I read an interesting post on Advogato about IT recruiting agencies (along with an interesting preface about medical treatment for broken ribs). Their report closely mirrored my experience in many ways. Here are what I consider to be the main points for a job applicant dealing with recruiters:

1. Ask more than you believe that you are worth - the worst they can do is say “no” (and you will feel like a fool if the agency pays you less than half what the client pays because you didn’t ask for enough).


2. Put lots of terms in your CV that will work for grep or other searches. A human who reads your CV will know that if you describe 3 years of Linux sys-admin experience that you can do BASH shell scripting and sys-admin work on other versions of Unix. But if a search doesn’t match it then the typical recruiting agent won’t offer you the position. I have idly considered saying things like “Perl (not Pearl) experience” to catch mis-spelled grep operations.


3. Recruiting agents will frequently demand that you re-write your CV to match a position that they have open, they will say things such as “you claim 3 years of shell scripting and Perl experience but I don’t see that on your CV” and insist that you re-write it to give more emphasis to that area.


4. Most recruiting agents are compulsive liars and don’t understand computers, you have to deal with the fact that to get most of the better paying positions you need to have an incompetent liar represent you. Avoid the stupid liars though. For example I once refused to deal with an agent who told me about his plans for stealing the CV database from the agency he worked for and selling it to another agency - not because he was shifty in every possible way, but because he was so stupid as to boast about such things immediately after meeting me on a train.


5. Expect that recruiting agents won’t understand the technology. If you politely and subtly offer to assist them in writing a letter to a client recommending you then they will often accept. Why would they go to the effort of assessing your skills and writing a short letter to the client describing how good you are when you can do that for them? On one particularly amusing occasion I was applying for a position with IBM and the recruiting agent had been supplied with a short quiz of technical skills to assess all applicants - they gave me the answer sheet and asked me to self-assess (I got 100% - but it was an easy test and I would have got the same result anyway).


6. Some levels of stupidity are so great that you should avoid dealing with the agent (and possibly the agency that employs them). Being unable to view a HTML file is one criteria I have used since 1999 (every OS since about 1998 came with a web browser built in). Another example is an agent who tried to convince me that “.au” is not a valid suffix for an email address (I was applying for a sys-admin job with an ISP). Job adverts that mis-spell terms (such as Perl spelled at Pearl) are also a warning sign.


7. Gossip is important to your business! Some agencies will pay you what you earn and merely terminate your contract when things go wrong. Other agencies will refuse to pay you when things go bad, or even demand that paid money be returned and threaten legal action. Talk to other contract workers in your region and learn the goss about the bad agencies. Also track agency name changes, when a bad agency changes name don’t be fooled.

When applying for a position advertised by an agency you will ideally start by seeing an advert with a phone number and an email address. The best strategy in that case seems to be to send your CV with a brief cover letter and then about 5 minutes after your mail server sends the message to their mail server you phone them. I found that I got a significantly higher success rate (in terms of having the agent send my CV to the client) if I phoned them when my CV arrived. Sometimes a fax number is advertised, unless there is some problem that prevents sending a document via email (such as the agency having a broken mail server) then do not FAX them. A faxed document will have to be faxed on to the client and will look bad after the double-fax operation and will prevent the agent from grepping it. Rumor has it that agents will often post fake adverts for the purpose of collecting CVs (so that they can boast to clients In most situations a recruiting agent should insist on meeting you for an interview before sending your CV to a client. The only exception is if you are applying for a job in another country. Meeting an agent at a restaurant or other public place is not uncommon (often they want to meet you while travelling between other locations and sometimes their main office is not in a good location). I suspect that some agencies start with a “virtual office” and perform all their interviews in public places (this doesn’t mean that they will do a worse job than the more established agencies). If an agent is prepared to recommend you to a client without meeting you then they are not doing their job properly. It used to be that there were enough agencies pretending to do their job that you could ignore the agencies that will recommend any unseen candidate. But now an increasing number of agencies do this and if you want a contract you may have to deal with them. When an agency has a fancy office keep in mind that they paid for it by taking money from people like you! For contract work a recruiting agent is not your friend, they make their money by getting you to accept less money than the client pays them - the less they pay you the more money they make. A common claim is “we only take a fixed percentage of what the client pays”, but when you ask what that percentage is they refuse to answer - I guess that the fixed percentage is 50% or as close to it as they can manage.

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September 17.

Andrew Cowie, talking about Orthogonal Patches, believes that having your revision control system assume that patches which are the same text is the same is a good thing:

If X = B [in the java equals() sense], and if Z = D..E, it's no problem, because when the day comes that X and Z are merged to some branch which happens to be the public mainline, and you later pull from that public branch, then X and B will "contend" and merge without conflict, and likewise Z will merge without conflict. It's all the same text. Mission accomplished.

