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5 January 2007

Gunnar Wolf: Five rarely known things about me

Hah! Targetted memes have hit again - Arareko decided I should talk about myself. I will do this, but I won't point the finger at five others - Lets see just who bites ;-) Besides, having left this post rot as a draft for over a week already, it got a bit more interesting: The meme bit from two sides. Arareko (as well as Ion) was bitten by Cicloid, from the mx.planetalinux.org-derived side of reality, and then Hanna bit Wouter on Planet Debian. Ok, time to get this message out from the freezer...
So... Five not very well known things about me? Ok, here I go.
  1. Many people inquire me routinely about my name, specially when reading it off an official document where it appears with both names and both family names (Gunnar Eyal Wolf Iszaevich). As many Jewish families, mine comes from all over Europe: My mother-side grandparents were both born in Poland (hence the Iszajewicz, morphed into the slightly more writable Iszaevich). My father-side grandmother was born in Vienna, Austria (I still have some family in Graz), and my father-side grandfather was a proud child of the Austro-Hungarian empire - His family probably was originally Austriac (Wolf is a German name), but became Hungarian and Hungarian was their home language. He was born in Felszoviso, Transilvania (the part of Hungary that later became Northern Romania). And, yes, I mentioned my family is Jewish, so having the Hebrew name Eyal (my second given name) is no surprise. Now, about Gunnar? Well, I still don't know :) It's a Scandinavian name. My family has no (upwards) relation to Scandinavia, but both of my parents (although merely by coincidence, and with over 30 years between periods) lived in Western Sweden - My father, 1970-1972, and my mother, 2003-2006. Oh, and people usually expect them to carry strange foreign names as well - No, they are Bernardo and Ofelia.
  2. I like to think started my journey into Free Software very early in my life. No, I didn't use Linux until 1994 (and only installed it in 1996), I'm not talking about such a modern piece of free software. I first touched computers around 1983-1984, when my father used to take me on Friday nights to his institute, to play with the computer. This computer was a Foonly F2, administered by La Mancha. What did I use to play on such a beast? Why, of course, I used Emacs to write TeX! Rumors say that this Foonly had the first TeX installation outside of Stanford (I guess this fact derives from Donald Knuth's visit to UNAM in 1977 - But of course I don't remember that!)
  3. My family is bitterly split in two camps: Those who love eggplant and those who hate it. At least my parents, my aunt and I are known to love it. At least my wife (Nadezhda), my brother and two of my cousins are known to hate it. The feelings towards this noble plant are really strong, but out of respect for the other party of the family, we practically never cook with it.
  4. Now that we mention food-related strangeness, I was a vegetarian for almost my first 20 years of life. My father is still a vegetarian (for over 35 years already). Nadezhda became a vegetarian almost a year ago. I still think I have saved enough karma during those 20 years to endure some more meat eating, but who knows... I might switch back just to be on the safe side ;-)
  5. Often, memes can absorb too much energy from me. Even having left this entry not responded for over a week, I've been thinking (and forgetting) on and off what to write in it. So, Mauricio, thanks for making me waste my time this way! ;-) I hope this fact counts as a legal fifth thing.

MJ Ray: Environment: Driving: Toll news? Not fantastic

Kewstoke is connected to the town of Weston-super-Mare by the mile-or-so of Kewstoke Toll Road but since 2005, there has been no toll collector. Unsurprisingly, the number of the least desirable vehicle types (Chelsea tractors/SUVs and light goods) using this coast road has doubled while the toll has been missing. Now the council is looking at putting up the season ticket rates from 5.50 to somewhere between 22.00 and 35.00 if they bring the toll back. A seven-fold increase? The alternative is to abolish to toll: which do you think is more likely? The latest report lists
"Unrestricted access and egress between Kewstoke and Weston-super-Mare"
as a benefit of abolition. Becoming a rat-run between the town centre and M5 is a benefit for who exactly? Certainly no benefit to the residents of Kewstoke or the top end of WsM who get the extra traffic wriggling along small roads with junctions not designed for that flow. Probably no benefit to drivers if they start to rely upon a hazardous road along the cliff-tops, which can be totally closed by just one break-down. It also goes against the Joint Local Transport Plan which says the council will
"direct traffic and particularly freight onto the most appropriate roads. Manage safe travel taking into account the current and desired uses of the network. Improve quality of life for local people."
Are press releases like Toll Road Accidents Reduced trying to convince us that driving along the cliff-tops is safe? More reports can be found among the items of the Strategic Planning and Economic Development Policy and Scrutiny Panel

Russell Coker: core files

The issue of core file management has come up for discussion again in the SE Linux list.

