Jan 26 11:26:35 arrakis sshd[2515]: pam_unix(ssh:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=my-debian.org
Jan 26 11:26:38 arrakis sshd[2515]: Failed password for invalid user myra from 88.151.100.103 port 53744 ssh2

Note the rhost in the first line: my-debian.org. And, indeed:

% host my-debian.org
my-debian.org has address 88.151.100.103

Whois tells me:

Registrant ID:DI_6983786
Registrant Name:Czibulya Gergely

LART, anyone ?

Robert A. Heinlein: Starship Troopers (Putnam, 1959)
Paul Verhoeven (director): Starship Troopers (TriStar, 1997) The trouble with movies is that they fit only a short story. You can make a terrific movie out of a short story, but I have never seen a movie made of a novel that was at the same time good and faithful – most movies made of books fail in both. The novel Starship Troopers chronicles the evolution of a high-school kid into a mobile infantry officer in a world which had seen modern democracies fail and be replaced by a veterans’ rule (veterans of also noncombat and civilian service, not just military) – Juan Rico gets in just to impress a girl, and maybe to get to vote some day, goes through boot camp, makes combat drops from orbit as a private and then as a NCO, gets opted for officer training and by the end of the book is a competent officer, helping his old drill sergeant who had found the prize. Along the way we get political sermons (now I know where John Ringo got his tendency to have characters lecture on politics!), some interesting characters and just a hint of romance. The movie paints in broad strokes and primary colors. The first half of it is in fact a fairly decent redesign of the book as a movie, though I did not like at all how much in the face the romance (and two interconnected love triangles!) was played. Johnnie Rico gets in to impress a girl, goes through boot camp, makes some combat drops – And then it transforms into a horror movie (and loses any resemblance with the book). They make a combat drop, Lieutenant Rico drops his mission and goes rescue his girlfriend (the two triangles having been – eliminated by now) and totally misses his old drill sergeant finding the prize. Allegedly, the director never finished reading the book. Well, it shows. In the book, Rico would have been hanged by the neck until dead, dead, dead well before the end of the movie just for striking a superior officer; in the movie, everybody just shrugs it off. The book is an enjoyable military story, the founding father of a subgenre consisting of lots of newer books; the movie is just silly. If you have seen the movie, read the book. Don’t bother the other way around.

Just a quick post about the final cyclocross races: highlights from Hoogerheide are on RAI Sport Sat (free-to-air 13e) at 2255 CET tonight (Thu 24 Jan). Highlights of this weekend’s Treviso-Veneto races (26 and 27 Jan) should be on Eurosport (free-to-air at 19 east), 0900-1000 CET Mon 28 Jan. If you know of other broadcasters showing the race, please leave me a comment. Sven Nys has this pretty tied up, no?

Tracing python programs. Today, Evan Dandrea asked a general question "Where is set -x for python". A quick google for sys.settrace found: Some code snippets. I thought this was nice, but surely you want to be able to just trace an arbitrary program. So I present a 'quick hack' (5 minutes precisely :)) to do that based on the previous links final version:

#!/usr/bin/env python
 import linecache
import os
import os.path
import sys
 def traceit(frame, event, arg):
    if event == "line":
        lineno = frame.f_lineno
        filename = frame.f_globals["__file__"]
        if (filename.endswith(".pyc") or
            filename.endswith(".pyo")):
            filename = filename[:-1]
        name = frame.f_globals["__name__"]
        line = linecache.getline(filename, lineno)
        print "%s:%s: %s" % (name, lineno, line.rstrip())
    return traceit
 def main():
    search_path = os.environ.get('PATH',
        '').split(os.path.pathsep)
    argv = sys.argv[1:]
    if not argv:
        raise Exception("No command to trace supplied")
    args = argv[1:]
    command = argv[0]
    if os.path.sep not in command:
        for path in search_path:
            if os.path.exists(os.path.join(path, command)):
                command = os.path.join(path, command)
                break
    del sys.argv[0]
    source = open(command, 'rt')
    exec_symbols = dict(globals())
    exec_symbols['__name__'] = '__main__'
    sys.settrace(traceit)
    exec source in exec_symbols, exec_symbols
 main()
 

As much for my reference as anything else. Am I missing anything obvious I ought to be at? April-June seems oddly empty, which I guess gives me an opportunity to actually sort my life out. OLS loses on the basis of the beer in Portland being better than the beer in Ottawa. Posting does not imply a contract. Attendance of Matthew may go up as well as down. Statutory rights are unaffected.