If you think this is right, "think about two different patches each adding a new keyword and also changing the line #define NUM_OF_KEYWORDS 17'' to #define NUM_OF_KEYWORDS 18''." (example taken from the darcs manual, because I'm not going to come up with a better example than that).

Some weeks ago we started developing KTrace, a graphical KDE frontend for strace. We quickly managed to have something which worked, but development stalled after that. Today we are holding the first KTrace developers meeting to make some decisions about the next features that will be coded. If you want to propose a feature that you would like to see in KTrace (or just a better name proposal), feel free to write a comment

These days I tries to remaster ?OpenSuse 10.2 in order to put several own packages onto the DVD and customise some settings here for Oscar. This DVD should install itself without any questions correctly configured. First of all, the only way to control the autoinstallation is to use autoyast. And in order to use autoyast you've to create an xml file which specific settings in it. ?OpenSuse has an own tool for creation of this xml file: Start ?YaST2 and select the Autoyast module there and then create a reference profile from the running system. (Then simply save this file created by autoyast itself and perform an xml check on this file... you'll see that this check will raise errors.. argh Okay. the next thing is: If you want to use the autoyast gui to select additional packages, your package selection from the last time is purged... so you must every time the complete bunch of packages.... this sucks! Mh... let's see how this will continue.. but I know that remastering a Debian DVD is much easier

After getting Ethernet Bonding working (see my previous post) I tried to get it going with a bridge for Xen. I used the following in /etc/network/interfaces to configure the bond0 device and to make the Xen bridge device xenbr0 use the bond device: iface bond0 inet manual
pre-up modprobe bond0
pre-up ifconfig bond0 up
hwaddress ether 00:02:55:E1:36:32
slaves eth0 eth1 auto xenbr0
iface xenbr0 inet static
pre-up ifup bond0
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
bridge_ports bond0 But things didn’t work well. A plain bond device worked correctly in all my tests, but when I had a bridge running over it I had problems every time I tried pulling cables. My test for a bond is to boot the machine with a cable in eth0, then when it’s running switch the cable to eth1. This means there is a few seconds of no connectivity and then the other port becomes connected. In an ideal situation at least one port would work at all times - but redundancy features such as bonding are not for an ideal situation! When doing the cable switching test I found that the bond device would often get into a state where it every two seconds (the configured ARP ping time for the bond) it would change it’s mind about the link status and have the link down half the time (according to the logs - according to ping results it was down all the time). This made the network unusable. Now I have deided that Xen is more important than bonding so I’ll deploy the machine without bonding. One thing I am considering for next time I try this is to use bridging instead of bonding. The bridge layer will handle multiple Ethernet devices, and if they are both connected to the same switch then the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is designed to work in this way and should handle it. So instead of having a bond of eth0 and eth1 and running a bridge over that I would just bridge eth0, eth1, and the Xen interfaces.

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After getting Ethernet Bonding working (see my previous post) I tried to get it going with a bridge for Xen. I used the following in /etc/network/interfaces to configure the bond0 device and to make the Xen bridge device xenbr0 use the bond device: iface bond0 inet manual
pre-up modprobe bond0
pre-up ifconfig bond0 up
hwaddress ether 00:02:55:E1:36:32
slaves eth0 eth1 auto xenbr0
iface xenbr0 inet static
pre-up ifup bond0
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
bridge_ports bond0 But things didn’t work well. A plain bond device worked correctly in all my tests, but when I had a bridge running over it I had problems every time I tried pulling cables. My test for a bond is to boot the machine with a cable in eth0, then when it’s running switch the cable to eth1. This means there is a few seconds of no connectivity and then the other port becomes connected. In an ideal situation at least one port would work at all times - but redundancy features such as bonding are not for an ideal situation! When doing the cable switching test I found that the bond device would often get into a state where it every two seconds (the configured ARP ping time for the bond) it would change it’s mind about the link status and have the link down half the time (according to the logs - according to ping results it was down all the time). This made the network unusable. Now I have deided that Xen is more important than bonding so I’ll deploy the machine without bonding. One thing I am considering for next time I try this is to use bridging instead of bonding. The bridge layer will handle multiple Ethernet devices, and if they are both connected to the same switch then the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is designed to work in this way and should handle it. So instead of having a bond of eth0 and eth1 and running a bridge over that I would just bridge eth0, eth1, and the Xen interfaces.

