My supervisor pointed out a very annoying habit I had formed when writing technical documents, best summed up below:

"It would be difficult to find a page of governmental, military, or academic writing that doesn't have on it the word utilize. It must be one of the most over-utilized words in the world. It seems as though people out to impress people with the significance of what they're doing use utilize when they should use use. Utilize is not an elegant variation of the word use; it has its own distinct meaning. When you utilize something, you make do with something not normally used for the purpose, e.g., you utilize a dime when the bloody screwdriver is nowhere to be found. If the screwdriver were there, you'd use it, not utilize a stupid dime for the purpose. Use use when you mean use, and utilize only when it's properly used to mean--to use something not normally used. The computer went off-line, so they utilized Mr. Wang's abacus, the one he liked to use. Despite the temporary breakdown, the computer's use-rate was up (not its utilization-rate)." Cheney, "Getting the words right" (1983)

You will now probably notice this subtle verbiage in most everything you read!

One problem with the blog space is that there is a lot of negativity. Many people seem to think that if they don’t like a blog post then the thing to do is to write a post complaining about it - or even worse a complaint that lacks specific details to such an extent that the subject of the complaint would be unable to change their writing in response. The absolute worst thing to do is to post a complaint in a forum that the blog author is unlikely to read - which would be a pointless whinge that benefits no-one. Of course an alternate way for the recipient to takeg such complaints as suggested by Paul Graham is “you’re on the right track when people complain that you’re unqualified, or that you’ve done something inappropriate” and “if they’re driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you’ve probably done something good” (Paul was talking about writing essays not blogs, but I’m pretty sure that he intended it to apply to blogs too). If you want to actually get a blog author (or probably any author) to make a change in their material in response to your comments then trying to avoid empty complaints is a good idea. Another useful point Paul makes in the same essay is ““Inappropriate” is the null criticism. It’s merely the adjective form of “I don’t like it.”” - something that’s worth considering given the common criticism of particular blog content as being “inappropriate” for an aggregation feed that is syndicating it. Before criticising blog posts you should consider that badly written criticism may result in more of whatever it is that you object to. If you find some specific objective problem in the content or presentation of a blog the first thing to do is to determine the correct way of notifying the author. I believe that it’s a good idea for the author to have an about page which either has a mailto URL or a web form for sending feedback, I have a mailto on my about page - (here’s the link). Another possible method of contact is a comment on a blog post, if it’s an issue for multiple posts on the blog then writing a comment on the most recent post will do (unless of course it’s a comment about the comment system being broken). For those who are new to blogging, the blog author has full control over what happens to comments. If they decide that your comment about the blog color scheme doesn’t belong on a post about C programming then they can respond to the comment in the way that they think best (making a change or not and maybe sending you an email about it) and then delete the comment if they wish. If there is an issue that occurs on multiple blogs then a good option is to write a post about the general concept as I did in the case of column width in blogs where I wrote about one blog as an example of a problem that affects many blogs. I also described how I fixed my own blog in this regard (in sufficient detail to allow others to do the same). Note that most blogs have some degree of support for Linkback so any time you link to someone else’s blog post they will usually get notified in some way. On my blog I have a page for future posts where I invite comments from readers as to what I plan to write about next. Someone who prefers that I not write about topic A could write a comment requesting that I write about topic B instead. Wordpress supports pages as a separate type of item to posts. A post is a dated entry while pages are not sorted in date order and in most themes are displayed prominently on the front page (mine are displayed at the top). I suggest that other bloggers consider doing something comparable. One thing I considered is running a wiki page for the future posts. One of the problems with a wiki page is that I would need to maintain my own private list which is separate, while a page with comments allows only me to edit the page in response to comments and then use the page as my own to-do list. I may experiment with such a wiki page at some future time. One possibility that might be worth considering is a wiki for post requests for any blog that is syndicated by a Planet. For example a wiki related to Planet Debian might request a post about running Debian on the latest SPARC systems, the first blogger to write a post on this topic could then remove the entry from the wish-list (maybe adding the URL to a list of satisfied requests). If the person who made the original request wanted a more detailed post covering some specific area they could then add such a request to the wish-list page. If I get positive feedback on this idea I’ll create the wiki pages and add a few requests for articles that would interest me to start it up. Finally to encourage the production of content that you enjoy reading I suggest publicly thanking people who write posts that you consider to be particularly good. One way of thanking people is to cite their posts in articles on your own blog (taking care to include a link to at least one page to increase their Technorati rank) or web site. Another is to include a periodic (I suggest monthly at most) links post that contains URLs of blog posts you like along with brief descriptions of the content. If you really like a post then thank the author by not only giving a links with a description (to encourage other people to read it) but also describe why you think it’s a great post. Also if recommending a blog make sure you give a feed URL so that anyone who wants to subscribe can do it as easily as possible (particularly for the blogs with a bad HTML layout). Here are some recent blog posts that I particularly liked:

• Security Anti-Pattern: Path based access control from Joshua Brindle (feed). A fairly strong criticism of path based access control (as used in AppArmor). I’d have written something about this myself but Joshua did it so well that there’s no need. His post about Status Quo Encapsulation is also a good read. It’s a pity that Joshua doesn’t write more than two posts a month.


• Federico’s post about concrete for housing. Some technical data and some good pictures. (feed)


• Tim Connor’s blog posts about Australian politics (feed), particularly this post about interest rates (especially his latest comment). It’s a pity that Livejournal seems to offer no good options for searching and the comment in question has broken links. I would be happy to offer advice if Tim wanted to switch to a self-hosted Wordpress installation (as would some other bloggers who are members of our local LUG).

Here are some blogs that I read regularly:

• Problogger (feed), I don’t think that I’ll be a full-time blogger in the forseeable future, but his posts have lots of good ideas for anyone who wants to blog effectively. I particulaly appreciate the short posts with simple suggestions.


