Anthony Towns will be Debian’s next project leader. I am not happy with that outcome at all. With just a tiny margin, aj has won over Steve. Steve was not my favorite candidate as well, but he’d be better than aj, who in my opinion stands for the cabal that is running Debian from their positions of power for years now. Only 421 DDs have cast their vote, which is 43.3128% of all possible votes. Voter participation has thus been lower than the historic low Germany’s state Sachsen-Anhalt recently had in its Landtag election. More than half of the DDs do not seem to be interested in who makes Debian’s external policy and who represents the project to the outside. On the other hand, debian-vote sees a number of people who are not currently allowed to vote, but regularly contribute to Debian. It looks like the people who could vote don’t, while people who do good things to Debian are not allowed to vote. Bad. But, IMNSHO, the really bad thing is the new DPL itself. I think he has won the election with saying that he will increase Debian’s speed. On the other hand, he is member of ftpmaster, the team that might be one of the biggest causes for Debian’s slow speed. He is generally regarded to be close to the “Cabal”, which of course does not exist. I don’t see how the speed increase is can be accomplished giving this background. However, the vote can easily be interpreted as a vote of confidence in the Cabal, which in itself is a good thing. It shows that even the voting DD’s are comfortable to be ruled by the secret club of most senior DDs. I don’t have to like it, but I’ll have to live with it. aj is also one of the founders of #debian-tech, an IRC channel which has been created as a “nice” channel for technical discussions. The channel has a very strict code of conduct, and people are being removed from the channel if they do not comply. I am really really really afraid of this “be nice or else” attitude being extended to other Debian communications media during aj’s term. Being robbed of the right to speak one’s mind might adversely affect many people’s motivation to spend time with Debian in the future. In a nutshell: This is a sad day for Debian. But, otoh, every project gets the leadership it deserves. And it looks like Debian didn’t deserve any of the better candidates. jftr, I voted 63571824 Be warned: I have a bad history of mis-judging new DPLs just after their election. A year ago, I was quite happy about Branden being elected, and was convinced that things would change during his first term of DPLship. I really believed that he could remove the Cabal from the power, and that Debian would change to a more co-operative environment. I surely hope that I am as wrong this time as I was a year ago. It’ll be more positive this time.

My notebook’s DHCP setup seems to be a challenge for DHCP servers around the world. Looks like almost no server implements the standard in a decently complete way. My notebook has a wired Fast Ethernet, and a wireless 802.11bg network interface. Of course, both interfaces have their own MAC address. I want the thing to work at least at home, regardless of whether wired or wireless is in use, with preferably the same static IP address, and on the office wired network, again, with the static IP address allocated to me there. Configuring this is considerably harder than I expected. At home, I am using a Linksys WRT54G router with OpenWRT, which has dnsmasq as DHCP server. Unfortunately, dnsmasq does not support the case where multiple MAC addresses are statically assigned to the same IP address: Only the first dhcp-host statement in the configuration file is honored, all others are ignored. So we need to resort to using a dhcp client-identifier. In DHCP request option number 61, the client can send an identifier, which the Server can then use to determine the client’s identity and assign a static IP address. The client identifier, according to RFC2132, is to be treated as an opaque string by the DHCP server. This works fine with dnsmasq, solving the issue at home. But it causes more grief in the office network. My office is the kind of place where a non-Microsoft solution is rarely considered. Thus, our network is fully buzzword compliant and the network infrastructure, including DNS and DHCP servers, is based on Windows Server System. I am the only one using a non-MS operating system in my work environment. When I plugged my notebook into the network this morning, I noticed that I didn’t receive my static IP address but a different one from the dynamic pool. After verifying that the Windows guys didn’t touch the DHCP server in the last days, I began to think what I changed locally and naturally remembered configuring the DHCP client identifier. Removed it for testing, got my normal static IP address, so the client identifier was quickly pinned down as the culprit. After my Windows colleagues decided that it must be a client issue, I began investigating how to configure the Windows DHCP server to honor a client identifier. MS Knowledge Base article #172408, “Custom DHCP Client Identifiers for Windows NT”, is a high hit on Google, but is like three years old and shows that somebody at MS has badly misunderstood the DHCP standard - they think that the Client Identifier is a 4 byte number in little endian order. I couldn’t believe that and investigated further. But it looks like the Windows DHCP server really cannot handle free-form client identifiers at all. I tried coding my free-form identifier in ASCII and entering it as MAC address, big endian, little endian, to no avail. So, I have come to the conclusion that MS has - again - only partly implemented a very important protocol for their network software. “Embrace and extend”, my <censored>, DHCP wasn’t extended at all. Looks like they stopped developing after the first developer box had successfully received an IP address, and shipped the resulting code. Woah. If somebody can tell me how to configure the Windows DHCP server to properly handle a free-form string DHCP client identfier, I’ll be most graceful for that information. I finally resorted to setting the DHCP client identifier of my notebook to the MAC address of the wired ethernet interface, which has at least brought my static IP address at the office back. I hope that the dnsmasq at home will successfully grok this or I am - again - back to square one. All software sucks