26th January - 3rd February: Melbourne for linux.conf.au
3rd February - 10th February: San Francisco
11th February - 15th February: Cambridge
16th February - 20th February: Boston (dates not finalised)
21st February: Cambridge
22nd February - 25th February: Brussels for FOSDEM
26th February - ?: Cambridge
3rd March: Viva
Early March - somewhere vaguely around October: London
16th March - 19th March: Recife for Bossa (tentative)
7th July - 12th July: Istanbul for GUADEC
21st July - 25th July: Portland for Ubuntu Live and OSCON
10th August - 16th August: Mar del Plata for Debconf
17th September - 19th September: Portland for Plumbers Conference
Somewhere vaguely around October - indefinite: San Francisco

iTaser: I never can remember: Were these the earplugs, and those the 50000V stunners, or was it the other way round?

In just over a month (1 month and 1 day, to be precise), it's FOSDEM again. The Debian Developers Room schedule is almost complete, and some interesting things are being published around it. Such as the pre-FOSDEM beer event. In previous years, this always happened at the "Le Roi d'Espagne", a bar at Grand Place in Brussels. This was a nice place for many years, because it's easily found, and they have this backroom where quite a lot of people would fit in. Unfortunately, "quite a lot" does not equal "a huge number", with the amount of people going to the pre-FOSDEM beer event more and more approaching the latter than the former as the years go by. Last year, it finally became too crowded, and it was decided that the pre-FOSDEM beer event would change bars this year. Which has now happened. This year, the pre-FOSDEM beer event will be at the Delirium Caf , which is not at the Grand Place anymore, but just 100m away from it; the FOSDEM website has more information. A nice feature of the Delirium Caf , besides the fact that they are much larger, is the huge amount of different beers they have. Over 2000 of them, which you can query online!. And that's not even considering the soft drinks or waters or whatever, which they also have on their menu. Another novelty this year is the streaming; the main tracks that will be held in Janson will be streamed out of the event, and the Debian video team is also planning to do some streaming. Meaning, even if you can't make it to FOSDEM, you'll still be able to follow some of it. You won't be able to follow everything, especially not the hallway track which at FOSDEM is a very important one; but at least you'll be able to sample some bits, which is nice. Other than that, not much will change. There'll be a key signing party, organized by yours truly. There'll be Lightning talks, there'll be the Main track, and there'll be a number of Developer rooms, including the Debian one—which, occasionally, is also organized by yours truly. This conference has always been my favourite (even though I haven't been to many conferences besides FOSDEM); I've never missed even one edition ever since the very first one back in 2001 (when it was still called OSDEM). And since a few years, I've also been offering crashing space at our office, for international geeks who don't mind roughing it a bit (it's an office, there no shower, there's only floor space). This year, perhaps I haven't been spamming enough for that, but for now I only have two people who're interested in sleeping over (and they're not even sure); if you're going to FOSDEM and still need a place to sleep, you're (probably ;-) welcome. Send me an email. On the Debian front, things are going well, for the most part. The list of speakers for the Devroom is nearing completion, leaving me with little more to do than to start assigning times. We've been assigned a booth as well, but there I still need to figure out how to organize it, and what to do with it. There will of course be the regular UK T-shirts, and probably some other merchandizing, but I also want something involving some computer device. We've had this d-i "babelbox" installation running a few times now, which was nice; but I do think we need some variation, too. The only problem with that approach is that I don't really know what that variation could be. Suggestions are welcome! And so time goes on, and FOSDEM draws nearer. At some point it'll eventually happen, and then it will be over before one can say "blueberry pie". Sometimes I wonder whether all these months of preparation are actually worth it. But when FOSDEM is actually here, I'm sure I'll find that it is, indeed, worth it...

I send mail from my laptop by a local smarthost-with-auth install of exim4. Recently I got motivated to setup smtp submission port for this, as I got tired of borked hotel wifi intercepting smtp, and was behind a firewall that allowed no smtp out... It was pretty simple - on my mail server, enable listening on port 587 by putting: 'daemon_smtp_ports = smtp : 587' in before the local_interfaces line. And on my laptop, edit the 'remote_smtp_smarthost' stanza to add 'port = 587'. Yay to less mail headaches.

A phone call in December made me very proud: A colleague I met thanks to the Espora collective told me she was involved in the Mexican activities for this year's World Social Forum (FSM Mexico 2008 site). The Mexican activities? Yes. This year, the World Social Forum will not be held at one -or several- distinct places, but it will happen globally. There will be activities in tens of countries. The activity program for Mexico (full PDF version) is quite loaded - And I was invited to give one of the talks, this Friday (Jan 25) at 12:00, about Free Software for a Free Society, in the Foro Derecho a la Comunicaci n track.
I am very honored by this invitation! I just spent a couple of hours organizing/going through the topics I will be presenting. I hope to be able to be at some other of the forum's activities, as it just is too important and interesting to miss out!