• Mega Tokyo (feed) - A manga comic on the web. The amusing portrayal of computer gaming fanatics will probably remind most people in the computer industry of some of their friends.


• Defence and the National Interest (feed). The most interesting part of this (and the only reason I regularly read it) is the blog of William S. Lind (titled On War. William writes some very insightful posts about military strategy and tactics but some things about politics will offend most people who aren’t white Christian conservatives.
  
  It’s a pity that there is not a more traditional blog feed for the data, the individual archives contain all posts and there seems to be no possibility of viewing the posts for the last month (for people who read it regularly in a browser and don’t use an RSS feed) and no search functionality built in.


• WorseThanFailure.com (was TheDailyWTF.com) (feed) subtitled Curious Perversions in Information Technology. Many amusing anecdotes that illustrate how IT projects can go wrong. This is useful for education, amusement, and as a threat (if you do THAT then we could submit to WorseThanFailure.com).


• XKCD - a stick-figure web comic, often criticised for the drawing quality by people who just don’t get it, some people read comics for amusement and insightful commentry not drawings. It’s yet another example of content beating presentation when there’s a level playing field.

Finally I don’t read it myself, but CuteOverload.com is a good site to refer people to when they claim that the Internet is too nasty for children - the Internet has lots of pictures of cute animals!

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Hey'all! We're still in transit on our great trans-continental adventure! Sorry if you've emailed us and we've not gotten back, Internet access is spotty at best on this trip, and who wants to spend their vacation reading email anyway? =)

We just finished a good time in the kitchens of Opus and ConCentric. Angie, Sera, Chris and I all worked well together in a cohesive team, with a minimum of drama. It was really nice to work with such a solid group of people that we could say things like "Dude, I need a nap, can you cover for me?" and there was no problem with the rest of the team trading off.

Leif was an absolute hit at the con. We were able to participate in a couple worships where him singing along wasn't a distraction at all, and he totally loved being passed between people. It does mean that he caught his first cold, but he's doing alright.

There are always the people that I'll miss when I'm gone from there. Alexis was in the kitchen on a regular basis saying hi, Liz was always nearby, Karina with her star maps, lizzie the brit with her piles of energy, the frying-tofu master Geoff seemed to be in the kitchen often. In the kitchen, though, we got to see pretty much everyone so it was a nice chance to connect with people.

The staff was also a very neat set of people. I don't think there was anyone in the Opus staff that I couldn't see actively working hard to pull of great programming. There's always the curmudgeonly part of me that sits in the back corner and can nit pick things to death, but in doing so I wouldn't want to hide that by almost every measure this was a successful Opus. In particular, I was impressed that the staff faced head-on how to handle walk-ins at the staff meeting just before the con started. It was interesting to watch a consensus process work with a group of people who came in from wildly different personal perspectives and to watch people change from varying viewpoints to agree on the compromise that best suited the group.

So what's next? We've spent the night with Andrew from Koolu and will be heading down to Buffalo next to get an van and start on the adventure. We don't know where we're going yet, or how we'll get there, but the idea is to head down to the Creation Museum and then west towards Vegas and the Grand Canyon. On the way, we might see if we can visit Stephanie in Ohio, Sera in Albuquerque, and Karina in Flagstaff.

Peace, Love, Faith and Blessings to all.

For a while I used the Item Link Clicks feature in Feedburner. For those who aren’t aware Feedburner is a service that proxies access to an RSS feed (you need to either publish the Feedburner URL as the syndication link or use a HTTP redirect to send the requests there - I use a HTTP redirect). Then when people download the feed they get it from Feedburner which is fast and reliable (unlike my blog on a bad day) and which also tracks some statistics which can be interesting. The Item Link Clicks feature rewrites the guid URLs to point to a Feedburner URL that will redirect back to the original post (and track clicks along the way). The down-side of doing this is that some people who read blogs via Planet installations and just copy the link from the Planet page when citing a blog post instead of actually visiting the blog in question. This causes a potential problem for the person citing the post in that they won’t know whether the URL is valid unless they visit it. So when (not if) people have misconfigured blogs that are widely syndicated the people who cite them without verifying the links could end up linking to invalid URLs. The problem for the person who is cited is that such Feedburner redirects don’t seem to be counted as part of the Technorati ranking (which is a count of the number of links to a blog in the last 6 months which give some rough approximation of how important the blog is). The Technorati rating can sometimes be used in negotiations with an advertiser and is often used when boasting about how popular a blog is. To increase my Technorati ranking I have stopped using the Feedburner URL rewriting feature. For people who view my blog directly or through a Planet installation this will not give any difference that you would notice. The problem is for people who use a service that syndicates RSS feeds and then forwards them on by email, such people received two copies of the last 10 items as the URL (GUID) change means that the posts are seen as new (Planet solves this by deleting the posts which are seen as unavailable and then creating new posts with the new URLs and no change is visible to the user). Based on this experience I suggest not using URL rewriting services. They will hurt your technorati ranking, give little benefit (IMHO) and annoy the small number of RSS to email readers. Particularly don’t change your mind about whether to use such a feature or not. Changing the setting regularly would be really annoying. Also this means that if you use such a service you should take care not to have you Feedburner redirection ever get disabled. A minor Apache configuration error corrected a day later could end up in sending all the posts in the current feed an extra two times.