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Once again I'm working on furthering the creation of the NVIDIA packaging team. I already have 2 members plus myself but I am seeking people who will help with the ever growing legacy packages. Please email rdonald@debian.org with your interests if you want to help even if in other areas.

I have previously blogged about Ethernet bonding on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now I have a need to do the same thing on Debian Etch - to have multiple Ethernet links for redundancy so that if one breaks the system keeps working. The first thing to do on Debian is to install the package ifenslave-2.6 which provides the utility to manage the bond device. Then create the file /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond with the following contents for a network that has 10.0.0.1 as either a reliable host or important router. Note that this will use ARP to ping the router every 2000ms, you could use a lower value for a faster failover or a higher value
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=1 arp_interval=2000 arp_ip_target=10.0.0.1 If you want to monitor link status then you can use the following options line instead, however I couldn’t test this because the MII link monitoring doesn’t seem to work correctly on my hardware (there are many Ethernet devices that don’t work well in this regard):
options bond0 mode=0 miimon=100 Then edit the file /etc/network/interfaces and inset something like the following (as a replacement for the configuration of eth0 that you might currently be using). Note that XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX must be replaced by the hardware address of one of the interfaces that are being bonded or by a locally administered address (see this Wikipedia page for details). If you don’t specify the Ethernet address then it will default to the address of the first interface that is enslaved. This might not sound like a problem, however if the machine boots and a hardware failure is experienced which makes the primary Ethernet device not visible to the OS (IE the PCI card is dead but not killing the machine) then the hardware address of the bond would change, this might cause problems with other parts of your network infrastructure.
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1 There is some special support for bonding in the Debian ifup and ifdown utilities. The following will give the same result as the above in /etc/network/interfaces:
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether 00:02:55:E1:36:32
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
slaves eth0 eth1 The special file /proc/net/bonding/bond0 can be used to view the current configuration of the bond0 device. In theory it should be possible to use bonding on a workstation with DHCP, but in my brief attempts I have not got it working - any comments from people who have this working would be appreciated. The first pre-requisite of doing so is to use either MII monitoring or broadcast (mode 3), I experimented with using options bond0 mode=3 in /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond but found that it took too long to get the bond working and dhclient timed out. Thanks for the howtoforge.com article and the linuxhorizon.ro article that helped me discover some aspects of this. Update: Thanks to Guus Sliepen on the debian-devel mailing list for giving an example of the slaves directive as part of an example of bridging and bonding in response to this question.

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I have previously blogged about Ethernet bonding on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now I have a need to do the same thing on Debian Etch - to have multiple Ethernet links for redundancy so that if one breaks the system keeps working. The first thing to do on Debian is to install the package ifenslave-2.6 which provides the utility to manage the bond device. Then create the file /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond with the following contents for a network that has 10.0.0.1 as either a reliable host or important router. Note that this will use ARP to ping the router every 2000ms, you could use a lower value for a faster failover or a higher value
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=1 arp_interval=2000 arp_ip_target=10.0.0.1 If you want to monitor link status then you can use the following options line instead, however I couldn’t test this because the MII link monitoring doesn’t seem to work correctly on my hardware (there are many Ethernet devices that don’t work well in this regard):
options bond0 mode=0 miimon=100 Then edit the file /etc/network/interfaces and inset something like the following (as a replacement for the configuration of eth0 that you might currently be using). Note that XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX must be replaced by the hardware address of one of the interfaces that are being bonded or by a locally administered address (see this Wikipedia page for details). If you don’t specify the Ethernet address then it will default to the address of the first interface that is enslaved. This might not sound like a problem, however if the machine boots and a hardware failure is experienced which makes the primary Ethernet device not visible to the OS (IE the PCI card is dead but not killing the machine) then the hardware address of the bond would change, this might cause problems with other parts of your network infrastructure.
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1 There is some special support for bonding in the Debian ifup and ifdown utilities. The following will give the same result as the above in /etc/network/interfaces:
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether 00:02:55:E1:36:32
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
slaves eth0 eth1 The special file /proc/net/bonding/bond0 can be used to view the current configuration of the bond0 device. In theory it should be possible to use bonding on a workstation with DHCP, but in my brief attempts I have not got it working - any comments from people who have this working would be appreciated. The first pre-requisite of doing so is to use either MII monitoring or broadcast (mode 3), I experimented with using options bond0 mode=3 in /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond but found that it took too long to get the bond working and dhclient timed out. Thanks for the howtoforge.com article and the linuxhorizon.ro article that helped me discover some aspects of this. Update: Thanks to Guus Sliepen on the debian-devel mailing list for giving an example of the slaves directive as part of an example of bridging and bonding in response to this question.

