Search Results: "rul"

4 June 2006

Martin F. Krafft: A safer way to apply a new iptables ruleset

You probably now the feeling, that cold and hot rush of adrenaline after you've typed iptables-restore < new-ruleset and didn't get to see the shell prompt again: you've just locked yourself out of a machine that's potentially far away, and you feel like vanadlism, or screaming on the top of your lungs, or whatever. In my series "scripts to the rescue" (uh, which doesn't exist as a series actually), here's a new one: iptables-apply (and docbook manpage), which will make things easier for you. It applies the new ruleset and then prompts whether you like it. If you've locked yourself out, you cannot answer the prompt, and if you don't, the script rolls back the ruleset. Nice and simple. And surely beats my previous approach, which was: 
echo 'iptables-restore < /etc/network/iptables'   at now + 2 min
iptables-restore < /etc/network/iptables.new
[...]
atrm ...
mv /etc/network/iptables .new,
Now I hope the iptables maintainer feels inclined to put the script in with the package (see #370292).

30 May 2006

Simon Law: Debconf 6, Day 8


Tree climbing
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
I awoke to a very early alarum clock, which I shut off quickly. I dragged myself out of bed to see [info]ze_dinosaur off, but he was far more prepared than I was. I waved goodbye and then collapsed back into bed. Sunday morning was pretty difficult for me. In fact, I only got up in the afternoon. I ate some bananas and showed up to the HackLab where I socialized for a good while. Then we realized that lunch would be smart, so we went to the market. Instead of tortilla based food, we managed to get some stewed meat and deep-fried vegetables. That was rather tasty and I had to waddle back. I spent the rest of the day touching up photographs instead of going on the waterslides. I'm now wondering if that was wise. But at the time, it seemed like a lot of fun. What wasn't so wise was trying an iced treat when I didn't want one. I got some money out of an automated teller and saw a shop across the street that sold iced things. Well, I crossed into the shop and ordered one. They scooped out some ground ice, topped it with mango syrup, splashed it with lime juice, and topped it with salt and chili powder. Now that I think of it, it would be tasty and refreshing if you drank lots of water all day.

The end of the road
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that our last meal in town should be wonderful. So I rounded up a rather large group of people who wanted to go out for dinner, expressed that we'd be going all fancy, and generally herded them into the fanciest restaurant in town. Some people initially complained about the potential cost, but the convival atmosphere and cloth napkins overruled this. So did the tasty platters of beef. We were all quite happily stuffed. Afterwards, a few of us strolled through a park attached to a local historic site. There were plenty of benches to sit upon and we contemplated the night air. I'll have to say that Mexico's nights are a lot less chilly than Montr al's. But the resort had all the lights on, so you couldn't see any stars at all. By the time we had strolled back to the HackLab, people were disassembling the network. I lugged a big server into a van and brought a few more boxes of things there. After the heavy lifting, I took a few more photographs of people, wonderful people, before deciding to retire. But the camera never does capture the fleeting moments.

26 May 2006

Zak B. Elep: For those who still care about CVS, here s one for you :)

Heh, almost the end of May and I’ve not a post. Well, that’s going to change :P There’s a new version of cvs in unstable, courtesy of Steve McIntyre and Yours Truly, responding to the RFH posted earlier. As a new upstream version, it is supposed to fix a lot of bugs, but it seems that a duo of grave and normal have been found :/ Hopefully those wouldn’t be there for long :) Along with fixing those bugs, I’ll be checking out the rest of the bugs list and start pinging submitters… Hopefully a good few of the old outstanding bugs will get done. As for my other packages, gtklp got updated (thanks Nutmeg!) to fix Catalan l10n (thanks Lluis!) and updated the autotools update, as well as its (borked) touch-fu. I also got the new gnome-ppp in, thanks to Paul Cupis. Updates to libungif4 and lua50 will follow shortly.

25 May 2006

Wouter Verhelst: IceWM

I had been an Enlightenment user for a long time—halfway the Summer of 2000 up to the early fall of 2004—before someone finally decided to pick up the pieces where they were left somewhere around 2000 and restart its development. Unfortunately, that also meant causing #219925, which was irritating me more and more each day. Eventually, in the early fall of 2004 (almost a year after I filed that bug), I gave up and started looking for something else. The problem, of course, was that I'd grown so accustomed to using Enlightenment and its way of doing things that I felt at a loss. I wanted to be able to move windows above the upper edge of my screen again. I needed focus-follows-mouse. I was having a hard time without edge-flipping. Eventually I found that there was functionality for all of the above, but it wasn't flawless. Especially not the edge flipping—GNOME implements that in a truly horrible way1. Not to mention the fact that brightside, the application which implements edge-flipping for GNOME, segfaulted on me an annoyingly high number of times, sometimes even taking away my entire session with it. Even Enlightenment never did that; it would just misbehave instead. Apart from that, of course GNOME also had some extra annoyances that I didn't get rid of. The fact that it insists on mucking with my keyboard settings, to name just one example. Even so, I used it for about nine months. Then, slightly after DebConf5 in Helsinki, I realized what the true horror of GNOME is: not the fact that they hide away features or try to make the desktop void of superfluous options; the fact that they remove features that are critical to some of its users. I know I was horrified to find out that something I really used a lot had been removed in that new release. I kept using it for three more months before I threw in the towel and tried something totally different. Ion3. After coming from the mostly mouse-oriented interfaces that GNOME and Enlightenment were, ion3 was truly different. I liked it at first; it was a welcome change from what I'd previously been doing. Eventually, though, I found that the ion way of doing things just wasn't my way. The fact that, by default, it puts new windows right in front of the window you're working on was rather offputting. Any serious attempt at configuring the thing involves learning lua which, though supposedly not hard to do, is not something I ever found the time for. In the end, I discovered that I disliked working with ion, as I often felt that it gave me a fragmented and tunneled view on the world, and that it was working with me instead of the other way around. In short, it was getting the fun out of computing for me. Which wasn't good, at all. So that's when I started looking for something else again. When I'd made the decision to move way from ion3, I didn't want to keep using that "until I'd found something else"; instead, I quickly installed IceWM instead—which I still knew from back when I had a Yopy YP3000—and used that until I had found something better. Little did I know the beaty of IceWM. I've decided, by now, that it does all I need, and more: By default, it tries the best it can to put a window on your screen so that it overlaps with as little other windows as possible. I can have it not focus a new window by default. I does focus-follows-mouse, if enabled. It even does edge-flipping. Of course it's not perfect—the edge-flipping, though not as horrible as the GNOME implementation, can still use some improvement. As if to prove my point, I accidentally closed the window in which I was writing this very post before it had been written to disk, the cause of which could be described as an interface problem in IceWM (though it's more likely an example of PEBMAC (Problem Exists Between Mouse And Chair). But, all in all, using IceWM feels like finally coming home. Thanks, Marko and Mathias, for a truly wonderful piece of software. 1 I know that there are a lot of people who dislike edge-flipping. I am 99% sure that this is because they've never seen it implemented right. Edge-flipping is great, if done right; it's nightmare if done wrong. GNOME does it horribly wrong. IceWM does it better, though not perfect. The implementation in Enlightenment is perfect. I'll discuss the details in another post.