I believe that there are two essential security requirements for managing core files, one is that the complete security context of the crashing process is stored (to the greatest possible extent), and the other is that processes with different security contexts be prevented from discovering that a process dumped core (when attacking a daemon it would be helpful to know when you made one of it's processes dump core).

The core file will have the same UID and GID as the process that crashed. It's impossible to maintain the complete security context of the crashing process in this manner as Unix permissions support multiple supplementary groups and Unix filesystems only support one GID. So the supplementary groups are lost.

There is also a sysctl kernel.core_pattern which specifies the name of the core file. This supports a number of modifiers, EG the value "core.%p.%u.%g" would give a file named "core.PID.UID.GID". It would be good to have a modification to the kernel code in question to allow the SE Linux context to be included in this (maybe %z).

To preserve the SE Linux context of the crashing process with current kernel code we need to have a unique type for each process that dumps core, this merely requires that each domain have an automatic transition rule for creating files in the directory chosen for core dumps. In the default configuration we have core files dumped in the current directory of the process. This may be /tmp or some other common location which allows an attacker to discover which process is dumping core (due to the directory being world readable) and in the case of SE Linux there may be multiple domains that are permitted to create files in /tmp with the same context which gets in the way of using such a common directory for core files.

The traditional Unix functionality is to have core files dumped in the current directory. Obviously we can't break this by default. But for systems where security is desired I believe that the correct thing to do is to use a directory such as /var/core for core files, this can be easily achieved by creating the directory as mode 1733 (so that any user can create core files but no-one but the sys-admin can read them) and then setting the core_pattern sysctl to specify that all core files go in that directory. The next improvement is to have a poly-instantiated directory for /var/core such that each login user has their own version. That way the user in question could see the core files created by their own processes while system core files and core files for other users would be in different directories. Poly-instantation is easier to implement for core files than it is for /tmp (and the other directories for which it is desirable) because there is much less access to such a directory. When things operate correctly core files are not generated, and users never need to access each other's core files directly (they are mode 0600 so this isn't possible anyway).

This area will require a moderate amount of coding before it works in the ideal manner. I aim to briefly describe the issues only in this post.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Remembering Mnemonics

I noticed recently that often had trouble remembering mnemonics. To help remember them, I've started a list of mnemonics that I have trouble remembering on my Wikipedia user page. If there are mnemonics you have trouble remembering, you should leave a comment on my blog or a message on my Wikipedia talk page because it's possible I have trouble with them as well. If I do, I'll add them to my list. If they are not even in Wikipedia's List of mnemonics I can add them so others who forget them also might be able to recall them as well. One thing I noticed when making the list was that in some situations (e.g., the lists of planets or the hierarchy of the taxonomy in biology), I have no problem remembering the thing that the mnemonics in question are referring to but can't remember the mnemonic itself. Of course, I can sometimes use the referent as a mnemonic for the mnemonic. Also, since my list is hosted in my user page on Wikipedia, I should also urge you to considering donating to the Wikimedia Foundation to help support the great work they and to insure that they can purchase the bandwidth and servers necessary to keep Wikipedia going.

Alexander Schmehl: Irie Révoltés

Yesterday we have been at a concert of Irie Révoltés. Interesting experience: Most of their songs are (partly) in french, while - may bubulle forgive me - I don't speak that language... We spent a nice time at the concert, and most of the time I could understand enough of the texts. (Well, at least until they started to sing really, really fast.) If you like Ska or social critical songs, give them a try if they happen to do a concert near to you.

Thijs Kinkhorst: On Inconvenient Truths

Yesterday I went to see An Inconvenient Truth with Hieke at LHC: the documentary by Al Gore about global warming. Already a classic, and well worth a visit. Gore is an excellent, erudite speakererudite, has convincing arguments and is surprisingly humourous. The film consists mainly of a recording of a speech he's been giving for about twenty years on the topic of global warming. He supports his views with clear arguments. The film is not at all fatalistic: a good point was his emphasis that we need not "go from denial to despair" but that it's actually quite well possible to solve the problem. If there's policical will. The only downside is the distinctly "American" flavour that the film has: intermezzos about his family and some emotional personal events in his life. And every person that Gore quotes is "my friend". But these points are really minor. A must see.

