In case you are using HP ProLiant G6-series or G7-series with Intel-based hardware and you are thinking about virtualistion (e.g. booting the hypervisor), you should have a look into this customer advisory. To make it short, the following should work:

# grep GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN= pci=use_crs
# update-grub It took me two workdays to discover this solution for a DL180G6. Anyways I m still having trouble on a DL160G6 when booting the hypervisor, suggestions are welcome.

And here we are, with another day of work ahead. And another huge unchecked/dinstall run about to finish. Yesterday evening Ansgar and later on Phil turned up, so we are now 5 persons sitting here and mostly coding happily away. Mark continued trying to wrap his brain around the changes we need to properly support multiple archives, with different sets of rights attached to them. It is a complex topic giving lots of headache. Besides that he is on a very good way of letting us completly remove apt-ftparchive by importing all the data we need to write Packages/Sources files on our own. And even better, the same work we can use to rewrite our rm and cruft-report commands in a sane way, not parsing Packages files anymore. Torsten did help with various database issues around the Packages/Sources issue and continued working on importing all the source filenames into the database, so we can soon provide a Contents file for sources. My own work, besides writing blog entries and preparing meeting minutes, consists of a rewrite of the script generating our Release files, the old one just wasn t up to it anymore. Especially not as we are on our way of having more and more of our tools use parallel processing, to fully use the power our ftp-master host has. And when I am done with this I will be off to tackle the keyring maintenance part we will need to enable autosigning by buildds to work. Should get interesting, with the shit of an interface one usually finds to gpg Ansgar started out by working on changes to our NEW handling, something I started with the dpkg bug #619131 and he just finished our site of the NEW handling scripts. Which means that, as soon as the dpkg maintainers added the code on their side and support this field in the .dsc files, NEW handling for packages like linux-2.6 will be much smoother. He is now implementing version control constraints into our control-suite tool. Phil is working on wanna-build stuff. And while this is just a short overview of what we did, there is always lots of discussion and bugfixing going on. It is incredibly useful to have a team sitting in one room for some days.

Update: Despite another email yesterday reasserting the 90-120 days lie, the source code has now landed on HTC's site.

As has been discussed before, HTC have a somewhat "interesting" interpretation of the GPL that allows them to claim they don't need to provide source code until between 90 and 120 days after the release of binaries. It's probably noteworthy that the FSF (who, you know, wrote the license and all) disagree with this interpretation, as do the kernel copyright holders (who, you know, wrote the code that the license covers) I've talked to about it. Anyway, after a pile of screaming and shouting from all sides HTC have tended to release their source code in a timely manner. So things seemed better.

HTC released the Thunderbolt last week and we're back to the 90-120 day song and dance. It's probably worth remembering that by behaving in this way HTC gain a competitive advantage over any vendors who obey the terms of their license - HTC can incorporate improvements made by others without releasing their own until through a significant portion of the lifecycle of their phone.

As far as I'm concerned, every single Thunderbolt sold so far embodies a copyright infringement. Wilfully engaging in copyright infringement for commercial benefit is typically frowned upon by courts, especially if by doing so a foreign company is gaining commercial advantage over a domestic one. If you think Microsoft's patent assault on Android is a problem, just imagine what they could do if they hired one significant Linux kernel developer and used their copyrights to attack the overwhelming majority of Android vendors who fail to comply with the GPL. It probably wouldn't be industry ending (companies would merely have improve their compliance procedures) but it'd do a huge deal of damage in the short term. It's insane for companies to behave this way. Don't reward them by giving them your money.

I'll be talking about this at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit next month, along with an update on my study of the compliance of Android tablets. I'm hoping that there'll be further developments after that.

I ve posted #Budget11 one #coops response on UK.coop because it s a bit long and I doubt many of the people reading this through software-related sites will want to read it. If you re interested in UK co-ops and the budget, click through to read points including:

• it s a mixed bag for co-op members and not really clear if we win or lose. The BBC reckons individuals will lose about 400 on average.
• Basically, the business measures which I can understand are bad for co-ops and seem to be aimed at private businesses, but some of the other things might be useful.
• Co-operatives UK general secretary Ed Mayo asked for changes to employee share ownership annual tax concessions, easier starts for co-operatives and encouragement for grassroots successes. I don t see any of those in this budget. Do you?

