I'm indescribably happy to be able to say that I found Smudge alive and well this morning. I was getting ready to head out the door to work, and I opened the shutters in the kitchen and saw that the trap that I had outside by the front door was closed. The trap itself was wrapped in a sheet, so I couldn't immediately see what I'd caught. I quickly went outside, half-expecting to find a raccoon in there, and I was pleasantly surprised to find Smudge in there! I brought the trap inside and got Smudge out and raced her over to the food and water, where she had a long drink of water and something to eat. She's definitely lost some weight, but otherwise doesn't seem any worse for wear. She's currently sitting in my lap as I write this, so I don't think she's too traumatised by her ordeal. Lily was a bit standoffish this morning, hissing and growling at her, but I suspect that's because she didn't smell right. If she keeps that up, I'll put a drop of vanilla essence on both of them so they smell the same. Yesterday, I'd received a report of a possible sighting three streets over (houses on one side of the street back onto the Hetch Hetchy trail, where there were also reported sightings), so last night I placed the other trap in the backyard of one of the houses where there'd been a sighting. A couple of hours after that, I got another report of a possible sighting from someone else on the same street, further down. So I was pretty keen to substantiate all of these sightings on this particular street. Unfortunately, after two trips up there, I didn't see any black cats, so we'll never know if it was her or not. The night before last, I'd upgraded the food in the traps to some sardines, tuna and some fresh wet cat food, to try and lure her in. I have no idea if that helped or not, or she just finally found her way home, but it was such a relief to find her in the trap this morning. It turns out I caught an opossum in the other trap. Those are the funniest animals. They have a totally broken fight or flight reflex. This one would not leave the trap when I opened it. I ended up having to upend the trap and shake it out, and even then it just lay there playing dead - even when I shoved a bowl of food in its mouth. I've just done the rounds of the neighbourhood and taken down all the posters I'd put up. It had been suggested that I might want to update the posters and say that I'd found her, but I honestly don't want to do the extra trip to then take them all down again after that.

A month ago I started a new job, at Codethink, a British software development company. We work mainly on and with free software. I'm working on a new project called Baserock, a way to build embedded Linux systems that we think will avoid many of the pain points that people usually have. Baserock is still in its formative stages, not something you can really play with. Codethink has its main office in Manchester, so the past weekend I moved there with my fianc . Oh yeah, Soile and I got engaged. Rings of Palladium. While I've been having a lot of fun, I'd like to be bored for a while now. Instead, I'm going to Prague for ELC Europe.

See also parts 1 and 2. That s a photo of Vlicha Beach, near our hotel. But before I talk about the Greek beaches, I need to explain something about living in Kansas. Kansas is in the middle of the United States. The nearest ocean is the Gulf of Mexico, which is 700 miles (1100km) away. That s roughly the same as the distance between Berlin and Minsk, or New York and Chicago. And I believe it s farther away from a saltwater body than all (or almost all) of Europe. So we re not just going to the beach every weekend or something. Vlicha Beach was all those incredible things you ever hear about beaches. The water was so clear that I could easily see my feat while wading in it. That, and the fish swimming around them. It was peaceful, relaxing, and picturesque. Between the deep blue of the sea and the same in the sky, I suppose it is no wonder that blue is often associated with Greece. We weren t exactly the only ones there. Though I think we were the only ones there with Kindles, which seemed to be much more popular in the USA than in Europe. We got several interested people carrying paper books asking what they were. Towards dusk, the mist would become more pronounced and the mountains off in the distance started to fade: The evening before we were set to fly home, we spent some time sitting on our balcony watching dusk set in. One last gaze out over the beautiful Aegean, the misty mountains, and the boats in the distance.