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Kids These Days - Myspace Bandwidth

I just noticed that I’ve been donating gigabytes of free bandwidth per month to Myspace users. Apparently several of my eight megapixel uncompressed images are popular as wallpaper—also on Friendster and a similar site called “Hi5” that I’ve never heard of. I hate to be mean, but: 
RewriteCond % HTTP_REFERER  myspace.com hi5.com friendster.com [NC]
RewriteCond % HTTP_REFERER  !(rosi-kessel bostoncoop adamkessel planet aggregator rawdog) [NC]
RewriteRule !sorry - [C]
RewriteRule .* sorry.png [L]
In reality, the content here is by default under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd license, but I’d like these people to realize they should at least check before copying images they find on the web. And if they are going to use images, they should copy rather than link them. In my day, we knew about netiquette. Kids these days. (I won’t embarrass these people by linking to them, but now there are several hundred Myspace, Friendster, and Hi5 pages that look terrible.) Most popular backgrounds: Winter Sunset and November Foliage.

Martin F. Krafft: Post-Debconf

One thing that never really came to my mind during Debconf6 in Oaxtepec, Mexico, was blogging about what went on. In part, that's because I never had a minute to spare, plenty of other people were blogging about the event on the planet, and definitely also because I developed a dislike to play-by-play blogging, which I certainly do not like to read for my part. But now, sitting in Oaxaca in the Hostel Pochon (which has free wireless, imagine that), I feel like at least jotting down some of the highlights. My favourite non-Debian related happening must have been the descent to Mexico City airport. I am willing to bet that our pilots either had too much to drink or way too much fun, because we literally zig-zagged across this amazing city. It's about 2200 metres above sea level and our inflight information system noted our altitude at 3500m for at least 20 minutes, so glued to the window, I felt in a miniature world, hovering above a city that extends to all sides however far the eyes could see (I conclude that in all miniature worlds I've seen so far, such as the Eisenbahnmuseum Hamburg and Swiss Miniature, trains and cars are generally moving too fast). The population of "la Ciudad de Mexico" (which the locals just call "Mexico") is estimated to be somewhere between 20 and 24 million, which makes it the largest city in the world, and it was not hard to believe that during the descent (and afterwards). I arrived at Oaxtepec, a government-run vacational complex, some three or four hours after touchdown and didn't last very long until the jetlag took me to bed. That was Saturday night. With Sunday morning, the official Debconf conference had started and was to last for seven days. In general, that meant talks and BoF sessions throughout the day, loads of hacking and socialising in between, food, and drinks with more socialising in the evening (and throughout the night in some cases). I really enjoyed seeing many of the folks I had met at last year's conference in Helsinki, while some others' absence was equally prevalent. I spent most of the week hanging out with Biella Coleman, Micah Anderson, Sean Finney, Clint Adams, and a bunch of others, I also managed to make the real-life acquaintance of some people I had known online for a long time. In retrospect though, I should have spent less time with the regular clique (with whom I was to go to the post-Debconf trip anyway) and spent more time getting to know more of the attendants. The vacational complex was interesting, and unlike many others, I didn't get annoyed by the long distances between presentation room, my accomodation, the hacklab, and the place where we were served edible lunches and dinners. Rather, I enjoyed walking with others, engaged in discussions on some of the more prevalent topics filling my life with Debian (such as version control, low-level Debian tools, security issues, and social challenges). The only nuisance was the long walk to the nearby town and its market, from where I would get most of my food and drink throughout the week -- but even that walk I rarely had to manage alone. The massive pool (with a ten metre diving board) that lay in the middle of it all didn't really attract me that much, but then again I've never been much of a pool person. In the interest of various people worrying about my safety in Mexico, as well as some of my clients, I purchased a Mexican prepaid SIM card for my cellphone and linked up with the world (after two attempts and an accumulated 2.5 hour wait). The fun was only short though, when I found out that in Mexico, phone charges are ridiculously expensive, and receiving calls on a mobile phone costs exactly the same as making them. At USD 1/Minute to and from Europe, I ended up limiting my air time to a minimum. I spent most of the first couple days getting mdadm back into shape, bug triaging and uploading a new upstream to experimental, except for Monday, which I spent together with Joey Hess, Micah, and Biella trying to recover files from her wrecked filesystem, which we managed in the end using a simple fsck to at least recover her presentation. I'd be sitting on the terrace in front of the "hacklab" where people kept passing by, so my work certainly wasn't focused and without interruptions, but in the end I was still satisfied with the end result. And in the evenings, it was usually the same terrace, sampling the local beer, enjoying cheese from all over the world at the cheese party on Tuesday night, trying liquors from other parts of the globe, and talking and joking and meeting great people (I truly love the Debian crowd). Out of the large assortment of talks available, I attended several but found that front-up presentations aren't my thing and I would have to let the topic simmer a bit (along with some research) before delivering my questions to the speakers outside of the talk (where I finally got some interesting answers to long-standing questions). Thanks to the awesome work by our video team, which recorded every single presentation to tape, streaming it live and also intending to publish it on a post-conference DVD, I found myself often listening in on talks I wouldn't have gone to, while hacking away on said porch. Noticing, however, that many talk slots were left unfilled at the start of the conference (they did quickly fill with impromptu presentations and BoF sessions once the inertia of the event picked up), I was a little annoyed that my proposal was turned down in the first phase of selection. Wednesday was the day of the day trip. Against my recommendations of an early departure, we left the site at 11:30 with six busses (remarkably on time), heading for Xochicalco for a rather boring tour of the museum, and a vastly more interesting, two hour stroll (in the midday sun) around the actual archeological site, which was quite impressive despite mostly being artificially built or rebuilt by the government. We went on for an excellent buffet-style lunch (which was amazingly well organised), and then headed on for Cuernevaca, a small, romantic town where we had only an hour to spend before heading back home (who recommended starting the day earlier?). When we finally made it back to the conference, most of us were just tired and the evening wasn't as wild as some of the other ones during the week. Come Thursday, my mission was to attack the thinkpad packages, which make Debian on IBM laptops a lot more of a pleasure to use. Unfortunately, I didn't get anywhere (yet) with that work, simply because most of my time was spent battling the weird hacks that make up module-assistant, which actually makes it a lot harder for developers to provide kernel module packages (while really improving the end-user's experience). But of course, there was a positive twist to this issue, as I would now leave my screen in frustration much more frequently and socialise with the others. For the evening, the organisers had prepared the "formal dinner" (which isn't so formal at all). A bunch of busses took us to a nearby shed, where we found all tables arranged in a massive swirl, and when we were all seated, a Mariachi band entered, at the same time as the rain outside picked up -- I thought one of the Mariachis was playing the snare drum but as the rain grew stronger, I concluded it must instead be the drops on the metal roof causing the noise. Generally in love with rain, I made my way to the door while others lined up to fetch dinner and stood in awe for a bunch of minutes at the sight of the marble-sized drops descending from the sky. ... when suddenly I saw one of Debian's troublemakers, Jonathan/Ted Walther, running at me, chased by three developers and found myself amidst their altercation before I could do anything. People screaming, one reaching over my shoulder to push Ted, it was all too much. I told everyone to calm down, to which Jonathan/Ted