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Here's what I wrote on other people's sites last week:

Drake.org.uk: Welcome back..

MartynD reboots his blog yet again. This time with added eyetests.

Two Questions for All Serious Free Software Contributors

I answered, as did many others.

ProBlogger Redesign - Bedding Down for the Night

Much easier-to-read, but I still had an enhancement suggestion.

Blowing bubbles niq's soapbox

Comment on house-building and house-owning in England today.

gravityboy: This Is My Good Free Software Experience

I think the GPL is useful for things other than programs and CC is confusing about DRM for everything.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho I am going to rank MJ Ray low from now on

Commented more on my blog, but also directly. The criticism might be fairer if the SPI ballot were secret, but it isn't.

WEBlog -- Wouter's Eclectic Blog - Voting tactics

Is this about SPI? How is IRV broken?

Constitutional amendment: reduce the length of DPL election process

Amending the amendment proposal - got enough seconds to reach the ballot, for a change.

Amendment to: reduce the length of DPL election process

This one doesn't look like it will get onto the ballot. Informative subthread on combination of amendments.

Here's some of what I read last week:

talks with Linus Torvalds

He's much ruder than I am, but can get away with it because he's done more.

The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Richard Stallman - Edward O'Connor

He's much ruder than I am, but doesn't get away with it because he's done more.

Mayor wants London to copy Paris bike rentals News This is London

I saw those bikes in Paris. Seemed like a good idea.

Parisian-style hire bicycles to beat London traffic jams - Independent Online Edition > Transport

Slightly inaccurate report.

Hacking gadflies: Open Document Format

It's almost September again.

dgh: Bike power

Interesting idea.

apenwarr's log

quite a funny letter to google

Bristol Climate Protesters En-Route to Camp

My legs hurt after cycling only 6 miles yesterday. Not sure what I did wrong.

The Weston Mercury - Call to 'have a say' on the future of Britain

Pensioners to save country. Or not.

BBC NEWS Technology UN's website breached by hackers

Can't be bothered to check netcraft.

Little's Log: North Norfolk Councillor defects to UKIP

Little's still raging against the media.