I am currently running a crowdfunding campaign whose ultimate goal is to liberate the English translation of a French book that I have written. This book will be named The Debian Administrator s Handbook because it has primarily been written for Debian. Creating a new Ubuntu book based on The Debian Administrator s Handbook But since Ubuntu is based on Debian, a large part of its content applies equally well to Ubuntu. While discussing with Mark Shuttleworth, he suggested me to reuse those parts and to create a new book dedicated to Ubuntu. It would also cover the latest cloud technologies that Ubuntu has been delivering (since this is a topic that the current book does not cover). This is something that I have been envisioning for a while and something that I would be ready to try if we manage to complete the liberation of the current book. This project would then bring a truly free book to the Ubuntu ecosystem. Why? The official Ubuntu books are not really free There s a policy in place that ensures that official Ubuntu books use a free software/culture license and they are effectively available under the terms of a Creative Commons Share Alike license. But try to create a derivative book you won t find the sources (LaTeX or DocBook usually with most big books). You can only find a few PDF copies if you google for it. But this is really not the preferred form of modification for such a book. Those books are also not packaged. Ubuntu much like Debian deserves to have a good book embodying the values of free software that can be shipped together with its product. When I speak of liberation of the book, I really mean it in the way that free software hackers are used to: a public Git repository containing the DocBook sources, the pictures and the .dia files for the various schemas. Help Ubuntu by spreading the word I understand that at this point this proposed Ubuntu book is really hypothetical ( vaporware one could say) but we need to go step by step to make it a reality. And the first step is to ensure that we manage to liberate the Debian Administrator s Handbook. For this I am seeking the support of the Ubuntu community to promote the current fundraising campaign. If the perspective of the Ubuntu book is not enough to convince you, you ll be glad to learn that I also commit to give back to Ubuntu 15% of the money raised via the link below (once VAT has been subtracted). Click here to go to the crowdfunding campaign page and pledge a few euros. Then share this article (or the link http://debian-handbook.info/go/ulule-ubuntu/) and convince others to participate. At this point, the liberation target is entirely reachable with your help and the help of the community: the remaining 18 K needed in the liberation fund represent 720 persons giving 25 EUR each or 1800 persons giving 10 EUR each. Thank you very much for your support and your help in this project!

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With this, my NIN vinyl album collection is now complete. I don't have a comprehensive NIN vinyl collection by any account: I don't have all the singles nor the remix albums, rarities, etc., but I do have all the albums. This is the newly-remastered version of "Pretty Hate Machine", which sites proudly next to an original. I'm still waiting for the much-anticipated remaster of The Fragile, which turned 12 last month. It appears to have been sidelined by movie soundtrack work.

Hetzner have recently updated their offerings to include servers with 16G and 24G of RAM [1]. You can get a dedicated server with two 3TB SATA disks, an i7-2600 quad-core CPU, and 16G of RAM for E49 per month plus an E149 setup fee. That is a good deal and I ll probably soon be running a few more servers at Hetzner because of it. HTC is currently offering five different Android phones that have 1G of RAM [2]. So while Hetzner is offering some great deals on dedicated servers, the affordable option has 16* the memory of a modern phone and the high-end option and the biggest option has a mere 24* the RAM of a phone! Linode is a virtual server provider that I m using for some of my clients, they offer virtual servers with 20GB of RAM for $US800 per month [3]. That doesn t compare well to Hetzner s offer of 24G for E59 ($US81) per month. Admittedly the management interface for Linode is really good while the process of recovering from a Hetzner server with a serious configuration issue is painful but getting two Hetzner servers in some sort of HA configuration would be 1/5 the cost of a Linode virtual server. HTC offers two Android phones with 16G of built-in flash storage that have the ability to take a 32G microSD card for a total of 48G of storage. Linode s smallest virtual server plans have 20G, 30G, and 40G of storage, so a modern phone can store more than twice as much data as the smallest Linode plan and more data than any of the three smallest plans. While it s obvious that phones don t perform well for any real server use (lack of fast network access, disk IO speed, and CPU power being obvious issues) it does seem that the recent announcements of newer cheaper server plans aren t that exciting when compared to mobile phones. For a similar monthly rate I could get a mobile phone free on a two year contract or a Hetzner server that has 16* the RAM. It s a pity that Hetzner does t offer servers with up to 128G of RAM and more than four disks. RAM isn t THAT expensive nowadays and their business model includes having the customer pay for various options that other companies don t tend to offer in a similar price range (such as SSD and other hardware customisation). Also see XKCD s comparison of HDTV and mobile phones [4].

