As if being hospitalised after crashing into a spectator wasn't enough, Patrick Sinkewitz has been told he's tested non-negative for testosterone. I think that is the same test that Floyd Landis failed, which I'm still unsure about. In an outrageous move, ARD/ZDF (visible at 19 and 13 east) have stopped live tour coverage "until clarification of the Patrik Sinkewitz case" whatever that means. Will they resume if it the second test is positive too? I doubt it. If I remember correctly, ARD/ZDF have been threatening to drop the Tour de France for at least a year and maybe more. Finally, they get an excuse to replace proper tour coverage with more cheap, bland daytime TV like Z-list interviews, soaps and cookery shows - or continuous criticism of the Tour de France, like they had today. In the Expatica report, ZDF chief producer Nikolaus Brender said:

"We can't screen an event involving some teams and riders under suspicion of doping."

(That's strange. Of course they can. They have before and I bet they'll still show motorsport, football, horse-racing, golf, wrestling, and so on if they get them. They just don't want to show cycling.)

"We want to show by this gesture that we're ready to support cycling only if it's clean, that's to say without banned doping sustances."

(That's actually quite a high standard: over 180 participants, none of them cheating. That's a lot harder than 20 drivers or 30 footballers all being clean - even then, they don't always manage it and I don't see ARD/ZDF dropping those sports every time one player is accused of doping. Never mind all the smaller cheating attempts which are easier in many other sports than cycling.)

"It's a warning to cycling and to every other sport,"

It's a warning that ARD/ZDF's TV producers are short-sighted and don't care about the viewers. At least Eurosport Germany continues with live coverage every day! Let's keep watching and see how the chips fall for Sinkewitz. Are ARD/ZDF fee-payers raising hell about this absurd decision? I hope so.

When you connect Gammu to phone, it does several checks on phone (I'm currently talking especially about AT based connections). Some of these checks might result in suggestions on improvements in configuration either in code or configuration. However they are a bit hidden - you need to enable debug log to actually see them. One of those hints might allow Gammu to do much more with your phone:

HINT: Please consider adding F_OBEX to your phone capabilities in common/gsmphones.c

F_OBEX will tell Gammu, that phone can be switched to OBEX mode, which might provide access to more features than generic AT mode. The word might is important here, because for some phones OBEX does not bring anything new and using it only hides some AT functionality. This is also reason, why switch is not done automatically and you must change sources to do this. I'd gladly accept patches, if you have successfully tested F_OBEX with your phone!

I’ve just uploaded a new version of reportbug-ng including an Italian and a Hebrew pony and a cool enhancement to the buglist filter: Now the filter doesn’t try to match the whole string anymore but splits the input by whitespaces and tries to match all words. Now you can even exclude words by prepending a leading minus to it. The Syntax for the filter is: [-]keyword [[-]keyword2] ... Multiple keywords are separated by whitespaces and can have a leading minus. A leading minus means “exclude” the whitespaces represent the logical AND. Some Examples:

• foo bar -baz means all bugs containing the words foo, bar and not baz
• outstanding -wishlist means all bugs which are outstanding and not wishlist
• -resolved will show all open bugs

Please note the the filter does look into the actual bugreports (the fulltext), it currently tries to match against the packagename, the bugnumber, the summary, the status and the severity. The best thing about this new filter? It’s not even slower than the old one, the only delay you’ll notice is when filtering packages with a huge amount of bugs (like wnpp) and even there the filter just needs a fraction of a second. The delay of a few secons comes acutally from the QTable when I remove all the rows not matching the filter. QTable.hideRow(int) and -showRow(int) seem to be very expensive even when I temporary disable all graphic updates for this widget during this operation. If someone knows a trick to circumvent this, please tell me (you may get a pony…). This feature isn’t spectacular, but it should make filtering big buglists a lot easier.

Many thanks to Moray for uploading the required library updates for this - gpe-calendar RC bug is finally fixed in a new upstream version and dependencies: 0.90-1 which I have just uploaded to incoming.

v0.90 is a substantial rewrite from 0.72 and has much better memory handling.

Hello World, I’m organizing a little birthday party for the Debian project in Switzerland, G rkan created a Wikipage where you will be able to find more information in a few days, if you also want to have an event also link it on the Wikipage. Happy international celebrating Thanks to debian.ch for food/drink sponsorship.

