So, what’s with all the broken laptop hard disks?! I have two laptops running almost all day (one as a cheap simple server with built-in UPS) and one as workstation. But in the last, say, 2 years I had to replace the 2.5” (laptop) hard disk drives 4 times! Since laptop HDDs cost a lot more per megabyte than normal 3.5” drives, this was becoming an expensive issue for me. So, I geared up S.M.A.R.T on both machines and did some investigating. The major issue seems to be the load/unload system that is integrated into more and more of these drives nowadays. The heads will automatically be retracted (parked) after some idle time to decrease the risk of shock damage and reduce power consumption. However, this seems to be a bad combination with Linux. I have not done any research into the specific implementation of the journaled file systems that I use (ext3, XFS), but it can something to do with it. It seems the heads of almost all laptop disks I encounter are continuously unloaded and loaded instead of around 5 times per hour. It seems a hard disk drive is made to allow for 300.000 load/unload cycles, after that the mechanism wears of so that inaccurate moving can occur and the platters can be damaged because of a small miss. Now, my drives had 650.000, 1.2000.000 and 900.000 before bad sectors and completely erratic behaviour start to occur, but this was within a year. My most recent broken drive had about 3 load cycles per minute, this means 180 per hour. With things going bad at 600.000, the disk thus had a lifetime of 3333 hours (138 days). This is ridiculously short. So I’ve turned APM of all my drives off (hdparm -B254). Better a small risk of bad sectors when dropping my laptop than having to replace my disk within the year. Also note that my brand new Western Digital disk has spent 14.000 of its load cycles within the first 15 hours that I was busy with installing Debian and recovering backups! If someone has more information about this, please let me know.

SableVM SDK for Java is back with 1.13-pre1 ! Guess what---a new shiny prerelease of SableVM SDK suite for Java is out for you to have some serious fun with it! The main point of this release is getting new GNU Classpath 0.19 integrated. Tests show that with the updated class library Swing apps look waaaay better. Kudos to the GNU Classpath hackers and contributors! Installation of SableVM SDK is as simple as it can be. As usual you need recent GTK and a few other libraries and tools available as packages for most distributions. The non-commonly used elements (like libffi, libpopt) are included in SableVM SDK to cut the hassle of installing it to minimum. Basically all you need to do is to fetch the SableVM SDK 1.13-pre1 tar archive, unpack it, run ./configure && make and su; make install. With the default settings in /usr/local/lib/sablevm you'll find a fairly complete JAVA_HOME like environment. Enjoy! And please let us know of your successes and problems by sending as an email to sablevm-user@sablevm.org. This will ensure future SableVM SDK releases work better for you! In other news SableVM Project team has been silently working since many months on new JVM features that will start showing up in upcoming releases after 1.13. Stay tuned!

The Fahrplan (yes, that's German — it means "schedule") of the 22C3 (the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress) is online now. Joi Ito will deliver the keynote speech titled "Private Investigations". Here's a small (really!) selection out of the plethora of great lectures:

• Understanding buffer overflow exploitation
• Hacking CCTV
• Peer-to-peer under the hood
• The intelligent web searcher
• RFID - overview of protocols, librfid implementation and passive sniffing
• VoIPhreaking
• European politics concerning digital rights
• Biometrics in Science Fiction
• Software Patenting
• A way to fuzzy democracy
• Military intelligence for terrorists(tm)
• Black Ops Of TCP/IP 2005.5
• Robots for fun and research
• Search Engines - Oracles of the Information Society
• Secure Code
• Literarisches Code-Quartett
• Attacking the IPv6 Protocol Suite
• Towards the first Free Software GSM Phone
• Esperanto, die internationale Sprache
• "Xbox" and "Xbox 360" Hacking
• How to construct Utopia
• The truth about Nanotechnology
• Free Software and Anarchism
• Hacker Jeopardy
• Breaking Down the Web of Trust
• Access to Knowledge
• Bluetooth Hacking - The State of The Art
• The very early Computer Game History
• Security Nightmares 2006

Four days, four rooms, lectures from 12:00 am to 12:00 pm every day. Need I say more?

