Search Results: "will"

SSH To enable remote logins with ssh:

apt-get install openssh-server

Then you can login with:

$ ssh efossnet@proxy.dream.edu.et

To verify the host key fingerprint of a machine:

$ ssh-keygen -l -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub

Note: you need to verify it before logging in! More information at http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1806 Example ssh usages:

To log in:
$ ssh efossnet@proxy
To run a command in the remote computer:
$ ssh efossnet@proxy "cat /etc/hosts"
To copy a file to the remote computer:
$ scp Desktop/july-18.tar.gz efossnet@proxy:
To copy a file from the remote computer:
$ scp efossnet@proxy:july-18.tar.gz /tmp/

Warning about SSH: there are people who run automated scans for ssh servers and try to login using commonly used easy passwords. If you have an SSH server on the network, use strong passwords, or if you can it's even better to disable password authentication: in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, add:

PasswordAuthentication no

To log in using public/private keys:

Create your key:
ssh-keygen -t rsa
Copy your public key to the machine where you want to log in:
ssh-copy-id -i .ssh/id_rsa.pub efossnet@proxy
Now you can ssh using your RSA key

If you use ssh often, read these:

http://mah.everybody.org/docs/ssh

http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1812

http://www.sshkeychain.org/mirrors/SSH-with-Keys-HOWTO/SSH-with-Keys-HOWTO-6.html

proxy Problems we had today with the proxy:

ssl does not work. Reason: squid tries to directly connect to the ssl server, but the AAU network wants us to go through their proxy. Ideal solution: none. There is no way to tell squid to use a parent proxy for SSL connections. Solution: update the documentation for the Dream university users telling to setup a different proxy for SSL connections. Longer term solution: get the AAU network admins to enable outgoing SSL connections from the Dream university proxy. Other things that can be done:

report a bug on squid reporting the need and requesting the feature

download squid source code and implement the feature ourselves, then submit the patch to the squid people
Browsing normal pages returns an error of 'Connection refused'. In the logs, the line is:
1153294204.912    887 192.168.0.200 TCP_MISS/503 1441 GET http://www.google.com.et/search? - NONE/- text/html
That "/503" is one of the HTTP error codes. Explanation of the error codes:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/HTRESP.html

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

http://offline.web.cern.ch/offline/web/http_error_codes.html

Reason: the other proxy is refusing connections from our proxy. Solution: none so far. Will need to get in touch with the admins of the other proxy to try to find out why it refuses connection to our proxy, and how we can fix the problem.

postfix on smtp.dream.edu.et http://www.postfix.org/basic.html Difference between mail name and smarthost:

The mail name is the name of the mail server you're setting up (TODO: need more details on what's it used for)

The smarthost is the name of the mail server that will relay mail for you.

Quick way to send test mails:

apt-get install mailx
echo ciao   mail efossnet@localhost

To configure a workstation not to do any mail delivery locally and send all mail produced locally to smtp.dream.edu.et:

install postfix choosing "Satellite system"

put smtp.dream.edu.et as a smarthost.

To setup a webmail: apt-get install squirrelmail (on a working apache setup). To setup mailing lists: apt-get install mailman, then follow the instructions in /usr/share/doc. Mail server issues we encountered:

When a mail is sent to efossnet@localhost, the system tries to send it to efossnet@yoseph.org

Investigation:

"yoseph.org" does not appear anywhere in /etc or /var/spool/postfix

postfix configuration has been reloaded

postfix logs show that the mail has been 'forwarded'

Cause: the user efossnet had forgotten that he or she had setup a .forward file in the home directory. Solution:
rm ~efossnet/.forward

Apache To add a new website:

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available

sudo cp default course
sudo vi course:
Remove the first line
Add a ServerName directive with the address of your server:
ServerName course.dream.edu.et
Customize the rest as needed: you at least want to remove the support for browsing /usr/share/doc and you want to use a different document root.
sudo a2ensite course

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

More VIM Undo: u (in command mode) Redo: ^R (in command mode) You can undo and redo multiple times.

To recover a lost password for root or for the ubuntu admin user Boot with a live CD, mount the system on the hard disk (the live CD usually does it automatically), then edit the file /etc/shadow, removing the password:

enrico:$1$3AJfasjJFHa234dfh230:13343:0:99999:7:::

becomes:

enrico::13343:0:99999:7:::

You can edit the file because, in the live CD system, you can always become root. After you do this, reboot the system: you can log in without password, and set yourself a new password using the command passwd.

