Five out of six experts agree:
It. Is. Cold. No, we are far from this very impressive picture of a fully-snowed UK seen from the sky that everybody and their dog must have seen by now. Still, in Mexico City we are experiencing the traditional one-or-two-weeks-a-year where it is genuinely cold. And, very strange being this Winter (the rainy season is Summer around here, January should be dry!) we have rain all day long. The Ajusco mountain is around 15Km south from my home, and it is the closest of the giants that surround our valley. Yesterday I managed to get some peeks at it behind the very thick layer of clouds we have. Ajusco looks really gorgeous all snowed, maybe down to the 3400m line (while the city's main area is at 2300m). This picture was not taken this year, we have snow in Ajusco almost every year (although very seldom as much as this time): (last photo is not current, we have not yet had a clear day to take a picture of our Ajusco yet this year) How does it feel? Well, I live in Coyoac n, in the flat area of the valley. Remember that houses here are not built to endure extreme temperatures (and this week is what we call extreme, of course ;-) ). According to Yahoo! Weather: And while the difference appears to be small, what about Magdalena Contreras, ~200m higher, where many people dear to me live (and have even a window pending to be installed)? People say this cold wave is the strongest in 120 years, since records are being taken. Every year people get excited, expecting that this time we will get snow. This has only happened once in at least a century, in 1966 AFAIR. I do not think this year to be atypical. Still, I have a reputation for being insensible to cold weather. Everybody wears heavy jackets while I still go to work with my usual long-sleeved shirt and that's it. But the last two days, I have been using jacket and scarf... But, of course, I don't look as gratious or cute as my cats :-

Here is a great talk from the Chaos Communication Congress about Tor and censorship: lessons learned. It's the inside scoop from the Tor guys on how they're keeping Tor usable inside China, Iran, etc despite attempts to block it. If you're like me, you have resources and would like to help Tor, but the exposure of running a exit node is way too high, and even running an non-exit node seems risky. Now there's a third option, running a bridge which can be used to get to the Tor network. The great thing about doing this is that you can be pretty sure anyone using your Tor bridge is the kind of person you want to help (and not some spammer or worse). There's little reason to use a Tor bridge unless your ISP/Government is repressing you. Also, the worst thing that is likely to happen to your bridge is that $COUNTRY discovers its IP and blocks it. So the benefits seem focused and high, and the risks easily managed.

Here s stuff that I d like to do this year, more or less by decreasing order of importance:

• translate my Debian book into English and get it published;
• finish the cleanup of the perl API in dpkg-dev in order to create libdpkg-perl;
• create dpkg-buildflags to export default build flags that packages should use (and get rid of the code setting those environment variables in dpkg-buildpackage), needed to properly fix #489771;
• ensure the new source formats continue to gain acceptance by improving whatever is needed;
• design a generic vcs-buildpackage infrastructure to be integrated in dpkg-dev. This design will probably happen through a DEP (Debian Enhancement Proposal) to ensure we have had proper discussion before someone gets to the implementation;
• continue fixing dpkg bugs faster than they are reported;
• enhance our infrastructure to ease interaction between contributors and to have a better view of how each package is maintained (see my last blog entry on this topic);
• update the developers-reference where needed and fix some of the numerous wishlist bugs;
• rewrite in C the last perl scripts provided by the dpkg binary package (update-alternatives/mksplit mainly, for dpkg-divert there s a preliminary patch available already) so that it s easier to build a minimal system without perl-base;
• integrate the 3-way merge tool for Debian changelogs in dpkg-dev;

All of this probably doesn t fit in my free time (being a father since last month does not help increasing my free time ), so if you re interested in seeing one or more of those projects completed, and if you know some person/company that could sponsor them, get in touch with me! Partagez cet article / Share This

