Search Results: "will"

22 March 2006

Simon Richter: Chaos

Yesterday was pure chaos. Today will be no better, I fear. I shall now enjoy the few minutes of peace on the tube, where there is no cell phone reception, listening to Faithless. After that, I will close my eyes and dive into it.

Gustavo Franco: open for business

Well, it's my first attempt to write a blog with Debian related content. Let me see if i can bring on this thing more readers than haters.

Jacobo Barreiro, told us on his blog that Ubuntu sounds like "O Ponto" (The Point in english) in portuguese. As he said about Brazilians in the end of his post (and i'm one), i disagree. Ubuntu sounds like "O buntu" or "The buntu" (weird, no?). It took me some minutes of research asking people to say the word. He's right about his others portuguese references, specially in the Fedora one. Yes, it's really Stench with 'a' appended.

Closing my first post, i would like to announce that i will prepare better content than it. I'm doing and talking with too many people to keep this buried somewhere.

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Ed Felten on Network Discrimination

Ed Felten is writing an excellent series of series of blog entries on network discrimination (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), focusing on the nuts and bolts of how Internet Service Providers can (and do) discriminate between network traffic they like for various reasons (commercial, legal, etc.), and network traffic they do not like. Today’s entry focuses on encryption. Felten points out something that had never occurred to me: even if the user encrypts network traffic so that the ISP can’t see what he’s doing (or even tell the traffic in question apart from the standard website traffic), the ISP can still implement methods that selectively prefer certain types of traffic over others:

But the ISP may have a different and more effective strategy. If the ISP wants to hamper a particular application, and there is a way to manipulate the user’s traffic that affects that application much more than it does other applications, then the ISP has a way to punish the targeted application. Recall my previous discussion of how VoIP is especially sensitive to jitter (unpredictable changes in delay), but most other applications can tolerate jitter without much trouble. If the ISP imposes jitter on all of the user.s packets, the result will be a big problem for VoIP apps, but not much impact on other apps. So it turns out that even using a VPN, and encrypting everything in sight, isn’t necessarily enough to shield a user from network discrimination. Discrimination can work in subtle ways.

Martin F. Krafft: Myanmar or not?

It all started with about 15 kilogrammes of children's clothing... wait, let's try again: It all started last year on my trip to Laos, about 14 hours walk from Luang Phrabang (the tourist capital). We were guests to a community somewhere up in the hills north of the city, where the children either wore some threads (it couldn't be called clothes anymore) or nothing at all. I felt pity, especially because people from those areas freeze very easily, since it's always hot there. I decided to come back. So when my girlfriend's mother, who runs a second-hand clothing store for children offered I'd take some before she clears out last year's "collection", I gladly did, even though I didn't have any concrete plans yet -- plans, yes, but no concrete ones. So with the clothes in my flat, I felt obligated to do something and finally ended up booking my trip to South-East Asia. Well, Bangkok, from there it's all do-as-you-go. It turns out that by rare circumstances, my girlfriend will be accompanying me for two of the five weeks I have set aside. The rest I am alone. And I wanted to go to Myanmar [0], which is the last of the countries on the South-East Asian mainland I haven't yet visited. But just today, I called the German Department for Foreign Affairs and was informed that Myanmar is fighting with bomb attacks in the cities and avian flu outside -- aside from the internal frictions caused in large by the ruling militia. Anyway, I am less afraid of the flu than of bombs, which are a risk -- however low -- that I won't take because I don't have any influence or control. So I am reconsidering (and I would love to hear any advice you may have). There are, of course, plenty of alternatives: for instance, the circle Chiang Mai, Laos, Hanoi, Hue, Saigon, and back. The clothes will be welcome (and needed) mostly anywhere, and I have at least some experience with the other countries. I doubt I will actually go back to Luang Phrabang because the only sensible way to do so is by spending two days on the boat from Chiang Khong, or flying in to Vientiane. I don't want to do that boat ride again, and I don't have money to burn either (despite flights being rather cheap over there). Anyway, my intention is not to travel and be a tourist, but instead to teach computers. I've done this before and noticed the need, and it's really not hard to get a bunch of interested kids into an Internet cafe, which you "rent" for the day for $20. I don't speak any of the languages there, and few speak English, but it's surprising how little speech is needed (maybe that's Bhuddism?). Sounds like Hanoi or Saigon will be the best places for that. Phnom Penh (in Cambodia) also has me interested. My flight's on the 4th of April, and I shall not return until the 5th of May, although the return date is flexible. I am excited, but also feel somewhat weird. Last year, I took a full turn in my life but have since been disabled. Now that I am regaining control over my body, but at the same time wondering whether a Ph.D. is what I want (I could just do Debian without the academic appendix, and probably earn money more effectively), I am burning to actually dive into the matter to be able to finally answer that question. The trip to South-East Asia just pushes this further out into the future. Some of you may wonder why I am even daring to bother with such petty concerns -- after all, they aren't really existential, more like luxury (compared to some previous troubles in my life). Well, I don't have an answer. I feel weird about it all, and it's been weird to be disabled for the better part of that last half a year, just after quitting my previous job. At least I am maintaining my optimism.