One year ago today, I wrote that we had moved onto the farm on Jan. 20. That was quite the day: 7.5" of snow, and windy.

When we moved in, our kitchen didn't yet have its flooring or any appliances. We had a microwave sitting on a 5-gallon bucket and a borrowed dorm fridge for the "kitchen". There were other little things being finished up, too. Of course, "moving in" doesn't just happen in an afternoon either. We are still sorting through boxes from time to time, cleaning up stuff in the elevator (some of which was grandpa's), and punching down the last few network runs.

Before we moved in, we spent three months in a drafty basement apartment. Our previous house had sold, and the farmhouse wasn't ready to move into yet. And we moved out of that other house about 3 weeks after Jacob was born.

It was a busy, exhausting time. But we're so glad we did it. Jacob's room is much closer to ours, which is quite helpful. He loves to scoot around on the wood floors. Terah bought him a large pillow, and he likes it when I give him pillow rides around the house.

Older people that knew my grandparents love to drop by, too. For awhile after we moved in, we'd have people just drive on the yard to see what it looks like now. The person who pruned our trees hinted that he was curious what the inside of the house looked like, so I showed him. He grew up Amish, and said, "wow, this would be a perfect Amish house!" I guess the Amish could remove the network jacks.

We have some neighbors a mile away. They're two sisters living on their parents' farm. I think they're in their 70s or 80s. They drive whatever car their dad bought before he died 20 or 30 years ago. Last month, one of them gave me a call. I've been collecting photos for the upcoming church centennial, and she had some that she thought I might be interested in. It was snowy and cold, so I said I'd be happy to go over and look at them sometime. That wasn't quite her plan. "Oh, that's no trouble. I like to get out, and you're not far away." She brought over some wonderful photos (which I scanned), and also got to see the inside of the house for the first time in years.

That's how things go out there. Last June, we had some tourists drop by. It's been a lot of fun to be part of this community again.

Before long, Jacob is going to love playing in the elevator and walking down to the creek. Maybe he'll like making a snowman next winter, or riding a bicycle up and down the driveway someday. It will be fun to see.

The traditional gathering of the Linux and FLOSS community in France will this year again feature a Debian booth. The event will be held in Paris-La D fense (CNIT), on Jan 29-31. As the Babelbox was born in that event three years ago, we will again have one, of course (people will get bored of it...). Frans Pop improved the thing so much that it took me less than 2 hours to set one up. We will also probably have a few other demo machines and the usual bunch of developers, contributors and friends popping up at the booth. If you're around, please come up and say "hi"....(don't forget fingerprints, IDs and some aspirin to cope with the verbiage of some of us who definitely talk too much).

Since 3 weeks, half of my worktime (but i don't have worked that much, due to another real life occupation) has been dedicated to setting up a meeting for the OCaml community in Paris. This is the first public meeting about OCaml in France. It will be located at ENST (Telecom Paris) on January, the 26th 2008. This should be an occasion for the european OCaml community to meet in the real life and to discuss the hottest current topics of OCaml. I hope that this meeting will help people to begin creating a more consistent community around OCaml. In fact, the community already exists -- but it will be a time to meet several members that has never meet before... More information and subscribtion