reacted, vigorously shaking and foaming, with a "get out of my fucking way, you fucking Nazi" and I knew that stuff had gone wrong. I withdrew, and in an attempt to find out what had happened managed to piss off one of the three involved developers, who'd then later refuse to hear me out for an explanation. All that really left me in a depressed state mainly because I simply hadn't expected Debian developers getting physical at each other, and this time it was Erinn Clark who consoled me and turned the night around for the better. I still had no appetite and took the first bus home, sent an apologetic email to the offended developer (who never acknowledged receipt but seemed to have forgotten the incident the next day), and enjoyed beers while the others kept returning to the hacklab. Apparently, people were quite aware of my (passive) involvement during the incident, so I was bombarded with plenty questions, most of which I refused to answer for lack of knowledge of the actual facts. Still, when I saw one girl in another altercation with Jonathan/Ted later that night in response to severe offences he published on his blog, which led her to come close to tears, I decided it was time to pull him off the planet. He re-added himself shortly afterwards by "fixing a typo" (according to the CVS changelog), but by that time, I couldn't care less no more and simply resumed the discussions, which eventually turned into topics of life, intelligence, and the bottom-up vs. top-down debate. I am a strong supporter of bottom-up (as many of you know), and I somehow regret the way I approached the discussion, because in retrospect I see myself as somewhat arrogant during it; fortunately, noone seemed to hold it against me the next day. Throughout the entire week, I built up a reputation of the guy that needs no sleep: staying up until the early morning hours, yet rarely missing any of the first talks at 10 in the morning, and even joining with people for breakfast at the market before. Friday morning, however, I just couldn't get up. We talked until six in the morning, and when my eyelids finally moved after I dropped into bed, it was already noon and I dragged myself to the next talk. after which I simply returned to the hacklab and developed more of my dislike towards module-assistant, before the call for the official Debconf6 group picture rescued me (and those around me). The keysigning party followed and I made the mistake to offer to coordinate it (picking up where Anibal's great preparation left off), without really running the process through my head before. Standing up on the diving tower and screaming to the crowd of 140 participants, it was in part due to Moray Allen's comments that the party went more or less without any complications; I did get to conduct another experiment though. During the keysigning, Mark Shuttleworth invited a bunch of us to join him for dinner to discuss the Debian-Ubuntu situation (no bribes involved; we paid for ourselves). I'll have more on this in a separate post when it's ready. The discussion continued after we arrived back at the hacklab, and once again, I didn't go to bed at a civilised hour... ... but I did get up in time for Biella's talk, during which she employed very effective techniques to get me to actually pay attention (which I would have done anyway): she required my laptop for the presentation. Again, the talk didn't do much to me (which is not Biella's fault), but I am certainly interested in reading the relevant parts of her dissertation. At the same time, however, it made me realise how far from reality the academic world is: big words and complicated concepts just don't count when it comes to getting your hands dirty, and I will try my best not to go down that route when my own dissertation gets more serious. Two other memorable events happened on Saturday: the fun group photos (I was determined to get the participants to line up in a swirl in the pool, and partly succeeded), and the last-night-party on the porch of the hacklab, which was mighty fun, in part because we had speakers blasting tunes for the first time that week (thanks to the dance BoF the night before), and Ryan Murray was playing some of the truly excellent mixes of a close friend of his, which are available from mux.ca. I didn't sleep that night. And then Sunday had arrived, the sad last day of a great conference. I would like to thank all the organisers and helpers for making this event possible! I know some of you had some reservations before and during the event, but in the end it's the result that counts, and I was only one of many who were absolutely satisfied by the week. A great big THANK YOU to you! Following the last bits of socialising and copying Biella's harddrive image to Micah's drive for later rescue of some of her precious videos, we were off to Mexico city for the vacational part of the trip. Some of us went by bus, Vagrant and myself hopped onto the bus to assist one of our developers with his wheelchair at the airport. When the group reconvened in front of our hotel for the night in the centre of Mexico city, the vacation had started (blog post forthcoming sometime...)

23 May 2006

Biella Coleman: Mexican Bribes

Another Debconf has come and passed. This was my 3rd conference and surely to be one of the more memorable, partly because I showed up for the whole time (and am now traveling with 4 other DD’s in Mexico) and partly because of a few problems that plagued my visit. There is no doubt that I had a wonderful time but some of my attention was drawn away from enjoyment toward crisis management. For the first few days, it was due to computer problems (now sort of fixed) and then the last few days I had “Biella Hardware” problems in the form of one of the worst combo sore throats/ body aches that I have had in recent memory (now sort of fixed but not entirely). Now that I am in Oxaca, I hope to spend a little time blogging about this year’s Debconf but before I wanted to pass along what I think has been one of the more amusing experiences thus far in Mexico. So yesterday a group of us (Jeroeun, Martin K, Micah, Vagrant) rented a car to head off to the Southern city of Oxaca. I have actually never rented a car in a foreign country, and I was a little concerned about everything from price to roads to cops. Amid my nervousness, the employee at Thrify was sort of reassuing and quite nice but he gave us some unfortunate news: he warned us that as we reached this one particular circular intersection in Mexico City we would be stopped by a cop (because we are tourists) and basically bribed. This was not surprising news to be but I was surprised at how upset this made me. (maybe because I have never had such an experience and thought I would mangle it when the time came to pass off the money or offset the bribe or whatever). Anyway, after we packed 5 bodies and copious luggage into our compact Nissan, we headed off somewhat prepared to face off the cop and decided it was best I drive as I was the Spanish speaker. We made our way through the congested streets and headed toward the intersection and as we got closer, I thought to myself how are they going to spot us within all this traffic? But you see, the thing about this intersection is as soon as you make the turn left, you hit a light and need to stop for a long time. And you see, this gives the cop ample time to switch on the tourist radar and spot the noticeable white bodies. Sure enough, within 30 seconds of stopping at the intersection, a Mexican cop walks over and there is where the fun began. So he basically told me that I did not use my signal lights for turning when I made a left and that this infraction would cost me US $120. At this point I started to get a little freaked (I already dropped too much money on a rental car) but I remained calm and told him basically in Spanish With all respect, officer, I think I used my light because I am in a foreign country and am very aware that I must follow all traffic rules. After a little back and forth, I moved on to the bribe stage. While we were told that 100 pesos (10 US) was the typical bribe, we, being cheapskates, just offered 5 US. And then, magically, at that point, the officer said, ok just go ahead and be careful not to repeat the offense next time. I was shocked. I mean there was some money being offered right there and I was sure he was going to ask for a little more. But he backed off. Why? I think it was a combination of factors. Ok so perhaps he was surprised that I knew what was going on. Perhaps he was uncomfortable that I knew Spanish. But I think he the tipping point was due to cultural factors. I think he found it odd that there was this little woman driving a car with 4 grown and pretty large men. Given the gender dynamics in the country, this was just beyond his cultural comfort zone and he realized that I was badassss, and he just backed off. Ok, so I don’t really know if that is what happened but I like the explanation and am glad I got off the hook :-)

