is permitted or denied (default deny) and whether it is audited (default is to audit all denied operations and not audit permitted operations).

MCS is a confidentiality protection mechanism where each file has a set of categories assigned to it. The set may be empty, may contain all 1024 categories, or any sub-set. Each process has a set of categories that determines which files it may access. File access is granted if Unix permissions allow it, if the domain-type model allows it, and if MCS allows it (on an MCS system). I have just had an article on MCS published in Linux Journal.

MCS is an optional feature for people compiling Linux from source or for distribution vendors. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and Debian the decision was made to include it, so the strict and targeted policies for those distributions include MCS.

There is another policy known as MLS. This is a policy build that comprises the strict policy plus Multi-Level Security. Multi-Level Security aims to give the highest confidentiality protection and comply with the LSPP (Labeled Security Protection Profile - roughly comparable to B1) Common Criteria certification. It would be possible to build a targeted policy with MLS but that wouldn't make sense - why have the highest protection of confidentiality with anything less than the highest protection of integrity?

As for how the policies are implemented, I'm not about to write a tutorial on policy writing for a blog post, I'm sure that someone will post a link to a Tresys or Fedora web page in the comments. ;)

> there r some packages of linux in which some changes has been made
> to support linux......for eg:- coreutils, findutils

That is correct. Every program that launches a process on behalf of a user at a different privilege user (EG /bin/login, sshd and crond) and every program that creates files for processes running in different domains (EG logrotate creating new log files for multiple daemons) needs to be modified to support SE Linux. Also ls and ps were modified to show SE Linux contexts as well as the obvious programs in coreutils.

> 'Z' is the new thing that have been added to most of the
> utilities......wherever I search I get the changes made only in few
> utilities like ps, mv, cp, ls
>
> Can u help me by giving all the changes made in each of the utilities.....

Unfortunately I can't. This has been identified as an issue and there is currently work in progress to determine the best way of managing this.

I think it's time to start blogging more often about this topic, and fill this section a bit more. I mean, Mermaids was a long time ago... And debconf in Mexico with my first try on skirts, getting rid of my beard and dying my hairs red is history in the meantime, too. So, what has happened in between... Well, there was of course the Regenbogenparade which I attended and which was nice. I even ordered a special t-shirt from a shop in Australia that I totally love. In summer I met up in Bratislava with a longtime friend from a MUD I played way back, and enjoyed running around in a skirt there, too. Gladly it was a sunny day. It was though... people back here in Vienna looked more awkward at me than in Bratislava. At least that was my impression... Had been to Extremadura for the i18n meeting which was quite nice. It was quite productive, even though I have to admit that I haven't done much on that front since. Even in Spain people didn't look that strange at my skirt as over here in Austria... At our company's Christmas party I got into a talk with a work colleague about the topic and she informed me that a former working colleague of us is starting with hormone treatment after the year change and if I'd fancy a meeting with him. I was quite happy about that offer so we arranged a meeting on December 23rd. It was a bit strange at first to address him as he, and we didn't know how to start talking because said working colleague was late, but after a while we talked about various things and even were finished with the more interesting topics when she finally appeared. We arranged to visit the next Trans-X meeting after the year change.
I left them for leaving home, but I wasn't able to catch my bus on time—the subway had serious problems. Well, I thought I might spend the night in the Flex so I called another working colleague who usually hangs out there about what was going on that evening, and interestingly he told me it was Gay Heaven night. I stopped believing in coincidence long ago... Anyway, was a nice evening all in all, they had a Christmas rabbit handing out "I love you" stamps with pink ink-pads. :) The Trans-X meeting wasn't too bad. It was some discussions about various topics. After a while my first shyness dropped a bit and I started to join in the discussion at some points. After the first started to leave I had some more direct talks with two of the women from there, one of them had mostly the same trip home as me so we talked on in the subway. A week later they had set a transgender weekend—no wonder, it was the weekend of the Rosenball. They were meeting in a cafe on Friday and I joined them, a bit less shy now that I at least knew some of the faces. Maria was quite ill and was sitting in her jacket within the cafe, shivering like hell... But all in all it was a nice meeting too, got to know some more nice people. I was a bit lazy from there on, didn't join another meeting... But another working colleague did invite me to the carnival party of his sister. I thought I could try a bit more than before, in the disguise of the carnival party, so I used a bra my former wife left behind, filled it with some socks, and put up some eye makeup (quite discreet, I hate overdone makeup already on natural females...) The light there wasn't the best, so they just saw my tall body at first. It took them a while to even notice the skirt, and only after I put off my long-sleeve they haven't noticed my breast. But well, I don't really blame them, my working colleague has announced me as a he, and given the low lights it's not too bad. Though, after the host noticed my breasts he asked if he could touch them and I even received a quite nice kiss from him. :D I stumbled upon the Gaia TG Guild on Gaia Online—a quite interesting web-based community. In general Gaia is filled with mostly kids, many of them immature, not able to spell and considering that even cool, but there are some quite special guilds that are lots of fun. But still, when I stumbled upon the TG Guild I was in awe of that such a thing could exist there. What I read made me feel totally happy and more confident on the path I'm having ahead of me. Last week I finally had been to an Trans-X meeting again, and Maria showed some quite interesting reportages about transsexual people—including one that was on TV just the day before about a 14 year old girl who is already on hormone treatment and has the absolute support from her family since she was 4 and confronted them with cutting "it" off when they don't allow her to wear skirts when going out, too. All the best to you, Kim! I so envy your strength... I'm sorry about the length of this entry—but I'm sick of people who tell me that I'm only playing it, or that I would hide... And I also see it as a chance to document my path for myself. I promise—the next entries will be more often and thus shorter.

