It's been one of those days.

It started with me forgetting my laptop bag at home. Then I had to work with an attorney on some things. He's a nice guy, and does a good job, but you know, it's not what I'd really like to spend my day doing.

Then in the middle of the afternoon, I hung up the phone and checked my email. About 50 messages from Samba telling me that processes with various PIDs had crashed unexpectedly. Uh-oh. I think we still have some 80ish people using that.

About a minute later, a coworker says, "John, I've been bad." "Is that why I just got 50 emails from Samba?" "No. Well, yes. Well, maybe. I don't know."

It turned out he was working on a restore from tape that, out of necessity, grabbed more data than he needed. He meant to type rm -r ./var but typed rm -r /var instead. Oops. He hit Ctrl-C halfway through, so /var was still there enough to send email but not enough for Samba (or, apparently, NFS) to work.

As he dashed off to pull yesterday's tapes from offsite storage, I prepared the restore and made a plan. We hadn't installed any software since yesterday, so I restored var to a temporary location, took the server down into single-user mode, overwrote the /var that still existed, and rebooted the Xen instance in question. Everything back to normal. Except, that is, for the potentially dozens of users that will require assistance running SCANPST.EXE because their Outlook PST, being the fragile heap of garbage that it is, will have somehow been corrupted by this little incident.

So, what did we learn from this?

• Deleting /var was probably the least annoying outage I've had to deal with yet. Certainly less nerve-wracking than the time I was working on a live, powered-up server and my wedding ring shorted out something on a circuit board. I didn't know if that thing would just reboot or if we'd be down for hours waiting for parts...


• It was really nice knowing what was going on, rather than trying to find that bit out


• One coworker commented, "if he had to delete part of an operating system, at least it wasn't Windows. We wouldn't have recovered in 15 minutes if it was." True.


• Bacula is great.


• Backups are great, even if you don't use Bacula to make them.


• I dislike programs that take server load from 0.3 to 9.5 just telling you that there's something wrong with the server.

I work in an open-plan office. Normally I like to listen to some of my iPod's music, or NPR or something, at some point during the day. It helps me tune out distractions when I'm coding or concentrating on something. My iPod, and my nice Etymotic headphones, get transported to and from work each day in my laptop bag. Today I forgot the laptop bag at home.

What to do? I could just work without headphones. I'd be fine, but you know, I've got standards here. My job involves working with computers, so I ought to be able to come up with a workaround, right?

So lesse... what do I have? One binaural (mono sound, but speakers for each hear) telephone headset. One Polycom SIP phone, connected to our corporate Asterisk system. One workstation with sound capabilities. One installation of Asterisk on this workstation for testing purposes. And, a pre-existing path from the corporate system to the workstation system for testing Asterisk. (Very handy that, and used a lot when we were doing active Asterisk work.)

So in less then five minutes I had music going via my telephone headset. Lo-fi, and not noise-dampening like the Etymotics, but I enjoyed it for the simple fact that it was being played *over the phone* at no cost to anyone. My desk phone supports multiple "lines", so I still could place and receive calls just fine.

Should anyone care to look, they'd find a 5-hour call from me to myself deep in the Asterisk logs. My own workstation logs will show that I put myself on hold for 5 hours (since I used Asterik's music-on-hold feature to play my own selections).

IP telephony is fun. So is Asterisk.

Neil McGovern recently blogged about the SPI election results - namely the outcomes using different election systems. While it is an interesting exersise, a point to note is that people know the rules for the elction and vote tactically. So to make the assumption that if SPI used a given system, then the outcome would be Neil's results is wrong. This point also applies to discussions of the use of secret ballots - changing this will change the election result.

Since MJ Ray seems to think that anyone who doesn't vote for him but doesn't tell him why is a coward, I'm going to be up-front about it so I can't be accused of cowardice. Elections are all about everyone making their own decision, for their own reasons, in the hope that the aggregate of those decisions will produce a useful and workable result. (Whether that happens in reality is a whole other issue). The individual's decision is a statement of their opinion, nothing more. Adding confidentiality to the voting process is meant to remove any pressure from the voter to make a decision on any basis other than their own opinion. Complaints about it like this from a candidate is pretty weak:

There seem to be some 30 or 40 voters who really dislike me, but didn't tell me that straight, preferring to be silent then vote me down. Are you cowards, or what?

Given this outburst, I'm hardly surprised that people weren't keen on telling Mark upfront that they weren't going to vote for him. (As a disclaimer, I didn't vote in the SPI election, because I don't have a specific opinion on any of the candidiates' suitability for office on the SPI board.)