Comment here or there, as you prefer. I ll read both every day or so for the next little while.

Another release (1.1.90) by Conrad Sanderson for his wonderful Armadillo templated C++ library for linear algebra appeared yesterday. Consequently, a new release 0.2.17 of RcppArmadillo, our Rcpp-based integration into R is now on CRAN mirrors. The short NEWS file extract follows below containing just Conrad's entry for 1.1.90. No further changes from our side.

0.2.17  2011-03-22
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo Version 1.1.90  "Inside Job"
         * Added .min() & .max(), which can provide the extremum's location
         * More robust mean(), var(), stddev()

And courtesy of CRANberries, here are the diffs to the previous release.

 ChangeLog                                                    6 
 DESCRIPTION                                                  8 
 inst/NEWS                                                    7 
 inst/doc/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.pdf                     binary
 inst/doc/unitTests-results/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.html      6 
 inst/doc/unitTests-results/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.txt      36 +-
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Cube_meat.hpp                  112 ++++++++-
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Cube_proto.hpp                  14 -
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Mat_meat.hpp                    98 +++++++
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Mat_proto.hpp                   10 
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/arma_version.hpp                 4 
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/fn_prod.hpp                     12 
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/fn_stddev.hpp                   18 -
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/fn_var.hpp                      18 -
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/glue_mixed_meat.hpp             22 -
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/op_max_meat.hpp                199 ++++++++++------
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/op_max_proto.hpp                21 +
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/op_mean_meat.hpp               154 +++++++++++-
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/op_mean_proto.hpp               22 +
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/op_min_meat.hpp                199 ++++++++++------
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/op_min_proto.hpp                19 +
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/op_stddev_meat.hpp              44 ++-
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/op_stddev_proto.hpp              9 
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/op_var_meat.hpp                198 +++++++++++----
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/op_var_proto.hpp                14 -
 25 files changed, 925 insertions(+), 325 deletions(-)

More information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

I have been reading Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook by Sarath Lakshman, published by Packt, for a while. While most people I know learn shell scripts themselves, I was looking to refresh my concepts a little as well as have a reference lying around on the table for fast access. Since I was asked to review it for someone else, I thought I might as well post the review here.First of all, let me remark by saying that shell scripting is something learned more on a need basis than as a tool to solve the main problem. People would seldom write shell scripts as standalone programs (exceptions exist). However, what makes shell scripting invaluable to know is the fact that knowing some tricks can save several minutes, or hours, of work by automating and simplifying certain tasks, generally (but not restricted to) file management and data processing. Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook does go quite far in pursuing this goal, and is appropriate for both beginners who are looking to gain dexterity in shell scripting, as well as intermediate users who wish to polish their skills. The book also can double up as a quick reference, though I would argue that the "Advanced Bash Scripting Guide" would suit that more.At the outset, the author clarifies that the focus will be on Bash. This, people may or may not like, but the fact that bash has become ubiquitous in terms of the available shells on Unix-like systems today, starting out with bash is not a bad thing to do. Besides, learning other shell scripting languages while knowing bash isn't too hard, since the paradigm remains the same.Let's go through the books from the aspects I found most relevant.OrganizationThe book is organized into chapters based more on utility than scripting concepts themselves, although the language aspects are brought onto the reader gradually. For instance, the examples in the first chapter focus more on the basic data elements (variables, arrays, functions etc.) as well as operators (for numbers, files etc.), and all the examples demonstrate simple usage of these concepts, and he further chapters build upon these in a gradual manner.At the same time, if the reader has some familiarity with shell scripting and needs to only refresh or learn a certain concept, he/she needs to just read the relevant chapter. It is not too difficult to grasp the examples of the later chapters, provided some basic shell knowledge is assumed.Content and PresentationA positive trait in the presentation of this book is that it is all based on practical everyday examples which, with minor adaptation, can be used by many for their own daily tasks. For instance, there are several examples which describe searching for and processing files, which, I'd imagine, many users would want to do on a regular basis. Thus, providing realistic examples allows the book to double its utility. The language and approach used is simple and conversational, and the presentation is very clear, with each idea being described as a problem statement followed by a "How to do it" section with the actual code, and ending with a discussion of the nitty-gritties of the code. It is easy to go for a quick scan for those in a hurry, while those who with to read in more detail will not be disappointed either.The book also covers a wide array of applications. For instance, there are examples on automating fetching web pages and processing them, demonstrations of parsing and simplifying and even some queries around databases wrapped around in shell. It also spans to utilities and tasks connected to statistics, backups, compression, version control and many more.Breadth and DepthThe book goes into a fair amount of detail in terms of describing the shell scripting concept under consideration. The examples used go into a fair amount of detail in order to describe to the user all the aspects involved in the method or command being used. The concepts described are fairly complete, and would be sufficient for the reader to use immediately or with just a little bit of fine tuning. In terms of breadth, the book covers most of the features of shell scripting while also describing the various facilities the shell provides access to in a Unix-like environment. Thus, the book does not disappoint in this front either.In summary...In summary, probably the only thing I'd have liked to see more of is some emphasis on how to write more efficient shell scripts. Granted, most of the shell scripts described in the book are very simple and succinct, but a some words on how loops can be made better, or how to spot situations where pipes are not needed to solve a problem etc. might have been a nice addition. Some explanation of differences with dash, tcsh, zsh etc. might also have been nice, since a lot of users have different default shells. But all this isn't going to prevent me from giving this book a high rating, since it delivers quite well on the promises it makes at the beginning.This is definitely a good book to have near your desk, and kudos to the author for having taken the effort to put it together. I would highly recommend it to the beginner and occasional shell user for a thorough read, and to an intermediate to have on his/her desk for borrowing the cool scripting ideas and applications the author has written in this book.

