I m not an avid gamer, but I do occasionally enjoy playing video games. I sometimes have time to do so over the holidays, so I m looking for suggestions. I have a PS3 and a PC available. Thinking about what I like, most recently it seems to be immersive world games: Oblivion, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 1 & 2, and GTA. I ve also enjoyed simulation games, such as Civ, SimCity, FreeCiv, and Railroad Tycoon in the past and could again. Some of the Star Wars games (Knights of the Old Republic, Jedi Academy, Force Unleashed) I ve enjoyed, though the ones that have essentially no plot I didn t really. What suggestions do you have?

Hello During the Config::Model presentation at Debian mini-conf, I was asked whether Config::Model could be used from other languages than Perl. Of course, config-edit command line can be launched from any program with any language, but we can hardly call it an API. There s also the possibility to use Config::Model::SimpleUI to fork a process and send commands on its STDIN and get results on STDOUT. But using this from another program is awkward. On kernel side, /proc and /sys are widely used to get information from the kernel and set kernel configuration. How about using a similar approach with system configuration data ? Configuration data from config files is already mapped into a tree within Config::Model. This tree can also be mapped to a file system structure. This file system structure could have the following layout:

/conf/
system/
sshd/
PermitRootLogin # contain 0 or 1
ssh/

popcon/

As a bonus, this file system would provide a unified access to all system configuration data available through Config::Model. In any case, people would still be able to tinker configuration with their favorite text editor on a file in /etc. The modification will be propagated to the corresponding entry in the /conf virtual file system. The reverse will also be done. Anyone interested ? All the best PS: Further technical discussion will be held on Config::Model mailing list: config-model-users at lists.sourceforge.net 2010.11.25 edit: specified that config data can still be written in usual config file.

I ve just been asked for advice on buying a digital camera. I m not an expert on cameras but I have a good general knowledge of technology and I m sure that the readers of my blog will correct me rapidly if I make any serious mistakes. ;)Types of CameraThe Wikipedia Page about Digital Cameras is worth reading [1].Here are the types of camera that are useful as a stand-alone camera (IE not camera phones or industrial cameras):

• Digital SLR large, very capable, and very expensive. They have detachable lenses and a prism to split the light between a viewfinder and the CCD that records the digital photo. Such a split provides much less benefit now that you can have an LCD display for the viewfinder. In Australia they seem to start at about $1500.
• Bridge Cameras they are of a similar size and shape to a Digital SLR, but the lens is permanently attached and the price is a lot lower. Typically between $400 and $800.
• Mirrorless Interchangeable Lens Cameras they allow changing lenses like a DSLR but don t have the prism for an optical viewfinder. This makes the optics simpler and cheaper. Andre Pang wrote a good review of one [2] which sells for about $700.
• Compact cameras small and cheap. Between $60 and $400 depending on features.

