Thanks Lennart for mentioning Hugin! This is a really cool piece of software, allowing you to assemble a mosaic of photographs into a complete panorama. I’ve created this 180 degrees panorama from 16 photos taken out of my window (3 rows: 6 + 6 + 4). The original picture is huge: 5000-something pixels wide and high and approximately 22Megs (jpg) fat. If you want to test it yourself just aptitude install hugin and make sure to get enblend from somewhere else (eg, debian-multimedia.org). If you don’t install enblend you don’t lose functionality, but the output will be of much lower quality. Thanks Florent Bayle for packaging hugin and Christian Marillat for packaging enblend!

The panel ratings for SXSW07 just came out today. I'm glad to see that my talk on the commercialization of wikis scored so highly (4.42 out of 5). I'm already planning to pull together a panel for next year -- we'll see how that works out. You can get the slides for my talk this year at Talks/SXSW07 and on slideshare.net. tags: sxsw sxsw07 wiki commercialization talks

Creacamp So, I just found out about Creacamp, a meeting for female DIY "creators" d'ici ("from here", but... a loaded word in Quebec). It's happening Saturday, 5 May at noon at the Me dia world headquarters, 2025 rue Parthenais, #304. I'm going to go, but it's interesting -- sounds like there's a real crossover with BarCampMontreal, with the exception that the presenters will be exclusively female. Local BarCamp organizers are trying to attract more women, so Creacamp makes me feel like we've failed in some way. But I take this kind of thing way too negatively; I'm sure it will work out to be a positive thing. Maybe there's something too phallic about the "bar" in "BarCamp". I dunno. I'm at La ka today working with Niko, so when I heard about Creacamp I went across the caf and asked Hugh McGuire about it. He'd heard about it just seconds before, in a blog comment. Weird, wired world. Hugh has a blog post about BarCampMontreal and women, by the way. tags: creacamp barcamp barcampmontreal women laika

Currently there is a problem with the MySQL default install in Debian/Etch (and probably other distributions too). It sets up "root" with dba access with no password by default, the following mysql command will give a list of all MySQL accounts with Grant_priv access (one of the capabilities that gives great access to the database server) and shows their hashed password (as a matter of procedure I truncated the hash for my debian-sys-maint account). As you can see the "root" and "debian-sys-maint" accounts have such access. The debian-sys-maint account is used for Debian package management tools and it's password is stored in the /etc/mysql/debian.cnf file.

$ echo "select Host,User,Password from user where Grant_priv='y'"   mysql -u root mysql
Host    User    Password
localhost       root
aeon    root
localhost       debian-sys-maint        *882F90515FCEE65506CBFCD7

It seems likely that most people who have installed MySQL won't realise this problem and will continue to run their machine in that manner, this is a serious issue for multi-user machines. There is currently Debian bug #418672 about this issue. In my tests this issue affects Etch machines as well as machines running Unstable.

Last week I started the final round of Debian upgrades for the servers I maintain here and there, which is mostly complete today. I haven't been so lucky with upgrades this time, for a long list of different reasons. In the end, the smoothest upgrades were those boxes I upgraded when etch froze or so. natura.oskuro.net is the box serving these pages. It's an old, extremely noisy Pentium 150 which I've been intending to replace for a while now. I started the upgrade early on Thursday, knowing it'd take a while (natura takes its time only to read the Dpkg database), and it had apparently finished when I was ready to leave the office. Three issues:

• apache2's enabled modules were forgotten and I had to reenable them again, plus IIRC the default "It works!" site got reenabled, hiding the blog for a little while.
• bind didn't like some change in one of the default configs and I failed to noticed it had not started. After the reboot, the box was unreachable remotely, but that was OK as I had to go visit my dad that night for his birthday, so it was fixed after one hour or so.
• Last, my blog stopped working, and while I thought it'd have something to do with apache2.2, I had no time to have a close look as I had to leave to Lleida this weekend. Yesterday I discovered that for some reason, the old tar.gz PyBlosxom install wasn't liking the new python2.4, so I decided it was about time to move to PyBlosxom 1.3, from the Debian package. Not without the mandatory "It works!" post published in the gazillion Planets, natura was ready to go.