[0]

Moray Allen (of the Debian project) was actually the first to give me a good reason (in Brussels) to call Myanmar Burma instead/again -- it seemed backwards before. But apparently, Myanmar was the name chosen by the militia in control, which is undoubtedly not to be supported. Burma has the negative taste of Britain to it -- negative only in the light of the tourist boycott Tony Blair called out last year. I will stick with Myanmar as do most other sources.

21 March 2006

Joey Hess: Birthday plans

Looks like I will be celebrating my 30th in Spain. I arrive in Madrid on my b-day. Oddly the only presents I want are also only apparently only available for shipping to Europe, so that works out pretty well, in theory:

This is a pretty good kite design, my only other one in this design is fanny pack sized and works pretty well. If you ever wondered how to make my happy with just 2 euros, this is how.

Er, that was my idea, so it's only fair..

Axel Beckert: RIP CitroNews

CitroNews has closed its doors since there were no news for over two years. I liked the idea but it seemed to have neither that much readers nor many submitters. And since I’m not really that active in the Citro n or 2CV scene anymore, I seldom had something to send in. Update, 20:37h: And no, this does not mean that I’ve sold or will sell any of my 2CVs. I just was on no 2CV meeting for IIRC nearly a year now. Too many Open Source events out there… ;-)

Ross Burton: Go Rowan Go

Vicky and myself have said this before, but I'll say it again. For the top man in the Church of England, the current Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is surprisingly moderate, progressive and possibly even cool (via The Guardian):

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has stepped into the controversy between religious fundamentalists and scientists by saying that he does not believe that creationism - the Bible-based account of the origins of the world - should be taught in schools. … Dr Williams spoke of his determination to hold the third-largest Christian denomination together in its row over the place of gay clergy. He was also highly critical of parts of the church in Africa and said he did not wish to be seen as "comic vicar to the nation", speaking out on issues where he can make no difference.

Ross Burton: WinXP Madness

Recently I had to reboot my laptop into Windows so that Vicky could use iTunes. After a few minutes, this little dialog popped up. Windows XP restart dialog

Some automatic updates had been downloaded once I'd logged in, and I now had to restart. The day before I had a similar dialog which had disabled the Restart Later but didn't have a countdown, so I moved the dialog to the side and carried on (luckily it wasn't system modal). However a five minute timer is just amazingly bad: did installing the security fix break the system so much that it has to be rebooted now, and applications will start to crash and die shortly? NP: Maxinquaye, Tricky

MJ Ray: The DPL Debate 2006: The krooger effect

While discussing the debate with another DD, I noticed something interesting. While Ted Walther goes in too hard and too heavy in part III of the debate (lines 600 on in the log), two of his targets demand evidence rather than answer his questions. One example was Jeroen van Wolffelaar responding to Ted Walther's questions like "do you think that trying to kick people out of the project because you don't like their religious views is something to sweep under the carpet?" with the answer "can you prove one quote where I'm discriminating based on religion?" Why do that? It's usual to ask for evidence when one is undecided, but how could he be undecided about whether he discriminates based on religion? Why not reject that suggestion too? Some will assume the target(s) are avoiding or ignoring the question because they're undecided whether they need to confess yet, but don't want to lie. However, I decided I think Jeroen is ignorant or careless, rather than bigoted. At least he gave some answer, unlike several others. The other notable evader IMO was Steve McIntyre about debian commercial activity and DUS's tax registration (presumably based on the -project and/or -uk list traffic from the last year) but I'm a bit too close to that for it to change my vote. Even those who rank Ted Walther low should admit that he asked some of the trickiest questions in part III and mixed it up a bit.