I know I said I was swamped until December, but there’s always a few minutes to release a new version of a package, right? It’s kind of like dessert—there’s always room. I’ve released randomplay 0.49. The new version adds a keystroke to pause playing and a keystroke to display the available keystrokes, and the ability to configure UTF-8 display of tags on or off. I’ve also improved the documentation and filled in the sample rc file to give all available options. By the way, Clint Adams, I would be happy to add Audioscrobbler support. Unfortunately, there is not yet any Net::AudioScrobbler perl module. I contacted the guy who is working on it and he said it’s not yet fit for public consumption, but will let me know when it is.

(Reposted from old blog) Inspired by Matthew Palmer’s writings (1, 2) on his experiences about the Australian judicial system, I decided to write a series of essays on the Finnish legal system, mostly to contrast it with the universally familiar United State system (even if that universal familiarity is a little skewed by generally having been obtained from dramatizations and not actual court practice). I will concentrate on criminal cases. I will write based on my personal experience as a part of the judicial system, and I will be supplementing the experience with my personal research into law. I am not legally trained, but I have read a fair bit of law and related literature. I am a lay judge in the Jyv skyl District court. I will explain the significance of that later, but I hope it suffices to say, here, that I have sat on the bench, as part of four-judge panels, since March this year, in ten sessions each a day long, and each containing at least two, usually four or five criminal cases. Some highlights:

• There are no plea bargains. With some minor exceptions, every criminal case is tried in a full court session.
• There is no jury. Criminal cases are tried as a rule by a panel of four judges, of which one is legally trained and three are lay judges, each having an equal vote.

Later essays in this series:

• The main hearing in a Finnish criminal trial (November 16, 2005)
• The Finnish lay judge system (November 16, 2005)

Fictional depictions of court cases in this series:

• Driving While Intoxicated – A Glimpse of Finnish Criminal Justice, Part One

Read more

Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 03:07:13 +0300
From: Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <gaia@iki.fi>
To: "Debian developers' misc list" <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>
Subject: RFC/ITP: Constitution of Finland

On IRC I proposed packaging the Constitution of Finland.  Among other
things, it would be an example of a good Constitution :-)  The response
on IRC was positive; what do people think here?

Since Finnish laws are specifically not protected by copyright (see
Finnish copyright law), the law is free and can go to main.  There is
an English translation at http://www.om.fi/perustuslaki/3313.htm.
I am researching its copyright status.

Assuming people are okay with this, and the copyright issues around the
English translation are resolved, I will package Constitution of Finland
to woody.

-- 
%%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % gaia@iki.fi % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%%

                    I'm moving IRL on May 2, 2000.
               New contact information on the home page

Do you remember this infamous thread? :) For some reason, it has almost completely been censored off the Debian mailing list archives. I digged my own archive and put the thread online in a mailbox. Have fun with nostalgia and AJK-bashing :) Maybe this will help to reestablish the thread in the archives; who knows?

If you have a firm opinion about the latest general resolution vote, please publish your ballot, and an explanation of your reasoning, in your blog (and hence in Planet Debian). Note that the ballots will all be published after the vote, so there is no voter confidentiality protecting your ballot in any case, and hearing your arguments will help people like me, who are undecided, to decide. I'm not looking to imitate anyone in my voting behaviour, but after the previous vote, I don't trust my personal reading of the proposals to be accurate or at least to reflect the reading that matters. Julien Danjou already explained his position:

Since I think we have to release Sarge as soon as possible in order to satisfay our users, I have just voted for postponing changes until Sarge is released.

Julien, I would like to ask you to publish and explain your full ballot. There are a lot of options in there, and it is not at all clear, at least to me, how one would order them to bring about a release of Sarge as soon as possible (note that I am as of yet undecided on even whether I want that or not:).

I was playing around with BNFC's C++ mode, and discovered that its authors have fallen prey to two of C++'s famous pitfalls:

• All polymorphic classes (i.e. classes with at least one virtual function) must have a virtual destructor. Fortunately, G++ -Wall warns about this one.
• The compiler inserts a default copy constructor and a default copy assignment operator to all classes that lack an explicit copy constructor and an explicit copy assignment operator. This will bite you if you have pointer members in the class, and your destructor performs a delete operation on one of them. You need to either forbid copying by adding an explicit private copy constructor and an explicit private copy assignment operator to the class (prototypes without definitions will do nicely), or by enforcing some sane copying policy by giving your own copy constructor and copy assignment operator (popular policies are deep copying and sharing with reference counting).