We’re trying hard to include Frets on Fire in Debian. FoF is a really great game where you have to try to play a simulated guitar through your computer keyboard. The code is already GPL, and the developers are really nice and collaborative. The game consists of some code in python, some game data, graphics and so, and some songs, including a tutorial. The problem comes when we try to get the songs into Debian too. It seems that, for being able for someone to be something in the musical scene in Finland, they must sign an abusive contract with Teosto (Finish Composer’s Copyright Society, which AFAIK is a private organization), giving them exclusive rights on whatever songs you make, so you won’t be able to license any song at all without using a license that has been approved by them. More discussion here. This is wierd. Composer’s Copyright Societies should be there to help composers and artists, not to enslave them. For what I heard it’s not the only country in which that happens. Especially in Europe, the EU is extremelly protectionist to those matters, whether they do right or wrong, or whether they even go against the author’s will. Gosh, it’s the authors who should have the right to choose, not the mafias choose for them. In Spain I think it’s more or less the same, the SGAE seems to have the same attitude towards artists than Teosto. When will they realize they’re being anachronistic and unfair?

With updated cross-building toolchains and a much improved emdebian-tools package, work has finally started on actually building cross-built packages for Emdebian. Wookey has identified the first set - a usable rootfs. http://wiki.debian.org/EmdebianRootfs

Nineteen packages have been cross-built so far, from base-files and popt to util-linux and ncurses so I thought I'd make a note of how it has gone at this early stage. Packages, patches and build logs can be viewed at: http://www.emdebian.org/packages/search.php

Results:
======

1. CDBS cross-builds like a dream. No failures, no missing files, no misplaced files, no files Emdebian doesn't want (like changelogs and manpages). em_make replaces one makefile with a customised one and everything else falls into place. Fantastic.

2. debhelper packages generally cross-build quite well - as long as debian/rules sticks to actually using debhelper rather than creating bespoke rules that just do what dh_foo would have done anyway! (I then have to go behind them and remove the custom rules to get rid of manpages etc. when if the task had been left to dh_foo, em_make would have removed dh_foo automatically. Grrr.)

3. Packages built without CDBS or debhelper are an absolute PITA. I know it is a good exercise to build without "high-level" tools, but PLEASE, only put non-debhelper packages in the main archive if you really cannot have debhelper involved. It'd make my life SO much easier right now.

4. Splitting out the translation files into individual, dedicated, packages one per language is having two related effects: there are a plethora of packages in the repository with only 19 source packages built; the size of the main binary packages has dropped substantially. Some translation packages are 30-60kb in size but in Debian, 12 maybe 30 of these are packaged inside the main binary or a similar combined _common package. Users get no choice, it's no translations or all translations. I cribbed the idea from OpenEmbedded and it's nice to see it paying off, even if it means that 'apt-cache search' listings will be at least an order of magnitude longer in Emdebian. (Sounds like a wrapper is needed.) Need to start testing 'langupdate' soon to make sure it can cope with keeping users up to date with translations of installed programs.

So far, haven't needed too many cache files to be used with ./configure --cache-file but I'm bound to meet those soon.

Overall, things are going well (famous last words).