I'm on the plane down from Vancouver to San Francisco this morning. My flight from Taipei hit Vancouver around 8PM last night, so I stayed at the Fairmont Hotel at the airport. It was definitely a special treat -- the Fairmont's pretty pricey -- but this trip has been really low-budget and I needed a lot of rest and recharge. I had a good room with a view of the airport and the city beyond. My flight over was uneventful -- sleep, eat, Spiderman 3 -- which was good since I'd had such a big last day in Taipei. In the morning, I'd gone out to see Taipei 101, which claims to be the tallest building in the world by some standards. I think there are lots of ways to slice the "tallest building" category -- the CN Tower has a strong claim, but that's only counting the huge antenna on top. And there's an unfinished tower in Dubai that's already close to, or taller than, Taipei 101. Regardless, Taipei 101 is a real interesting site. The elevators are the fastest in the world -- 38 seconds to go from floor 5 to floor 87. The windowed observation deck is interesting, and there's an outdoor deck two flights above it. The outdoor deck is racked by Taipei's scorching heat -- when I was there, it was 31C, up above the city's protective smog belt. The sun and empty sky make for an otherworldly experience. After 101, I took Taipei's local subway, the MRT, to the National Palace Museum. I've found the MRT easy to get around on -- most of the information was available in English as well as Chinese -- but I got a little lost looking for the museum. I was disappointed that the information booth in the Taiwan Main Station had so little tourism information, and all of it in Chinese. (Yeah, I forgot to print out the Wikitravel Taipei guide before leaving the hotel. My bad.) But I managed to wend my way out to Shilin Station and took a cab to the museum. It was worth the search. When the Chinese Nationalists left the mainland for Taiwan, they took with them many of the treasures of the Imperial Palace (much to the chagrin of the victorious Communists). These form the core of the museum's collection, and they're really quite amazing -- articles in bronze, ivory and gold from the Neolithic era to the modern day. While Western culture has gone through so many distinct and discontinuous phases -- Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greco-Roman, Medieval and Modern -- China's has varied much more smoothly and continuously. It's a little disconcerting to see artistic themes from 4000BC that are echoed in items for sale in the stores today. I had to get back to the Wikimania site -- by then almost empty -- to do a GChat conference with Niko. There were a passel of Wikimaniacs still around after the conference looking around Taiwan like I was, and after consulting Wikitravel we decided to go to Taipei's most famous restaurant, Din Something Something. It's got a short menu of delicious steamed dumplings -- pork, veggie, crab and shrimp. The shop's claim to fame is the elastic skin that keeps a pocket of hot broth inside the dumplings. Hey: if you do something well, why vary the menu? It was the best meal I've had in a long time. The dumplings themselves were incredibly good -- moist and rich with complex flavors. But the company was even better -- about 14 Wikimedians from all continents and walks of life, some of the most fascinating and important people on the planet. We were a big enough group to be stowed in our own party room, and with basket after basket of steamed dumplings piled onto the table, washed down with shared bottles of the ubiquitous Taiwan Beer, we had a crazy chaotic and fun time. I'm so glad I took an extra day after the conference to see a bit of the city. I think there's a lot more that I missed, but I'm glad that I got a taste. tags: taiwan taipei travel wikimania2007 taipei101 nationalpalacemuseum wiki

Wikimania 2008 Inevitably the conversation at Din Something Something turned to Wikimania 2008 and possible venues for it. Right now, the only serious bid is from Alexandria, Egypt, home of the Biblioteca Alexandrina. This is a modern reconstruction of the famous Library of Alexandria, centre of learning for the ancient world and repository of all of its knowledge. The bid is to use the sleek, glamourous conference centre attached to the Biblioteca -- offered to us free of charge. You couldn't put together a more powerful metaphor -- Wikimedia being itself a project to capture the world's knowledge and share it with all humanity. Having our event on the African continent would also send a great message about the Foundation's commitment to making free information accessible to the developing world. North Africa is definitely the most accessible part of the continent for Europeans and North Americans -- many of whom balked at the price and distance of travel to Taipei. The big problem with planning Wikimanias (Wikimaniae?) in the past has been the short time-frame. Typically bids for the event don't start until after the previous one, and the bidding process takes several months. By the time a venue is selected, there may be only 6-8 months of planning time available. For an international conference of several hundred people, this is a stressful, breakneck schedule. The idea was floated to do a little stutter-step and put Wikimania on a more long-term planning schedule. The event committee would short-circuit the bidding process this year, and declare Alexandria the site for Wikimania 2008 unless other groups insisted on bids for other cities. Then, bidding for Wikimania 2009 would start in September or October, with a decision made by the end of 2007. This would give 20 months for the Wikimania 2009 organizing team to prepare. Most importantly, they'd be able to shadow the 2008 team, learn how the job is done, attend the 2008 conference, and present about their venue for the next year. I think this is a really good idea. The Biblioteca conference centre staff will be able to provide us some professional services, making the shorter schedule (still about 11 months) a lot easier. There are some concerns about fairness of the process, or appearance of same, but my guess is that if the 2009 bid process starts soon after, people won't have a big beef. There are two major concerns with going to Alexandria, though. First is Egypt's worrying problem with human rights -- specifically gay rights. Homosexual Egyptian men are subject to arrest, and the laws are occasionally enforced. One foreigner was arrested in 2002. That's enough to put Egypt on a no-visit list with some gay-rights groups. Depressing as it is, I think it might be too much to hope for a venue in a country with an absolutely spotless human rights record. Maybe parts of Scandinavia...? There's a cruel calculus needed to evaluate which national human rights abuses can be reluctantly overlooked, and which are unacceptable. It's also clear that my personal judgment might be clouded, since this particular human rights issue is not one I would be directly targeted by. My hope is that an official statement by the Foundation would make it clear to the Egyptian government that this kind of policy is not conducive to attracting overseas business and tourism. The second concern is that Egypt and the Arab world in general have only embryonic local Wikimedian communities. While there are many people who contribute to Arabic Wikipedia, there is not a Wikimedia chapter in Egypt, nor are there regular meetups in the country or region. This might be a chicken-and-egg problem: choosing Alexandria would probably kick-start local groups. I hope that ar: Wikimedians pick up the mantle of leadership that the world Wikimedia community is offering them. tags: wikimania08 alexandria arabic wikipedia egypt