20 March 2006

Matthew Palmer: The Curse of the Podcast

Over the past week or so, I've decided to get around to listening to some of the "amateur" (in the same way that Open Source software is "amateur") podcasts that I've collected in the past couple of months (primarily so I can either archive them, or delete them and free up a bit of HDD space). As a great fan of radio, I've been pretty disappointed at the quality of the podcasts I've listened to. While I hadn't expected the BBC world service, there are a number of quite common mistakes I've noticed across several of the podcasts I've listened to. In the spirit of kaizen, I've noted down the really bad things that I've noticed, in the hope that someone who does a podcast, or is considering doing a podcast, might keep these simple mistakes in the back of their mind and avoid them. No podcast I've listened to so far has exhibited all of these symptoms (there's no way I would have gotten to the end of that hypothetical nightmare audio file) but most have exhibited at least one of these flaws. For a better general idea of how a good podcast might sound, listen to professional radio for a bit -- a lot of good shows are podcast themselves these days -- and get an idea of what a good show looks like. I'm also prepared to go further than just bitching about podcasts. If you do a podcast, and would like my (unprofessional but oh-so-opinionated) assessment of your podcast, please e-mail me at mpalmer@hezmatt.org with a link to your podcast, and I'll try to give it a listen and honest critique.

Ad-libbing is a sometimes thing. I think I'm quite good at it (I gave my wedding thankyou speech unscripted and unrehearsed, and survived, so I can't be that bad) but I'd never consider doing a podcast without a script. In a podcast, all you have are your words, so if you're searching for words, or mangling them, it all falls apart. The downside to scripting is that you can end up reading your script in a monotone, without any life at all. I think practice with your script can probably improve that, but see the last point below.
Waffle sucks. I'd say that scripting can help here, but if your script is full of waffle too, then you're SOL. Brutal editing is the only cure. The worst part here is that, since most people silently read faster than they speak, what looks fine on paper turns into something amazingly long and boring when read.
Avoid meta-podcasts -- that is, don't talk about your podcast in your podcast. Something like "we're always looking for new content, see for more info" is bearable, but when 8 minutes of a 30 minute podcast is taken up with talking about the podcast wiki, mailing list, forum, ouija board, and so on, know that you're killing your audience.
You do actually need content. Things that somebody out there is going to care about. A regular podcast is a brutal thing to commit to, and sticking to it must be hard at the best of times, but if you've got nothing interesting to say, don't record it, just have a short or missing show. We all know what filler sounds like -- you're not fooling anyone.
Uhm is your mortal enemy. Not so much the occasional quick 'uhh' in the middle of a sentence, but I've heard "Uhmmmmmmm"s that went for at least 5 seconds. If you're that stumped for something to say, you need more scripting or editing.
"Funny" voicing can be really distracting. Having a bit of life in your voice is great, but going completely off the charts only works for Robin Williams (and even then it's not a surefire hit).
Whilst talking faster than a chipmunk on speed isn't a great way to run a podcast, you can easily fall into the trap of going too far the other way, and... talking... like... your... jaw... is... stuck... in... chilled... molasses...
Why in the name of $DEITY are you reading out a long command line in a podcast? Sure, without the help of something like Annodex it's tricky to do commands and links the way you're supposed to (as text, dammit), but please do try. If your podcast is example-heavy, either consider dropping the podcast angle, or at the very least, provide an annotated transcript or "companion guide".
You are allowed to do multiple takes of your podcast. Really. Read in small sections, and then stitch it together. Listen and retake a bunch of times until it sounds reasonable. (Aside: my one appearance in a podcast to date was about 15 minutes of recorded audio, before final editing. It took me about 7 hours to do -- admittedly, that included learning how to drive Audacity and do my editing, but I'd say I had at least 2 hours of mic time in there.)
Some people just weren't cut out for "radio". You may be unable to stop your voice sounding like Lurch, or you get the giggles, or just can't think of interesting things to say "on air" -- whatever the problem is, you may just have to accept that you're better behind a keyboard than a mic. There's nothing wrong with that, but please be self-aware enough to realise it. No podcast I've yet listened to has been "kill it, now!" bad, but since I've only been listening to personal recommendations, I figure I'm mostly listening to the better class of podcast out there, and there's plenty of "give it up, please" podcasts out there.