The very same night of last Thursday, I decided to dist-upgrade the box which serves the Spanish Debian website mirror. That's the only purpose on the box, so you can imagine the upgrade should have been pretty straight-forward. And so it seemed, until, in the middle of unpacking, dpkg died with a horrible I/O error, and I dropped into an unusable remote terminal with no working commands. Fortunately, apache2 was still up and running, and the web service has been working without interruption since the hard drive crash, albeit with no syncs from www-master. Today, Sergio visited the campus and had a look. It was a XFS crash, which got cleanly repaired using an install CD. We have an empty partition in the box, and will probably move the system to it temporarily, and back to the RAID, but on ext3. When the box was back online, I just had to resume the upgrade process, make mdadm happy and update lilo.conf before rebooting into the new kernel. This box uses LILO for some obscure reason I can't remember too clearly anymore. The box has just one partition on a md array, on two SCSI disks on a aic7xxx-based controller. Can anyone hint me why GRUB would have failed on us back in sarge, and if any fixes in the etch version would work any better? Using LILO here is error prone, and basically feels like a step back. Anyway, www.es.debian.org is now back up and running with updated content. Sindominio.net had its bi-annual upgrading party last monday, but unfortunately I wasn't able to help much as when I tried to log into the server, I must have caught the system in the middle of some key lib upgrade or something, and again I was locked in a unusable shell which would only segfault. Given my previous experience, I assumed that something had gone wrong and the box would need to be fixed at the console, and after 20 minutes I gave up helping on that front. Until I noticed, quite a long while later that I was still getting mail from the server. I managed to log in to discover the upgrade was done, with just a few bits remaining to be done. The major issues were encountered with our pam and ldap setup, plus nscd kept dying causing quite a lot of mayhem all over the place. Great work from Seajob, Syvic, nogates, apardo and the rest of the people who handled it! With etch, we can finally move back to an official Debian kernel, something we've been longing to do for a long time. The only pending upgrade issue is that we need to move from our old jabber server to either the traditional jabberd 1.x or ejabberd; our current implementation is no longer supported in Debian. The last of the etch upgrades stories involves Sofcatal 's servers. The box was running on a CentOS 4.4, which was moved away into a subdir just after booting Debian-Installer, and then lobotomised so it would run as a Linux-VServer under a new Debian etch install. I'll probably write more details about it soon though, as it could be a maybe less scary alternative to Guillem's debtakeover. Yay for etch!

This is now established as my german annual pilgrimage. Every year since 2002, I migrate to G ttingen for 3 days to attend the SambaXP conference, the world conference of the users and developers of Samba. Halfway between a very classical conference (high-class hotel, nice conference rooms, drinks and food at will...and expensive fee) and a "geeky-style" conference (the whole Samba Team usually attends it as well as many users and developers), it is now established as the annual reference for people involved in Samba use and development. After an always interesting tutorial (this year, as often by Jerry Carter, Samba3 release manager) about making samba friendly to administrate to....Windows admins, the track continued with talks drawing the future of samba development. This year, I was however missing No l K the who could not attend, so the Debian crowd here is pretty small (but many Debian users and admins are around). I however could have interesting talks with Jelmer Vernooij (mostly involved in Samba4 development...and also in our NM queue). I also used some time to try cleaning out the Debian BTS for samba bugs, using the opportunity to show old bugs to upstream developers. I also could visit Alex and Meike who live not that far, which was a real pleasure, including the Real Swabian Sp tzle that make swabian women so strong and powerful. The conference will end up today. It will have been too short, as usual and I will feel like I'm running away on the A7 up to Hannover to catch the plane and come back home....and, as usual, I'll promise myself to come back next year and practice my German, which sucks. Tomorrow, leaving to Rome for a long week-end with Elizabeth. No laptop, no mail. Just enjoy the city. Gut!

Welcome! I will be posting here about the work that is underway on my Google Summer of Code project: BitTorrent Proxy for Debian Archive. A lot of the initial discussion about the path this project will take has already occurred between myself and my mentor Anthony Towns. This has led to an inital name for the software program created by the project: debtorrent. To support the project, an Alioth project has been created, including a mailing list. All of the previous discussion has been archived to that mailing list. A wiki page is available for contributing ideas and comments on the proposed implementation of this project. The program will be based on the BitTornado bittorrent client. A subversion repository has been created for tracking the changes made to the client to create the debtorrent program. It currently contains the unmodified BitTornado code from version 0.3.18. If you're interested in contributing, join the mailing list, update the wiki, or try out the experimental code in the subversion repository.

