Bok bok booooook bok bok mono bok bok bkaawk bok bok bok Chicken Little Remix 9.10 Karmic Kraienk ppe Braaaaaaaak bok boooooook bok bok bkaaawk bok bok bok bok bok:

• Bok bok LiveCD
• Wallpaper bkawk bok bok
• Cluck cluck Gnote
• Booooooook bok Solang bok bok bok

Bok bok booooook Mininova: 4577800beda226d815f98bc8d79521cd clr-9.10-desktop-amd64.iso
f97179e5b13f3aceb6c9d98d2c7e6ef5 clr-9.10-desktop-i386.iso Bkaaawk bok bok bok boooooook bok braaawk bok bok booooook bok bok bok 10.04? Bok bok boook charity, bok bok videogames, braaaawk money. Bok bok.

To readers who followed my concerns about virtualization for my brand new laptop (see former blog entries): I finally settled for the easy way and I'm now using VirtualBox OSE to host the Windows machine I use at work. Booting our master CD (that uses a Dos-based system and Symantec Ghost to write a sysprepped image on the new machine) in a virtual machine, and write the master on the virtual disk was really straightforward. Then, the magic processes we have for our automated masters, ran nearly flawlessly and, apart from figuring out which network setup to choose for the Windows machine to properly join the company's domain, I had na real headache. So, now, I have a working double machine with no big trouble. The only pain is switching in on/off from the docking station: I found no way to have the double screen setup I use when the laptop is docked (main KDE screen on laptop and emulated machine on the desktop screen) to automatically shrink down to the laptop's screen when I undock the machine. So, I had to hack down two little xrandr-based scripts to do this manually before undocking and after docking. And the final reault is there: the Dell Latitude E 4200 farly well survives to all this and both machines are fast enough for my needs (except when I compile packages on the laptop, which is very rare now).

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to travel to Colombia, where I delivered a talk at III Encuentro Internacional de Seguridad Inform tica in the city of Manizales (photos available, of course. I travelled with Colombia's nacional airline, Avianca. On completely unrelated news, today I entered Avianca's website to check my miles. To my biggest amusement Turns out I am now a resident of Bamiyan, Afghanistan! (I swear I didn't select that) Seems they do beard-based georeferentiation?

NP: Hey, mister Taliban, tally me bananas
daylight come and me wanna go home!

Thanks everyone for the helpful comments yesterday on Apache vs. lighttpd. I ve taken the first few steps towards improving things. I ve eliminated mod_php5, switched all PHP to FastCGI, and switched from the prefork to the event MPM. The event MPM docs say that it s incompatible with mod_ssl, but it worked, and googling for that turned up mailing list posts from 2006 saying it was fixed. The only real glitch was that egroupware inexplicably depends on libapache2-mod-php5. It works fine without it, but I had to create a fakelibapache2-mod-php5 that provides libapache2-mod-php5 to convince the system not to remove egroupware when I switched to the event MPM. I went from 28 Apache processes to 4 Apache processes plus an average of around 2 php5-cgi processes which, despite the name, actually do grok FastCGI. Three of my Apache processes now have an RSS of about 20M, and the other of about 30M. The php5-cgi processes are at around 40M. My old Apache processes ranged from 18M to over 40M. So there is some memory savings here, though not drastic. My Redmine processes, two of them, each use over 50M. Ruby on Rails still is leaving me with a bad taste. At least it s not a Java app; it seems a lot of those allocate 2GB before they ever start accepting connections. I ll see how this goes for awhile, but for now I doubt that moving to lighttpd (or similar) will yield enough benefit to make it worth the effort. But there may be some benefit in inserting a caching proxy in front of Apache, so I may yet do that.

I managed to resist for a while, but after thinking about it for a couple of weeks, I've cracked and ordered a Pandora, which is a tiny palm-top cum gaming console, with an OMAP3530 (ARM Cortex A8) running at 600MHz, a smidgen larger than a Nintendo DS. I'm not really interested in the gaming side, but am thinking that now that DisplayLink seems to be somewhat supportable on Linux I'll be able to plug it into a decent monitor when I'm home, and that the 10 hour battery life and pocket size will be great when I'm not. Hopefully it'll be built and shipped in time for Xmas.

