Do you use blackholes.securitysage.com? If you do YOU ARE LOSING VALID MAIL NOW. At least if you reject as soon as it hits. The “service” currently simply returns a host from NetworkSolutions instead of real information, so all those software rejecting based on the DNS return are currently rejecting legal mail. If you only use it to score mails a little up and not as a black/white decision you might be lucky, but should still remove it from your lists. Its not the first time that this blacklist sucks like this, seems the people behind it aren’t able to keep it running reliable. To validate my claims, try the following:

host blackholes.securitysage.com
host nomattherwhat.securitysage.com
host $someipreversed.blackholes.securitysage.com

compare it with another list (whatever you chose, surbl, rfc-ignorant, doesnt matter), like

host abuse.rfc-ignorant.org
host $someipreversed.abuse.rfc-ignorant.org

Comments: 2

For the first time in a while, I've filed a data protection complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office about a company's bad behaviour. Take a bow, Sky TV! Claiming that you can't remove my details from your mailing lists because I'm not one of your customers is stupid beyond belief. If I'm not one of your customers, never have been and have never permitted you to have my personal details, then you shouldn't have them anyway and you definitely shouldn't keep them after I've asked you to stop.

To continue the CECB mini-review series, I picked up an LG/Zenith DTT900 at Circuit City in Southaven this evening with one of my two digital converter box coupons (and $24ish of my hard-earned money at Sam’s Town’s blackjack tables). With essentially the same setup and conditions (same television and el-cheapo VHF/UHF indoor antenna) as the RCA DTA800B tested before, the initial channel scan found the same 17 channels/sub-channels. However, the Zenith’s ability to manually add channels meant that I was able to add WMC-DT/NBC 5 (RF channel 52) and with some fiddling get a reasonably stable signal, something I was unable to accomplish with the RCA—this isn’t that surprising, since the Zenith is based on LG’s ATSC digital tuner chipset, which is known for its superior reception capabilities over most other silicon. In addition, other channels (WHBQ-DT/Fox 13, WPTY-DT/ABC 24, and WLMT-DT/CW 30) that were less-than-stable with the RCA were rock-solid with the Zenith. Bear in mind that WMC is running on a different frequency (and lower on its tower) than it will after the transition is complete in nine months, so indoor antennas in Shelby County at least should cope better with WMC when it is back on VHF channel 5. The built-in guide is a little weaker than that included on the RCA model; the Zenith’s only shows program data for one channel at a time. The Zenith, however, has more functionality accessible from the remote control, including a “favorite channels” feature that would be useful for the compulsive surfer who isn’t interested in switching past the news and weather loops on 3–2 and 5–3 when doing the Letterman/Leno (or Conan/Craig) shuffle, and a sleep button. I also thought the Zenith’s menus were a little more polished and better organized. On the antenna front, the Zenith, unlike the RCA, does not provide an attachment for digitally-steered “SmartAntennas,” which may be a consideration if you already have one of these (they are apparently uncommon at present) or have hard-to-tune channels in multiple directions which might benefit from this high-tech solution. The Zenith’s better signal-handling may reduce the need for a fancy antenna, however; either way, you should probably check out TVFool’s antenna aiming guide or the somewhat less-friendly CEA/NAB-sponsored AntennaWeb website to determine what sort of antenna solution is going to be necessary for you before spending money on one. The only real problem I encountered in testing was that the “zoom” setting seemed to behave oddly; at first, letting it decide on its own seemed to work OK on some channels, but then I ended up with some bizarre “squeezed” pictures on several HD channels. Expect to manually fiddle with the zoom setting when channels switch between showing native 16:9 and pillarboxed 4:3 programs. Those who use closed captioning will also find that it seems to forget the CC setting when you switch channels, although I think there’s a menu option to leave closed captioning on all the time. Finally, caveat emptor: many manufacturing runs of this converter, and its near twin sold by Best Buy under its Insignia house brand, apparently have an audio problem that certain TVs seem to be more susceptible to than others. The converter I purchased had a manufacturing date of April 2008, which has been reported to be the run in which this problem was fixed, and I observed no audio problems during my testing (on an admittedly low-end CRT stereo television/VCR over RCA cables). Overall, I’d assess the LG/Zenith DTT900 as a better option for those who are planning to use the converter on a regular basis; however, if you’re simply buying a converter to serve as a “lifeline” when cable or satellite television is disrupted, or if you would like to take advantage of the SmartAntenna connectivity on that unit, the RCA model is probably adequate for most needs and seems to retail for about $10 less.