Installing packages not on the CDs To get a package for installing when offline:

apt-get --print-uris install dnsmasq

Manually download the packages at the URLs that it gives you

Otherwise, apt-get --download-only install dnsmasq will download the package for you in /var/cache/apt/archives. You can install various previously downloaded debian packages with:

dpkg -i *.deb

Backups There are various ways:

dump (for ext2/ext3 file systems) or xfsdump (for xfs file systems). Makes a low-level dump of the file system. It must be used for every different partition. It makes the most exact backup possible, including inode numbers. It can do full and incremental backups. To see the type of the filesystems, use 'mount' with no parameters. To restore: restore or xfsrestore.
tar Filesystem independent. It can work accross partitions. It correctly backups permissions and hard links. It can do full and incremental backups. Example:
tar lzcpf backup.tar.gz /home /var /etc /usr/local
tar lzcpf root.tar.gz /
To restore:
tar zxpf backup.tar.gz
faubackup Filesystem independent. Uses hard drive as backup storage. Always incremental. It cannot do compression. Unchanged files in new backups are just links to old backups, and do not occupy space. Any old backup can be deleted at any time without compromising the others. It can be used to provided a "yesterday's files" service to users (both locally and exported as a read-only samba share...). To restore, just copy the files from the backup area.

amanda apt-get install amanda-client amanda-server It is a network backup system. It can do full and incremental backups. You can have a backup server which handles the storage and various backup clients that send the files to backup to the server. It takes some studying to set up. To restore: it has its own tool.

Some data requires exporting before backing it up:

To save the list of installed packages and the answer to configuration questions:
dpkg --get-selections > pkglist
debconf-get-selections > pkgconfig
To restore:
dpkg --set-selections < list
debconf-set-selections < pkgconfig
apt-get dselect-upgrade
If you do this, they you only need to backup /etc, /home, /usr/local, /var.
To save the contents of a MySQL database:
mysqldump name-of-database   gzip > name-of-database.dump.gz
To restore:
zcat name-of-database.dump.gz   mysql

You can schedule these dumps to be made one hour before the time you make backups.

Scheduling tasks As a user:

crontab -e

As root: add a file in one of the /etc/cron.* directories. In cron. hourly,daily,weekly,monthly you put scripts. In the other directories you put crontab files (man 5 crontab). If the system is turned off during normal maintainance hours, you can do two things:

Change /etc/crontab to use different maintanance hours

Install anacron (it's installed by default in ubuntu)

For scheduling one-shot tasks, use at(1):

$ at 17:40
echo "Please tell Enrico that the lesson is finished"   mail efossnet@dream.edu.et
^D

When and how to automate

First, you manage to do it yourself

Then, you document it

Then, you automate it

Start at step 1 and go to 2 or 3 if/when you actually need it. (credits to sto@debian.org: he's the one from which I heard it for the first time, said so well).

Interesting programs to schedule during maintanance

rkhunter, chkrootkit

checksecurity

debsecan

tiger

Important keys to know in a Unix terminal These are special keys that work on Unix terminals:

^C: interrupt (sends SIGTERM)

^\: interrupt (send SIGQUIT)

^D: end of input

^S: stop scrolling

^Q: resume scrolling

Therefore, if the terminal looks like it got stuck, try hitting ^Q.

Problems we had today with postfix

Problem: mail to efossnet@dream.edu.et is accepted only if sent locally. Reason:
$ host -t mx dream.edu.et
Host dream.edu.et not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
Solution: tell dnsmasq to handle a MX record also for dream.edu.et:
mx-host=dream.edu.et,smtp.dream.edu.et,50
The problem not solved with the previous solution. Reason: postfix was making complaints which mentioned localhost as a domain name. Solution: fixed by changing 'myhostname' in main.cf to something different than localhost. Note: solved by luck. Investigate why this happened.

Problems found yesterday and today:

there is no way to tell squid to use another proxy for SSL connections: it only does them directly

if you want to configure evolution to get mail from /var/mail/user, you need to explicitly enter the path. It would be trivially easier if evolution presented a good default, since it's easy to compute. It would also be useful if below the "Path" entry there were some text telling what path is being requested: the mail spool? the evolution mail storage?

