Originally posted on 2006-04-16. Clarification 2006-04-19: The misfeature discussed below applies to feeds only, as far as I know, not to regular HTML serving. Update 2007-05-06: I have just learned that the option in question is Activate strict RFC2616 RSS-Feed compliance. I have no idea when it was added. While investigating (wearing my hat as the Planet Haskell editor/technician) John Goerzen’s Planet floods, I stumbled on a very strange misfeature in Serendipity. A HTTP/1.1 client can ask a server to send a file over only if the file has been modified since some date. What Serendipity does is send only those entries dated after the provided timestamp. Now, this might seem like a triviality, but it isn’t. The HTTP/1.1 feature is there to make proxy caching work. It is very important for caching that the file sent is the same, regardless whether the request is “since this timestamp”, or a regular request. Serendipity’s behaviour breaks this very important caching invariant! What’s more is that Serendipity’s developers seem rather proud of this misfeature. While the feature this misuse of HTTP/1.1 is intended to create is certainly useful, it should be implemented as a separate mechanism, and not by misusing HTTP/1.1 caching! (A separate protocol is probably necessary, perhaps specifying a URI query syntax for this is enough; obviously, one needs to get the aggregators to support this.) Serendipity will apparently have a configuration option to fix this, but it will be off by default. Serendipity users, upgrade (as soon as it is possible) and mark that option On, to remain compatible with the rest of the Internet.

I can write a program that counts up to 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but apparently that would be illegal, because whoever owns HD-DVD claims they own the number. Perhaps the DMCA has gone too far when numbers are copyrightable?

Ah, beautiful Sunday! This is the first day this week we've had a little peace around the house. It'll all go crazy on Monday, of course, but it's nice to have something like a day off. tags: sunday rest

BarCampMontreal2 I had a great time yesterday at BarCampMontreal2. It was pretty fortunate that my parents are visiting this week, because it meant that both Maj and I could go to the event together. We also had our friend and fellow Wikitraveller Jani Patokallio visiting from Singapore, so we brought him along with us. Jani's a community and technology hacker and he's a lot of fun, too. This was our first event in the new BarCamp venue at the SAT, and it turned out to be a good one. The space is really big, with about 3 huge spaces. We used the back room, which is wide enough for a lot of video displays, to good advantage. The front area became an informal caf and it was really great for personal talks -- isolated from the main presentation area. Damian DiFede gave a great talk about his Ajax-based MUD, Mujax. I think it looks really cool -- I hope he can get the kind of participation and content to make it a more immersive space. I gave the second talk. I'd really wanted to do a talk about The Keiki Project, our upcoming venture, but it was too soon for a real hands-on demo. So I'd planned to do a presentation about RDF and our use of Wikitravel:Turtle RDF on Wikitravel, but I kind of got too busy by the end of the week. So I ended up recycling my talk about Commercialization of Wikis (see Talks/SXSW07), which got a lot of positive feedback. I liked seeing Sylvain Carle's presentation on what he'd learned in Silicon Valley. Sylvain is one of the best presenters at BarCampMontreal -- he's a big goofball who loves his work and communicates that passion with intelligence and sincerity. For example, he themed his talk with songs by Quebec rocker Robert Charlebois. Candid and ingenious. Also great was Hugh McGuire's talk about lessons learned in development of the cool podcasting platform Collectik. His talk came down to one great point: that you have to be able to communicate the purpose of your Web site (or other project) in one sentence. He didn't do that for Collectik, and now he's trying to figure out how to. It's great hearing people talk about their mistakes. Maj gave a great talk about Wikitravel Extra, the new personal-opinion and -experience platform that we've built to complement the objective, consensus information in Wikitravel. I keep forgetting what a good public speaker she is. She did a good job talking about the needs we were trying to fill, and she demo'd the platform (flawlessly). I think she's got a good presentation to take to other conferences now (lucky dog). Another talk I found fascinating was Chris Car's discussion of his past project, MeshCube. The MeshCube is a tiny mesh networking tool that Chris and a partner developed in Hamburg. Chris talked about what worked and what didn't work with that project, showed off some cool hacks (mesh network robots!) and was (like Hugh) open about mistakes. Sitting in the middle of about 8 WiFi networks (in my home office) as I type this, I'm really interested in mesh networking and I was glad to hear from Chris why it doesn't currently work and what can be done to make it work. Probably the most important talk, for me, was Martine Pag 's discussion of what we need to do to bring more women to technology conferences. She did a great, fair overview of the topic, and then opened the floor to discussion. We had a really great, frank talk about -- both men and women -- and a lot of diverse points of view were expressed. I'm really appreciative of Martine opening up this discussion, and I'm glad we're going to be more proactive in the Montreal technical community about being inclusive of the really great women working in technology in this city. There were some other good talks, of course: apenwarr gave a good talk about the new, new way to have a startup; the mysterious and elusive Madame Woo talked about traveling alone; and Australian visitor Moomlyn gave a great description of lucid dreaming. There were good demos of Cake Mail and My Carpool Station. All in all a great set of presentations. I also liked meeting up with some of the people there. Patrick Tanguay gave a great lunchtime standup symposium about the state of Montreal's coworking space and where we're going from here. I also liked talking with Tamu Townsend, who I hadn't met before. Probably my best talk was with Sylvain and Martine about what the boundaries of BarCamp are. Why do we have talks about solo travel, digital photography, and lucid dreaming? Sylvain had a great answer: BarCamp comes out of the hacker ethic: that spirit of curiosity, humor, passion and playfulness that makes working on computers so enjoyable for so many. If someone can communicate that same passion and intellectual captivation with another subject, it's going to go over well at BarCamp, no problem. Well said!