The Abel prize for 2011 has been awarded to John Willard Milnor.[1] In response to a query from Dr. R. Ramachandran who writes about Science and Science Policy for The Hindu'' newspaper group, I wrote the following short piece which others may find interesting as well. Milnor is well-known for his work on topology and geometry. He has also made significant contributions to algebra and even number theory. In addition, he has written a number of books which are loved by graduate students in Mathematics all over the world. One of the striking early results of Milnor was the example he gave of a seven dimensional space which is topologically a sphere but its geometric (differentiable) structure is different. This was the first example of an "exotic sphere". A nice way to state his main result (due to Ajit Sanzgiri) is that "Groups of homotopy spheres are homotopy groups of spheres". Milnor received the Fields' Medal in 1962. In addition, the work of a number of later Fields' medallists such as Donaldson, Thurston, Mori and Voevodsky can be seen as having roots in the work of Milnor.

---

[1]The last time I wrote about the Abel Prize was to contribute to a guest post to Rahul Basu's science blog: The Far Side. Unfortunately, Rahul is no longer among us. This post is dedicated to the memory of Rahul Basu.

Yesterday I was hinted towards lxc when I wondered what happened to openvz in unstable (which unfortunately isn't documented at all in the kernel changelogs, but that's a different story). So I started off taking a look. From a bit of experimenting around with it I consider it something that I want to play more with, and I want to share the problems I stumbled upon with you so that you don't have to figure them out on your own. First of all, LXC uses the cgroup kernel facility for resource management. The according file system isn't mounted by default, and LXC doesn't care for where it is mounted, it just needs to be. It seems like /sys/fs/cgroup seems to be the proper place (see 601757), so add the line cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup cgroup defaults 0 0 to your /etc/fstab file and sudo mount cgroup it. Next, it seems like bridging is the defacto standard for networking with lxc, but given that I want to use it on my notebook while being mobile I can't bind the bridge to any specific interface. To make this happen, one needs the bridge-utils package installed, and secondly, this is the path that I chose. I've added to /etc/network/interfaces this snippet:

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
    bridge_maxwait 0
    bridge_ports dummy0
    address 10.80.80.1
    netmask 255.255.255.0

This will bring up the bridge and act as gateway. For the running system, call sudo ifup br0. To make the host universally being able to work as gateway, of course ip_forward needs to be enabled. For this I added the line net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 to /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf (and for the running system, echo 1 into /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward). As I am using ferm for configuring the firewall on my notebook I have to add some parts into its configuration. This is the raw part that needs to get added, mix it into your existing configuration:

table filter  
    chain INPUT  
        # allow DNS queries from LXContainers
        proto (udp tcp) dport domain source 10.80.80.0/24 ACCEPT;
     
    chain FORWARD  
        # allow LXContainers into the net
        source 10.80.80.0/24 ACCEPT;
     
 
table nat  
    chain POSTROUTING  
        # NAT LXContainers
        source 10.80.80.0/24 MASQUERADE;
     