Two movies again this week: first we went to see "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" which was quite nice. For people who have read the book and know how things work: quite some parts got reduced/removed. Who am I kidding, I mean, the book is immensly long, noone was expecting to have everything in the movie, did they? If they did, they were fooling themself.
For those who haven't read it: the remaining parts were mostly consistent and well done. There was just one thing that iritated me a bit with respect to the Thestrals on which they flew which Hermione and Ron weren't able to see—I expected to have at least a small scene with their scared faces and/or when mounting them. But appart from that it was pretty nice. :) Second movie was "Live Free or Die Hard". I really was looking forward to it, being an longtime Bruce Willis fan—and I wasn't disappointed. At. All! Everything was great. The action was nice but not the sole part of the movie. The dialogues were more than just interesting, and the story had it's nice parts, too. And I liked that Kevin Smith was in the movie. His role was great. :D

The ABC reports that an oil shortage is predicted soon. The International Energy Agency predicts that oil supply problems will start within the next five years. Oil production has been dropping over the last two years (we have passed the “peak oil” point) and demand is steadily increasing. Regardless of wars oil prices will increase significantly in the near future. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the average age of Australian cars was 10.7 years at the end of 1998. So the vast majority of the current fuel-hungry cars on Australian roads will still be in use in five years time - if the owners can afford them. The government needs to start providing tax incentives for fuel efficient cars and to end tax incentives for inefficient cars. Currently 4WD vehicles have reduced taxes and the tax deduction for a business car is based on the engine size (get a less efficient car and get a bigger tax deduction). The government claims to be protecting the economy (at the expense of the environment). But with the way things currently work the economy will be destroyed in less than five years. Even though the government cares little for the environment (in spite of the effect that climate change is having on farmers) they need to do something if they want to fulfill their claims of protecting the economy! Thanks to Chris Samuel for informing me of this.

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I finally decided to publish the few hacks I am using to run Linux on SUN's LDOM.
They are not pretty but they do the job done for me.
I take 0 responsibility for them so use them at your own risk.
Use this HOWTO only if you are dealing to mess with your system. Do *NOT* use for production systems if you do not understand what you are doing Step 1: read all the possible LDOM documentation that SUN made available for you. Step 2: understand that this is all experimental software. Step 3: repeat 1 and 2 a few times. LDOM server in Solaris allows to export 3 kind of block devices (file, partition/slice, entire disk) to the guest and those are seen as virtual disks.
The guest cannot really feel the difference but it is important to understand the way in which the LDOM software plays with them.
I did *not* test the export for partition/slice and my hacks do not know how to cope with it. You have been warned. The problem: LDOM virtual disk daemon mangles partition tables In an attempt to make sure that the partition tables exported to the guests are sane, the daemon ends up trashing valid ones because the check it forces to the devices is too strict and it behaves differently if the device is a file, a partition/slice or an entire disk.
The ldm bind operation is the dangerous one to perform and that can kill your partition table for good.
How ldm bind operation work: - for entire disks: * check device partition table
* fix device partition table if check fails
* lock device
* export device to guest
* store status of device once it is validated and do not check it ever again
- for files: * check device partition table
* fix device partition table if check fails
* export device to guest
Remember that I did *not* test export of a slice and that my hack does not take it into account. You have been warned twice. Limitations of the workaround First of all I assume that you installed LDOM 1.0 in the standard path (/opt/SUNWldm/) otherwise you might need to change the script manually to match an alternate path.
Each guest is using the same kind of devices. The workaround does not yet how to cope with exports of files and partitions to the same guest.
You know how to use dd and some other basic tools.
If you start playing with bind/unbind operations manually and things break, you keep all pieces.
How to This list of operation sounds extremely complex, but it is not and it is required only at the first install time and possibly to update your partition table backups if you decide to change them. The changes to the ldom init script will take to restore the last known to work partion table on each reboot. NOTE: if you fail to follow these instruction and do not use valid configuration entries or backup partitions, LDOM might not start anymore or even core dump. TAKE EXTREME CARE (and learn how to reboot into factory-defaults at SC/ALOM)