DCG mentioned on Linux.com A friend of mine pointed me to the Debian Community Guidelines being mentioned in a linux.com article. "[Mako] hopes that Garrett's resignation will give the Debian community an added impetus to adapt its own code of conduct, like the one proposed by Enrico Zini." I'm very happy to see the DCG geting mentioned, although I don't think that it makes sense to 'adopt' such a document. what I'd like for it is to be mentioned as a suggested read, and linked from here and there. So today it happened, and I'm happy :)

I'm glad people have reacted in a largely positive manner to the steering committee idea. It's not really original, but I'm perfectly happy with stealing ideas from other people. I'm going to clarify a few basic ideas here and then address criticism.

The biggest difference between Debian and someone like Canonical or Redhat is that we don't pay employees to do things. We could go that route, but a defining feature of Debian is that it has a bottom-up structure, rather than top-down. I think this makes us unique and we need to do our best to preserve it. I imagine the steering committee to be an extension of this model.

First, the committee would be not be elected by the developers, but would instead be delegated by the DPL. Developers could challenge this delegation in the same manner as any DPL decision. The committee would be very similar to the technical committee in terms of size.

Second, its scope of power would be similar in that it would only relate to the distribution itself, rather than the way the Debian project itself was organized. Its powers would be limited to approving specific improvements within the distribution. These improvements would have to be submitted for approval by the committee, preferably in some sort of specification format similar to the one Ubuntu uses. The committee would then vote on the issue (most likely following the same rules as the technical committee). If they approve it, anyone is free to work on that specific improvement even if it touches on packages they don't maintain. This allows motivated developers to freely work on cross-distro improvements without worry. The committee would ideally be relatively quick to reply to submitted proposals, allowing fairly rapid developments to occur (to facilitate this, proposals must be well thought out).

Further, like the release team, the steering committee would also be responsible for actively working on goals that are set. This would ensure that something actually does get done. These features would give us a group with a limited scope of powers to implement large-scale improvements to the distribution without forcing anyone to do work they don't want to do. In addition, motivated people would have the authority to make large-scale improvements (like consistent theming for example) across many packages they don't maintain. People working on these improvements would be expected to try and cooperate with the normal maintainers as well as possible, so as to prevent problems. Maintainers who have issues can appeal to the technical committee, whose role would remain reactive to solve conflicts as they arise.

Ok, now for the critique from ij, which is a good one. I think the problem with what you suggest is that the DPL simply isn't going to be capable of acting like a good dictator without working full time on Debian for several years. The job is just too big. Allowing them to remain DPL for more than a year is something I don't think many DPL's would opt for anyway, it's just too draining.

The other existing structure is the technical committee, which is a better candidate for taking on this sort of role. The key to the tech-ctte though is that its job is to handle technical disputes. We could expand its role to allow it to set policies and direction, but then who do you appeal to if you don't agree with them? The developer body can override the tech-ctte (with a 2:1 majority) but that adds additional democratic overhead. GR's are draining, and providing another layer for technical decision making allows us to avoid them. Further, I'd like the steering committee and tech committee to have different modes of working. I imagine the steering committee to be more agile, taking a leading role in setting out a vision for the mass of developers to follow and take inspiration from. The tech committee, on the other hand, should be more defensive, carefully deciding on the most difficult issues. Basically the steering committee will looking towards the future, the tech committee will be looking towards the present.