I suggest that people not start out a hobby of digital photography with a DSLR or other interchangeable lens camera. I think that it s best to start out with simple gear that s cheap if you decide that digital photography is not your thing then you have wasted less money, and if you really get into it then you ll be able to make a more informed choice about an expensive camera after getting some experience.A spare cheap compact camera can be useful even if you own a more expensive camera. There are times when you don t want the bulk of a DSLR or Bridge Camera and when you have a risk of theft or accidental damage such that you don t want to take an expensive camera. People who are really serious about photography apparently take a camera everywhere, you could have a compact camera in your front pocket for fast pictures and a bulky camera in your backpack for when you have time to prepare a quality shot. So buying a cheap camera and then buying an expensive one a few months later would not be wasting money!As the person who asked for advice has never owned a digital camera before I ll focus on cheap compact cameras for the rest of this post.Pixels and LensesCameras are typically advertised with the resolution in Megapixels described in bold. Presumably most people search for the camera with the highest resolution. The first thing to beware of is cameras that don t have hardware which is capable of taking a picture of the stated resolution, they use interpolation to generate a higher resolution image. There are probably some cameras with interpolation that are OK and provide a decent picture at a low price, but generally I recommend avoiding all cameras that do interpolation.Optical zoom is a very important feature. Often pictures have to be cropped to remove unwanted background, if you zoom in appropriately you can avoid cropping and make better use of the available resolution. Beware of cameras that advertise things such as advanced zoom , anything that doesn t exactly say optical zoom is using digital zoom IE interpolation. I suggest not considering a compact camera unless it can do at least 4* optical zoom, with 5* or better being preferable.The physical size of the lens is important. A bigger lens allows better pictures in adverse lighting and also allows a faster shutter speed to give better photos of moving objects and better photos when you are moving. Generally you can get a rough idea of the potential that a camera has by just glancing at the lens, if it s the size of a lens in a mobile phone then the pictures won t be that great. If it is on a telescopic mount and it s wide then the result will be better. When buying a lens for a DSLR or other detachable lens camera you should be able to read specifications of the lens which indicate it s size. For compact cameras the specifications of the lens are usually available from the vendor and often available from review sites but generally aren t included in adverts by retailers. If you are comparing cameras in the store looking at them seems like the best option.The ratio of the lens area to the number of pixels determines how much light is received by the sensors for each pixel. So when there are two cameras that are essentially identical apart from the number of megapixels the one with the highest number isn t necessarily better in all situations. A 12MP camera might not give a better result than a 10MP camera, a monitor described as Full HD has a resolution of 1920*1080 which is 2MP. A 5MP camera is useful to allow cropping but if the aim is to display pictures on current monitors then anything much bigger than 5MP is probably wasted at this time and 10MP will provide pictures that can use the capabilities of monitors that are developed for a while.PrintingSome printers that are affordable for home use might require something like a 7MP camera to print a picture at A4 or Letter size at the highest quality. Professional printing will probably require something even greater. But if your intended use of a digital camera doesn t involve printing the pictures, or only rarely involves printing them at A4 or Letter size then you don t need a high resolution for printing. I expect that there are some available printers that can use paper at sizes such as B3 which might require a 20MP camera for best quality. But if the aim of the printing is to put a picture on your wall (the most common case) then even if it s not at the ideal resolution then probably no-one will notice the difference you can t see the pixels from a few meters away.If the aim of the camera is to photograph professional artwork for the purpose of selling it on the Internet then a high resolution camera really isn t desired. You want to offer pictures on the Internet which aren t good enough to be usefully printed.VideoThe capabilities for recording video can vary significantly between different cameras in the same range. If you don t care about video then that s fine, but if video matters to you then you have to read the specs. It s also worth considering digital video cameras, I have previously summarised the available digital video cameras although I m sure that there have been some new models since then [3]. A good (expensive) digital camera will have video functionality that compares well to most digital video cameras but it will cost a lot more.Choosing a Compact CameraThere are many compact cameras in the $100 to $150 price range. Ted s has the Samsung Digimax ES65 for $99.95 which has 10MP and 5* optical zoom. This seems like a good deal. Practice with a cheap camera could easily allow you to make a better choice when buying a more expensive camera that saves you more than $100 so it seems unlikely that you will have any great regrets about buying a $100 camera.Buying from the specs is a bad idea, I recommend testing a camera in the store before buying every store that you want to buy from allows this. But don t expect that quality pictures in the store means much, the people who run the camera stores usually set them up with good lighting so that pictures will tend to turn out well. The aim of an in-store test is not to discover what the camera does well, but to discover what (if anything) it does badly. Also it s useful to test the ergonomics of the camera before buying, discover whether you would be happy to hold the camera for an hour.It s a good idea to ask the staff at a camera store for advice, but don t rely on such advice. My experience is that they tend not to ask what the prospective customer plans to do with the camera and this significantly limits the quality of their recommendations.ConclusionMake your first digital camera a cheap compact camera that doesn t cost much more than $100. Make sure it has at least 4* optical zoom with 5* being preferred. Don t worry too much about the number of megapixels, anything more than 5 will do. Test the camera in the store to look for any obvious reasons that make it unsuitable for your use. If you want video then be prepared to pay a little more as the cheapest cameras have a low resolution for video.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_camera
• [2] http://algorithm.com.au/blog/files/gf1.php
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/07/20/digital-video-cameras/

