DebConf newbies: we want you! You've probably already read a nice blog post by Joey about the DebConf Newbies initiative. Let me recap in case you didn't: Debian will invest some money to explicit sponsor DebConf10 attendance for "non-regulars", i.e. for those that have not attended DebConf ever, or quite in a while. If you are interested you should check the wiki page and mail Joey as requested. (Including a big thank you to him would be more than appropriate, given that he'll be taking care of most gory details.) Why are we doing this and why is it separate from the regular DebConf sponsorship process? Answering the latter is rather easy. The initiative has sponsoring criteria different than regular DebConf sponsoring (which is well oiled and taken care of by the DebConf orga team) and it didn't seem fair to mix the two, possibly keeping out from regular sponsoring requests some people, just because of this new initiative. Also, as we're well past the deadline for requesting regular DebConf sponsoring, it wouldn't have been nice to induce extra work to the DebConf sponsoring team (and Joey has been kind enough to volunteer anyhow, so ... ). Answers to the former question (why are we doing this in the first place?) are possibly subjectives. My personal belief is that attending DebConf increases the enthusiasm of attendees and ultimately will make them better Debian citizens. It surely happened to me years ago: in the beginning of my Debian membership (as DD, since DMs did not exist back then) I just cared about my pet packages. It was only after meeting the Debian crowd in person at a FOSS event (LinuxTag 2004, IIRC) that I got really enthusiastic about Debian, gradually increasing my involvement in the project. I've never regretted it. I hope it can happen to some of you too, possibly starting with DebConf10.
See you in New York!

Last weekend, I went to the Grenslandhallen in Hasselt, to see Belgium compete against Estonia in a Fed Cup tie of the World Group playoffs. The winner of this tie would gain a seat in the top-tier World Group next year, which opens the possibility of winning this competition. The Belgian team was the strongest possible one, with all four best Belgian female tennis players Yanina Wickmayer, Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin, and Kirsten Flipkens. On paper, the team should not have had any problems beating the Estonian team. Unfortunately, Justine fractured her pinky finger during practice on wednesday; and while it did not make it impossible for her to play, it did reduce her fitness somewhat, which meant that on Saturday, Kim and Yanina had to defend the Belgian colors. They did and won, but then Kim injured some muscle in her foot, which made it hard for her to walk on Sunday, let alone play. With only Justine, Yanina, and Kirsten available, coach Appelmans chose to put Justine on the field. Though she made a valiant effort, she unfortunately did not manage to beat an unleashed Kaia Kanepi, who it must be said played a terrific match. As such, it fell on Yanina to bring home the tie in the fourth singles rubber against Maret Ani. Being a bit nervous in the start of the first set, she made some unnecessary errors; but after a few games, she came through and started to play much better. Unfortunately, by that time the score was already at 5-1. Yanina won her first service game of the match to bring it to 5-2, but it wasn't enough, and Ani won the first set somewhat easily. She couldn't put anything on the table against a storming Wickmayer, however, and after two more sets, the outcome of the match and, by extension, the tie was clear: a win for Belgium. I can't help but note that Wickmayer has been a great player for the Belgian fed cup team these past few years, however. Since her first Fed Cup participation in 2007, she holds what is, given her ranking at the time, a rather impressive 9-4 win-loss record in Fed Cup. If it wasn't for Wickmayer, the Belgian team would not be where it is now. It was Wickmayer who won her three matches against Canada, one as part of a doubles team, to prevent demotion from world group II to the Europe/Africa zone back in 2009, with a 3-2 score. It was Wickmayer who won the crucial third rubber against higher-ranked Radwanska in February to beat Poland, with the latter even holding the home field advantage. And it's now been Wickmayer who won two of the three rubbers against Estonia that were needed to win the tie. So Congrats, Yanina!