As it looks like I will be sent to business trip to Japan, I found out that I will need to buy yet another phone. I'm quite happy with my Sony-Ericsson K750i right now and I will continue to use it after I return, so I need just short term replacement. From this comes my requirements:

1. It must work in Japan. This means 3G phone is needed.
2. I don't want to spend lot of money.
3. Should be available on Czech or Japanese market as I don't have time for buying somewhere else.

Currently I have Nokia 6151 and Sony-Ericsson K610i in my viewfinder as they seem to be cheapest 3G solutions available here on market. If you have better tip for cheap 3G phone, just write me on michal@cihar.com, thanks! PS: Of course I will try my new phone with Gammu. If you want to have support for some special 3G phone in Gammu, just drop me a note. Donations for such phone is welcome :-).

What do you think is the most important single-sentence of advice that you can offer to someone who wants to contribute to the free software community? I intentionally didn’t mention what area or type of advice or what “contribute” means, interpret it how you wish and give multiple answers for different interpretations if that seems appropriate to you. If you had the opportunity to say one sentence to someone who knows about computers and free software (EG they have used both Linux and Windows and done a small amount of programming) to convince them that they should join the free software team, what would it be? Writing an essay about your thoughts is fine (and I’m sure that many readers of my blog could easily write an interesting essay on each of those topics). But please preface it with what you consider to be the most important sentence. Please either track-back to this blog post or post a comment with a URL of your post (comments are moderated but I usually approve them in less than 12 hours and often much faster - I approve all sensible non-spam comments). If you only offer two sentences (and decide not to write an essay) then the comment section can contain your entire answer. Note that by Serious Free Software Contributors I am referring to people who feel that they are serious about it. If free software matters to you and you go out of your way to help the cause in the way that best suits your abilities then it means you. I will write another post with a summary of what I consider to be the most interesting responses (including links to any blog posts with long answers). PS This post is not what I consider to be a “meme”.

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I'll be 0x24 (hex) or pow(6,2) (dec) years old next Sunday and it is becoming obvious that I need to change my lifestyle. On the physical side I'm sure that I have to loose between 20 and 30 Kg. if I don't want to have health problems in the future. The plan is to change my eating habits and do sport regularly. The basic idea is to do a diet seriously and keep part of the rules more or less forever (that's the habits change); the other important thing is to do some exercise, I've never liked sports too much, but I'm sure I can try to walk some days and swim others (I've been going once a week to the swimming pool during the last months and I'll be doing it twice a week starting this September). On the mental side, I need to reduce my obligations and care less about the work problems in and out of the office. To reduce my obligations and have more free time I decided a couple of months ago that I was going to leave the Uni, as it was taking away a lot of time that I can use for more important things; I notified it and after this September I won't be working for the Universitat de Val ncia anymore. Initially my idea was to keep my main work and use some hours each week to work on my PhD Thesis, but the truth is that I'm not interested anymore; I don't have anything specially interesting to say and my main motivation for getting a PhD has also disappeared (at some point I thought about becoming a full time University professor, but after three and a half years I've had enough, at least for a looong while). This leaves me with my work at the ITI as my main and only work, but after some months I'm seriously considering leaving it also. My main problem there is that I believe that I'm starting to suffer the Peter Principle or something similar; almost all my professional career I've been working as a technician, first as a programmer and sysadmin and lately as analyst and team leader or technical manager, but now, as it seems to happen always in the Spanish IT companies, I'm being forced to move to a pure project management work and, to be fair, I don't like it. I don't know if that means that I'll get to my level of incompetence, but if that is the case I think I'll have to try the Peter's Parry, that basically means to refuse a promotion (I've already done it asking to get a place under my theoretical level, although not on a convincing manner, it seems) or use the Creative Incompetence technique, that is, give the impression that you have already arrived to your incompetence level (probably it is too late to do that at my current place, but maybe on the next one I'll be able to do it). Maybe this is not the last level of the Peter Principle, as I'm sure that I can and will do this work (I'm thinking about moving, but I will not do it until I have a plan for the future, and that will probably mean a new job), but I'm also sure that I will never do it as well as I can do technical tasks because I don't have any real motivation to do it and while I plan to get the skills needed, they are not attractive to me. I understand that on the current IT world we need to have project managers, and I really hate bad managers, but that does not mean I like to become one, I prefer to be a team leader and work only on one or two projects at a time, instead of having more than five and not do real work in any of them; my main problem is that the challenges and tasks a manager has to do have nothing in common with the things I like from computer science and I'm too perfectionist to handle people that does not care about how things are done in a lazy way (a team leader with a couple of projects can handle technical people, when you are a manager with multiple projects you miss the day to day perspective and problematic people is more difficult to handle). Oh well, we will see how things evolve. The good thing is that I believe that one way or another I'll end up having a better life and, if I'm able to care less about my own work (and the one done by others) maybe I'll be able to stay at an acceptable level on the hierarchy without getting burn out and maybe some day I'll be able to work again on the things I like and keep my promises.