Since Linux kernel 2.6.21 entered higher release candidates, more people started to report that Gammu has problem on that with connecting over USB cable. First I thought it is some misconfiguration of kernel, but when several same reports appeared, I decided to take a look at it. As great side effect of this, I found out that I can use snapshots of Debian kernel, where current version (2.6.21-rc7) is available as Debian package. This saved me lot of time, thanks guys! After installing and booting new kernel, I quickly found out that the problem is not SIGSEGV as many people reported, but SIGIO. After quick look at code, it was obvious that setting file to asynchronous I/O causes this. Well this is how asynchronous I/O is supposed to work and kernel people implemented it now for (some?) serial drivers. I have no idea why there was attempt to use it in Gammu. The code is not at all ready for this and makes no use of asynchronous I/O. So the fix was quite easy - just to remove this flag from file. Fix now sits in SVN, impatient users who run kernel 2.6.21 can get SVN snapshot :-). Testing release will follow during next week.

Long time no blog. Well, a long time for me -- it's been more than a week, which is pretty unusual. To be fair, I've been blogging on my Wikitravel Extra blog, since we were spending our week in Puerto Rico. We had a great time while we were there. Our last few days we spent in Luquillo, a colonial town turned beach resort northwest of Fajardo. It has a great beach and some of the best food shacks in PR, so we managed to really enjoy ourselves. We also took some time hiking in El Yunque National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the US national forest system. (I've actually visited the temperate rainforest, the Quinault, in the Olympic National Forest). Probably my big regret is not getting to Culebra, which according to Biella and other sources is perhaps the highpoint of Puerto Rico. We just didn't manage it, but there's something to be said for saving good things for the next visit. tags: wikitravel travel puerto rico get-together07

Visit from my parents My mom and dad came for a week-long visit last night (less than 24 hours after we landed on the plane from San Juan. They're going to visit our new house and spend some time with Amita June. They're going to get to see some of the nicest weather in Montreal. The early spring is really the greatest time to be here. tags: amitajune mom dad montreal parents visit

BarCampMontreal2 We're coming up fast on BarCampMontreal2, the second BarCamp in the Montreal area. We've had two DemoCamps this year, which have been great for getting people interested in the *Camp idea. I think BarCampMontreal2 is going to be a real hoot. The event is going to happen Saturday, April 28th (that's 8 Flor al to you and me) from 9:30AM until the early evening. I'll be presenting and so will Maj. The list of registrants (BarCampMontreal2Registrants) reads like a Who's Who of the Montreal tech scene, including some more Debian and Ubuntu people this time around. Good deal! This will be the first BarCampMontreal at the SAT, on 1195 blvd. St.-Laurent just south of St. Catherine. The venue is huge, has great A-V equipment, and is definitely funky. Hopefully the bar will be open at some point. tags: barcamp barcampmontreal barcampmontreal2 sat event

Speaking of Camps I've been working pretty hard on our RecentChangesCamp event here in Montreal, RoCoCoCamp. It will be a 3-day event, 18-20 May 2007, hosted by the international wiki community but open to all people interested in creativity, collaboration, and building communities. Our list of RoCoCoCamp participants is getting quite long, and it looks like our RoCoCoCamp sponsors are going to help us cover the costs of the event. We've still got some people on our RoCoCoCamp invitation list who haven't gotten an invite; I've got some work to do there. I'm excited, though, that so many people are going to be there. We're going to have the project leads for the most important PHP wiki packages -- MediaWiki, PmWiki, PHPwiki and TikiWiki. It'd be great if something came out of that! And Earle Martin of OpenGuides will be there. We're trying to work out an RDF interchange format for our wikis, so I hope to work on that issue, too. Hopefully we'll find the sponsorship to make up our budget shortfall -- there are some Open Source developers and students that we'd like to give travel microgrants to. But I'm optimistic that more companies like Google, Atlassian, AboutUs, SolSeed Movement, Keiki, Wikia, and wikiHow will come through for us over the next few weeks. All in all I think it's going to be a really cool camp. tags: recentchangescamp rocococamp rocococamp07

Sune Vuorela asks about how to secure important data such as GPG keys on laptops.

