After 5 years of holidays, studying computer science (mostly), I got a real job and began to work... 3 hours ago. I finally accepted the offer that Easter-eggs made me at the end of my 4 months training. My work will mainly consists in doing sysadmin stuff, on servers running... Debian!

I'm pretty excited; after blogging for a couple of months now, I've been listed on the YULBlog meta-blog for Montreal bloggers. (Yeah, that's a lot of instances of the syllable "blog" in one sentence.) YULBlog (the name comes from the 3-letter IATA code for Pierre Trudeau Airport, formerly Dorval) has been around for more than 5 years and hosts a monthly get-together on the first Wednesday of each month. It's been pretty instrumental in promoting blogging and supporting bloggers in the Montreal area. I guess it was probably a good idea not to name the site "YMXBlog", after Montreal's ill-fated wp:Mirabel Airport, which stopped passenger operations in 2004. Mirabel is the largest airport in the world by operational area (88,000 acres!) and a gigantic flop politically and economically. Which is too bad: I flew in and out of Mirabel in 2002 to go to Paris on Air Transat, and it was a really nice airport. Anyways, I've added the "YUL Blogger" badge to my sidebar, and if my luck holds this post will show up on yulblog.org when I post it. tags: yulblog blogs montreal dorval mirabel

Mike Hommey has posted an interesting blog entry about how CPU state for saving power can be affected by modules you have loaded. In this case, C4 processor state can only be reached if no uhci_hcd module is present. If it is, the only state the processor can reach is C2, which will at some extent affect battery life. What seems to me quite interesting is the ability to unbind drivers from devices. Sometimes I wonder how many optimizations that are available in our hardware we are missing because of lack of information.

From the ever-fabulous Lambda the Ultimate programming languages blog, I found an article on the recently published Revised Report on Scheme Status Report. Yes, it's a report on a report. Each new version of the programming language Scheme has an associated Revised Report on Scheme, where n = a monotonically increasing integer. The current version is usually called "R RS" Scheme, but a new version is in the works. The R RS Status report is the status report on this new version. And R RS Scheme looks like it's got some very fun parts to it. First and foremost, a plan for a library (= module) system, which has probably been the single most difficult issue for making portable Scheme code. Next, a standard system for error-handling and exceptions. Also, standard records (AKA structures), and finally Unicode implementations. I think this sounds like the finest kind of standardization process: working from the dozens of existing Scheme implementations and ad hoc community standardization efforts like the fabuloso SRFI (Scheme Request For Implementation) project. It's identifying a problem (differences between implementations) and supplying a solution. There are some incompatibilities introduced too; top-level definitions are gone, which is a little sad but understandable. (eval) is going to have to (evolve) to deal with the new library format. These are unfortunate incompatibilities that serve a greater good. It's strange to see some other ideas bandied about, though, like making pairs immutable (no set-car! and set-cdr! any more), and requiring the cdr of a pair always to be a list. That way lies top-down revisionist language design, which is madness for a language with the maturity of Scheme. Codifying standard interfaces and implementations for features that are different in all Scheme implementations is a Good Thing; they're what everybody wants. Messing with the basics of the language is a Bad Thing; I don't think there's a Scheme programmer in the world who wants that to happen. tags: scheme r6rs r rs status report programming lambda the ultimate

NonCommercial So, one thing that I find kind of sad is that some contributors to Open Source or Open Content projects make particularly emphatic anti-commercial statements. It comes up on Creative Commons mailing lists and even Wikimedia or Wikitravel talk pages. A typical comment is, ''I don't want anyone to profit from my works.'' It's strange that the worst possible thing people can think of happening with their work is that someone could make money from it. You rarely see, "I don't want anyone to use my work to twist minds, justify racism or break the human spirit," nor "I don't want anyone to use my work to hurt others or themselves." Why is the idea of generating value with a work the worst we can imagine, when so many more destructive purposes are served with pieces of information, art, and software every day? It would be an interesting intellectual exercise to design a piece of software or a work of art from which no one could profit in any way, financially or otherwise. It would have to be uninformative, unpleasurable, inutile as a doorstop or sample bitstream. Of course, intellectual exercise is itself a benefit, so that'd have to be gotten rid of, too. Here is my wish: I wish that my work on the Internet and elsewhere is of use to many, many people for many years in ways I cannot imagine today. I hope it makes people think, it guides them through difficult waters, and that it amuses and provokes. Good luck with that, whoever you are. tags: sharing noncommercial cc profit money