A couple (?) of days ago, I uploaded wtop to the archives (more precisely, to experimental), but what does this little tool do? Quoting directly from the project's page:

"wtop is like "top" for your webserver. How many searches or signups are happening per second? What is the response time histogram for your static files? wtop shows you at a glance. "

So if you're in the mood to try -yet another- log parsing tool, please give it a try (it should work even on Lenny (with backports)), and if there's anything that didn't worked for you, the BTS is your friend :-)

So Tuesday was another very productive day seeing lots of things done. And actually today also started (and will end) like this. I am now of the opinion that we need such a kind of meeting of our team every 6 months, if only we could manage to get the time off from our real lifes. Sitting together, discussing, working on the same thing, being able to just call over the table and get a different opinion just gains so much that we are missing otherwise As you already read, Monday was our day to change the database layer while Tuesday left us with adding the v3 source formats. Which was declared finished today, somewhere around noon. The first picture in this blogpost shows our still to fix up/todo list from Monday evening. Besides the v3 format we also worked on other things, like the already mentioned lintian autorejects. This patchset is also fully committed and tested working since today, so we could start on other issues. We had lots of general enhancements of our code committed, from improving our logging to fixing some issues with expiring old files from the pool all the way up to reducing code duplicates all over the place. I must confess that we did not start right away working on dak today. . We had to start by using hightech to fix a broken shoe first. (Some glue and a heavy laptop. NOT MINE). :) Back to reality - we are currently 6 persons all working on various parts of the dak code. We still have the archive mostly disabled (basically one large dinstall run in the evening always) and are happy with this, as this allows us immediate testing without the risk of accidently destroying someones package upload. And we do test a lot, haven t seen that many python backtraces before in one place :) The third picture shows our todo list status from today. We still have a good number of points open, but as we have 6 persons working it does seem manageable to at least get a very good start on each of them. What we currently work on is ACLs in the archive, which will soon allow us to fix another issue the old DM code has but even more important will allow automated signing of packages built by buildds soon. We basically are able to limit such keys to only be able to upload for the one architecture they are allowed to, as well as forbid them to upload any kind of source. (Together with various other considerations around the setup of the buildds (like, for example, only buildds administrated by DSA can have that, but other points too), the handling of the keys, etc, this will lead to much faster uploads of the build binary packages). And will take a tedious work away from buildd admins (who will still have enough to do to deal with the general administration of it, the build failures, such things). Another thing we work on is the handling of arch all packages, in a source that produces arch all as well as arch any binaries. Currently, as soon as a new source is uploaded for one architecture, every architecture will see the new arch all deb. Which can lead to uninstallability of other packages. Not very nice. And another one of us is also working on our contents generation. Something started long ago, but not yet finished. Recently we did take big steps in this, getting our SQL queries for it down from about 10 minutes to something around 10 seconds. That is for one suite, one architecture, the full contents file contents. While this is SQL only and we still need to write it out to disk, it is a nice improvement. And to my right we have someone working on getting the Packges/Sources files data stored within projectb too, so we can also use our own python scripts to write those files. This will finally enable us to completly ditch apt-ftparchive. And finally, to my left site sits someone who is working on a dak policy wrapper, with which we can allow other groups then ftpmaster to control suites. The initial usage will be to restore the (oldstable-)proposed-updates handling with their own queues in front, as that is no longer part of our NEW handling script. In the future it will also allow easy handling of other situations, like suites for volatile or backports.org. Basically everything where the people running the archive software are different to those people actually setting the policy for the suite. Another nice detail is the ability to throw away uploaded binaries and only ever take buildd built binaries into the archive. We will not go to source-only uploads, as that will only lead to lots of untested uploads (sorry people, we are all humans, it WILL happen), but we can have them uploaded, do regular checks (including the lintian ones), then take the files from the buildds. (Of course there is a way to get things bootstrapped, the system behind this is flexible to allow for a bootstrap mode for a new architecture). (I have multiple pictures, will probably put some more up when I am back home).

I didn't htought I'd post this soon again, but...