We hear a lot these days about the price of gas, energy efficiency, and the like. But, in the United States, outside of a few progressive cities, there aren't a lot of people that are using the ultimate zero-emissions transportation technology: bicycles.

That's really too bad, because bicycles are a lot cheaper to operate than cars even before you consider gas prices. They also are great exercise and are probably faster, safer, and more convenient than you think.

I live about 10 miles (16 km) from work, which includes several miles on sand roads. I haven't bicycled in about 6 years. Last week, I got my bicycle out, touched it up a bit, and started riding. Sunday I rode in to work and back as a test. As soon as I get a bit of gear (hopefully by the middle of next week), I plan to start riding bike to work at least 3 days a week.

I've picked up some tips along the way. Let's talk about a few of them.

Safety

Many people think bicycling is dangerous. In fact, bicycling is about as safe as driving an SUV. Not only that, but only 10% of bicycling accidents occur when you are hit from behind (and 90% of those produce only minor injuries). It turns out that the vast majority of bicycling accidents occur because people are not riding on the road with traffic, or are acting unpredictably. Following some basic safety advice can make you safer in a bicycle than an SUV. Oh, and don't drink and ride; 24% of fatal bicycle accidents involve an intoxicated rider.

Distance

Think it's too far? Think again. It's fairly easy for an untrained, unfit person to ride a bicycle up to 10 miles without working hard at it. That can probably be done in about an hour. As you get more fit and used to the bike, you may be able to go that distance in half that time. Also, get pannier bags for your bicycle. They attach in back and let you carry work clothes, laptops, etc. without having to use a backpack.

Smell

Many people with office jobs are concerned about this. Not everywhere has a convenient shower. Check out these tips from the Tips and Tricks for Biking to Work manual.

I'm excited about it, and will be sure to post more here on how it goes.

Last week I noticed, that Kabel Deutschland, a cable provider in germany, returns for any non existing hosts “204.9.89.60″. It seems, thats it is rolled out since last fall. Even for DNSSEC enabled infrastructure it breaks it totally:

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> +dnssec web.pixaco.se @83.169.184.161
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; ANSWER SECTION:
web.pixaco.se. 0 IN A 204.9.89.60 Beside that, this behavour breaks the whole DNS, since many mechanism rely on a negative answer. The most visible effect for the users is, that when having a typo on surfing, he will forwarded to http://suche.kabeldeutschland.de/de.kde.assist/?domain=<domainyoutypedinyourprompt>. Since 204.9.88.0/21 is located at our transatlantic friends from US, there might be some problem with leaking privacy informations. I don’t feel happy, if I had a typo in my URL and getting listed for it on any terror list or providing the newest porno links to my american friends inside the organisations with the tree capitals. All that for getting some extra money, but racing pricedumping for connectivity, this sucks a lot.
If you are a customer and feel pissed, you can send a friendly note to them:

Kabel Deutschland Vertrieb und Service GmbH & Co. KG
Beschwerdestelle
99116 Erfurt
kundenservice@kabeldeutschland.de
Fax: 01805299925

A quick and dirty workaround for dnsmasq maybe to add “bogus-nxdomain=204.9.89.60″ to your config file. This doesn’t fix the DNSSEC problem.
The problem also pops up at dns-operations and there are traces at google too.