I'm worried that my Debian Planet credentials are a bit weak, so have a technical post rather than one discussing the fact I'm unemployed in 3 days, or that I'm going back to NI for a week after that to try and get the new house sorted. Oh. Wait. Ooops. Anyway. While I still have easy datacentre access to my colo box (the.earth.li) I thought it might be a good time to think about upgrading it. The most limited resource has been disk space; it was a Dell 2550, so dual PIII-1GHz + 2GB RAM which is nice, but SCSI hotswap drive bays. So nice disk, but anything large is expensive. I think SATA has come along nicely, so was happy to change over to using that instead. As it turned out the old machine was over 5 years old (doesn't time fly!) so there's been a disk performance boost anyway from using new technology. I ended up buying the new machine from Sentral - their website isn't great, but they're very helpful by email and Black Cat had bought machines from them in the past with no problems. It's a Core2Duo E6600 with 4GB RAM and 2 * 750GB Seagate ES SATA II drives in hot swap bays. I pondered a quad core chip and an extra drive (there are 4 bays total), but decided I didn't really need them at present and keeping power consumption down was a good idea. Last time I upgraded the I just did a straight copy of the data over to the new disks. This time there were a couple of things that meant I didn't want to do this. Firstly, I decided to go 64 bit. The chip can do it, I have 4GB RAM, it seemed like a good idea. That meant a dpkg --get-selections on the old box followed by a dpkg --set-selections on the new one, followed by an apt-get dselect-upgrade. Is there a way I could have kept my aptitude knowledge about auto installed packages? I did have a look, but didn't see anything obvious. That gave me the same packages. I also installed ia32-libs to ease the transition for my users who had self compiled bits. Then I had to copy the rest of the data over. /home was easy enough, plus a few other filesystems that didn't have packaged data on them. I manually reviewed changes in /etc but there wasn't anything non obvious thankfully. /var was trickier. I was pleased to discover that Mailman config appears to cross archs quite happily. A pg_dumpall did the trick for PostgreSQL. Rebuilding the overview database for inn took all night. Maybe I should move away from tradspool. There were a few other things to fix up (I hate Berkeley DB), but by and large it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Oh, except that copying that much data across takes a long time. And rsync isn't that much help when the data includes lots of mail folders, some of which are over 1G big (and receiving mail, so constantly changing). I'd started out with a 100M link between the old and new machines, as I hit the e1000 Tx Unit Hang bug. Disabling the power management solved that, giving a 1G link. Still took ages. The second major change with the new box is I've decided to go Xen. That should let me hand out machine slices to users who want to do weird stuff, without me really having to support them. And allow me to throw up test machines when I need to. This was actually really easy to install. I did a basic etch install onto a 2G partition, installed xen-linux-system-2.6.18-4-xen-amd64 and then rebooted and had a dom0 up and running. I gave the main VDS (ie replacement the) a 600G partition, access to both processor cores and 2G of RAM - ie still quite a few more resources than it used to have. Then it got a bit tricky. I wanted lvm to be available within the VDS. So I did all the VG creation and a base install (using debootstrap) from the dom0, then added a filter to /etc/lvm/lvm.conf to exclude /dev/md2 (the 600G partition). And tried to boot the domU. Which was fine, until it tried to mount the root fs at which point the initramfs complained it couldn't find / and bombed out to a shell. The confusing bit was that doing vgcreate -a y found and brought up the lvm partitions fine, at which point the rest of the boot process would complete. Very odd. Much digging eventually led me to discover that the LVM initramfs script only gets run if the specified root partition has a - in it. Argh! I prefer the format /dev/<vgname>/<lvname>, but once I changed to /dev/mapper/<vgname>-<lvname> it all worked fine. The new machine has been in service for the past week and so far it all seems fine. I don't notice the fact it's a Xen instance and it still feels quite nippy. Plus the extra disk space is great as I don't have to worry so much about things getting full. Yet. I haven't noticed a change with the 64 bit side either, but I think on a server that's going to be much more the case - I haven't moved my desktop to 64 bit primarily due to the lack of Flash and Java plugins (I don't see the point of a chroot as there's not really a pressing reason to go 64 bit if it's going to be hassle). I threw up another domU instance to test out some bits and that went smoothly too (I'm using an LVM VG on the dom0 to share out to the other domUs, which will all have a less complicated setup than the main one). So all in all I'm pleased with both the hardware, and the software - I hadn't expected setting it up to be so easy. My last Xen experience was under sarge where it hadn't all been integrated in the same way as it is under etch. Oh, one other thing I did; I rebuilt the AMD64 netinst Etch CD to output to the serial console for both isolinux and the actual installer. And then did the install over the serial console, even though the machine was beside me. The CD is still in the machine which means that I have a fallback if it all falls over horribly - I can access the BIOS, tell the machine to boot from CD and then hopefully prod and see what the issue is. Or even do a complete reinstall if necessary. It was surprising easy to modify - I just had to edit isolinux/isolinux.cfg and add SERIAL 0 9600 at the start and then console=ttyS0,9600 cdrom-detect/eject=false to the append lines for kernel parameters. Definitely worth considering if you have a colo box properly serial consoled up.

Recently I've been using Remember the Milk to remind me to do stuff. In the past I had used the service briefly on my search for an online GTD tool. I discarded it because it was too hard then to add new lists, which I had planned to use for each project. I also was turned off by it because I wasn't keen on requiring the Internet to work.

A couple of events has recently made this decision change. The first thing that happened was my addition of messaging to my cell phone plan. I did it mainly to interact with Twitter while I was on the road. It's something I never saw myself using before, but now that I am, it is really nifty and I can see why people use it from their phones.

However, with their recent introduction of a Twitter bot, it is now much more useful. The bot lets me add things to my Inbox list from anywhere, unchaining me from the Internet. All I have to do is text 'd rtm whatever' to twitter and it automatically adds a item to my inbox, which is where I keep everything I need to do. I have it setup as a template in my phone, so that I can even avoid typing the 'd rtm ' part. Remember The Milk also has notification settings for phones, so at the beginning of the day it will message me with the things due that day. Having it turned on reminds me to do most things, because I check my phone quite often, even though I don't get any calls.

I've stopped trying to use the lists for separate projects. I now use the Inbox as a main list, not caring how long it gets. I also have separate lists for categories of things that I'd like to do, but I don't care what order or when they get done. For example, I have a list for the pizza places that Diana and I might go to on our pizza place tour of the cities. I also have a list of cheaper and more expensive restaurants that we haven't been to, so when we want to go out to eat somewhere but can't decide where, we can just grab one off of the list. Remember the milk is particularly decent for lists like the two described because you can associate a geographical location with any element on a list, so I can see where the restaurants are instead of having to look them up.

There is one special list that I keep which isn't of the two types above - the projects list. This is the list of projects that I have committed myself to. It has one entry for each project, with a note on each entry explaining the past-tense result of the project. It is used in my weekly review, in order to populate the list if I have for some reason marked off a part of the project and not added a task for the next action in the project. I find that it keeps me honest because I can't mark off something from here until the past-tense description has actually come true.