Amaya Rodrigo: Love yourself, whatever your size is!

Quoting Shakespeare's Sister:
It remains a radical act to be fat and happy [...], especially if you're a woman (for whom "jolly" fatness isn't an option). If you're fat, you're not only meant to be unhappy, but deeply ashamed of yourself, projecting at all times an apologetic nature, indicative of your everlasting remorse for having wrought your monstrous self upon the world. You are certainly not meant to be bold, or assertive, or confident and should you manage to overcome the constant drumbeat of messages that you are ugly and unsexy and have earned equally society's disdain and your own self-hatred, should you forget your place and walk into the world one day with your head held high, you are to be reminded by the cow-calls and contemptuous looks of perfect strangers that you are not supposed to have self-esteem; you don't deserve it. Rare indeed is the fat chick who manages to find contentment in her own skin, because everything around her is designed so that she will not.

Being publicly fat and happy is hard; being publicly, shamelessly, unshakably fat and happy is an act of both will and bravery.
Love yourself, whatever your size is!

Being Sedintary Is Bad For You, Not Being Fat

Michael Janssen: Setup will complete in approximately: 39 minutes

Hardware evils

I've had quite the unfortunate week, hardware-wise, here. Nothing on my end is broken, but [lj user=ceilingsarecool]'s computer is screwed but good. It all started near the beginning of this week when I started to look into her machine. It had been loud for a while, and was being unreliable in regards to applications. Running memtest86+ on it via a handy System Rescue CD I always keep around discovered a couple of stuck bits on the memory that otherwise had been perfectly fine. However, I have had sticks die before, so I called Crucial and am having the memory replaced. (thank you Lifetime warranty). While I was taking the Memory out I noticed the couse of the loudness. Apparently there was ailing fan on the south bridge, which explained her issues with USB-connected devices. No problem - I'll just order a replacement motherboard. The old FIC AD11 was getting pretty bad anyway.

The new motherboard (a PCCHIPS M810LMR) arrived yesterday, so I went through the lengthy process of removing the old motherboard and moving the CPU from one to another. Just one problem: the new motherboard didn't start up. After checking that I had everything connected right, I thought the board was DOA. This would be my first DOA ever, but as usual the place I bought from has a DOA replacement policy so I thought I just wasted 2 hours and a bunch of time replacing. Unfortunately, this isn't even the end of this sad tale of brokenness. When I put the CPU back in the old motherboard, it didn't start either. So now I'm left with two motherboards for a processor that doesn't work, I assume. I don't really have another one that I can test it out on, and I can't test the motherboards with another CPU because I don't have one.

Luckily, I have some old towers sitting here that were about to be dragged out to the dumpster. I rescued them. They're ancient, even more than the machine that was in use was. I had to burn a Maxtor MaxBlast4 CD just to get them past the 65GB barrier, and of course I need to do a "repair" install of Windows because all the hardware changed since I installed it.

Lesson of this tale: Almost-broken computers are a delicate ecosystem. Just buy a new computer - you'll have to do that in the longrun anyway. Currently I'm looking at replacing the mainboard and CPU with this combo from newegg. It's got mixed reviews, but is reasonably priced, and if DOA I am sure that newegg will replace it. I'm debating between doing this and just saving up to get a decent new motherboard and CPU (generally around $150-$250, $300 easily with new memory) later in the year. I feel pretty bad because every computer that I've given [info]ceilingsarecool to use has had issues like this. She tells me that she doesn't really care that much, and she does have a laptop which works well when the desktop has issues like this, but it's still like a poison apple.

Windows XP Setup

It doesn't seem to matter what you are installing Windows XP on. It can be 500MHz or 1.2GHz or 3.0GHz, the first time estimate that you get for finishing the install is 39 minutes. When XP was first released, I never ever had a computer that would finish that fast - it consistently took an hour or more from that state, and then I jumped to fast computers that come under the mark most of the time (although not by much). At least the estimate is monotonic, not going up to an hour. I can at least assess the progress a little more. Installing a couple times in the last few weeks has got me wondering about the origin of that estimate, and if it was going to be so inaccurate as to just guess and be constant at the beginning of the install, why include a time estimate at all?