Back from my travels, it's time for a few updates. I've mostly blogged about these elsewhere, so I'll just give some pointers here. The launch of magnetic-stripe cards at Where 2.0 went well. We had some initial teething issues with Linux talking to the card printers, which was resolved by backing down to Linux kernel 2.6.22 from 2.6.24. I'm not entirely sure what's up with 2.6.24, but it exhibited strange behavior talking to the card printers over ethernet — as if there were MTU misconfigurations. It's a big nuisance, as 2.6.24 is the default kernel shipped with Ubuntu Hardy, an otherwise excellent release. I've been paying some attention to OpenID 2.0 recently, as it's time for me to upgrade my OpenID accepting websites to use the new release of the specification — if for no other reason than Yahoo! OpenIDs are 2.0-only. This investigation led me to notice XRIs again, which are the confusing underbelly of the OpenID specs. The W3C Technical Architecture Group recently advised against using XRIs. I wrote about this over on my XML.com blog. I've not used for that blog for a long time, but will try to do so more. I've realized that I've still got a lot to say about the web, XML and open standards, and the XML.com blog seems like a good place to say it. Finally, to brag for a short moment. Another XTech has been and gone, and this year's was a great experience for everybody involved. This quote from attendee Paul Smith summed things up nicely, as it tells me I succeeded in my main goal for the conference:

What I really liked about this conference was the mix of attendees and presenters, both from academia, and the commercial world both and small. It made it feel much more valid, and it really felt like everyone was there for the right reasons - not trying to sell anything, but out of a genuinely altruistic wish to make the web better.

My sincere thanks to everybody involved in XTech this year.

I write most of my email (in gmail) and submit most web site content in English, however, a significant portion is also done in Italian. I leave the spell checker in English, because Italian is, in general, quite easy to spell, so that even as a native speaker, a helping hand is occasionally welcome. However, it isn't as if I write Italian perfectly either, so the help there would be nice as well. I find it quite annoying to go change the language in the spell checker option each time, especially when, as an example, I'm responding to email and do 2 in English, one in Italian, another in English, and so on. Ideally, some sort of adaptive technology would be possible, where it figures out what language I'm using, out of a preselected list, after a few words, and starts behaving accordingly. It seems as if there is some discussion, so hopefully a solution won't be too far in the future.

Recently I have mostly been "behind". I've caught up a little on what I wanted to do though over the past couple of days, so I won't feel too bad. I've:

made a new release of the chronicle blog compiler, after recieving more great feedback from MJ Ray. un-stalled the Planet Debian. updated the weblogs hosted by Debian Administration, after help and suggestions from Daniel Kahn Gillmor. stripped, cleaned, and tested a new steam engine. Nearly dying in the process. discovered a beautiful XSS attack against a popular social networking site, then exploited that en masse to collect hundreds of username/password pairs - all because the site admins said "Prove it" when I reported the hole. Decisions decisions .. what to do with the list... released a couple of woefully late DSAs. started learning British Sign Language.

Anyway I've been bad and not writing much recently on the Debian Administration site, partly because I'm just sick of the trolling comments that have been building up, and partly due to general lack of time. I know I should ignore them, and I guess by mentioning them here I've kinda already lost, but I find it hard to care when random folk are being snipy. Still I've remembed that some people are just great to hear from. I know if I see mail from XX they will offer an incisive, valid, criticism or a fully tested and working patch. Sometimes both at the same time. In conclusion I need my pending holiday in the worst way; and I must find time to write another letter... ObQuote: Dungeons & Dragons

Looking at the current discussions, I'm wishing some people would calm down a bit. It's always impressive how some things switch sides like pendulums. First of all, Debian already is centered about packing software and not developing them. We already have the rules and policies and methods in place. Our policy states:

If changes to the source code are made that are not specific to the needs of the Debian system, they should be sent to the upstream authors in whatever form they prefer so as to be included in the upstream version of the package.