Next article highlighting some new features which will come in phpMyAdmin 3.4 is about more little changes. You can try them it out on our demo server. Or just wait few hours for first alpha release of 3.4. The user interface cleanup is partly connected with previous changes, because some functionality simply required more Javascript (for example editor for ENUM/SET fields). Besides these there were major changes in export and import pages, which now should be easier to understand, hiding advanced options from unexperienced users, while still providing ability to change them. This feature was implemented by Lori Lee during Google Summer of Code 2010.

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This past saturday I passed by this man in the park. He was calling and feeding some squirrels.

<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/eA1ASjWRmbs?fs=1&amp;hl=ro_RO"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eA1ASjWRmbs?fs=1&amp;hl=ro_RO" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480"></embed></object>

He was kind enough to give me some walnuts to call the squirrels myself. He did this without even me asking.

<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/oL700Fnd3ck?fs=1&amp;hl=ro_RO"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oL700Fnd3ck?fs=1&amp;hl=ro_RO" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480"></embed></object>

It was such a wonderful experience for me, especially since the last squirrel gently touched my index finger while trying to get the walnut from my hand. Its paw was so cold and it felt very smooth and gentile.

I don't know when, but I will definitely go with a bag of walnuts of my own and spend some time there.

This past saturday I passed by this man in the park. He was calling and feeding some squirrels.

<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/eA1ASjWRmbs?fs=1&amp;hl=ro_RO"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eA1ASjWRmbs?fs=1&amp;hl=ro_RO" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480"></embed></object>

He was kind enough to give me some walnuts to call the squirrels myself. He did this without even me asking.

<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/oL700Fnd3ck?fs=1&amp;hl=ro_RO"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oL700Fnd3ck?fs=1&amp;hl=ro_RO" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480"></embed></object>

It was such a wonderful experience for me, especially since the last squirrel gently touched my index finger while trying to get the walnut from my hand. Its paw was so cold and it felt very smooth and gentile.

I don't know when, but I will definitely go with a bag of walnuts of my own and spend some time there.

This post and the next to come are about a project I'm doing at work that I've called The Freaky Wall. The project has its origins on the idea that using multiples technologies is better for security; almost all the servers I use are running Debian GNU/Linux and use iptables locally, so when I decided that we had to build new firewalls at work I thought it was a good idea to look at different technologies, that is, a different kernel and firewalling tools. As I wanted to avoid iptables and the Linux kernel my first idea was to go after the free BSD systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD), and soon realized that pf (the OpenBSD Packet Filter) was the way to go; it has a clean syntax and includes advanced features like CARP and pfsync that allow me to build redundant firewalls. Before going after the standard systems I looked at pfSense a firewall appliance built on top of FreeBSD that uses a PHP interface to do everything. At first it seemed that it was going to be a good option, but soon I felt that I wasn't in control of what the system was doing and I had to change the PHP code to do trivial things (I wanted to configure IP aliases on a CARP interface and it was not possible with the web interface, while it is trivial to do using the standard system configuration files), so I left the idea of using it. The second option was to use OpenBSD directly, as it is the system were pf has been developed. Soon I saw that I was going to be able to do what I wanted with the system, but I missed the Debian's way of installing and upgrading the system and the list of packages available. For different reasons the firewall project was left in a limbo for a little while and when I went back to it I already had to upgrade my test systems to a new OpenBSD release; after reading a little bit about how to upgrade and not liking the idea of doing it I remembered that jordi suggested that if we only want the kernel and the firewall tools the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port could be an option instead of OpenBSD or FreeBSD. Before trying to install the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD system I saw Robert's post about a Debian installer with ZFS support and I decided to start with it, as the use of ZFS will allow us to use software RAID-1 and snapshots, something we have on almost all our Linux servers (we use software RAID for redundancy and LVM snapshots to be able to do our backups at any time of the day with consistent data, but that is for another post). On my next post I'll explain how I did the initial installation with ZFS, and after that I'll explain the changes I did to the kernel and some of the packages to be able to build a firewall as described on the Firewalling with PF document (that is, I needed pfctl, pflogd, a tcpdump with pflog support, the pf's ftp-proxy, etc.) and on the last document I'll explain how I've configured the firewalls The Debian Way .