Facebook seems to have little interest in protecting its users from a huge flow of common scam/spam. Sure they do get active when accounts are mass hacked, and I havn't seen a "Facebook virus" for some time. Their JavaScript filtering is pretty neat, and they have implemented dereferrer pages they can use to quickly stop URLs from spreading.However, some of my friends keep on joining very dubious groups and installing very dubios applications. No wonder "FarmVille" is sometime nicknamed "ScamVille". There still is a lot of money to make in dubious ways.The big problem with Facebook is that everyone can set up groups and applications that look like they might be real. This is why people keep on installing "Mafia wars gifts" applications that have nothing to do with the actual game except the name. And sometimes not even realize they don't actually get these gifts in the real game.Even worse are the "pimp" groups. It's a classic pyramid scheme. Invite all your friends to the group, then you get extra Mafia points. Facebook really needs to stop that.A quick search for "invite proof" - these groups usually require you to post "proof" of having invited all your friends - turns up 246 groups, almost all of which promise you Mafia stuff.Searching for "getElementsByTagName" in Facebook turns up "over 500" groups. This string is a JavaScript command commonly used to auto-invite all your friends to a group. A typical mass-spread group will use this in its "join instructions".Facebook needs to combat this kind of spam/scam. And it's not too hard. Just actually check user complaints/reports, do simple searches like the ones I posted above, and have some employee go through them and just delete all these dubious mass-join groups. Pyramid schemes likely violate the Facebook TOS, and they definitely are illegal in at least Germany.

Git bisect, ccache and cowbuilder: a combination made in heaven! Tracking down a commit which introduced an ugly bug with those tools was a breeze. Git bisect is very useful finding a commit which introduced a bug very quickly, ccache massively reduces compiling time. Compiling icedove (thunderbird) on my laptop using cowbuilder takes roughly 30 minutes. Using cowbuilder with ccache, it only takes 10 minutes, where most of the time is spent setting up the build environment.

There s been a fair deal of talk on the intertubes lately about prettifying the boot process. The first I saw was a post from Lasse Havelund regarding a proposal for Ubuntu Lucid, and the second was regarding a forked version of GRUB2 called BURG, which adds some theming abilities. A tiny bit of research revealed that despite the existence of BURG, the regular upstream GRUB2 project already has graphical theme support, courtesy of a Google Summer of Code project by Colin Bennett (albeit with a few less features at time of writing). Since Lasse had gone to the hard work of actual design, I decided to try my hand at chopping his design up into a usable GRUB2 theme, and the result can be seen here. I ended up speaking with the upstream GRUB2 team (which has certainly lead to a strange alliance in one case) about Colin s GSOC themes, and as it turns out, the main reason there s no theme supplied with GRUB2 is that Colin s themes use non-Free elements (proprietary fonts like Helvetica are used heavily). Since I had learnt the theme format to a basic degree in doing my Ubuntu theme, I proposed making a genuinely Free theme starting with a Debian theme, and moving on to a generic GRUB2 theme afterwards. As I went along, I found a handful of bugs and feature oddities, which have almost all been fixed with incredible turnaround by Vladimir Serbinenko, the current maintainer of the gfxmenu code (there remain some questions regarding RTL support in themes, and how to gracefully deal with different aspect ratios) and I want to extend my thanks to him for his help. However, at this point in time, I m pleased to announce a theme I d consider ready for public consumption. It s obviously not perfect, and it uses the old visual style from Debian Lenny, but it s a fully Free starting point, which hopefully can be deconstructed by others seeking to make their own themes. It ought to scale fully to any 4:3 resolution. And it may explode and eat your disk on any version of GRUB2 Experimental other than r1499. Generally, the README is a good starting point. Oh yes, an URL. Try http://retro.apebox.org/grubthemes/ I ve been speaking with some folks on deviantART regarding using their Debian-themed wallpaper in future releases of my themes package, but for now, this should be enough for gfxmenu to get a little more exposure and a little more testing. And, hopefully, shift artist focus back from the theme-incompatible BURG fork to the real GRUB2 project.

In a comment to my previous blog post, I linked to the DebConf photo gallery page with the DebConf8 mugshots. Felix Brandt, a friend of mine, noticed the per-picture view statistics there and plotted them, differentiating between male and female. He finds that the number of views on an image gives a fairly good indication of the sex (or gender?) of the person in question: The most notable exception is the image of bubulle. He does not even look feminine. Maybe it s because he s like a mother to us Debianers, always kind and always helpful? :-) This observation fits my experience when I created a top-100-statistic of individual picture page views of my personal gallery: I got a collection of pretty much all pictures of girls in bikinis, lying at some beach, across the various pages and years, and hardly any other picture. I won t post these top-100 here, as I don t want to additionally increase the effect...