Just a little script that I've found useful when working out which packages contain translations needing an update - WITHOUT regenerating the POT file unnecessarily and thereby messing up CVS/SVN/RCS status of the PO files themselves. (You still need to regenerate the POT file when the strings actually change but this script is useful when receiving updated PO files.) The script checks each PO file and omits those that are up to date.

Add your own set of working directories.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;



print "emdebian-tools\n";

chdir "/opt/working/emdebian/svn/current/host/trunk/emdebian-tools/trunk/debian/";

&check

print "deb-gview\n";

chdir "/opt/working/deb-gview/";

&check

print "pilot-qof\n";

chdir "/opt/working/pilot-qof/";

&check



sub check

 

	opendir (PO, "po") or die ("Cannot open po directory. $!\n");

	my @files = grep(/\.po$/, readdir PO);

	closedir (PO);

	foreach my $po (@files)

	 

		my $msg= msgfmt -c --statistics po/$po 2>&1   grep "[fuzy]" ;

		print "$po: $msg" if ($msg ne "");

		undef($msg);

	 

	unlink ("messages.mo");

 

It turns out I was playing Don Quijote when I was trying to fix the reset issues I had with my slug.

Of course, I was suspecting the USB rack for the issues, but the issues never showed up on the laptop... until now.

I decied to temporary use a USB stick for the FS and started copying files over to the stick. During the copying the rack disconnected and everything became more clear. I was tilting at the windmills all the time.

BTW, be smarter than myself and just change the UUID to mach the old one instead of regenerating the initrd and reflashing it:

tune2fs -U the_uuid_of_the_previous_root_partition /dev/sda1


Oh, next on the agenda will be to use my ipod mini as a hdd for the slug in order to prevent ruining the stick... And another thing, total silence is really nice, even if the rack was not that noisy.

Our place this morning was so calm and peaceful. Angie was cooking muffins. Then the packers showed up at 8am. It's 2.5 hours later, and we're now surrounded by boxes. In another 24 hours, the computers will be shut down, the cable modem returned, and the moving trucks will show up.

Two weeks ago when we left Montr al for visiting family and going to UbuntuLive, we knew that we only had a couple days left back here, but the reality is now setting in. From here we'll go to Opus, the Unitarian Universalist young adult conference at which we're two of the four cooks. From there, we head south, fetch a rental car, and start our one-way drive out to California.

Crazyness!

Having taken time out to go to the other side of the world to attend DebConf 7 in Edinburgh, and then after spending some time with my family, I have been somewhat distracted from things CalDAV for a wee while now. There are signs that I will be able to put a few more evenings and weekends into it in coming months. Current Status With the release of 0.8.0 I believe it is quite a usable application for shared group calendars. We use it at Catalyst for about 80 staff and, while we're not heavy calendar users, it manages without any noticeable performance problems. There have been an impressive number of downloads from Sourceforge, as well as substantial downloads from my Debian repository, and I believe that the program is in tens, if not hundreds, of installations. Future Plans In the immediate future I want to get the basic framework for querying properties about the owner of a calendar or a set of calendars. This will be used by Mozilla soon during their configuration of a new CalDAV source, and I think that Apple iCal probably uses them already. This is partly done, but it's implementation has been slowed by the necessity to refactor the handling of the REPORT method in general to make the code more modular and readable, and to support queries and properties in a more general manner. The refactoring of the REPORT method handling is in place now, so moving on to the handling of DAV:principal objects should become fairly straightforward. I may end up with a fair bit of quiet, undistracted time over the coming weekend so if I can get in the 'zone', it may get done, and we can start rolling towards a release 0.9. Release 0.9 will have a new name. One from the cast of thousands that have been submitted to me so far, or one that I will hastily think up in between, but the next released version will not be called RSCDS any longer. The main goals for further into the future are:

• Maintain interoperability with clients
• Improve specification compliance
• Extend coverage to related specifications
• Documentation improvements
• Configuration improvements
• Installation improvements

Interoperability I think that RSCDS does fairly well on the interoperability front. Unfortunately I have no access to the preview of OS 10.5, with it's native CalDAV client (though I have been told that it works with RSCDS). Likewise, other commercial CalDAV clients aren't available to me for testing either, so I have concentrated my efforts on supporting the featureset used by the various free CalDAV clients. My initial work focused around supporting Evolution, in particular, but with the recent effort put in by the Mozilla Calendar team the primary interoperability challenge is to enhance RSCDS to support their areas of development. If I could see how the OS 10.5 client behaves, too, I believe that would help identify a few points to extend, as well as suggesting some future directions. The best place to review interoperability would probably be at the CalConnect Roundtable 10 but I think that without some sponsorship for airfares I probably won't be able to make that. Maybe next time. Specifications Compliance As I read, and reread, the CalDAV (and DAV, and HTTP, and ...) RFCs the compliance with the various specifications improves. Recently I have put a lot of work into the calendar-query report, in particular, which means it now supports querying against arbitrary properties much more comprehensively. This is important because some of the client software is starting to do arbitrary queries also, and it is inevitable that queries for the classification of events, or the percentage completion of todo items will become more common. And now I notice that there is a new version of DAV in RFC4918, though not too many changes as far as I can see. The intent of this release is mostly to clarify, and slightly to extend, primarily in order to improve client interoperability. Coverage of Related Specifications In terms of general calendaring activities, the biggest hole in the CalDAV specification at present is standardisation around the location of other people's schedules. The current draft of the Scheduling Extensions to CalDAV appears to address that, and a lot more besides. I expect to start working on parts of this at some point, but perhaps not sooner than I see a client which starts using it, or when it is ratified, whichever occurs soonest. Documentation The documentation is OK. The wiki, in particular, is a reasonable resource for resolving problems (I believe), but it would be good to have some documentation of other things. One area that could do with enhancement is some documentation of how to check out a copy of the code, and how to provide patches back to me. Even better if other people can maintain their own trees which I could pull patches from, since we're using a distributed version control system (Git) to start with. Configuration The administration interface for RSCDS is OK, but could do with a few improvements to make it more usable. Really there are not a lot of reasons to be in the administrative interface, so these improvements should be relatively few, and relatively easy. This would be a good area for someone interested in helping out to become involved, because it does not entail reading large reams of RFCs, or watching tcpdumps scroll past for the debugging. Installation One thing that I have done right, I believe, was to provide the software from the beginning in a packaged form to make the installation easier. Although the software is packaged for Debian, however, it has not yet been uploaded to the archive because I have been waiting for the webapps-common package to enter Debian so I can use that for configuration. I think I have waited long enough though, so I will upload the next version to Debian for use by a wider audience. Security Security has always been a focus for me and I have had the code reviewed for any obvious security flaws. If any particular vulnerabilities are found they will be addressed with appropriate haste. Retrospective I've been working on this for a little over a year now, and I think I have largely met my goals for the project. It has certainly been an educational experience for me, and the effect of this work on other projects that I also participate in has also been valuable. Any new open-source project is always at risk of the developer losing energy and interest, but I believe this one has made it to a state where the bulk of the infrastructure effort has been done, and there are enough interesting challenges in the future to continue to keep me (at least) working on it into the future. The scope of this project is good, in that it is not at risk of expanding to take over the world. The intention behind this is simply to provide a back-end service for client software which should be very much Someone Else's Problem. In reality there have been times when I have had to get to grips with some of that client software in order to resolve problems, but those have by and large been good experiences.

So it seems that Squid changed its redirector API with 2.6. This pissed me off no end once I got to the bottom of a problem related to it at work last week. Squid's had redirector functionality since, oh, last century, and it's a really handy feature, if you want to intercept URLs that Squid's handling, and change them to something else. I've used it in a past life at an ISP to force people to use a local mirror for various things, regardless of where they think they want to go. So for the longest time, the API has been documented that an external program, which Squid will attach to the stdin and stdout of, will receive on stdin four words on a line, pertaining to the URL being requested: the IP address/FQDN of the client requesting it, the username of the user, if they've authenticated to the cache, and the HTTP method being used. All good. So we had an in-house redirector script, which used a regex (^(\S+) \S+ \S+ \S+)$) to determine if it should apply any logic to the URL at all, or just output a newline, meaning no redirection should occur. So along comes Squid 2.6, which changes that API. It now passes in five things on stdin. The changelog has an innocuous "Added to the redirectors interface the support for SSL client certificate" entry, so I presume on a good day, that's what is passed in as the fifth word instead of a hyphen. Anyway, our redirector script started not rewriting anything at all, which made some other stuff break spectacularly. It was most fun in one location, where we had four proxy servers behind a load balancer, and two were running Squid 2.5 and two were running Squid 2.6. Yay for non-deterministic behaviour. So once I'd tracked down the problem, I swore a lot, and changed the regex to be ^(\S+) \S+ \S+ \S+( \S+)?$ and proceeded to rant at anyone and everyone within earshot on how messed up this whole situation was. The thing that is irritating me the most is that this seems to have been a fairly poorly communicated change, as best I can determine. It happened between Squid.2.6.STABLE1 and Squid.2.6.STABLE2 (hmm, stable?). I mean, the FAQ hasn't even been updated. This clearly caught out other projects like jesred that provide generic extensible Squid redirectors, looking at #381984. I wonder if SquidGuard in Debian Etch is busted? So, whilst Squid 2.6 (the release that changed this behaviour anyway) is just over 12 months old, if you haven't upgraded yet, and you have custom redirectors, consider this rant a head's up.