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If you walk up to the Swiss railways customer service desk and tell them that you're a group of six looking to travel from Zurich to Munich and would thus like to make a reservation, they'll charge you 15 CHF (~ 9.50 ) for a little piece of paper which documents that the guy behind the desk put his brain to use and reserved six contiguous seats to keep the group together. Well, he actually asked me whether that's what I wanted. If you walk up to the German railways customer service desk and tell them that you're a group of (now) eight looking to travel from Munich to Zurich and would thus like to make a reservation, they'll charge you 28 for a little piece of paper which documents that the guy behind the desk does not have a brain or didn't bother to switch it on: instead of two adjacent groups of four seats, we got four pairs of aisle seats. Given that we mainly reserved to minimise the annoyance for the other travellers while we kept up a conversation for the five hours of the journey, it did piss me off quite a bit to have paid three times as much in Germany as the reservation cost in Switzerland and not be able to talk among each other without annoying the others. This reservation was made two days in advance. You may, of course, think that the train was already full and no space to sit eight was left; however, I did not have to go further than two wagons to find copious amounts of unreserved spaces for eight, which were then, unfortunately, already occupied (of course). It shames me to expose my peers (I made the travel arrangements) to the crap and blather one has to put up in German railways: the quality of the speaker system is crap, everything is repeated in English by non-English-speaking conductors, and after every stop, we're yet again alerted to the fact that we could be relaxing to high-quality cuisine in the board restaurant, or should watch out for the little trolley passing by and happy to collect our money. Oh, and of course the brainless and often unfriendly service employees. And all that for a price more than it would have cost the lot of us to rent a van and drive back and forth. Going by train is my most preferable means of transport, not only, but in large part due to environmental issues. I don't understand why the German government puts this important bit of infrastructure in the hands of imbeciles and lets them overcharge for their low-quality service and their delays. NP: Mono: Under the Pipal Tree Update: A guy from Berlin wrote:

The seats you found in the other wagons may as well have been reserved, too. The electronic reservation signs will extinguish about 15 minutes after the train departs from the station. Or, there was too little time between reservation and departure, so you could only get one of the few express-reservation seats.

I am aware of this. However, the train between Zurich and Munich is ancient (part of the way it still has to run on Diesel) and the reservation signs were paper slips. The seats of eight I found were definitely unreserved, especially because I checked immediately after departure.

A little bit ago I blogged about how I was using Remember The Milk in order to get some things done around the house and to remind me about stuff that I want to do. Things have been going pretty well on that account, I have been using it to great effect for basically everything that I need to do outside of things that I need to get done at Honeywell (I keep a separate todo list for there). However, when using it these past weeks, I have noticed a few things that I wish it would have or things that could be improved upon, I think in a big way.

I think the twitter interface should have some enhancements. For example, it is impossible currently to mark off an item that repeats through twitter, because you always have more than one of them on your list. I would love to do this with daily tasks so that I can mark them off as soon as I finish them with a few button presses on my cell phone. Also it would be nice to be able to add things to lists and not just the INBOX through twitter. Possibly another command starting with '!' that takes a keyword.

Remember the milk has as a major component the map of locations that items in a list can be placed at. There are a couple improvements that I would like in this area. The first is to have multiple locations that are all just as valid in order to complete the task. Remembering the Milk (the actual task) is a great example. There are literally hundreds of places that I could get milk, and two or three of them that I use regularly, depending on which one I am driving by at the moment. If you could place these three markets in a group of some sort, then they could all be associated with the item and you could see it on your mobile or however you're viewing the map.

The other map improvement is fairly simple - offer to give me directions from one place to another. I don't know how to drive to a random location I've just put in because it is where I need to drop my car or pick someone up or whatever, and a small link to a google maps directions would be nice. Even just a link to google maps (where I could then click on the "directions from..." link) would be a big improvement.

The last improvement that would be nice is to be able to click on the URL or visit the site in the URL field for tasks in some way. Currently the URL field is pretty useless as a URL, because there is no way to click it and actually visit the site. If I click on it, the editing field pops up and I have to do all the hard work myself of cutting and pasting the URL into the location field. It's also a mis-cue because the URL looks like a link before I click it, just like I could click on it as I want to. A keyboard shortcut for visiting the site would be nice as well since I do use the keyboard interface quite a bit.

These improvements I think would make a big difference to RTM users. The map improvements alone would be a big upgrade in my opinion. As for now, I will continue to use RTM whether these are implemented or not - it's a good way to keep an online list in any case. It's kept me writing blog posts at the rate of about once every two days. Not sure if that's a good thing or not yet..

The next release of DebTorrent is now available. This release includes new functionality for communicating with APT using a new transport method specifically designed for debtorrent, and many bug fixes. The major changes in this release are all in the communication between APT and DebTorrent. The HTTP server in DebTorrent that listens for APT requests has been upgraded to support HTTP/1.1 persistent connections and pipelining, which allows APT to have multiple outstanding requests for files. This is useful as DebTorrent suffers from the typical bittorrent slow start, so requesting multiple files at a time helps to speed up the download considerably. Though better, HTTP/1.1 is not ideal for DebTorrent however, as a maximum of 10 outstanding requests is maintained by APT's http method, and files must still be returned in the order they were requested (which is not ideal for bittorrent-type downloading since downloads occur randomly). To further improve the APT communication I have modified APT's http method to create a debtorrent method. This new debtorrent transport for APT is packaged separately as apt-transport-debtorrent, and once installed APT can be told to use it by replacing "http://" with "debtorrent://" in your sources.list file. This method sends all requests it receives immediately to DebTorrent, and will receive responses from DebTorrent in any order. You can find this new method on the Alioth project, or in my personal repository (only amd64 and i386 versions are currently available). Unfortunately, the story doesn't end here. The APT code responsible for sending requests to the method also limits the maximum number of outstanding requests that it will send to the method to 10, which is not really necessary since all existing methods limit the requests they send out themselves. I have therefore patched the current APT code to increase this limit to 1000 (a one line change), and released this patched version as 0.7.6-0.1. You can find this patched version in my personal repository (again, only for i386 and amd64). I have tested it with the other methods available and it causes no problems, and I hope to get the change included in the regular APT code soon. To sum up:

• new DebTorrent over HTTP = fast
• new DebTorrent with new apt-transport-debtorrent = faster
• new DebTorrent with new apt-transport-debtorrent and a patched APT = fastest