It's quite some time since I gave news about my running junkiness. So here they are. Apparently, my last blog entry was about my worries about which marathon(s) to run next year. At least one is scheduled, of course Paris. The highest probability as of now if Berlin in September (probable enough for me to register as soon as it becomes possible)...which would also leave a possibility to run Donostia in late November if I manage to convince Elisabeth that running 3 marathons in a year is not entirely crazy. I'll also try again to run a solo marathon in late May in for t de Rambouillet (: I still have to see some wallabies that are said to be living here). Other planned runs include the Semi de Paris (Paris half-marathon), which is twinned with the Paris marathon, 5 weeks before, as well as a much smaller one, the semi-marathon des Lions in Bullion, in the Rambouillet forest, where I had a memorable run on Dec 17th on a snowy day. That will make 3 mass runs in a row, one per month, culminating to Paris marathon. Sounds like a good plan. So, since I ran the Cologne marathon, my plans were mostly to stay trained enough. For this, I went back to me regular schedule of one short 10km run on Saturday morning, then a longer one on Sunday morning, plus hopefully small runs with colleagues, or alone, at lunch break. The most interesting things to notice during this October-December timeframe were then:

• 10km+14km on the week-end after the marathon. Much better recovery than what I had after my first marathon.
• a small local cross-country run in my living town, where I completed the 11km in 52 minutes, finishing 40th or so, out of 160 runners...and something like 10th in my age category.
• a first "how are the legs" half-marathon on Oct 18th...that I completed in 1h51'31", my best time on half-marathon so far (5'16"/km, 8'35"/mi)
• an interesting series of four half-marathons, one each week, ran every Sunday between Nov 29th and Dec 20th, in very bad weather conditions (the last one turned out to happen during a mini snow storm). They were run on purpose at quite slow paces, between 5'30" and 5'45", but are very promising on my ability to chain long runs over time
• this memorable run I mentioned already: the 14km run I did alone in snow in the middle of nowhere in Rambouillet forest during the day (Dec 17th) where the entire Paris area was a giant traffic mess because of big snow falls during morning peak hour

All this, plus many others cumulated about 375km in 3 months which is fairly what I planned to do. The goal right now is to both enjoy winter runs in snowy landscapes as we are very lucky to have a real winter this year in Paris area (I'll try to shoot some pictures tomorrow and post them on my gallery)....and properly prepare the Paris marathon, where my goal is to break the 4h barrier and go down to about 3h50 (some might say I'm not ambitious enough). A long term goal (probably 2011) is the well-known Saint Lyon long distance night run, starting from my birth city, Saint- tienne: 69km, departure at midnight, 1300m positive slope (1700m negative), up to 850m altitude from 500m, 55 editions. This on the first week-end of December, which in that season may mean "snow" (the 1990 edition was stopped at the 2/3 of the run because of a 70cm snow fall, but 80 heroes completed the whole run anyway). That run will be the next Grail, as it seems.:)

Wow. I just stumbled over the SIL Fonts, which I haven't heard of before. Looks like an absolutely great project. Not only are these fornts released under an open license (I haven't read it myself, but many of these fonts are in Debian...), but above all I really liked the selection of supported systems with icons by each entry: The Old Windows 3.1 Windows flag stands for tested on Windows , the very old rainbow colored apple for tested on Mac , our official (and current :-) familiar swirl not only for tested on Debian, but for Debian package available . I mean: while it's not uncommon today to see some kind of Linux support in software (or other downloads), explicit Debian support is not that widespread. And seeing this side by side with the two very outdated logos for the two other mainstream OSs (and Ubunut not even being mentioned on this page) is ... what, exactly? Wishful thinking? An ironic comment on how the (conputing) landscape should look like? Made me smile, in any case.