In Evolution: IMAP or IMAPv4r1? What is the difference? Why should I care?

apt-get --print-uris doesn't print the URIs if the package is in the local cache, and there seems to be no way to have it do it.

in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default, is the NameVirtualHost * directive appropriate there? It gets in the way when using 'default' as a template for new sites. Otherwise, one can add a new (disabled) site that can be used as a template for new sites instead of default.

the default comments put by crontab -e are not that easy to read.

Things ready to change again :o)

[Debian]

Keeping you up-to-date about my NM process, I have some good news since last time I wrote here. I was approved in the P&P! And I just sent the answers to T&S Part 1, by far, this was the most time intensive part of the NM until now. I had to fix RC-bugs, write shell script, write manpages and answer another round of questions. It is a hard part of the NM, IMHO, not because of the questions but because of the time required to prepare everything as good as possible. There is always something new to learn about Debian, how the project works, where to find information, how to help, it is really amazing. Extremadura i18n meeting is pretty close and we have a proposal to work in the debian-installer language packs (or something like that) trying to add more languages (and trying to save space or using another approach to load the languages).

Talking quickly about Brazil, August is almost there, our Debian User Group already find a place to celebrate Debian Anniversary, which is great and will allow us to prepare everything in the best way possible to have a very nice event. Translation work is a little bit delayed because CVS pserver is offline and translators without ssh access (non Debian Developers) can't work directly, we are routing our files and patches do debian-www, a huge thanks for all people helping us to get the files commited!

[Random stuff]

University classes are about to begin. Next week (August 31st), let's go for another round. I got visit from my cousing from Sao Paulo and also from my cousins from Netherlands, busy weekend (which delayed a little bit my NM answers, but it was all fun). :-)

I'm trying to get involved with DebConf Organization, we are in the middle of lots of changes. I'm working to get my packages uploaded to get them in "etch" and "in time". I'm also waiting for the new point release of Sarge (r3) so we can update Debian-BR-CDD (r1). Speaking about Debian-BR-CDD, we are ready to migrate to RT which will help to keep the tasks (DebConf Teams also use it).

Hmmm, I would like to write more about lots of things. Not right know, but certainly pretty soon. And by the way, if you don't know, the idea is to get Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, codename "etch", in time for Christmas. :-)

Three things which I do with my free time which will have some impact or change this week: Gaming, Sleeping, Watching TV.
In gaming, I discovered a list of games which are available on computer and have AI opponents. This will probably kill some productivity as it means I discovered San Juan, a card game which I simply must buy a real life copy of. The game dynamics are perfect and it's in the "learn once, play forever" category. Hope to play this at the next board gaming night. In sleep, I am attempting to change my sleeping patterns so that I am an early riser. Generally I'm a late sleeper and late riser, but as I get older, I am finding that it is better to wake up early and get things done in the morning. I feel much more productive at the end of the day. To this end I am now sleeping at 10-11pm.

ceilingsarecool also appreciates the new schedule because it lines up with hers much better. In TV, I have concocted a plan to lessen the amount of TV that I watch per week. I have dubbed it the TiVo TV diet, and details are after the fold.
Continue reading "On the Varied Use of Free Time"

So recently the prime minister of Iraq criticized Israel for a disproportionate response in their attacks against Lebanon. I don't know his exact words, but in general, I agree with that sentiment.

It's no big surprise that Bush and Republican leaders have all been rushing to support Israel and taking their sweet time before helping with a ceasefire, and taking plenty of time with that process, too.

So it's also no big surprise that a number of Washington politicians mustered up a good deal of righteous-sounding moral indigniation at the Iraqi PM. There were some that boycotted his address to Congress today. Lots of fiery rhetoric.

But here's the surprise: it was the Democrats doing this.

Huh?

The populist party, the one that's supposed to be valuing life and perhaps has recently started to grow a backbone in opposing ever-broadening war, is now in support of Israel's tactics?

I think it's all politics. The Republicans don't want to criticize the PM because he's part of the process their party started. And the Democrats want to pander to their base and criticize anything related to an unpopular war.

I don't think very many people in Washington from either party have genuine ethics these days. They just take whatever moral position they think will win votes.