Having my primary working Computer, a Lenovo Thinkpad, going into repair at the end of December I finally got up to ordering on of those TouchBook ARM based netbooks I was looking at for some time. After some processing time it finally got shipped in April and arrived here last Monday, time to write up my first impressions. Some words about the Hardware. The TouchBook ships with a so called "Beagle Board" featuring a OMAP3 Processor, ARM Cortex A8 running at 600MHz, 512MiB of RAM and a 8GiB SD Card for storage. It has a 8.9" touch screen and comes with USB and Bluetooth Sticks for wireless connectivity. The Display part contains all the needed Hardware and is detachable from the bottom that is just a keyboard sitting on the secondary Battery. You can open the Top to get at 4 intern USBs (3 USB-A and one Mini-USB) where 2 of these spots are occupied already for wireless networking and Bluetooth. First experience The TouchBook comes with an US Power Adaptor only so when I got the device I was running for some tiny Adaptor to get the plug into a normal EU Power Outlet (it's incredibly hard to get one for this Direction while it's easy to get some travelling stuff to plug EU Hardware into various different Outlets!). When I finally booted it the first thing you'll notice is the touch interface for the bootloader. That's quite a difference to all-text-based old grub! The shipped SD Card offers 3 Operating Systems, one custom Linux that might well be interesting to the average User, a Ubuntu Karmic that really OK for a Debianoid Hacker- both running a XFCE Desktop - and a Android that is really slow and doesn't seem to be good at anything. Needless to say I sticked with the Ubuntu for now. What to not expect Well this is a 600MHz CPU with half a Gig of RAM running of a SD Card. So don't expect it to be good at anything that can profit from today's High-End Hardware. The good Points First of all, I have to admit that the touch screen is a neat interface, way superior to the Touchpad Area you'll normally find on a Notebook - at least if you use the stylus. It's quite different from the inside-the-keyboard trackball the thinkpads have of course. The Website claims 10h of Battery life and while I've emptied the battery much faster under certain workloads (e.g. Playing cards) it does hold that promise with emacs fired up in org-mode, IRCing on a server over SSH and the mandatory wireless working. Same for a always-on on campus day which just works. Again putting the screen on the keyboard the wrong way 'round will give you a touchscreen tablet with the keyboard out of your way, an ideal configuration for playing. And I have to admit playing games like gtkballs or aisle riot real fun. So much fun actually I'm currently thinking on whether it would be feasible to get openpandora working on it. What I'm really missing There are two Properties that are really lacking from the device which would make it (in my personal opinion at least) a whole lot better: A simple Ethernet controller I could use to go online when sitting in the server room doing some maintenance without taking my WRT with me and some slot to store the stylus when not using it where it's easy to get out (currently I'm having it in my wallet). Then there's something (maybe a Kernel Bug): The Wireless is unable to find any new Access Point after disconnecting from some and walking out of reach from that. Force-unloading the kernel module and waiting 30 minutes worked for me multiple times but that's purely inacceptable. Finally there are some minor glitches. The shiny red cover just gets dirty every time you touch the thing and the Keyboard is really small (what a surprise on a 9" device) and has some of the special Keys (like the Home key) located at unusual spots (Page-Up/Down only available through the FN modifier). Shift and End at the right side are also labeled opposite from their actual function (at least on Ubuntu). The last ugliness is the top part battery only charging when the device is running, which means you"ll have the TouchBook running all night to get the battery charged and the Battery Monitor not working at all (at least in the current version of the operating systems). Where to go now I've not yet come around to really play with the operating system (apart from installing wicd, urxvt-unicode and awesome getting the most needed of my working environment). As I'm a Debian Developer I'll definitely need a Debian running on it (although I was told it'll be slow with software compiled for armv4te) and, as it needs to be running all night anyway, I'll try out gentoo pending another SD Card for experiments. Secondly there's currently no useable conforming Common Lisp Implementation in Debian for armel as far as I can tell. As arm was already working it shouldn't be that hard, let's see if I can change that but feel free to join me! Final Notes I was thinking of some mobile-ish note-taking device and remote ssh terminal for University which the device clearly can do even for 10h away from any power plug while being some non-standard non-x86 device to toy on (It's actually my second armel next to the sheeva plug mounted on my window board. As a final Remark: This blogpost was written on the TouchBook hacking some markdown into emacs while traveling by train to Erlangen where I study on Sunday Night after having read some chapters of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother on my E-Slick E-Book reader and finished later in my Room. Maybe I'll find some time to write a review for this device as well one day!

I'm going to Debconf 10:



I've also decided to put in a late submission for a talk about multistrap - a description of the new features in multistrap for creation of complex chroots and bootable root filesystems using apt to collect packages from multiple repositories and/or suites.

The current version of multistrap in experimental has gained a lot of features and will soon be migrating into Debian unstable where it will replace emdebian-rootfs and emsandbox - the old debootstrap scripts which haven't worked properly for a while. Documentation is lagging a bit but I'm in the process of updating the emdebian website with detailed docs on how multistrap can be used.

Also in NEW is pdebuild-cross, an extension to pbuilder which uses multistrap to create a cross-building chroot tarball and provides pbuilder hooks to allow svn-buildpackage to cross-build directly from SVN using pbuilder support. pdebuild-cross will, in time, replace most of the functionality in the old emdebian-tools package and dramatically simplify the dependencies of the old package in the process. The talk will briefly cover that too. pdebuild-cross is a little hamstrung by the well known bugs in apt-cross but alternatives can be easily incorporated when the time comes.

my current list of worked on RC bugs; not many for two weeks but I was on vacation for almost a week ...