Were you aware of these issues? :) I fixed these problems in BNFC with this patch.

I just sent the following email to certain mailing lists and individuals on campus:

Did you ever wonder how computers could be made prove theorems? Did you ever look at logic and tell yourself, wow, this should be automated? Are you... ... an IT student interested in logic or software/hardware verification? ... a math student with a taste for logic and the foundations of mathematics, and with an interest in computer science? Starting on Tuesday, 2 March 2004, I will give a series of lectures on *** Automated Reasoning (TIE 329, 2 cr) *** We will look at how logical information can be processed on a computer. We will discuss (both in theory and in practice) fundamental automated reasoning methods such as unification, resolution and semantic tableaux. In the end, we will have constructed a simple automated reasoning system. A familiarity with first-order (predicate) logic is necessary. Other prerequisities are the Automata and formal language course (or equivalent) and programming experience. Enroll via Korppi. The course has a home page at http://www.mit.jyu.fi/antkaij/opetus/ap/2004/. For the benefit of our foreign students, we will use the English language.

Hit http://ftp.uk.debian.org stable/main Packages
Hit http://ftp.uk.debian.org stable/main Release
Hit http://ftp.uk.debian.org stable/non-free Packages
Hit http://ftp.uk.debian.org stable/non-free Release
Hit http://ftp.uk.debian.org stable/contrib Packages
Hit http://ftp.uk.debian.org stable/contrib Release
Hit http://security.debian.org stable/updates/main Packages
Hit http://security.debian.org stable/updates/main Release
Hit http://security.debian.org stable/updates/contrib Packages
Hit http://security.debian.org stable/updates/contrib Release
Hit http://security.debian.org stable/updates/non-free Packages
Hit http://security.debian.org stable/updates/non-free Release
Reading Package Lists...
Building Dependency Tree...
Merging Available information
Replacing available packages info, using /var/cache/apt/available.
Information about 8839 package(s) was updated.
Checking sources in /etc/apt/sources.list:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You should take care to ensure that the distributions you're downloading
are the ones you think you are downloading, and that they are as up to
date as you would expect (testing and unstable should be no more than
two or three days out of date, stable-updates no more than a few weeks
or a month).
Source: deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
  o Origin: Debian/Debian
  o Suite: stable/woody
  o Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 18:57:17 UTC
  o Description: Debian 3.0r2 Released 20th November 2003
  * Signed by EXPIRED key: Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (2003) <ftpmaster@debian.org>
  * Signed by EXPIRED key: Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (2003 v2) <ftpmaster@debian.org>
  * NO VALID SIGNATURE
  * PROBLEMS WITH main (NOCHECK, NOCHECK)
  * PROBLEMS WITH non-free (NOCHECK, NOCHECK)
  * PROBLEMS WITH contrib (NOCHECK, NOCHECK)
Source: deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
  o Origin: Debian/Debian-Security
  o Suite: stable/woody
  o Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2004 13:58:21 UTC
  o Description: Debian 3.0 Security Updates
  o Signed by: Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (2004) <ftpmaster@debian.org>
  o Okay: main contrib non-free
Results
~~~~~~~
The contents of the following files in /var/lib/apt/lists could not be
validated due to the lack of a signed Release file, or the lack of an
appropriate entry in a signed Release file. This probably means that the
maintainers of these sources are slack, but may mean these sources are
being actively used to distribute trojans.  The files have been renamed
to have the extension .FAILED and will be ignored by apt.
    ftp.uk.debian.org_debian_dists_stable_main_binary-i386_Release
    ftp.uk.debian.org_debian_dists_stable_main_binary-i386_Packages
    ftp.uk.debian.org_debian_dists_stable_non-free_binary-i386_Release
    ftp.uk.debian.org_debian_dists_stable_non-free_binary-i386_Packages
    ftp.uk.debian.org_debian_dists_stable_contrib_binary-i386_Release
    ftp.uk.debian.org_debian_dists_stable_contrib_binary-i386_Packages

It would be very nice if stable could be re-signed with the new signing key. Why is it that this is not automatic?

I have now started a series of experimental versions of grep-dctrl, in which I intend to implement most, if not all, of the outstanding feature requests. The proud first new feature is grep-aptavail, a grep-available lookalike that takes its input from apt-cache dumpavail by default. The grep-dctrl 2.2 release is therefore for all you grep-available users out there that kept dselect only to run dselect update. It will be installed in experimental shortly. (Note that you need to explicitly select experimental by pinning or by the -t switch to apt-get in order to install this version.)