19 May 2006

Erich Schubert: No fun for me - I'm not at debconf

But I'd like to be... I'd love to bring that lame old line:
My sock's got your name on it
(Well, if you failed to successfully assassinate someone, it can still be fun to remind him for the next few hours of that fact that he's going to die.) Not to be confused with:
My socket has got your name on it
Becaue we're not talking about coding, and some players have characters in their names (e.g. whitespace) that your programming language will probably not allow for variable names. ;-) Oh, if you want to play that game some time - instead of smacking people with clean socks, you can also just use something like saying "You're dead". Works just as well for virtually killing people. But is probably less fun. I've never been running around for days trying to smack someone with a sock. Do you know what the most evil thing is about this variant of the game? You don't have a chance to stop him from trying to assassinate you again and again... in other game variants, you at least have a chance of defeating him instead. Oh, and maybe Ted Walther misread the game instructions, and the reason he's been smacking people with his toy is that he's trying to assassinate them? Can someone hit him with a cluebat please and explain the rules of the game again?

Sam Hocevar: Best dinner ever!

Holy crap, thanks to the great Tlaloc, eighth ruler of the days, ninth lord of the nights, almighty god of the rain and the lightning, supreme mariachi soaker, we had the best Debconf dinner ever. They even had my favourite Mexican dish.

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Five


Me and Anthony Towns
A Debian Pope is born. Tonight was Debians formal night. Fabio drove John Sokol, Hilda, and myself to the auditorium where the dinner was being held. Fabio owns the local internet cafe and provides the internet connection to Debconf. Hilda is a local businesswoman, who owns a dental supply company. Very nice people; a real slice of the real Mexico. Hospitable, friendly, and helpful. We arrived just after the buses arrived and people chose their seats. As a formal diner, I had to wear my official costume, the crown and the clue bat. If anyone wants a genuine replica of the clue bat, the price is $50. If you don't buy it for your office, buy it for your kids; the foam is four inches thick and cannot bruise, cut, or hurt anyone. As soon as I entered the auditorium where the dinner was set up, Juan Diaz from Argentina took the crown from my head and raced away. I chased him with the clue bat. Then I saw that his intention was to put the crown on AJ, Debians newly elected project leader. He did it hastily, illegitimately, and backwards. Reaching AJ, I put down my clue bat and told him to hold still. To the cheers and applause of the entire auditorium, I lifted up the crown, and then placed it on AJ's head correctly, in a style befitting a pope crowning an emperor. Immediately after, we hugged and waved to the happy crowd. By the act of crowning, I am now the Debian Pope. This isn't the cushy job it might seem; some members of Debian really hate popes of any sort. Mariachi rain dance. Soon after the crowning, the food and drink started arriving. The mariachi band started playing their trumpets and guitars, starting off with the Mexican national anthem, which is a fun song to sing but I didn't understand a word of it. The newly crowned AJ came along the tables and organized "the wave" like at a football game. We all stood up and sat down as the wave came around, and made the low moaning WHOOOP sound as it came by us. A few minutes after this the food was set on buffet tables, so everyone got into line to get their meals. The meals were simple. Some meat, some rice and bread, and some salad. A nice meal after a week of rich eating. Beer flowed freely, and toward the end some wine was passed around too. The mariachis must have been a signal, because the rainy season started right after they started playing. First the rain bounced off the tin roof so we could hardly hear the band. As dinner went on the clattering of rain got louder, then flashes of lighting showed through the windows. The roof leaked onto many peoples dinner plates and heads, so we all got cozy with each other, finding places out of the rain. At one end of the hall the rain gushed out of the roof so strongly that the entire wall became a waterfall. Finally the lights went out. Cell phones and cigarette lighters quickly waved around, lighting up the place. Strobe lights from digital cameras gave the place a disco atmosphere. Slowly the emergency backup lights came on, then a few minutes later full power was restored. The rain did stop after that, but many people chose to leave shortly after, including yours truly. The Pope is assaulted. Several acts of rudeness and aggression were committed against myself and my guest, a local businessperson. I'm going to wait until tomorrow to see how Debian responds to this inappropriate behavior. If it is resolved to my satisfaction, I'll see no need to name names or post the details in public.

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf6 day 3: BOOT!