The last DebTorrent version (0.1.3.1) is currently in the NEW queue, and judging by the length of it, will be there for about another week. After DebTorrent is added to the archive, I will be upgrading it to this new version. I also hope to get the new apt-transport-debtorrent package into the NEW queue soon. This brings to an end the Google Summer of Code (which this project was created as a part of), but development of DebTorrent will of course continue (probably a little slower). The next major change will be the addition of unique piece numbers, which is almost complete but needs to be extensively tested. I'd like to thank Anthony Towns, Steve McIntyre, and Michael Vogt for their help over the last 4 months, and also the many others who sent me encouraging emails or engaged in interesting discussions about this project. It's the people who make a project like this a fun and memorable thing to do. Here's the changelog for the new DebTorrent release:

• APT communication supports HTTP/1.1 connections, including persistent connections and pipelining
• Add support for the new debtorrent APT transport method (see the new apt-transport-debtorrent package)
• Make the Packages decompression and torrent creation threaded
• Improve the startup initialization of files
• Add init and configuration files for the tracker
• bug fixes:
  • restarts would fail when downloaded files have been modified
  • deleting old cached data would fail
  • small tracker bug causing exceptions
  • prevent enabling files before the initialization is complete
  • only connect to unique peers from the tracker that are not already connected
  • tracker would return all torrents' peers for every request

The next release of DebTorrent is now available. This release includes new functionality for communicating with APT using a new transport method specifically designed for debtorrent, and many bug fixes. The major changes in this release are all in the communication between APT and DebTorrent. The HTTP server in DebTorrent that listens for APT requests has been upgraded to support HTTP/1.1 persistent connections and pipelining, which allows APT to have multiple outstanding requests for files. This is useful as DebTorrent suffers from the typical bittorrent slow start, so requesting multiple files at a time helps to speed up the download considerably. Though better, HTTP/1.1 is not ideal for DebTorrent however, as a maximum of 10 outstanding requests is maintained by APT's http method, and files must still be returned in the order they were requested (which is not ideal for bittorrent-type downloading since downloads occur randomly). To further improve the APT communication I have modified APT's http method to create a debtorrent method. This new debtorrent transport for APT is packaged separately as apt-transport-debtorrent, and once installed APT can be told to use it by replacing "http://" with "debtorrent://" in your sources.list file. This method sends all requests it receives immediately to DebTorrent, and will receive responses from DebTorrent in any order. You can find this new method on the Alioth project, or in my personal repository (only amd64 and i386 versions are currently available). Unfortunately, the story doesn't end here. The APT code responsible for sending requests to the method also limits the maximum number of outstanding requests that it will send to the method to 10, which is not really necessary since all existing methods limit the requests they send out themselves. I have therefore patched the current APT code to increase this limit to 1000 (a one line change), and released this patched version as 0.7.6-0.1. You can find this patched version in my personal repository (again, only for i386 and amd64). I have tested it with the other methods available and it causes no problems, and I hope to get the change included in the regular APT code soon. To sum up:

• new DebTorrent over HTTP = fast
• new DebTorrent with new apt-transport-debtorrent = faster
• new DebTorrent with new apt-transport-debtorrent and a patched APT = fastest

The last DebTorrent version (0.1.3.1) is currently in the NEW queue, and judging by the length of it, will be there for about another week. After DebTorrent is added to the archive, I will be upgrading it to this new version. I also hope to get the new apt-transport-debtorrent package into the NEW queue soon. This brings to an end the Google Summer of Code (which this project was created as a part of), but development of DebTorrent will of course continue (probably a little slower). The next major change will be the addition of unique piece numbers, which is almost complete but needs to be extensively tested. I'd like to thank Anthony Towns, Steve McIntyre, and Michael Vogt for their help over the last 4 months, and also the many others who sent me encouraging emails or engaged in interesting discussions about this project. It's the people who make a project like this a fun and memorable thing to do. Here's the changelog for the new DebTorrent release:

• APT communication supports HTTP/1.1 connections, including persistent connections and pipelining
• Add support for the new debtorrent APT transport method (see the new apt-transport-debtorrent package)
• Make the Packages decompression and torrent creation threaded
• Improve the startup initialization of files
• Add init and configuration files for the tracker
• bug fixes:
  • restarts would fail when downloaded files have been modified
  • deleting old cached data would fail
  • small tracker bug causing exceptions
  • prevent enabling files before the initialization is complete
  • only connect to unique peers from the tracker that are not already connected
  • tracker would return all torrents' peers for every request

One situation that you will occasionally encounter when running a Heartbeat cluster is a need to prevent a STONITH of a node. As documented in my previous post about testing STONITH the ability to STONITH nodes is very important in an operating cluster. However when the sys-admin is performing maintenance on the system or programmers are working on a development or test system it can be rather annoying. One example of where STONITH is undesired is when upgrading packages of software related to the cluster services. If during a package upgrade the data files and programs related to the OCF script are not synchronised (EG you have two programs that interact and upgrading one requires upgrading the other) at the moment that the status operation is run then an error may occur which may trigger a STONITH. Another possibility is that if using small systems for testing or development (EG running a cluster under Xen with minimal RAM assigned to each node) then a package upgrade may cause the system to thrash which might then cause a timeout of the status scripts (a problem I encounter when upgrading my Xen test instances that have 64M of RAM). If a STONITH occurs during the process of a package upgrade then you are likely to have consistency problems with the OS due to RPM and DPKG not correctly calling fsync(), this can cause the OCF scripts to always fail to run the status command which can cause an infinite loop of the cluster nodes in question being STONITHed. Incidentally the best way to test for this (given the problems of a STONITH sometimes losing log data) is to boot the node in question without Heartbeat running and then run the OCF status commands manually (I previously documented three ways of doing this). Of course the ideal (and recommended) way of solving this problem is to migrate all services from a node using the crm_resource program. But in a test or development situation you may forget to migrate all services or simply forget to run the migration before the package upgrade starts. In that case the best thing to do is to be able to remove the ability to call STONITH . For my testing I use Xen and have the nodes ssh to the Dom0 to call STONITH, so all I have to do to remove the STONITH ability is to stop the ssh daemon on the Dom0. For a more serious test network (EG using IPMI or an equivalent technology to perform a hardware STONITH as well as ssh for OS level STONITH on a private network) a viable option might be to shut down the switch port used for such operations - shutting down switch ports is not a nice thing to do, but to allow you to continue work on a development environment without hassle it’s a reasonable hack. When choosing your method of STONITH it’s probably worth considering what the possibilities are for temporarily disabling it - preferably without having to walk to the server room.