FastCGI So, I got Gauche-fastcgi installed on my server, as well as mod_fcgid. The builds were easy, and after a little bit of fiddling in the Apache configurations I had a sample wp:FastCGI script running on this server. With just a couple of lines of changes, I had my WiLiKi instance running FastCGI. Some httperf runs later, and I could see a 4-5x difference in speed between FastCGI and CGI. So, I couldn't resist: I've moved this whole site over to FastCGI. I've noticed a considerably peppier response time. I'm going to try to add some more WebSoftwareFriendly optimizations to the WiLiKi software soon, which should speed up the site even further. Hurrah for that! tags: fastcgi gauche-fastcgi fcgid wiliki httperf web performance

Long day Maj and I went to see the local Movies 4 Mommies matinee this morning at the Guzzo Cineplex in the March Central. Movies 4 Mommies are special showings for parents with babies less than 1 year old; the babies can cry or yell or whatever and nobody gets upset because everybody's got one. It was fun to go -- despite the name, I'd guess that 20-30% of the babies had daddies in tow, too -- and we met a few nice parents and cute bubbies. Unfortunately, the experience was ruined by the movie that was playing this morning: Click. I'm not an anti-wp:Adam Sandler snob; I'm fine with the fart jokes and the warbling voice. No sweat. But this movie was badly paced; the jokes were completely unfunny; the story was boring and the interactions were creepy and mean-spirited. It was our first day at Movies 4 Mommies, so that's probably the only reason we didn't walk out on this movie. It stunk really bad; the Rotten Tomatoes reviews of Click were pretty bad, too. Afterwards we felt dirtied by the experience, so we stopped by Santropol for some lunch with our friends Tara and Chris. We got hugantic sandwiches and salads and veggies and Amita June made a fantastic mess. For dinner tonight Niko stopped by; it was good to see him. He was in Paris while we were in California, so it was good to get back in touch. Maj made an excellent shrimp pasta and a big salad, which was good for this hot, humid weather we've been having. tags: click movies4mommies adam sandler babies movies rotten tomatoes santropol amitajune tara chris niko

ClaimID I just signed up for a new ClaimID account: http://claimid.com/evanprodromou . ClaimID is a service for accumulating links to your various profiles, clippings, and other media mentions. It means you're claiming an identity assembled on the Web. I think this is a pretty good idea, but I'm not 100% sure why it's significantly better than my Me Other Places page. I do have a lot of on-line accounts -- too many -- but I'm not sure ClaimID is a good way to organize them. I dunno. It's great, though, that they support OpenID, which I think is the coolest shared identity system out there. Hopefully identity aggregators like ClaimID will start bringing some logic to our online identity systems. However... I'd sure like to see some other identity players, like TypeKey, starting to move towards OpenID. tags: openid claimid identity typekey

People I like Flipping through the Internet Identity Gang site, I tripped over a post by Bob Blakley on his blog, Ceci n'est pas un Bob. Bob was one of the members of the SAML committee when I worked on it for Outlook Technologies and then Securant. I found him to be an excellent explainer; I learned more on that technical committee about being clear and concise in technical communications than I'd learned before or since. So it's great to see that he has a blog; I've bookmarked it for further reading. tags: blogs bob blakley

Nice to know that my friend Ot vio Salvador started his English blog. As he noted, his toughts will be sindicated on Planet Debian soon. It’s always a pleasure to know which are the newer crazy ideas he’s working on. Go Ot vio ! Update : I’m also blogging in Portuguese. My friends from Debian which can read Brazilian Portuguese can read my ramblings on my blog. With some luck, my ideas will soon also be available on Planeta Debian Brasil, a Brazilian planet for Debian lovers.

While in Edinbugh, I have taken some pics. We have not been able to get in most of the venues, so I will take some pics later, when it is open. But still, my main concern is where to find the picture where everybody is hugging Ganneff right before the Debconf Hug Days ended.

Now that the right people have been told, I can make it public: as of January, I’ll be a full-time developer for the Free Standards Group, producers of the LSB. This is, perhaps, one of the most difficult job decisions I’ve had to make. In every other case where I’ve changed jobs so far, I’ve done so only when it becomes clear that the old job isn’t going anywhere: either by going under, getting radically reorganized, treating me poorly, or otherwise being a dead end. None of that is true here. I still believe in what Progeny is doing. The co-workers are superb (yes, even that one), and management has always treated me well, even in difficult circumstances. But sometimes, opportunities are too good to pass up. I think that the next year or two will be pivotal to the future of free standards, and I’ll be in a unique position to influence the direction those standards go. Plus, I’ll be able to work with another group of brilliant and talented people, with the hope that some of that brilliance and talent will rub off. I’m also positive about working primarily from home. So, you can expect more blogging (he says, a month after his last post!), especially about standards in the free software world. I’ve created a new category for that topic, in case you’re interested in following just that conversation.