May 16th. In the morning I was kind of lazy and watched the talks via the webcast which worked very nice. I was even able to give some comments via IRC feedback. Very nice experience. One good idea popped up in the IRC there - it would also be useful to have an audio only webcast to conserve bandwidth. The "early" morning discussion about etch release and kernel to use in it was quite interesting to watch while I did not necessary got all the things that were said there. Then in the tower there was a great BOF session about speeding up the boot. It was a very nice session because there was a lot of discussion, lot of questions and comments from the audience. A GPL license talk followed the boot BOF and again I watched it via the webcast from the hacklab. Convenient. But then my network went down somehow I found it faster to walk to the tower then to get it back up. Several good questions were asked about the problems with current GPLv3 draft. Some ideas formed about how to fix the Affero clause using "public performance" phrasing. An insightful insight into the brain of debian-legal. Mao is deep ingrained into the brains of Debian Developers 
marga: it has been observed that debian members respect each other.
Myon: are you explaining the rules?
marga: Myon, actually, I wasn't, but I wouldn't mind explaining them
dondelelcaro: Myon, is that against the rules?
Myon: I would have to take a penalty card if I said 'yes'
dondelelcaro: talking.
Enrico did the social guidelines dance outlining the recommendations for peaceful coexistence without resorting to telletubbie or inquisition practices. It sounded very reasonable as recommendations, but those must never be promoted to any kind of policy. Enrico also mentioned that. Penny Peach, we miss you. After dinner a bunch of small mexican-looking females bunched first around the Japanese guys and then around the group where I was in. They were all smiling and very exited. They spoke very fast Spanish while rubbing their clothes and making horizontal back-and-forth motions with their hands. Nobody of us spoke Spanish. And they kept speaking and rubbing. My mind raced to present one unlikely reasoning after another, but nothing really fitted the situation. After a few minutes of total confusion we found a Spanish speaker who found out that they wanted ... an iron. An iron to iron their clothes. Doh! I was so confused that I only got 1 blurry photo from the ... incident. Random note: the fan control system here is quite ... buttony. Then we had a BOF about packaging of web applications and other applications that need database access. Maintainers and users of such things will be happy to hear that the situation is being resolved and there will most probably be a policy for etch+1 for that. Large ISPs and hosting providers will be happy to hear that their need are also heard (or will be heard if you join the process) and most probably it will be possible to activate/deactivate a web application for a certain user at a certain path of a certain virtual host with a single command that can also be scripted. In any case if you are interested in this development, please participate now, so that your need can be heard too. After the BOFs the, now official and scheduled, wine and cheese party started. It was briefly interrupted by rain, but the tables were moved under the roof in seconds and the party continued. There were around 40 different cheeses. Most of them were French and almost all of them were very tasty (some were .. an acquired taste :)). I can't say anything about the wine (I do not like the taste of alcohol), but other tasters were expressing very positive remarks. The party went on for a long time with more and more cheeses and vines brought up with time. There was some more hair coloring going on. Then there was the demonstration of use of duck tape on an almost professional HD 1080i video camera. And then there was the public demonstration of present Debian swirl tattoos. Impressive. When I was just going to go to the bed, I was lured into another game of Mao. I must say that playing Mao right after the wine and cheese part is ... interesting. Some girls got ... lucky ... seven. And there was still quite a lot of hacking going on around two in the night when I went to sleep. Tomorrow is the daytrip.

18 May 2006

Ted Walther: Why didn't King Solomon kill the two prostitutes?

On the long bus ride back from the Mexican pyramids, I got to think about a long standing problem. If Israel's laws forbade prostitution, why didn't Israel's greatest judge enforce those laws? We've all heard the story of King Solomon and the two harlot's, where he finds the real mother by threatening to chop the baby in two. Since the laws of Israel carried a death penalty for adultery, why didn't Solomon enforce it? People today equate prostitution with adultery, but the Bible does not. Not always. As the wisest man who ever lived, a walking embodiment of true justice, Solomons judgement deserves a deeper look. Here is the text of the whole incident:
1 Kings 3:16-28 Then came there two women, that were harlots, unto the king, and stood before him. And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house. And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also: and we were together; there was no stranger with us in the house, save we two in the house. And this woman's child died in the night; because she overlaid it. And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom. And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead: but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son, which I did bear. And the other woman said, Nay; but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son, and the living is my son. Thus they spake before the king. Then said the king, The one saith, This is my son that liveth, and thy son is the dead: and the other saith, Nay; but thy son is the dead, and my son is the living. And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king. And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other. Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it. Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof. And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king: for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him, to do judgment.
Whoredom, harlotry, prostitution; they defile the land. When Judah thought his daughter-in-law Tamar had become a harlot, he ordered her to be burnt. The problem was not with the sex for pay, but with violation of Judah's property rights. Tamar had been bought and paid for, and belonged to his family for the purpose of increasing their manpower. Biblically, sex for pay is fine. A ketubah (marriage contract) guarantees a woman a certain financial allowance in return for performing her sexual duties. The problem is that prostitution lowers the birthrate of the population, thus reducing its manpower, thus reducing its brainpower, thus reducing its ability to protect and defend itself. The connection between prostitution and lower birth rates isn't obvious to the layman, so just take it for granted right now.
Leviticus 18:20,28 Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour's wife, to defile thyself with her. That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you. Leviticus 19:29 Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness.
Prostitution can fall into two categories; the woman is still the property of her father, or she belongs to a husband. Widows, divorced, and single women fall into the category of belonging to their fathers; they have a right to return to the family home and be supported there. How would a father prostitute his daughter? If he treats her harshly, refuses to marry her off to a suitable husband, does not feed or clothe her, train her or discipline her, she may well turn to whoredom to support herself. Look closely at the story of the two harlots. They say they have no man. They fall into the category of single women. Sex with a single woman is not adultery. Adultery carries the death penalty, but as single women, their prostitution was to be regulated by different laws. If a girl took up the prostitution trade, and then got married under false pretenses, pretending to be a virgin, the penalty was death. However no death penalty is indicated for the circumstance where the woman and her family were up front about her past. A man taking a wife needs to be able to accurately assess the risks of disease and future infidelity.
Deuteronomy 22:13-21 If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: And the damsel's father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him; And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days. But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.
Suppose a single woman was to work as a whore. What is the penalty? For the girl, no penalty at all. If she is a virgin turning her first trick, the man has to pay a hefty fine of fifty shekels to her father, who has the choice of giving her in marriage or not.
Exodus 22:16,17 And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins. Deuteronomy 22:28,29 If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.
When she is no longer a virgin, her father either allows her to be a prostitute, violating the law at Leviticus 19:29, or he doesn't allow her. If her father allows her, then he becomes liable for her behavior and she is not punished, as described in Hosea 4:13,14 quoted below. If her father doesn't allow her, she is again subject to the death penalty, as set forth in the next set of verses:
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
In the case of Solomon's two harlots, there is no evidence at all that their father disciplined or otherwise acted to prevent them from their trade. Perhaps their father was dead, but in that case his responsibility to his daughters would have fallen on his next of kin. It really is a matter of family responsibility, not of persecuting individuals. There is one remaining corner case; what of the married woman who becomes a prostitute? What if the two harlots had been married after all? It is a principle of the Torah that it must be applied equally. You cannot hit one party with the full penalty then let another get off free for the same crime. It is better to err on the side of mercy, so if you do not convict one, you should not convict another. This is violated daily by un-Godly governments who selectively enforce their laws to "make examples" of people. Such selective enforcement is neither fair or just. In Solomon's case, assuming the women were married, the other parties to the crime of adultery were missing. Without them, there was no way to proceed. This is why Jesus was able to say "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." The two witnesses rule also comes into it; before a person can be put to death two witnesses to the crime are required. Solomon's two harlots had no witnesses against them. When people engage in false worship, and use the services of whores, God will not punish the women who turn to adultery and infidelity. He will punish those who are responsible; the men, who failed to take their patriarchal prerogative in setting a good example of just, fair, respectful, and temperate behavior.
Hosea 4:13,14 They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow thereof is good: therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom, and your spouses shall commit adultery. I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses when they commit adultery: for themselves are separated with whores, and they sacrifice with harlots: therefore the people that doth not understand shall fall.
If you have any Torah questions, feel free to write in to ted AT reactor-core DOT org.