• [1] http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTC_phones
• [3] http://www.linode.com/
• [4] http://xkcd.com/732/

A couple of times I have written code which basically does this:

1. accept() an incoming connection
2. do some magic to get another socket
3. start passing bit between the two sockets
4. perform a correct close down sequence

An example use case of this is a proxy implementing the HTTP CONNECT method, but in for some known hostnames it will log a message and mangle the hostname before proceeding. This has been used as a legacy fall back solution while changing a network setup. But my uses are not restricted to HTTP proxies I have done the same for a few legacy protocols where the magic has been of different complexities. The two final steps are quite general and it would be nice to have a module doing just that. Take two sockets and make it easy (or even automatic) to pass bytes between them. The na ve non-blocking solution would use a scalar string buffer for each direction and perform a select loop while maintaining the write vector depending on which buffers contain data. I have written this code multiple times. In development this is usually quite successful, in production less so. While Perl might be quite suited for the magic in step 2, the na ve way of passing bytes have quite an overhead for the buffer management. A less na ve way would use a array of strings for buffers, but I m not quite sure if this would be a win in all cases. You might be able to get away with some string operations on the read side of the buffer, but it might be more expensive on the write side. I have not benchmarked this. Most of the time I don t care about Perl level IO handles. I know that there is a real C level file descriptor beneath. So an even better POSIX compliant solution might be to use XS to have plain C strings and use readv()/writev() and a iovec structure as buffer. Can we do even better? At least on Linux we can. With the Linux splice() specific system call it is possible to us a pipe as buffer and never to have to copy data from and to user space. I have not been able to find any off the shelf solution on CPAN. So I think I need to write it myself, but what would the nice and general API be? I guess the basic interface would be something like:

    my $chain = IO::Splice->new($fh1, $fh2);
    $chain->pump(); # read and write from both handles if possible and needed
    $chain->read($fh1);  # read to buffer from one specific handle
    $chain->write($fh2); # write from buffer to one specific handle
    $chain->can_write(); # returns the handles it needs to write to

but it might be simpler to have two callbacks for setting a file handle in write or no-write state:

    my $readset  = IO::Select->new( $fh1, $fh2);
    my $writeset = IO::Select->new();
    my $chain = IO::Splice->new( $fh1, $fh2,
        writable => sub    $writeset->add( shift )  ,
        unwritable => sub   $writeset->remove( shift )  
    );
    while ( ... select ... )  
        $chain->pump();
     

As said, I think I have plenty of implementations of the na ve way but before releasing some code it would be nice to get some input on the API. But the best feedback would be a module that already have a usable API but might not implement the Linux specific way. That would allow me to steal the interface

The few articles I wrote that explained how to install GNOME 3 from Debian experimental have been very popular. So I figured out that a small update would be welcome. The Debian GNOME team started uploading a mix of GNOME 3.0 and 3.2 packages to Debian unstable because the release team is ready to take care of this transition. This means that as soon as the packages are ready in Debian unstable, the release team will ensure that they also reach wheezy (aka the current testing distribution). So if you re a Debian unstable/testing user with a GNOME Desktop, expect some important changes by the way my experience with GNOME 3 was recently plagued by some rendering issues resulting in parts of the screen not being properly refreshed. While trying to track this down (and investigating clutter as a possible culprit) I came upon this mail on the clutter-devel mailing list. I recompiled mutter with the indicated patch and it fixed my issue. I immediately uploaded mutter 3.0.2.1-4 with the fix so this issue should be gone for the many people who are going to experience GNOME 3 for the first time in the coming days. It s also worth noting that contrary to how upstream handles it (they hide the fallback mode and the user has to enable an option to use it in place of the GNOME Shell), Debian has a dedicated session for the GNOME 3 fallback mode so you decide what you get right from the login screen. This will be appreciated by the people who do not see GNOME 3 as a step in the right direction. Unless they switch to XFCE as some did. As far I am concerned, I m already used to GNOME 3. I spend most of my time in terminals, browsers and an IRC application and the whole Shell does not fundamentally changes my work habits.