Ogg and MP3 files often contain the interpreter and song title in the file name. Which is (besides quoting blanks, etc.) usually no issue if you have English interpreters or song titles. But it may become a character set issue, if you have songs with e.g. French, German, Greek, or Russian interpreters or song titles: They may not be in your preferred character set and therefore don t display properly on your system. Worst case: You just see questions marks. If you face such problems, convmv (man page, Debian package) is your tool, because convmv converts filenames from one encoding to another:

$ ls -lF
total 4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 abe abe 4 2010-11-21 16:17 ????
$ convmv -f latin1 -t utf-8 *
Your Perl version has fleas #37757 #49830 
Starting a dry run without changes...
mv "./??"       "./ "
No changes to your files done. Use --notest to finally rename the files.
$ convmv --notest -f latin1 -t utf-8 *
Your Perl version has fleas #37757 #49830 
mv "./??"       "./ "
Ready!
$ ls -lF
total 4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 abe abe 4 2010-11-21 16:17  
$ 

Of course it can also recursively rename your whole Ogg collection. And it can do it interactively, too:

$ ls -lF
total 4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 abe abe 4 2010-11-21 16:17 ????
$ convmv -i --notest -f latin1 -t utf-8 *
Your Perl version has fleas #37757 #49830 
mv "./??"       "./ " (y/n) y
Ready!
$ ls -lF
total 4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 abe abe 4 2010-11-21 16:17  
$ 

So convmv takes away at least one UTF-8 migration fear. Update 23:03: Nearly forgot, but Mowgli reminded me: There is also convmvfs (Debian package), a FUSE based filesystem which converts file names on access.

Fusion Garage have put up a website containing the source code for the kernel, bootloader and some miscellaneous tools (including their recovery system). As far as I can tell (by inspection - I haven't tried building binaries) it corresponds to what they were distributing, which is excellent. On the other hand, that's all the source they've provided. The pkgs.tgz binary they're providing is the binary packages shipped with the Joojoo, missing their source code. Many of these appear to simply be Ubuntu packages with the gpg signatures stripped, which is a GPL violation though not a terribly interesting one (GPLv2 only allows you to point at someone else's repositories if (a) you're not distributing commercially, (b) they gave you a written offer for the source code and (c) you pass on that written offer - however the source is out there, so it's not something I'm personally terribly upset about). In some other cases, there do seem to be genuine differences. udev, for instance, has a bunch of customisation. And finally there are packages that don't appear in Ubuntu at all, but which do contain GPLed or LGPLed material (such as webkit).

So, the take-home message is that even when given 6 months to provide source code, Fusion Garage are unable to adhere to the licenses of software they distribute. Don't give them any of your money, since unless they magically get significantly better it'll probably end up being spent on defending lawsuits.

Today was quite strange day for me - at the morning I felt quite bad so I took sick day to rest a bit. During afternoon I turned on the computer to see announcement that Novell agrees to be bought in $2.2b deal. As this is company where I work, it of course has attracted my attention. Novell was bought by Attachmate, a company with one quarter of our employees, and over a third of our revenue, what sounds strange. And this is the first time I hear of this company... The information is now very scarce (we as employees were not really given more information than is available publicly), so all what remains to people is to speculate. What does it mean for openSUSE? What is the "certain intellectual property" transferred to CPTN Holdings LLC (owned by Microsoft Corp.)? And some people just comment on current situation of Novell and some of it's products :-).