One of my dedicated servers was in bad need of major LVM surgery today. Since the rescue system delivered with the server by the housing provider suffers from lack of LVM support, I needed to pull a creative stunt with grub and grml to accomplish this. The dedicated server rented from strato is the Box I tested in a different article. Installing the LVM-based Debian system via the LVM-less rescue system involved first installing without LVM in the partition which was originally supposed to be swap, booting the just installed system and using this temporary system to finally bootstrap the target. I had originally planned to go this way again in case rescue should become necessary. Today, I checked first whether the provider supplied rescue system had improved in the mean time (which it hadn’t), and I didn’t feel like installing a new temporary system. Instead, I decided to go through a different route, using grml. grml is extremely versatile regarding boot. All you need is to get the grml kernel to boot and point it towards the grml initrd, and the initrd automatically searches the available drives for the compressed file system image, mounts it and continues the boot process. This was the point where I hooked myself into grml. I put an ext3fs on the swap partition and copied the contents of a grml CD to that partition. After thinking a while about how to get ISOLINUX to boot this grml, I remembered that the disk already has grub installed, and decided to use grub to boot grml. This was possible because the provider offers a serial console for the machine. If no serial console had been available, things would have been a lot harder since there would be no feedback and one would have to talk to grub via offline editing of menu.lst. Thanks to the serial console, things were a lot faster. Booting grml via grub is actually easy. After finding out which partition grml is on (find /linux26) and setting this partition as root, all you need is “kernel /linux26 ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us BOOT_IMAGE=grml console=ttyS0,57600n8”, “initrd /minirt26.gz” and finally “boot”. The “57600” given on the kernel command line was actually the hardest part: Strato operates the serial console at unusual 57600 bps, and grml’s serial console feature starts mgetty with hard-coded 9600 bps. The rather frustrating symptom was that you can watch grml booting, with “Finished execution of main grml startup” as the last sign of life. Knowing that there is a login prompt waiting for you at the wrong baud rate. After talking to Mika from the grml team for some minutes, we decided to take two “roads” to solve the issue. Mika hacked grml’s startup process to parse the baud rate to be used for mgetty from the kernel command line. Since I couldn’t wait for Mika’s fix, I used a grml.sh script to put a fixed mgetty.config over the file contained in grml. After fixing some stupid mistakes on my part, I finally received my grml login prompt and could start with the LVM surgery. Grml is a perfect tool for such tasks since it is extremely flexible and not selective in which medium and partition types it can boot from. It has saved me a lot of grief today and has helped me in solving a difficult problem. Oh, btw, pvmove --alloc anywhere can move a logical volume inside a pysical volume without the need of a temporary physical volume, and it is thus possible to “manually” defragment a physical volume in order to allow more clean resizing of logical values. While it is debateable whether this does really make sense, it satisfies my sense of order to have an LVM setup unfragmented.

Today I thought it’s time to look deeper into the Xen hype. So I decided to install xen on etch. I followed Ganneffs recommandation

playground:~# aptitude install bridge-utils iproute \
xen-ioemu-3.0.3-1 xen-utils-3.0.3-1\
xen-linux-system-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686 libc6-xen Booting the dom0 leeds me into kernel panic, cause no root device was found. Hmm … there seems to be the driver missing. Right - there wasn’t any /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686.
Waldi did hint me to /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686.postinst and I got my ramdisk this way:

playground:~# update-initramfs -c -t -k \
2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686
playground:~# command -v update-grub > \
/dev/null && update-grub After booting dom0 successfully, my serial console disappeared. After some digging around, I got the clue I need to tell xen, that there is one.
I modified /boot/grub/menu.lst:

# xenhopt=com1=115200,8n1 console=com1
..
# xenkopt=console=vga Dom0 is running now, lets see what we can do next, maybe:

playground:~# aptitude install xen-tools Debian, Linux, opensource, planet, xen

Thanks again to all the updaters. Please, start lists for banks in other countries and tell me about them. If a list already exists for your country, consider sending updates there first. Added: Banca Popolare Etica, Caisses Populaires Desjardins, Caja Madrid, Caja de Segovia, Fortis Bank Belgium, KBC, netbank.de, Osuuspankki, PC Financial Master Card, Soci t G n rale, Sparebank 1-Gruppen, Storebrand Bank Updated: NatWest Andrew Donnellan suggested:

"Perhaps it would be useful to start a list of banks that *don't* work with Free Software as well so we can a) petition them, and b) boycott them until they make it work."