We're not huge users of Caltrain, because frankly, it sucks. It's way slower than driving to San Francisco, and by the time you've paid for two return tickets, you might as well have driven and paid for parking. That said, we do use it from time to time. One of the things I noticed when we first moved over here was this intriguing box on a pole, to the side of the normal ticket vending machine. It looked all battered and faded, kind of like a deprecated form of ticketing that had been phased out years ago. Except it looked too high-tech to be phased out. Fast forward to four years later, and we're using Caltrain to get back from SFO after returning from Atlanta for Christmas, and there's this "Don't forget to tag off" TransLink poster inside the carriage. I'm now officially intrigued. I did some browsing of their website on the journey home. How could this be? Hong Kong's MTR has the Octopus Card. London's Tube has the Oyster Card, and the Bay Area has TransLink? Why the hell isn't this thing being pimped out more? It's awesome! I mentioned it to a co-worker the other day, who's been in the Bay Area for 7 years, and he'd never heard of it. So I signed up for it for myself and Sarah, and two cards promptly arrived. If you sign up with an autoload of $20 or more, there's no cost for cards at all. So from now on, whenever we need to ride Caltrain (or BART or Muni, which are the public transport networks we're ever likely to use) we can just wave these cards at something and never have to worry about a ticket ever again. It's awesome. Apparently VTA is coming on board with it later this year, so that'll round things out nicely. It sounds like it's been an epic implementation, starting back in 1999, and still rolling out ten years later. Better late than never. The added bonus will be for our visitors. When they come, we can just give them these cards, and they won't have to deal with BART's utterly confusing (for casual riders) fare system. One of my favourite things about Hong Kong was the MTR and the Octopus Card. Now we just need awesome mass transit for the Bay Area. Somehow, I think that's going to take even longer than TransLink.

I was driving home from a late night at work recently, and I was almost home, when the car behind me lit up like a Christmas tree. My immediate reaction was, "Oh crap, I'm tired and I wasn't paying attention to my speed". So I pulled over. To my relief, it wasn't my speed that was the problem, my left-hand tail light was out. The officer was very nice about the whole thing, but he gave me a fix-it ticket. He told me I had until I think some time in February to fix the problem, then I had to get a police officer to sign off that it had been fixed. I thought that was the end of it, and continued on my way home. The other day, I got this official looking letter in the mail the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara. My initial thought was, "ha, the fools have issued me a jury summons like they did for Sarah. Can't they tell I'm an alien? Nanoo Nanoo." So I open the letter and start scanning it. It's a courtesy notice. The first actual sentences I run into start with "Failure to respond to this notice by the due date may result in your bail being increased...". Huh? Bail? What? It turns out that there's a bit more to the fix-it ticket story. Not only do I have to get a police officer to sign off that I've had the tail light fixed, to avoid going to court, I have to pay a $25 "dismissal fee" (also known as California is broke and needs every dollar it can get). Today was the first day that either of us have had any time to scratch ourselves, so we trekked off to Toyota. The guy yanked off the cover inside the boot, and was poking around to show us where to change the bulb, when lo and behold, it started working again. So it was just a loose connector. Dammit. So now I have to track down a police officer. Preferably under the cover of darkness, as we've tinted the front windows of the Prius, which is apparently cause for another fix-it ticket. Although I'm struggling to find the wording that specifically says that.

renovate

v 1: restore to a previous or better condition
  2: make brighter and prettier

remodel

v 1: do over, as of (part of) a house
  2: cast or model anew

I much prefer the term renovate to remodel. Remodelling to me feels more like tearing down internal walls and changing the actual layout of the place. But we're in America, so remodelling it is. We've had a bit of (mostly self-inflicted) scope creep. It started with just wanting to get some Ethernet cabling installed, then we decided to get recessed canned lighting (the whole lamp thing over here drives us nuts), and then we discovered that acoustic ("popcorn") ceilings are a haven for dust mites (we're both allergic) so it made sense to get the ceilings redone while they were putting the lights in. We're also getting the light switches replaced, and new childproof power outlets. We also got the electrical panel upgraded. Removing popcorn ceilings is somewhat hilarious. They put down plastic everywhere, then have at it with a garden hose, and then it just scrapes off. The ceilings they've completely finished already look a million bucks, so we're very happy with the decision to do that. The Ethernet cabling installation caused a lot of wall carnage, so we're going to get the walls repainted as well. Then we can get the carpets cleaned and stain proofed, and then we can start thinking about trying to move some non-essential stuff in. Hopefully it'll all be done by next weekend. The kitchen cabinets have a six week lead time, so the kitchen remodelling will have to be done while we're living there. Unfortunately some unexpectedly time demanding stuff has come up at work, right in the middle of this, so Sarah's had to do the bulk of the running around to sort out contractors for all of the work, and I've been stuck at work until all hours, 7 days a week. To cap it off, I've managed to come down with a cold, and feel quite crappy. NyQuil consumption is ensuing.