Pros and cons Here are some things I liked and didn't like about BarCampMontreal2. First, things I liked:

• The people. Yet again, meeting up with my favourite technologists in Montreal. Many people I first met at BarCampMontreal1, and it was nice to see how our friendships have developed in the 6 months since then.
• Diversity. I was really glad that there were many more women at this vent than at previous ones. My guess is somewhere around 20-25%, which isn't anywhere near where it should be but a big improvement over the 5-10% we had at BarCampMontreal1. Special props to Hugh, whose invite to women was, I think, pretty helpful. And of course to all the women who took the extra step to show up at a majority-male event.
• The presentations. Almost uniformly really, really good. Some were just excellent.
• Lunch. Simple and easy, didn't get in the way of socializing.
• The Bar. I liked having the bar open at lunch. Having a beer with friends really changes the dynamic of the event; and SAT has a decent selection of brews and friendly barstaff.
• The screens. A-V was great this time around -- good job by SAT on this.
• The space. It was cool having the back room at SAT. It's a really nice place for this kind of event.
• Powerpoint Karaoke. A great idea (people have to give 5-minute presentations based on off-topic slidesets they've never seen before), but I think the scheduling was off. It would have been great to spread these out between other sessions during the day for comic relief, rather than clumped all together at once.

Second, things I wasn't happy about:

• Registration. It was really great being welcomed at BarCampMontreal1, and this was distinctly missing at our second event. We had a pile of nametags on the table by the door, and no other form of greeting. For a space like SAT, this just didn't work. I'm going to volunteer to help out with this step at future events, since it's so important.
• Coffee. I realize I'm a coffeeholic, but it would have been nice to have a coffee table out. It's nice to have on a rainy Saturday, and it gives shy people something to do.
• T-shirts. I think every BarCamp should be an event worthy of a t-shirt. Fred gave out some shirts left over from BarCampMontreal1, but it would have been nice to have new ones for this event, too.
• Tables. I realize they're expensive to rent, but dang, they're really great to have if you've got your laptop and other techno doodads. It changes the event from being a show to being a symposium.
• Schedule timing. The (very important) talk by Martine about women in tech conferences ran far over schedule and wiped a few talks off the board. I think that was a mistake. After it was done, the joke segment of Powerpoint Karaoke started. By the time it was finished, 60% of the audience was gone, even though there were 4 serious talks still to go. We need to do a better job with timing this kind of thing so we keep the energy going through the entire day.
• Too much noise from the caf area. As people drifted off from the main presentation area, the caf filled up, making for lots of loud chatter that drowned out the presentations. We should probably figure out how to fix this problem; it would be nice to stimulate this casual conversation while still being respectful to the speakers. Maybe more breaks (one in the morning and one in the afternoon)?
• <100% participation. It seemed like there were a lot of spectators this time around, which drags down the participative nature of the event. I think that asking registrants how they're going to participate when they come to the door is a great way to gently remind people that they're expected to be involved (we do this for Burning Man events sometimes). I think Powerpoint Karaoke and other exercises would be a great way to get better hands-on participation by people who didn't prepare talks. (I hope that MadameWoo does a talk in the future about how to do an ad-hoc talk at BarCamp.)