I started the grep-dctrl rewrite last spring. I soon had most of the code implemented, and I asked for testers on -devel. There were no debs at that time, and so it probably was not much of a surprise that nobody volunteered. I got discouraged and abandoned the project for several months. In August, just before my vacation at work ended, I decided to polish the code, and I did. I prepared debs and was ready to submit them to unstable. (At that time I was under the impression that experimental was the wrong place for any grep-dctrl stuff.) I felt it was necessary to warn users about the code, since it was sure to contain nasty surprises. I considered sending a mail to some lists: -devel-announce would have reached my audience, but the message would have been inappropriate there; I feared it would not be noticed in -devel. I considered a message at installation time,either with debconf or without. However, debconf messages are seen by system administrators and not users, so that was not an attractive option. I finally decided on that annoying banner:

==========================================================================
                                  NOTE                                    
 grep-dctrl has been rewritten from scratch.  Although this does add new  
 features, regressions are certainly possible.  Please watch for them and 
 report them to the BTS.                                                  
==========================================================================
(The above annoying banner will not be shown to you again, unless you
request it with the -B switch.  It will also be removed entirely soon.)

I took great care to make the banner as unobtrusive as possible, still taking in account that it had to be prominent to have any effect. I added logic that would suppress the banner after a user had seen it once (using a dotfile in home directories, ~/.grep-dctrl-banner-shown; if you find one in your home directory, you can now safely remove it). I did not print it to stdout (it would clobber the output) nor to stderr (it might be redirected, which would have been counterproductive); rather, I used /dev/tty. After all, many people use grep-dctrl in scripts without realizing it; especially they would need to know that there was a weak link there. Nevertheless, I expected to get flamed for this. To my considerable surprise, I got no reactions - aside from several good and substantial bug reports. The banner stayed in longer than I intended, mainly because I was exhausted by my teaching duties during the autumn. I finally removed it last week, in 1.103. And then, several days after the banner had been removed, I get a bug report (which, strangely, is still open even though I sent a closing message almost 24 hours ago). That's when I decided to post this entry.

As I start to write this, it's the last minute of my country's 87th birthday (the Finnish Independence Day). It got me thinking about nation-states and independence and whatnot. And I came to a threefold conclusion: First, there is some value in independence. Getting rid of the status of a Grand Duchy in personal union with Russia was certainly a good step for Finland, in light of the rough road the Russians themselves have since travelled. For the same reason, the two wars Finland fought against the USSR were quite worthwhile. Similarly, if Finland were to be threatened by a neighbour again, armed defense would certainly be justifiable. Second, there is no intrinsic value in independence. If a humanly life (including freedom and local government) can be guaranteed even if there is no Finnish state in itself, I see no reason to hold on to the old-fashioned concept of a nation state. Third, I am in favour, as a long-term goal, of a world government. Of course, a single government becomes a single point of failure in case of a coup, for example, but if the global state is arranged properly, the danger of a successful coup is minimal. On the other hand, a world government is in far better position to institute necessary policies to combat the global problems of poverty, climate change and other such issues than the current system of competing and cooperating nation-states. In the current system, the big issues are easily put aside in name of local opportunism. Finland is by no means immune to that problem. The great crises of the 20th Century were its devastating wars. Fortunately, we have overcome them to a sufficient degree. The great crisis of the 21st Century is not terrorism - though it is a symptom. The great crisis is caused by the limits of growth, and we are already feeling quite concretely the nearness of those limits. If something is not done, our current civilization will crash spectacularly. The human race will probably survive - but do we really want to live through another Dark Age? Long Live the Earth!