 

For DNS I installed dnsmasq so that I won't have to touch the /etc/resolv.conf inside the containers whenever I switch networks. So far for the host part, now to the actual containers. There is the /usr/lib/lxc/templates/lxc-debian helper script which uses debootstrap to create you a lenny chroot at least in the squeeze package this is hardwired, likewise with using cdn.debian.net. Copy the script and edit it to your likes if you feel like it. From what I understood it expects you to store the containers below /var/lib/lxc, I haven't yet tested for different places. So this was my commandline for that:
sudo /usr/lib/lxc/templates/lxc-debian -p /var/lib/lxc/vm0 A while later you'll end up below that directory with two entries: The config file and the rootfs subdirectory which is actually the bootstrapped distribution part. Now comes the configuration of the container. Open the config file with your favorite editor and add the following lines to the end:

lxc.utsname = vm0
lxc.network.type = veth
lxc.network.flags = up
lxc.network.link = br0
# lxc.network.name = eth0
lxc.network.hwaddr = 00:FF:80:80:80:80
lxc.network.ipv4 = 10.80.80.80/24

The network.name part is commented out, it defaults to that name internally; you though can change it to whatever you prefer. Caution, even though this is the documented approach, it does not work for Debian containers. It will always try to get its IP address through dhcp, lxc.network.ipv4 has no meaning for us. We need to change inside the rootfs the file etc/network/interfaces to read like this instead:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
   address 10.80.80.80
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   gateway 10.80.80.1

I suggest to keep the config and the interfaces file aligned with respect to the ipv4 setting so if this gets fixed upstream you won't stumble into any surprises. Also like mentioned before, we need to change the nameserver entries inside the rootfs file etc/resolv.conf to read nameserver 10.80.80.1. Now it's time to start it up and log in! sudo lxc-start -n vm0 -d will start the container in the background, and sudo lxc-console -n vm0 will give you the login to the container. The default password for the root user is root, obviously you want to change that before you install any networking services into the container like ssh-server. In case you want to quit from that console notice the message upon starting it, it's bound to <Ctrl+a q>. One more issue that I had: The default route wasn't set. I had to manually call ip r a default via 10.80.80.1 dev eth0 to be able to use the network inside the container. It seems to be related to that netbase isn't installed by default. If you install it the default route will be set upon starting the container automatically. This should get you started, there is of course more to explore and experiment with. Actually it is also suggested to create a tarball from your vm0 after you did the basic setup and installed the basic components you want to have around so you won't have to bootstrap over and over again. Do this after you have shut down the container, either through a halt from a container shell or through sudo lxc-stop -n vm0. The tarball can then get extracted to a different directory and just needs minor tweaks in the config and rootfs/etc/network/interfaces file to not create any clash with other containers (lxc.rootfs, lxc.mount.entry, lxc.utsname, lxc.network.hwaddr and ipv4 address). About limiting the containers, you can do it dynamically through the cgroup file system, and set it permanently through the config file. See man lxc.conf about these settings, amongst others. Enjoy, use, experiment. With sudo lxc-checkconfig you will see what your kernel actually supports for your LXCs. You will most probably notice the missing for the memory controller, this is tracked in the Debian bug report 534964.