Benjamin Mako Hill: Who Owns <em>Free Culture</em>?

The previous year saw far too much fighting over who gets to define and control the term free culture. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that these fights conflate a very important discussion about the goals of a set of nascent social movements -- or the lack thereof -- with much less important issues of semantics, definitions, and control over terms. The term is being used in a way that describes a whole lot of projects I support and participate in fully -- and a few I don't. And I think that's OK. When Erik M ller and I launched the Free Cultural Works Definition (at the time, the Free Content and Expression Definition), we struggled to find a good term for the works that we wanted to liberate. We thought about using the terms content, expression, knowledge, information, art, data and communication but each word seemed to exclude an important body of works or producers. Few musicians we knew thought of their productions as "content" while few encyclopedia writers did not. The term we liked most was culture: it defines a very broad set of practice and has very positive connotations. Of course, others had already been using the term free culture so we spent some reading up on the term and talking to the people most closely associated with it. Originally, the term seems to have its roots in the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I reread the book to get an idea for exactly what Lessig meant when he used the term but, upon reaching the end, I found myself without a good answer. The book's index included a promising entry for "Free culture, defined" which pointed to a short section in the preface:
A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. (emphasis mine)
Framed by a negative definition of what free culture is not, Lessig's definition describes the broad space between two unattainable extremes. This resulting ambiguity is fully intended: Lessig has not only spoken out against my particular suggestion but against any definition and the process of offering ex cathedra definitions or goals altogether [1]. In personal conversations about our definition, Lessig was initially very supportive. In fact, it was Lessig who introduced Erik and I to each other and suggested that we work together. What Lessig did disagree with us on however, was calling the definition the Free Culture Definition. I think that Lessig felt some sense of ownership of the term and felt that he and others had defined it and been using it in a way that was broader and incompatible with the definition we were proposing and with any definition of the type of we were suggesting. Early on, Lessig blessed a group of students to create a Free Culture student movement. Most active now in Harvard Free Culture and Free Culture NYU and but in a handful of other places as well, these groups have been involved in everything from the promotion of transgressive approaches to IP, to speech bubbles, to anti-DRM work, to protecting the right of cereal restaurants to operate. When Erik and I suggested to this group that they might benefit from adopting the Free Cultural Works Definition as a set of explicit ideals or goals for their movement, the larger part of the coalition soundly rejected the idea. Like Lessig, they wanted free culture to refer to wide variety of projects and did not feel good about describing any work by sympathetic parties as "non-ideal." Erik and I were faced with two choices: we could call our definition the Free Culture Definition and in effect engage in a power struggle with Lessig and with some portion of the free culture student movement or we could pick another term. While we don't like the alternatives as much as free culture, we didn't have a lot of trouble deciding that going with a term like free cultural work or free content and expression was the better choice. This is why I am a little worried about the recently announced UK-based Free Culture Foundation. I have nothing but respect for the founders (Matt Lee, Tom Chance, and Rob Myers) and trust them to create the type of free culture organization that I would like to see. I am very much looking forward to working closely with them on this project in the future. They seem likely to choose a set of goals and adopt a set of strategies in line with the ones I've argued for. But in that my goals and strategies have run into opposition among many of the most visible people using the term free culture in the past, that's also why I'm a little worried. SJ Klein and I were recently saying that its time to start naming organizations and projects in this area using only words in dead languages. That way, we can side-step the (unimportant) semantic arguments over who gets to control existing terms and focus on the real goal of building stronger social movements, setting goals that sound as unthreatening to each other as they actually are, and building better tools. Without semantic arguments in our way, we'll be able stronger to build coalitions and work together in all the ways we should be.
[1]

This is an important distinction because it is also possible to disagree with the first fully articulated definition but also feel that offering another set of goals -- for example, a set that allowed for commercial use or anything under current CC licenses -- was productive.

After all, I have been arguing for much longer in favor of any set of goals much longer and more strenuously than I have argued for any particular set of goals and I still feel that a set goals is much more important than any paritcular one.