Yesterday I posted about my first steps with cfengine. By the end of the day today, I had things far along that I can:

cdebootstrap a directory
Run a special cfengine script to get the base files like /etc/fstab and /etc/hosts set up
Bring it up in Xen, apt-get install cfengine2, and use cfagent to bring up the rest of the system and install the necessary base packages (like xfsprogs)

Very nice.

I've had a few annoyances with the cfengine packages support, which doesn't quite seem to work as documented al the time.

I also took a look at bcfg2 thanks to a comment yesterday. It looks very interesting, but I have a few gripes about it. I find cfengine files easier to read. I can look at a file, having never used cfengine before, and have a reasonable idea of what is trying to be done and how it will be accomplished. I can't say the same for bcfg2, plus bcfg2 uses XML config files (ick) and a bunch of small otherfiles. While the architecture as the authors have described it certainly sounds appealing, I'm not sure that bcfg2 is a simple as cfengine. I am a strong believer in the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. But THANKS to the person that left the comment, and I hope that bcfg2 continues to evolve and provide an alternative to cfengine.

I also looked at Puppet. This thing looks very slick. Seems to be cfengine with a nicer syntax. On the other hand, it's not really clear that anybody is using it. That makes me nervous -- this is the kind of thing that can seriously harm machines if it does something unexpected.

I've been working on some introductory slides on SELinux. They're still far from finished. All I've written so far is some basic terminology, identities, roles, types. I also tried to show how this increases security, though that part is probably still hard to understand unless you know about common attack vectors. I havn't yet written about the actual policy, policy modules, all the fancy UI stuff available, reachability analysis etc. I probably will not do so: The goal of the slides is not to give an exact overview over how SELinux works, how to write good policy etc. I also don't claim to have all facts right - instead I want to provide an easy to understand overview over how SELinux works and why it is a good thing. I guess I won't even be flaming AppArmor. ;-) Thats why I picked the name "gentle introduction to SELinux". Remember, it's just a work in progress, "the best is yet to come". I really need your feedback (and encouragement -- there is still so much to be written). Get the slides as PDF here. Feedback is best via email -- erich AT debian DOT org. I intentionally do not have comments in my blog.

...is to close the bug report and to see what happens. Or so it seems:

I decided to finally close #291975 last week after having been unable to reproduce the problem for some months. I've done this once before about a year ago but the issue resurfaced straight after. :-( (I have filed #290722 and later #351367 in regards to this.)

Anyway. A few days after having closed the bug report for the second time, version 0.52.2-5.1of libnewt0.52 is released and brings the problem back again - I've filed a new bug for this: #379938. (Maybe I should have just updated #351367 instead, but then again the issue is so very clearly tied to version 0.52.2-5.1 of libnewt0.52 - and also, I'm sure Alastair will merge as required.)

In light of this, becoming superstitious looks like a viable option...

Yesterday was such an insanely long day -- we woke up in a tent, had breakfast over a Treo, then released a lot of software and went to sleep in the middle of the night. It seemed like 4 days, not 1. And this morning I had to take our new mini-SUV into the shop for its first maintenance checkup. For the last 6 years, I've driven a beautiful old wp:Citro n DS station wagon, but around the time Amita June was born I decided I wanted her to learn to drive on it. Maj and I decided that that meant it had to be taken care of a little better, so I put it in storage and we bought at 2005 Hyundai Tucson. (The Hyundai people here in Quebec pronounce it like "Tux-awn", to our endless amusement.) It's weird having a new car -- like, newer than 1972. Parts are not only plentiful but inexpensive. There is a selection of multiple mechanics in my major metropolitan area that can service the vehicle. And people don't point and wave when you're driving, or stop you on the street to tell you stories about how their grandfather used to drive one on their family farm. We'll be driving the car to wt:Boston next week for Wikimania 2006, so I'm glad it went to the shop. It should be in good shape for the drive -- I hope the rest of us are. tags: hyundai tucson citro n ds quebec new car

Slides Speaking of Wikimania -- I'm nowhere near ready for my presentation. Jeez, how'd it get to be almost-August already? Thankfully, no one else I've talked to is really ready to talk, either... so at least I'm not the last one to get my homework done. tags: wikimania presentation slides