On Sunday morning, the polls open in Finland's municipal elections. In these elections, representatives of the people are selected to all municipality (city, town or rural district) councils in Finland. Eligible for vote are all citizens over 18 not living abroad and certain foreigners living in Finland. The polls close at 8 pm local time, and early results based on the hand-count of the votes given during advance polling are announced soon after. The full (manual) count is finished around 11 pm local time; partial and full results are announced as they become available. A mandatory manual recount is then performed during the next few days and the official results (essentially never resulting in any significant changes, while close contests may see changes) are announced on Wednesday. The new municipal councils begin their work after new year and sit for four years. The votes are tallied according to the open list variant of the d'Hondt method. While a voter marks the number of a single candidate on the ballot, the vote is counted toward the total sum of votes received by the candidate's party, and seats are allocated to parties more or less in proportion of votes received. The list of candidates within each party is then sorted in descending order of individual vote count and from the top of the list and the first N candidates are elected, where N is the number of seats allocated to the party. The upside of this mechanism is that - as long as parties represent true differences of opinion in material issues - the different opinions held by the people are represented faithfully, in miniature, within the municipality council. There is a small bias toward large parties in that fractional numbers of seats tend to get rounded up for large parties and down for small parties, but the system works, nevertheless, fairly well. A preferential system would be my preference (no pun intended:), though. And now for the good part: I am running in these elections as candidate number 129 in the combined candidate list of Jyv skyl . My party affiliation is the Green League. It is estimated that I would need about 150 votes to get in the city council, though the exact treshold cannot be known in advance. For the past two weeks, I have been exerting myself in distributing my personal and our party's election materials to people in my local area, as well as standing in the city centre trying to get people vote for me, or alternatively, for other candidates in our party list - or even to vote at all. My body is aching all over, since I have not been very good at exercising before this endeavour. The end is near: tomorrow evening we will know what will become of this. Please wish me luck :)

As you might have noticed my site (+ my podcast + my photoblog) was down for a few days. I am experiencing unforseen hosting problems, and maybe there will be another downtime while I move the site to a more stable location. However, the site should be back for good real soon now. I apologize for the trouble.

I seem to be getting more reports on pbuilder failing weirdly.I also noticed cowdancer no longer seems to be working.cowdancer debugging time, again.First, I noticed that cp has changed behavior and cowdancer testsuite was failing to set up a test lab.cp -al 1/ 2/used to create directory 2/ from 1/,but it now fails complaining that 2/ no longer exists.cp -al 1/ 2will do what I wanted to do.The main problem was that with 5.3.0 (which was uploaded on 12 Nov),stat --format changed behavior, and that broke cow-shell. According to the NEWS, in new feature(!) section.

VBEtool 0.4 - "Where the fuck did that gin and tonic come from, and just how drunk am I?" has been released.

VBEtool is a very dull piece of software that executes code in your video BIOS. As of version 0.4, a set of drunken Northern Irish people have added support for x86emu in order to allow it to run on systems that do not support vm86 mode (such as an AMD64 in 64-bit mode). As an added feature, version 0.4 will run on kernel 2.6.15 thus making it at least 3 times better than version 0.3. This functionality is added at the possible expense of it scribbling over chunks of utilised memory. Thlinux.

VBEtool will happily allow you to make DPMS calls to switch your screen on or off, but is primarily useful for reinitialising your video if your power management system can't do it itself. This makes it ideal for ACPI users. x86 people have had this for some time, but 0.4 brings the love to AMD64 users and IA64 users (yes, all 3 of you). Source is available from http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~mjg59/vbetool/. It requires the development headers from pciutils in order to build, but should otherwise be self-contained.

If 0.4 breaks on systems where 0.3 worked, please let me know and I'll point out how it's entirely not my fault and then fix it anyway. I'm lovely like that. But it works on my AMD64, so boo to you.

So I'm now adding the diversion for libglx.so so the drivers will work with the newer xorg and will soon upload new versions due to that fix.

I've found a couple of issures with my SELinux backports. One is actually a bug present in sysvinit and cron (at least): The debian/rules makefiles uses dpkg-architecture to detect a Linux system (as opposed to GNU hurd or FreeBSD or Solaris) since SELinux only works on Linux. This code queries the DEB_HOST_ARCH_OS variable via dpkg-architecture, but this variable isn't available on sarge (yet)... When building with either my dpkg backport or by using code similar to the following:

dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_ARCH_OS   dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_GNU_SYSTEM

the packages will actually have SELinux support enabled. I've already filed a bug against sysvinit, but should I also file bugs against logrotate and cron, who apparently use the same code to detect SELinux? (openssh and coreutils have better fallback code than suggested above in place)