17 May 2006

Andres Salomon: whee, packing!

dilinger’s first rule of packing: no matter how well you prepare, you will end up needing something that you’ve already packed. In 15 days, I will no longer be a resident of New York. I certainly won’t miss Queens at all!

16 May 2006

Christian Perrier: Debconf 6 - day 2

Back to a normal schedule now and, thus, woke up at 06:00..:). Quiet hacking near the pool, with a few mosquitos so that I don't feel alone. We had a nice breakfast at the Tower (too lazy to go in the village and have some more barbecue food). Watching Lior discover that he actually ordered a giant piece of meat was kinda funny (less funny for Lior, though). After hacking in the hacklab, I'll have to gather people for the 1st i18n infrastructure session. I hope I'll find everybody...we'll see. I quickly attended Mark Shuttleworth Ubuntu report. I'm quiet balanced about it as it is still giving good promises....but the real achievements aren't coming. Rosetta which is a promising framework, even though it still has IMHO many design flaws or missing features, will not be free. So that seems to definitely rule it out from our i18n infrastructure project. Talking about it, I escaped from Mark's talk and ran into the hacklab to handle what was supposed to be an informal session about i18n infrastructure, which I did set up very quickly (and badly, with many schedule changes). It finally turned out to be an interesting brainstorming with about 30 people attending and many interesting exchanges about what we would like to see in future i18n infrastructure. Thanks to all people who participated, it was a real pleasure to animate that one. After lunch, I've been quietly attending Manoj's workshop about SELinux. It flies way over my head but it is always interesting to hear about these security things. I also took the opportunity to a very good discussion to setup plans for the i18n meeting in Extremadura with Dario Rapisardi and Cesar Gomez Martin.

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf6 day 2: Java is non-free, at last!

The first session in the morning that I attended was the BOF about Python. After an introduction to the current state by the Python maintainer (Matthias Klose) and a few other people we run overtime and the BOF was extended into another time slot. Also the session was plagued by the room switch hanging which affected both the network and the recording. It really looks that that strange situation with a bunch of python-foo, python2.3-foo and python2.4-foo packages will be fixed. Later in the day guys from Intel gave a talk about some kind of data mining stuff they were doing with hardware database from Ubuntu. The tool was called Toppler (from Dilbert) and basically was a hardware database. They pondered about possibilities of getting some useful information from the huge pool of data, but the examples that they showed were just lame. For example they showed how you can get a list of 1234 reports relating to this wireless card, but that is not what I want to know - I want to know if it works and if it does not work, what can I do to fix it. The showed an example of an OEM entering his computers hardware configuration to see what distro works on that hardware - that is completely useless: as an OEM I at that point would already have chosen a distro and what I really would like to know is what will and what will not work from my hardware configuration in that distro, why it will not work and how to fix that. That would be approaching useful status - so far they only have a SQL DB with a simplistic web fronted. At the same time to give out that kind of information you would need much more datapoints to make a correlation - datapoints most of which can not be tested automatically and require user interaction on submitting. On the other hand the more user interaction they need, the less users will want to submit that data. They already have at least 10 times too many questions (there were 30 + options) if they really want this to be something that users will want to contribute to. Also there is no real direct motivation for users to contribute to that database - maybe OEM's have that kind of motivation, but they must decide to use Linux first. In short I only saw mountains of social and technical problems with this project and really little in terms of benefit. That's what you get when you have too much money to burn. After that there was a "yearly" Ubuntu report from Mark Shuttleworth. Most of what Mark said was already widely known if you followed Ubuntu's development a bit. Dapper will release on 1st of June and will be supported for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the servers. Edgy Eft will be a developer driven highly experimental release that will be done in 4 months and its planning will be done in Ubuntu conference in Paris (18th-23rd June). In Dapper KDE is given equal weight to Gnome and in Edgy the same will be done to XFCE. There is a graphical installer - Ubiquity and a graphical upgrader that works around strange things that APT has not been designed to handle. Mark can only guess what will be in Edgy as developers will decide this one, but most probably Xen and XGL will be integrated, startup will be reworked by adding paralel init scripts with dependencies and maybe even APT will be replaced by some kind of SMART tool. I have not heard anything about it before and Mark also gave no further detail. but in any case Edgy promises to be "the Ubuntu equivalent of a release of Debian experimental". Way to go not to stick into the enterprise stability. I am really looking forward to that. Another announcement came from Sun - thanks to hard work of many people the license of Sun Java was changed to allow it to be included in Debian non-free repository. FHS and Debian Policy compilant packages have been produced and are uploaded to Debian sid non-free. Congrats to all involved! Now we only to move it to main somehow. Unfortunately I missed two BOF that I wanted to see due to scheduling changes that I did not follow at the time: i18n BOF and Debian representation BOF. I have been doing quite a bit of both during last years, so I wanted to be there, but missed it. Doh. In the afternoon I was twice recruited by the organizers to do the group photo. Last year there was a huge collection of dSLR's around Debconf5, but this year either the dSLR owners did not come or did not want to lug their cameras across half the globe, so I with my Canon 350D and a few (cheap) lenses have become the de-fact photographer of the Debconf6. It was only natural that the group photo also had to be taken by the best camera around. I, naturally, am very honored by the opportunity even if that would mean that I myself am not on the group photo. I could just gimp myself into the corner of it after the fact :) In any case the place to take the picture had to be found. The amphitheater where the Debconf5 group photo was taken was a perfect place, but lacking that a trick all the way back from Debconf3 could be employed - standing at a high place and take the picture at a sharp angle down. The best place for this that I found around here is the 10m diving tower - there is a platform aprx. 8 meters from the ground where one can clearly see to the back area of the tower where a large grass area is located. I still need to confirm whether I can take the group photo from there with my best lens (Canon 50mm f/1.8 II) and what amount of light will we have on time point when we have the ability to actually take the picture (18:00). There will still be a bit of a chance with the weather, so an alternate group photo time should also be planned. There will be an announcement mail that will probably go public before this email will. Oh and later in the evening I found a guy (sorry, names escape me is seconds) who has a Canon 17-40mm f/4 L lens which I will borrow from him for the group photo. That will make the photo a lot sharper and make us much more flexible to the group size which is very helpful. Just before the dinner I want to see the saunas that i was told long ago. Basically it was a headed room 3x1 meter with a temperature control outside that was set to 0. Nobody uses the sauna here and that is no wonder - the whole place is like a large sauna. In the same club (just above the restaurant where we have all the meals now) there was a ping-pong table, two pool tables and a gym. In the gym I found a Mexican Gentoo spy who's mom was born in Riga, Latvia. The world is truly small. After the dinner I sent out the group photo announcement email and then took a look at the Joey Hess's BOF about debian-installer. I snook into the talk to take a few photos and watched the rest via the webcast. Unfortunately all the people spoke very quietly there, so it was hard to distinguish their voices from the background noise. Please, do not do that! Speak up, people! The tango practice took place between hacklabs tonight. Looked fun, but I would rather take a lot of pictures of it :) On a final note I witnessed a Mao game in Spanish. That was only a bit more disturbing then the same game in English. Even while I do not speak any Spanish. P.S. If you really like what I do with photos in this blog, it would be very nice if you would sponsor me a Pro account at Flickr. Otherwise my monthly traffic limit there (20 Mb) is nearly up with only select photos of two days of Debconf uploaded. I have now almost 2 Gb of photos stored on my laptop and the conference is only starting.