Hard to believe it's been more than a week since I posted on my blog. It's been a fun-filled week; Maj, Amita June and I took a cruise of the Baltic Sea. It was everyone's first cruise, as well as our first time in the area, so we did a lot of travelling -- hitting wt:Lubeck, wt:Visby, wt:Stockholm, wt:Tallinn and wt:Saint Petersburg during the week. Unfortunately, our onboard Internet connection was neither easy to use, reliable, nor cheap, and our time on land was too short (about 8-10 hours per city) to waste in Internet caf s. I did manage to get wireless in Tallinn, which famously has free municipal WiFi, but otherwise I was stuck with exorbitant satellite-feed access on board our ship. Most of my time online was making sure that Wikitravel wasn't crashed while we were at sea. (It's my constant fear -- as soon as I get out of range of easy Internet access, I'm sure that either the servers have gone kaput or there's an exploitable bug in the software. Either way, I'm pretty nervous on most trips. Kind of ironic, in a way.) Suffice it to say that it was really a worthwhile, good time for us. We're back in wt:Copenhagen today. I'm trying to catch up with a couple of Debian developers and NM candidates to exchange wp:OpenPGP key signatures, and trying to plan our scant 23 hours in wt:Zurich starting tomorrow. tags: cruise baltic wifi debian blogs

Blogue My friend Nicolas Ritoux, an Internet and games journalist in wt:Montreal, has a new blog at http://www.vulusu.ca/ . Vu, lu, su means "seen, read, known" in French, and I think it makes a lot of sense for the name of his blogue. He's got a near-comprehensive view of Internet and video gaming culture, and I think that this blog will be a nice addition to his weekly columns in La Presse. tags: niko vulusu blogs

To keep non-Debian-related articles from showing up on Planet Debian, my blog used to have a Debian-English category which was subscribed to Planet Debian. This also meant that only English-Language, and Debian-related articles showed up there which made my kind of an irregular contributor. I’m going to change this. Recent Serendipity have the possibility to free-tag articles and generate RSS-Feeds for these tags. After using tags for a few weeks, I am now reasonably comfortable to put them to real use. A new tag planet-debian will be generated and subscribed to Planet Debian. And then I’m going to tag articles that I decide to put up to Planet Debian with this tag. To avoid old articles from showing up again, I’ll refrain from tagging them planet-debian. This also means that the “Debian-English” category is going to disappear and to be replaced by “Debian” (or even other categories). An additional tag “english” is going to appear on english language articles. So you can now choose whether you want to read only my english articles. btw, what’s the stance of Planet Debian about non-Debian articles and/or native language (in my case: German) on the Planet?

On a closed mailing list someone wrote:<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">2 X 120gb ide drives installed as slaves on each ide channels. ... Presto. A 230'ish GB storage NAS for all my junk.</span><br /><br />I'm not going to write a long technical response on a closed list so I'll blog about it instead.<br /><br />Firstly I wonder whether by "junk" the poster means stuff that is not important and which won't be missed if it goes away.<br /><br />If P is the probability of a drive not dying in a given time period (as a number between 1 being certain death and 0 an immortal drive) then the probability of serious data loss is P^2 for the configuration in question.<br /><br />If P has a value of 0.5 over the period of 7 years (approximately what I'm seeing in production for IDE drives) then your probability of not losing data over that period is 0.25, IE there's a 75% chance that at least one of the drives will die and data will be lost.<br /><br />If the data in question really isn't that important then this might be OK. About half the data on my file server consists of ISO images of Linux distributions and other things which aren't of particularly great value as I can download them again at any time. Of course it would be a major PITA if a client had a problem with an old distribution and I had to wait for a 3G download to finish before fixing it, this factor alone makes it worth my effort in using RAID and backups for such relatively unimportant data. 300G IDE and S-ATA disks aren't that expensive nowadays, if buying a pair of bigger disks saves you one data loss incident and your time has any value greater than $10 per hour then you are probably going to win by buying disks for RAID-1.<br /><br />As another approach, LVM apparently has built-in functionality equivalent to RAID-1. One thing I have idly considered is using ATA over Ethernet with LVM or GFS to build some old P3 machines into a storage solution.<br /><br />P3 machines use <a href="http://www.coker.com.au/energy/computer-power.html">38W of power</a> each (with one disk, maybe as much as 70W with 4 disks but I haven't checked) and should have the potential to perform well if they each have 4 IDE disks installed. That way a large number of small disks could combine to give a decent capacity with data mirroring. Among other things having more spindles decreases seek times when under heavy load. If you do work that involves large numbers of seeks then this could deliver significant performance benefits. If I had more spare time I would do some research on this, it would probably make for a good paper at a Linux conference.

