(Disclaimer: I work for MIT Information Services & Technology blah blah blah I am a student blah blah these are only my words and do not represent the opinion(s) of my employer.)
Way back in the day in 1983, MIT started something it called Project Athena, which had the goal of investigating how computers could be used to enhance education at MIT. This project became the origin of such pieces of software as the X Window System and Kerberos, as well as a campus-wide network of workstations all running similar software. In 1991, Project Athena ended, but the Athena system continued on, taken over by MIT Information Systems.
It’s 2008, and Athena still exists at MIT—walk into a computing cluster, and chances are all the machines will be running Athena software. (Unless that particular cluster has been taken over be Athena’s evil sibling, often referenced as “WinAthena”, which often seems to be maintained by no one, and whose existence is sometimes denied by those who maintain and support Real Athena. Not many machines have suffered this agonizing fate, luckily.)
Unfortunately, as the years have progressed recently, fewer and fewer resources have been put into the development of Athena. In many ways it is no longer on the cutting edge of things as it has been in the past, though it is certainly still useful. Some students these days, however, even think of Athena as only “their MIT email” or maybe use it occasionally to print something in a cluster on the way to class. I’ve seen people grow frustrated and storm out of a cluster due to things like instructions for using a flash drive that involve more steps than just plugging it in. While on the one hand it’s easy to laugh at people for a lack of patience or being open to a computing system that is not either Windows or Mac and perhaps a bit more complicated on the surface, on the other hand, some of these things really should just work by now, and on other UNIX-based systems they do—but Athena has lagged behind.
When you log into an Athena workstation for the first time, you are confronted with what looks like this:
That’s GNOME 2.8, and it looks kind of like the GNOME 2.8 default but uglier. When you look under the hood, there are pieces of the system that obviously originated in a time where nothing better existed and so something new had to be created—the “xlogin” login system doesn’t support PAM, and the login path involves a hairy maze of scripts that perform various tasks. Under the hood, the base OS is currently RHEL 4 or Solaris 10. I still can’t remember what the right options are to feed RPM whenever I need some information that I think I should be able to get from it. These things were once necessary but today just look crufty.
Some people have tossed around the idea that everyone has a laptop these days and thus clusters are uselessly expensive, but it’s been met with a lot of resistance. I’m all for progress, but I use clusters all the time! They’re one thing that makes it an easy choice for me to have a really portable laptop, because when I really need computing power or screen space on campus away from my room, there is always a cluster nearby. They’re also nice isolated places that can be associated with “work mode”, which is good for productivity. Beyond all this, Athena provides a common platform that all technical classes can depend on, from providing standard and specialized academic software to standing as a baseline of “make sure your code works on this before handing it in because that is how it will be graded”.
At any rate, things are finally happening on this front. Athena can’t stay RHEL 4 forever—while AFS allows non-system software to be easily updated for all machines without requiring any OS release, hardware moves on and compatibility is lost, and the rest of the world is coming up with new awesome things that Athena machines are missing out on. A student group that I am vaguely involved with, SIPB, took the early initiative with this and created DebAthena, which takes stock Debian and Ubuntu and allows it to closely resemble an Athena environment. We even run a campus Linux dialup using the packages. (I won’t claim to have done much work on DebAthena myself because, well, I didn’t.) Amazingly, the Athena release team has decided to work with the SIPB on the next release of Athena.
So, what I really just wasted over 600 words prepping for is to say that Athena 10 will be based on Ubuntu. This is only relatively new news, but I am lame about finishing blog posts. There are a variety of reasons why Ubuntu was chosen over Debian. Some of them are lame and some of them are not. Even so, I am excited about this prospect—and it should be possible to peripherally support Debian in such a way that was not possible with Athena 9.4.
I really like Athena. Even coming to MIT with a background in Linux there has been a steep learning curve, though, and I think that things could be better. Lots of people here have their first encounter with a ‘nix system in the form of Athena, and we should strive to make that experience as good as possible. I’m kind of skeptical on the expected release date of this upcoming summer, but as long as it happens soon it will be a big step forward.