Software The OpenID software I did for MediaWiki went out yesterday, and I got a lot of good feedback on it. OpenID requires that some state data is stored between participating servers, and the code I wrote uses the memcached client built into MediaWiki to store it. Not optimal but it works. Well, better today than yesterday, that is. There were some pretty gruesome bugs in the implementation that were only showing up for some exceptional circumstances. So I adapted the JanRain unit tests for the other storage classes to my Memcached class, and that helped a whole hell of a lot for debugging. Yay, unit testing! Some people are still having problems with the software, though. The main thing I've found is that the key-value pair output required by OpenID for its inter-server communications is sensitive to extra whitespace thrown in. Why would there be extra whitespace? I've found that a lot of PHP libraries have bits of whitespace at the end, after the closing ?>, and that will show up in the output. Whether it matters depends on how sensitive the output format is to whitespace. In the case of OpenID, the answer is: pretty sensitive. But I'm looking forward to having some more people try the OpenID MediaWiki extension out. tags: openid mediawiki extension unit test php whitespace

Wikipedia's 25th of July Spot-on satire from The Onion: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence. I quote:
"On July 25, 1256, delegates gathered at Comerica Park to sign the Declaration Of Independence, which rejected the rule of the British over its 15 coastal North American colonies," reads an excerpt from the entry. "Little did such founding fathers as George Washington, George Jefferson, and ERIC IS A FAG know that their small, querulous republic would later become the most powerful and prosperous nation in history, the Unified States Of America."
Does the fact that I find an Onion article funny say more about my declining humor standards, or about their recent improvements? I don't know. tags: the onion wikipedia satire

Four ideas I was very interested to see Tim O'Reilly's Four Big Ideas About Open Source. I think that there are some fascinating developments over the last few years that have fallen under the rubric of wp:Web 2.0, and I think they affect those of us who put our hearts and minds into Open Source software. I think this was part of his keynote at OSCON 2006, which, y'know, I'm not techically at or anything. It briefly crossed my mind, but I've got too much to do for Thermidor and Fructidor to flit off to yet another conference -- this one only tangentially involved with what I do for a living. Still, it's interesting that Open Source software and Web services are crossing paths. FLOSS has been critical for making Web services possible, but taking that up to the meta-level and seeking the same freedoms from Web apps that you expect from "regular" software... that's a Moebius strip of rights right up in there. tags: floss open source oscon tim oreilly

My life as a toolbar So, sometime in the last year I started installing Firefox toolbars. The main one that's useful to me is Chris Pederick's excellent Web Developer Extension, jam-packed with little tools that make my job as a developer that much easier. But I also install, well, pernicious toolbars. Judgemental toolbars. Toolbars that make me forget what really matters and turn the Web into a horserace or a highschool popularity contest. They're horrible, and they're addicting, and I can't stop using them. The Google Toolbar has some diddly little useless gadgets that I don't give a shit about, like searching my Gmail account for the given search terms (whoopee). What I loooove, though, is the wp:PageRank indicator. PageRank, of course, is the patented algorithm developed by Google founder Larry Page to estimate the importance of a page on the Web. It's incredibly accurate and valuable and though no longer the only criteria Google uses for ranking pages, it's still critical as a measure of the intrinsic value of a page. So, there's this little wp:progress bar on the Google Toolbar that shows the PageRank of any page you're looking at. It's an apparently logarithmic scale from 1-10, with the number showing up in a popup tooltip. Creative Commons? 9/10. Ted's story about the great worldwide race? 2/10. Technorati home page? 8/10. Male Secretary? 6/10. Wikitravel's France discussion? 3/10. And so on and so on. Even worse is the A9 Toolbar, which (again) has a whole bunch of bogus boring features, but also shows the Alexa ranking of any site you're looking at. Alexa ranking isn't some egghead hooty-tooty algorithm about the importance of a page -- it's a ranking on the Big Board of who's the most visited site in the world and who doesn't matter in the slightest. So, I can see that Flickr is ranked #41 today, le Sans Fil is #347,296, and wikiHow is #2248. Alexa is a lot more coarse-grained than Google's toolbar -- it measures the traffic to a given second-level-domain, not a particular URL. So any LiveJournal or Blogger site gets LJ's entire Alexa ranking -- not very useful. Still, I've taken to thinking almost entirely in terms of PageRank and Alexa rank. It's unreasonable. Every site I go to, my eye drifts up to my toolbars to confirm my idea about it. Do I really like Achewood? Sure, but it's only got an Alexa rank around 20,000... Doc Searls's blog has a PageRank of 8, which is really impressive; but... my page for 22 Prairial (Journal/22 Prairial CCXIV) apparently has the same PageRank. Holy moly! Why could that be? (I think it has something to do with the wp:Law of 22 Prairial, but I could be wrong.) Really, putting these numbers on everything is ruining the Web for me. It's turning me into a total jerk, too. I kinda want to go back to the time when I just found stuff on the Web and didn't think, "How do I measure up?" Thankfully the Yahoo Toolbar doesn't include anything remotely like rankings... just as well. Of course, that's the reason I uninstalled it, too. I can find my way to Yahoo! Canada Greetings just fine on my own if I need to. tags: google a9 alexa toolbar pagerank

