Search Results: "will"

20 September 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: Bending the DFSG a little...

...is what Mike Connor appears to be suggesting here. As far as I can tell, this has already happened - the way I interpret #8 of the DFSG, it is not just about Debian and derivatives but absolutely everyone including Osama Bin Laden and George Walker Bush and even John Howard. ;-)

Seriously, though, I perfectly understand that Mozilla needs to protect its brand and they certainly have every right to do so. And we have every right to change the name and modify the code without asking anyone for approval. A right that we will have to exercise by the looks of it. How about 'freefox' (probably too close) or the 'browser otherwise known as firefox', short 'bokaf' (anyone?).

I believe that Mozilla is doing the free software movement a disservice when they are as hard-nosed about their brand as it appears they are. They certainly need to put mechanisms in place to protect themselves from the Dr. Evils of the world. Debian most definitely does not belong into this category (neither do Redhat nor Suse nor any other Linux distribution I can think of). So why not just let sleeping dogs lie?

Eric Dorland and Steve Langasek are my heroes for remaining calm and on topic in the discussion.

Holger Levsen: Get ready for DebConf8

Whatever date and place is choosen, unfortunatly there always will be people who will not be able to make it... (Though it would help if those currently complaining about the (currently only estimated) date for Debconf7 would propose a workable alternative.)

But, there is always a next time. So, get ready and propose your venue for DebConf8!

Bernhard R. Link: Trademarks

If everyone thought that accepting bogus obligations just to be allowed to name something by it&aposs name, take a look at Eric Dorland&aposs blog or directly into the new problems.

My vote for this: Call it firesomething or mffbrowser or some other free name once and forall. With some luck somebody will then also write a nice patch to have a common Debian ca-certificate handling. (I&aposm sick of having to do anything twice, especially if it includes writing mozilla extensions adding a ca-certificate every time a user loads its config as I&aposm ignorant in all this stuff to know any better way). Having things as similar as possible in different environments is a nice goal, but having working solutions and the right to implement working solutions is much more important...

Alexis Sukrieh: Money Money Money

The Dunc-Tank is out.
Why not paying Debian Developers? Why not allowing everybody to support the project? Yes, these are good ideas…
But don’t you think we should have took the time to think about it, to discuss ideas, pros and cons? It looks like that Dunc-Tank thing was not intended to be debated (because of the fact it’s “outside of Debian”).
Anyway, I’m puzzled by two issues around the idea of paying Debian Developers by such an entity:
Well, you know, when money comes in the game…

Brett Parker: I think I've gone insane...

So, today was "interesting", but aside from the working part of the day, I was in a pub... Now, this isn't a new experience for me, as most people will know... but anyways - the subject came up about "religion" (kinda), as I don't actually believe that anyone exists, but do believe in the fact that I find myself in this environment that I can't actually prove does or doesn't exist, and that I then deal with that on a day by day basis of "shit, it's time to go to work..." my view on the world may be "a little" skewed by other people's standards... So, anyways - it came to a point where someone was saying that "animals" don't do "xyz" and so they can't be as intelligent as us... now my view on this is that animals may have already done xyz and decided that "survival" in this environment is the key to sucess, ergo basic instinct assuming that they all know mortality (which if they didn't the wouldn't reproduce) is that the *only* thing in this world that actually matters for any given species is survival of the species. Now, that being the case, and the general case being survival of the fittest, why on *earth* did we invent this medium (the internet) for talking to each other - do we *really* need to know what's happing several thousand miles away? If we ditched the technology and went back to our roots, what seperates us from the thousands of other species on the planet? Isn't it possible that other species have already been through the stages that we are still going through, come out the other end and worked out that, actually, on balance, it's better to hunt/gather and survive than mess with the delicate balance of nature? So, get out the way the messy politics, the correctness, the complete stupidity that is current human nature and go back to the basics - eat, sleep, hunt/gather... we've ended up making the world a much more complicated place than it actually needs to be... and, at the end of the day, what do we actually gain from this? Anyways - just a random brain dump after a potentially stupidly long chat in an establishment that is setup purely to intoxicate it's customers... Night peeps. Brett.