I’ve seen several requests for a simple set of instructions that test a distribution against the LSB. I wrote some Debian-specific instructions in a mailing list post back in October, and thought they’d do better as more general instructions. Before you start, you have to find out two things about the distribution you want to test:

• How to install the LSB on your distribution. At minimum, your distro should provide something like a “lsb” package. Make sure that’s installed.
• How to install LSB packages on your distribution. RPM-based distros have it easy here, since the procedure is likely to be the same as installing any other package on your system. Debian users (and users of Debian derivatives) need to use alien; I’ve found that you get the best results with alien -ick [package]. Other distributions will have their own ways, possibly involving alien as well.

Go to the LSB download page and start downloading everything under the Runtime Tests for the LSB version and architecture you want to test. Make sure you don’t get the betas unless that’s what you want to test. You will also need the lsb-python package from the Application Battery list. Install all of these packages. Once all of the packages are installed, run the tests:

• /opt/lsb/bin/lsblibchk
• /opt/lsb/bin/lsbcmdchk
• Add /usr/opt/lsb/appbat/bin to your PATH, run gcc -dumpmachine to get your machine triplet, and run /opt/lsb/share/test/qmtest_libstdcpp_[version]/run_tests. Answer the questions as appropriate.
• For the X test suites, install enough of XFree86 or X.org on your system for proper client support, as well as the Xvfb X server. Debian users can install the x-window-system-core and xvfb packages, but see below about problems with Xvfb. After this is done, go to the directory /opt/lsb/test/vsw4 and run the run_vsw4.sh script found there.
• For the main runtime test, make sure the loop driver is loaded. (This is mostly a problem on systems using udev.) After the test package is installed, set passwords for the “vsx0″, “vsx1″, and “vsx2″ users, log in as vsx0 at a system console, and run run_tests. Logging in is required; su or sudo won’t work. The default answers to the questions asked are mostly OK, but a few don’t have good defaults. In particular, you’ll have to tell the script the right passwords for the vsx users, and you should make sure the test block device is /home/tet/test_sets/nonexistb. Be prepared to type the root password several times to set up various things the tests need.

Most of the tests are quick, taking less than 15 minutes usually per test. The runtime test takes somewhere in the neighborhood of six hours, and often looks like it has hung. Don’t assume the runtime test has hung until it’s run overnight. If you’re using an emulator, don’t give up on runtime until it’s run for at least 24 hours. The tests create two kinds of files: journal files, and the official runtime report (created by the runtime test). Where you ran the tests, look for files with names starting with “journal” in the current directory, or for paths like results/0001e/journal. The C++ tests create a directory called “qmtest_libstdcpp_[version]”. There’s a handy utility called tjreport in /opt/lsb/bin; run that on the journal to get a quick summary of the results. If you want to post results, use tjreport. The official runtime report (in /home/tet/test_sets/results) has some additional information: a list of FIP (Further Information Provided) results. What to do with failures: First, make sure it’s really a failure of the environment, and not a failure of the tests. The LSB publishes a list of official waivers for test failures; check that your failures aren’t on that list. For failures not on that list, Google is your best resource; most likely, someone else has experienced the same failure, and will have more information about it. If you really can’t figure it out, come over to one of the LSB’s mailing lists and ask around. On Xvfb: The Xvfb versions shipped with most distributions have bugs that can cause problems. Anything running XFree86 will likely not be able to complete the X tests, and anything running X.org may see a number of failures. Because Xvfb is not required by the LSB, you can replace Xvfb with one that doesn’t have these bugs. Recent Debian xvfb packages for etch don’t have these bugs, so Debian and derivatives can use them for testing. (The sarge backport of Xvfb can be installed on vanilla sarge without upgrading any of the other XFree86 packages; missing packages can also be pulled from the sarge backport without affecting the packages that do ship.) Please post questions, problems, criticisms, etc. in the comments. A version of this might end up on the LSB site someday, so any improvements would be appreciated.

Joey Hess is happy to see us using debian-installer for the DCC Core, and speculates about whether Progeny will be moving away from Anaconda. First of all, I certainly hope we can make useful contributions to d-i. As a first effort, the long-stalled debian-installer module for picax (started at DebConf 4) is now in good shape, and was what we used to build DCC 3.0 PR1. And I can honestly say that d-i has, so far, exceeded our expectations. On the other hand, there’s no reason why we can’t have more than one installer for Debian. FAI has been around for a long time, after all. Some people like Anaconda’s UI better than d-i’s, and probably will continue to even after d-i goes graphical. As long as people want it, there’s no reason why Anaconda for Debian should die off.