Useful things to keep in mind when setting up a service:

always take note of what you do

make yourself always able to explain to another person what you did

keep a copy of the configuration files before changing them, so that you can see what you changed

be always able to move the service to another computer

make sure that it works after reboot

Example use of vim block selection:

ESC

exits insert mode.

^V

starts block selection. Move the arrows to form a rectangle.

c

change. Type the new content for the line.

ESC

gets out of insert mode, and the change will happen in all the lines.

To change network configuration with config files, edit:

/etc/network/interfaces

To also setup DNS in /etc/network/interfaces, use dns-search and dns-nameservers (for this to work, you need to have the package resolvconf):

dns-search dream.edu.et
dns-nameservers 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.2

To make a router that connects to the internet on demand using a modem:

apt-get install diald

To see the path of network packets:

mtr 4.2.2.2

Basic NAT script:

OUT=eth2
IN=eth0
modprobe iptable_nat
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $OUT -j MASQUERADE
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

What happens at system startup:

the BIOS loads and runs the boot loader

the boot loader loads the kernel and the inintrd ramdisk and runs the kernel

the kernel runs the script 'init' in the initrd ramdisk

the script 'init' mounts the root directory

the script 'init' runs the command /sbin/init in the new root directory

'init' starts the system with the configuration in /etc/inittab

To install a new startup script:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/sbin/firewall /etc/init.d
sudo update-rc.d firewall defaults 16 75

Normally you can just do:

sudo update-rc.d [servicename] defaults

To have a look at the start and stop order numbers, look at /etc/rc2.d for other start scripts and /etc/rc0.d for other stop scripts To test a proxy, low level way:

$ telnet proxy 8080
Trying 192.168.0.6...
Connected to proxy.dream.edu.et.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET http://www.google.com HTTP/1.0 [press enter twice]

Hey, I'm sure you're wondering what DeFuBu is, aren't you? That's the Debian Funniest Bug contest! This is a new monthly contest which consists to choose the more fun bug. How to win? Simply drop me an email with the bug number. I will maintain a list of candidats. Then, a selected and feed jury will choose the best of them.
If the bug you reported win, you and the reporter will win something like your weight in Ubuntu CD or the right to write my new book, Debian for dummies. For example, I give you a bug reported by Florent Bayle, #355455, which the first candidate for July. PS: Please note that I do this for fun, not for raising personnal attacks ;-) PS2: This challenge has been renamed to DeFuBu to avoid some misunderstanding on its leitmotiv.

One of these days I'd like to understand why my life goes in waves. This round was contacts from Vancouver.

Katy and Ryan were here this weekend.
Frances just called to tell me about working at an Ottawa church this fall.
I sat down at my email and Mulan emailed me.
Ted, Tam, Heather and Rachel emailed to arrange visiting at the end of August.
Sandy (Angie's mom) is coming here on Saturday and will house-sit through Opus.
Jamu was in Montreal last week (even though I wasn't).
Heather (Angie's sister) was here the week before.

Weird. I don't mind at all, though. =) I miss all y'all!

John Goerzen professes not to understand the apparent inconsistencies in the Presidents positions on life issues. While I can't speak for him, I am as near to a "typical Republican" as you are likely to get around these parts and although I'm busy with other things I feel compelled to explain how they are in fact consistent.

The foundation is a belief in the innate dignity and right to life of Man simply by virtue of being a member of the human species. Therefore the default position in any case should be to protect against the unnecessary taking of life whenever there is a choice in the matter. Therefore abortion is wrong precisely it is as its defenders say a "choice." Stem cell research is also wrong on these grounds but as a clump of cells is not clearly a human being you can agree to disagree on that. Those who do think it is wrong should not be forced to participate in murder which is why the government is against Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research not against the practice altogether. (Also remember there are other sources of stem cells.)