/debian permanent link Comments: 6 Flattr this

Good morning, and welcome to another day of archive damage, i mean hackery. Well, at least at the time of this writing it is morning and we are starting off into another day of work. As we promised to try to have at least a once-a-day-installation run I am currently processing the queue of uploaded packages, around 4gigabytes from 431 changes files. After that a dinstall will follow to push that all out. Lets see how often we can do this again today, yesterday we managed multiple times. Yesterday my work consisted of getting the ries sync into something nice and acceptable, starting to think of the change to only use the suite codenames in future (long term making lots of code issues easier, but short term a good headache) and doing the groundwork so we can upgrade the security and backports archive to squeeze/pg9 too. Mark finished of the Built-Using flag and then moved on to think about database file tracking changes related to multiple archives/locations. Which sounds simple in so few words but is definitely not simple at all. Torsten started to work on source contents and also on generating the packages/sources files out of our database. Both together is taking a good amount of time, so he continues to work on those today. In the evening we had a meeting with the Debian Hurd porters about the future of their port within the Debian archive. The perceived Hurd situation until then was that every port has to follow certain rules or gets thrown out but Hurd doesn t seem to ever get into a releasable state . Well, we did get a clean view on both sides standpoint and in the end emerged with a solution which works for both sides: The Hurd port stays on FTPMaster until Wheezy is released. Should they have managed to get the port into a state that it is released together with all the others (probably as a technology preview), it is kept in the archive. Should they not manage this, the port will be removed from the main archive and move fully to debian-ports.org. It may then reenter the main archive whenever it is ready to get released with the next release. For today we are all continuing in our parts, Mark is yelling at the insanity of the multi-location thing (something we DO need when we want to merge multiple archives, which we do want), Torsten curses the code for Packages/Sources and while I hope that DSA can find time today to upgrade our security- and backports-archive machines to Squeeze, I try to wrap my head around the code we kindly got provided by Serafeim Zanikolas - the dinstall programming fun task I asked a while ago. Im not sure yet I will succeed. :) And then we will get more arrivals this evening, so more people doing stuff tomorrow.

...and me. I turned 40 today and on such a momentous occasion I should pause
to take stock of my life. Executive summary: it's not bad at all. Last week I completed 13 years of marriage to Jyoti who loves me and always
looks out for my best interest even during the times when I do not. I have two lovely children who are kind, intelligent, Dharmic, and (mostly :-)
well behaved. Of course I can't forget all my dear friends and family who gave me their
blessings and good wishes today and indeed every day. My health is better now than it was in my twenties. Since last year I've been
exercising on the treadmill regularly and taken a lot of junk out of my diet.
I've lost about two stones and while I won't be joining the Debian marathon
runners just yet, I can at least jog briskly without collapsing in a puddle of
sweat, heart palpitations and shame. Mentally, I've been taking college level courses in Maths in an effort to
relearn the things I didn't pay proper attention to the first time I was in
college. I completed National Novel Writing Month for the first time with a
60,000 word philosophical science fiction blockbuster that other people might
actually consider readable once I finish revising it. And I am still training
for the day when I shall be granted the spot on Jeopardy which is rightfully
mine. Financially, the last few years have not been good for many people but we are
holding our heads above water and even slowly moving forwards. This is the
year Consolidated Braincells Inc. my little corporate empire will take off I
hope. As I begin preparing for Chaitra Navaratri I feel it will be extra special
this year because all these good things that are happening to me are solely
due to Her grace and krpa. Last thing I wanted to mention is that a present I gave myself today was to
make a donation to the Red Cross to help the victims of the tsunami in Japan.
If you have had good fortune in your life and have not already done so won't
you consider doing the same? (or to any of the other reputable charities
engaged in disaster relief.) Our shastras say that dana is the best insurance
against accidental sins and the guarantor of good luck.

Ok, so finally it is official! We just had the DebConf 12 decision meeting. We saw two great proposals, from the cities of Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Managua, Nicaragua. If you are curious on the decision process: We held it over two IRC channels The moderated #debconf-team channel, where only the five members of the decision committee (Marga Manterola, Andrew McMillan, Jeremiah Foster, Holger Levsen, Moray Allan) and two members from each of the bids (Marco T lio Gontijo e Silva and Rafael Cunha de Almeida from Brazil; Leonardo G mez and Eduardo Rosales from Nicaragua) had voices, and the open #dc12-discuss channel where we had an open discussion. Of course, you can get the full conversation logs in those links. I have to thank and congratulate the Brazilian team as they did a great work... The decision was very tight. It was so tight, in fact, that towards the end of the winning all of the committee members were too shy to state the results - so I kidnapped the process by announcing the winner ;-) (I hope that does not cast a shadow of illegitimacy over it) And, very much worth noting, both teams were also very professional: In previous years, we have seen such decisions degenerate into personal attacks and very ugly situations. That has always been painful and unfortunate. And although the Brazilians will not be able to go celebrate tonight, the decision was received with civility, knowing it was a decision among equals, and a decision well carried out. Well, that's it I am very much looking forward for that peculiar two weeks when the whole Debian family meets, this year to be held in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and I am very eager towards meeting in 2012 in Managua, Nicaragua! Yay!