Generally my workflow now goes like this. I add the task to my Inbox list either from the road or from the web interface. Then it gets moved to a special list if it is of a special class like the "Eating out" or "Pizza Places" lists. If it has more than three or four steps, I will put it on the project list instead and create a new task on the Inbox list that is doable and is the logical next action for the list. When I do something, it gets crossed off the list and then I go on to the next item. I know that if I don't have anything left to do on that day in remember the milk, I can just do random stuff from farther down on the list without a due date.

I've been doing this for a couple weeks now and its working out just fine. I was happy to have everything work out together so that I could use Twitter and Remember the milk, and I am being more productive than any other system that I've tried. This may just be an example of Using What Works. I thought I would share just in case it can help someone else find their workflow to get things done.

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1. ewtikins: Thank you for this! I will definitely look into it. I have been trying to figure out a way to use online list-making and todo-list facilities without being unable to edit when I'm away from internet for a while, and this sounds like it might just do the trick.
   #1 2007-08-13 01:19 (Reply)

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I recently bought a Fujitsu-Siemens LIFEBOOK S-4572 (sub)notebook on eBay for less than 150 Euros, a really great little machine. It's a Pentium III, 750 MHz, 256 MB RAM (the chipset cannot handle more than that unfortunately), 12.1" screen, ethernet, 2x USB 1.1, CD-ROM/DVD reader + CD-ROM writer, PCMCIA, IrDA, modem, and a 15 GB hard drive. No floppy, no serial ports, no parallel port. There's no wireless builtin, but I use a cheapo PCMCIA adapter. The greatest feature compared to all other laptops I previously owned is that the battery life is really great, it lasts almost 3 hours (compare that to 45 minutes on my current "main" laptop). I'm running Debian unstable on the box (of course). Here's the Linux support status as far as I have tested things: Networking Works out of the box using the e100 driver. Sound Works out of the box using the snd_intel8x0 driver. X11 Works out of the box, using either the vesa or the ati driver (at a max. resolution of 1024x768). Touchpad Works out of the box. Using the Option "SHMConfig" "on" line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf's InputDevice section (using the synaptics driver) also works fine and allows you to scroll using the touchpad, e.g. in a browser. More info in the SynapticsTouchpad page on the Debian wiki. CDROM, DVD Reading CD-ROMs and DVDs as well as burning CD-ROMs works fine. I don't think the drive is capable of writing DVDs. External VGA Displaying the screen contents on an external VGA monitor (or beamer) works just fine, switching is done using Fn+F10. PCMCIA Works fine, tested using the Sitecom WL-112 wireless card. The driver installation for that is straight-forward, too:

$ apt-get install rt2500-source
$ m-a a-i rt2500-source
$ dpkg -i /usr/src/rt2500*deb

Special keys All the Fn-keys work fine (brightness, volume, etc.). There are five other special keys (for starting a browser or something) which I haven't tested, but I don't really care... USB Works fine, but it's only USB 1.1, so some higher-speed devices will not work (DVB-T USB devices for example; PCMCIA DVB-T adapters might work). IrDA, Modem Untested, I don't care. Powersaving, Suspend to RAM It seems this CPU (Pentium III, Coppermine) doesn't support frequency scaling, so cpufreq-set doesn't work. I'm using laptop-mode-tools to improve battery life a bit more, though. Also, Suspend-to-RAM works fine out of the box:

$ apt-get install hibernate
$ hibernate-ram

I haven't tested Suspend-to-Disk yet, but I'm not sure it'll work anyway, as I'm using a dm-crypt'ed disk (+ LVM), as with all my boxes. lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 82440MX Host Bridge [8086:7194] (rev 01)
00:00.1 Multimedia audio controller [0401]: Intel Corporation 82440MX AC'97 Audio Controller [8086:7195]
00:00.2 Modem [0703]: Intel Corporation 82440MX AC'97 Modem Controller [8086:7196]
00:07.0 Bridge [0680]: Intel Corporation 82440MX ISA Bridge [8086:7198] (rev 01)
00:07.1 IDE interface [0101]: Intel Corporation 82440MX EIDE Controller [8086:7199]
00:07.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82440MX USB Universal Host Controller [8086:719a]
00:07.3 Bridge [0680]: Intel Corporation 82440MX Power Management Controller [8086:719b]
00:12.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] [8086:1229] (rev 09)
00:13.0 CardBus bridge [0607]: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6933/711E1 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller [1217:6933] (rev 02)
00:13.1 CardBus bridge [0607]: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6933/711E1 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller [1217:6933] (rev 02)
00:14.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility P/M [1002:4c52] (rev 64)
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: RaLink RT2500 802.11g Cardbus/mini-PCI [1814:0201] (rev 01)

Other resources

• Linux on a Fujitsu Siemens S-4572 notebook
• Linux on the Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S-4572 Laptop
• LCO's Notebook: Fujitsu-Siemens S Series Lifebook S-4572
• FreeBSD on the Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S-4572
• Gentoo on Fujitsu Siemens s4572

I'm really considering making this my "main" box even though it's a bit older/slower, as my current laptop with 45 minutes battery life is a major pain when travelling...