And our source format shows how important marking the difference is to use: We have explicit .diff.gz files to contain them. The differences are not hidden in same Version Control System (like BSD) or in propretary formats (ever tried to unpack a .srpm without rpm or without downloading some magic perl script?), but in a simple universal understandable format. That said, please remember we are a distribution. Our priorities are our users and not the whims of software authors. We have to find the middle ground between harmful and necessary changes. Patching software to abide the FHS, to allow the user choose their editor or browser in an common way or any other thing to form a coherent set of packages is no bug in Debian, it is a bug in upstream to not allow this at least via some configure option. We have neither the manpower nor the job to rewrite and fork stuff to a usable state, though. Thus we have to keep to upstream and hope they will include our modifications or forward-port them to every new release. Thus, we need both: We need to patch (and in general, the worse the software from a distribution's point of view or from a general point, the more of this we need. This does not necessarily hold in the other direction, though.). And we need and want to show what we change. So our users can find out how exactly the software we ship is different. And so other people dealing with the same software can profit from our changes. (After all, free software is about "giving back" a lot.). And of course maintainer change over time and we want the new one understands what the previous one did. That said, there is of course things that can be improved. But as with all improvements there are things that improve and there are things where nothing is worse than good intentions. Adding more thing to keep in sync is almost always a bad thing in the long run. The easiest way to keep things accessible is to use stuff actually used. I think any additional place to track patches will be futile. A good interface to view the .diff.gz files in our archive in some browser, on the other hand, could hardly get unuseful. The format of a single .diff.gz is of course also improveable. Things like a quilt-like standardized patch series look like a very good idea to me. But the format is of course also very downgradeable. Storing VCS formated information for example, tempting as it is, spoils two very important points:

• universal readability is lost. Everyone coping with software can work with patches or patch series, no matter what tools they use.
• visibility of changes is sacrificed for history. Every single VCS I ever saw primarily coped with history. Even patch based ones represent changes in time and not by itself changes by topic.

And of course, a lot can be improved by just using some rules more strictly. Not using a pristine tarball or a proper subset of one where the first is not possible should not be some mere ignorable non-conformist behaviour, but seen as the serious problem it is.

Romain, you might just want to check 471263 where there is disagreement over how this lintian test should or should not behave towards generated files. In particular, if a package contains a patch in debian/patches that causes upstream files to be modified indirectly (e.g. because upstream is old / quiet and hasn't updated the autotools stuff for years, any patch that affects Makefile.am or configure.in ac is going to cause changes in generated files and these changes should not be wrapped into yet more patch files because of the inevitable build failures when any of the tools used to generate those files are updated.

Your stats may also be out because of this problem - it is hard to see how lintian can resolve the problem cleanly without carrying a long list of "possibly generated files" and risking the list going stale.

There is more to the contents of .diff.gz than may meet the eye.