It’s now available, and mostly works. There are two source packages and four binary packages available here and here. One source package builds the dynamic linker itself, as well as the fixed libc. The other fixes a bug in PAM; the pam_unix module returns success instead of the proper error under some circumstances. See Debian bug 323982 for the details. If necessary, the package could be itself patched, but as I’m focused on Debian stable’s LSB compatibility, I’m assuming that there will be resistance to the idea of patching stable in this way. With these packages installed on top, nearly all of Debian’s LSB problems are resolved. Some exceptions may be found in this post.

After replacing the laptop disk of my “server” that was failing yet again, my journal is alive again. I already had to replace the disk in November 2005. Of course, I cannot expect it to run for more than 7 months. Anyway, holiday is near! I will leave for France (Perret, Bretagne) with friends and will really be gone for two weeks. I will leave July 8 and return on July 22. I am looking forward to this, especially because this is going to be my first real “external” holiday in 3 years. Study The study is going smoothly. I have almost finished my exams and the ones I have done so far went quite well. I had to change my planning though, since I was asking too much of myself. A feasible, less ambitious planning will get the job done much better than an overfull, too ambitious plan (4 courses, 4 assignment and 10 hours of work per week). While everybody is probably consciously aware of this, including me, I had to learn it the hard way. After my holiday I plan to finish the pending thee assignments that I have been postponing for years and then, September 1, start with my 6 month Master project. I hope to finish the project and get my MSc somewhere in April 2007, so near… :) Debian/Ruby I noticed that the Debian Python team beat us to it with the rigorous policy changes. The Debian/Ruby Extras team has been planning quite some changes for a few months but actually haven’t gotten around to discussing about it and doing some real proposals. Meanwhile the team grown in numbers of members and packages and everything is running smoothly (except of course for some issues concerning the current policy). I hope to activate that process in or just after the summer holidays.

I will be looking at MacBook installation and what's lacking there.

Recently, I finally lashed out and bought an FXS-100 module for my A400P card, and yesterday it arrived, so I can now plug in a cordless phone. My poor main Linux box now has more cables going into it than you can poke a stick at, and the closet it's in is getting completely out of control. Oh well. Said module works fine, installation was painless, configuration equally so. I managed to do it all whilst being slightly tipsy from the pub last night, and no-one got hurt. It's so cool getting a dial tone from a Linux box. There's a few caller-ID issues to resolve for internal calls, but other than that, it's great to be able to call Australia from couch for 10 cents, rather than sitting on the floor near an Ethernet wall jack.

I got up this morning with hundreds of messages in my inbox, and re-sorted them to the correct folders. My monkeyplexer program, which sorts stuff into the correct folders automatically, has been running out of control. I developed it for a version of CRM114 that's now totally obsolete, but the file formats and interfaces have all changed. I've taken a poke at bringing the program up to speed with later versions, but it's just not bad enough to deal with. Also, the horrendous interface of crm114 is just too ugly to imagine. Blech. Instead, I took the opportunity to unsubscribe from about 25 mailing lists that I no longer read and that go from my inbox to an overstuffed folder to a trashcan two weeks later. Hopefully this will take some of the pressure off of the monkeyplexer until I get time to either a) move to something easier and bayesian like ifile or b) upgrade monkeyplexer. tags: crm114 email monkeyplexer folders mailing lists sorting

My mom, the rattlesnake magnet So, my Mom got bit by a rattlesnake yesterday morning. She'd taken a baby car seat out of my Dad's car the night before to put it in her car, but it was too late and dark so she left it in the driveway to install in the morning. Apparently when she tried to install it the next day, a rattler had snuck in there to sleep and nailed her on the arm. (My folks live on a pretty big lot in wt:Los Altos Hills, and there's a lot of wildlife, of the fuzzy and also scaly nature.) She got to Stanford Hospital just fine, and she's had 4 rounds of anti-venom. She's hurting but they think it's going to be all right. The strange part of the story is that this is the second time she's been bitten by a snake. I'm not sure how she's survived the process twice, but I'm pretty amazed that it happened twice at all. Waiting for news, here in Montreal... a little nerve wracking. tags: mom rattlesnake bite los altos hills

Peer-to-peer, broadcast style I read through TechCrunch that three major studios will be distributing shows via P2P in the coming months. That's all well and good, but if it's a for-pay system (content costs $0.99 and up), why should you have to contribute any bandwidth into a peer-to-peer system? For a dollar a pop, these should be easy, high-performance HTTP downloads, not shaggy and unreliable p2p stuff. I contribute my upstream bandwidth to Free Software and Open Content, not to re-forwarding something I had to pay for. tags: p2p tv techcrunch for pay