I believe that the ideal solution involves booting from a USB device with an encrypted root filesystem to make subversion of the machine more difficult (note that physically subverting the machine is still possible - EG through monitoring the keyboard hardware).

The idea is that you boot from the USB device which contains the kernel, initrd, and the decryption key for the root filesystem. The advantage of having the key on a USB device is that it can be longer and more random than anything you might memorise.

In my previous posts about a good security design for an office, more about securing an office, and biometrics and passwords I covered some of the details of this.

My latest idea however is to have the root filesystem encrypted with both a password that is entered and by a password stored on the USB device. This means that someone who steals both my laptop and my USB key will still have some difficulty in getting at my data, but also someone who steals just the laptop will find that it is encrypted with a key that can not be brute-forced with any hardware that doesn't involve quantum-computing.

Also coincidentally also on Planet Debian in the same day Michael Prokop documents how to solve some of the problems relating to booting from a USB flash device.

Jesus Climent writes about donating laptops.


Free Thinkpad

I have a Thinkpad 385xd laptop to give away for free. It has a PentiumMMX-233 CPU, 96M of RAM, a 3.2G IDE disk, and a 800x600 display. As of my last tests it works well and is currently running an old version of Debian.

The power connector on the laptop is a little broken (it takes a bit of work to plug the cable in) and the cable is also broken (I think that some of the wires are broken and it gets hot when used for a while). Probably the best thing to do would be to solder the cable from the PSU onto the motherboard.

If anyone has a good use for such a machine that benefits a free software project and can arrange to collect it from Melbourne Australia then let me know.

Also I can bring it to any conference that I attend.

Note that I will delete this post once the laptop is taken. So if the Planet link doesn't resolve then someone else got in first.

I have just installed a machine running CentOS 5 as a Xen server. I installed a full GUI environment on the dom0 so that GUI tools can be used for managing the virtual servers.

The first problem I had was selecting the "Installation source", it's described in the error message as an "Invalid PV media address" when you get it wrong which caused me a little confusion when installing it at 10PM. Then I had a few problems getting the syntax of a nfs://1.2.3.4:/directory URL correct. But these were trivial annoyances. It was a little annoying that my attempts to use a "file://" URL were rejected, I had hoped that it would just run exportfs to make the NFS export from the local machine (much faster than using an NFS server over the network which is what the current setup will lead people to do).

The first true deficiency I found with the tools is that it provides no way of creating filesystems on block devices. The process of allocating a block device or file from the Xen configuration tool is merely assigning a virtual block device to the Xen image - and only one such virtual block device is permitted. Then the CentOS 5 installation instance that runs under Xen will have to partition the disk (it doesn't support installing directly to an unpartitioned disk) which will make things painful when it comes time to resize the filesystems.

When running Debian Xen servers I do everything manually. A typical Debian Xen instance that I run will have a virtual block device /dev/hda for the root FS, /dev/hdb for swap, and /dev/hdc for /home. Then if I want to resize them I merely stop the Xen instance, run "e2fsck -f" on the filesystem followed by "resize2fs" and the LVM command "lvresize" (in the appropriate order depending on whether I am extending or reducing the filesystem).

Xen also supports creating a virtual partitioned disk. This means I could have /dev/lvm/xenroot, and /dev/lvm/xenswap, and /dev/lvm/xenhome appear in the domU as /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, and /dev/hda3. This means that I could have a single virtual disk that allows the partitions to be independently resized when the domU in question is not running. I have not tried using this feature as it doesn't suit my usage patterns. But it's interesting and unfortunate that the GUI tools which are part of CentOS don't support it.

When I finally got to run the install process it had a virtual graphics environment (which is good) but unfortunately it suffered badly from the two-mouse-cursor problem with different accellerations used for both cursors so the difference in position of the two cursors varied in different parts of the screen. This was rather surprising as the dom0 had a default GNOME install.

Scott Lamb commented:

"Measuring police on the absence of crime is even easier to game, with horrible consequences."

In more detail, Baruch wrote:

"The result of measuring absence of crime will be that reports of crime will be rejected if the cops will think that they won't be able to catch the criminals. You will have to seperate the group that takes the reports and the group that handles them to make it work and even then I'm not sure someone won't find a way to go around that with another trick."