Jordi Mallach: GNOME 2.14 for Debian

The observant eyes will have noticed a few interesting uploads hitting unstable or incoming in the last few days. GNOME 2.14 is being uploaded to unstable in small chunks, in an attempt to let the buildd's do the compiling in a given order, so things can get sorted out in all architectures at the same time. The libraries will take a few days to get in, and once most of them are in place, you can expect more mass uploads of end-user applications of the GNOME 2.14 suite. As this time no big or complicated dependencies were introduced in the release, and there are no soname changes involved, it was easier to avoid the previous, and sometimes annoying experimental uploads.

Martin F. Krafft: The Winner Takes It All

Sometimes I am in a whistling mood. So today as I was running some errands [1], I whistled Abba's "The Winner Takes It All". Some kids stepped up to me and asked what kind of crap I was whistling and whether I was gay, Abba is "out" and "sucks anyway". They did not appreciate when I asked why they even recognise it then. :) WTF? Sure, Abba is not everyone's thing, but "The Winner Takes It All" is an all-time, very beautiful hymn which will never die. Unlike the crap aired on the radio these days.

[1]	My iron broke and I need my shirts ironed for a conference next week. Switzerland is bloody expensive: 4 per shirt, and that's just ironing.

In related news: After a very Cure-centric last week, I find myself totally digging Pulp now; I've been listening to the seven albums I have pretty much since Sunday morning. "Masters of the Universe" must be my favourite so far.

Joey Hess: codewiki

Taking an idea from AJ, I've set up my own codewiki. I'll use this to collect info about software projects I'm working on, and since I'm lazy, it will also serve as the main web site for many of them. I've already moved many stub web sites for software over to there, and now moreutils has a web site there, and I finally have a place to document some of the useful tools in my ~/bin. Of course it's powered by ikiwiki, which is nearly ready for a release.

Jacobo Tarrío Barreiro: The curse of Galician-Portuguese words

Many Linux distributions suffer the curse of the Galician-Portuguese words. This means that many of such distributions have names which look or sound like (or are) Galician and/or Portuguese words. For example, “Ubuntu” sounds, in Portuguese, like “O Ponto”, which means “The Point”. “Debian” means, in Galician, “They Should” or “They Owed”. “Centos” means “Hundreds” (and reminds Galician speakers of “Centolos”, “Spider Crabs”). “Fedora” looks like “Fedor”, which means “Stench”. “Nexenta” looks like the Galician word “Noxenta”, which means “Disgusting”. AFAIK, “Red Hat”, “Slackware”, “Caldera OpenLinux”, “SuSE”, “Mandrake” (sorry, “Mandriva”) and “Yggdrasil” mean nothing in Galician or Portuguese, but I’m sure that, given enough beer, somebody will be able to think of something. (As a speaker of Galician, I can offer my services as a naming consultant. My fees may look expensive, but think of the advantages of not having millions of Brazilians laugh at your distribution’s name!)

19 March 2006

David Pashley: Atom feed and Planet Debian

I upgraded my atom feed to atom 1.0 during the week. This appears to have broken my entries on Planet Debian. If anyone has any ideas on what I can do to make planet like me with a valid atom 1.0 feed, please let me know. Update: I've changed my feed from having html content to xhtml, which isn't encoded. Hopefully Planet will like this. If not I'll have to fix it in the morning.

Raphaël Hertzog: My favorite candidates

So the DPL vote just started and I crafted my ballot. So it’s my turn to give you my opinion on the various candidates. Here’s my top 3 by order of preference:

Jeroen van Wolffelaar
I had the occasion to work with Jeroen due to our common involvement in Debian-QA and his work on the PTS. He’s only Debian Developer since 2004 but he’s the proof that you can get involved in core teams if you’re willing to work. His commitment to Debian is impressive. He’s also a strong proponent of the DPL team concept, and he managed to gather a well-balanced team. With some changes to the DPL team concept, this can make a big difference this year. Yes, I hope to be able to serve the project as a member of his team.
Steve McIntyre
I worked with Steve on numerous occasions due to our common involvement in debian-cd. He’s very moderate, appreciated by many people and could be very effective in mediating internal conflicts since he’s not involved in any core team. I look forward working with him, his platform is very attractive.
Anthony Towns
Anthony has been doing a great job for a long time, and I really appreciate his efforts to communicate what he does. I like his idea to bring momentum to the project… and he proposed the last general resolution to bring us to a conclusion on the GFDL problem. That’s the kind of initiative that I’m also expecting from a leader. His strong opinions do not suit everybody but at least he’s trying new ideas.