1 - get the few files from here. This html file is there too for your convenience.
2 - ldmd_start is the newly modified init script for LDOM. It should be placed in /opt/SUNWldm/bin and made executable. Note that if there is no configuration file or the configuration file is empty nothing will happen and you will be running the exact same script as the original. ldmd_start.orig and .diff are there for your convenience to check that I did not add a root kit ;).
3 - ldom.linux is an example configuration file that you want to place in /etc.
4 - mkdir /.ldom.linux , we will use this directory to store the backup partition tables.
5 - decide what kind of device you want to export.
Follow steps 6 and 7 if you decided to use a full disk as device and skip to 8 if you are using a file 6 - Use the format command from Solaris and make sure to label and format the disk.
7 - Take a copy of the clean partition table.
Example: dd if=/path/to/device of=/.ldom.linux/$guestname-$(basename /path/to/device).format count=1 bs=512
So let say that your guest is called foo1 and you are exporting /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2 you will issue the following command:
dd if=/dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2 of=/.ldom.linux/foo1-c1t1d0s2.format count=1 bs=512
Continue from here if you are exporting a file 8 - Configure your LDOM guest following the LDOM administration guide.
9 - Netboot and install Linux in the guest.
10 - Before rebooting into the installation, halt the guest and unbind it. The unbind is required to unlock the exported device for read.
11 - Take a copy of the partition table that has been created by Linux.
Example: dd if=/path/to/device of=/.ldom.linux/$guestname-$(basename /path/to/device).backup
Following the above example: dd if=/dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2 of=/.ldom.linux/foo1-c1t1d0s2.backup count=1 bs=512
or
dd if=/path/to/file of=/.ldom.linux/foo1-file.backup count=1 bs=512
12 - Edit the configuration file in /etc that you installed at step 3.
Each line contains:
guest_name disk1 disk2 ...
NOTE: you do not need to add entries for Solaris guests. Only Linux guests are required! Empty lines are skipped, no comments are allowed in the file.
Follow steps 13 to 19 if you are exporting a disk 13 - Restore Solaris partition table:
Example: dd conv=notrunc if=/.ldom.linux/$guest-$(basename /path/to/device).format of=/path/to/device bs=512 count=1
14 - Bind the guest
15 - Unbind the guest again. HINT: this is the most important step here because LDOM disk server now has validated the partition table and it will not check it again.
16 - Restore Linux partition table:
Example: dd conv=notrunc if=/.ldom.linux/$guest-$(basename /path/to/device).backup of=/path/to/device bs=512 count=1
17 - Bind the guest again.
18 - Start the guest.
19 - Enjoy.
Follow steps 20 to 23 if you are using a file 20 - Bind the guest
21 - Restore Linux partition table:
Example: dd conv=notrunc if=/.ldom.linux/$guest-$(basename /path/to/file).backup of=/path/to/file bs=512 count=1
22 - Start the guest.
23 - Enjoy.
This said, the script will allow you to reboot the controller without having to worry about Linux guests and it should ensure that LDOM will always start properly. LDOM stores the status of a guests in the Machine Description and we will use this status to restore the partition tables too. If the guest is in either bind or active status, we will take proper actions to stop/unbind/restore/bind/start. If the guest is in unbind state, we will do nothing because we do not know why is in that state. The script also is not error prone. Failing to stop or unbind the domain, to perform restore partition table operation, might cause LDOM to abort and can require manual fixing but the above information should be enough for any experienced user to recover. Have fun