My net feeling about the event was extremely positive, and I'm making these notes not to criticize anyone but to remind myself to do something about them for the next BarCampMontreal. I think that we can continuously improve this event to be inclusive, stimulating, fun and exciting, and I hope we keep this great barcamp spirit going in this city for a long time. tags: barcampmontreal2 barcampmontreal barcamp

Since some days I’m trying to install windows into a domU just for fun. All went fine until accessing discs. Sometime partition is not formatable, sometimes files could not read from cdrom. To be sure, it’s not the disc image, I used a fresh one from a MSDN Subscription, but it didn’t help. Searching around on web, I found that I’m not the only one, with this issue. The common(s) seems to be etch (and AMD CPU). I found traces of the issue at SP Team Blog, xen-users and xen-forum (german). Maybe anybody can enlighten me? Debian, opensource, planet, xen

Today the RIPE DNS for LIRs Training Course did take place. (some not up to date course material can be found here)
Managing some thousands of zones inclusive nameserver infrastructure behind since several years, I thought it would be neat to provide a secure dns chain to our costumers.
After going deeper into the material within the course, I recognized the following impacts:

• only bind9 (>= 9.3) and NSD privides support (yet)
• bandwidth will be increased 2-3 times with max. key size
• increased memory usage depending on your server software
• operational costs will increasing dramaticaly due significant higher amount of regular work
• more computing power (hardware) needed to generate dnssec ready zones and signing
• unknown influence on resolving nameservers (load/memory/bandwidth)
• chain of trust ends at resolving nameserver and is not provided to enduser

Since the last issue isn’t solved (yet), it doesn’t make any sence for me to invest resources into setting up DNSSec infrastructur, cause the end user would not recognize if the communication with the resolving nameserver or the resolving nameserver itself is taken over. Any complaints and/or hint? Did I missed something? Networking, planet, ripe, security

Today I received a letter from the tax office urging me to pay an amount which they claimed was past due. Looking in my records, I found that I had payed this back in January. To make a bureaucratic story short, it turns out that I was a "too fast payer" (their words): I paid it right the day when I got the invoice, which was too fast for their system to process it. The amount was automatically refunded to me by the system, that just could not understand why I transfered money to them, even though it did manage to send me an invoice the day before. Now I have to file an official appeal to get a whopping 11 euros in costs of late payment refunded. Another life lesson learned: delaying saves trouble.

Last weekend I got a hardware donation from muempf. It’s a new 1U server with the following specs:

Supermicro P8SCi Systemboard
Intel P4 3.00GHz
2x 512 MB DDR2 533MHz unbuffered ECC Systemmemory
2x 160 GB SATA disk (ST3160812AS)
2x GE Networkcard (BCM95721)
Console Redirection

I ordered additional 2x 1024 MB DDR2 533MHz modules and replaced an old server with this new system.
The system was installed on a Software Raid(1). The system migration was smooth, except problems getting the NICs up and running. They was recognized as eth2 and eth3 (10 MBit and no link). After hours searching around, I was guessing the problem is anywhere related to udev. Daniel told me to wipe ‘/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules’ nearly at the same time I saw, this was the only file with different size in ‘/etc/udev/’ compared to a working (etch) system on this hardware. Removing the file did the trick. As the system is running now very well, sincere thanks are given to muempf! Debian, planet

... I would appreciate that (any *init maintainers going to DebConf?) - but I won't be around. I missed the DebConf sponsorship deadline (which was end of January; since I'm currently devoted to getting my diploma done, I don't have an income, so sponsorship would be good); and even now (they're currently asking for reconfirmation) I don't plan that far ahead. I have no idea what the state of my diploma thesis will be back then in June. Probably not yet stressful, but I just don't know. So I can't commit to DebConf.A pity, I'd really like to go to a DebConf again, the last (and only) one I was at was in Oslo in 2003. I don't think we needed to sign up that early back then; the school building we could sleep in (and use the showers) was fine with me.And of course I'd also love to contribute some swing dancing 'course' to the social dancing event...

If you use grep-dctrl, sort-dctrl or tbl-dctrl, I’d like to see your use cases! I’m building a system test automaton for dctrl-tools, and I’d like to include as much real-world examples as possible so that any regressions get found before uploading. You can send example command lines (and preferably also a test file, unless it’s one of the standard Debian files like Packages) to me by email at <ajk@debian.org>, as a wishlist bug report against dctrl-tools or by a Darcs patch against the experimental repository (see instructions).