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Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated upgrade testing of the Lenny Gnome and KDE Desktop to do apt-get autoremove when using apt-get. This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and can now present the updated result from today: This is for Gnome: Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude

apache2.2-bin aptdaemon baobab binfmt-support browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cups-pk-helper dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more gnome-user-share gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf gtk2-engines-smooth hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap libart2.0-cil libboost-date-time1.42.0 libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0 libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0 libcryptui0 libdiscid0 libelf1 libepc-1.0-2 libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard libfreerdp0 libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7 libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgpod-common libgpod4 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8 libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1 libsdl1.2debian libsrtp0 libssh-4 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0 media-player-info mesa-utils mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto nautilus-sendto-empathy p7zip-full pkg-config python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers python-elementtree python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell software-center system-config-printer-udev telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

cheese ekiga eog epiphany-extensions evolution-exchange fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit gedit-common gnome-games gnome-games-data gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnuchess gucharmap guile-1.8-libs libavahi-ui0 libdmx1 libgalago3 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0 liblircclient0 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libspeexdsp1 libsvga1 rhythmbox seahorse sound-juicer system-config-printer totem-common transmission-gtk vinagre vino

Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get

gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs

Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get

[nothing]

This is for KDE: Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude

ksmserver

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

kwin network-manager-kde

Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get

arts dolphin freespacenotifier google-gadgets-gst google-gadgets-xul kappfinder kcalc kcharselect kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager kdeartwork kdeartwork-emoticons kdeartwork-style kdeartwork-theme-icon kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeeject kdelibs kdeplasma-addons kdeutils kdewallpapers kdf kfloppy kgpg khelpcenter4 kinfocenter konq-plugins-l10n konqueror-nsplugins kscreensaver kscreensaver-xsavers ktimer kwrite libgle3 libkde4-ruby1.8 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10 libplasma-ruby libplasma-ruby1.8 libqt4-ruby1.8 marble-data marble-plugins netpbm nuvola-icon-theme plasma-dataengines-workspace plasma-desktop plasma-desktopthemes-artwork plasma-runners-addons plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets plasma-scriptengine-python plasma-scriptengine-qedje plasma-scriptengine-ruby plasma-scriptengine-webkit plasma-scriptengines plasma-wallpapers-addons plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement ruby sweeper update-notifier-kde xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod

Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get

ark google-gadgets-common google-gadgets-qt htdig kate kdebase-bin kdebase-data kdepasswd kfind klipper konq-plugins konqueror ksysguard ksysguardd libarchive1 libcln6 libeet1 libeina-svn-06 libggadget-1.0-0b libggadget-qt-1.0-0b libgps19 libkdecorations4 libkephal4 libkonq4 libkonqsidebarplugin4a libkscreensaver5 libksgrd4 libksignalplotter4 libkunitconversion4 libkwineffects1a libmarblewidget4 libntrack-qt4-1 libntrack0 libplasma-geolocation-interface4 libplasmaclock4a libplasmagenericshell4 libprocesscore4a libprocessui4a libqalculate5 libqedje0a libqtruby4shared2 libqzion0a libruby1.8 libscim8c2a libsmokekdecore4-3 libsmokekdeui4-3 libsmokekfile3 libsmokekhtml3 libsmokekio3 libsmokeknewstuff2-3 libsmokeknewstuff3-3 libsmokekparts3 libsmokektexteditor3 libsmokekutils3 libsmokenepomuk3 libsmokephonon3 libsmokeplasma3 libsmokeqtcore4-3 libsmokeqtdbus4-3 libsmokeqtgui4-3 libsmokeqtnetwork4-3 libsmokeqtopengl4-3 libsmokeqtscript4-3 libsmokeqtsql4-3 libsmokeqtsvg4-3 libsmokeqttest4-3 libsmokeqtuitools4-3 libsmokeqtwebkit4-3 libsmokeqtxml4-3 libsmokesolid3 libsmokesoprano3 libtaskmanager4a libtidy-0.99-0 libweather-ion4a libxklavier16 libxxf86misc1 okteta oxygencursors plasma-dataengines-addons plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba plasma-widget-lancelot plasma-widgets-addons plasma-widgets-workspace polkit-kde-1 ruby1.8 systemsettings update-notifier-common

Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.