Bruce Schneier writes about Correspondent Inference Theory which deals with situations when the motives of an individual or group are inferred by the results of their actions. Both his article and the MIT article on which it is based only consider the results of terrorist actions against the US and allied countries. I believe that this is a serious mistake by Bruce, the MIT people, and most people who write about terrorism. The most sensible writing about Terrorism is by Noam Chomsky. Noam considers the definition of Terrorism in both propaganda and literally. By the literal definition of terrorism the US government is responsible for more than it’s fair share of terrorist acts performed around the world. There is no reason to believe that people in the Middle-East are any less intelligent than people in the US and Europe. It seems obvious that some of the people who’s countries are destroyed by violence sponsored by the US government will believe that the US is entirely inhabited by blood-thirsty monsters. The number of US citizens who realise what their government does and approve is very low as is the number of Muslims who know what Al Quaeda does and approve of it. The US government claims that it wants democracy in the Middle-East, and Osama bin Laden claims to want the US military out of the Middle-East. If the US forces were withdrawn from Saudi Arabia then it would probably lead to a significant increase in democracy in the region (it couldn’t get any less democratic) - both sides could get what they claim to want. The discussion of the MIT paper seems to be largely based on the fact that Correspondent Inference causes the US government (and other governments) to decrease the probability of doing anything that might meet the terrorist goals. But no-one has mentioned the possibility that the same may apply to the probability of non-state organisations doing anything that might meet the goals of the US government. The wars in Iraq and Iran have significantly decreased the capabilities of the US military, they can’t recruit enough new soldiers and the current soldiers have reduced effectiveness due to long tours of duty with short breaks. The US economy is stagnating partly due to the direct effects of financing the wars, partly due to the way the airline security theatre has hurt trade and tourism, and partly because everyone has been concentrating on other things instead of fixing the economy. When two states have a war there is always the possibility of it being ended by a peace treaty or one side surrendering. With modern communications fighting can end in a matter of hours after a cease-fire has been arranged between states. But when non-state forces are involved things become much more difficult to manage. A state can make a deal with one non-state group only to discover that another non-state group (or a dissident faction within the original group) doesn’t like the treaty and continues fighting. With non-state terrorist acts connected to Al Quaeda in the US, the UK, Spain, and Indonesia (and more acts apparently planned in other countries) it’s obvious that we aren’t going to get a clean or quick solution to this problem. It seems to me that the only way the US and allied countries can escape from Correspondent Inference is to withdraw from the Middle-East entirely. If the people of Iran or Palestine want to elect a government that you don’t like then let it go (that’s what democracy is about anyway). If a dictator seizes control of Iraq then either leave him in control or provide air-support to any province that wants to rebel and establish a democratic government. Either make a stand on the principle of support for freedom and democracy or do nothing on the principle of letting people in other countries sort out their own problems. An invasion for the wrong reasons might fool people on the other side of the world but is unlikely to fool many people who live in the target country.