The innate dignity of a person can be made forfeit by an act of will on the part of that person. Thus a murderer has no right to life, by his personal actions he has surrendered it. If fetuses started leaping out of vaginas and attacking people, they would forfeit their right to life too but they don't.

What John conspicuously fails to mention concerning the 30,000 Iraq civilian deaths is how they died and who killed them. In the vast majority of the cases it is at the hands of those who putatively were on their own side. So how is Bush or America morally culpable? In the few cases where Americans have deliberately caused civilian deaths, they have been punished for it. But where is the outrage when terrorists do not wear uniforms and deliberately hide amongst civilians and in religious sites? (May I note that such behavior is against the Geneva convention and UN resolutions though I'm aware such things only apply to Israel.) It is the Baath party and Al-Qaeda have right to life issues concerning the war in Iraq not the US.

You can disagree with any of these positions--even from a conservative or Republican point of view but my point is they are consistent. And I daresay being easier to understand, they resonate more strongly with the electorate than the muddled messages of the Democrats.

Hall and Oates in '08!

So I’m planning a new box for college, and have come up with a tentative parts list. I am soliciting any advice and comments that people would be willing to offer. CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2000MHz HT 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Dual Core Processor - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103562
$169 (This was $289 2 days ago when I was pricing it - sweet) Motherboard: ASUS A8N5X Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131569
$84.99 RAM: CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145587
$207.00 Video: eVGA 256-P2-N553-AX Geforce 7600GT CO 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130283
$169.99 (Before $30 mail-in rebate) Hard Drives: I was originally planning on doing 3 Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144701, $82.99) in a RAID-5 (software) configuration but there is currently a sale on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140) for $99.99 and I might just order three today. Enclosure/Power: Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Piano Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450Watt SmartPower 2.0 ATX 12V V2.0 for AMD & Intel systems Power Supply - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811129155
$104.99 (But that’s a one-day sale price, I think it’s like $109.99 normally, though this is the 2nd day in a row it’s had a one-day sale. Both before $15 mail-in rebate). Optical Drive: Reusing my Sony DVD Burner from my current box. Not including shipping or rebates, the total price comes out as: $1035.94 Advice, comments, etc. are most definitely welcome as I don’t follow the hardware market.

Argh. Turning void* into char* will not make your program typesafe. In fact, it will only annoy people with warnings if you are really passing an int*

We had a great trip out to Park de la Yamaska and Mount Orford this weekend. Sure, it rained a couple of hours each night, so we had some wet mornings, but if you have a good tent and some half-decent rain clothes it's really not that big a deal. Park de la Yamaska is one of the closest Quebec parks to Montreal, and it borders a reservoir, so we thought it would be kind of boring. Not at all -- nice big beach, huge pine forests, lots of space for camping and a lot of trails. It was a contrast to the Fraser sector of Mount Orford that we slept at last night -- much smaller, denser deciduous forest, and the lake's beach, although really nice, was a long walk from our camp. Amita June, it turns out, is one great camper. She loves the trees and the flowers and going in the lakes. She's been really good about sleeping on the big air mattress we have, and playing in her playpen, and riding in the car. Probably going to the beach 2-3 times a day is sufficiently tiring that she doesn't have time to fuss, but I have to admit that eating pasta with her next to a campfire last night really impressed me. She's a real outdoors girl. We woke up to rain this morning, so we packed the car in a hurry and ran off to wt:Magog for breakfast instead of cooking for ourselves. As soon as we got in cell-phone range, I started getting alerts about Wikitravel -- messages from admins and notifications from the servers. Turns out our /var/ device got too full and the monitoring tool didn't detect it, so no PHP sessions were getting created. Maj and Amita June were really tolerant of my Treo-hacking over breakfast at Restaurant Jack-o -- the admins at IB and I were able to identify and correct the problem pretty quickly once we realized what was going on. It kind of put me off ever going camping again, though... I think our servers have put some sort of GPS tracking device on my person, and go kablooie as soon as they see I'm out of cell range. tags: camping yamaska mount orford lake fraser quebec eastern townships magog restaurant jack-o maj amitajune wikitravel