I've been quietly coveting the Zonbu for a number of months now. I finally caved in and ordered one when we got back from Australia, with the intention of using it to replace minotaur, the computer that exports my RAID10 via ATA over Ethernet to my MythTV box. minotaur is the old daedalus, which I bought back around 2000. It's a VA Linux Pentium III. It's old, noisy, and has no idea what power management is. The Zonbu has more grunt than it (in terms of BogoMIPS), and it's a fraction of the size. Our linen cupboard is now significantly quieter (and hopefully cooler). Heck, hopefully the power bill will be lower as well. Anyway, I put the order in when we returned from Australia, with the expectation that it'd turn up some time while Sarah was in hospital, or shortly afterwards, and I could use the rest of the month that I was off work to play with it. Well, I got an email on the 31st of December, telling me they were out of stock, and unless I wanted to pay $29 more for one with built-in WiFi, I'd have to wait until mid-January. As I just couldn't see the point of having WiFi (or spending more money) and not needing the thing in a hurry anyway, because I had more important things to worry about in the meantime, I opted to wait. This morning, I emailed them to enquire about whether or not more stock had arrived, and they emailed back to say that they were still waiting, but they'd found one they could sell to me anyway. The company happens to be close by in Menlo Park, so I picked it up today in our travels. Let me just say that it is a very cool little computer, just if you use it for its intended purpose. It's running a customised Gentoo Linux, with a 2.6.22 kernel. I'm a bit surprised about their choice of Gentoo. I think they'd be better off partnering with Canonical, given that Mark Shuttleworth is trying to make a Linux distribution easy enough for his grandmother to use. That'd take the work of engineering the operating system out of the equation, then they could just focus on the hardware and a bit of integration with Amazon's S3. The thing I have to give them mad props for is documenting how to hack the tripe out of the box. They tell you how to enable root. They tell you how to enable PXE booting. So once I figured out that the front USB port seems to get treated slightly differently for a USB keyboard than the back ones, it was very easy to PXE boot it and install Debian. I initially started with trying to install Etch, but I kept getting missed interrupts on the CompactFlash device, which resulted in the filesystems panicking. So I gave up and went with Lenny, and presumably because it also uses 2.6.22, everything seemed to go fine. The box comes with a 4Gb CompactFlash card, which is ample for my needs. It's running the 686-optimised kernel, which is probably not ideal, but works. We'll see how things go. Interestingly, I blew another hard drive power supply, exactly like last time. I've no idea if it's the act of plugging everything back in again that's causing the problem, or they're generally flaky, and they don't fail until they're powered off and back on again. Maybe that IEC Y-cable wasn't such a good idea after all. I've now run out of spare power supplies, so I'm going to have to get some more for when these two inevitably fry themselves. Overall, I'm very pleased with this purchase, but it's a bit early to see how it's going to perform. I can't imagine it's going to perform worse than the computer it's replacing, but it was probably never intended for what I'm using it for either... Oh, and I discovered vblade-persist, which seems to be a very nice framework for managing ATA over Ethernet exports. Now I just need to get my hands on a big tub of Lego to build a nice chassis for the whole thing.

After 2 weeks of my new life, i just found time again to write this entry. I think that some people were enjoying the new year when my wife and I were also waiting for our baby. He is born at 3:30 am on 2008/01/01. Happy new year!

It’s incredible how one troll can split a channel up. It’s incredible how the sexist shit can be spread all over the place. It’s incredible, not wait, not incredible, it’s sad, sadder and sadder, to see what Debian has become. The Debian social life has become a center for dramas of all kinds, since sexist traumas, transgenders issues, people with too much free time, real good technical people leaving, freaking big farts in Debian thinking on leaving the project, elitist dolls clubs, small wannabes who think they can treat other people unrespectful. Debian itself is now its own slow killer. There has always been old people, new people, people leaving and people entering, but when you see other projects just as good as we were, some of us remain because of the social side of Debian. But is it really worthwhile? Perhaps not anymore. And because of the non-sense shit from the debian-women mailing list thread, here are a few random greps on my old logs:

Jun 11 07:19:29 <directhex work> timgoh0, for the same reason a woman in skimpy lingerie is sexier than a women in the nude, lesbians are sexier to watch than a threesome. it’s the *potential* being presented. the thinly veiled chance for the imagination to run wild Sep 13 00:23:27 <tech> women are mostly useless Sep 12 23:28:10 <tech> nvz: just stay away from women, it’s easier Mar 04 20:12:32 <nvz> women like to be refluffled Jan 13 12:50:07 <toresbe> rcox: Some idiot got out on the debian-women mailing list and said #debian-offtopic was “sexist”.

Of course we are sexists, just like we are men and women unfriendly, we laugh about nationalities, we like fluffling, make fun of others and we like to be nipple smited. Love it or get the fuck out of there. We’re an unofficial community now. Who would want to be official after all?

Russisprung, Hundschopf, Minsch-Kante, Canadian Corner, Kernen-S, Wasserstation, Hanneggschuss, Silberhornsprung, sterreicherloch, Ziel-S. If that rings a bell, you know what I'm talking about. Today was *the* ski downhill race of the season, namely Lauberhorn in Wengen, Switzerland. The longest (2'30") and fastest (sometimes up to 160km/h) downhill races of the season. Wengen's scenery is among my favourite ones, with the Eigerwand, M nch and Jungfraujoch dominating the entire race (the image of racers in the S curve before the Hundshopf jump, with Eiger, M nch and Jungfrau at the back is usually the image of the year when it comes at ski competitions. And, this year again, the sun was brilliantly shining over Wengen so we spent a great time watching this (on TV...going there to see it live is one of my dreams). And, for this non standard downhill race, we again had a non standard winner with Mr Bode Miller, winning it for the second time in a row. Next week is the Hahnenkamm downhill in Kitzb hel, the ski Mekkah of Austria, on the Streif. Also coming, the Schladming night slalom, Chamonix downhill, Val d'Is re downhill.....January is always busy for those who enjoy competition ski. (and, as I do not only watch sports on TV, I also ran my second longest distance today, with 19.5km in just 2 hours. Yay)

I'm uploading new backports of xorg for etch at this moment. They are based on what was on unstable on the 9th on January, which was xorg 1:7.3+10. Thanks to XSF for their great work!