As the person who has, rightly or wrongly, effectively been the one who ended up forcing the decision about what MTA and desktop are the default in Debian, I really like Gravity's idea of a Debian steering committee. I've never felt comfortable making these kind of decisions on my own, and using debian-devel to try to make a legitimate decision (as was done with the MTA and attempted(?) with the default vi) has been a PITA. (I was actually going to rant about this exact thing during my lightning talk @ DebConf, but felt too mellow that day for the rant.) FWIW, I'm not suprised to see Ubuntu people leaving Debian. I've been working to fix many large (technical) issues in the project since I joined it, and I feel like I have, but it's hardly been easy. And while I feel that this means that only the good ideas have survived to be implemented, driving a big change in Debian is still very hard, and so I'm not suprised to see people associated with a distribution that makes change easier feeling happier working on it. But, this pressure for Ubuntu to diverge from Debian makes the chances of merging back many changes seem even more slim, and makes me wonder when it will turn into a total fork. Which concerns I've probably talked about enough before.

More and more early adopters choose to use Ubuntu instead of Debian. Ubuntu has newer versions of the software that matters (XOrg, FF, OOO, Gnome,…) than the stable Debian or, sometimes than even the unstable Debian. Early adopters are the users that are most eager to try new shiny things, do not scream too much if those things break and seem to make good bug reporters. They are the key second level - just below the developers and above most users in the pyramid of software development and use. They are also the people that have a tendency to become developers. That is why I have this feeling that capturing early adopters is essential to development of a thriving free software community. How can that be done? I do not know, but I have an idea that might just work. What I envision is a merger of development processes of Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, Skolelinux and all other Debian derrived distributions. The base for this merger would be an eternal unstable line where all developers would be encouraged to put the newest and greatest software - THE place to be if you want to be on the bleeding edge. I see this unstable line being much newer then Debian unstable, but retaining similar level of quality (how? it is a good question). Then there would be a set of tools available to splice packages from this unstable line into a stabilisation and stable branches for each distribution. The tools would be the same for all distributions and the packages would be the same for all distributions, the difference between distributions would be achieved by the way that the packages and their specific versions are chosen, patches applied for a particular distribution and in some ways by the assembly of the final release media. The proper Debian releases in this context would be no different then Ubuntu releases but will be created using different criteria and at different times. The tools must be powerful enough so that release preparations of any distribution (including Debian proper) would not need to slow down the progress of the flow of new features into the eternal unstable line. The infrastructure needed to operate such complex system would be immense. It would need to have some similarities to the systems Debian uses for distribution, release and bug management, it would need to have some similarities to Ubuntu’s Launchpad (just free, understandable, usable and well documented), and I think that it would also need to have some similarities to Gentoo’s Portage system (distros do want to recompile packages with different options and with their own library versions). It would also help if this unstable line could still hold few parallel versions of one package - like the latest release and the cvs version. (However I am pressed to even imagine all the complexities this would bring into apt and bug reporting/debugging.) I think that such structure will not only concentrate the scarce resource that are the early adopters in a place that will benefit all distributions, but will also provide extra dimensionality for social and technical growth for The Debian Project. The Debian Project will turn from a single great distribution to a swarm of wonderful distributions with a strong central spine - the eternal unstable line. An additional benefit to this will be that it will be possible to fork Debian if social pressures require that (like it happened with gcc vs. eggc) for the benefit of all free software users. Like, for example, the David’s steering commitee whould not disturb the Debian main line until it has been proven to work - it could be formed, it could set goals for a branch and feel in total control of their release goals and methods. After the steering commitee makes a successful release, it would be only a matter of a political decision of whether to call that release Debian proper or not. Note: As always this is just an uniformed rant of a relatively passive DD who is blissfully ignorant of pretty much everything, so please tell me if and why it can or can not be done. P.S. While I am in such writelly mood, I should probably write that free software advocacy article for a new journal that I promised them a month ago. P.P.S. If the system is written with it in mind, then each user’s computer could theoretically be a separate distribution which keeps a splice of Debian unstable line (or any subline) with local modifications and possible local compilation options. If done right, this could also provide a ground for merging up with Gentoo. P.P.P.S. After reading trough logs of several bugs on the Launchpad, I have a feeling that Ubuntu is being flooded by much more bugreports then Cannonical is designed to handle (especially for free). I am not pointing fingers here, I am just suggesting that it is another facet of the same problem and that this idea of mine could reduce this load and let Ubuntu developers concentrate on what they really want to do.