Nacho Barrientos Arias: Debconf7/NoJune

Taking a look to one of the IRC channels where I’m habitual, I found an URL to a Debian wiki page, where people is adding their names because they will have problems to attend Debconf7 in the planned date. By chance I’m in this set, exams are planned for this date. Please consider add yourself to this list if it is impossible for you attend DebConf7 in June.

19 September 2006

Tollef Fog Heen: Formulating iCalendar in SQL

I am currently working on something which hopefully end up being a good calendar server. The goal is to make it easy to add new frontends such as a CalDAV frontend, a Web frontend, etc. So far, I am just working on getting the data model right. The iCalendar RFC has a data model which I am trying to formulate into SQL, something which is ending up being quite hard. Shannon Clark blogs about why calendars are hard, and all of those issues are issues I am running up against when trying to make the data model. The main problem seems to be related to time zones, more closely: "How do you store timezone information in your database". The easy (but wrong) solution is to just normalise everything to UTC. This will not handle the case of events crossing timezone changes, such as to or from daylight savings. What I am currently considering is making sure all data in the database is stored in UTC, but also store the original time zone information. While a bit more complex, this allows applications to get back the same timezone they put in (I am not convinced Evolution will be happy if the timezones are renamed, for instance) and it allows my application to generate recurring events properly. My main issue with this is having the application responsible for making sure the data in the database makes sense, but without putting half my app in PL/perl, I can not see a way around that. Oh, and if anybody has great ideas on how to represent timezones in a relational database (postgres), please do mail me or grab me on IRC or something similar.

Edd Dumbill: EuroFoo reflections

I got an enormous amount out of the just-finished European FooCamp, with lots of thoughts sparking off and interesting things to consider. Jon Mountjoy proposed a theory to me that Web 2.0 and the enterprise weren't in fact as far apart as a naive observe might imagine. He reckons that mashups, tagging and the like do happen within the enterprise, and in fact are often solving harder problems than found in the wilds of the web. There is a lot in common between Web 2.0 and SOA (even aside from buzzword compliance factors). This is a theme I'd like to follow through. Who are the hackers on the inside of companies, and what stories do they have to tell? Gavin Starks from Global Cool really opened our eyes again to the problem of the environment, and introduced the interesting position that Global Cool are taking. If you want to do anything real right now to avoid catastrophic consequences, it's too late to wait for government initiatives to bear fruit. Private citizens must act too. And that's the aim of Global Cool: educating and lobbying the individual, not the government. I was struck, as were others, by the unfortunate irony that conferences have a big environmental cost in the travel involved, as we sat there among people from many countries. I want to now investigate how XTech could be better in this regard, through carbon offsetting and similar schemes. I guess being in Paris is already a good start, as trains are apparently only 25% as polluting as planes, though this still seems like a lot! Claus Dahl led an interesting and wide-ranging discussion about Second Life as a prototyping space for real life invention. Too many themes there to summarise neatly, but we did have an entertaining side discussion about Second Life's potential environmental impact due to CPU consumption and data centers. One suggestion was that objects and activities could be annotated in-world with their environmental cost. Simon Willison energetically explained OpenID, a decentralized identity system proposed by SixApart and already live in systems such as LiveJournal. It attempts to solve the problem of a username and password pair for every site you visit, without the controversy of centralisation suffered by projects such as Microsoft's passport. Simon demonstrated a proof of concept that I think will be a very neat answer to site providers who ask "why should I support OpenID?" (Sneak preview: because if you don't, it's going to be astonishingly easy for a middleman to provide it, and you wouldn't want that.) I also took time to learn about something I'd been interested in but not known much about, 3D printing and "fabbing". Simon Wardley led a great overview of current systems for 3D printing and their various attributes, and indicated where the current trends were going. It doesn't seem so unrealistic that there'll soon be affordable 3D printing bureaux similar to walk-in reprographic facilities like Kinkos. Plenty more went on that I've not got time to transcribe, but I think will flavour my thinking over the months to come. I was fortunate to be among some incredibly intelligent and welcoming people. My thanks to O'Reilly for putting this on, and to everyone else who went for being inspiring companions. Oh, one more thing. Belgians are excellent at confectionery.