Stimulus and response Thanks to Matt for forwarding this excellent summary of blogs. tags: blogs matt malex microbes

While on the subject Our home mail server went on the fritz while we were in California, and it was a serious pain in the keester. I had to redirect all our mail redirects from our home server (bad.dynu.ca) to Gmail. The home server's back in business now, but I hadn't changed the email stuff back yet... and today I decided not to. I've re-pointed mail for our business, Wikitravel, and personal domains to the old Wikitravel server at iWeb (the same server this site runs on). I think that's probably the best thing for us to have a "home" server that's not at home; we really need to be able to get to our stuff from the road. It's been good so far; most of the domains were pretty easy. It's been the ones I'd forgotten about that are a hassle. Like, say, bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us. Damn, man. The geographical .us domains used to be one of my favorite things. Now they're not so much. tags: mail server move .us iweb gmail

Second wife So, I guess I'd finished some work yesterday, and I was feeling pretty good about it, because after dinner I decided to spend a little illicit "me" time. And with me, that usually ends up being a game. I'd heard a lot about Second Life, and I was especially impressed by some of the important appearances in the world, like Larry Lessig and Mia Garlick of Creative Commons. But I also have a terribly addictive personality, which is exemplified by the large pile of coffee cups on my desk, but also by the way I go completely crazy over video games. I just don't play them that often any more, because they suck up huge parts of my life, and in the end I've just moved a few bits around. So I try to steer clear. So the fact that there doesn't seem to be much to do in SL -- no level-ups, no territory to conquer -- is kind of an advantage for it. So I gave SL a try last night. I had to use one of our laptops, since the Linux alpha of their client doesn't work on Ubuntu (as far as I can tell). I'll say this: it's awfully nice for graphics, and the world is incredibly built out. But I felt a little bit like a hobo in Vegas -- everything was about casinos and strip clubs and huge fancy houses and cars and planes that I couldn't afford. SL is pretty famous for charging for every little thing, and building an impressive dual-world economy. It seems to have worked pretty well -- there's lots of chasing after the lucre in SL. It was awfully good on the eye-candy, but I felt like Neo in the Matrix: all I could see was dollar signs behind the colors. When I told Maj this morning why I was up till 2AM last night, she gave me a serious scowl. I'm pretty sure my SL days are over... mostly. After all, there's a theory that MMORGs are the reason why we haven't met any aliens -- that any sufficiently advanced culture is going to get sucked into pretend worlds like SL and not go out and explore the universe. tags: second life mmorpg games vr cc

French parliament just approved today DADVSI, the worst copyright law in Europe. For those who don't know about DADVSI, this law is the French version of DMCA, supposedly created to fight against "piracy" and P2P, ended up in enforcing copyright in the worst way, making illegal previously licit uses of copyright material, like private copy or making de-facto illegal things like reading a DVD with free software. Parts of the DADVSI, like the so-called Vivendi Universal amendment explicitly makes programs than are "obviously" made to share illegally copyrighted material (sic, lawyers will have fun determining if a webserver is "obviously" a copyrighted material sharing program). Making available such programs will be of course illegal and debians mirrors will risk three years of jail ... will Debian continue shipping amule on its French mirrors? As a conclusion for this months long fight that proved majority does not care neither about democratic procedures nor the 170.000 citizens that signed the EUCD.INFO petition, we still has a chance constitutional council declares DADVSI as anti-constitutional. Scary, heh?

ross@flashheart ~/Pictures/Photos/Incoming/guadec
$ du; ls   wc -l
692M    .
292

Daniel "Camera Whore" Stone stole my camera and wouldn't give it back. Two things to note: 1) I predict Daniel will have an EOS 350D within the month, and 2) when at GUADEC, bring a battery charger and twice as much CF as you think you'd need, just in case. Daniel was only stopped due to the battery dying. I should blog more about GUADEC but in my usual style I'll leave it until I can't recall anything. Instead I'll just mention my favourite quote of the week: GUADEC has been homo-erotic and informative. But mostly homo-erotic. Thanks, if I recall correctly, to Fiona. Personally, I have no idea what she is talking about.

... sounds like a joke, but the "certificate in technology management" I got yesterday for completing a two year extracurricular program is supported by eight professors from two of germanys best universities. It's an additional degree to my regular studies, and included courses like "Business Planning", taught by top managers from major communication companies here. I've definitely learned some thing there that will help me later when founding my own company or taking up a job with some management responsibilities.