I have been asked how Ubuntu relates to Debian, and how packages flow from one to the other. So here s my attempt at clarifying the whole picture.

Where do the packages come from? Most packages are created by Debian contributors and they are uploaded in Debian unstable (or Debian experimental). New packages are reviewed by the Debian ftpmasters before being accepted in the official archive. The packages are held in the NEW queue until the review is over, and the time spent there varies between a few hours and a few months (usually they are processed within one week or two). Ubuntu imports all the official Debian packages, but they also add some packages of their own. About 7% of the Ubuntu packages are third-party software that have been packaged for Ubuntu but not for Debian. What are the changes made by Ubuntu? From all the source packages coming from Debian, 17% have additional changes made by Ubuntu. Many of them are part of the main repository, which is actively maintained by Canonical and Ubuntu core developers. The universe repository is usually closer to the official Debian packages. Many of the changes made by Ubuntu are the results of the decisions taken during the Ubuntu Developer Summit in order to reach specific goals: provide a better user interface, offer faster boot times, become a better platform for third-party software developers, offer a good integration with their online services (Launchpad, Ubuntu One), etc. Other changes are simply the result of fixing bugs reported by Ubuntu users. Note that even non-modified source packages will result in different binary packages for Ubuntu. That s because Ubuntu has made changes to the build environment. They only support Intel-based computers with a 686-class (or newer) CPU, they enable some compiler options that Debian doesn t, etc. And all binary packages are modified by a program called pkgbinarymangler. Ubuntu s release cycle and the relation with Debian Ubuntu releases every 6 months (that s what time based releases is about). Debian has a very different schedule. How does Ubuntu manage to reuse Debian s work? Ubuntu imports packages from Debian unstable (even experimental sometimes) to get the newest packages. If the Ubuntu package already has Ubuntu-specific changes, they merge their changes in the updated Debian package. Otherwise the Debian package is simply grabbed and rebuilt in Ubuntu. This works well because Debian unstable is much more usable than the name suggests. And this process only goes on during the first 2 months of the cycle (until the Debian Import Freeze), so there s plenty of time afterward to fix the biggest problems. In the third and fourth month, it s still possible to pick updated packages from Debian but it must be requested by a developer, it won t be done automatically. At the end of the fourth month, the feature freeze is put in place. The 2 months left are dedicated to bug fixing and polishing the distribution. There are various sub-freezes that happen in this period, you can check the Natty release schedule as an example. Picking updated packages from Debian is now the exception, it will only be allowed if the update on the Debian side is a bug-fix only release. Credits: some figures taken from a talk of Lucas Nussbaum, they were collected based on the packages available in the Lucid Lynx release of Ubuntu. Click here to subscribe to my newsletter and get my monthly update on what s going on in Debian and Ubuntu.

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• An initial development snapshot of Firebird 3 is packaged and available from Debian Experimental. More information.
• Mike Hommey has updated Iceweasel to 4.0 beta7. It is available from the Debian Mozilla team APT archive.
• Google Code-in 2010 is beginning today! Read about Debian participation and if you are student, take a look to the tasks.
• The current Debian project leader, Stefano, was interviewed during the Open World Forum 2010 . The interview is now available in youtube.

Most of the computers in use by the Debian Edu/Skolelinux project are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine. This was a bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file. I found a nice recipe to do this, and wrote the following script to do the migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.

#!/bin/sh
# Based on
# http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
set -e
set -x
if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <hostname>"
    exit 1
else
    host="$1"
fi
if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
    echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
    exit 1
fi
# Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
disksize=$( lvs --units m   grep $host-disk   awk ' sum = sum + $4  END   print int(sum * 1.05)  ')
swapsize=$( lvs --units m   grep $host-swap   awk ' sum = sum + $4  END   print int(sum * 1.05)  ')
totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
img=$host.img
#dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
qemu-img create $img $ totalsize MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
parted $img mklabel msdos
parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
parted $img set 1 boot on
modprobe dm-mod
losetup /dev/loop0 $img
kpartx -a /dev/loop0
dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1   true
mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
kpartx -d /dev/loop0
losetup -d /dev/loop0

The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion. After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines seem to work just fine.