Clint Adams: Grangers on a pane

Rudy told James that he was going to be in Tainbridge the following Saturday and asked if he would like to have dinner or drinks and catch up. James agreed to dinner and they met at a very mediocre Italian restaurant that incited a mild bit of regret in the both of them. Though they hadn't spoken in seven years, there was not much catching up. Rudy announced that he was moving to Tainbridge soon, and James's heart lept. Then somewhat abruptly, he asked if James had a boyfriend. James replied in the affirmative, and Rudy's heart sank. Somewhat upset, Rudy called Carlo, then asked James if he would like to have dessert with Carlo downtown. James did not particularly want to have dessert with Carlo, so he replied in the affirmative. Presently they came to be having dessert, and Carlo excitedly chattered about how he was getting Rudy a job at his firm and how everyone's lives were going to be fantastic. James developed a slight melancholy and went home to his boyfriend, Chaim. Rudy moved to Tainbridge, began working at Carlo's firm, and started spending as much time at Carlo's house as Carlo spent at Rudy's. After about a month, he began to lose hope that work began tolerable, and life started to wear him down. Carlo knew that Rudy did not want him very much, but swore to win him over, no matter what it took. Carlo was very devoted to him, but the constant doting did not make him happy. James called him to chat, and Rudy asked about his boyfriend again. James changed the subject, and Rudy jokingly suggested that James buy him a new phone. James laughed, and suggested that they get together. Rudy said that he was far too busy with work at the moment, but perhaps that would change in the future. Then a spark of hope ignited within Rudy's soul, and he began to fantasize. Rudy would leave Carlo and run to James when given the new phone which would be imbued with so much unspoken meaning. So too, a dream nagged at James's mind. Finally, in a moment of weakness, he bought a new phone which he imagined Rudy would like. Rudy was afraid, so he continued to say that he was too busy to spend any time with James. James continued to grow frustrated until at last Rudy was free for dinner. So they made a date, and James gift-wrapped the phone and brought it along. Just a few minutes before their scheduled rendezvous, Rudy called and asked if it would be acceptable if Carlo joined them for dinner. James did not want Carlo to join them, so he answered in the affirmative. Rudy avoided any opportunity for him to be alone with James, and James grew increasingly frustrated. When the bill arrived, everyone just stared at it contentiously until Carlo finally announced begrudgingly that he would pay for everyone. Carlo and Rudy returned to Rudy's house, and James retired to his. James became more downcast and berated himself for being pathetic enough to buy the phone. Rudy became even more impatient, finally losing control and calling James to scream at him for being so inconsiderate as to make Carlo pay for the dinner. James was very defensive, and their relationship grew very strained. One day, Rudy called James and invited him to dinner immediately after work. James accepted, and headed to the restaurant. When he got there, Rudy was alone. James groaned, for he did not have the phone with him. They had a very civil dinner, Rudy paid for both of them, and then they went home. Rudy gave up all hope that James would buy him a phone. They never saw each other again.

4 January 2007

Russell Coker: monitors for developers

Michael Davies recently blogged that all developers should have big screens. This news has been around for a while, the most publicity for the idea came from Microsoft Research where they did a study showing that for certain tasks a 50% performance increase could be gained from a larger monitor.

If you consider that a good software developer will get paid about $100K and it's widely regarded that in a corporate environment the entire costs for a worker (including management, office space, etc) is double their base salary then you consider each developer to be worth $200K per annum. Therefore larger and more monitors could potentially give a benefit in excess of $100K per annum (we assume that the value provided by the developer is greater than their salary - apart from the dot-com boom that's usually the case).

It's quite obvious that you can get a really great monitor configuration for significantly less than $100K and that it will remain quite current for significantly more than a year (monitor technology advances comparatively slowly so a good monitor should last at least four years).

Some time ago I researched this matter for a client. I convinced all the managers in my area, I convinced a bunch of colleagues to buy bigger monitors for their homes (and bought one myself), but unfortunately senior management saw it as a waste of money. I was trying to convince them that people who were being paid >$100,000 should be each assigned a $400 monitor. Sadly they believed that spending the equivalent of less than a day's wages per employee was not justified.

If I was in a management position I would allocate an amount of money for each developer to spend on hardware or conferences at their own discretion. I would make that amont of money a percentage of the salary of each employee, and I would also allow them to assign some of their share to a colleague if they had a good reason for it (EG if a new hire needed something expensive that would exceed their budget for the first year). I think that people who are good programmers are in the best position to judge what can best be done to improve their own productivity, and that allowing them to make their own choices is good for morale.