• #574192 typespeed: "typespeed: package purge (after dependencies removal) fails"
  apply patch for postrm from BTS and upload to DELAYED/2
• #574217 libpdl-netcdf-perl: "libpdl-netcdf-perl: package purge (after dependencies removal) fails"
  fix postrm and upload to DELAYED/2
• #576639 libpath-dispatcher-perl: "Path::Dispatcher::Declarative is now a separate distribution, breaks prophet"
  upload after the split-off package is ACCEPTED (pkg-perl)
• #577861 src:libpadre-plugin-vi-perl: "libpadre-plugin-vi-perl: FTBFS: tests fail"
  rules: run under xvfb (pkg-perl)
• #577890 src:libpadre-plugin-autoformat-perl: "libpadre-plugin-autoformat-perl: FTBFS: tests fail"
  rules: run under xvfb (pkg-perl)
• #577909 src:libpadre-plugin-xml-perl: "libpadre-plugin-xml-perl: FTBFS: tests fail"
  rules: run under xvfb (pkg-perl)

Even though I do not understand the whole European campaign-period concept, I kept my mouth shut even though it was at odds with trying to answer every question, no matter how stupid. I give props to Jeroen for his efforts in question-answering that year, even though the electorate obviously never cares about that. I wanted to answer all questions directed to all candidates (excluding replies for the same reason that I only responded on-list to questions directed explicitly at me), but did not. Quite a bit of the encouragement I have received after the fact has been from people who are not DDs. I find this strange since most of what I have said has been about the enfranchisement of DDs, and nothing about non-DDs. I could speculate about why this might be the case, but I will refrain. We now return you to your regular program.

I'm helping out on the talks committee for debconf 10 this summer in NYC (so yes, i'm going to be here for it, even though i don't have that little badge thingy). This is a call for interested folks to let us know what you want to see at debconf! Talks If you haven't already, submit your proposal for a talk, performance, debate, panel, BoF session, etc! We know you've got good ideas, and the final call for contributions went out yesterday, due in less than a week. Please propose your event soon! Tracks Also, we want to introduce Tracks as a new idea for debconf this summer. A good track would thematically group a consecutive set of debconf events (talks, panels, debates, performances, etc) to encourage a better understanding of a broader theme. For this to work, we need a few good people to act as track coordinators for the areas where they are knowledgeable and engaged. A track coordinator would have a chance to set the tone and scope for their track, schedule events, assemble panels or debates, introduce speakers, and report back at the end of debconf to the larger gathering. We also hope that a coordinator could identify potential good work being done in their area, encourage people to submit relevant events for debconf, and shepherd proposals in their track through the submission process. Are you interested in coordinating a track on some topic? Or do you have a suggestion for someone else who might do a good job on a topic you want to see well-represented at debconf? You can contact the talk committee privately if you have questions at talks@debconf.org, or you can contact the whole team publicly at debconf-team@lists.debconf.org. Some ideas about possible tracks:

• Science and Mathematics in Debian
• Debian Integration into the Enterprise
• Media and Arts and Debian
• Trends and Tools in Debian Packaging
• Debian Systems and Infrastructure
• Debian Community Outreach
• ...your topic here...

We can't guarantee that any particular track will happen at dc10, but we can guarantee that it won't happen if no one proposes it or wrangles the relevant events together. Help us make this the best debconf ever and make sure that your own topical itch gets scratched! Tags: debconf, debconf10

I have been looking at writing a program with XCB today. I seem to pick projects that are an exercise in undocumented frustration.

So it s no surprise that Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from our services. Of course many of these requests are entirely legitimate, such as requests for the removal of child pornography (1). We also regularly receive requests from law enforcement agencies to hand over private user data. Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship (2).

source (1)

Do your statistics cover all categories of content removals? No. Our policies and systems are set up to identify and remove child pornography whenever we become aware of it, regardless of whether that request comes from the government. As a result, it s difficult to accurately track which of those removals were requested by governments, and we haven t included those statistics here.

(So, why did you mention this as these requests ?)

(2)

* Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.

(where s the real transparency?) Furthermore, I tell you the incorrectness regarding requests/removals data from Brazil in your tool is a big truth.