15 May 2006

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf6 day 1: Intro

The day was started by a welcome speech from the organizers saying thanks to all (most) the helpers and sponsors. The tower room was almost full, I wonder how will it look like when the real talks start. The next talk is only planed after an hour and a half as no BOF claimed this time slot. Well - a bit more time for hacking, socializing and sunbathing. :) After an hour of working on a good tan I went to "Debian vs. Open Solaris" discussion. After a bit of time the discussion about CDDL broke out. Debian basically objects to choice of venue clause and there are also GPL-incompatibility problems that might go away with GPLv3. The core of the discussion was more of the explanation of why those clauses were placed there in the first place. The sense that I got for the discussion is that Sun would modify CDDL in a way that will most probably make it DFSG-free and compatible with at least GPLv3. Also it was told that in fact usually choice of venue only applies to court suites between multi-regional corporations with overlapping regions. The legal discussions went over my head more then once especially when GPLv2, GPLv3 and CDDL license interaction on one system and distribution of such where discussed. On the OpenSolaris front there is a move from indoor source control system to Subversion. So far there are only around 100 non-Sun commits to OpenSolaris, but a big jump is expected after the transition to SVN is complete. Joey Hess had a wiki talk in paralel, which I did not see. Off to lunch! At the lunch I got to sit at the one table with Paul Allen from Intel and Ted Walther. It was discovered that Ted is actually just coming out of fasting so he does not eat anything, but only drinks juices. Well, that's one way to avoid foreign food problems. On the way back from lunch I got a lead on my first mark. I will now start a separate article about the Assassins game that I will publish when the game is over. The second talk was from Enrico about waisting time. He waisted a lot of our time with that :). I loved vigor - a paper clip assistant for vi :D. xlaby - a labyrinth for your mouse pointer. Read the man page! On the later part of the day I was busy mourning my death, preparing and trying to print papers fr the travel reimbursement stuff, so I missed all BOFs between Enrico and dinner, but had a bit of time for some local tetrinet fun. While I was doing that Ted was at the marketplace and got me a few bags of fried grasshoppers - a great souvenirs, thanks! :) Some evening hacking in the hacklab after the dinner and I already wanted to go to bed when I saw in the IRC an announcement about Speaker training BOF. The event was very interesting - Meike Reichle showed and made us do us several nice things that will definitely improve our public speaking. After that I just could not go buy a group of people playing Mao and I immediately joined the game. Luckily they were not playing long so I got the rules in seconds. The game nearly imploded after one of the players was very inconsistent with his rules (he had to rethink them all the time), but then another winner just reset the game and it went on with a lot of fun from that point. The game had three newbies, so it was a lot of fun, but also a bit of waiting for people to catch up and pay attention. Well, off to bed now - tomorrow will be busy.

14 May 2006

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Comcast: Human or Automaton?