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Since I'm a member of the set of people "somebody better suited to explaining it" mentioned in Silvia Pfeiffer's "A Long Story of Logins", I suppose it falls to me to explain what the hell we actually did to make the thing work. A quick recap, for anyone who hasn't read Silvia's article: the Vquence website is a very AJAXy, Web 2.0 style video socialisation site. Since we want the site to be available to all as much as possible, we don't lock any part of the site away behind a "login required" page unless we absolutely have to. An unpleasant side effect of this is that, when it does does come time for you to login, pushing you off to a separate "please login" page is going to be, well, a pest. There's all sorts of state about what the user is up to (it's a web-based video mashup creator, after all) that we need to submit -- but only after the user has logged in. Enter the realm of the Web 2.0 Login. Instead of sending the user to a login page, getting them to login, and then redirecting them back to where they want to go, you just have some sort of popup form that, when submitted to, does a background request and logs the user in behind the scenes. This isn't a new concept by any means -- for example, try voting up or down a link on reddit when you're not logged in. However, most sites that implement this sort of thing (based on our brief informal survey around the office) don't protect the password information in any way -- it goes over the wire as a plaintext HTTP request. We don't like this, so we wanted to send the login form over HTTPS. And there began our problems. The trivial implementation of a Web 2.0 Login page is as you'd expect -- the AJAX stalwart, XmlHttpRequest, POSTing to a handler somewhere that validates the login, sets a session, and sends back some javascript to change the page layout a bit to show you're logged in. We had this working nicely, until we started testing on our staging environment, where HTTPS comes into play... You see, XmlHttpRequest doesn't like making a request to a domain other than the one that the main page comes from -- for security. It also thinks that the same hostname via a different protocol counts as a different domain, for the purposes of this security check. (I can see the theoretical reasoning for it, but it is a bit weird for HTTP to HTTPS transitions) So if you want to POST to https://www.vquence.com/something using XmlHttpRequest, you need to be doing it from a page which is retrieved from somewhere in https://www.vquence.com/ as well. We considered just turning on HTTPS across the board, but that would have all sorts of unpleasant ramifications, so we decided against that. But the problem remained, how do we get the user's credentials to our server in a secure manner with a minimum of unpleasantness? We came up with all sorts of options. This is where the infamy of "bug #93" started -- it's a monster of a bug log. Lots of it is me going "we could do this, but it'd suck, or we could do this, but it would suck". Finally, Silvia (I think) suggested we look at using an iframe. "Eeew" was the general response, but it might at least give us a way to set a part of the page to HTTPS, which we could use as a launching point for our XmlHttpRequest call. While researching how to make this all work (I had, to my great pride, never inflicted an iframe on the world before), I managed to come across a few articles on how you can use a hidden iframe to handle requests instead of using XmlHttpRequest. Basically, the trick is that you do a regular POST on your main page, but set the target of the form to a hidden iframe in your page. A general discussion of the principle is available At the Apple Developer site, and there's also a Rails plugin that implements the concept rather nicely. When I found these, I briefly danced for joy. My quest was over. POST to the iframe, the iframe get some JS back from the server, JS mangles the main page's layout to show the user is now logged in... aaaand profit. Like fun it was. My implementation was short and sweet -- a true work of genius (if I do say so myself). Everything worked like a charm. Until we got it back into staging. Then cross-domain security bit me again. Naturally, if you don't want XmlHttpRequest calls to perform cross-domain, you probably don't want iframes for different sites to be manipulating each other's content either. That's exactly what happened -- the iframe can't manipulate the main page's layout as we need it to. Why I didn't think of this before I charged mightily ahead I don't know. My only defence is that I've never claimed to be a web development guru. Sneaky tricks will defeat any security measure, though. For instance, we control both sites (http and https), so we can send the user back to the unsecured site after login and then that location (still in the hidden iframe) can manipulate the main page layout. Redirect to the rescue! That worked really well in Firefox, even with HTTPS in staging. We were saved. At least until IE came along. Bloody Microsoft, ruining all my cunning plans. IE complains when a HTTPS site redirects (using the Location HTTP header) to a HTTP site. You apparently can't turn this off. I was shocked that Microsoft cared so much about their user's data security -- it's certainly not the first thing I think of when I think "Microsoft". My faith in the world was restored when Silvia pointed me to a workaround for the problem -- if you send the redirect in a <meta http-equiv="refresh"> tag instead of a Location header, IE is more than happy to let it pass. Because obvously a chunk of HTML that says "HTTP equivalence" is completely different to a HTTP header. Sheesh. To snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, after all this brilliant hacking, I managed to make a newbie error with the contents of the http-equiv by setting the content to "0;http://www.vquence.com/blah" instead of "0;url=http://www.vquence.com/blah" (note the url=, because I sure didn't). IE complained by looping infinitely on the source URL, while Firefox just made sense of it and did the right thing. I managed to waste most of an hour of three of us over that little stuff-up. Go me! (Sorry about that guys, by the way) Feeling very chuffed, I went home for the evening. The next morning saw a browser compatibility defect in my queue -- Safari didn't like the new setup. Instead of doing the right thing, clicking on the login button would create a new tab instead of logging in. The fix? Changing the style of the hidden iframe from "display: none" to "width: 1px; height: 1px; border: 0" did the trick. Fark. So much for "hidden" iframes. What's particularly funny is that Apple's own tutorial on hidden iframes says to avoid "display: none" because NS6 doesn't like it, but doesn't mention it's own glaring deficiency in this area. So, what are the lessons learned?

• Firstly, IE is different. I knew this already, but living in an all-Linux, not-normally-a-web-frontend-developer world, I need to be reminded every now and then.
• Safari is differently different. Being a former Konqueror user, and wrangling with that browser's retardations in an earlier existence, I should have been ready for this one.
• "Code to the standards" is a crock of shit. That's not to say that we shouldn't encourage it, but I'm fairly sure that the HTML 4.01 standard is silent on whether or not an iframe with it's display property set to none is a valid target for a form submission (I had a quick look, and nothing jumped out at me). Anyone who dismisses the difficulties of web development with a hand wave and a casual "just code to the standards" will get a double-spaced, 24pt printed and bound copy of all of the W3C standards dropped on their head from a tall building.
• No matter what security measure you think has stopped you, there's always a workaround. Can't do a XmlHttpRequest to a different domain? POST to a hidden iframe (you can post to any domain you want, too -- so much for cookie security). Want to run JS you got back from POSTing to a different domain? Just redirect back to the first domain. Can't redirect from a HTTPS to a HTTP page? Don't use a HTTP redirect, use a meta refresh. Sigh.
• Hidden iframes are cool. While I'm firmly in the "frames are evil" camp, they're a nice freaky behind-the-scenes tool if you want to do something more than what a simple XmlHttpRequest gives you. It's like having a whole separate scratch-pad of a browser you can play with, and the user never has to see it.
• Web development is frustrating. I don't do a whole heap of it (I'm more a backend code / infrastructure guy), so when I do some web UI work, I have to re-learn exactly how much of a pain it is to have to cater to the needs of a bunch of different browsers, each with their own quirks and irritations. Suddenly supporting a bunch of different Linux distros seems so much less frustrating.