Since there were quite some requests for a Planet Commandline feed without the microblogging feeds included, I splitted Planet Commandline into different flavours. I m quite happy with that solution, because I must admit that the amount of microblogging postings in relation to normal blog postings was indeed higher than initially expected So from now on Planet Commandline has a basic flavour at http://planet-commandline.org/ and one with the microblogging feeds (climagic and commandlinefu) included at http://planet-commandline.org/+snippets/. For making this possible I hacked our Planet Venus wrapper to accept arbitary configuration snippets to be added at the end of the configuration as well as as sed-based modifications to the concatenated configuration before Planet Venus is run on them. This also allowed me to create further flavours of Planet Commandline:

• +german where Beat G tzi s German-written Chr tertee blog has been moved to, and
• +emacs which adds Mickey Petersen s Mastering Emacs to the list of included blogs.

I hope nobody minds this diversification of Planet Commandline. Currently no combination of flavours is supported, but if there s a relevant demand for the one or the other combination of flavours I may have a look if that can be automated, too.

A while ago I received a new desktop machine (8 cores, 8Gb of memory ...) at work. Since for the moment I kinda happy to work on my laptop using an external screen, I decided to put the hw to a good use and to explore a bit more some more exotic (at least for me) xen features. In particular I spend half a day playing with different xen network settings. The bridge model, that should work out of the shelf, is the easiest one. To setup this up, you basically need to specify a couple of options in the xend-config file and you're done. This is the "default" network configuration and is should work out of the box in most situations. Using this method, since all VMs' interfaces are bridged together (surprise !) with the public interface, your network card is left in promiscuous mode (not a big problem if you ask me...). Once your VMs are up, you can then decided to use your default dhcp server, autoconf your VMs with ipv6 only, or do nothing as you please. An other popular method, albeit a bit more complex, is to setup a natted network using the script network-nat (this one is an evolution of the third method that is 'network-routed') . I played with it, but since I wanted to have all my DomU on the same subnet, this setup wasn't satisfying for me. In particular, by default, 'network-nat' assigns a different subnet to each DomU. Using the natted set up you can also configure a local dhcp server to give private IPs to your VMs all done transparently by the xen network scripts. I've noticed that there is a bug in the xen script that does not make it very squeeze friendly. Since the default dhcp server in squeeze is isc-dhcp and few configuration files got shuffled in the process (notably /etc/dhcp3.conf is not /etc/dhcp/dhcp.conf) , the script needs a little fix to work properly. I'll report this bug sometimes soon... Goggling around I found a different setup that is called brouter, that is a hybrid between a bridge configuration and a routed configuration. This is the original (??) article well hidden in an old suse wiki.

I've done few modifications here to add natting. So basically, all virtual interfaces connected each to one DomU are linked together by a bridge (xenbr0). The bridge with address 10.0.0.1 is also the router of the subnet. All DomU are configured to used dhcp that assigns a new ip and specifies the router of the subnet. The dhcp server is configured to answer requests only on the xenb0 interface avoiding problems on the public network... routing is configured using iptables : Note that since the dhcp server is configured to give addresses only on the virtual network, we need to restart it after creating the bridge interface, otherwise isc-dhcp-server will refuse to run. Mum says that I should configure the bridge in /etc/network/interfaces to make the dhcp server happy at startup, but I felt a bit lazy, so I let to task to xen... In the next episode, I'll add ipv6 connectivity to the virtual subnet and then start playing with puppet... ipv6 is almost done, puppet... I started with the doc... The complete script from the suse wiki and with my modifications is below (only lightly tested):

On Sunday the annual March Madness Half Marathon in Cary took place, which (at least informally) opens the running season in greater Chicago. Following my participation in 2005. 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009). and 2010, I kept that streak going. Weather was pretty bad: A forecast of rain materialized with a shower at the start, another at about the halfway mark and a more solid downpour at the end, while temperature where in the lower 40s. And as I train less than I used to, I was also few just a few second slower than last year at 1:39:55 (hand-stopped) but managed to sneak in just under 100 minutes (and having taken six seconds to the starting lime, the official non-chip time has me just over that mark). All-in-all another nice half-marathon and I was appropriately sore yesterday.