I'd prefer to keep this to a positive list for various reasons (including lawyer-fear, search engine rankings, rewarding the good and saying nothing if I've nothing nice to say). If a listed bank goes bad, it will show up as Removed. If you want to rant about how a bank screwed you, please use your own site. If I see it and like it, it will appear in one of my linkposts.

Hard to believe it's already time for DemoCampMontreal2 tomorrow night (Thursday, March 29, at the SAT). I had a pretty good time at the first DemoCampMontreal back in February, despite my demo going belly-up a few times. It was a good space and a fun time to talk. I think the BarCamp page on DemoCampMontreal2 has some good info, too. Check out Fred Ngo's writeup of DemoCampMontreal2, including a fancy photo of yours truly demoing in February. It looks a little like BarCampHell, but in a good way. tags: barcamp democamp montreal DemoCampMontreal2 fred ngo me

Big day Today's our big day -- we're closing on the house at 4690 rue Pontiac tonight at 7. We just got in from Las Vegas last night, but we headed out to the bank this morning to get a cashier's check for our (very large) down payment and dot the t's and cross the i's for the mortgage. Lots more running around today, but we go to the notaire tonight, and we'll have some sort of paper certifying us as homeowners sometime tonight. Shom-pan-yah to follow. tags: house buying closing 4690ruepontiac

Open Web Design One really great Open Content (or is it Open Source...?) resource that I don't pay enough attention to is the Open Web Design repository. It's a collection of very nicely done Web designs, delivered in convenient packets of HTML and CSS. They make very nice templates for "skins" of blog engines, CMSes, or even wikis. It's a great complement to the tons of Free Web software available out there (most of which is quite skinnable, and most of which has execrable default themes). My favourite part is that all the designs are dedicated to the public domain or made available under the liberal Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, which makes them honest-to-goodness Free Culture per the Definition of Free Cultural Works. I'm going to be using one of these Web designs to clean up my kinda bland home site. It could use a bit of editing. tags: web design design open content skins themes

Thanks Mark, Allegra, No ma and Anoushka Thanks to Mark and family for the congratulations on our new house. We signed the papers tonight, and it went surprisingly smoothly. Our seller is a fascinating guy who started the animation lab at Ubisoft, so we enjoyed getting to talk to him in between onslaughts of legalese and flurries of signatures. In other good news, I guess the gang is coming out for RoCoCo. Wow! That'll be pretty fun. Good thing we'll have two houses then. tags: mark house rococo ubisoft

[Note: I wrote this more than three weeks ago, but due to me being lazy again (yeah right) I’m just publishing this now. Well, here goes:] Due to a project working on (in Perl,) I’m asking the great Lazyweb for their great insight into the problem of sending outgoing mails. It all started when I was trying to set up my own mail system on my laptop perlis. After months of doing most of my mails under GMail and finding it impressive, but not quite adequate for my needs, I decided to go back to my old desktop workflow of downloading all my mails using ESR’s fetchmail over IMAP, and using my preferred MUA (Gnus, in this case to write my replies/posts/spam and send them using an MTA. However, since the time I’ve been checking my mails on revan, the amount of mail that I have been receiving has gone up to less than manageable proportions for my old system, so I had to revise my way of getting my email fix. Ultimately, I went on to use John Goerzen’s offlineimap to synchronize my IMAP Maildirs locally and do my mail stuff from there. No problem at the receiving front. On the sending of emails, I ran to a slight problem. I used to use an MTA to relay my mails to a smarthost for delivery, but since things have changed a bit (new ISP that blocks port 25, for one I have to find some other means. Although I could probably configure my MTA to use (and authenticate to) a smarthost, I found that approach to be too heavy for comfort (even when using a special-purpose MTA such as masqmail.) Furthermore, I’d like to have more control on how I send my mails (like which mails using one of my email addresses should go to a particular smarthost.) So, here is my attempt to solve my problem: a small, user-configurable mail submission agent. It small because it is written in Perl, and makes the most out of it (being a Perl user means you gotta love CPAN It’s user-configurable, involving a small INI-style file in the user’s home directory (I would prefer, however, to do away with tinkering with config-files altogether and do all configuration via some friendly interface.) It’s not much, but it works. And it’s working for the past three weeks or so now. I call it kartero because its the Spanish-Filipino word for postman (and yes, that’s exactly what my program does. It’s not much, but you can pick it up and try it yourself. Complaints; violent reactions: you know where to send them.