On a more technical level I have a problem with getting a big monitor. I do most of my work on a laptop because I travel a lot. I don't travel as much as I did while living in Europe but still do a lot of coding in many strange places. I started writing my Postal benchmark in the hotel restaurant of a Bastion hotel in Utrecht during one of the worst recorded storms in Europe (the restaurant had huge windows and it was inspirational for coding). I wrote the first version of my ZCAV benchmark in Denver airport while waiting for a friend.

What I need is a good way of moving open windows from my laptop to a big external display and then back again. I don't want to logout before moving my machine. With a Macintosh this is quite possible (I'm using a OS/X machine while working for a client and the only thing that has impressed me is the monitor support). With Linux things aren't so easy, it's supposed to be possible but I haven't heard any unqualified success stories yet.

I guess I could try setting up XDMCP between my laptop and a desktop machine with some big displays and logout before moving.

Any suggestions?

MJ Ray: Cycling: Injuries, Death, Roadworks and the Cycle Forum

I used to live in Norfolk, so Norwich Evening News: Was top cyclist killed by driver asleep at the wheel? (Updates: EDP: Death crash trial hears of "most viable explanation" and EDP: Driver guilty of causing cyclist's death ) and Norwich Evening News: Cyclist hit by bus on A47 are rather worrying. Weston super Mare Weston Mercury: Town centre havoc reports that Wales and West Utilities will be digging up Orchard Street followed by Alexandra Parade, Regent Street, Walliscote Road, High Street and Knightstone Road over 16 weeks from 8 January, and also
"Three months worth of work to remove the central reservation and add a filter lane to Herluin Way is also due to start on the same day [...] Uphill Road South in Uphill is closing on January 9 for six weeks as Wessex Water repairs the highway's sewer. [...] Winters Lane in Redhill is shutting for two months while a new sewer is put in."
Pipe works seldom seem to take up the full width of the road and the Herluin Way cycle track only crosses Herluin Way at a few points. Will these roads be kept open for cycling? They should be. All of these seem to be starting just before next week's Cycle Forum (7pm Wednesday 10 January at Worle Campus, press release ). Interesting new year present.

Anthony Towns: Five Things

Suppposedly, card number five in the Tarot is the Hierophant, described as “someone who interprets secret knowledge” and representing concepts such as “conformity” and “group identification”. Not that any of that is related to this “five things you don’t know about me” meme, for which I’ve apparently been tagged by both Pia and Tony. And since I wouldn’t want to be accused of being either cool or vanity lacking here’s some from me. Let’s see, I’ll tag: vocalist extraordinaire James, companionable carnivore Pat, sometime C hacker David, fellow motorcyclist Sez, and future housemate Clinton.

Andrew Pollock: [life] 8 flights in 2 weeks (visiting Australia)

(and I'm still catching up on my blogging backlog) So Sarah and I returned to Australia for two weeks at the end of November/start of December. The reason for the timing was my grandmother's 90th birthday, but we decided to spend 5 days on Heron Island for a belated honeymoon as well. We flew back with Qantas, who are always a pleasure to fly with internationally, directly to Sydney. I'm getting better at sleeping on that long-haul. We then flew domestically up to Brisbane on Saturday, after spending Friday in Sydney, checking out the Sydney Google office and catching up with as many friends and family as time permitted. Saturday was a bit of an "open house" at my parent's place for my grandmother's birthday. She now lives in Toowoomba, but lived in the Sandgate/Bracken Ridge area for the majority of her life, so it was easier for her to come down to Bracken Ridge, and for everyone to come around to my parent's place than for everyone to go up to Toowoomba to see her. I didn't keep count of how many people dropped in through the course of the day, but I'd hazard a guess at about 40 or 50. It was really good to see some relatives on my Mum's side of the family that I probably hadn't seen in nearly 10 years. It was also good to see my Aunty and Uncle and one of my cousins from Vanuatu (who is now in New Zealand), who I haven't seen for a while either. On Sunday, we went out for dinner with just a bunch of the more immediate family. On Monday we flew up to Gladstone, and then had a helicopter transfer out to Heron Island, where we stayed until Friday. Heron is a fantastic little island, and I highly recommend it if you want to relax and disconnect from the world for a while. It feels very isolated, there's no telephones in the rooms, and there's only really slow Internet access via a couple of coin operated kiosks. It's a really tiny island as well. Only about three kilometres in circumference. The snorkeling is absolutely fantastic. You can see so much marine life from straight off the beach. We also saw turtles coming up the beach to lay eggs in the mornings. I certainly felt very relaxed afterwards. Photos from the week are here. We had more time to spare on the way back, so we took the launch back to the mainland and then flew back to Brisbane for four days. Sarah and my sister organised a bit of a surprise dinner for my 30th birthday with a bunch of family and friends, which was a total surprise for me, and very nice of them. On Tuesday night we flew down to Canberra and stayed with our old neighbours and caught up with friends down there. I also spent a day racking and installing the new mirror.linux.org.au server, but wasn't able to cut over to it at that time. On Thursday, we drove off into the outback to find Alli and Rusty's new property, a 1000 acres near Braidwood. They really are living remote, but it sounds like they've got some very exciting plans for the place, and I look forward to checking out what they've done when we're next able to visit. Then on Friday morning, we drove out at an ungodly hour, headed back for Sydney, to fly out for San Francisco (via Los Angeles, unfortunately) again. I'm not sure when we'll be visiting Australia again. We're intending to get our respective parents over here to visit us during the year, this year, and not return for Christmas. I'm unable to attend linux.conf.au this year, but would like to go to Melbourne for it next year.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Reflecting on the Definition of Definition