In some ways it’s kind of sad that I’m excited about a big part of a research institution catching up with others—but inertia is a strong force, and dealing with thousands of workstations is no trivial task. I kind of long for the exciting days of creating new big pieces of free software like X. I bet I imagine those days as being better than they actually were.
:
Without any other comment.
Thanks to madduck: this comic is of course from xkcd
Since September 19th I have been mostly offline and unreachable. This was due to having started a new job in a wonderful new project: soitu.es, an online newspaper with a strong focus on Citizen Journalism: citizens playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information, I must mention the master mind behind this all: Gumersindo Lafuente, one very well known journalist in Spain. On the other hand, working with Ra l Rivero, not the Cuban poet but the technical soul of the project, is something I would pay for, and I get actually paid to learn from him! Too bad he doesn t digg Debian :)
I had been eyeing an inexpensive network-storage device -- for the non-geeks:
think of a hard disk with an ethernet port and some controlling software --
for some time. I was aware of some of the hacking efforts around a few of
these but somehow nothing really appealed. I was sort-of looking for nslu2-with-a-disk, and
preferably not too expensive.
Lo and behold, that's what I saw today in my techbargains feed: a Buffalo
LinkStation Live which contains a 500gb SATA for $199 after rebates.
Some quick googling lead to these
wiki pages which looked promising: anything from enhancing the stock
Linux setup by enabling a few more services to a custom Linux distro (similar
to my wrt54 router
running linux) to reportedly some work-in-progress for a native Debian
installation. Nice!
So off I went, ordered the thingie for local pickup for an additional 5%
off and picked it up a little later at the local Circuit City (where visits
are seemingly a recurring
event these days). The documentation is very brief and insist that you
install something on Windows -- just to find that the little box
autoconfigures itself just fine. Presumably some network discovery is going
to find the assigned dhcp address which is needed for the web interface. A
few minutes later, a new (fixed) IP address was assigned, ntp was enabled and
that was about that.
After dinner, I quickly followed this
tutorial to get the box a bit more Unixy without going too far (yet) from
the default: start up telnet via a simple Java command-line tool, login, then
enable ssh, set it up in /etc/init.d, add some extra binaries. All very quick
and simple [ with the caveat that the addons.tar didn't want to get there via
the Java tool, so manual scp once 'inside' did the trick ].
NFS, which I like for shuffling files around, appears to be little
trickier for this ARM-based LinkStation Live. So at least for now I am
content with simple rsync'ing of my backup directories on the few machines
here. Much better than the current setup with mutual backups between
workstations and semi-permanently being out of space.
All in all a rather pleasant gadget and recommended at the price. The
extra $100 in rebates are valid from today to the 12th.
"Day Two Downers" be damned, Sarah's powering along like a freight train.
Neither of us had a terribly fantastic night's sleep. Her chest drain is
attached to this big box thing that has some sort of water seal in it, and
with the suction going through it, it bubbles and makes noise like a massive
aquarium. But she did get some sleep, and said she felt better this morning
for it.
The doctor came by at 8am, and took the incision dressing off, and we got
our first good look at it. It's big (i.e. long). It runs from about the top
of her breastbone to the bottom of her sternum. 20cm at my estimation. She
said that she thought the chest tube could come out today, and sure enough
it came out at about 12:30pm. They also took her urinary catheter out at
that time, so now all she's hooked up to is oxygen. Her blood sugar levels
were acceptable at breakfast time.
Oh, the reason the incision ran so high was because they elected to do the
bypass attachment to an artery in her neck, rather than further around the
aorta, because the tissue was fragile and they didn't want to risk a
dissection. Not doing the bypass in the aorta also left them the option of
removing some of the transcending arch if they determined it still ended up
being necessary.