Following up on last year's report, this is what I managed 06/07:

	2005/06	2006/07
number of (partial) days	25	16
Damüls	10	10
Diedamskopf	15	3
Warth/Schröcken	0	3
total meters of altitude	124634	74096
highscore	10247m	8321m
# of runs	309	189

We simply had too little snow this year, the initial three visits (6th and 28th of January, 18th of February) did not feature a lot of natural snow but loads of people and were cut absurdely short (less than two hours of riding) due to the lack of fun. The real season started only in the middle of March and I have make the most of it. - The best thing is that I did not hurt myself this year. :-) Have a nice summer.

Note: This article is part of my Testing stuff with QEMU series.

From Wikipedia:

MenuetOS is an operating system with a monolithic preemptive, real-time kernel, including video drivers, all written in FASM assembly language, for 64-bit and 32-bit x86 architecture computers, by Ville Mikael Turjanmaa. MenuetOS development has focused on fast, simple, efficient implementation. It has a graphical desktop, games, and networking abilities (TCP/IP stack), yet still fits on one 1.44MB floppy disk. It also facilitates easy, full-featured assembly language programming. This stands in marked contrast to the (as of 2007) widespread view that assembly languages are useful mainly for old and embedded systems.

Testing (the GPL'd) MenuetOS in QEMU is easy:

wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/menuet/M32-084.ZIP
unzip M32-084.ZIP
qemu -fda M32-084.IMG -m 384
There's also Menuet 64, written in 64-bit assembly, but that's not open source'd for some strange reason I don't understand. But you can try that one, too (the binary images, that is), using QEMU:

wget 'http://www.menuetos.be/download.php?CurrentMenuetOS'
unzip M64-059.ZIP\?3.1
qemu-system-x86_64 -fda M64-059.IMG


Just uploaded to Debian experimental. New features: grep-dctrl -I, tbl-dctrl -H

At http://tanso.net/selinux/ Jan-Frode Myklebust has documented his work in creating new SE Linux policy to run Googleearth on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. He discussed this with us on #selinux in irc.freenode.net (the main SE Linux IRC channel).

One of his later IRC comments was:
btw erich, the reason for creating this googleearth module was mostly triggered by your apparmor blog entry.. I wanted to see how much more difficult it would be to create policies in selinux compared to apparmor, and must say it wasn't too hard.

"erich" refers to Erich Schubert. His AppArmor blog entry is currently the top entry in his SE Linux list.

I’ve been reading Baen’s collections of Christopher Anvil’s classic sf stories. In general, I’ve found them excellent; I thoroughly enjoyed the Free Library book Interstellar Patrol; and I’ve enjoyed all the stories of Interstellar Patrol II: The Federation of Humanity that I’ve read so far – with the exception of one. I agree completely with Alex Kasman of MathFiction: In my opinion, this story is slanderous and the author should be ashamed. I have very little to add to his review, and I won’t repeat his points here. I recommend reading the whole of Kasman’s review. On my first reading I totally missed that Dr. Phipps had been identified as a mathematician; I couldn’t believe my eyes when I went back and checked. A mathematician of the future, who is that ignorant of elemental set theory? The stuff is hammered down the throat of every mathematics freshman everywhere. It might be possible to graduate with that sort of ignorance, and I might accept it from a scientist who is not a mathematician, but to get a maths doctorate? No way. Fine, so we suspend disbelief on that point. The good Doctor is a professional imbecile. When he uses his faulty understanding of Cantor’s Theorem to suggest a plan of attack against the bad guys, I expected it to fail, naturally. I expected the bad guys to somehow diagonalize themselves additional warships, and so prove that their number is actually uncountable, when the good guys have just a countably infinite set of ships. But did we get this? No. Go read Kasman’s review, and the Anvil reissues. But by heavens, if you are educated in higher maths, skip Cantor’s War.

I used to be a hardcore daily bike commuter. (By “hardcore,” I mean I commuted 20-30 miles roundtrip every day in Chicago in January.) Lately, I’ve gotten lazy, especially since I now live about thirty seconds by foot from a train station that takes me to a spot about thirty seconds by foot from my job. Also, since I’m now supporting two people (including my nearly two-year-old daughter), I’m a little more reluctant to get myself killed. I was reminded of the perils of biking in Boston this afternoon when a 22-year old bicyclist was killed by a dump truck in an area where I used to ride daily:

The bicyclist, a 22-year-old man from Halifax, was riding between two lanes of traffic on Huntington Avenue when he was clipped by a taxicab near Northeastern University at about 2:30 p.m., police said. After being clipped by the cab, the bicyclist was run over by a McCauley and Sons Co. dump truck, police said.