If you have a hard drive with two or more logical partitions in one extended partition and then proceed to erase the first of those logical partitions (in GParted), then you will soon discover that the number of the second logical partition changed (from sda6 to sda5 in my case). If you then try to create a partition in the free space and launch cfdisk, you will notice that there is no free space where it should have been. If you then manage to get to GParted and create a partition there, then do not relax, as your perils are not yet over. Upon reboot you will find that the logical partition that is in the beginning of the logical partition got a new number (sda7 in my case) and the your valuable second logical partition is still numbered wrongly (it was sda5 instead of expected sda6). Even more so, if you try to fix it with cfdisk, it bails out with a fatal error of overlapping extended partitions. The fix is to start fstab, press “x” for advanced operations and press “f” to reorder the partitions according to the order on disk (do not forget to enter “w” to write the changes). That fixed the problem. But I have no idea who to bug for this wonderful Mongolian Clusterf*ck of Partition Numbering. And that is only a tiny preview of the immense fun I am having right now by trying out installations of Debian etch and Ubuntu edgy on my Dell M1710. If you want a stable desktop on this computer right now - use Ubuntu Dapper (with nvidia binary drivers). You will have much unneeded fun with IPW3945 wifi and the NVidia video card drivers otherwise.

GTetrinet 0.7.10 is out. This release fixes a security hole (CVE-2006-3125), so you're advised to update ASAP. The last release was assembled during UbuntuDownUnder, back in April 2005, which is a good indication about GTetrinet's development health. If you're interested in writing new features or fixing the many bugs in GTetrinet, please consider joining the mailing list. GTetrinet really needs your help! Debian binaries are on the way to unstable; Ubuntu will hopefully suck them up soonish. Get the hot tarball from the GNOME FTP mirrors.

Russell, I believe that the way of teh Phuture will be that cars are for short distances only. Essentially, what the world needs to solve both the energy and the traffic problems are standard containers that you can transport with an electrical car, or hand off to the local tube system for transport. At the supermarket, you'd put your stuff into such a container, take the tube home, and your stuff would be waiting for you there. You'd get one of the little antigravity transporters (or a car, if antigravity has not been invented yet), let the robot at the station put the container into it, drive home, unpack your stuff, mark the car as being free, and be done. As the maximum distance a car has to travel is pretty small, it doesn't need a vast energy storage, since cars would not be personalised, you'd simply leave one that ran out of energy, hook it up to one of the ubiquitous power stations and take another one. The idea behind this is to eliminate the advantages cars have over public transport.

Yesterday, I uploaded Firefox 2.0b2 in experimental. Please give it a try and checkout if some of the bugs in firefox are fixed by this new release. Same kind of help welcome with the version in unstable. When the bug count is more than 200, it gets painful to do bug triage, so any help on that matter will be very much appreciated by Eric and I. In other news, work has started on seamonkey. Unfortunately, I’ll be away for a little while, so I’ll have to leave quite an amount of the work to Alexander Sack, but I’m pretty sure he’ll be able to handle it. Anyways, we hope to be able to work out a full featured package for etch so that people using mozilla on sarge will get a correct upgrade path. I also uploaded yesterday a new xulrunner release that (finally) provides some of the NSS tools, so that administrators can handle keys/certificates databases for mozilla products. It is still in NEW, but should reach unstable soonish (let’s just hope the ftp-masters won’t reject the new package).