Today I have released the next version of DebTorrent. This is the first release to be available in a binary package (.deb) form, and most of the changes are related to the packaging I still consider the program to be alpha quality, though all the functionality for a beta release is there, it just needs to be tested (so tell your friends). I run the program daily and use it for my apt-based updating, so I'm pretty sure it works, but there are definitely bugs. If you do find one please submit it to the DebTorrent mailing list. The installable binary can be found on the Alioth project, or in my personal repository which can be added to your sources.list like so:

deb http://debian.camrdale.org/ unstable main contrib non-free

Once installed, it will start running automatically, and will restart on bootup, so all that is needed is to modify your sources.list files to point them at DebTorrent by prepending localhost:9988 to the mirror name. For example, the entry above for my personal repository would become:

deb http://localhost:9988/debian.camrdale.org/ unstable main contrib non-free

Here's the changelog:

• First debian package release (Closes: #428005)
• Cleanup all the configuration options
• Add a global config file
• Moved all logging to log files
• Stopped displaying periodic updates
• Added init script and default options

I’ve created a page about translating my blog. Currently it has the following text: If you would like to translate any posts from my blog to a language other than English then please feel free to do so. I demand that any translations correctly cite me as the author of the original English version and give a permanent link to the original post, but I don t expect that this will cause any inconvenience. I also request that anyone who translates one of my posts gives me permission to do whatever I wish with the translated text (I want to mirror all translations of my work on my own site). I am unsure of what legal rights I have to demand this and have not yet considered whether I have a moral right to demand it. But I believe that it is the nice thing for a translator to do and hope that everyone who translates one of my posts will do so. Also I may grant permission for translations of my posts to appear on sites with Google advertising or other commercial use. I won t rule out the possibility of assigning monopoly rights on commercial use of the translations of my posts to specific individuals or organisations. Does anyone have suggestions for improvements? One of my multi-lingual friends suggested that I should be concerned about the risk of bad translations. But I desire to have people read my posts and I believe that this is a risk I just have to accept - I’m sure that there are enough multi-lingual people in the blog space to find such errors and help the translator correct them. Also I have to consider the best way to mirror the translations. I could add them to the same permalink page (producing long pages with multiple translations of my best posts), I could create a new post (resulting in English-language Planet installations getting posts that most people can’t read), or I could use a separate blog installation for the translations. Please comment if you have any suggestions. I’ll write another post in future with the solutions that I select and some analysis of the issues. Update: Thanks for the nice post Victor. It was seeing my blog in the list of “Enlaces Interesantes” on Victor’s blog that inspired my post about translation.

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As some of you may know, I’ve been working with Linbox for the past 3 years, on and off, part time and full time, depending on the time of the year. I won’t be working with Linbox anymore after Mandriva, which has bought Linbox back in June, decided Linbox wouldn’t go ahead in the Enterprise VoIP business. I have been, for the past 2 years, the architect of Linbox’ VoIP solution. This unfortunate and ill-advised decision of stopping the development of a successful product at its beginning will effectively leave the current customers out in the cold, as technical support will probably be erratic at best. Looking back in the mirror, I’ve done a lot of things, small and big, during these 3 years:

• [2004] Developed a web-managed multi-service turn-key solution for SMBs, of which the web interface served as a prototype for the Linbox Management Console (a web-based server management framework);
• [2004] Developed the product deployment system based on FAI; still in use today, obviously updated since then;
• [2004] Wrote an AD to LDAP account (including password) sync script (customer with a special need); that resulted in me hacking OpenLDAP to port the lanman password hash support to gcrypt (Debian #245341);
• [2004] Started the hosting business;
• [2005] Started the development of the Linbox IP Telephony Solution (LIPS), based on AMPortal (now called FreePBX); ended up forking AMPortal to fix the gazillion bugs and bring it to a more usable state;
• [2005] Hacked up OpenXchange to add a click’n'dial feature to the addressbook; eventually we decided to dump OpenXchange, mainly for being an underdocumented pile of crap full of security holes (nice SQL injections, eh) and, over all, a false free software (no upgrade path, no doc, some components not released, GPL patches added to the non-free version without agreement, among other things);
• [2006] Prototyped the cluster version of the VoIP solution; this cluster version meant the solution could scale up to support thousands of users on multiple sites with redundancy and failover;
• [2006] Wrote a migration tool to migrate mails away from a FirstClass groupware to anything IMAPv4-compliant, straight out of the on-disk FirstClass storage database;
• [2007] Integrated the VoIP solution into the Linbox Management Console; after 2 years of consolidating the AMPortal web interface, I’ve finally got rid of that horrible thing;
• [2007] Integrated the cluster support infrastructure into the solution;
• [2007] Added proper faxing (over PSTN) support, at last.

And, more importantly:

• [2007] Deployed client sites without any interruption in telephone service.

I’m especially proud of that; the solution was ready for that moment, and my deployment plan proved to be the right one and flexible enough to account for everything that wasn’t ready in time (missing network infrastructure, things that had been forgotten on the client side, things that didn’t go as planned and last minute changes to accommodate users’ needs). The customers were very happy and enthusiastic with regard to their new VoIP infrastructure - so much that there was more to come. And more to come means more business for a company that definitely needs it, and is now turning that business down. So it’s all over now, and overall I’ve had a good time working there with the technical team. They’re all very talented, and we were 3 DDs working there - that figure is now down to 1 (yes, one, as in 3 - 2 = 1). I’ve been able to produce a really great free (as in speech) Enterprise VoIP solution that I liked quite a lot. I had great plans for the LIPS, but couldn’t carry out much of that until it was integrated into the Linbox Management Console. In the last weeks, I’ve had confirmation that my plans were right and I was going the right way. That’s history now, and I’m looking at what I’ll be doing next. It’s good because I can look for a job that either involves VoIP or not; it’s good to change after a while. It sucks because looking for a job sucks.

I got bored recently, so I rebuilt the whole Debian archive on one of my machines. To make this not a completely useless excercise, I used the Open64 compiler instead of gcc and created build logs for your perusal. So what is Open64? From the Wikipedia page:

Open64 is an open source, state-of-art, optimizing compiler for the Intel IA-64 (Itanium), AMD Opteron and Intel IA-32e architecture. It derives from the SGI compilers for the MIPS R10000 processor. It was released under the GPL in 2000, and now mostly serves as a research platform for compiler and computer architecture research groups. Open64 is licensed under the GPL. Open64 supports Fortran 77/95 and C/C++, as well as the shared memory programming model OpenMP. It can conduct high-quality interprocedural analysis, data flow analysis, data dependence analysis and array region analysis.

Open64 installation The installation is pretty easy fortunately:

$ wget http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open64/open64-4.0-src.tar.bz2
$ tar xfvj open64-4.0-src.tar.bz2
$ cd open64-4.0
$ export TOOLROOT=/opt/open64
$ make
$ make install (as root)

I think you need gcc-3.4 (gcc 4.x is not yet supported), and for some odd reason you also need csh as one of the install scripts seems to use it. It would be nice if someone could package Open64 for Debian, I definately don't have the time to maintain such a huge package (a whole maintainer team would probably be good here). Rebuilding the Debian archive There are several possible ways (and tools) to rebuild the Debian archive; I've used pbuilder/cowbuilder with the rebuild scripts from Bastian Venthur, which are now included in pbuilder. First we need to install the required packages, setup a cowbuilder base chroot, and get the list of packages:

$ apt-get install cowdancer grep-dctrl wget devscripts sudo
$ cowbuilder --create --distribution lenny --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow
$ cp -r /usr/share/doc/pbuilder/examples/rebuild .
$ cd rebuild
$ ./getlist lenny

Now we add Open64 into the cowbuilder chroot and fix up the chroot by pointing the gcc/g++ symlinks to Open64:

$ cp -a /opt/open64 /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow/opt
$ chroot /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow
$ cd /usr/bin
$ mv gcc gcc.orig
$ ln -s /opt/open64/bin/opencc gcc
$ mv g++ g++.orig
$ ln -s /opt/open64/bin/openCC g++
$ exit

In addition, we set the CC and CXX environment variables to Open64, which will make 90% of all (autoconf-using) packages automatically use Open64. We need a small script for that:

$ cat c.cfg:
export CC="/opt/open64/bin/opencc -m32"
export CXX="/opt/open64/bin/openCC -m32"

Now edit the buildall script. Change the Debian mirror used there (optional) and make it use our c.cfg script by adding the --configfile /path/to/rebuild/c.cfg option in the "pdebuild" line. We can now finally start building the archive:

./buildall list.lenny.i386 lenny

You can also run multiple buildall instances at once to speed up the archive rebuild on SMP/multicore machines, and you can even abort the command and simply restart it later. The script will continue where it left off. Results The whole rebuild (with 2 instances of buildall running at the same time) took ca. 9 days on an AMD64 Athlon64 X2 (dual core, 1.8 GHz each) machine with 1 GB of RAM. I really should have used something like apt-proxy to speed up the rebuild and save some bandwidth, but I read about apt-proxy too late... All log files from my rebuild are available for detailed analysis if anybody is interested (you can browse the logfiles online or download all of them as tarball). I didn't perform any detailed analysis, just some rough numbers here:

• Succeeded package builds: 8425
• Failed package builds: 2509
• Total number of packages rebuilt: 10934

If anybody does some more elaborate analysis, please let me know.