Sarah hit the 20 week mark on Monday, and so we had the big anatomical ultrasound. We also found out that it looks like we're having a girl. We're now trying to come up with a name. There was also a worrying piece of news: they couldn't see the cavum septum pellucidum, while they were checking out her brain. Apparently the cavum septum pellucidum is a particular marker they look for when they're checking everything out. Now what the absence of the cavum septum pellucidum actually means isn't terribly clear. Apparently normally this is found along with other abnormalities, but the rest of her brain structures look fine. The nuchal translucency we had earlier in the pregnancy came back fine also. So we got bustled off to have a chat with the genetic counsellor (during which the 4.1 earthquake happened). We got booked in for an amniocentesis for later that afternoon, as well as a fetal MRI at 22 weeks, and trundled off home. To cap things off, when we were trying to park back at the hospital for the 2pm appointment, I managed to scrape the car up against one of the poles in the car park. (The lower level parking is notoriously tight). Note to self: always use the free valet parking service from now on. Sarah had some second thoughts about the amniocentesis, as it does carry with it some risk of miscarriage, and after chatting with with a couple of the obstetricians, we elected not to do it. The fetal MRI should definitively determine if the cavum septum pellucidum is absent, and then we can talk to a paediatric neurologist about what the ramifications of that might be. One of the reasons they wanted to do an amniocentesis now, rather than after the fetal MRI, is the amniocentesis itself takes a couple of weeks for the results to come back, and that would bring us up to the 24 week mark. Apparently if we wanted to terminate the pregnancy, once it was at 24 weeks, we'd have to go to LA to do it. Whilst I consider myself an atheist these days, I was raised a Catholic, and although I like to think of myself as pro-choice, I still have a lot of problems with abortion, so I don't think I'd be comfortable terminating unless it could be shown with reasonable certainty that our baby was going to be in a really bad way. Based on how the rest of the brain looked, and the nuchal translucency results, and the fact that the amniocentesis would only identify chromosomal and not genetic neurological disorders, I don't think we'll be aborting. From my limited research, it sounds like the cavum septum pellucidum disappears at about 3 months after birth anyway, so looking at it one way, you could say our baby's brain is developing faster. Other research has indicated a correlation with optic nerve development issues, so I don't know if that means she might be blind. We really need to chat with a paediatric neurologist. But hopefully the fetal MRI will find it, and this will turn out to be nothing. An anxious two weeks will now follow.

Five years ago I spent an hour wandering around a large department store looking to buy a kettle & a set of bathroom scales. Much to the amusement of the woman I was shopping with I spent a very long time trying to find the cheapest available set of scales. (We're talking at least 20 minutes, due to the nature of the store and the crowds.) Once I'd selected the cheapest possible set of bathroom scales we walked over to the kitchen section of the store. I glanced over all the available kettles and picked up the one that looked the nicest (in terms of size, shape, and handle design) with no regard for the price at all. Why? A set of bathroom scales I use maybe twice a year. A kettle I use in excess of ten times a day. Something you use that often should be right. Even if over time you take it for granted and forget about it. (FWIW the scales were 6.50 and the kettle cost me 39.95 - John Lewis 15/03/2005 - I kept the reciept!) I'll haggle and quibble over prices for a lot of things, trying to ensure that I don't pay too much. But there are items which are worth paying for (and I don't just mean that "expensive == good" idea some people seem to have). On that basis I'll think nothing of paying 150 for a pair of shoes for example, even though I'll go out of my way to save 5- 10 on a DVD player. Because shoes are important, used very very often, and DVD players just aren't. (ObReference: I have one pair of shoes. I have five pairs of boots. I might pretend I don't but I also have a pair of sandals. Sshhh it'll be our little secret. ;) Anyway today my kettle broke. I had to buy a new one at short notice. I did so and the replacement is obviously more advanced. It boils quickly and quietly which is technically an advangtage but in practise is actually a drawback. Generally speaking I'll fill the kettle, turn it on, then wander away. I'll only return to the kitchen to make my delicous beverage when I hear the "click" signaling that the kettle's job is done. This new one? From outside the kitchen I cannot hear it at all... In conclusion: Technology and progress is all around us. Sometimes a technical step forward "being quiet" is a bad thing. In other news I'm fighting with IPv6 & a head cold. Both suck. ObTitle: Alias