When I was a bike commuter, I was fairly cavalier about this sort of incident. I realize it’s still fairly rare and biking may not be any more dangerous than driving. But we still see these events in Boston fairly regularly. I don’t think it can be fixed fully by better driver education/behavior (or better bicyclist education/behavior). There are just too many streets that are poorly designed and naturally hazardous. On a related note, Nat mentioned this nasty run-in during a recent Critical Mass in San Francisco (the article is obviously from the driver’s point of view — there may be another angle on this):

Susan Ferrando, her husband, their two children and three preteens had come to San Francisco from Redwood City to celebrate the birthday of Ferrando’s 11-year-old daughter. They went to Japantown, where they enjoyed shopping and taking in the blooming cherry blossoms. Things took a turn for the worse at about 9 p.m., when the family was leaving Japantown — just as the party of about 3,000 bikers was winding down its monthly red-lights-be-damned ride through the city. Suddenly, Ferrando said, her car was surrounded by hundreds of cyclists. Not being from San Francisco, Ferrando thought she might have inadvertently crossed paths with a bicycle race and couldn’t figure out why the police, who she had just passed, hadn’t warned her. Confusion, however, quickly turned to terror, she said, when the swarming cyclists began wildly circling around and then running into the sides of her Toyota van. Filled with panic, Ferrando said, she started inching forward until coming to a stop at Post and Gough streets, where she was surrounded by bikers on all sides. A biker in front blocked her as another biker began pounding on the windshield. Another was pounding on her window. Another pounded the other side. “It seemed like they were using their bikes as weapons,” Ferrando said. One of the bikers then threw his bike — shattering the rear window and terrifying the young girls inside. All the while, Ferrando was screaming, “There are children in this car! There are children in this car!” …

Update 4/5/2007: the 22-year-old bicyclist had a myspace page.

The xend config looks like this:

playground:~# grep -v ^# /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp
(network-script ‘network-bridge netdev=dummy0′)
(vif-script vif-bridge)
(dom0-min-mem 196)
(dom0-cpus 0) Creating volume group for Xen domU (/dev/hdb2 was allready created with id 8e):

playground:~# pvcreate /dev/hdb2
Physical volume “/dev/hdb2″ successfully created
playground:~# vgcreate xen-vol /dev/hdb2
Volume group “xen-vol” successfully created
playground:~# vgscan
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while…
Found volume group “xen-vol” using metadata type lvm2 Creating first domU:

playground:~# xen-create-image –ip 192.168.222.50 –hostname xetch.blubb.cyconet.org
General Infomation
——————–
Hostname : xetch.blubb.cyconet.org
Distribution : etch
Fileystem Type : ext3
Size Information
—————-
Image size : 4Gb
Swap size : 1024Mb
Image type : full
Memory size : 128Mb
Kernel path : /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686
Initrd path : /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686
Networking Information
———————-
IP Address 1 : 192.168.222.50
Netmask : 255.255.255.0
Gateway : 192.168.222.1
Creating ext3 filesystem on /dev/xen-vol/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org-disk
Done
Installing your system with debootstrap mirror ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/
Done
Running hooks
Done
No role script specified. Skipping
Creating Xen configuration file
Done
Setting up root password
Enter new UNIX password:
etype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
All done
Logfile produced at:
/var/log/xen-tools/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.log Add the following to /etc/network/interfaces:

auto dummy0
iface dummy0 inet static
address 192.168.222.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.222.0
broadcast 192.168.222.255 Bringing up network interface, restarting xen and starting the domU:

playground:~# ifup dummy0
playground:~# /etc/init.d/xendomains stop
playground:~# /etc/init.d/xend restart
playground:~# /etc/init.d/xendomains start
playground:~# xm create xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg -c
Using config file “/etc/xen/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg”.
… If you want to autostart your domUs, you have to symlink the configfile to /etc/xen/auto:

playground:~# mkdir /etc/xen/auto/
playground:~# ln -s /etc/xen/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg /etc/xen/auto/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg Debian, Linux, opensource, planet, xen

Charlie Stross: Why the commercial ebook market is broken

In the pre-internet dark age, there was a subculture of folks who would get their hands on books and pass them around and encourage people to read them for free, rather than buying their own copies. Much like today’s ebook pirates, in terms of the what they did (with one or two minor differences). There was a closely-related subculture who would actually sell copies of books without paying the authors a penny in royalties, too. We have a technical term for such people: we call them “librarians” and “second-hand bookstore owners”.