Sarah got up and had breakfast in a chair again, and was generally feeling
pretty mobile. She moved between the chair and a wheelchair (and back) when
they came to get her for another x-ray, without requiring any assistance.
She took her first walk around the ward at 11am. I'd popped home for a
shower and to check on the cats, and so I missed it.
Doctor Miller dropped in at around 12:30pm to see how she was doing, and
that was good as Sarah got a chance to talk directly to him about how the
procedure had gone. He was very positive and said she could put this whole
thing behind her now.
At 2pm, she went for another walk, this time sans two thirds of the tubes
from her first walk, and got in and out of bed unassisted.
She took her last walk of the day at 4pm.
Apparently her blood sugar is still on the high side, but within the range
that they don't feel the need to give her insulin. Her chest is apparently
looking better on the x-ray they took this morning. They took a second one
after they removed the chest drain, but we haven't heard anything about how
that looks yet.
She's continuing to do extremely well, most of this less than 48 hours out
of surgery.
In rough chronological order, with capsule reviews. I don’t think I’ve missed any, but it is possible that I have.
If you look through the list (behind the cut), you’ll see I read mostly Baen books nowadays. There’s a simple explanation: Baen is (almost) the only publisher that does real e-books, and I tend to avoid the inconvenience of paper books where I can. Still, there’s about a hundred titles on the list.
(more…)
A few weeks back, someone asked on
debian-68k about an unexpected result of some piece of software when
it was compiled on ARAnyM, an m68k emulator that can run Linux.
His initial idea was that this could perhaps be a bug in ARAnyM,
since it only occurred to him inside ARAnyM, and not on any of the other
architectures he tried. In fact, it was a bug in his code.
Let's have a look at what's going on here. The example program which
Sergei provided and which exhibits the problematic behaviour is spread
over two files. The first file contains this:
#include <stdio.h>
void *f();
main()
void *a;
a = f();
printf("%d\n", (long)a);
while the second contains this:
#include <stdio.h>
long f();
long f()
long a = 84;
printf("%d\n", a);
return a;
Many people familiar with the C programming language will intuitively
expect that this program, when run, will output the following:
84 84When in fact, when compiled and ran on an m68k machine, the output is as follows:
84 -1072577264What's going on here? In order to understand that, we have to take a look at the assembly code. This is done by use of "objdump -d", and gives (amongst others) the following output:
800004c4 <main>: 800004c4: 4e56 0000 linkw %fp,#0 800004c8: 61ff 0000 001a bsrl 800004e4 <f> 800004ce: 2f08 movel %a0,%sp@- 800004d0: 4879 8000 05aa pea 800005aa <_IO_stdin_used+0x4> 800004d6: 61ff ffff feec bsrl 800003c4 <printf@plt> 800004dc: 508f addql #8,%sp 800004de: 4e5e unlk %fp 800004e0: 4e75 rts 800004e2: 4e75 rts 800004e4 <f>: 800004e4: 4e56 0000 linkw %fp,#0 800004e8: 4878 0054 pea 54 <_init-0x800002f0> 800004ec: 4879 8000 05aa pea 800005aa <_IO_stdin_used+0x4> 800004f2: 61ff ffff fed0 bsrl 800003c4 <printf@plt> 800004f8: 7054 moveq #84,%d0 800004fa: 4e5e unlk %fp 800004fc: 4e75 rts 800004fe: 4e75 rtsSo what's happening here?
#include <stdio.h>
void* f();
int main()
long* a;
a=(long*)f();
printf("%Ld\n", *a);
return 0;
void* f()
static long a=84;
printf("%Ld\n", a);
return &a;
To close up: there's a reason why compilers emit warnings if you do
something strange or "clever". In this particular case, the warning was
suppressed, since both files contained a declaration of an f() function,
even if the declaration was different. This is a horrible hack that
tries to work around those warnings, rendering them utterly useless.