Yesterday, my co-worker notified my about a promotion of 3DSupply and I recognized, that they have new design and you have also the choise to select from various models and colors for your shirts. I like the new site much more than the old.
For just speading they word, they offer to give a shirt (or any other item < 20 Eur) for free. So it seems to be a good idea to equip my dear wife, which is a teacher of catholic religion, with a new Jesus shirt.
Update: Today I got a reply from 3DSupply, stating that they deny the shirt request, cause I don t have 10 posts in the last 6 month. As this is unfortunately true, due my always limited time, I can t find this hard requirement in their terms. Looks like my blog doesn t match their minimal requirements and I m advised to equip my girls somewhere else with geekware. :o)

Sam Harris gave an interesting TED talk about whether there are scientific answers to moral questions [1]. One of his insightful points was that when dealing with facts certain opinions should be excluded it would be good if journalists who report on issues of science could understand this. Another insight was that religious people most strongly agree with him regarding the issue of whether there are factual answers to moral questions but they think that God just handed the answers to their ancesters rather than making it an issue that requires consideration. He cites the issue of gay marriage as being a distraction from moral issues such as genocide and poverty. He asks how have we convinced ourself that every culture has a point of view worth considering? . He asks how the ignorance of the Taliban on the topic of physics is any less obvious than on the topic of human well-being. Dan Gilbert gave an insightful TED talk titled Why Are We Happy? [2]. One interesting fact he cites is that people who become paraplegic are no less happy in the long term than people who win the lottery. He points out that a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable and uses this fact to explain the promotion of natural happiness over synthetic happiness in our society. Dan Barber gave an amusing and informative TED talk How I Fell in Love with a Fish [3]. He speaks about ecological fish farming and how the fish are more tasty as well as the farm being good for the environment. The farm in question is in the south-west of Spain, hopefully there will be more similar farms in other parts of the world soon. Gary Lauder gave an interesting brief TED talk about road signs [4]. His main point was to advocate a road sign saying take turns , but there are already signs in the US at freeway on-ramps saying that 1 or 2 cars may enter every time the light turns green which is a similar concept. The innovative thing he did was to estimate the amount of time and petrol wasted by stop signs, add that over a year based on the average income and then estimate that an annuity covering that ongoing expense would cost more than $2,000,000. This makes two stop signs at an intersection have an expense of $1,000,000 each. He suggests that rather than installing stop signs it would be cheaper to buy the adjacent land, chop down all trees, and then sell it again. Alan Siegel gave an insightful TED talk about simplifying legal documents [5]. He gives an example of an IRS document which was analysed with a Heat Map to show which parts confused the readers the IRS adopted a new document that his group designed which made it easier for taxpayers. He advocates legislation to make legal documents easier to understand for customers of financial services. Tim Berners Lee gave an interesting TED talk about Open Data, he illustrated it with some fantastic videos showing how mashups have been used with government data [6] and how the Open Street Map project developed over time. Martin F. Krafft gave an interesting Debconf talk about Tool Adoption Behavior in the Debian project [7]. One thing that I found particularly interesting was his description of the Delphi Method that he used to assemble a panel of experts and gather a consensus of opinion. The post-processing on this talk was very good, in some sections Martin s presentation notes are shown on screen with the video of him in the corner. As an aside, I think we really do need camera-phones. The Big Money has an interesting article comparing the Mafia Bust Out with the practices of US banks [8]. Mark Roth gave an exciting TED talk about using Hydrogen Sulphide to trigger suspended animation [9]. They are now doing human trials for suspending people who have serious injuries to reduce tissue damage during the process of surgery. Pawan Sinha gave an interesting TED talk about how brains learn to see [10]. He started by talking about curing blindness in people who have been blind since birth. But he then ended by showing some research into the correlation between visual processing and Autism, he showed that an Autistic child had significantly different visual patterns when playing Pong to an NT child. Adora Svitak gave an insightful TED talk about what adults can learn from kids [11]. She made some particularly interesting points about the education system requiring that adults respect children more and expect them to do better than their parents which is essential for all progress in society. The NY Times has an interesting article on animal homosexuality [12]. In terms of research it focusses on lesbian relationships between albatrosses. But a large part of the article is devoted to the politics of scientific research into animal sexuality. BrowserShots.org shows you what your web site looks like in different web browsers [13]. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article titles Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship about the Apple DRM [14]. He describes the way the Apple Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) doesn t stop copyright violation but does reduce competition in the computer industry. He is not going to sell his work on the Apple store (for the iPad or iPhone etc) and suggests that customers should choose a more open platform. It s unfortunate that he didn t suggest a better platform.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_lauder_s_new_traffic_sign_take_turns.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/alan_siegel_let_s_simplify_legal_jargon.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.html
• [7] https://penta.debconf.org/dc9_schedule/events/381.en.html
• [8] http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/money-trail/2010/03/19/bust-out?page=full
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_roth_suspended_animation.html
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/pawan_sinha_on_how_brains_learn_to_see.html
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/adora_svitak.html
• [12] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04animals-t.html
• [13] http://browsershots.org/
• [14] http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/456751-Can_You_Survive_a_Benevolent_Dictatorship_.php