There is an article on TechCrunch on Windows on the OLPC. This article started out as a comment below lots of comments that were missing the point, but eventually grew too large. The entire discussion circles around the question whether it would be beneficial to give the users the same view and behaviour that is on 90% of machines worldwide, so they can start out prospective jobs with a minimum of training. Learning your way around the UI is only a significant part of training if that actual work you will do is trivial — so this argument basically boils down to "I don't expect the African kids to do anything but grunt work during their lifetime anyway, so we better start training them early", which is the wrong approach not only to education. To make a bad car analogy, roads are usually made of several layers, from the foundation providing the stability up to the paint defining lanes. Operating systems are similarly layered, with a core that applications (cars) never touch directly, and several other layers on top of that that are not really required for basic functionality, but that add safety (process separation) or comfort (standard functions). The minimum standard of things is a "platform definition", which all car (or application) makers can expect — all roads have a minimum width and there are no dangerous spikes (if that is not true, you can get a steamroller or respectively format your harddisk). Railways use the same kind of foundation (operating system), but the platform (heh) is quite different. You cannot drive a car on a railway, or a train on a road, just as you cannot run a Windows application on a Linux system or vice versa (there are special wagons you can place your car on, and special trucks with rails on them if you feel like it, but these are heavier and need more energy to pull). Now in this discussion, people have been comparing Windows (the platform) to Linux (the operating system). That doesn't work. On Linux, there are several platforms available, the most prominent being GNOME and KDE for the desktop and POSIX utilities on the command line, but there are lots of others as well. Part of most platform definitions is an user interface, which abstracts what is really happening to something comprehensible to the user, using analogies (a tachometer displays our speed as an angle usually, but other representations are possible). The "desktop" idiom happened to be the first graphical UI some thirty years back, and was perpetuated into today's computers (just like the width of roads hasn't changed from the days of the Roman empire, where it was "two horses and then some"), however this doesn't mean it is the best choice available — it's just what we are used to. If you look at the screen contents on the day traders' computers (lots of that on the TV right now thanks to the market crisis), you will notice the vast majority does not use overlapping windows or standardized "rising-edge" buttons to click on, but rather, they have a tightly-packed grid layout with high-contrast information displays that also color-code certain messages. I think that is the most important point here: to achieve optimal results, the presentation idiom needs to be chosen in a task specific way. With children as the target audience, we lose one of the key requirements behind the adoption of the windowed view: the need for side-by-side presentation of data from multiple unrelated sources (which is also a problem given the lack of screen space). With the introduction of ad-hoc mesh networking and collaborative applications, the "desktop" analogy begins to break down. The project's mission also defines requirements on the platform. If we want to keep the requirement "users should be able to build and share their own stuff", then we want a framework where it is hard to make mistakes, especially those that can be spotted only after an interesting failure, and more importantly impossible to write code that makes unrelated components fail, because these components might be your way back out of the situation. Windows has an excellent event model with fairly good isolation of components (to the point where a problem in an event handler can be handled by the event loop rather than terminating the program, so for example Internet Explorer can shut down broken plugins rather than crashing), but the detail knowledge required to really work with the API (how to build a message loop that also runs queued I/O completion handlers correctly) leads to a fairly steep learning curve, and would teach implementation details rather than concepts. The normal "linuxy" approach of going low level whenever higher-level approaches fail is not the answer either as we want to truly empower people rather than just training them to be a cheap replacement for the tech support Indians (no offence), so it is vital that the "real" applications use the same framework that people implementing new things would use, and thus all the complexity that we want in our "official" applications needs to be taken care of by the platform, with all the safety features in place too. So no existing platform provides what we want. — hence Sugar. And that is the problem for Windows advocates: Sugar replaces those bits that make Windows a platform and not just a kernel, so porting Sugar to Windows doesn't make sense from a technical point of view, since we already replaced the bits that we didn't have free software for before. Other than that, the "Linux vs. Windows" kernel choice is secondary; in fact both kernels are very similar in design and function, the various advantages and disadvantages of either aren't that relevant really. The only technical reason in favour of Linux is the virtual memory management — the Windows VMM behaves erratically in the absence of a swap device, but I believe that is not something that cannot be fixed. The reason why I believe Linux is the better choice here is long-term support. Since these devices will be used in basic education (which hasn't changed that much in the past years as 1 plus 1 still equals 2), there is hardly any need for radical changes after the initial rollout — why add instability when you don't have to? With Microsoft as a for-profit company, there needs to be a business model sustaining that behind it, and I believe it will be very hard to find one. "Subscription" falls down in that it is a long-term recurring expense, which governments tend to be pretty wary of. The alternative is to upgrade several million computers' OS every few years. Lots of companies are skipping entire Windows releases because of the migration cost, and even with the "console bonus" (all hardware is the same) and bootloader support for software upgrades over a mesh network, this is still a massive endeavour. That each machine would have to reserve enough memory for the entire "upgrade pack" so it can transition "in one go" also makes this model unworkable. To summarize, using Windows on the OLPC does not make sense at all. If you use just the kernel, you don't gain anything over Linux, and if you use the entire platform (and by extension, the UI), you add unnecessary complexity that is not only not required for the actual task, but also distracting. If you add restrictions and extensions to make it work, you invent a new platform, which is precisely what Sugar did. The argument that it is important for pupils to use the same thing that the rest of the world is using to ease their entry into the workforce is bogus at best, and racist at worst.

How to view the fingerprint of the ssh host key This way, ready to copy and paste:

ssh-keygen -l -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key

Background: It already takes a lot of resources to recall that to see the host key fingerprint you need to run something called 'keygen'. Then ssh-keygen doesn't support --help: it will try to generate a new key instead. We're in 2008. There should be a law against this sort of behaviour. To figure out how to see the host key, you need to dig through a long manpage with no examples section. ssh-keygen does have commandline help, but does not implement any switch to invoke it (check the getopt invocation in the source code if you don't believe me). It will however show commandline help when given an unrecognised option, so it will mutter but at least give you love if you ask for it:

$ ssh-keygen - 
ssh-keygen: illegal option -- 
Usage: ssh-keygen [options]
Options:
  [...]