Labor day weekend approacheth, and myself and ceilingsarecool have secured a little getaway for ourselves. It is proving to be a nice way to relax a while before a big rush of work. I have been in all true form not updating the blog lately, so I get to give everyone a big update all at once.

The iBook problems which I mentioned in the last blog entry proved to be fatal to the machine, so I went out and bought a shiny new MacBook to replace it. Given the pricing behind most of the small laptops and the experience that I had with my iBook, I was happy with my decision. I plan to add ram (Apple's ram is so expensive) and replace the hard drive (also cheaper elsewhere) sometime before the end of the year. After I bought the new book, looking through my old receipts I discovered that my iBook is still under AppleCare so I took it in to get it fixed. The Genius Bar at the MOA store was very busy today so we had to walk around the mall and then wait for ages still. However, we successfully got the thing to freeze twice in the presence of a MacGenius(tm) so it is now off to the magic depot in the sky for fixing before I sell it used to someone. It is a nice machine and works great other than the freezing which will be fixed, and I was informed by the MacGenius(tm) that the AppleCare travels with the machine, so if it breaks in the next 8 months or so the buyer can get it fixed for free.

Honeywell this week was pretty hectic and non-normal. There was a deadline which required the working of an application I hadn't planned on having working until the end of the week, so I had to work Monday and Tuesday, putting in 20 hours before mid-week. This made it slightly hard to get anything else done, but still not bad because it means I have a little leeway for next week. The good news is that we got it done, and the even better news is that it's possible to focus on other things which I have more experience in there now.

After the weekend (which I'm sure we'll have pictures from) is the start of the new school year. This means that my schedule is being impacted a lot, and I will need to get used to classes again. With any luck, this semester will be the last time I ever take classes in grad school. I also need to start a paper next week which is due on the 14th, so it's a little tight on the scheduling end. Hopefully I will be able to pull it off, because the conference is in Italy next year and ceilingsarecool has a keen interest in going with me.

But for now, I get a little R&R time before rejoining previously scheduled overwhelming work, already in progress.

• One Year Ago: "The new place is great - even with all of the boxes it's better than the old apartment"
• ~Two Years Ago: "THEN DON'T TAKE IT ASSHOLE. IT'S NOT YOURS."

Following about a month of irregular activity, I just uploaded three source packages (along with related binary packages, of course) to Debian unstable: gforge (4.5.14-9), gforge-plugin-scmcvs (4.5.14-3), and gforge-plugin-scmsvn (4.5.14-2). I hope unstable will give them more exposure than experimental did. Plans for the future: I ll focus on getting these packages into testing, without too many changes if possible. I haven t managed to get dbconfig-common to work reliably (or at all) with PostgreSQL so far, so I ll consider the migration to its infrastructure as a nice option, but not a blocker. The problem is that it would make the install scripts simpler and (hopefully) more reliable if it worked. Again, help would be very much appreciated. (And yes, I will be submitting bug reports when I get some time to do some more thorough testing of dbconfig-common.)

I’m writing this in Windows Live Writer. It’s pretty incredible—setup was easy, and there’s a mode for editing the entry such that it looks exactly as it will look after it’s posted (i.e., with the right font, layout, etc.), though without all the page adornments (header graphic, sidebars, etc.). There is a preview mode for that though—if you could edit in the preview mode, now that would be incredible (better still, if you could edit the page directly, inline, presuming you had the appropriate credentials—a truly writable web!). It’s too bad this is Windows only—I have a Windows box in my office, but it’s a desktop machine, so I don’t have it when I travel (I wonder if it will run under Wine?). I’d also love to see this integrated with Firefox, something like Performancing, where you can select some text, then right click “Blog This”. There is an IE toolbar, but that doesn’t help me. In addition to being a nice tool, this does give a glimpse into Microsoft’s strategy for the web: Desktop/thick client apps as an extension to web/thin client apps, providing all the advantages of web apps but better UI, better performance, and offline support. So far, I like what I see.

linux.conf.au will be held from 15 - 20 January 2007 in Sydney, Australia.