Well, if you read any cycling online forum, you'll have seen some reports of police rejecting reports of 'too hard' crimes like harassing cyclists. I think I've had one report accepted in the last year, about a moped user riding along a cycle track near a playground where I had noted the number plate, and two pretty certainly discarded. So, police discarding or discouraging reports of no-obvious-solution crimes seems to be happening already. andy r wrote:

"Hi there, Don't talk to me about tragedy of targets... As a teacher the word 'target' fills me with both fear and laughter. Last year my year 6 class and I worked our butts off and achieved the highest set of grades for any school in North Somerset, thereby rescuing the school from a very sticky situation with Ofsted. Within days of these results being known the senior LEA advisor suggested to me that the targets had, perhaps, in hindsight been too low. My reply was curt and Anglo-Saxon. Hindsight! Looking out of her hind? The LEA love targets. If you hit them you have not pushed the kids enough. If you exceed them you should have pitched them higher. Woe betide anyone who fails to meet their targets (I will this year, different cohort and those % from last year have been INCREASED!)... My kids have targets (though they have so many that they actually fail to remember them all). Teachers have targets for the numbers of children who are 'supposed' to achieve certain grades but the idiots who set them frequently have only a rudimentary grasp of mathematics. In my current school there are 45 children in a year group, so each one represents a little over 2%. In schools with small classes (perhaps 10 per year in some rural schools) 1 child can equate to 10%. If he's sick on exam day or is just not bright enough, that's 10% gone. And with the government expecting 75-80% of children to achieve a level 4 in their KS2 SATS, it's all too easy to drop blow your 'targets' through illness alone. But here's an even worse tragedy of targets in primary schools... a couple of years ago I had to disapply 2 children from SATS, simply because they have profound special needs and could not take the tests. In addition, the school had an Autistim Unit (now called something PC, but I forget what) which that year had 4 children in year 6. Therefore we had 6 children who could not take the exams. We filled in the paper work but were horrified when the results came in to discover that these children (who all had official exemption on disability grounds) were counted as having taken the test, even though they couldn't. For 'statistical' purposes these kids were classified as having scored zero! Out of a cohort of 36 children, 6 were classified as not having done a thing! The department of education acknowledged that this didn't help our statistics, but stated that it was their policy. In a school with a lot of very deprived kids this 16% scoring zero, added to a significant quanitity of under-achievers was enough to push us down to the bottom 100 primary schools nationally. You can only imagine how damaging that was for the school's reputation - parents took kids out, we were slated in the local press and had to fight like mad to justify our continued existence... Targets... bah! Hey, talking of which. The Health Trust has recently done a survey of local primary school children's weights and heights. In our day this sort of thing was compulsory. Not any more. Parents had to 'opt in' to the survey... And guess what? The parents of the largest kids refused to take part - as did the ignorant b*strds, but that's another story. So the WAHT will now be collating a totally skewed data set. I'm just waiting for the press release highlighting our slim North Somerset children... And of course, someone will be complemented on achieving targets for reducing childhood obesity, whilst infact the problem has probably - as it were- grown. I used to like the way that 'on time targets' were displayed in Didcot railway station. There was a board in foyer which highilighed punctuality. The impressive looking bar chart had these words written on it: "% of trains on time, compared to last month." And the brightly coloured chart was always up around 95%, ish. I was always suprised that nobody commented on that. 0.95*0.95*0.95...... month on month those trains were getting less and less punctual! But nobody bothered to point this out because 95% looks impressive! On many occasions I took the time to read, and re-read, the wording of those graphs so I know with 100% confidence that this was what they quoted. We never had a month with more than 100% punctuality compared to the previous month. Shame. That's enough. I'm off to the dog house."

I asked if anyone had seen the Barclays PINsentry keypad before... Kris Marsh wrote that:

"it looks a lot like the way secureid cards work. In which case, it won't physically connect to your PC, would provide you with proper two factor (password + token) and would definitely be a Good Thing(tm). Not only then, would a phisher have to take your password, but they'd have to steal your actual card and PINsentry device to get access to your online account. Thus pushing the phishing emphasis elsewhere (different banks? phone scamming?). I guess time will tell if they manage to mess it up to make it only work on Windows somehow. :-)"

Adam Bower opined:

"The Barclays devices just look like a challenge response system. Someone I know has something similar for a bank account which when you login the website presents you with a 4 digit number. You then type that number into the pad and then enter a pin and it presents another number that you enter onto the webpage and the online banking lets you in (along with a username and password). I should imagine that these new devices won't make any difference to people running Linux."