We're heading to release candidates for phpMyAdmin 3.4.0, so the translators have less time to make the translations better. There are still 13 translations at 100%:

• Catalan
• Chinese (China)
• Czech
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• French
• German
• Greek
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

There are still lot of translations which would need some love, for example:

• Italian
• Norvegian
• Polish

Recently, new people started to work on Bulgarian and Brazilian Portuguese translations, so we will hopefully have these two on the list soon as well. You can help make translation to your language better! If your language is missing just let me know (either in comments or by email).

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I am at the next edition of Debian FTPMaster meetings in the LinuxHotel Essen currently. We arrived Sunday evening and will stay until 27th March, giving us again a nice week of time to work on outstanding archive issues. And our todo does list a good number of points. Currently we are 3 persons, all 3 FTPMasters. On Wednesday evening one wanna-build member will join and on Friday evening one FTPTeam member arrives for the weekend. While thats not all of our team it still gives us a good base to work on. And so we already did, starting Sunday evening with unbreaking some fallout from Lenny->Squeeze update of the ftpmaster host as well as discussing some of our agenda points and how to tackle them. Today I started changing our backup strategy. Instead of dumping the whole dak database at dinstall start and end, a 4gb file each time, later compressing and then expiring them, we don t dump them at all anymore. Instead we save the postgres transaction id and let the Debian Sysadmin team do the backup. Which they do anyways, using the PostgreSQL WAL stuff. Which means we can just tell them to please reset the dak db to the place of transaction $BLA . Something that only works as we are switching to Postgres 9.0 and will use replication to sync our DD-accessible machine. Torsten started work by explaining us his ORMObject idea in our database layer, then violently vomitting when I pointed him at some code to fixup. Seems that code isn t all the most beautiful one, so he switched to cleanup in a different place. Lets see if I get him back to that bad code. Mark is playing with our database and trying to get that from 8.4 to 9.0, seems like some stuff we are using isn t all that en vogue anymore in 9.0, so might need adjustments.

Debian CD/DVD ISO images are huge files (4.7 GB for a DVD). It can take a long time to download if your connection with the server is not very fast. Jigdo can help you download them much more quickly if you have a high-speed connection to a normal Debian mirror. If your download rate from your usual Debian mirror is not better than the download rate from the closest Debian CD mirror, then you should download your images straight from the Debian CD mirror. Otherwise read on and learn how you can save lots of time. Jigdo is based on a simple idea: the CD images contain mainly thousands of .deb files (and source files too) that are already available on all Debian mirrors. So instead of downloading the ISO image in its entirety, you could reconstruct it with all the files that it contains, that you would download from your usual Debian mirror. Thus when you download a .jigdo file, you only download a little text file (compressed with gzip) that contains enough information to reconstruct the complete image:

• it contains a list of the individual files that are needed to rebuild the image;
• it indicates a mirror where those files can be downloaded (it s mainly a fallback URL in case our preferred mirror doesn t have them anymore);
• it contains an URL to a .template file which describes the layout of all files within the ISO image. It also contains the data which can t be downloaded from the mirror.

The tool that we will use to regenerate the ISO images is called jigdo-lite, it s available on Windows if you don t have any Debian system yet. Otherwise just install the jigdo-file Debian package. We just need the URL of a .jigdo file (get one from the Debian CD page) and we pass it to jidgo-lite on the command line. It asks for a path of Files to scan : if we have an older version of the same CD image, we can indicate a path where it is mounted and it will avoid redownloading the files that we already have, otherwise just press Enter. Then it asks for the Debian mirror to use and by default suggests the one used in /etc/apt/sources.list. Again pressing Enter is usually enough. You can even use --noask to avoid the prompts.