After figuring out that it's -l -f, you still have to go and fish the file wherever it is. And luckily we had the recent Debian openssh problems, so now I can get the fingerprint of the RSA file only and be done with it. But thanks to this blog entry, no more of that, at last.

Heh, in the 11 or so hours since my last blog post I've received two emails from people going "yeah BA is crap!" Well the flight itself was fine. The plane was nice. The entertainment system was pretty decent. The UI was all touch screen based, which made it less clunky than Qantas'. Food-wise, I thought the dinner tray was pretty loaded with stuff. Only problem is that the flight was running about 10 minutes behind schedule, then had to hang around in the air at Heathrow for about 10-15 minutes, so we didn't make our connecting flight. BA bumped us to the next one without any problems, so now we're chilling out in the spiffy new terminal 5 BA lounge for an hour. I guess an hour just doesn't have enough fat in it for a connection. Terminal 5 is pretty shiny in general. Hopefully our bags won't get lost.

I am affiliated with a project whose origin is the northern parts of Canada, although whose members span the globe called What Sort of People Should There Be?. The idea behind this nifty and catchy title is to get a bunch of researchers in various fields, from disability studies to philosophy and everything that comes in between to start asking a series of questions about the role of human enhancement today and eugenics in the past, all within the context of thinking about the experience and politics of disability. I am super excited about the project because it spans the past and present to confront what it means to be human, how we value variation, how we seek to support or erase difference, and lastly something close to my academic heart, the role of technology in facilitating and dampening the politics of possibility and hope when it comes to disability. The project has recently launched an multi-author blog and I will be posting there from time to time. If you are interested in this topic, do come by for a visit. I am sure you won’t be disappointed. My most recent post is here and it covers an interesting article in the New York Times on Mad Pride, which oddly enough is in the Fashion & Style section.

I bought an HCL MiLeap X for Shruti (who is in the tenth standard) and the IMSc purchased an eeePC for "general use". Now that I have both machines in front of me, it seems like a good time to review them.

SimilaritiesLet's be clear that we are not comparing "jamun" to "aam" (or apples to oranges, if you prefer); these machines have quite a few similarities. Both are aimed at young students who are starting to use the computer for "real work" for the first time. Both the machines run GNU/Linux, and have similar dimensions and features --- even the prices are close. However, we are here to "raise the differences and not bury them"!

Physical appearanceThe eeePC is marginally lighter and more compact. The MiLeap appears to be more rugged though I didn't dare drop either machine to check!The eeePC has a rectangular touchpad which appears to have only one button but in fact this button has a left and right! The MiLeap has two regular buttons and a circular(!) touchpad.The MiLeap is bulkier but has a nice handle to lift it by. The eeePC can be carried like a book and has a matt finish.Both were proclaimed "cute" by Shruti and Sudeshna; I depend on their opinions in such matters!

Hardware featuresThe eeePC scores over the MiLeap X in terms of hardware features. The former has a web camera, a VGA out and one additional USB port. At the same time, the remaining features of both devices are likely to be adequate for most users --- 900 MHz low power processor, graphics adapter, wireless, ethernet, smart card reader. The eeePC has 4GB storage to the 2GB on the MiLeap, but the larger base software install on the eeePC means that the user has about the same amount of working area on both machines.The extra hardware features on the eeePC do give value for the 10% extra that one pays for the eeePC; the latter costs Rs. 17K to the MiLeap's Rs. 15.5K.