Today I thought it’s time to look deeper into the Xen hype. So I decided to install xen on etch. I followed Ganneffs recommandation

playground:~# aptitude install bridge-utils iproute \
xen-ioemu-3.0.3-1 xen-utils-3.0.3-1\
xen-linux-system-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686 libc6-xen Booting the dom0 leeds me into kernel panic, cause no root device was found. Hmm … there seems to be the driver missing. Right - there wasn’t any /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686.
Waldi did hint me to /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686.postinst and I got my ramdisk this way:

playground:~# update-initramfs -c -t -k \
2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686
playground:~# command -v update-grub > \
/dev/null && update-grub After booting dom0 successfully, my serial console disappeared. After some digging around, I got the clue I need to tell xen, that there is one.
I modified /boot/grub/menu.lst:

# xenhopt=com1=115200,8n1 console=com1
..
# xenkopt=console=vga Dom0 is running now, lets see what we can do next, maybe:

playground:~# aptitude install xen-tools Debian, Linux, opensource, planet, xen

• My “travel” talk suggestion is accepted for Debian Day at Debconf7. See you there!
• How many DDs eat 150 emails for breakfast? Some people on this HTML WG are hilarious.
• Wordpress should be in etch. Thanks for everyone’s input on this.
• The Debian live based Webconverger “browser live system” is BETA! See about Webconverger for more information.
• My Cornwall house sitting days are over and now I need to find a (hopefully debian) contract (my CV) so I can one day afford more travel adventures.

There were quite a lot of small changes in my personal e-mail, web server and DNS infrastructure during the last months. While for more than ten years all my mails came together on a Linux account at the Students Representatives of Computer Science (German: Fachschaftsrat Informatik, short: FS Info) at the University of Saarland and all but one domain was hosted at my former employer, now nearly everything (including this blog) has moved to a Hetzner root server run by me and some friends and running Debian Sarge for AMD64. Most of these moves happend divided in small steps during January and February this year. Only one move happend a little earlier than expected: Without any notice all external mail to my FS Info account got lost in a black hole one hop in front of the FS Info mail server. It looks like the RBG of the Dept. of CS at the University of Saarland didn’t like my face —eh— mails anymore and just dropped them. No bounces, no notices. Not that I knew them as friendly and kind, but blackholing active e-mail accounts without notice leads to dismissal at other places. They should really go and hear alphascorpii’s BOFH talk. So my long-time e-mail address abe@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de is no more valid and any mail there won’t get read or answered. But I don’t mind if you send any junk there, it’s not my job anymore. For luck the hoster of my deuxchevaux.org domain, Internett, which I used for all non-university e-mail, changed the forward within a good hour, so I only lost incoming mails of about one and a half day (which was the time until I noticed the blackholing), namely most mails written to all of my addresses at 30th and 31st of January 2007. If you wrote me around that time and miss the answers, you now know why. The few people I expected mail from, already have been contacted. So for the future, write emails only to abe@ either deuxchevaux.org or — if you can’t remember how to spell that (no, you’re not the only one ;-) — noone.org (“no one” as in “nobody”, not “no. one” as in “the best” ;-) And so since then none of my coworkers can make fun of me because I don’t have root on the box where my mail is received. ;-) One of the moves also gave me the possibility to get “my own” Jabber server, so the time with those two jabber addresses (abe@jabber.noxa.de and abe@amessage.de), where usually at least one had some problems with some gateways are also over. If you want to contact me using Jabber, use abe@noone.org, equal to my easier to remember e-mail address. ;-) So there’s still left to move: web, mail and DNS of deuxchevaux.org and beckert.at (domain of my parents) and my old web pages on fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de as well as Planet Symlink. And of course the redesign of my web pages, which I’ve planned since more than a half decade… ;-) The infrastructure in my real-life home also changed: My gateway to the world is now a 266 MHz MIPS based ASUS WL500g Premium (which I named “pluriel” after the multifunctional Citroën C3 Pluriel) running FreeWRT 1.0.1 which replaced tryane, an as noisy (power supply fan) as compact Unisys Aquanta CP mini-desktop with a passively cooled 200 MHz Pentium MMX.