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Dear LazyWeb: Our kitchen laptop is on its last legs. I’d like to replace it with a standalone LCD and a cheap, quiet, low-power CPU with just one or two gigabytes of storage for the operating system (music and other data are stored on a server in the basement). Can someone point me in the right direction? This is an instance where Google doesn’t provide an obvious leading/consensus solution. Most searches for solid state computers point to laptops, which isn’t what I want. The closest thing I’ve found is the Zonbox, but I’m not interested in their network/subscription storage model. Ideal specs:

• Total cost less than $300 (preferably less than $200)
• High-end Pentium III or lower-end Pentium IV, or equivalent. Should be able to play ogg files and browse today’s overactive websites at the same time without user latency. No need to support graphics-intensive applications like gaming or video editing.
• Built-in wireless networking. Support for a PCMCIA wireless card would also be acceptable. Most data will be accessed via an NFS share on the WAN.
• 1GB or 2GB of Flash memory for storage.
• Standard VGA out, preferably at least 1280×1024 (although 1024×768 would be okay).
• USB ports for keyboard, mouse, possibly external hard drive storage when needed.
• Painless Debian/Ubuntu installation, including out-of-the-box suspend/resume functionality.

Suggestions?

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As many readers of this blog know, I tend not to shy away from writing about my mother s struggle with Alzheimers. But in the last 6 months and especially since I paid my last visit to my mother, I have found it much harder to sit and write about her current state of affairs. If we think of Alzheimers as a journey to a new place, she is almost at the point of reaching that place of great loneliness and inhospitality, which is not only new and different both for her and those around her but is a virtual prison, for it rarely allows you to leave and visit the places of your past. More than ever, her memory and understanding of her life as she (as I and many others), once knew it, is fading fast; Of course, this was to be expected but it is quite difficult to imagine what it will be like until the actual experience unmistakably knocks on the door of present time and unfortunately, when it knocks, you can t do anything but open the door and let it in. Unsurprisingly, it is incredibly difficult to witness and interact with a person who is losing most all recollections, the stuff of which, you come to realize, is what defines a person and allows you to more or less have the opportunity to seamlessly interact with him or her. In the last number of months, I have perhaps been more silent than usual because there is only so much I can and want to think about when it comes to my mother s decline. I talk to her nearly every day and I have decided for now, that is enough. But I am retreating out of my silence after reading a refreshingly honest, though still somewhat timid piece on Alzheimer in the NYTimes, entitled Zen and the Art of Coping With Alzheimer s
The piece is striking because it offers a more realistic portrayal of the disease than most mainstream media accounts and it provides some really sound advice about the importance of just letting go and going with the flow when interacting with those with Alzheimers. At the same time, it lacks a certain window into just how disheartening and hard it can be to witness the decline, and how hard it can be to manage those conversations and interactions. On the whole, I try to go with the flow. For example, I recently returned from a visit and soon after I left, my mother forgot I was even there. She started to ask me over and over again when I was coming home for a visit and when I told her I was just there, her semi-humorous reaction was well, why didn t anyone tell me? (and then proceeded to castigate her caretaker for not telling her!!). Perhaps I did not stay long enough, or perhaps her lack of recall would happen no matter what. To hear she forgot shook me hard and deeply. The first time I realized she could not remember I had just visited, I was able to jog her memory by listing off all that we did together. Finally, when I mentioned that I bought a new refrigerator while in PR, something clicked. She is still worried about money, so buying a refrigerator was enough to remind her I had spent a lot of money. But after it was clear that she felt quite bad about not remembering, I knew that was the first and last time I would try to jog her memory. Instead, I will merge and mold my reality to her reality, as much as I can and assure her that I will soon visit.
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It&aposs been some time since I got this working, but I decided to now also blog about it here now, as I was just asked it.

The main magic to get thunderbird/icedove use your ldap server as addressbook, is to include the proper schema. Search the web for mozillaAbPersonObsolete and you should find it. You do not have to use any of it&aposs new fields, not even the object class in it is needed. Your slap only have to know about the field names, then thunderbird will be able to show the normal inetorgperson&aposs mail attribute.

Some caveats, though:

You might think you might test your settings in thunderbirds by using that button to download everything and store it locally. In my experience that never works but strangly asks for a password, while the addressbook is already nicely working and needs no password at all.

Also don&apost be confused by no records shown in the new addressbook. I guess that is some measure against always loading a possibly large remote addressbook. To test just enter anything in the search field, and the matching records should show up nicely. (I&aposm not sure if all versions allow searching for substrings. If they do, try searching for the at sign, to get a full list.)

The shown fields seem also a bit strange, and differ with the different mozilla messenger/thunderbird/icedove versions. In some versions the field the primary name is extracted from can be changed, but directive to set that seems to change even more often.

Finaly, some snippet for your /etc/icedove/global-config.js, which causes all newly created users to have an addressbook as default. I forgot if all are needed or why I added them, but those that are unnecessary at least do not seem to harm. (Last tested version is the one in etch, though. Newer version might again have something changed).