Starting about a year ago, I started following the release of videos from TED events. If one looked interesting, I would download the video to watch later. In this way, I accumulated a substantial collection of talks which I never managed to watch. I spent a Saturday evening working my way through the list. These are my favorites out of this batch.

• Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory exploring the subtle and evasive nature of happiness, how we can study it, and the surprising way in which it manifests in our lives
• Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success a critical look at how we evaluate ourselves and others, and how this shapes our social constructs
• Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity an insightful questioning of commonly held and accepted ideas about the creative process, and how they could be changed for the better
• David Logan on tribal leadership a taxonomy of tribal groups in modern society, and how leaders influence them
• Eric Dishman: Take health care off the mainframe a radical perspective on health care, and how technology can help to transform it into a more decentralized and personal system
• Erin McKean redefines the dictionary a humorous and accurate look at lexicography: where it came from, where it is and where it needs to go
• Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action deriving design inspiration from natural systems
• Jill Bolte Taylor s stroke of insight a riveting first-person account of a stroke from a brain scientist: funny, bizarre, transcendent and awesome
• Margaret Wertheim on the beautiful math of coral coral reefs, non-euclidean geometry, general relativity and more unfold from a global community art project
• Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds a look at different types of mental capacities within the autism spectrum, how they create our perception of the world, and how they can be nurtured in young people

My most successful Green Lemonade to date: Approximate recipe:

• Five or six leaves of kale
• A bunch of fresh parsley
• One-third of a medium-sized cucumber
• A thick inch of fresh ginger (peeled)
• A whole lemon (include seeds, peel, etc.)
• A whole lime (likewise)
• Two fuji apples (cored)

Juice and consume. I have heard from green-juice skeptics before. It may be hopeless for some poor souls. But don t knock it until you ve tried it.

I spent the whole last week in bed with an acute case of pharyngitis, so I haven't been able to gather my thoughts in a blog post up to now. I'd like to congratulate zack on winning the election, and I have faith that he will be a great DPL. I'm happy with my second place, I'd like to thank everybody that supported me and I think that I'll probably try again in the future, although not necessarily next year. Since zack is probably not going to have time to keep up with his bug squashing campaign, I'm going to try and continue that myself. And, if time permits I'm also going to try to put some of the ideas in my platform into action. Finally, last friday both Maxy and me were granted the US visa that we needed to go to DC10, so we finally can say:

A new package - a set of hooks and wrappers to extend pbuilder and pdebuild for cross-building support - is heading to Debian experimental soon. Support depends on replacing debootstrap with multistrap when creating the cross building chroot and includes an svn helper to use alongside svn-buildpackage to cross-build directly from SVN.

There are limitations - apt-cross being the main one. Once these rough edges are smoothed over, pdebuild-cross could possibly migrate into pbuilder.

The reason to ditch debootstrap is so that the cross-building chroot can collect packages from multiple repositories (in this case, the emdebian toolchain repository). The package scripts support no options directly but will pass options down to the underlying tools. Other configuration happens in /etc/pdebuild-cross/pdebuild-cross.rc which is an extended pbuilder.rc file. I see this as a better option than bulking out the scripts with option support - especially at this stage of development.

Initially, pdebuild-cross will be a binary package built from the emdebian-crush source package (which itself replaces the emdebian-tools source package) and pdebuild-cross will depend on the version of multistrap also in Debian experimental.

Coming to Debian NEW soon....

SVN: http://www.emdebian.org/svn/browser/current/host/trunk/emdebian-tools/branches/2.2.0

Since we had little snow this year shows a negative trend. Less days spent snowboarding, less meters of altitude. In December and around christmas I basically went snowboarding instead of talking a walk, stopping after an hour or two. The first reasonable day was January 23rd. My season ended April 17th with a perfect day at Warth. Here is the balance sheet:

	2005/06	2006/07	2007/08	2008/09	2009/10
number of (partial) days	25	17	29	37	30
Dam ls	10	10	5	10	16
Diedamskopf	15	4	24	23	13
Warth/Schr cken	0	3	0	4	1
total meters of altitude	124634	74096	219936	226774	202089
highscore	10247m	8321m	12108m	11272m	11888m
# of runs	309	189	503	551	462

On good days I had problems stopping ;-), ending up with three 11000m+ days. Not included above is one day in Brand (with the company I work for, I also did this last year) and my very first time at Lech am Arlberg. The road from Bregenzerwald to Lech is usually closed in winter due to danger of avalanches which is what stopped me before. This year it was open for some time due to little snow. I had great day there, although the snow cannons did not manage to cover all rocks.