I’m not the first person with a story about the sad state of Comcast. Since I’m certain I’m never actually going to get a True Human to read my email at Comcast, I’ll just post my brief exchange regarding Comcast’s SMTP servers here. Maybe some future archaeologist of the Internet will point to this exchange as early evidence of the End of Email: I posted the following to Comcast’s website feedback form — apparently there is no publicly advertised email address for communicating with Comcast:
Please forward this email to an engineer responsible for Comcast’s SMTP service. I run an ISP. Email to @comcast.net addresses often bounces with a “556 null byte in data” rejection connecting to gateway-s.comcast. I use postfix from Debian Sarge. This is not a problem on my end. There are numerous reports of this problem in newsgroups (just google ‘556 null byte in data’ ‘comcast’). The problem is independent of mail user agent and ISP. Note that this is *not* an issue of my users attempting to connect to the Comcast SMTP server themselves—I understand there is some issue where Comcast only accepts SMTP/SSL/TLS now for its users. This is a *delivery* problem. I have seen some speculation that Comcast’s SMTP servers are rejecting email with this error because of either large attachments or attachments with long filenames. I have seen the problem occur where the attachments are very small (on the order of 10K), but I haven’t ruled out the latter explanation. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to fix this problem. My users would like to be able to email Comcast customers.
Comcast’s response:
Dear Adam KESSEL, Thank you for taking the time to write us. Comcast is aggressive about protecting its’ subscribers from unwanted and unauthorized emails. In keeping with industry standards and best practices some recent changes to our filters have been made.If you are attempting to send emails to legitimate recipients in the Comcast.net domain, and receive an error message there are 3 likely reasons: 1. Your mail server has been identified as a source of Spam. Our mail filters have been updated to reject all mail from your server until the administrator of your mail server contacts us to request the server be removed. 2. The source of your message has a dynamic email address. Anyone attempting to email into the Comcast domain directly from a Dynamic IP address will receive the following error message: Comcast does not support the direct connection to its mail servers from residential IPs. Your mail should be sent to comcast.net users through your ISP. Please contact your ISP or mail administrator for more information. 3. Your mail server has an invalid rDNS value. What this means is that our mail filters authenticate each message by checking the rDNS value to ensure its’ a legitimate domain and yours wasnot. The error or “bounce” message you receive will indicate which reason the message was rejected. Youwill either be given the address to request Blacklist removal or you will be directed to our rDNS FAQpage. If a domain administrator feels that their IP range has been blocked in error or they would like information on required steps to be removed from our black list, they can contact us at: blacklist_comcastnet@cable.comcast.com If you need assistance setting up email through your ISP?s mail servers please visit their support pages or contact their support group. If you need information on the rDNS block, please visit: http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=Email118405 Thank you for the opportunity to assist you. If you need further assistance with any of your Comcast services please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you again for choosing Comcast we appreciate your business. To visit our local support page including links to contact us via Live Chat, as well as many downloadable forms,and FAQ pages, please visit: http://www.comcast.com/nesupport/ Did you know that Comcast offers its customers a variety of free benefits? These include McAfee Antivirus, Firewall and Privacy software as well the Comcast tool bar that lets you take Comcast.net with you while you surf, and the Desktop Doctor to help you restore lost settings…plus much more, please visit http://www.comcast.net/downloads/ to see all of the extras that we provide. Sincerely,
Irene Comcast Electronic Customer Care - New England You can email us anytime by replying to this email or by clicking the “Contact Comcast” link found on the bottom of all www.Comcast.net and www.Comcast.com webpages. Our Electronic Customer Support teams are available to assist you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. **************************************************
The response contained in this message is intended for the addressee only and may vary from other ponses depending on geography, promotional campaigns or other factors. If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of the information contained in this message is prohibited.
**************************************************
The last bit about “unauthorized use” is a nice touch. My follow-up:
The 556 null byte SMTP error is *not* a spam or blocking related rejection. My mail server is (1) not a source of spam (2) does not have a dynamic IP address (I assume below whenyou wrote “dynamic email address” you meant “dynamic IP address”); it is not a residential IP but rather a commercial ISP that I run; and (3) the mail server has a valid reverse DNS lookup. To clarify: not every email is being rejected from the ISP’s IP address. In fact, the same sender can send from my ISP multiple times to a Comcast subscriber, and most messages will get through. There appears to be a bug in your SMTP delivery server whereby certain triggering events cause a 556 null byte error. There is at least some evidence that one such triggering event is an email with an attachment with a long filename. This is not a spam filter issue. This is a Comcast SMTP configuration issue. As you will see if you google “‘556 null byte in data’ comcast” this is awidespread problem that is entirely unrelated to Comcast’s zealous efforts to block unsolicited email. Please forward my email to an engineer or technician. Thanks,
Adam
Finally, Comcast’s witty retort:
Dear Adam Rosi-Kessel, Thank you for taking the time to write us. Commercial Email Accounts We have to apologize, but at this time you must contact our Commercial Business support team by calling one of the following toll free numbers 888-824-8105 or 888-824-8155, 1-888-737-8361 Thank you for the opportunity to assist you. If you need further assistance with any of your Comcastservices please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you again for choosingComcast we appreciate your business. To visit our local support page including links to contact us via Live Chat, as well as many downloadable forms,and FAQ pages, please visit: http://www.comcast.com/nesupport/ Did you know that Comcast offers its customers a variety of free benefits? These include McAfee Antivirus, Firewall and Privacy software as well the Comcast tool bar that lets you take Comcast.net with you while you surf, and the Desktop Doctor to help you restore lost settings…plus much more, please visit http://www.comcast.net/downloads/ to see all of the extras that we provide. Sincerely,
Ivonne Comcast Electronic Customer Care - New England You can email us anytime by replying to this email or by clicking the “Contact Comcast” link found onthe bottom of all www.Comcast.net and www.Comcast.com webpages. Our Electronic Customer Support teams are available to assist you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. **************************************************
The response contained in this message is intended for the addressee only and may vary from other responses depending on geography, promotional campaigns or other factors. If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of the information contained in this message is prohibited.
**************************************************
If anyone has interesting ideas about how to get past Comcast’s front lines, I would like to know.

Ben Hutchings: Debconf video streaming: bugs and fixes

Yesterday we found some problems with our streaming set-up that hadn't appeared in the short time we had to test it beforehand. Firstly, due to a misconfiguration, the 10 Mbps link from the Parliamentary Tower to our network became congested with broadcast traffic. This seems to have been fixed, though I don't know the details. Secondly, at times when the picture kept changing, the encoding machine was unable to encode it in real time. We believe we've fixed this by using libtheora-mmx in place of the standard libtheora. Finally, we weren't able to set up both internal and external Icecast servers, and to save bandwidth we had to stop people at Debconf from streaming from the external servers. We have fixed this with the aid of some new NAT and firewall rules. If you're at Debconf you can use http://video:8000/hacklab.ogg or http://video:8000/tower.ogg. If you're outside, carry on using video.debconf.org. One of the servers has gone down due to a disk failure, but should be back later. In the mean time we should be able to add more relay servers.

13 May 2006

Meike Reichle: Arrived in Mexico

It's taken a while, but now I am finally in Oaxtepec and online! The journey was not too bad, pretty long of course, but otherwise fine. The vacational centre in Oaxtepec is a great venue! Tasty food, nice rooms, comfortable hacklab, beautiful surroundings and a laaarge pool. It's really warm here and I am truly enjoying myself. The internet uplink caused some trouble during the first days, which is why I haven't posted earlier, but everything is fixed now and everybody is in good spirits. There are still the usual minor annoyances, but overall we're fine. Tomorrow the official conference will kick off with the DebianDay. A special day with more general talks aimed at beginners and interested locals. The day after that the actual developer conference will start, featuring talks, workshops, round tables and lots of BoFs. I am particularly looking forward to tomorrow since it's also the day when maxx arrives, bringing along his old laptop for me to use. I've been without one since I arrived here, since my own one is still broken, and it hasn't exactly been fun being without a laptop. (Not to say it truly sucked!!)

12 May 2006

Erich Schubert: Hello you lucky DebConf/DebCamp attendees!

I envy you. I would have liked to attend, and I already had to pass last year. I had expected to be in the middle of my finals by now, but it'll actually be another month. But I have most of my dates now, at least. Also I'm such a cheapskate, flying over the ocean to attend a conference is a bit out of my league. Guess I need to find a sponsor for such things. Just like I could use a build and test machine for my SELinux work and for backporting (I have four pbuilder setups on my laptop), maybe with an UML or Xen virtualization setup for easier and faster testing. Well, I may dream, okay? ;-) My favourite DebCamp postings so far:
no nude swimming pool use (wear at least an Ipod!) SCNR. As for the Google Summer Of Code: we've received lots of applications, I think somewhere in the 80s. Some pretty bogus (some don't even have a title), but also very cool ones. A dozen duplicate proposals, too. I think our "favourites" list is around 20, but I don't expect Google will sponsor this many, and we also need enough mentors.

Next.

Previous.