Please, pretty please, with sugar on top: don't do something like
that. If you write C code, please compile it with -Wall
-Werror, and make sure it compiles that way. If you want to access
a function in a different file, create a common header file that both
will #include, so that the compiler can notice differences
between declaration and definition of a function; and don't expect that
something will work because you fixed it for a common and well-known
case, because there will often still be other places where your bug will
still trigger. In this case, by declaring the function as one returning
a long value, they made sure it could not break on 64-bit
architectures. However, as shown above, that doesn't make the bug go
away...)
Writing clean and portable code is way more fun. Trust me.
(click to enlarge)
By xkcd, A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
I am very saddened by the state of the IT industry. It seems like nearly
everyone who works in or around IT is, to put it bluntly, a cowboy. There
appears to be very little desire for actually helping people;
instead all I see is a very large number of people circling around looking
for the next person they can make a quick buck off. In short, most of the
IT industry is composed of people who are little better than shysters and
conmen.
As a case in point, I recently had contact with someone who is trying to
get an online store running. They've been trying, unsuccessfully so far,
for several months. They've been screwed over by basically every
IT-related person they've had contact with so far. Now, after all of
their suffering, they've finally gotten in contact with me. Most of their
money is gone, and they're deeply behind schedule. So I'm left trying to
pull a miracle job in little time and with little money. Yes, I could
shoo them away, because they're asking for more than they can afford, but
there's a little spark of helpfulness left in me, and I'll try to get them
going as best they can with what they've got.
If they'd found someone competent right at the beginning, they'd have been
fine. They started with sufficient cash and time to produce a good end
result. But chancing upon someone decent doesn't have good odds in IT;
it's a bit like winning the lottery.
This story isn't unique in my personal experience, by any stretch. There
seems to be a near-endless procession of non-technical people who come out
of their encounters with the IT industry battered and bruised, whether it
be on the web, in their business infrastructure, or their personal
computing needs.
While it's easy to blame the customer for not managing themselves and
their computing properly, I don't think it's fair to lay the blame on them
-- to me, that's like blaming the patient for dying on the operating
table, when the responsibility must lie, prima facie, with the surgeon.
It's the surgeon, after all, who is the (presumably) trained and
experienced professional in the relationship, and it is his
responsibility, primarily, to ensure that everything goes smoothly[1].
Depressingly, I don't see much of a way around this problem. The few IT
people who did care could try and group together, build some sort
of a rating or "membership implies quality" system, educate the consumer,
and try and drive the cowboys out, but guilds and trade associations are
frowned upon these days, smacking (as they do) of restraint of trade and
collusion. Government regulation never seems to produce anywhere
near the desired result, while hoping that the consumer will either rise
up and demand quality, or will gain sufficient knowledge to be able to
pick a cowboy is a complete non-starter, for the same reason as teaching
everyone basic surgical techniques isn't going to improve the quality of
hospitals.
vim! \o/ But not emacs :)
mc! Someone out there wanted to make my life easier.
fbreader. I had never heard of it, but it's a very
good discovery that I've now started to use it on my laptop as well.
Little howtos
To get to a terminal, hit Ctrl+T in the file manager, or Ctrl+Alt+T elsewhere.
The root password is the same as the user password.
To change the system language, I managed with a simple dpkg-reconfigure
locales.
Ways they simplified the unix system
It's single user: I didn't find a way to create multiple users besides the
terminal, and the login program does not ask for a username, only for the
password.
The "win" key has a house painted on it, and it's used as "hide/show all
applications" key. When all applications are minimised, the Asus launcher is
visible instead of the X background: this behaviour basically turns the key
into a sort of "run application" key. The key still works as a kind of shift,
although it probably was not intended to.
The repository management is interesting. /etc/apt/sources.list contains:
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701 p701 main
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701/tw p701 main
en_GB.UTF-8 via dpkg-reconfigure locales.
Add en_GB.UTF-8 to /etc/scim/global, to get SCIM input methods to work.