Steve Kemp: Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

I’ve been using monit on my Debian servers for a long time now. For those that don’t know monit is a simple monitoring service which allows you to check that processes are running, automatically restarting them on failure, etc. When I first started using monit I manually added all the checks to /etc/monit/monitrc - but that soon became unwieldy, even with only three machines to maintain. Adding new software meant I had to keep updating the file, and because each server ran different services things couldn’t be shared. Not good. After I while I figured I’d create /etc/monit/includes and just drop files into there - that way I could include them:
# /etc/monit/monitrc
	
include /etc/monit/include/*.monit
Now to monitor a service I’d just create the appropriate file with a .monit suffix. All was good. Until I needed to start monitoring different services on different systems where adding and removing the files got to be painful. Surely there must be a better way I wondered to myself? Now there is. I’ve come up with a nice approach (perhaps the obvious one to everybody else?): I now have two directories: The master.d can have all your *.monit files dropped into it, regardless of whether they apply to the given host or not. To actually monitor a service you’d symlink master.d/foo.monit to include.d/foo.monit - In much the same way as you use symlinks to handle Apache sites and modules in Apache2.x Now the really clever bit is that you write a (perl) script to automatically parse each .monit file and only link in the ones which apply to this host. That means you can use cfengine to copy everything into the master.d/ file - and not care if some tests only apply to other hots. (e.g. You can crteate apache2.monit - and that will be symlinked in if apache2 is installed on the current host, but ignored otherwise.) For the moment my parsing and detection code is very simple, but it is working. In the future I guess I could create foo.monit and foo.package - then only link in the file foo.monit if the Debian package contained in foo.package was installed. The script is in my cvs repository along with a collection of test files.
I will attempt to catch up on mail tomorrow…

Clint Adams: Draft Debian Code of Business Conduct

The following Code of Business Conduct ('the Code') has not been approved by the Board of Directors of Debian, SPI, or any U.N. committees: Debian and its subsidiary companies operate in many different markets and countries throughout the world. In most instances, we respect national laws and industry codes of conduct. We, the directors and employees of all companies under the Debian umbrella ('corrupt fuckers'), recognize our obligations to all who have a stake in our success including shareowners, clients, employees, and suppliers, unless those obligations run counter to our profitability; Information about our business shall be communicated clearly, and accurately in a non-discriminatory manner and in accordance with local regulations, unless doing so would impact negatively our profitability; We select and promote employees on the basis of their willingness to support our aims and their potential for profitability, without discrimination or concern for race, religion, national origin, creed, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, or scruples, as long as doing so would improve our profitability; We believe that the Debian mailing lists should be safe and civilized; we will not tolerate sexual harassment, discrimination or offensive behavior of any kind, which includes the persistent demeaning of individuals through words or actions, the display or distribution of offensive material, or the questioning of our integrity, unless such tolerance would improve our profitability; We will not use, possess or distribute illegal drugs or software, unless doing so would improve our profitability; We will treat all information relating to Debian's business, or to its clients, as confidential. In particular, 'insider trading' is expressly prohibited and confidential information must not be used for personal gain, unless such personal gain is acceptable to at least two of the persons involved; We will not knowingly create work which contains statements, suggestions or images offensive to general public decency and will give appropriate consideration to the impact of our work on minority segments of the population, whether that minority be by race, religion, national origin, creed, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability or scruples, unless that minority can be safely ignored without damaging our bottom line; We will not for personal or family gain directly or indirectly engage in any activity which competes with companies within the Debian umbrella or with our obligations to any such company; We will not offer any items of personal inducement to secure business. This is not intended to prohibit appropriate entertainment, the making of occasional gifts of minor value, or any monetary contributions transferred through PayPal, unless the client has a policy which restricts this; No corporate contributions of any kind, including the provision of services or materials for less than the market value, may be made to politicians, political parties or action committees, without the prior written approval of the DPL and a clear assessment of the rate of return on the investment; and we will comply with all applicable local laws and regulations, and any other laws with an international reach, such as the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, where relevant; We will disclose fully to the DPL the nature and all relevant details of inducements paid to us by external parties, whether or not such inducements affect our judgments and actions, and we will accord the DPL a percentage of such inducements for use in re-election campaigns or discretionary spending; When we engage in bookmaking, the standard vig should be 10%, and any exceptions should be appealed to the Racketeering Committee, a self-selecting committee with no external oversight; We will not NMU or hijack any packages if the maintainer is refusing to act on said packages as part of a negotiation for inducements; We will not underbid our colleagues in the midst of such negotiations; We will always assume that any inaction or incompetence is due to such negotiations, whether or not that has been disclosed, as it is often the wish of the persons involved to keep such dealings hush-hush; We will spout trite falsehoods such as We are all volunteers here , and At some point you just have to trust people , as a standard business practice; We will avoid sarcasm at all costs.