Neil McGovern noted:

"It seems that they're external devices for generating OTPs from C+P cards, so won't affect compatability."

Roger Gammans commented:

"Barclay use GEM plus usb smart card readers with their business internet banking. IIRC, this requires windows and IE so that the activeX controls on the page can talk to the reader. Having said that one desciription of the new device I heard sounded like it was a standard alone device with a display. You put your card into it and push a button and then it produces a code number which you copy onto the web page. But I haven't seen one yet - and the media are good at getting the wrong end of the stick."

So, let's wait and see.

Sign EFF's Petition Against IPRED2 On April 24th, the European Parliament will vote on IPRED2, the Second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive. With one stroke, they risk turning thousands of innocent EU citizens and businesses into copycriminals. If IPRED2 passes in its current form, "aiding, abetting, or inciting" copyright infringement on a "commercial scale" in the EU will become a crime. (Source)

"a monthly public demonstration of Free Open Source Software (FOSS), aimed primarily at beginners. It's not specifically for Linux, as the software will be demoed on a WinXP system to lure people in ;) -- however, I will make some live linux distro CDs for the event. Here's the details: Title: Introduction to Free Software
Date: Wednesday 18th April
Time: Lunchtime 1-2pm
Place: Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol BS2 8JS
Map
Price: Free
The website"

The second one will be on 26th May 2007 at the Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol BS2 8JS (Map), 1pm-3pm, and is hopefully a music one with a barbecue (weather permitting!).

If you are trying to setup SELinux, a must-know command for you is "sestatus".Example output:

SELinux status:                 enabled
SELinuxfs mount:                /selinux
Current mode:                   permissive
Mode from config file:          permissive
Policy version:                 20
Policy from config file:        refpolicy-strict

If it doesn't say "enabled", there is no way it will work. :-)If it says "Current mode: permissive", SELinux will not block any access (that's why it's called "permissive"). So if you still get an "access denied" error from your web server, your unix permissions are blocking the access.When asking for help, please include which policy you are running (most likely you'll be running 'refpolicy-targeted', since that is the most usable out of the box). Writing e.g. "sestatus says enabled/permissive/refpolicy-strict" is really helpful, and not much to type, is it?

In a previous post, I claimed that SELinux uses a kind of object-oriented approach, and that this has several advantages over path name based access.Since SELinux policy isn't actually a 'program', the term is somewhat surprising. It's just one fragement of "object oriented programming" that is available in SELinux, and actually a rather simple fragment. Also it's not how it's evaluated; but the OOP 'design pattern' of 'classes' is somewhat present in the SELinux reference policy. The syntax is kind of twisted, too.Let me give you a simple example policy fragment:

type mylog_t;
logging_log_file(mylog_t)

This fragment defines a new type, and 'inherits' from the 'log_file' class. (you can think of "logging_log_file" as com.tresys.oss.refpolicy.system.logging.log_file if you are a Java freak)The logging_log_file 'class' (which technically is a M4 macro, and maps to the SELinux 'typeattribute' 'logfile' - this would be called an abstract class in other programming languages) in turn will make mylog_t also be a "file_type" type attribute.So above line means that the new mylog_t type will 'inherit' certain access rules. Namely those defined via the logfile type attribute or file_type.This means that I can write policy to grant access on "any file" (e.g. for security scanners such as 'samhain' or the SELinux relabeling utilities, backup application, etc.) or just to any log files (e.g. for logrotate). Independend of where they live or who wrote the policy for them.So if I write policy for a custom application, add mylog_t for files living somewhere in /home/myapp/logs, I don't need to modify the logrotate policy, because that policy contains:

logging_manage_all_logs(logrotate_t)

(You can again think of this as logrotate being derived from a "log file manager" class, though it's implemented differently this time. Also note that multiple inheritance is no problem in SELinux policy)Macro names in the reference policy usually start with a namespace prefix. In this example, it's logging_. Since it uses M4 for processing the files, the syntax is largely determined by what is easy to use in M4.

I have just updated my previous post about licenses and also explicitely licensed my blog. Previously I had used a Creative-Commons share-alike license for lecture notes to allow commercial use and had not specified what the license is for my blog apart from it being free for feeds (you may add it to a planet without seeking permission first).