Little flaws
Virtual screens are enabled, so W+arrow switches virtual screen. The feeling
you get if you hit W+arrow is that all your applications disappeared. This
could be improved by having the vm keep the asus launcher at the bottom of the
current virtual screen, instead of just at the bottom of the first screen. Or,
to disable virtual screens by default.
It is possible to drag the lower panel around, maybe accidentally: that's
another of our fancy default "features" that should be disabled by default.
It is also possible to remove applets from the applet bar by mistake: for
example I wanted to disconenct the wireless, and I instead ended up quitting
the wireless applet. Luckily, the next time I started the computer it
magically came back.
~/.xsession-errors is continuously getting the useless stdout/stderr
debugging flood of GUI apps. Noone bothers usually, except that in this case
the file is on flash, where unneeded writes are also very much unwanted. I'm
considering symlinking it to /dev/null, but ideally we should get GUI apps to
only write out what is really important.
Battery charging doesn't show how long it is going to take until the battery is
fully charged.
No capslock or numlock leds. This probably calls for disabling or remapping of
capslock. Numlock is very hard to hit by accident, but capslock is.
Random thoughts
If you buy an eeepc, I really suggest you think of it a mass consumption
appliance and stay on the original OS for a while. Most of what's in here is
what we use everyday, just on a different context. Try to use it as an
appliance and see if it is perfect, and if it isn't, try to find out what is
missing. It is a fantastic way to find out important bits that are missing in
Debian as well.
Also, if you're used to tailoring everything to yourself before starting to use
a Linux system, this is a great way to try the usage experience that we can
offer by default. The Firefox welcome page the first time you
connect, for
example, is surprisingly nice. Everything we know as doable comes a
bit as as a surprise because this time someone has done it for us.
I wish that that someone can be invited to talk at the next
Debconf: the possibility of having a look at the work
that has been done in bending Debian to this nice little device is to me one of
the most valuable things so far about the eeepc.
Help/About KDE/Credits
It's reachable by most applications, and says:
The development team would like to thank the following people and organizations for their contributions:I'm using an appliance that is thanking me, and others like me: priceless!Linus Torvalds and the other Linux kernel developers, and Free software developers around the world.
- the Debian Project,
- the GNU Project,
- the KDE Project,
- the Mozilla Project,
- the OpenOffice.org Project,
- the SAMBA Project,
- the X.Org Foundation,
While looking at outstanding bugs against my Debian packages, I noticed that an RC bug had crept in against Planner. The bug itself isn't new. In fact, Ubuntu had experienced it already and simply decided to build their package without SQL support to resolve the issue.
Planner is a fairly well-matured piece of software, with very few bugs remaining. It remains quite usable in everyday use. However, it has fallen behind in terms of keeping its code up-to-date against the latest versions of some optional dependencies.
Tonight, I was just sitting here pondering what to do and it occurred to me that I'm simply no longer interested in maintaining the package. I have done a fairly good job of overhauling the build scripts and of upgrading them for the Python transition but, at this stage, I feel that I've accomplished as much as I could do. Besides, I no longer have the time to maintain so many packages, so I have decided to focus on maintaining those I actually care for and Planner isn't one of them.
The package already is assigned to Debian's GNOME team, so no need to actually orphan it, since anyone from the team can pick it up. If you're a member of the GNOME team and feel like taking over, perhaps even submitting patches to upstream to close a few more bugs, go right ahead and jump in.
It's noon now and half the attendees or so the day hasn't really begun. Sure, some people here at the 24C3 in Berlin are having lunch already, but most are having breakfast or not even that yet. As the Debian booth is set up (mugs are sold out, bags almost...) and there are no interesting talks for me at the moment, I'm having a second breakfast in the smokers lounge is the cellar. Officially, this is the third non smoking congress and inofficially it's the third time there is an official smoker place ;-) This time, it's a lounge with comfortable sofas, ambient light and loud music... 