Anthony Towns: Dunc-Tank announced

After a lot of discussion on -private, and a fair bit more discussion off list, a bunch of Debian developers, including myself, have launched dunc-tank.org. The idea is that we think getting etch out on time is important enough to be worth paying the release managers to work on it full time, so in the free software spirit, we’ve gone ahead and done something about it. We’ve already put up some of our own money, as have some other developers, and if you’d like to join us, there are more details at the website. We’re currently hoping that SPI will agree to accept funds on our behalf, and thus provide a good level of accountability. The board meeting later today will hopefully shed some light on whether that’s feasible. There’s also some information in press release form, and some interesting background detail for people who don’t follow the Debian release process as closely as some of us do. The first article on the topic’s already been published; with one somewhat inaccuracy – this is not a Debian project, and is being specifically handled outside of Debian to both ensure that any conflict of interest that might occur can be decided by Debian in Debian’s favour, and to allow other groups that have different ideas about what priorities are important to encourage contributions to those areas. A question that has been raised is whether the organisation can be sufficiently “outside” of Debian when the DPL is intimately involved. I don’t have the answer to that – in my opinion it can be, but whether this one is will be up to Debian to decide.

Steve McIntyre: Conference in Tenerife

After take#2 at the flight (*grin*) I got here last night. Met by Carlos at the airport in the south of Tenerife, then driven up to Santa Cruz in the north. We met up with a fair-sized group of the locals and went out for pizza. I'm happy to be here; the local people are bending over backwards to include me in conversation, despite my lack of Spanish. They seem to be a really friendly group. Then across to the university at La Laguna this morning. My 90-minute talk about Debian went very well, in front of 40 or so people. I don't normally like public speaking very much, but it helps a lot when I'm talking about something I know very well. People were clearly interested in knowing more about Debian, and asked some good questions at the end. The slides from my talk and some photos will appear on-line at some point when I find a decent net connection. For the rest of my time here, people have suggested a few touristy things to do, and have offered to show me around. My thanks to Ren , Carlos and the others - it's great to be here!