I've also included a backport of Andres Salomons xserver-xorg-video-amd package, as the one in sid is not uptodate enough for the OLPC laptop.

At 9pm Thursday my heart went into overdrive. At the emergency room I was diagnosed with acute atrial fibrillation and was scheduled for electric cardioversion but the problem went away on its own (as it sometimes does) so I was discharged in late afternoon yesterday, after a 16 hours long hospitalisation with no food or drink (cardioversion requires anesthesia). A noninvasive echocardiogram detected no faults in my heart, and no reason for the attack was identified. I am told this is a good thing and means I have a very good prognosis (it is likely that the problem will never recur). I feel fine now. The hospital visit was educational. I learned stuff about hospital procedures and some things about the equipment they use there, and met various people. I’m glad I had to make the call (if you have to go to the ER, it’s best if it’s for something nontrivial so they don’t feel you’re wasting their time but still something relatively dangerless). A bit more detailed report in Finnish is available.

Originally I planned to post this with the title "Last night I slept with 300 people" but this night happened two weeks ago... It was the night before the fourth and last day of the 24C3 were I slept in the gym :-) Actually I also planned to blog on the third day but then this day turned out to be really busy... and then I arrived home on new years eve and suddenly it was a week later and now it's the 10th of January. Time flies when you're having fun. And as you might have noticed it's not even the 10th anymore...

Timewarp back to the chaos communication congress! I think it's safe to say that the Debian booth at the 24C3 was a success. It was a nice meeting (and storage) point for Debian people, we collected quite some donations for t-shirts and stuff (the exact amount needs to be examined still) and we were able to help various users and contributors answering Debian specific questions of both kinds: how to install/configure/fix foo and packaging and other development questions from a number of people.. And we had a babelbox setup which was much better understood and perceived, once I added a sign explaining it :-)

Thanks a lot to the 24C3 organizers and the angels (thats how the congress volunteers are called) for making such a smooth and interesting conference as well as giving such a great space to the Debian booth! And equally thanks a lot to all the people operating our booth! For those who are interested to attend next year: roughly 64 talks were held in english, and 26 in german. I saw about five events live...



The sign hung for about an hour unmodified...

On the third day of the congress we had an OLPC.de meeting, which was quite productive and resulted in us founding OLPC Germany this monday. In the aftermath of this meeting I came up with the idea of having an OLPC Europe event at FOSDEM in Brussels in February, which by now has been accepted and scheduled by the FOSDEM organizers. Yay! So if you are in Europe and involved or interested in the OLPC, please mark the 23rd of February 15-17 localtime in your calendar :-) The idea of these projects is probably best summarized with "think global, act local and global", for more detail please read our vision. (And keep in mind this is in its very early stages.) OLPC Europe should also become an interface for all those european OLPC efforts which have been popping up recently and which all take up ressources in Cambridge, the OLPC "mothership", taking ressources away from the children of the world.

Then on the last day of the 24C3 congress I also gave the DebConf7 "thank you, Sponsor"-package to those four people from the freifunk community, who helped us out with accesspoints for Edinburgh. Much to my surprise and joy, they were really happy about it! Funnily two of those four are also among the three OpenWRT developers who ported OpenWRT to the OLPC laptop, which I borrowed to them somewhat in return :-) And now we work together in OLPC.de and .eu. Networking is sometimes really really fun.

Fast forward to 2008. Two days ago I finanlly had the time to to run etch, lenny and sid on the OLPC laptop (with wireless (including WPA), xorg and sound working and dualbooting with the original fedora install) and then yesterday I've created a usbstick which successfully booted a "d-i prototype". Yay! And best of all (for me), most of the actual work was done by other people, I just had to collect the pieces. My next steps will be documenting what I did and prepare a d-i image which actually works. I don't have pics yet (it's Debian running on a laptop, I guess you can imagine this), so for now I will just post another picture I received some three months ago and which made me incredibly happy at that time:



When I have a working d-i running on it, I'll post more pics.