Today, the panels of bare circuit boards, the paste stencil, and the last parts I need (the Venus GPS modules) to hand assemble first-article prototypes of TeleMetrum v0.2 all arrived! The parts for the first three prototypes are staged and ready to load, so my next step is to go use my CNC mill to rip up one of the panels into individual boards, then make up a fixture for the stencil. Meanwhile, the solder paste is out of the shop fridge warming up... For my friends in Colorado, this means I will not try to attend the NCR annual meeting this weekend. It's about a 6 hour round-trip drive from my house to Ault, and getting boards loaded and tested before I leave for New Zealand where Keith and I are scheduled to give a talk at LCA about our work takes priority!

I've just finished migrations on Debian packages under my maintenance:

• Update my e-mail address to @debian.org
• Switch to DebSrc 3.0 format
• Drop defoma use on font packages
• Run autoreconf on packaging time for autotools-based packages, instead of just config. sub,guess replacement
• Fix piuparts error for thaixfonts package, which involved fixing Debian #543512 in xfonts-utils and debhelper before rebuilding the package. This also solves the same problem on other xfonts-* packages as well.

The last upload was done on the New Year (2010-01-01). Just have time to blog about it.

I want to use the Ext4 filesystem on Xen DomUs. The reason for this is that the problem of fsck times on ext4 (as described in my previous post about Ext4 [1]) is compounded if you have multiple DomUs running fsck at the same time. One issue that makes this difficult is the fact that it is very important to be able to mount a DomU filesystem in the Dom0 and it is extremely useful to be able to fsck a DomU filesystem from a Dom0 (for example when you want to resize the root filesystem of the DomU). I have Dom0 systems running CentOS5, RHEL5, and Debian/Lenny, and I have DomU systems running CentOS5, RHEL4, Debian/Lenny, and Debian/Unstable. So to get Ext4 support on all my Xen servers I need it for Debian/Lenny and RHEL4 (Debian/Unstable has full support for Ext4 and RHEL5 and CentOS5 have been updated to support it [2]). The Debian kernel team apparently don t plan to add kernel support for Ext4 in Lenny (they generally don t do such things) and even backports.debian.org doesn t have a version of e2fsprogs that supports ext4. So getting Lenny going with Ext4 requires a non-default kernel and a back-port of the utilities. In the past I ve used CentOS and RHEL kernels to run Debian systems and that has worked reasonably well. I wouldn t recommend doing so for a Dom0 or a non-virtual install, but for a DomU it works reasonably well and it s not too difficult to recover from problems. So I have decided to upgrade most of my Lenny virtual machines to a CentOS 5 kernel. When installing a CentOS 5 kernel to replace a Debian/Lenny kernel you have to use console=tty0 as a kernel parameter instead of xencons=tty , you have to use /dev/xvc0 as the name of the terminal for running a getty (IE xvc0 is a parameter to getty) and you have to edit /etc/rc.local (or some other init script) to run killall -9 nash-hotplug as a nash process from the Red Hat initrd goes into an infinite loop. Of course upgrading a CentOS kernel on a Debian system is a little more inconvenient (I upgrade a CentOS DomU and then copy the kernel modules to the Debian DomUs and the vmlinuz and initrd to the Dom0). The inconvenience of this can be an issue in an environment where multiple people are involved in running the systems, if a sysadmin who lacks skills or confidence takes over they may be afraid to upgrade the kernel to solve security issues. Also apt-get dist-upgrade won t show that a CentOS kernel can be updated, so a little more management effort is required in tracking which machines need to be upgraded. deb http://www.coker.com.au lenny misc To backport the e2fsprogs package I first needed to backport util-linux, debhelper, libtool, xz-utils, base-files, and dpkg. This is the most significant and invasive back-port I ve done. The above apt repository has all the packages for AMD64 and i386 architectures. For a Debian system after the right kernel is installed and e2fsprogs (and it s dependencies) are upgraded the command tune2fs -O flex_bg,uninit_bg /dev/xvda can be used to enable the ext4 filesystem. At the next reboot the system will prompt for the root password and allow you to manually run e2fsck -y /dev/xvda to do the real work of transitioning the filesystem (unlike Red Hat based distributions which do this automatically). So the state of my Debian systems running this is that the DomUs run the CentOS kernel and my backported utilities while the Dom0 just runs the backported utilities with the Lenny kernel. Thus the Debian Dom0 can t mount filesystems from the DomUs which makes things very difficult when there is a problem that needs to be fixed in a DomU, I have to either mount the filesystem from another DomU or boot with init=/bin/bash .