   /* ldap-Server for FOOBAR */
   pref("ldap_2.autoComplete.useDirectory", true);
   pref("ldap_2.prefs_migrated", true);
   pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.attrmap.DisplayName", "displayName");
   pref("ldap_2.servers.default.attrmap.DisplayName", "displayName");
   pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.auth.savePassword", true);
   pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.description", "FOOBAR");
   pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.filename", "foobar.mab");
   pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.maxHits", 500);
   pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.uri", "ldap://HOSTNAME:389/ou=People,dc=FOOBAR,dc=TLD??sub?(mail=*)");
   

For the last few weeks, I've been trying to participate in Project 365. For those that don't know about it, it is the idea of taking one picture a day in order to accomplish.. something. I'm mainly just doing it for fun, and in order to improve my picture-taking skills with my camera phone. I have it walking around everywhere basically, so when I see something interesting, I try to have my phone at the ready. Some times I just take pictures of random stuff, but others are more interesting.

I've found that it's pretty useful for me. If you see the set, you can almost notice a perceptible increase in quality of the photos. It may just be because I'm taking 2-3 photos per day and choosing the best one, or I may be actually improving in my photo-taking abilities. Hopefully by the end of the year, the set of mine will actually have more than 300 photos in it.

The idea of taking a picture a day is quite interesting to me, if only because if you asked me what I was doing last year this time, I would probably give you a general idea because my life is basically boring - I work in an office, even when I'm at school. This way I might have some idea or get reminded.

I do have a couple of kinks that I would like to work out when I'm doing it though - when I download my photos through Bluetooth using my phone, it sets all of the creation dates to the time that I transfer the photos instead of the time that I took the photos. This means that I need to fiddle with the "taken on" date when I finish uploading the pictures - there's no way to use the Flickr Uploadr to set the date. This, and the horrible VGA camera that I have in the phone make it tempting for me to buy a new phone with a better camera and tools for transferring. Also, some days I just stay in, and don't do anything interesting, so I don't have anything interesting or different to take a picture of. I'm thinking of just taking a self-portrait on those days, but I'm not sure that it would be interesting enough.

Growing up in Eugene, Oregon, which like Berkeley or Boulder could have the label "People's Republic of" applied to it, I always thought of "business friendly", as something along the lines of helping huge corporations avoid laws against pollution, or other antisocial behavior. Only after moving to Europe did I begin to get an idea of what the very positive side of "business friendly" is in the US. Truth be told, all countries tend to protect their 'big players' to some degree, be it the US propping up creaking airlines after September 11th, Italy finding various clever ways to get around rules about funding Fiat and Alitalia, or France finding it in their 'national interests' to discourage a potential bid for Danone (yogurt!) by PepsiCo. Some are better or worse (the UK has been pretty good about not interfering), but there is a tendency to want to intervene. Leaving be the discussion over whether those sorts of policies are good, bad, or ugly, the biggest difference between continental Europe and the US is the ease with which new companies - 'startups' can be created and enter a market. As a first hand example, I decided this summer to create DedaSys as a real company in order to better separate my business and personal financial dealings. Were I to do that in Italy or Austria, we would be talking about fees upwards of 3000 Euros (about 4000 dollars at market rates), which is a great deal of money for something that is not making a lot of it at this point in time. Contrast this with what it took to create a Limited Liability Company (LLC) in Oregon, my home state. To have things done up professionally, it's certainly possible to lay down a bit of cash there too, but by trading my time for money, and with the assistance of some nolo.com books about the creation and maintenance of an LLC, I was able to register DedaSys with the state of Oregon for the grand total of 55 dollars, and was actually able to complete the process remotely from Austria prior to going home on vacation, where I did the only thing I needed to do in person: open a bank account. So it costs 1% of what it costs in Italy or Austria to open a company that provides limited liability... a very impressive difference, especially to a small, new company that does not have the connections a Ford or a Fiat will likely have to enable it to deal with all the other paperwork, rules, and regulations to deal with. Add to that a culture of greater risk taking (meaning also more acceptance of failure), better funding opportunities, and... one comes to the conclusion that Paul Graham is right. It's a pity, because the people in Europe are top notch. In Italy alone, I know a bunch of really bright hackers. Granted, some of them aren't interested, and are probably better off not starting a company or otherwise dealing with the business side of the equation, but it's always nice to have that opportunity. In closing, here is another example of bureaucracy in action, from my personal on line journal about life in Italy, and now Austria, which I recently revamped by moving it to the Typo platform: Confronting the bureaucratic beast - registering an Italian domain Two months to accomplish what can be done in ten minutes with a .com!

I've just finished releasing new versions of all modules related to my Summer of Code project, the Bug Triage and Forward Tool. If my mentor doesn't find any serious bug, these will be the last releases under the SoC flag. Thanks again, Google, for this great program and the progress it brings to Free Software.

The releases:

bzutils 0.2:

• Announcement
• Source .tar.gz

btsutils 0.3:

• Announcement
• Source .tar.gz

bug-triage 0.2.2:

• Announcement
• Source .tar.gz

Debian packages should hit the archive as soon as they get evaluated and sponsored. Of course, a full status report will also be posted during the evaluation time.

How to get rid of most spam on Alioth mailing lists.

Until some Debian developer implements this idea in the BTS, the mailing list and in PTS, the quantities of spam that people get on the mail addresses they expose in the Debian world, the spam will keep on coming in huge quantities. I don't care that there will always be spam, I care that the amount of spam would be lower or probably nonexistent for one time sending (I sent just one mail to the BTS from two different mail addresses and it was enough to get huge amounts of spam on them).


The Debian Games Team's ML has suffered for a while, back in 2006, from spam bombing.
We thought that the easiest method to get rid of spam is to requires registration in order to be able to send mails to the list.