I recently bought a Belkin 600VA UPS (model F6S600auUSB) and here's what I had to do to setup the monitoring and automatic shutdown on Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic). (This procedure should work on recent versions of Debian as well.)

This UPS comes with a proprietary monitoring tool (written in Java) and you can find instructions to get this working on the Ubuntu forums, but I was looking for a free solution that would integrate well with the rest of the system. So after reading this blog post I decided to go with the Network UPS Tools project:

$ apt-get install nut

Once the nut package is installed, I edited /etc/nut/nut.conf to set:

MODE=standalone

and created the following files:

$ vim /nut/ups.conf

[belkinusb]
driver = megatec_usb
port = auto
desc = "Belkin UPS, USB interface"

$ vim /etc/nut/upsd.conf

# MAXAGE 15
# LISTEN 127.0.0.1 3493
# MAXCONN 1024

$ vim /etc/nut/upsd.users

[local_mon]
password = MYPASSWORD
upsmon master

$ vim /etc/nut/upsmon.conf

MONITOR belkinusb@localhost 1 local_mon MYPASSWORD master
POWERDOWNFLAG /etc/killpower
SHUTDOWNCMD "/sbin/shutdown -h +0"


Then all that was left to do was to restart nut:

$ /etc/init.d/nut restart

and check syslog for any errors:

$ tail /var/log/syslog

While nut is running, it will monitor the UPS and report any power problems to syslog. Once the UPS is running on battery, it will make sure the computer is safely shut down before power runs out.

Hopefully future versions of GNOME Power Manager will be able to integrate with nut directly and display battery information through its notification icon.