Ever wondered which mirror of your favourite Linux distribution is the fastest at your location? Check it with netselect (code at GitHub). It checks for the number of hops and ping times to given hosts and tells you which one is the fastest of them:

# netselect -vv ftp.de.debian.org ftp2.de.debian.org \
                ftp.ch.debian.org ftp.nl.debian.org ftp.debian.org
Running netselect to choose 1 out of 5 addresses.
.......................................................
ftp.de.debian.org                       25 ms  16 hops   90% ok ( 9/10) [   72]
ftp2.de.debian.org                      17 ms  17 hops   90% ok ( 9/10) [   51]
ftp.ch.debian.org                        0 ms   3 hops   90% ok ( 9/10) [    0]
ftp.nl.debian.org                       22 ms  15 hops   90% ok ( 9/10) [   62]
ftp.debian.org                          22 ms  15 hops   90% ok ( 9/10) [   60]
    0 ftp.ch.debian.org

And if you re too lazy to optimize your sources.list with netselect manually, just use the netselect-apt package. It will do it for you.

...Or something like that ;-) For those who don't understand the silly joke Blender is a production-quality free 3D rendering/animation engine, which you can download for basiclally any operating system you can think of. Thanks to Claudia and Octavio, from the G-Blender Spanish-speaking community, for the nice sticker :-

My trusty somewhat-old laptop has been under the weather lately. It will not boot when it's cold, and it's fairly picky. ~20 C seems too cold already; so I have to heat it up at little.
Now that winter is coming, this needs to be done almost every morning, and that is extremely annoying. Does anybody have an idea of what could be wrong? It seems that the problem is not just a loose connection, as the laptop goes up in stages:

1) when the power button is pressed the power LED will blink for a split-second and nothing will happen,
2) the LED will light up for slightly longer, but the laptop still will not boot,
3) the laptop starts booting but shuts off spontaneously after while on the BIOS screen,
4) the laptop goes through the BIOS screen, but shuts down before showing the boot menu.
Past that, apparently the CPU generates enough heat for stable operation.
This is fairly complicated behaviour for a hardware problem. I wonder, maybe the power supply is at fault? Any ideas, anyone? This is a good excuse to buy a new laptop, but I would rather not splurge right before Christmas season.

Yesterday and today I attended Ruxcon the leading technical security conference in Australia [1]. The first lecture I attended was Breaking Linux Security Protections by Andrew Griffiths. This included a good overview of many current issues with Linux security. One thing that was particularly noteworthy was his mention of SE Linux policy, he cited the policy for the FTP server as an example of policy that can be regarded as too lax but also noted the fact that to get SE Linux used the policies had to be more liberal than we might desire. There is probably scope for someone to give a good lecture about how we are forced to make uncomfortable choices between making security features stronger and making them more usable.The next lecture I attended was Breaking Virtualisation by Endrazine. It makes me wonder how long it will be before someone cracks one of the major cloud hosting services such as EC2 it s not an appealing thought.Billy Rios gave a really interesting lecture titled Will it Blend? about blended exploits. The idea is to try and find a few programs which do things that are slightly undesired (arguably not even bugs) but which when combined can result in totally cracking a system. One example was a way of tricking IE into loading a DLL from the desktop and a way of tricking Safari into saving arbitrary files to the desktop, combine them and you can push a DLL to a victim and make them load it. Learning about these things can really change the way you think about misbehaving programs!Ben Nagy gave an interesting lecture about Prospecting for Rootite . His systematic way of finding test cases that cover a large portion of the code of a large application such as MS-Word seems quite effective. Once you have test cases that cover a lot of code then you can use fuzzing to find flaws.Edward Farrell gave an informative lecture about RFID Security , I didn t really learn that much though, he confirmed my suspicions that RFID implementations generally suck.Mark Goudie gave a very informative lecture titled We ve been Hacked! What Went Wrong and Why . Mark works for Verizon and often with the US Secret Service in investigating security breaches. He presented a lot of information that I have not seen before and made some good arguments in support of companies being more proactive in protecting their systems from attack.Stephen Glass and Mark Robert gave a lecture titled Security in Public Safety Radio Systems which mainly focussed on digital radios used by the Australian police. It would be good if the police got people like them to test out new kit before ordering it in bulk, it seems that they will be using defective radios for a long time (it s not easy or cheap to replace them once they are deployed).Edward Farrell gave an interesting lecture titled Hooray for Reading: The Kindle & You about hacking the Kindle. Unfortunately they haven t worked out how to get GUI code going on a hacked Kindle yet so there are some limitations as to what can be done.I think that the most interesting lecture of the conference was This Job Makes you Paranoid by Alex Tilley of the Australian Federal Police. He gave some interesting anecdotes about real cases to illustrate his points and he advocated the police position really well. I ve attended several lectures by employees of law enforcement agencies, but none of them demonstrated anywhere near the understanding of their audience that Alex did.The last lecture I attended was Virtualisation Security State of the Union by David Jorn of Red Hat. He gave an interesting summary of some of the issues including mentioning how SE Linux is being used for confining KVM virtual machines.Ruxcon was a great conference and I definitely recommend attending it. I have to note that even though there are police attending and lecturing it s not entirely a white-hat affair. One thing that I hope they do next year is to get a bigger venue. The foyer was rather crowded and because it had a hard floor was really noisy between lectures. Space and carpet are two really important things when you have lots of people in one room!