One thing i love about munin is the simpleness with which you can enhance it. I got a new ADSL Modem for my internet connection a few days ago, as I will upgrade the connection soon and the old stuff wouldn’t be able to handle the new settings. And this new modem appears to have a webinterface. Totally useless with a password protection - you can’t do anything there, just look at one info screen. Well, this screen provides a summary of the connection, which is the connection speed, signal noise ratio and attenuation, splitted by up- and downlink. Getting nice munin graphs out of this is plain simple. I bet it could be done without the additional perl module usage, but I didn’t care about that, its simple enough the way it is and just works: In case you got one of those “Telekom Speedport 200” AKA “Tecom Tiny Bridge DSL Modem” too you may want to fetch the script and have fun. Just link it into the munin plugins dir as dsl_[rate snr attenuation] and restart munin-node. A few mins later graphs should appear. In case you improve it (its a quick hack only) I would love to get some patches. :)

When I got myself a widescreen LCD monitor, it didn't quite work as expected. The image showed up on the screen, but squeezed down to the wrong format. Fixing it was not trivial. Apparently, X uses the video mode supplied by the monitor through EDID, but the video mode is wrong. Whether this is because the monitor sends the wrong information, or because of a limitation in the EDID format, I don't know. Anyway, here's how I got it working. Note that I have an Intel graphics card and I use the new "intel" video driver. It might not work for your particular configuration. First, I generated a modeline with the cvt command. CVT means "Coordinated Video Timing", and it's some kind of VESA standard. Run the cvt command with the horizontal and vertical resolution as arguments:

$ cvt 1680 1050
# 1680x1050 59.95 Hz (CVT 1.76MA) hsync: 65.29 kHz; pclk: 146.25 MHz
Modeline "1680x1050_60.00"  146.25  1680 1784 1960 2240  1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync

Now, put the modeline in the Monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "Generic Monitor"
    # 1680x1050 59.95 Hz (CVT 1.76MA) hsync: 65.29 kHz; pclk: 146.25 MHz
    Modeline "1680x1050_60.00"  146.25  1680 1784 1960 2240  1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync
    #
    Option "Preferred Mode" "1680x1050_60.00"
EndSection

The Preferred Mode option is needed so that the mode is actually chosen. In my case, I have a laptop, so there's also a built-in display, but the mode will not be used on it (the card knows the supported resolutions somehow). In order to be able to switch to a higher resolution when initially using a lower one, the framebuffer needs to be initialized to be big enough. This can be done in the Display subsection:

Section "Screen"
    ...
    SubSection "Display"
        Virtual 1680 1050
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Here's an interesting thing: the old Modes directives are not needed anymore. They are ignored by the intel driver. You only need one generic Display subsection. That's about it. The display should work automatically if it is connected when X is started. If it is connected afterwards, you can enable it with:

xrandr --output VGA --auto

It can be disabled with:

xrandr --output VGA --off

At least when running Gnome, the window manager automatically fits everything to the right screen size. See the xrandr(1) manual page for more options.

Reading this and the AdiumX wiki it seems like MSN is censoring IM on the server-side.

However trying with ak who is actually using Adium X this seem to be bullshit^WFUD since our little .info test conversation worked flawlessly.

"According to communications director of MSN Sweden, Jessica B rjel, this is being done to protect users against exploits and worms spreading through the MSN Messenger service."

According to what I know about big companies they make official statements, not just some foobar in a private mail. So can someone please enlighten me?

Anyway, stop crying guys, there are better alternatives.