OpenID extension released So, I got around to checking in the OpenID extension for MediaWiki that I've been working on. It's in the extensions section of the MW Subversion repository; the code's visible here for Web-viewing pleasure. tags: openid mediawiki extension

Wikimania is a-comin' Maj, Amita June and I are heading down to wt:Cambridge (Massachusetts) next week for Wikimania 2006. Wikimania is the world-wide Wikimedia conference, but it's also become a real magnet for ideas and projects that are related, like other wiki projects, open content, and community collaboration. As a member of the MediaWiki dev team, I'd probably go anyways, but I think it's a good opportunity to meet people and talk about wikis and travel, too. I'll be doing a lot of hacking at the Hacking Days pre-event, which I think will be pretty fun. From what I hear, there are a lot of cool features coming down the pike for MW over the next few months, and people really want to unveil them at Hacking Days. I'll have the OpenID extension under my arm, but I'll be curious to see what else is coming up. I'll be giving a talk about Wiki and open content travel guides: past, present, future, in a session with Jack Herrick of WikiHow. Jack's a great guy and WikiHow is an exceptional project -- I think it should be a lot of fun. Mostly I hope we get our Cambridge travel guide in shape for the conference. I think it'll be a great resource for wiki people going to the event. tags: wiki wikimania wikitravel hacking days wikihow

David Robinson, guest-blogging on Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker blog, makes an interesting observation about Microsoft’s offer to relicense and retrieve mp3s already purchased on iTunes for free. The market actually works:

Will copyright holders be getting the same amount from Microsoft, when their songs are re-purchased on behalf of migrating iTunes users, as they will get when a user makes a normal purchase of the same track in the Zune system? The copyright holders have a substantial incentive to offer Microsoft a discount on this kind of “buy out” mass purchasing. As Ed pointed out to me, it is unlikely that users would otherwise choose to re-purchase all of their music, at full price, out of their own pockets simply in order to be able to move from iTunes to Zune. By discounting their tracks to enable migration to a new service, the copyright holders would be helping create a second viable mass platform for online music sales — a move that would, in the long run, probably increase their sales. […] Bottom line: Markets are often surprisingly good at sorting out this kind of thing. Technology policy watchers underestimate the power of competition at our peril. It’s easy to see Microsoft or Apple as established firms coasting on their vertically integrated dominance, but the Zune buyout is a powerful reminder that that’s not what it feels like to be in this or most any other business. These firms, even the biggest, best and most dominant, are constantly working hard to outdo one another. Consumers often do very well as a result — even in a world of DRM.

What’s neat about this move is that it shows that there are more degrees of flexibility that most of us had thought. Critics viewed iTunes/iTunes Music Store as a monolithic lock-in system, but here a clever market participant figured out a combination of contractual and technological measures to work around it and create competition.

Greg must have given an amazingly insightful, inspiring, and amusing keynote at OLS:
:

http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/ols_2006_keynote.html

I truly enjoyed reading this, maybe you will, too...

Another "folded" post which was not intended to be folded. Arg. Will need

As asked on the debian-curiosa list, what effect will the AMD ATI merger have for the Linux community? Will AMD realize that Intel has a lead in the Linux field because of them making e.g. specifications for their graphics products available? Will AMD counter this by having ATI release some specifications to the community? (Or at least allowing the distribution of the already-written r500 2D graphics driver held back by a NDA? Apparently they havn't yet made up their mind after 4 months now...) As for me, I'm currently planning to buy my next Laptop with Intel graphics (and thus Intel CPU, I guess) because of the better driver support. (My current laptops ATI Mobility card is not supported by ATI...)

From the previous version of my last post, people with even moderate knowledge of English could have easily understood that I suck at spelling ad that, consequently, I did not have a spelling checker installed at this blog. Both of those two conclusions would be true.
So I decided to break in and install something to help me and after some mishaps, I settled on Visual Spellcheck plug-in. I am editing my posts in HTML anyway, so lack of WYSIWYG editor support is not critical for me, more like the opposite. All I needed was to install the plug-in, activate it in wordpress, install php5-pspell package and restart Apache. I forgot to restart Apache at first and got a cryptic error from the included fake pspell wrapper. Also aspell and corresponding language libraries must be installed on server site.
Note: after you have corrected all spelling errors in your text you must also remember to press “Continue Editing” link or otherwise changes will not be saved. I think that is a bug.