For those who have asked youself sometimes, when watching any of the Spanish sucess in any kind of sports (but football), why when Spanish athem is sounding no one signs anything, or why, when sound system breaks, people sings "ti-to-ti-to-ta-ri-ro-ri-ro-rit-to-ti..." you have to learn that Spanish Athem has no lyrics. Of course, it had, but was removed when democracy imposed over other darker options 30 years ago. Today, I have seen that, from a mistake, the old lyrics were used by a Romanian ship in a competition at Barcelona. You can see (and listen to it) below.

I cannot understand why this can be considered fascist by reading the lyrics. But listening to it I have felt again that we need lyrics. We cannot go out at the world mumbling our athem, as we cannot sign it. Recently, Spanish Olimpic Comitee requested lyrics to be written. I strongly think that they will be some king of "flower power" lyrics, to avoid hurting anyone (which is impossible)

For those who have asked youself sometimes, when watching any of the Spanish sucess in any kind of sports (but football), why when Spanish athem is sounding no one signs anything, or why, when sound system breaks, people sings "ti-to-ti-to-ta-ri-ro-ri-ro-rit-to-ti..." you have to learn that Spanish Athem has no lyrics. Of course, it had, but was removed when democracy imposed over other darker options 30 years ago. Today, I have seen that, from a mistake, the old lyrics were used by a Romanian ship in a competition at Barcelona. You can see (and listen to it) below.

I cannot understand why this can be considered fascist by reading the lyrics. But listening to it I have felt again that we need lyrics. We cannot go out at the world mumbling our athem, as we cannot sign it. Recently, Spanish Olimpic Comitee requested lyrics to be written. I strongly think that they will be some king of "flower power" lyrics, to avoid hurting anyone (which is impossible)

More than a year after gnucash upstream made the transition from glib1 to glib2, Debian has finally been able to do the same with the binaries. Problems in g-wrap and gnucash had led to libglib1.2 remaining as part of the dependency chain of gnucash as well as libglib2.0-0 (build-deps and runtime).

NMU's of g-wrap and gnucash have finally removed the last vestiges of libglib1.2 from my systems. Yippee!

My Overview showing the incoming packages which will migrate into the NMU section in due course.

g-wrap

gnucash

Hamburg is surrounded by four nuclear power plants, and two of those were partly on fire two weeks ago. So far, so bad. Now a list from 2001 is becoming public which describes on 50000 pages (no joke) the problems in one of the four. I guess Debian has less than 50000 known and open bugs....

Not to mention that nuclear waste needs to be stored securily for several ten thousand years and that so far this problem has not been really solved.

But I guess I don't care either: I guess the problems of war, hunger, global warming and the fights for oil and clean water and food will become much more pressing in a much shorter timeframe...

So enjoy life like there is no tomorrow! But also keep in mind that there might be a tomorrow or next year, and that you'd still want the earth to be a nice place to be. And don't tell me I should stop smoking for my future. If, I should stop it for my present well being.

Back to virtual reality now...

Collabora and OpenedHand are pleased to sponsor a party this evening at the Walkabout bar on Broad Street from 8pm. Please come along to today’s closing keynote for more details. To get there walk through the Paradise Forum next to the Conservatoire in the direction of Brindley Place and then along Broad Street to the left. Check out this map. Anyone who looks under the age of 25 will be required to prove they are over the age of 18.