• [1] http://www.ruxcon.org.au/

Can I count myself in a majority of people that feel that, while the USB standard is a great advance regarding the way we used to connect our stuff to the computer some years ago (when we used a different cable for every friggin' device we had, and we had to care about having only one parallel and two seral ports in regular configurations, and don't even get me started on port settings speed, parity, etc.), every time we hold a USB cable in our hand we feel one of the designer teams decided to play a prank on humanity by making the connector's orientation basically unguessable? By the frustration this square thingy inflinges on us (being any other decent cable used on a computer either have a visually recognizable shape or just round and thus omnidirectional) I think that the rate by which I get the connector with the correct side up (or front, or right, or whatever) is way lower than 50%. Anyway, I found that the standard does provide for a (IMO quite dubious but still better than guesswork at the port) way to distinguish which way up - Quoting from Wikipedia's entry on USB connectors:

( )The side of the connector on a USB cable or other product with the "USB Icon" (trident logo) should be "visible" to the user during the mating process.( ) Officially, the USB 2.0 specification states that the required USB Icon is to be "embossed" ("engraved" on the accompanying diagram) on the "topside" of the USB plug, which "provides easy user recognition and facilitates alignment during the mating process."

There are several caveats which make this less than ideal, some of which you already thought of, some others are in the referred article and I won't reproduce them. I am just amazed that... USB has been around for almost 15 years (and has been the most popular connection type for ~10 years). And I have never seen anybody apparently knowing this rule. This was a public service announcement in the hopes you will be happier people armed with its knowledge.

Ever wondered how to test or connect to a WebDAV server on the commandline? Don t want to use a bloaty GUI file manager to connect to a WebDAV server? Then use cadaver (Debian package), a WebDAV client reminiscent of the classic ftp commandline client (plus tab completion :-).

$ cadaver https://webdav.phys.ethz.ch/unixhome/abe/vortraege
Authentication required for D-PHYS on server  webdav.phys.ethz.ch':
Username: abe
Password: 
dav:/unixhome/abe/vortraege/> ls
Listing collection  /unixhome/abe/vortraege/': succeeded.
Coll:   wml                                    0  Mar 13  2007
dav:/unixhome/abe/vortraege/> quit
Connection to  webdav.phys.ethz.ch' closed.

There is also nd which works more like ncftpget/ncftpput/wget/wput, but I didn t get the current version in Debian to work with our WebDAV server. Last time I used nd was back then at ECOS times more than half a decade ago.