Ten Years of Catalyst IT It's our tenth anniversary at Catalyst this year. Since we have our company 'birthday' in the middle of the year we normally have a private party and, while that's been good in the past, we felt ten years was a milestone of some kind and we wanted to do something a little more special... So this year we decided to set up the New Zealand Open Source Awards, which are all set to go in October. There have been lots of entries rolling in to recognise all sorts of interesting projects and unsung heroes of the revolution, but I'm sure there are still a few out there that we haven't heard of. If you think we might have missed one you've only got 10 more days until nominations close at midnight, New Zealand time, on the 17th of August. Nominate your favourites now in the following categories:

• Open Source Ambassador
• Contributor
• Software Project
• Use in Government
• Use in Business
• Use in Education
• Use for Community Organisations

Note that this is not a vote. All entries will be judged on their respective merits by a panel of New Zealanders with a broad technological background. Good luck, and may the best people / teams / departments / organisations win :-)

The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about pre-fabricated houses from Ikea and suggests that they could solve the housing price problems. The article states that in the UK the pre-fab houses would be more than 25% cheaper than regular houses in the UK. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the introduction of Ikea pre-fabricated houses in the Australian market (which they currently don’t plan to do) will reduce house prices by 25%. This won’t solve the problem. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2006 the median income for males was $600-799 and for females was $250-399. A couple who are both at the high-end of that scale would gross $1200 per week, this would possibly allow them to pay $1600 per month towards a mortgage, if they were in the middle of that scale then they would gross $1000 per week which might allow paying $1000 per month towards a mortgage. With current interest rates that would make any mortgage greater than $200K unreasonably difficult for a couple at the high end of the median income range to repay and a mortgage greater than $120K would be unreasonably difficult for a couple in the middle of the range. The ABS median house prices show that the cheapest places to buy houses in 2005 were Adelaide, Hobart, and Darwin with median prices of $208K, $209K, and $216K respectively. So a couple who are both at the high end of the median income range can only afford to buy a house in the three cheapest cities in Australia (which are also not densly populated). The two largest cities are Sydney and Melbourne which had median house prices of $363K and $300K respectively, they would not be affordable to a couple who are anywhere near the median income - not even with a 25% reduction in price! I believe that people on a median income should be able to afford a median prices house - the majority of Australian families should be able to afford the majority of houses! The above analysis only covers families wanting to purchase a house with two incomes. The “traditional” Australian idea of having the man earn the majority of all the money that is required while his wife looks after the children (which is a bad thing for other reasons) is obviously dead. A man who earns 50% more than the median income will have trouble paying for a house while supporting children if his wife doesn’t also work. It is generally accepted that anyone who doesn’t purchase a house before having children will never own a house. It seems strange that the major political parties talk about wanting to support families and to support “the Aussie battler”, but won’t do anything serious about house prices (which is the most significant issue for such people). Giving a first home owners grant of $7000 (which is less than 3% of the required money). One possible way of alleviating this problem would be to remove Negative Gearing (or at least modifying it to encourage construction rather than buying existing properties). Then the price of properties that are rented out would reflect the rent value instead of being significantly over-priced. Another possibility would be to make public transport more efficient and with a wider scope. The desirability of a location is to a large extent determined by how much time/money/effort is required to get to the centre of the nearest city for work. Making the mass public transport support larger numbers of people (by larger and more frequent trains, trams, and buses), have shorter journeys (by a more frequent service to reduce waiting and express and connecting services where possible), and more routes (by building new train or tram lines every time a new major road is built) would significantly increase the desirability of properties that are further from the centre of cities. That would decrease the market pressure on prices of properties that are a currently 30 minutes or one hour travel from the centre. It would also be a significant benefit if people who currently spend 30 minutes commuting could spend only 20. If public transport was improved and negative gearing was abolished then I expect that there would be increased demand for new houses that are further away from city centres, and that pre-fabricated houses would make a significant difference in the price. But while the majority of the value of a house is contained in the land that it rests on I can’t see that making a difference.

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* Original announcement! If you have any idea/plan/suggestions what we can do there for Debian, let me know. Some thoughts, - Key Signing Party - Debian BoF, Debian-Indic/i18n BoF - Full day for Debian@Project Days, Talk.. - DDs from outside India, we will love to see you there!