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Good morning all! It feels like forever since I last blogged . Which is extremely bad of me *slaps own wrist*. However, I m been horrendously stupidly busy. As some of you may know, I m very much an Android fan. Recently, I ve gotten myself a shiny Galaxy SII. Given the fact that alongside my day job of being a Web Developer for an Online Retailer, I m also a Voluntary Ambulance Person I thought it d be useful to ask my current workplace if they d provide me a mobile phone cover for my new phone. Of course, work were more than happy to provide me with a shiny Samsung Galaxy S2 case (I actually went for the Case-Mate Barely There in brushed aluminium). Being a voluntary Ambulance Person, I regularly have to go to random places to pick up an ambulance/attend an event. Because of that I rely quite heavily on Google Maps and it s navigation features (Free Sat Nav in my opinion, the killer feature of Android). Having only had my phone a week, I started to find that there were a few problems with the GPS. Whereas previously, I d been able to lock on almost instantly, It d now take me about half an hour (literally) to get a lock on anything. I tried Googling, I tried everything I could think of, but to no avail. I downloaded GPS Test, and it was showing that while it was picking up a couple of sattelites, it wasn t picking up enough to get a decent lock The image above is a screenshot of the GPS test from directly outside my front door, taken after it had settled down. As you can imagine, I wasn t happy and was ready to send the phone back. Then, for some reason, a brainwave hit me (It doesn t happen often). What changed from when it was working to now? I know! The Case *takes case off, tries GPS test again* It can be amazing what happens when you realise that shiny case you have is mainly made of aluminium. Guess what works well at deflecting radio signals and the like You got it, aluminium. So now I need to decide whether to get another case or whether to just take the case off when I need to do sensible things. Other than the case problem, I m finding that the Samsung Galaxy SII is a great phone (as soon as I got rid of Touchwiz). I m not a fan of the OEM Samsung crap that s been bolted onto the phone, and will, as soon as there s a decent release, be putting a copy of CyanogenMod on the phone (I ve already made most of the tweaks I just want rid of SNS) In other news I ve started more and more gaming again. If you re interested in a couple of rounds of TF2 or some SC2 (or some Portal 2 Co-Op) then give me a shout with your Steam ID / Battle.net ID and I ll see what I can do. I m thinking of starting doing some Let s Play Videos, as my Youtube Channel is looking a bit sparse! I m going to try and start blogging a bit more aswell so if there s anything you want to see me blog about pop a post in the comments below! Till next time..

I really don t know what to make of this Cisco-made video What a Hackable World. It is sort of interesting that Anonymous and Lulzsec made it in but the video is not all that clever. And what up with the nerd-o-matic sys admin (most sys admin I know are more hoodie, less nerdie). But can anyone explain what/who the main featured dude is supposed to be? Hacker detective/destroyer? Cisco customer?

First, is that image really the best LOLcat referencing Brazil that exists out on the Internets? I sure hope not as it is sort of lame but it was the only one I could find (in the 30 seconds I looked, which I admit, is not all that much time). But all of this lolcat in Brazil stuff is really to say, I am heading to S o Paulo tomorrow to give a talk on Anon on Thursday at this conference. If you are an Anon in the city and can make it, please do. If you are not Anon and are still interested, come along as well ;=) If there are Debian developers as well in the city, it would be great to meet at some point. I am there from Tuesday morning to Friday night.

The Occupy Wall Street protests taking place around the world are incredibly moving. And, at May First/People Link, the joint us jumping with new projects. Occupy Together was the first to join, followed by the Occupy Wall Street Journal. We then launched boggs.mayfirst.org as our dedicated Occupy Wall Street shared server and the radical tech work keeps on coming (OccupyTechnoloyg, OccupyProvidence, OccupyColumbus GA just to name a few). It's also great to see free software and responsible software as a service making it's way into the conversation. I've heard many reports about the politics of technology taking it's rightful place in the realm of political decisions being made. I don't have the context for this photo from the blog non ti stavo cercando, but it sure sums up the connection :

here's my list of recent RC bug fixes, again comprising bugs which already had a patch in the BTS:

• #625330 fileschanged: "fileschanged: ftbfs with gcc-4.6 -Werror"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Colin Watson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #634414 src:libnsbmp: "libnsbmp: FTBFS: src/libnsbmp.c:297:11: error: variable 'uheight' set but not used [-Werror=unused-but-set-variable]"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643348 src:ale: "ale: FTBFS: ui/unsupported.h:35:30: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643350 src:alsamixergui: "alsamixergui: FTBFS: Fl_AM.cxx:154:20: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643353 src:asmix: "asmix: FTBFS: asmix.c:580:5: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643356 src:babl: "babl: FTBFS: babl-model.c:49:7: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643404 src:gyrus: "gyrus: FTBFS: gyrus-admin.c:1474:4: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643431 src:libnet: "libnet: FTBFS: libnet_init.c:88:17: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2