Remus Cernea's site is first on the trafic.ro statistics, which is great!

Update:
Thanks to Sven Joachim and Andrew Pollock for informing me about /etc/init.d/mountoverflowtmp which exists to mount a tmpfs named overflow if /tmp is full at boot time. It appears that the system was not compromised. But regular reinstalls are always a good thing. On the 24th of August this year I noticed the following on my SE Linux Play Machine [1]:
root@play:/root# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda 1032088 938648 41012 96% /
tmpfs 51296 0 51296 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10240 24 10216 1% /dev
tmpfs 51296 4 51292 1% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb 516040 17128 472700 4% /root
/dev/hdc 1024 8 1016 1% /tmp
overflow 1024 8 1016 1% /tmp The kernel message log had the following:
[210511.546152] su[769]: segfault at 0 ip b7e324e3 sp bfa4b064
error 4 in libc-2.7.so[b7dbb000+158000]
[210561.527839] su[778]: segfault at 0 ip b7eb14e3 sp bfec84d4 error 4 in
libc-2.7.so[b7e3a000+158000]
[210585.270372] su[784]: segfault at 0 ip b7e044e3 sp bff1b534 error 4 in
libc-2.7.so[b7d8d000+158000]
[210595.855278] su[789]: segfault at 0 ip b7e014e3 sp bfd18324 error 4 in
libc-2.7.so[b7d8a000+158000]
[210639.496847] su[796]: segfault at 0 ip b7e874e3 sp bf99e7b4 error 4 in
libc-2.7.so[b7e10000+158000] Naturally this doesn t look good, the filesystem known as overflow indicates a real problem. It appears that the machine was compromised. So I ve made archival copies of all the data and reinstalled it. As the weather here is becoming warmer I ve used new hardware for my new Play Machine. The old system was a 1.8GHz Celeron with 1280M of RAM and two IDE disks in a RAID-1 array. The new system is a P3-800 with 256M of RAM and a single IDE disk. It s a Compaq Evo which runs from a laptop PSU and is particularly energy efficient and quiet. The down-side is that there is no space for a second disk and only one RAM socket so I m limited to 256M that s just enough to run a Xen server with a single DomU. I put the new play machine online on Friday the 23rd of October after almost two months of down-time.

• [1] http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/play.html

Mircea Badea at Sinteza Zilei (minute 56:50): "If Remus Cernea enters the second tour I will vote him"

I other news Remus Cernea will be invited to the following shows at televisions in Cluj:

• today, 28th of October at 20:00 at One TV from Cluj for about 90 minutes and can be followed online
• again today from 22:00 to 24.00 will be invited at Direc ia opus , a show by Bogdan Eduard at Klub TV
• tomorrow, 29th of October, will be invited at TVR Cluj between 20:00 and 20:50

The debian project defines a critical bug as makes unrelated software on the system (or the whole system) break, or causes serious data loss, or introduces a security hole on systems where you install the package. FSF Europe reported that Windows 7, is currently shipping with a potentially serious defect [...] a high-risk vulnerability in the SMB2 protocol. This can be exploited over the network to shut down a computer with a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. (Full details) You d be hard pressed to know this from all the Windows 7 launch ra-ra on the BBC and others. Where was the Public Service part of the broadcast, warning customers about this awful problem? Please, when picking your software, when choosing your next operating system, select one that is mainly cooperatively-developed and which makes a promise like we will not hide problems . debian, fedora and centos all make promises of openness. Check whether your system does and if it does, mention it in the comments here. If it doesn t please ask its developers!