All the other candidates are well-intentionned (except one) but they do no match all my (fuzzy) criterion for a good DPL.

Raphaël Hertzog: Revisiting the DPL team concept

I have not been very much involved in this year DPL campaigning, but I’m part of two DPL teams, thus I feel the need to give my point of view on the subject. I’m not really satisfied by how the current DPL team worked out, and being on the DPL candidate team of both Jeroen and Andreas gave me the opportunity to gather information on what really happened. Also I’ve met Bdale yesterday and he gave me his opinion as well (and I really enjoyed that dinner. Thanks bdale!). Just for the record, I’ll try to sum up what really happened: Branden had agreed to be a participant of the DPL team concept, but wasn’t a major proponent of the idea. This, combined with his personal problems, explains why he didn’t make use of the full potential of a DPL team. Does it invalidate the DPL team concept? No, I don’t think so because the concept will evolve this year. Let’s see how it can change. Both DPL teams would this year receive all the mails sent to leader@debian.org. This means that the members are involved from the beginning and not only on request of the leader, which means that they can pro-actively take over if they see that the DPL doesn’t manage to follow up up to its expectations (which hopefully won’t be needed this year). Furthermore I expect that the team would be informed of what the DPL does, so that the team can give its opinion on everything done, and prevent big errors (nobody is perfect, errors do happen). But the most important thing is that the team should not stand behind the DPL, but next to him taking initiatives, and I expect the DPL to work with the team members for the best of Debian. As such I expect the DPL to accept most of the proposals of his team if there’s a consensus on it, even if he doesn’t personnaly think that’s it’s a priority for his DPL mandate. If I am part of an elected DPL team, I will work on that basis. I do have many ideas to try, and will make proposals. I ran once for the DPL election, and if you check my platform, you can see that I always had ideas for Debian and you can see that I worked on several of them which are nowadays very common (such as the PTS, alioth, collaborative maintenance). I won’t miss an opportunity to get the project moving forward.

Wouter Verhelst: Kerberos

I had nothing important to do this weekend, so I played a bit with kerberos. Pretty fun, that, and the Debian packages make it all so easy. First, when setting up Kerberos, you should note that there are two competing implementations: one is heimdal, the other is the MIT reference implementation. The former has some additional features (like storing principals in LDAP rather than plain files), but I found that krb5 was useful enough to me, so I didn't investigate further. Also, storing principals in LDAP isn't as useful as it sounds—kerberos is designed to make password replication unnecessary, so you want to store it on a machine with little or (preferably) no other jobs to do. You certainly do not want to store it in a server which will put it out to the world for all to see. Anyway. It's pretty well documented in info krb5-install (in the krb5-doc package); and the Debian packages let you do most of the setup through maintainer scripts and debconf questions, except for creating a new realm, which you do through a provided script. ... and this means that setting up kerberos on Debian is peanuts. Really. You need (at least) one KDC, which you do by installing the krb5-kdc package. For exactly one KDC (which will be your master KDC) you also need the admin daemon; you can get that one by installing krb5-admin-server. Then on the hosts in your network, you want to install krb5-utils, and libpam-krb5.so for authentication. After configuring them (as explained in the krb5-install document), you have a live kerberos system. It takes you about five minutes to do the initial setup (once you understand how the system works), and about 10 seconds to add a host to the system. Of course, doing kerberos setup is useless if all you want is to be able to log on to one system. But if you have more systems, you might want to use, e.g., the Kerberos support that is in OpenSSH, which you can do by adding the following two lines to both /etc/ssh/sshd_config and /etc/ssh/ssh_config (though obviously not on the same hosts:

KerberosAuthentication yes
GSSAPIAuthentication yes

... and with that, you'll have a kerberized setup. Fun.