A few days ago, I asked about
how to properly embed spamtraps in web pages.Well, noone could tell me if using display: none is appropriate. I
actually do not want Google to index the contents in that div. So as long as
they don't punish me for using display: none at all, it's okay. And
the page I placed the spamtrap on is a doorway-like page for others anyway;
it's not part of an important site.It took the first spammer around 54 hours to send the first spam. Or try to
send: all 10 retries with different zombies were rejected by my spam filter.
Since then, I've been receiving another round of deliver attempts - around 5-15
per spamtrap address - almost every hour.Of the > 500 spam delivery attempts I've seen since, none made it through
my initial spam filters (not to speak of the content filter behind that), but
they were rejected at the SMTP level, even before the mail content was sent.I've now disabled some of my spam filters to allow the trap adresses to
actually receive mail. After all, I want to use them to train my filter. :-)
Today I decided to add some EWMH support to awesome. It now supports a bunch of this extensions quite nicely.
However, while reading the spec and writing the code, it appears that this forces a window manager to behave in only one way: have a poor desktop support, and no multi-head/XRandR/Xinerama support at all.
The main caveats are that in Xinerama/XRandR mode, you'll have only one root window. And the root window is where you must store the NET_WM X properties So you cannot handle screens in a independant way like awesome does. That's really a shame.
There's also a big problem for window managers like awesome which are happy to draw several desktops at the same time. There's no support for stuff like that.
So far, I think EWMH is nice but is really too narrow-minded for softwares and people who want to think window management in a different way.
"Volldampf voraus" ("full steam ahead") is the motto of this years chaos communication congress, which should express a particular request for talks and projects featuring forward looking hands-on topics. If you are not attending check out the schedule anyway, it covers a huge variety of topics and most of the events are in English and all should be streamed live. My thesis is about data mining, clustering of correlated data in high
dimensional vector spaces, to be a bit more precise.In detail, I'm working on methods to improve upon existing clustering
algorithms such as 4C (Computing Clusters of Correlation Connected Objects) and ERiC (On Exploring Complex Relationships of Correlation Clusters), where you need to pick some parameters (e.g. k for a k nearest neighbour based approach) appropriately.My approach is twofold. On one hand, I'm improving upon the traditional
covariance based correlation (which is quite sensitive to noise), so the
parameters become easier to pick, on the other hand I'm working on an approach
to automatically fine-tune the parameters to further improve stability.For testing my computations I needed a visualization of this data. I was
considering using gnuplot (and in fact I'm using gnuplot a lot), but for some
situation I needed animation capabilities, and thats where gnuplot becomes
really messy.So I decided to dive into SVG and Javascript. Here's my first SVG project:Visualizing kNN
correlation in SVG with Javascript(Internet Exploder is not supported. I don't have Windows, and for all I know
it doesn't really support SVG. Use a Gecko-based browser such as Firefox, Opera
and Safari (at least on Windows) also seem to work. I didn't get it to work on
kHTML/Konqueror/Webkit. I'm just doing this for myself, so I have no need to
support other browsers.)It's a 3D dataset, consisting of 300 points. 100 points are noise, 100 points
are in a 2D cluster (green) and 100 points are on a 1D cluster embedded into
this plane (I'm working on algorithms that support hierarchical clusters, so
I needed a dataset with this property!).There are two buttons in the UI, one toggles rotation, the other one toggles
the playback of "k". It will cycle k through a range of about 3-200. When
offset hits 20 (so k would be 22 or 23), the main correlation vectors - the
big blue lines - already point along the 1D cluster. At an offset of around 80
they have already diverged quite a bit from the 1D cluster - at this point, the
correlation is seeing the 2D plane quite well already.I could also show you the behaviour for points in the 2D plane (but outside
of the 1D cluster) and noise points.We're preparing a paper for SSDBM 2008.[Update: Safari works at least on Windows]
Next.