$ jigdo-lite http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/6.0.1/multi-arch/jigdo-dvd/debian-6.0.1-i386-amd64-source-DVD-1.jigdo
Jigsaw Download "lite"
Copyright (C) 2001-2005     jigdo@
Richard Atterer             atterer.net
Getting mirror information from /etc/apt/sources.list
Downloading .jigdo file
--2011-03-22 09:08:11--  http://[2001:6b0:e:2018::163]/cdimage/release/6.0.1/multi-arch/jigdo-dvd/debian-6.0.1-i386-amd64-source-DVD-1.jigdo
[...]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Images offered by  http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/6.0.1/multi-arch/jigdo-dvd/debian-6.0.1-i386-amd64-source-DVD-1.jigdo':
  1: 'Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.1 "Squeeze" - Official Multi-architecture i386/amd64/source DVD #1 20110319-14:55 (20110319)' (debian-6.0.1-i386-amd64-source-DVD-1.iso)
Further information about  debian-6.0.1-i386-amd64-source-DVD-1.iso':
Generated on Sat, 19 Mar 2011 15:11:27 +0000
-----------------------------------------------------------------
If you already have a previous version of the CD you are
downloading, jigdo can re-use files on the old CD that are also
present in the new image, and you do not need to download them
again. Mount the old CD ROM and enter the path it is mounted under
(e.g.  /mnt/cdrom').
Alternatively, just press enter if you want to start downloading
the remaining files.
Files to scan: 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The jigdo file refers to files stored on Debian mirrors. Please
choose a Debian mirror as follows: Either enter a complete URL
pointing to a mirror (in the form
 ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/'), or enter any regular expression
for searching through the list of mirrors: Try a two-letter
country code such as  de', or a country name like  United
States', or a server name like  sunsite'.
Debian mirror [http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian]: 
Downloading .template file
--2011-03-22 09:12:41--  http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/6.0.1/multi-arch/jigdo-dvd/debian-6.0.1-i386-amd64-source-DVD-1.template
[...]
Successfully created  debian-6.0.1-i386-amd64-source-DVD-1.iso'
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Finished!
The fact that you got this far is a strong indication that  debian-6.0.1-i386-amd64-source-DVD-1.iso'
was generated correctly. I will perform an additional, final check,
which you can interrupt safely with Ctrl-C if you do not want to wait.
OK: Checksums match, image is good!

And you re done, you have successfully downloaded an official Debian DVD with jigdo-lite. You can head over to the Debian CD page and find out the URL of the .jigdo files for the latest stable release. One last thing, Bluray images are only available with Jigdo because they are so huge that keeping complete ISO images would be a waste of disk resources of the CD images server (and its mirrors). Of course, if downloading ISO images and burning CD/DVD is not for you, you can always order some professionally printed CD/DVD. You will even help Debian by doing this.

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I, and maybe some others, wondered why people would (have to) send new lenses back claiming that they got a bad copy so often. I couldn't imagine quality control being so bad that two out of three (at least that's the impression I got from reading the occasional foto discussion forum) lenses are bad. It turns out that it is not only people needing to be pampered and having the impression that their second (identical) copy of the expensive new lens is better. Nor is it bad QA by the manufacturers alone. Fact is that todays high megapixel cameras are at the limit of the manufacturing precision that can be achieved at a reasonable price. Roger Cicala (LensRentals.com, so he occasionally does have a lens or two at his place) wrote some very interesting articles about this topic which I discovered just now as they were featured on canonrumors (In case you're wondering: No, I don't see any issues with my new 70-200mm, just coincidence that I'm reading this just after getting a new lens. When I upgrade my camera body to something like a 5D MkII I will take a very close look at my Tokina 11-16 though, where I don't trust the AF 100%. On the 10MP Canon 40D it's a great lens, so I'm quite happy for now, but it seems strange that when I release and half-press the shutter again after having focused, the focus will sometimes move a tiny bit again. Haven't noticed this behaviour on the other lenses.)

I somewhat failed last week to take a photo because I was too busy with other things. However to stay on track I decided to publish about one month old photo from Charles bridge in Prague.

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This seems an active time for conference planning in two of the projects I like:

1. KohaCon11 is being planned for Thane, India. Registrations are open and I m helping to admin the conference system (OCS). If you d like to talk, submissions are also open now, although how we review and choose has yet to be decided (should be at the next volunteer meeting). If you d like to sponsor the event, please register as a potential sponsor.
2. DebConf12 s location will be picked at an IRC meeting today (Tuesday). Bids from Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Managua, Nicaragua are on the web and you are invited to help choose between them.

Are there any other Free and Open Source Software community conferences you d like to mention?