UPDATE: They really censor!
It seems to be no FUD, it seems to be true. But it's not just the .info keyword but the whole URL. So if you send http://test.info/download.php?foo=bar this will be blocked. At least you get an error message in AdiumX, in centericq/im you don't get one
Shame on Microsoft yet another time, especially for this lame approach of muddling security with obscurity, but as said there are better alternatives

James Purser writes about the current plans for Internet filtering in Australia and concentrates on the technical issues (whether it will degrade the ISP service) and the issue of who’s moral standards should be enforced for the entire country. But the fact is that children have never had any problem accessing porn. When I was in grade 4 at primary school (~9yo) a group of boys decided to walk to the local shopping centre at lunch-time and I joined them. At the shopping centre the other boys read Playboy (that was before such magazines were required to be displayed in sealed plastic bays). I didn’t read Playboy because there were some electronics magazines that were more interesting. When in grade 6 (~11yo) a friend told me about his parents video collection which featured fellatio and sodomy. I don’t recall whether he offered to show me the videos but being a good friend I’m sure he would have done so if I had asked. In the early years of high school some boys ran a black-market for second-hand porn magazines (ick), they also sold new magazines that were significantly more expensive. When in year 12 digital porn was just becoming popular and the exchange of porn on floppy disk began. I’m sure that now children use USB sticks to exchange porn that they get from the Internet or other sources. When I was in year 10 a female dancing instructor ceased working for the school after an up-skirt picture of her was stuck on a notice-board (I guess that her resignation was related to the picture but can’t be sure). The evidence that I witnessed while at school is that 15yo boys are prepared to photograph unwilling women and exchange the pictures, and that the exchange and sale of all manner of porn is not uncommon at school (including primary school). I don’t think that the schools I attended were in any way unusual in this regard. When I was at school cameras were large. Unless you had a polaroid camera (which was even larger) the film had to be developed - and the staff at the photo company were potential witnesses. I expect that these factors significantly decreased the amount of such activity. Now a significant portion of children have a mobile phone and it seems that a built-in camera is a standard feature in all new phones now. Digital cameras (which have much better quality than phone-cameras) are becoming quite cheap. It’s widely regarded that giving a teenager a mobile phone is good for their safety (and it certainly makes it easier to discover where children claim to be) and it’s also widely regarded that a digital camera is a good toy (babies as young as 2 are often given the old camera when their parents get a new one). We should expect that the number of children who have digital cameras to rapidly approach 100% of children who desire them. Given these factors it seems to me that it would be a good idea to allow teenage boys access to better quality porn than they are unable to produce (with either willing or unwilling subjects). It has already been shown that increased access to porn reduces the incidence of rape. I expect that the same also applies to the issue of making porn, people who have good access to porn will be less inclined to make their own. There is some nasty porn out there. If they were to try and prevent access to porn that is illegal under Australian law (IE pictures of children, animals, rape, etc) then I don’t think that anyone would object. But preventing access to soft porn such as Playboy (which is so tame that it’s hardly porn by modern standards) is a really bad idea if it will increase the risk of up-skirt photos and the production of child rape movies. Let’s be sensible and accept the fact that children who want to see porn will see it and focus our attention on what type of porn will be seen by children and whether the “actors” are consenting adults. PS I spent several years living in Amsterdam and working as a sys-admin for ISPs there.

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When debugging window managers or testing your X applications in other window managers, running them in an dedicated fake X server can be quite nice. While every reasonable complete window manager (even the old twm and vtwm can, and of course all of fvwm, qvwm, wmaker, ratpoison, ...) can replace itself with any other, running a window manager in a window of its own makes many things easier: single-stepping a window manager within a debugger when that debugger runs in an Xterm on the same server is no fun. And if some testing needs a more complicated setting, switching may destroy that. And it is just more comfortable to have the editor handled by your favorite WM, while you need another WM to test some aspects of an program. (It&aposs hard to see if inital sizes and layouts work well, when your WM does allow windows to choose their size. And if your WM does not have a bug another has, it&aposs easier to test a work around in the other than trying to port the bug ;-> )

So, here is some example invocation I use:

     #!/bin/sh
     Xephyr :2 -reset -terminate -screen 580x724 -nolisten tcp -xkbmap ../../../../../home/brl/.mystuff/dekeymap -auth ~/.Xauthority &
     export DISPLAY=:2
     icewm
     

Which Options are useful depends on what to use it for:

-reset -terminate means to terminate when the last child exited. This is usefull if you want it go away fast. Not usefull if you want to switch window managers without other clients running.

-screen 580x724 tells how big the window should be. This is just the size of one of my working frames, so it integrates well into my workspace. (It would be nice if Xephyr could change its resolution uppon resize of the window, though i fear programs will either be confused when the size of their X server changes unadvertised or because of too many advertisements of its changing).

-nolisten tcp as there i no need to let the world speak to your X server

-xkbmap ../../../../../home/brl/.mystuff/dekeymap I gave up figuring out how to select a German keyboard, so it justs gets 8 lines of fake description only specifing German keyboard.

-auth ~/.Xauthority tells Xephyr to require authentication. Without this everyone is allowed to control your sub X-server and all programs within it. Don&apost forget to create an token before with xauth add, though.