This week, Google released an extension called BITE which lets you file bug reports from within Chrome (or Chromium). If you are testing web applications, it lets you attach screenshots and/or automated tests to reproduce the bug you've found. There's just one small catch: they haven't released a server to go with the client. Oops. Apparently the internal systems are too tightly integrated to make that possible. I have hacked up enough stubs of a BITE server in Perl to get the client to "log in" and show off some features. (Warning: it doesn't actually do anything useful yet.) So far, I have learnt:

• To get BITE to point at your dev server, you need to edit bite.options.constants.ServerChannelOption in the file src/options/constants.js (as documented on the serverhandlers wiki page) before compiling it.
• To get a bug template to apply to all URLs, you need to use the string 'all' as the URL, which is hardcoded in 'templates.js' in the client.

As you may have noticed, I'm testing DIASPORA* as a blogging platform. Its been working reasonably well recently for me, with friends and family; even though the "Main" platform joindiaspora.com is not giving general invites, the code works and a bunch of distributed 'pods' have been set up. You can make entries public, and I've tested a public address for this: http://diaspora.sceal.ie/u/amckinstry which looks ok, a bit plain for the moment, but I'll work on that later. The problem has been the atom feed is garbage. (It's putting the content into both the Subject line (as unadulterated MarkDown, no less), and into the content). So, I've put the old blog back up for the moment. While I debug some Ruby on Rails, not a language i'm too familiar with ... Note: only logged in DIASPORA users can leave notes on the Diaspora site, but go to the login page and registrations are open. At least until spammers notice... Tags diaspora, ruby, debugging, blogging

DIASPORA* as a blog I'm testing out DIASPORA* , the open-source social network, as a blogging platform. Apologies to those who see bad output on Planet Debian - I'm working on the issues as you read. It is possible to add comments to a post : it just requires a Diaspora account (on the post page, log in and create an account. This is on my home "pod", running on an old server at home, so don't be suprised at the speed). Failing that, my Debian email is available, mckinstry at debian.org.

Dear Lazyweb, I'm building a #debian package, CDAT. The latest version 6.0.alpha uses CMAKE to build, rather than configure. The trouble is that CMake doesn't build. It doesn't even fail. $ mkdir build $ cd build $ cmake .. ()-- Configuring done -- Generating done -- Build files have been written to: /home/amckinstry/deb-packages /cdat/cdat-6.0.alpha/build $ make $ The problem is, 'make' does nothing. A Makefile is generated by CMake, which calls cmake which calls make again on ./CMakeFiles/Makefile2 ... which does nothing useful. Apparently the CMake is supposed to put useful stuff in there, but doesn't. What puts stuff into Makefile2, and where should I pick up the bugs trail? (It would appear I also have issues with DIASPORA*'s Markdown over RSS to fix ...)

#### Debugging CMake issues #### Dear Lazyweb, I'm building a #debian package, [CDAT](http://bugs.debian.org/584637). The latest version 6.0.alpha uses CMAKE to build, rather than configure. The trouble is that CMake doesn't build. It doesn't even fail. $ mkdir build $ cd build $ cmake .. <lots of output, ending in ...> ()-- Configuring done -- Generating done -- Build files have been written to: /home/amckinstry/deb-packages /cdat/cdat-6.0.alpha/build $ make $ The problem is, 'make' does nothing. A Makefile is generated by CMake, which calls cmake which calls make again on ./CMakeFiles/Makefile2 ... which does nothing useful. Apparently the CMake is *supposed* to put useful stuff in there, but doesn't. *What* puts stuff into Makefile2, and where should I pick up the bugs trail?

It'll be a week today since I assume Smudge disappeared. Still no sign of her. I got one call from my posters around the neighbourhood, but I'm now pretty confident that it was another black cat. I really got my hopes up on that one. I don't know what else to do. I could be out beating bushes every spare minute, but I feel like I'm chasing a potentially moving target around an unbounded space. I've had no bites in the cat traps out by the front door. Not even a skunk. The waiting game sucks. I have no idea if she's dead or alive.

Manipulating meshes and lights is nice, but sometimes we want to manipulate the good old pixels, in particular for post-processing effects such as blur. But how can we do that in OpenGL? In this new OpenGL wikibook tutorial, we'll explore a solution: render to a texture through a framebuffer object! http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming/Post-Processing For our first effect, we'll implement the wave system previewed a few days ago in the video capture tutorial.