That was a big mistake because, as some people suspect, mails from the BTS needed to be allowed in and the reporters got an automated reply saying that the mail is waiting for approval, etc, etc - plain rude, people send you bug reports and you say "You are not listed, bla, bla bla". We changed the setting not to send any automatic reply and people were more content.

But still, we had to hand approve or white list valid mails/addresses. That worked for a while, but once the mail ended up on spammer lists, the thing blew out of proportions. We were desperate. We tweaked the settings of the lists in different ways, but in the end we ended up in having such a broken setup that we had to approve white listed addresses.

That did for me. I had to do something. So I started working on the ML setup and basically I did the following things to get rid of spam:

• anything coming from white listed mail addresses was approved
• black listed mails (bellsouth is one of those) is rejected (or should be)
• anything that came from the BTS (there are some nice headers that the BTS puts) and was evaluated as ham with a score of 0 (there is a field for that, too - some field has Spam=No, Score=...) was allowed
• anything that came from the BTS that was Spam=No with a score above 0 was held for moderation
• anything else is held for moderation

This solution allowed us to lighten the burden of manually white listing every email address that ever sent valid mails to the BTS and to focus only on real spam.

Try it your self on your lists, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Skype seems slowly to recover from yesterdays blackout.However, it doesn't look to me as if they've actually solved the problem. I assume they've just added a workaround (e.g. maybe using DNS to locate good servers?) that help recovering. At least when enough people download the new version.If you look at the graphs at Njanjan.to and 85qm.de, then they still look far from healthy.I'm not talking about the mere numbers - Skype reports about 3 Million users connected, which would mean 1 out of 3 regular users is back. But I'm talking about the shape of the curve. During regular operations, the curve used to be smooth. Which is easy to explain: by some million users going online and offline indepentenly, it all smoothens out. The curve goes up when people start working in a densely populated area and goes down when they go to bed. But if you look at the graphs for the past few hours parts of the Skype P2P network still appear to get disconnected and reconnected. They cerainly didn't flip a switch and people could connect again. The service still appears to be going up and down.To me, that indicates that they actually didn't solve the problem, but just found a way to make the problems not take down the whole network, while parts still drop off now and then.Just my guesses, though. And Skype will not tell the truth either, you bet. (You might want to skim over the presentation "Silver Needle In The Skype" [PDF], about the inner workings of Skype, their obfuscation technologies and how far they go at hiding what their software is actually doing)P.S. I've read in a blog that Skype might right now only allow one connection per IP. That would even more support the rumors that they're actually trying to defend against an attack on their network (and using the IP limit to slow down the attacks?)P.P.S. Another interesting note: the Skype stats on the Skype website report 5.5 Million connected users - my Skype client reports 3.7 Million. Which number is correct?

As the new version of Gnash (0.8.1) is probably going to be released in some weeks, I decided it was time to make some newer packages available. I’ve done a lot of changes on them, first of all I’ve removed all the library packages, as they don’t seem to make a lot of sense right now. There is still no gnash-dev package and will probably not be at least for a while. I’ve also made available different options of the program, right now one compiled with GTK+ and AGG, and another one with KDE and OpenGL. I might add newer ones in the future. I’m not really sure if those packages, or this approach, will end up in Debian’s repository yet, anyway, due to some reasons I cannot say here, but in any case it’s the first release of packages of Gnash I’m proud of, so I thought someone might be interested.

Something I often hear from people that talk about Linux on the desktop is this: people want to be able to go to the store, buy hardware, and be confident that it will Just Work.

I would like to point out that things are rarely this simple on Windows. And, in fact, things are often simpler on Linux these days.

Here's the example that prompted this post.

I have a computer that's about 4 years old. It's my main desktop machine at home. It was still fast enough for me, but has been developing all sorts of weird behaviors. Certain USB ports stopped working altogether a few months ago. Then it started hanging during POST whenever I'd try to reboot -- but would still boot OK about 80% of the time after a power cycle. Then it started randomly losing contact with my USB mouse until a reboot. And the last straw was when the display started randomly going out. I've told everyone that my machine has cancer and is slowly dying.

The case is a pretty nice full tower -- solid and sturdy. I have an 160GB IDE drive in it. So I figured I will upgrade the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and add a 500GB SATA drive since they're so cheap these days and I'm running out of space. I'd also have to buy a new video card since my old one was AGP and the new motherboard only has PCI Express for video. So about $700 later from Newegg (I got a Core 2 Duo E6750), the parts arrived.

I spent some time installing it all. The motherboard had only one IDE channel, and I didn't have any IDE cable long enough to connect both the IDE hard disk and the optical drive, so I popped in an old Maxtor/Promise PCI Ultra133 controller I had sitting around to use with the DVD burner.

Now, to recap, the hardware that the OS would see as new/different is: CPU, RAM, IDE controller, SATA controller, Promise IDE controller, integrated NIC, sound, video.

Then the magic smoke test.

I turned on the machine. Grub appeared. Linux started booting.

Even though I had switched from the default Debian "supports everything" kernel to a K7 kernel, it still booted.

And every single piece of hardware was supported immediately. There was no "add new hardware" wizard that popped up, no "I've found new hardware" boxes. It just worked, silently, with no need to tell me anything or have me click on anything.

Only one piece required configuration: the NIC, thanks to some udev design flaws (it got renamed from eth0 to eth1 by udev). That took 20 seconds. Debian saw the IDE HDD, the SATA drive, the Promise controller, the DVD burner, the video card, the sound, and it all worked automatically. And Debian is not even a distro that occurs to a lot of people when they think of great hardware support.

Now let's turn to Windows.

The Windows Nightmare

I have a legal copy of Windows XP Home that was preinstalled on the machine when I got it. I resized its partition down to about 20GB so that I could use 140GB for Linux. I use it rarely, primarily for gaming, and I've bought about 3 games in the last 4 years. I usually disconnect the network when I boot to Windows, though I do keep it current with updates.