Russell argues (when talking about Mark's proposed high-end Free Software-based laptop) that laptops are hard (or expensive) hardware to modify and repurpose - Maybe your laptop will one day go to your child or something like that, but it's hard for it to be a server.
I disagree.
One of my most faithful and most beloved home servers was my old laptop, a Compaq Armada 4120 we originally got (used, for that matter) in 1998 and that was my main laptop until 2002, when I got my first Dell. 120MHz Pentium, 16 MB RAM (later upgraded to 32), 2GB hard disk.
From 2002 and until around 2005, it was my home server - Think about it: A low-power, compact machine you can store anywhere, and that has (still today! Wish I could say that for ~2 year old machines...) a two hour battery with the LCD on. We swapped the hard disk for a 40GB one around 2003, and it was just perfect for DSL sharing, Samba file serving to our internal network, and simple, personal HTTP server. Of course, it started aching when Nadezhda and I started running our blogs - MySQL and Apache didn't fit in the memory at the same time :)
For some months, we had an old 1GHz Athlon as our server, but it was too noisy and ate too much electricity - We now have a nice Mac Mini, but share the UPS with Nadezhda's main machine. Which is fine, but takes a bit off the coolness factor :) Oh, and -of course- it does not have a built-in screen anymore. Nadezhda uses an iMac, so whenever we need to directly use the server, I have to go find our clunky 17" CRT and work sitting on the floor...

One thing that often comes up in the world of commercial wikis is the idea of Paying wiki contributors. I think it's a bad idea, and I've written an essay why. tags: wiki commercialization crowdsourcing

SxSW submissions time I just submitted a panel for South by Southwest 2008. The title: "Wiki 2.0: Taking Collaboration to the Next Level". Hopefully it will get accepted; I'd love to do a panel with some of the interesting wiki people I've met over the last few years. The SxSW panel submission process is almost closed; submissions have to be in by July 20th. See Panel Submission Process for 2008 SXSW Interactive for details. tags: wiki sxsw08 sxsw panel submissions

Seeing Yellow seems to have encouraged hundreds of people to contact their printer manufacturers and complain about tracking dots. Lots of reports (like this one) are popping up on blogs and being sent to me in email. There are reports in upcoming magazines. And as far as I know, nobody has been visited by the US Secret Service yet. I spent half an hour on the phone with HP. I filed a technical support request about the yellow dots and had to speak with the engineer for a while before I was able to convince him that this was definitely not a malfunctioning printer. He checked out seeingyellow.com while on the phone with me and seemed to be genuinely shocked and concerned. He said he would talk to the other technical support people in the color laser group and would write up a report to send up the chain of command. I even had him promise not to turn me into the Secret Service. Please, lets keep the calls coming! We really are making a difference. Another thing people might do is call laser printer manufacturers before they buy a printer and talk to sales representatives. Demand an assurance that the printer they sell you will not surreptitiously print intentionally identifiable information. Explain that you will buy from the first printer manufacturer who can give you such an assurance. So far, no company has. I was thinking about how it was slightly funny that Brother prints tracking dots in their color laser printers. One might say that tracking dots are courtesy of Big Brother, and Big HP, and Big Toshiba, and Big Xerox, and all the other big printer color laser printer manufacturers.

One problem that I have had in configuring Heartbeat clusters is in performing a STONITH that originates outside the Heartbeat system. STONITH was designed for the Heartbeat system to know when a node is not operating correctly (this can either be determined by the node itself or by other nodes in the network) and then force a hardware reset so that the non-functional node will not interfere with another node that is designated to take over the service. However sometimes code that is called by Heartbeat will have more information about the state of the system than Heartbeat can access. For example if I have a service that accesses a filesystem on an external RAID then it’s common for the RAID to track who is accessing it. In some situations the RAID hardware has the ability to “fence” the access (so that when machine B mounts the filesystem machine A can no longer access it). In other situations the RAID may only be capable of informing the system that another machine is registered as the owner of the device. To solve this problem a machine that is to mount such a device must either prohibit the previous owner from accessing the device (which may be impossible or unreasonably difficult) or reset the previous owner. Until recently I had been doing this by writing some code to extract the STONITH configuration from the CIB and call the stonith utility. The problem with this is that there is no requirement that every node be capable of performing a STONITH on every other node, and that even if every node is are designed to be capable of rebooting every other node a partial failure condition may restrict the set of nodes that are capable of performing a STONITH on the target. Currently the recommended way of doing this is via the test program. Below is an example of the command used to reset the node node-1 with a timeout of 20000ms and the result of it being successfully completed. I have suggested that the Heartbeat developers make an official interface for doing this (rather than a test of the API) and I believe that this is being considered. In the mean time the following is the only way of doing it: # /usr/lib/heartbeat/stonithdtest/apitest 1 node-1 20000 0
optype=1, node_name=node-1, result=0, node_list=node-0

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