Jos Parrella: BSP Venezuela: Afterparty

Last saturday around 2100 (UTC-0400) some people started joining the #debian-ve IRC channel at OFTC, in order to participate on the very first Venezuelan Bugsquashing Party. We had a lot of people interested not only in squashing but also developing for Debian and other topics. Some DD’s were around, specially An bal Monsalve Salazar (anibal) who has been very helpful on testing and uploading packages. Both me and Jos Luis Rivas (ghostbar) made a couple of NMU’s (in his case, xfe and divine; in mine, sdr and orca), fixing six RC bugs. Jos Luis is like 17 or 18 years old and has proven to be a very energetic Debian collaborator. Other maintainers from Debian Venezuela (actually, we’re eleven persons as of last week) were around but couldn’t make a NMU at the time of the event. Others weren’t even present. It was a very small BSP indeed, but we learned lots of things and hopefully our work will help improving the quality in Debian a little bit. It also settles our desires as a group to improve our knowledge and work together to improve the Project without disrupting the overall ecosystem. By the way, the Venezuelan Debconf is definitely going to happen between October 17th. and 21st. Hopefully we’ll have Benjamin Mako Hill, Enrico Zini, Alvaro Lopez Ortega (OMG! Cherokee!) and Randal Schwartz sharing a nice time with people from all parts of Venezuela and the rest of South America. Some local Debian maintainers will set up some nice workshops and demonstrations, ranging from Xen and LTSP in Debian to QA and the local GNU/Linux distribution projects. This local Debconf is part of a larger event, the World Forum on Free Knowledge, which some people at Debian Venezuela help to make. Returning to the BSP topic, I was looking out at a couple of bugs out there, but I lack the hardware and the experience to handle them. One of this is #333915 and other orca bugs, and other one is #385078 regarding a Debconf script in xserver-xorg. The morning before the BTS I was testing the MBONE tools with a friend of mine, and we were quite unhappy by the fact that sdr was almost unusable (passing the mouse cursor over some buttons resulted in annoying notices). So, if you use sdr, please test the last NMU I sent, which fixes two bugs. Just for reference, the webpage where I keep my Debian-related work is here. The case where I learned most was #386938, regarding xserver’s FTBFS in s390. Events like BSP are a great way to motivate people to participate in the Project: while trying to learn anything about this bug I ended reading documentation from IBM, asking advice from someone with an S/390, sending a couple of emails to debian-s390@lists.d.o, browsing at a DD patch in upstream, looking at buildd logs, searching the Web for opcodes lists… usually trying to explain how all this pieces join in a sane way (most times; well, some times, well, seldomly) is quite difficult for someone who tries to promote Debian, but technical events like the BSP provide a really accurate way to see how things work in and around Debian.

Biella Coleman: First Drug for One Health

There are not many non-profit pharmaceutical organizations. In fact there is only one but now that they have recently announced that India approved a drug, Paromomycin IM Injection, to cure Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL), that they developed, it is more likely there will still be at least one, and perhaps more of these in the future.

Russell Coker: siteminder - what you expect from CA

Recently I've been unfortunate enough to be the sys-admin of some systems running CA software, the specific horror in this case is Siteminder.

The latest excitement was when an important machine stopped working abruptly and gave the error "ff ff ff ff" in the Apache error log. I have been familiar with the error message "ff ff ff" which means that the Siteminder policy server can not be contacted. But it took me a while to discover a message in the policy server logs indicating that a client was connecting to it with an invalid shared secret. It seems that the policy server had suddenly changed it's shared secret for no reason I could determine.

A google search for this issue turned up a single blog entry about it, which reports the "ff ff ff ff" error message as appearing in the case where the "ff ff ff" error occurs on the machines I run. Maybe I'm running a newer version, or maybe drax0r wrote the wrong error message by mistake. My colleagues have seen the error message "ff ff", we are still unsure of what that means.

For people who haven't used Siteminder I'll briefly describe how it works. There is a 2MB Apache module (larger than httpd and all the modules shipped in the RHEL package) that implements the access control and content management (compiled with -g, presumably because it will SEGV if compiled with -O2). This module spawns a daemon from Apache. Unfortunately the daemon code drops the root UID but does not drop the root GID (fun for security), I wrote a patch to the runuser program that can be used to address this by changing GID before running Apache. Then all communication between Apache and the policy server goes via the daemon process via sys-v IPC. Of course if the daemon crashes then the IPC resources are not freed and then it won't restart unless the system is rebooted or the semaphores are manually removed.