Hopefully, Bruno and I will be given the opportunity to share with others our experience with upstream/downstream maintenance of Mondo Rescue. The presentation we have submitted about this is called "Mondo Rescue & Debian - an Example for Upstream/Downstream Collaboration".

It would be positively fabulous to actively participate in the conference and to be surrounded by people that share the same interest in FOSS. And meeting Bruno in person would be cool, too - after all, we've worked quite closely together for a year now without even speaking to each other. Maybe we'd even get some hacking done! ;-)

I am excited!

Under EEST timezone (GMT+3) I am officially 100000 years old. And Lars is +101, so Lars, have a nice birthday. For a long time i have avoided celebrating it, but this year i have one more reason to follow the trend. So here it goes the long overdue personal post about my life. She is gone. Or so I feel. Today it will be the first time in 6 years and almost 9 months that she is not preparing a surprise for me. I always told her i did not want anything, but she always managed to prepare something: 26 roses and a cheese party (Jesus loves cheeses), a night at an Irish pub with most of my friends, a visit to Tampere’s amussement park, a dinner at a nice Italian restaurant or a concert with Kemopetrol and Giant Robot. So today, 1st of September 2006, my birthday, she, my best friend and my girlfriend during the last almost-seven years, is moving her stuff out. The apartment will be full of emptiness and empty of her. Dato is crying of happiness. I cry of sadness. One goes up, another goes down.

Well John Howard said he wanted to start a nuclear debate in Australia. Seems it has already started on Planet Linux Australia. I figure I might as well have a meandering blog post about alternative energy and current world events, since I've just been immersing myself in the best news I can obtain with my crappy cable package in a country not renowned for its awareness of world affairs. Firstly, since there's been talk about nuclear power, I'd like to offer my thoughts on Iran, and how it's sounding like Iraq all over again. People are getting in a flap about Iran enriching uranium. Iran says that they don't want "the bomb", they only want nuclear power to meet their energy demands. Now if this is true, then surely should applaud a country that sits on a chunk of the Middle East's oil reserves looking to use something other than oil for its energy needs. I for one don't know if you need to "enrich" uranium to use it for a nuclear reactor, or whether it's good enough "as is". But let's just assume that Iran's intentions are as they have said, then it's going to be Iraq all over again. The US said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The US is saying Iran is enriching uranium for the purposes of making a bomb. So far the former claim hasn't been proven, so what's to say the latter is true either? Let's say the nuclear debate in Australia determines that it'd be a good a thing for Australia to go nuclear. How is Australia enriching uranium for electricity generation any different to Iran doing it? (Other than Australia is in the Coalition of the Willing, and Iran is in the Axis of Evil). Speaking of Iran being in the Axis of Evil, how is Iran supplying weapons to Hezbollah fundamentally any different to the US supplying weapons to Israel? Oh, and is anyone allowed to criticise Jewish people without being called anti-Semitic? Since when is invading a neighbouring country considered okay? I am so glad Australia is an island nation. These countries with land borders, sheesh... Anyway, back to alternative energy. I'm a greenie, (with a lowercase "g") so I'm open to nuclear power, but it does frighten the willies out of me, with things like Chernobyl. I'd never heard of a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor until Paul wrote of it. It certainly sounds safer than previous methods of nuclear reaction. But of alternatives. Wind, for example, doesn't need to be big and arguably ugly. These guys in the UK have made a very sexy and quiet wind turbine. I don't know how it stacks up in terms of cost or output to the traditional three-bladed wind turbines like what I've photographed in Southern California, but they're supposed to be quiet, which is apparently one of the (many) arguments that landowners like farmers have against wind generation in general. This Australian company has come up with a very small, but less sexy wind turbine, that I believe to be fairly cheap. Finally, in terms of generation, and I've written about this before, but I find the Tower of Power to be a fascinating concept in natural energy generation. Where am I going with this ramble? No idea. I do think rapidly developing countries like China should completely leapfrog over the era of oil and move to renewably generated electricity. Maybe they can get the manufacturing costs down of the equipment, and it'll be less of a big deal in terms of cost for the rest of the world to adopt it. Whew. What a ramble. Don't start me on flushing toilets with drinking water.