Christian Perrier: i18n in Ubuntu and Debian

I would really wish that I could travel around the world and do evangelization about i18n just like Jordi, Daffyd and Michael have been able to do. Of course, this is a known difference between a development model where people are paid to work on development and a completely volunteer development model. However, I really hope that all the good things that will be done to better support Asian languages in Ubuntu will end up in Debian really soon. After all, much of the initial work has been done in Debian itself by the wonderful Japanese/Chinese/Korean developers, or by the "debian-in" project lead by Jaldhar H. Vyas for Indic languages support. Don't take me wrong: I don't have any griefs towards Ubuntu when it comes at i18n. This is an area where the collaboration is already quite good and I hope it will become better if we manage to converge towards common tools (just free up the bloody Rosetta, Mark!). This is one of the goals I personnally set for the i18n session in Extremadura. Our goals here are common: we want more and more pleaces in the world to be able to use the Best Operating System ever and we will paint it red. (another way to say this: "we want the world and we want it NOW") For this, we just have to cooperate.

Daniel Burrows: Memcheck good; Fry's not so good

So, after finding a CD that had memcheck on it, I ran a memory test on the new system I had assembled but couldn't get working. Unsurprisingly, it produced a bunch of errors, especially in test 8. I tested the memory modules one at a time, and confirmed that one of them reliably failed test 8 with, while the other survived multiple passes of memcheck's whole arsenal of tests without skipping a beat.

OK, no biggie; I got a bad RAM chip, I'll return it. So we take it back to Fry's, I explain that I ran a memory checker on one of the chips and it came up bad (I even helpfully gave them a note indicating which of the two seemed to be the problem), and asked to exchange it for a new chip. The customer service guy vanishes, then comes back a while later with a different chip in a box. As we're preparing to leave, Kate notices that the "new" box is opened. "Why's that?" she asks. "Oh, testing," the customer service guy says.

Testing. That's good, right? So we shop a little, take the chips back, and I plug them in. I figure, hey, never hurts to be too careful, and boot up memcheck. BAM! Within half a second the screen turns red with errors. In comparison, with the first set of chips I had to run the tester for up to fifteen minutes before I got a test failure. Trying the chips individually, I discover that 300MB on one is just (as far as I could tell) gone. It fails every single test. The other one survives the first few checks, but fails test 8 just like the other bad chip I had. [UPDATE: it's actually not that bad; it does seem to have problems, but it doesn't fail on every single run of test 8, and it was able to run the Kororaa live CD]

Now, as I see it, we have the following possibilities:

(a) My luck sucks and I just got three bad chips in a row.

Possible, but I've bought at least a half dozen memory chips in the past (not counting ones that came in preassembled systems) and I'm pretty sure this is the first, maybe second time I've seen a bad one. Three in a row? That's ridiculous.

(b) I screwed up and blew out the chips while installing them.

Unlikely for the same reason as (a). I may be shaky on some hardware stuff, but I know how to install DIMM chips. Killing one might be in the realm of possibility; killing three out of four? Don't think so.

(c) The chips aren't compatible with my motherboard.

The chips are listed as being DDR400, which ought to be perfectly compatible with the motherboard. They are installed in the proper configuration (according to the motherboard's manual); besides, one memory chip worked just fine.

Assume that (b) and (c) are indeed false: the chips are really bad and I didn't destroy them. This, combined with the fact that Fry's "testing" didn't catch the blatantly obvious problems with one of the new chips, make me wonder if

(d) Fry's decided to save costs by handing me a pair (maybe even two pairs) of chips that another customer had returned, on the theory that returns are on average spurious.

The main problem with this theory is that I don't see why they wouldn't have resealed the package; maybe they just suck at testing memory or didn't bother to. On the other hand, I have seen a number of complaints online about Fry's and other big retailers engaging in this practice. (e.g., Google for "Fry's restock")

Either way, whether it's deceptive practices or just plain incompetence, I'm afraid this hasn't left a particularly good taste in my mouth about Fry's, and I'll probably just try to get a refund and buy the memory elsewhere. The only downside is that "elsewhere" more or less means "online", which means no instant gratification. However, since "instant gratification" in this case has been more like "instant non-gratification", I'm willing to live with that.

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