I did some research on what Windows was going to do when I replace the hardware. The general consensus from people on the 'net is that you can't just replace a motherboard and expect everything to be happy. There were generally three different approaches suggested: 1) don't even try, just reinstall; 2) do a rescue install after you move over; and 3) use sysprep. The rescue install has to be done by booting from an XP install CD, then picking a rescue install option somewhere. It will overwrite your installed Windows with the version from the CD. That means that I'd have to re-apply SP2, though bits of it that didn't get overwritten would still be on the hard disk, and who knows what would happen to the registry.

Option #3 was to download sysprep (must have the Genuine Disadvantage ActiveX to get the free download from MS). Sysprep is designed to be used just prior to taking an image with ghost for replication. It removes the hardware-specific config (but not the drivers), as well as the product key, from the machine, but otherwise leaves it untouched. On the next boot, you get the "Welcome to XP" wizard.

One other strike against #2 is that Compaq "helpfully" didn't ship any install CDs with the machine. Under Windows, they did have a "create rescue CD" tool, which burned 7 CDs for me. But they are full Compaq-specific CDs, not one of them an XP CD, *AND* they check on boot to see if you're using the same Compaq motherboard, and exit if not. Highly useless.

So I went with sysprep. Before my new hardware even arrived, I downloaded the Windows drivers for all of it. I burned them to a CD, and installed as many as I could on the system in advance. About half of them refused to install since the new hardware wasn't there yet. I then took a raw image of the partition with dd, just in case. Finally, right before I swapped the hardware, I ran sysprep and let it shut down the machine.

So after the new hardware was installed came the adventure.

Windows booted to the "welcome to XP" thingy. The video, keyboard, mouse, and IDE HDD worked. That's about it.

I went through the "welcome to XP wizard". But the network didn't work yet, so I couldn't activate it. So I popped my handy driver CD in the drive. But what's this? Windows doesn't recognize the DVD drive because it doesn't have drivers for this Promise controller that came out in, what, 2001? Sigh. Downloaded the drivers with the imac, copy them to a CF card, plug the USB CF reader into Windows.

While I was doing that, about 6 "found new hardware" dialogs got queued up. Not one of them could actually find a driver for my hardware, but that didn't prevent Windows from making me click through them all.

So, install Promise driver from CF card, reboot. Click through new hardware dialogs again. Install network driver, reboot, click through dialogs. Install sound driver. Install Intel "chipset" driver, click through dialogs. Reboot. Install SATA driver. Reboot.

So the hardware appears to all be working by this point, though I have a Creative volume control (from the old hardware) and a Realtek one in the tray. Minor annoyance to deal with later.

Now I have to re-activate XP. I dutifully key in the magic string from the sticker on my case. Surprise surprise, the Internet-based activation fails because my hardware is different. So I have to call the 800 number. I have to read in 7 blocks of 6 digits, one block at a time. Then I answer some questions: have I activated Windows before, have I changed hardware, was the old hardware defective (yes, yes, and yes). Then I get 7 blocks of 6 digits read to me. Finally Windows is activated. PHEW! Why they couldn't ask those questions with the online tool is beyond me.

Anyhow. Linux took me 20 seconds to get working. Windows, about 2 hours, plus another 2 hours for prep and research.

I did zero prep for Linux. I made one config change (GUI users could have just configured their machine to use eth1).

Other cool Linux HW features

Say you buy a new printer and want to get it set up. On Windows, you insert the CD, let it install 200MB of print drivers plus ads plus crap plus add something to your taskbar plus who knows what else. Probably reboot. Then the printer might actually print.

On Debian, you plug in the printer to the USB port. You type printconf. 5 seconds later, your printer works.

I have been unpleasantly surprised lately by just how difficult hardware support in Windows really is, especially since everyone keeps saying how good it is. It's not good. Debian's is better, in my opinion.

Now that CUPS 1.3 has built in zeroconf support, it is easier than ever to provide print service to Windows machines. You don’t even need Samba anymore. Here’s a quick way to setup a CUPS print server and a Windows client: On the server side First you need to install CUPS 1.3 or higher on your print server and setup the printer (the web interface makes this task dead easy). Zeroconf isn’t enabled by default so you have to browse the CUPS admin page (http://localhost:631/admin if you’re running it on localhost) and enable the “Share published printers connected to this system” option. “Change Settings” will restart CUPS and your printer should be instantly visible to zeroconf-aware applications in the local network. If you can’t or don’t want to use the web interface (which is the easiest way though), you can edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and replace the line Listen localhost:631 with Port 631 and add the line BrowseAddress @LOCAL Now save the changes and restart CUPS and you’re done. On the client side Since most Linux distributions and MacOS support zeroconf out of the box, I’ll just explain how to setup the Windows client. On the Windows side you’ll need to install Bonjour for Windows which is freely available on apple.com. Bonjour for Windows will enable Multicast DNS (mDNS) and DNS based Service Discovery (DNS-SD) on your Windows machine. Once it is installed, you can start the printer helper application provided by bonjour which will guide you through the process of installing the network printer. The only problem here was that although it correctly identified my printer, it only let me chose between a generic postscript and a PCL driver. Both were not working correctly so I had to manually change the driver for this printer to HP LaserJet 4 Plus (which is my printer) after the setup via the printer properties, where all other printer drivers where available again. That’s it! Now you should be able to print on every zeroconf aware operating system connected to your network. Oh, one final warning: With this setup, everybody in the LAN will be able to print without prior authentication. This should be what you want in most cases when running a home LAN or a small business LAN anyways, but it’s certainly not so cool when strangers have access to your network. The whole setup process took like 15 minutes today. I remember me a few years ago, not being very experienced with Samba and CUPS wasting a whole weekend to achieve the same result. Thanks apple for making life a bit easier again!