Today I reached another milestone in the development of upstart, the packages in universe can now replace the existing sysvinit package. Before trying this, make sure your installation is up to date as we’ve had to split out some parts of sysvinit into a new sysvutils package. If you’re up to date, and want to try it out, install the upstart and upstart-compat-sysv packages from universe. Note that the first reboot after you’ve installed the packages (from sysvinit to upstart) will be a little tricky… use reboot -f. If your system boots and shuts down normally, everything’s working just fine. Note that both will be somewhat more quiet than you’re used to, unless you have usplash running. Throughout the rest of this entry, I’ll try to answer some of the questions and comments that I’ve received since the last post. Events As I talked about previously, upstart is an event-based init daemon. Events are the primary force for having your services and tasks started and stopped at the appropriate time and in the appropriate order. So what are events and where do they come from? (Note that this part is under development, so may change in later releases). Events are just simple strings that may be sent by any process when something it is tracking the state of changes. They have no state or longevity, and if, when queued, they do not cause any job state changes, then they have no effect unless they are sent again. Jobs can list which events cause them to be started if they are not already running and which events cause them to be stopped if they are running. Multiple start and stop events may be listed, in which case the first to occur changes the job until the next one occurs. upstart itself generates the following system events:

• “startup”, on system boot.
• “shutdown”, when the system is about to be shut down.
• “stalled”, when there are no jobs running and no events in the queue.

The shutdown tool included in the package also causes one of the following events to be sent once the “shutdown” event has been handled:

• “reboot”,
• “halt”,
• “poweroff”,
• “maintenance” (aka. going into “single user” mode),
• any user-defined event with shutdown -e event.

Jobs also generate events whenever they change state, this is the primary source of events for ordering:

• “jobname/start”, when the job is first started.
• “jobname/started”, once the job is running.
• “jobname/stop”, when the job is first stopped.
• “jobname/stopped”, once the job has stopped.
• “jobname”, for services this is generated once it is running; for tasks this is generated once it has finished.

And as mentioned, any other process on the system may send events through the control socket or just by using initctl trigger EVENT. For now this is just the event string, however it’s intended that the event may include other details including environment variables and even file descriptors. Typical example To clarify how it all hangs together, here’s an example (using fictional names) of how the tasks and events can be arranged to provide race-free mounting of filesystems.

• “udev” service started on the “startup” event.
• udev daemon is configured to send a “new-block-device” event whenever a new block device is added to the system.
• “checkfs” task is started on the “new-block-device” event to check the filesystem.
• “mountfs” task is started when the “checkfs” task has finished and mounts the filesystem if listed in /etc/fstab
• “filesystem-mounted” event is generated whenever a filesystem is mounted.
• “fstab” task is started on the “filesystem-mounted” event, it checks the list of mounted filesystems against /etc/fstab and if all are mounted, generates the “writable-filesystem” event.
• other services and tasks would be started on the “writable-filesystem” event.

By breaking this job into these small tasks, we can see how the pieces fit together. Because everything is now done on events, there are no race conditions; we know that any filesystem listed in /etc/fstab will be checked and mounted. The only reason they wouldn’t be is if there’s an error of some kind, and that means you have larger problems anyway and the system administrator would have a shell to fix it. Of course, the moment they finish checking the filesystem and mount it, the boot process would carry on. There’s no reason that any of these events need to be generated by the upstart daemon itself, it can receive them from any other daemon on the system such as udev, acpid, etc. This keeps the focus of the init daemon narrow. A large part of the future development will be working out exactly what kinds of events we want init itself to generate, what kinds we want to come from elsewhere, and what the contents of an event can be. Getting Involved If you want to get involved with trying to nudge the direction of upstart development, you can join the upstart-devel mailing list at http://lists.netsplit.com/ Or if you just want to grab the source code, tarballs are published at http://people.ubuntu.com/~scott/software/upstart/ and the bzr archive is at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~keybuk/upstart/main