Couchdb came onto my radar since distributed stuff is interesting to me these days. But most of what was being written about it put me off, since it seemed to be very web-oriented, with javascript and html and stuff stored in the database, served right out of it to web browsers in an AJAXy mess. Also, it's a database. I decided a long, long time ago not to mess with traditional databases. (They're great, they're just not great for me. Said the guy leaving after 5 years in the coal mines.) Then I saw Damien Katz's talk about how he gave up everything to go off and create couchdb. Was very inspirational. Seemed it must be worth another look, with that story behind it. Now I'm reading the draft O'Rielly book, like some things, as expected don't like others[1], and am not sure what to think overall (plus still have half the book to get through yet), but it has spurred some early thoughts: ... vs DVCS Couchdb is very unlike a distributed VCS, and yet it's moved from traditional database country much closer to VCS land. It's document oriented, not normalized; the data stored in it has significant structure, but is also in a sense freeform. It doesn't necessarily preserve all history, but it does support multiple branches, merging, and conflict resolution. Oddly, the thing I dislike most about it is possibly its biggest strength compared to a VCS, and that is that code is stored in the database alongside the data. That means that changes to the data can trigger processing, so it is mapped, reduced, views are updated, etc, on demand. This is done using code that is included in the database, and so is always available, and runs in an environment couchdb provides -- so replicating the database automatically deploys it. Compare with a VCS, where anything that is triggered by changes to the data is tacked onto the side in hooks, has to be manually set up, and so is poorly integrated overall. Basically, what I've been doing with ikiwiki is adding some smarts about handling a particular kind of data, on top of the VCS. But this is done via a few narrow hooks; cloning the VCS repository does not get you a wiki set up and ready to go. There are good reasons why cloning a VCS repository does not clone the hooks associated with it. The idea of doing so seems insane; how could you trust those hooks? How could they work when cloned to another environment? And so that's Never Been Done[2]. But with couchdb's example, this is looking to me like a blind spot, that has probably stunted the range of things VCSs are used for. If you feel, like I do, that it's great we have these amazing distributed VCSs, with so many advanced capabilities, but a shame that they're only used by software developers, then that is an exciting thought.

---

[1] Javascript? Mixed all in a database with data it runs on? Imperative code that's supposed to be side-effect free? (I assume the Haskell guys have already been all over that.) Code stored without real version control? Still having a hard time with this. :) [2] I hope someone will give a counterexample of a VCS that does so in the comments?

Anand Kumria has an ongoing dispute with Exetel, the latest is that a director of Exetel has libeled him in a blog comment [1]. Having public flame-wars with customers generally isn t a winning move for a corporation. But doing so in the context of the blog world is a particularly bad idea. The first issue is that almost everyone who regularly reads Anand s blog will trust him instead of a corporation (Anand is well regarded in the free software community). So it s not as if accusing Anand of lying will gain anything. But when a director of the company starts doing this it makes the issue more dramatic and interesting to many people on the net. Now Anand s side of the story will get even more readers, of course Anand s side was always going to get more readers than Exetel I m sure that Anand s blog is more popular than that of Steve Waddington. I wouldn t be surprised if my blog was more popular than Anand s and now my readers will be following the Exetel saga for the Lulz. I m sure that I won t be the last person to comment on this. The most amazing thing is that Steve Waddington talks about having to pay to take the TIO complaint. So I guess that means I should start complaining whenever I get bad service from an ISP and cost them some money! I should have stayed with Optus and started complaining all the time when they caused me problems! One thing that Steve and people like him should keep in mind is that members of our community are not only heavy users of the Internet, we generally recommend ISPs to other people, and many of us make money working for ISPs. If you want your ISP to get good reviews and to be able to hire good staff then attacking people like Anand is not the way to go.

• [1] http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/aum/2009/10/28#falsuminuno

A palestra sobre produ o musical com software livre no latinoware 2009 foi um sucesso. Muita gente pediu pra ter a musiquinha que produzimos para ilustrar a palestra, e que <noindex>Cesar Brod</noindex> cantou com tanta desenvoltura Ent o aqui segue o arquivo de projeto da m sica A minha menina que foi escolhida em homenagem a <noindex>minha namorada</noindex> e porque Brod queria algo MPB. Eu precisava de algo que pudesse vagamente se tornar parecido com Technopop/Electro. A m sica foi editada com <noindex>LMMS</noindex> (Linux MultiMedia Studio) 0.3.2 e poder ser carregada em qualquer vers o igual ou superior, pois foi feita exclusivamente com plugins e samples padr o da distribui o do LMMS. Apesar do nome, o LMMS est dispon vel para windows tamb m. O que voc est esperando? <noindex>Baixe daqui o LMMS</noindex> e o arquivo original da m sica daqui. P.S: A prop sito, a m sica n o foi masterizada e os volumes est o ajustados segundo os par metros do meu laptop, fone de ouvido e da sala l do latinoware. Brinque com os volumes de cada trilha para ajust -la a seu equipamento.