Unfortunately the operators of a site named lemonup.com decided to mirror many of my blog posts with Google AdWords. The site provides no benefit to users that I can discover and merely takes away AdWords revenue from my site. It has no listed method of contacting the site owner so it seems that blogging about this and letting them read it on their own site is the only way of doing so. :-#

I'm happy for Technorati to mirror my site as they provide significant benefits to users and to me personally. I am also happy for planet installations that include my blog among others to have a Google advert on the page (in which case it's a Google advert for the entire planet not for my blog post).

Also at this time I permit sites to mirror extracts of my articles. So for example the porn blogs that post paragraphs of my posts about topics such as "meeting people" with links to my posts don't bother me. I'm sure that someone who is searching for porn will not be happy to get links to posts about Debian release parties etc - but that's their QA issue not a license issue. I am aware that in some jurisdictions I can not prevent people from using extracts of my posts - but I permit this even in jurisdictions where such use is not mandated by law.

Lemonup: you may post short extracts (10% or one paragraph) of my posts with links to the original posts, or you may mirror my posts with no advertising at all. If those options are not of interest to you then please remove all content I wrote from your site.

Leon Brooks blogged about the Right to Fork (an essential right for free software development) but notes that governments of countries don't permit such a right.

One of the criteria for the existence of a state is the ability to control it's own territory. Lose control of the territory and you lose the state, lose some of the territory and the state is diminished. Therefore preventing a division of the territory (a split after a civil war) is the primary purpose of a state. The other criteria of a state are the ability to tax the population, impose civil order, and to administer all other aspects of government. All of these operations are essential to the government and lead to the destruction of the state if they are lost.

It's not that governments want to prevent forking, it's the fact that the existence of the state (on which the existence of the government depends) demands that it be prevented in all but the most extreme situations.

With free software forking is not a problem as multiple groups can work on similar software without interference. If someone else works on a slightly different version of your program then the worst that they can do is to get the interest of more developers than you get. This competition for developers leads to better code!

With proprietary software the desire to prevent forking is due to the tiny marginal cost of software. Most of the costs of running a software company are in the development. The amount of work involved in development does not vary much as the user-base is increased. So doubling the number of sales can always be expected to significantly more than double the company's profit.

One thing that would benefit the computer industry would be to have all the source to proprietary programs put in escrow and then released freely after some amount of time or some number of versions have been released. If Windows NT 4.0 was released freely today it would not take many sales from the more recent versions of Windows. But it would provide significant benefits for people who want to emulate older systems and preserve data. I expect that current versions of MS-Office wouldn't properly read files created on NT 4.0, I'm sure that this is a problem for some people and will become more of a problem as new machines that are currently being designed are not capable of booting such old versions of Windows.

Well, I'm really tired of these comments on how Ubuntu doesn't contribute patches back for Debian and how some Ubuntu contributors tell that they do it and that everything is ok with the swirl side of the fence. The truth is, both sides are wrong or just lying!

The fact is that for quite some time Debian contributors can opt-in to receive Ubuntu patches by mail. It started with my scottwatcher script for utnubu that was sending mails for Debian's PTS (Package Tracking System), keyword derivatives. Ubuntu does it now, so scottwatcher was deprecated in favor of their infrastructure that also sends messages to ubuntu-patches mailing list. Dissatisfied? Go to: http://patches.ubuntu.com/

I'm sure that some will argue "well, why not wishlist bugs to our BTS then?". I would be glad to receive the reports, but a lot of Debian contributors, developers, whatever argued against that because "we've a lot of differences and I don't care about Ubuntu patches" or stuff like "I hate automatically generated bug reports, they should process them manually before sending, figuring out if it makes sense or not". It makes no sense! I would prefer the opt-out approach than opt-in, but blame some Debian lazy contributors, including me because the raw data is there. I can start pushing stuff from ubuntu-patches mailing list into our BTS. Do you want it?

Before you reply to my post, read every word at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuForDebianDevelopers . What's wrong with you? Aren't you a Debian zealot? Go there and apply what's needed for us, for a better Lenny release. Don't you love to argue how they do it all wrong? Redo their stuff right then!

Please never write again "I never received patches from Ubuntu for my package foo". You don't own a part of the Debian project, you're a maintainer, stop crying, go there and raise the bar again. Thanks in advance.