SoftwareThis is where the difference between the two is most striking. The MiLeap comes with a pre-installed "classmate" version of EduBuntu. The net result is that this looks and feels like a regular GNU/Linux system configured with software appropriate for educational use.The eeePC on the other hand has a completely icon-driven interface where even getting a terminal is not easy (Ctrl+Alt+T). However, this is just the icing on top of a regular icewm cake. The applications that actually run are just the regular ones --- not customised to fit in with the point-and-click interface.The eeePC terminal has really small fonts and is a regular xterm so that fonts are not as easy to fix as they are for the Gnome terminal used by EduBuntu on the MiLeap. Overall, EduBuntu applications which are based on Gnome are more consistent with the interface than the mix and match between KDE, Gnome and icewm that has been attempted by Xandros; the latter has a lot of promise but needs more work!It was easier to install software on the MiLeap since the EduBuntu repository is significantly larger than Xandros' repository as used by eeePC. In particular, on the MiLeap we installed nethack-qt since that is Shruti's favourite game and openvpn which is needed for us to connect to IMSc from outside the LAN.The installation of the MiLeap is that of Intel's ClassmatePC on which it is based. The entire installation is on a squashfs filesystem image. The base system is used via unionfs at run time on both machines. This makes for easy "reset to default".Suspend-to-ram does not work on the MiLeap; it should be fixed by installing the Linux 2.6.25 kernel.

PhilosophyI have long believed that un-prejudiced minds (like children) will take more readily to GNU/Linux than the hordes of "experienced" (mostly adult) computer users who have well-formed opinions about "user-friendly" software and how particular applications should behave.The "standard" GNU/Linux interface actually encourages exploration and the "tune-it", "tinker" and "fix-it" approach to learning about computing. It is not a sealed box with a "do-not-tamper" sticker. (This tinkering attitude is further enhanced by the approach taken by the designers of the Sugar interface for the XO Laptop.)Since both the systems are based on GNU/Linux (and Debian derivatives no less!), I am nothing short of thrilled at how far things have come. However, will the interface of the eeePC actually encourage exploration? Perhaps the EduBuntu interface of the MiLeap will prove too daunting for a novice. (Shruti does not classify as one since she used GNU/Linux "forever".) Only time will tell ...As Larry Wall has famously said: "There's more than one way to do it!" These devices certainly prove the truth of that assertion within the GNU/Linux world.Devices like these could push GNU/Linux into mainstream usage much more effectively than the "battle for the desktop". Hence, it is perhaps not surprising the both MicroSoft and Apple are trying hard to get into the game. However, it is only GNU/Linux that can comfortably provide a plethora of applications in less than 2GB! Until small solid state disks become significantly cheaper, those guys will have to wait.

The command-history meme seems to have finally died a death (or maybe Im not reading in the right places). One thing I couldn't help to notice was that the most common two commands for virtually everyone were cd and—usually right behind it—ls. I'd wager that often, the ls follows straight on from the cd. For some time at work, I've had the following in my ~/.bashrc:

cd()  
	builtin cd $@ && ls -lhrt
 

This might well break some things, I'm not sure, but it's saved me a bit of typing.

One of the biggest questions which has to be answered when one starts a blog is what is the blog engine going to be? (Using a readymade hosted solution like LiveJournal or blogspot is for wimps.) Since the blog is going to be on IMSc's "people" server, there are a lot of choices. The scripting language for the engine is usually a choice between PHP, Perl, Ruby and Python (though with nanoblogger, even a POSIX shell is possible!). The gem looked tempting for a while. Eventually, I realised that the engine is far less important than the entries. Start writing the entries with some engine. It should be "relatively easy" to migrate the entries to a different engine. In some sense, having put essays on the web in the past, a change of engine (from wetware to software) is what I am doing anyway!So the temporary choice is the snake --- think of this is as the snake in the monkey's shadow. Specifically, this blog is currently powered by pyblosxom.

Configuring pyblosxom

StructureSince everything on this blog is meant to be public, all of its data and configuration information is kept in public_html. As far as I can see this causes no security issues --- but if some turn up then it may change!Current directory structure is

blog/ ->
    config.py   Configuration file
    drafts/     -> draft entries
    sources/    -> sources where required
    entries/    -> format of entries is "string"-"date"
    flavours/   -> not tutti-fruity!
    plugins/    -> actual plugins used
    style/      -> stylesheets and images
    index.cgi   -> pyblosxom.cgi renamed
    .htaccess   -> for apache2

Any and all of these files (except drafts) can be examined by extending the URL http://www.imsc.res.in/~kapil/blog by the file or directory name.The development of my web pages is done on my user machine and these are synchronised with the "real" web pages using unison. The local copy of my web pages is managed using git.The plugins were downloaded from the pyblosxom web site.The flavour was downloaded from snarfed.org.Since everything about this blog is visible, there is probably no need to document things further.