Since writing my post about whether the National Broadband Network can ever break even [1] I ve had a number of people try to convince me of it s merit. He is my summary and rebuttal of some of the arguments for the NBN: The FUD Claims are made that Australia may fall behind the rest of the world, children may be disadvantaged in their education, or many other bad things may unless a faster net access is provided to everyone. That is FUD. If we are going to spend $43,000,000,000 then we should have some evidence that it will do some good. One thing to note is that rural areas will not get anything near the 100Mb/s speeds that FTTH will deliver to people in the cities. So if faster net access is actually essential then it would probably make sense to start by delivering ADSL2+ speeds to rural areas something that is not planned to be part of the NBN. Some people claim that having slow net access (ADSL2+) is going to preclude unknown future uses of the Internet. However the NBN is only going to be 100MB/s so any such claim is essentially that unknown things will happen in the future to make 24Mb/s too slow, but those unknown things won t make 100Mb/s too slow . I started using computer networks when a 1200/75 modem was considered fast. Over about the last 25 years typical net access speeds have increased from 1200b/s to about 12Mb/s, that s a factor of 10,000 speed improvement! Now the people who believe that we only need to multiply the current speed by a factor of 4 to address all future needs could be correct, but it seems unlikely and doesn t seem like a good idea for a $43,000,000,000 bet. If they were talking about 1Gb/s net access then things would be different in this regard. Technological Development Some people compare the NBN to the Apollo Program and suggest that the scientific research involved in implementing a FTTH network might result in useful developments in other areas. The Wikipedia page about Fiber to the premises by country indicates that Hong Kong had 1Gb/s available in 2006. It seems that a service which is rolled out 4 years later and 10 times slower than in Hong Kong is not going to involve a huge amount of research. Certainly nothing like the Apollo Program. It would allow multiple HDTV channels to be viewed at the same time According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2001 the average Australian household had 2.6 people (3.0 in NT) [2]. The incidence of every member of a household wanting to watch a different live TV channel at the same time is probably quite low, it seems that young people nowadays spend as much time watching Youtube as they do watching TV. Based on the Wikipedia bit-rate page it seems that an ADSL2+ link could stream two HDTV channels. I could use fiber speeds today There are some people who claim that they need faster speeds for their data transfers right now. The problem is that the latency of data transfer is a bottleneck in transfer rates. In some quick tests between servers that have reasonably fast connections to the Internet I was only able to get one international transfer in excess of ADSL2+ speed (24Mb/s or 3MB/s). I was able to transfer data between London and Germany at a speed of 11MB/s which was possibly limited by the 100baseT Ethernet connection in the data center in Germany. Now if the people who pay for that German server were to pay more then they would get a higher speed. So anyone who downloads anything from my web site in it s current configuration would get a significant performance boost by using an NBN connection if they live in Europe! But if they live in Australia then they will probably get a fraction of that speed (a quick test indicates that my ADSL2+ connection gives me about 500KB/s from my web server. I need to have at least three transfers going at the same time to get more than 600KB/s when downloading files from other countries, and it s rare to have a single download run at a speed higher than 100KB/s. It would be handy if I could download at higher speeds from my ISP s mirror (which seems to be the only way someone in Australia can even use full ADSL2+ speeds). But it s certainly not worth the $5,000 per household installation cost of the NBN to get that. I m sure that there are some people who really do have usage patterns that could take advantage of fiber net access, one possibility would be downloading large files from a local source such as a major web site that uses a CDN. It seems likely to me that the majority of people who fit this category are using major porn services. Fiber would be good for Video-Conferencing To be better than ADSL for video-conferencing a NBN connection would need a faster upload speed. Internode is already selling NBN connections for the trial areas [3]. The cheapest fiber plans that they offer are at the 50/2 speed, that s 50Mb/s download and 2Mb/s upload in theory ADSL2+ should have a higher upload speed. In my tests the best result I ve got from sending files over my ADSL2+ link to another country is about 110KB/s (880Kb/s). The fact that the theoretical speed of a fiber connection is better than the measured speed of an ADSL2+ connection in this regard doesn t mean much, let s not assume that a fiber connection will get it s theoretical maximum speed. Not that you necessarily need higher speeds for video-conferencing, Youtube is one of many services that uses a lot less bandwidth than the upload speed of an ADSL2+ connection. Also video-calls which are supported on most 3G mobile phones use even less bandwidth again. I want an NBN connection to run a server at home The fastest connection for uploading that Internode offers to home users is the Home High plan at 100/8 speed, that is maybe a bit more than twice as fast for uploading as ADSL2+. They also offer a SOHO plan that supports 16Mb/s upload speed (at extra expense) and suggest that customers who want higher speeds contact their business sales department. But they include both sending and receiving data in the bandwidth quota for the fiber connections. Transmitting data at 16Mb/s isn t that great for a server. The cheapest virtual server plan on offer from Linode [4] includes 200GB of data transfer per month and has significantly higher transmission speeds. You could get a Linode virtual server plus an Internode ADSL2+ connection for about the same price as an Internode fiber connection to the home. There are two down-sides to virtual servers, one is that they are limited in the amount of RAM that they have (I can easily afford to buy 8G of RAM for a home system but renting an 8G virtual server is going to be expensive) and the other is that the storage is limited. Shared storage on virtual servers can be slow and is limited in size. If you need to run a server with a few terabytes of data storage (which is cheap on commodity SATA disks but expensive on server-grade disks) and you don t need to transfer much of it then a home server on the NBN might do well. Otherwise it s probably not going to work well for server use. The NBN will avoid people leaving their PC on to do downloads and save electricity To save electricity you would have to have a significant incidence of situations where a download can complete fast enough over the NBN to allow the user to turn their PC off before going to bed but be slow enough over ADSL to require that it be left on overnight. That would probably only apply to downloads from a CDN or from a local ISP mirror. From the Internode mirror I can download a test file at a speed of 850KB/s (I guess this means that my ADSL connection is not delivering full speed I suspect poor quality wiring in my home and would try to fix it if the current speed was too slow). In 5 minutes spend brushing my teeth I could download 250M of data, in the same time if I had a 100/4 connection on the NBN I might be able to download almost 3G of data. So in the unlikely event that I wanted to download a CD or DVD image and turn off my PC immediately before going to bed then the NBN would be a good thing. But then of course I would want to burn the CD or DVD image to disc and that would take long enough that I would leave it on overnight My ADSL connection gives really low speeds or I m out of range for ADSL Some people who live only a short distance from an exchange are unable to get ADSL2+. Some people live a long way from exchanges and are outside ADSL range. The ideal solution to these problems is not to provide fiber access to the majority of the population, it is to provide ADSL to everyone who is near an exchange and maybe provide fiber access to some people who are a long way from exchanges. I find it rather ironic that some people in the country are essentially saying because net access in the country is so slow we need fiber in the cities . The NBN is not going to give fiber to rural areas, satellite is one of the options that will be used. Really High Speeds I have been informed that to get the distances needed for the NBN they have to use Single Mode Fiber, this permits scaling up to higher speeds at some later time by changing the hardware at the end points. So we could end up with a Hong Kong speed network at some future time with the same fibers. This is a good thing. But I don t think that we need to get fiber installed right now so that we can use 100Mb, we could wait until there is enough need to get the faster transmission rates from the start. At the moment it s just a waste of money.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/17/can-the-nbn-ever-break-even/
• [2] http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mediareleasesbyTopic/52BF7AD1530122AACA256C75007E400F?OpenDocument
• [3] http://www.internode.on.net/residential/broadband/fibre_to_the_home/plans/