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/12/01/transition-ext4/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/05/ext4-and-rhel5-centos5/

The Tool Factory closed its doors on 31st December 2009. As you may remember, our co-op is one of few LLP co-ops and we mentioned 2amase LLP in our case study as one of the others. 2amase were closely linked to The Tool Factory LLP. Their goodbye message lists multiple reasons for the closure, but a key part seems to be a dispute between members about the copyright of their proprietary Business Plan Writer tool. I think there s a strong resonance between cooperative principles and free and open source software, so I m not suprised that proprietary software development has contributed to failure of a co-op, but it s still a shame. Goodbye and best wishes for the future to The Tool Factory workers. I hope to promote links between cooperatives and free software more in 2010. New Co-operatives UK head Ed Mayo mentioned it in his first speech, so the time seems right. If you d like to help put on some co-op FOSS events, leave a comment here or get involved in this open co-op discussion, please.

Mark this one down as another in the long list of "duh" once you realise what is going on! Bug report comes in about a long running daemon that has stopped logging. lsof reports the log file is now named logfile~ and further more is deleted! This happens after a system upgrade scenario, so of course I go off digging through a multitude of scripts and what-not to find the culprit... Have you got it yet? Try this... vi is very careful and renames your existing file, so that if anything goes wrong when writing the new version you can get something back. It's a shame the daemon doesn't know about this! The kernel is happy to deal with the rename, but when the backup file is unlinked you're out of luck. Confusingly to a casual inspection your log file looks like it's there ... just that nothing is going into it. (oh, and if you tried that, you might like to restart syslogd now :) Moral of the story -- overcome that finger-memory and never use vi on a live file; you're asking for trouble!

With the current move of X.Org to unstable, a few tips might help xserver-xorg-video-intel s users. Current issues involve screen turning to black from time to time, including while typing, or after a few seconds of inactivity, or after a few minutes. Depending on the applied tips, it s sometimes possible to switch back to a console, trigger a suspend to RAM, and then get back to an un-black screen. (The funny think being that using s2ram may break the Intel wireless driver, which can be fixed by then using s2disk ) Restarting the X server is usually insufficient. Logs (be it X.Org s or kernel s) don t show anything. Given those issues showed up with the previous X.Org stack too, with recent kernels, it might just be a bug there. Various stuff that can be tried:

• Disable powersaving by passing i915.powersave=0 on the kernel command-line. grub2 users can add it to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in /etc/default/grub, and run update-grub2. Once the system is started, it can be checked by checking the contents of the /sys/module/i915/parameters/powersave file.
• Disable DPMS in /etc/X11/xorg.conf: Specify Option "DPMS" "False" in the Monitor section. DPMS enabled or so should vanish from /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

With that setup (apparently, the first tip is particularly interesting, the second didn t seem to help much), turning to black seems to only happen when using MPlayer or VLC, while it was previously happening while e.g. reading a few lines of IRC backlog Passing various -vo flags to MPlayer, like -vo x11, doesn t seem to help. Have to try with some 2.6.33-rcX before reporting this bug, just wanted to let others know about current findings