Minor cribsI couldn't find anyone who had documented how they had setup their blog using pyblosxom. This meant that it took a while for me to set things up.The apache2 web server behaved rather differently from mathopd. In particular, the latter does not need or use .htaccess files and just declaring that index.cgi was the a CGI script and was the "index file" for the blog/ directory was enough for the blog to start working. However, I had to struggle with apache2 as it needed "Rewrite*" entries in the .htaccess file in order to pick up the style sheets and the blog pages.

From http://159.18.52.69/raw/983493 Error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 12, in module
    from xml.dom.ext.reader import HtmlLib
ImportError: No module named ext.reader

Fix/workaround:

+        sys.path.append('/usr/lib/python%s/site-packages/oldxml' % sys.version[:3])
        from xml.dom.ext.reader import HtmlLib

I had an old Python script doing some XML work and after upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 I started getting the above error message and had to use the above fix because the Ubuntu packages of python-xml moved the xml.dom.ext.* to /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/oldxml for some reason. Have not looked at the latest Debian packages. Does anyone know why such back-compatibility breaking change was introduced? All I find on Google are the people getting bitten by this bug and no reasoning or even discussion behind the change.

Going to be married. I am currently lagging behind in e-mails by approximately by a month. If you need my attention, shout.

Apparently it is a political suicide in USA to make people think. Obama’s ex-preacher Jeremiah Wright is the most sane US preacher that I’ve ever heard. If you read or listen to his sermons in full length and go beyond the Fox News presented soundbites, he is 99% right. The US has long been doing extreme violence to countries around the world, so it is no wonder that such violence came back to US. Russia had the same problem with Afghanistan and Chechnya. If you try to put yourself up as ‘world police’, some people will disagree. Then he damned America’s _government_ for letting Americans down by not caring enough about the people. The only thing that I would smile and shake my head at was the statement that American government invented HIV. I doubt even they have such resources. Read this transcript for example, the sermon is just a great sermon that urges the people think for themselves. And what people put this sermon down for? Using a word ‘Negro’? Having an issue with some specific politicians? He is a pastor, pastors are meant to have a strong opinion a vision and to project that for the congregation to see. “I’m not going to stop thinking just because I love Jesus” is the summary of that sermon if you ask me. And that is the most positive religious message I’ve heard from that side of the pond for a long time. You can agree or disagree with rev. Wright, but you can still go to his sermons and enjoy it because he makes you think. I would talk to most racist bastard, serial killer or even Hitler himself if he could tell me something that would provoke my mind to think and thus improve myself. You don’t have to agree with people to benefit from speaking to them or from listening to what they have to say. Even if someone is 100% wrong and misguided, if his speeches can make you think of some good idea, it is worth it. And rev. Jeremiah Wright is not 100% wrong, from what I’ve heard he is on the money most of the time and only some of his statements I would disagree with. And he is a great speaker. If I would have not been an Obama supporter, I would become one because of Wright. Or because of the very accurate observation by Obama that in hard times people in rural USA cling to trusted values such as guns and religion. There is nothing wrong with that. I am amazed how such true statements can be so turned by US press and can actually reduce Obamas rating. I was starting to believe that not all is lost in the US, but if Obama does not get elected, well … it is all lost in the US. PS. How this related to Debian? Or software is the best choice for the society in the long term. However, that is only true if we assume that people behave rationally and use it, improve it and contribute back improvements for the public good. If the general population is made weary of rational thinking and starts thinking in soundbites and slogans, then there is a ceiling to free software expansion and the whole free software movement can eventually be crushed in the interests of homeland security with strong corporate commercial software backing. (Only government approved software is allowed to run with mandatory government approved back-doors and hardware verification to prevent cyber-terrorism or something, thus also forbidding any compilers and interpreters outside government controls.)