In his latest talk Lawrence Lessig spends time defending the use of non-commericial use clauses and goes into detail about how the free culture movement does not need and should not have definitions of freedom. In doing so, he was referring to a public discussion the two of us had most recently in September. While my name was not mentioned until the questions, he implicitly criticized both my freedom definition and my call for any definition at all. As usual, his criticism has made me think a lot about what it is that I'm trying to do. I've been thinking about a conversation I had with Aaron Swartz recently where he was also criticizing me for focusing too much on definitions. He was skeptical about my assertion that social movements and freedom movements needed "definitions." I thought about it and told him then that I thought I'd been making a mistake by saying I want free culture movements to have definitions. More accurately, what I want are goals, standards, or ideals. I want to be able to say, "music when will be free when every producer can do A, B, and C and every listener can do X, Y, and Z." I want the possibility of a shared utopianism. I want these kinds of goals because I believe that these images of what what things might be like if we win is what motivates us to win in the first place. I believe that the idea that, "things might be better" is simply never as powerful as a strong, perhaps even unattainable, ideal that challenges people and gives them something to strive for. The leaders of other successful social movements I know can tell you exactly what they are trying to achieve -- although few of them ever will realize it completely. No free culture movement leader can do this with any authority. For reasons I've talked about in the past, I think that fact may ultimately make us less successful. In the free software movement, our most important goal (free software itself) is documented in the Free Software Definition. Even the most ethically motivated among us aren't perfect -- most of us use some proprietary software -- but we have an ideal to hold our behavior up to and a method by which we can always improve. Inspired by free software, I unimaginatively said that I thought free culture needed a "definition." I probably could have found a better way to describe what I wanted and I'll do so in the future. I suppose I should have thought a little more about the definition of definition.

3 January 2007

Hanna Wallach: 5 things

Steve’s started a game of tag, so for my second post of 2007 here are five things that you probably don’t know about me: I’m not going to tag any other people, but if you want to play along, feel free.

Lars Wirzenius: Random thought: "You write free software, therefore you..."

In a discussion on a mailing list, on a topic that isn't relevant to this log entry, someone wrote: "I just have expectations that if there is going to be progress in the [civil liberties/equality issue], that the 'Free' software world would be at the forefront of that effort". This is a common mistake. The thing that unites the free software developers, and the only thing that unites us, is that we make free software. Even though many of the us are liberal, or libertarian, or "leftist", or "green", or whatever you perceive as the common trait, it is wrong to assume all of us are. Some free software developers are very much "leftist", to the extent of being members of the communist party. Some are stout, Bush-voting Republicans. A couple are neo-Nazis. Some are worried about global warming; others are working full time to prove it isn't happening. ESR has a gun fetish, I'm nervous even of policemen carrying guns. All free software developers aren't even united in their opinions on matters that affect free software development directly. Some organize campaigns against software patents, others (although admittedly very few) apply for them. I'm a free software developer and the only thing about me you can deduce from that is that I develop free software.