On Thursday I will be helping to kick start a debate about some of the possible differences (or not) between free and open source software at Eyebeam, which will be hosted by Upgrade. If you are interested but are not in NYC, there will be a live stream and chat.

On Thursday I will be helping to kick start a debate about some of the possible differences (or not) between free and open source software at Eyebeam, which will be hosted by Upgrade. If you are interested but are not in NYC, there will be a live stream and chat.

It s been awhile since I ve made a blog post, and it will probably soon be evident why. For myself, I am taking two college classes philosophy and gerontology this semester, and still working full time. That s busy right there. I m really enjoying them, and in particular enjoying the philosophy class. I will, at long last, graduate this December. Oliver is about 3 months old now. He s starting to smile at us more, make his cute little baby noises more, and is very interested in taking in all of his surroundings. He has his opinions about things, but isn t expressing them too loudly just yet. Jacob, on the other hand, is sometimes. Our person from Parents As Teachers was talking to him for his 3-year-old evaluation. She said, Jacob, are you a boy or a girl? I a kitty. Are you a boy kitty or a girl kitty? I just a PLAIN kitty. Meow. He seems to delight in catching someone saying or doing something in a manner he considers wrong. No, not like THAT! is heard a lot in our house these days. Or perhaps, No, not RAILROAD tracks. They TRAIN tracks, dad! Jacob s imagination is very active. Sometimes if it is time to go use the potty, he will insist that we all stop because a freight train is going through the kitchen, the crossing guard lights are flashing, so we have to STOP. He pretends to be kitties, runaway bunnies (he has a book called Runaway Bunny), and occasionally other things.

This was the view yesterday from just outside my hotel. Needless to say, my vacation is going quite well. I've taken many pictures, read many books, written many reviews, and haven't thought about work (paid or volunteer) at all for about a week and a half. I'm slowly starting to recharge, although after this summer, a nice long vacation was exactly what I needed and I'm glad there's more of it left. I'll be back on line a bit more in about another week. In the meantime, I wish everyone a happy, productive time if you're not on vacation and a relaxing time if you are!

Note: via Blog post (obviously different formatting) and sent by email roughly: Lying in one, lying in all. That is from Steve Waddington. Please see the attached screenshot I have obliterated service identifying information. I find it telling that what I said in my original post, of all the things there the one you decided to fact-check was the number of emails between us. And you got that wrong. What was is you said again? Falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus? Do you still stand by that statement? If you have looked at the original complaint, no one asked for anything but information on 'what went wrong'. It simply noted that fact that payment occurred, and we were disconnected and went on to say "We find the above experience of diconnecting [sic] our service by EXETEL a very poor customer relationship experience." The response to that could have been: "Yes, that is a poor customer experience. We will look into it and see if we can improve." Instead we had an accusatory email back commenting, firstly, of the amount of time of the disconnection. As if someone paying for something and not receiving it for only 1 minute is OK. The point being missed we paid for something and we did not receive it. The point being missed -- this is a poor customer experience The second email then, falsely, accused us of not actually paying in the first place! Later the individual concerned, after the TIO complaint, clarifies that 'yes', we did indeed pay. Very telling indeed, then, when you were pointed to my blog entry and rather than pick up on the stratgeic ("we are getting feedback, for free, on how we can improve our processes") you looked at the tactical ("he is lying! How I prove it and thus be happy in ignoring what was said"). As I said, It is easier to hear when your fingers are not in your ears. In light of your recent blog post, and the recently released TIO report, I find Exetels' behaviour all the more perplexing. Complain to Exetel, get your service contract summarily terminated. Complain about Exetel, and get libelled publicly. But I guess when you have 1/6th (163 out of 620) of your complaints related to Customer Service (from the TIO report) and 3% of your own existing customers (from your blog post) complaining, you get the reputation you earn.