With only a few days until the Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid" release I'm starting the planning for a release party here in the Kansas City Metro area on the evening of Friday April 30th 2010, I'm not 100% on the venu yet , ideas welcome but I have setup a wiki page entry to get the discussion going.

I'd also like to setup a time before hand ( maybe an hour prior ) to do a "key signing party" for anyone that would like to exchange information. If there are any Debian Developers in the area I'd be thrilled to have one stop by to sign keys too, even if they could not or wish to not stay for the Lucid Release party, I still need one to begin part 2 of the NM process.

Just drop a note in the comments or email me ( me@brandonholtsclaw.com ) if you need any more info.

Nearly a year ago people starting worrying about the complexity of SHA-1 being reduced and the potential availability of viable attacks against things such as PGP keys that used SHA-1. Many people (myself included) generated a new key, or updated preferences on keys that were otherwise strong enough. There were worries about what this might mean for Debian. We were getting ahead of ourselves a bit though. Firstly there haven't been any public viable attacks that I'm aware of (though of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to migrate away), but secondly there's a much easier method of attack. PGP v3 keys. To quote RFC4880:

V3 keys are deprecated. They contain three weaknesses. First, it is relatively easy to construct a V3 key that has the same Key ID as any other key because the Key ID is simply the low 64 bits of the public modulus. Secondly, because the fingerprint of a V3 key hashes the key material, but not its length, there is an increased opportunity for fingerprint collisions. Third, there are weaknesses in the MD5 hash algorithm that make developers prefer other algorithms. See below for a fuller discussion of Key IDs and fingerprints.

At the time of writing Debian has 21 remaining v3 keys. This is a significant improvement over a year ago, when we had 200, but it's still 21 more than I'd like. I've been chasing people since last May (starting with those who had v3 + v4 keys, all of whom now only have a v4 key) and we're down to the stragglers. So it's time to name and shame, in the hope of kicking them into action. The following keys are what's left (doesn't match the currently active keyring because we've had a few replacements since the last promote):

0x0D2156BD3D97C149 Michael Stone <mstone>
0x225FD911CD269B31 Carlos Barros <cbf>
0x31E73F14E298966D James R. Van Zandt <jrv>
0x366CD3FEEBC11B01 Chris Waters <xtifr>
0x37A73FE355E8BC4D Frederic Lepied <lepied>
0x3E973117DCC528E9 Ardo van Rangelrooij <ardo>
0x5C7A46637953F711 Rich Sahlender <rsahlen>
0x5D6560F85F30F005 Craig Brozefsky <craig>
0x6B0E322836129171 Jim Westveer <jwest>
0x723724B4A5B6DD31 Christian Meder <meder>
0x7629B22ED71DAABD Adrian Bridgett <bridgett>
0x8FFC405EFD5A67CD Adam Di Carlo <aph>
0xB0D269DE17F3D4D1 Matthew Vernon <matthew>
0xBC151FC8D2A913A1 Peter S Galbraith <psg>
0xC1A0A171C2DCD3B1 Jim Mintha <jmintha>
0xC3168EBA23F5ADDB Ian Jackson <iwj>
0xCE951B1160D74C7D Patrick Cole <ltd>
0xE82A8B0D57137FE5 Paul Seelig <pseelig>
0xF20E242CE77AC835 Brian White <bcwhite>
0xFBAA570C3087194D Alan Bain <afrb2>
0xFFD1B4AC7C19FD19 David Engel <david>

Of these keys only 2 voted in the recent DPL election. 8 have failed to make any response to my mails (3 since last August). Only 9 have uploaded a package since August 2008. And 10 were already known to the MIA database. Some of them have stated they'll sort out a new key, but not yet done so.

If you are one of these people, please either get a new key sorted and signed and reply to the mails I've sent you, or reply and say you no longer wish to be involved in Debian. And if you know any of these people, encourage them to get a new key sorted and offer to sign it for them.