Lars Wirzenius: Random thought: A touch of neophilia

I'm not going to make any New Year's resolutions this year. I will, however, use the New Year as an excuse to re-think many things in my life. To start with, I have re-subscribed to several Debian mailing lists, even debian-private. A second new thing is that I have a new toy, an iRobot Roomba GR. In other words, an automatic vacuum cleaner. I used it for the first time today, and it was hilariously funny. Not excessively expensive, either. A third new thing is that I re-installed my laptop, with the Debian-Installer daily build from 2006-12-31. It worked like a charm. The old installation on this laptop had deteriorated over several months, as I did unspeakably evil things to it, so starting from fresh was a bit of a relief. Now I have an encrypted hard disk, and a working suspend and hibernation (suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk), apart from the backlight not coming back on automatically after resume. Yay! Etch is going to totally rock. A fourth new thing is that I switched over my web log from CVS to Bazaar (bzr). It was the last vestige of my youth. When I was a child, I used RCS. When I was young, I used CVS. Now in my old age, I use Bazaar, because it is comfortable. Incidentally, Notetak is up to version 0.4, and I'm getting comfortable with it, too. I'm going to experiment with adding tags to notes. I don't yet have an idea what would be a good UI design for that, but it will come to me eventually. New things are good, even for neophobic luddites like myself.

Russell Coker: Xen shared storage

disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1,hda,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1-swap,hdb,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1-drbd,hdc,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/san,hdd,w!' ]

For some work that I am doing I am trying to simulate a cluster that uses fiber channel SAN storage (among other things). The above is the disk line I'm using for one of my cluster nodes, hda and hdb are the root and swap disks for a cluster node, hdc is a DRBD store (DRBD allows a RAID-1 to be run across the cluster nodes via TCP), and hdd is a SAN volume. The important thing to note is the "w!" mode for the device, this means write access is granted even in situations whre Xen thinks it's unwise (IE it's being used by another Xen node or is mounted on the dom0). I've briefly tested this by making a filesystem on /dev/hdd on one node, copying data to it, then umounting it and mounting it on another node to read the data.

There are some filesystems that support having multiple nodes mounting the same device at the same time, these include CXFS, GFS, and probably some others. It would be possible to run one of those filesystems across nodes of a Xen cluster. However that isn't my aim at this time. I merely want to have one active node mount the filesystem while the others are on standby.

One thing that needs to be solved for Xen clusters is fencing. When a node of a cluster is misbehaving it needs to be denied access to the hardware in case it recovers some hours later and starts writing to a device that is now being used by another node. AFAIK the only way of doing this is via the xm destroy command. Probably the only way of doing this is to have a cluster node ssh to the dom0 and then run a setuid program that calls xm destroy.

Russell Coker: multiple ethernet devices in Xen

It seems that no-one has documented what needs to be done to correctly run multiple Ethernet devices (with one always being eth0 and the other always being eth1) in a Linux Xen configuration (or if it is documented then google wouldn't find it for me).

vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:00:01:01', 'mac=00:16:3e:00:02:01, bridge=xenbr1' ]

Firstly I use a vif line such as the above in the Xen configuration. This means that there is one ethernet device with the hardware address of 00:16:3e:00:01:01 and another with the address of 00:16:3e:00:02:01. I just updated this section, the 00:16:3e prefix has officially been allocated to the Xen project for virtual machines. Therefore on your Xen installation you can do whatever you like with MAC addresses in that range without risk of competing with real hardware. The Xen code uses random MAC addresses in that range if you let it.

I have two bridge devices, xenbr0 and xenbr1. I only need to specify one as Xen can figure the other out.

Now when my domU's boot they assign ethernet device names from the range eth0 to eth8. If there is only one virtual Ethernet device then it is always eth0 and things are easy. But for multiple devices I need to rename the interfaces.

eth0 mac 00:16:3e:00:01:01
eth1 mac 00:16:3e:00:02:01

This is done through the ifrename program (package name ifrename in Debian). I create a file named /etc/iftab with the above contents and then early in the boot process (before the interfaces are brought up) the devices will be renamed.

In the Red Hat model you edit the files such as /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0 and change the line that starts with HWADDR to cause a device rename on boot.

Update: the original version of this post used MAC addresses with a prefix of 00:00:00, the officially allocated prefix for Xen is 00:16:3e which I now use. Thanks to the person who commented about this.

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