18 September 2006

Lars Wirzenius: Debian Inquirer: Debian and Diebold join forces

The Debian Project has chosen Diebold as its official preferred electronic voting provider. This move comes at an opportune moment since the project has several votes coming up. "The double D partnership, as we like to call it, is going to change the shape of the Internet", says O. Fiend, the current Master of Voting of Debian. "We got tired of picking up paper ballots from all over the world, especially since flight security no longer allows locked steel containers handcuffed to the courier's wrist. Sea travel is so damn boring." Diebold is the global leader in the electronic voting market segment. They will bring much needed experience and expertese to Debian's proceedings. "Yep, those guys didn't know anything about cheating until we showed up. Wait, I meant voting", adds the Diebold CEO. Not everyone is happy, though. "Their stuff don't run onna m86k, dat's dumb, I wanna run it on my own-a box", claims Steve Vorlovski, one of the Debian Project's more prominent opposition members. "Stupid cabal, I hate them, hate, hate, hate." says another opposition member who prefers that we not reveal his identity, in fear of retaliation, so we'll just call him #808. The project expects to use the Diebold machines as build daemons when a vote is not going on. "The Debian GNU/Windows port is really lacking in build daemons and porter machines right now", admits Lars Wirzenius. "We don't have any, in fact." The Debian Inquirer joins the crowd congratulating Debian on getting this defect fixed.

Paul van Tilburg: Moved Jabber Server

I finally decided to move the Jabber server of luon.net to a different server. Our main luon.net server was being fairly loaded for weeks because of the business of the S2S component. The transition was a lot easier than I had expected and everyone got to keep his/her JID. Some tips/hints concerning the steps I took: It’s a pity that SRV records aren’t used more these days. But I guess the whole sub-domain and multiplex-by-CNAME stuff came earlier (why doesn’t your website start with ‘www.’?).

1 I thank Google for introducing the gmail.com JIDs <-> talk.google.com server discrepancy so that now all clients can configure the server separately from the JID.

Evan Prodromou: F te de la Vertu CCXIV

It's the Festival of Virtue today in the French Revolutionary Calendar -- the first of the five wp:sansculottides, festival days at the end of the year just before the fall equinox. The day is dedicated to singing the praises of individuals who've shown especially good qualities. I'd probably start off with the great people involved in Wikitravel -- they've been hugely successful at self-organizing and creating an incredible collection of high-quality travel guides. I'm always amazed at the persistence and goodwill of this great group of unselfish and dedicated travellers. Another is the great local local Montreal Burning Man community, putting together Ignition 2006, the regional burn event here in Quebec. There are people coming out of the woodwork to make this a fun campout, and I'm really looking forward to the event next weekend. There's still a lot to do, but I think it's going great. Who else? The thousands of people making and sharing Open Source software and Open Content music, images, and text continue to astound me. When we're in the thick of it, it's hard to remember how generous and giving you have to be to dedicate time and energy to sharing Free Information with the world and with posterity. It is a saintly pursuit and it deserves praise and support. tags:

17 September 2006

Ian Murdock: Fer Sher!

EFF: “Microsoft’s Zune will not play protected Windows Media Audio and Video purchased or ‘rented’ from Napster 2.0, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Unlimited, Movielink, Cinemanow, or any other online media service. That’s right — the media that Microsoft promised would Play For Sure doesn’t even play on Microsoft’s own device…”

Joachim Breitner: Software Freedom Day 2006 in Accra

Yesterday was the international Software Freedom Day, and the Linux Accra User Group, which I just found out about last week, held a small expo in the "India-Ghana Kofi Annan Center for Excellence in Information and Communications Technology". On the program was a keynote speech by the group members, introducing the concept of Free Software, an exhibition of Linux installations and some programs as well as the showing of the first Open Source movie, blender-made movie "Elephants Dream" and its making-of.What I did not expect at such a meeting would be such a Linux guru: Swedish guy, who was an Amiga fan but had to start using PCs in November 1991(!) and looked for an operating systen, heard of Linux and used it since then. For all those newbies as myself: That was when "Linux From Scratch" did not exist, but you had to do it that way anyways, since there were no distributions. He has been living in Ghana vor 10 years now, bound by a family, the warm weather and by a job where he get's paid to do OpenSource development. Envy, anyone? Read more about him on his recently opened blog.
Someone already uploaded his pictures of the event, my pictures will be uploaded in a short while.In other news: At the College in Tema, where I am working at the moment, we agreed on installing Linux on the library computers to let the students have a shot at it, if they want, and after that the enrollment in the regular labs will be discussed. I shall also give an introction lesson to the IT teachers so that they can help a student during class, should he try to use Linux.

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