Over one month ago, I truly hoped an evasive network misbehavior issue was solved. In the institute, we had a strange situation which caused a (seemingly random) stack of switches to go out to lunch and leave one of the floors without network access until it decided to restore itself (usually power-cycling it was not enough). The equipment, ten 4200 SuperStack switches, is new, we got it ~September, so I expected 3Com to give me at least some support on the issue. The behavior was apparently random, and I could not track it down, only (thanks to the very nice Cacti) prove it existed.
December 5 was terrible. The whole building's network refused to work. Switches were able to reply to my pings for no more than a minute after booting before they got flooded with "Spanning Tree CTRL MAC PAUSE: Quanta 65535" (according to another great tool, the Ethereal protocol analyzer).
I had been bugging the support people at 3Com for at least three weeks before this incident, they kept promising they would come soon to help us track the cause of the ellusive problem - We threatened to send the switches back and pursue reimbursement through whatever means we could (we had much better stability and performance with our old 10Mbps hubs, so my boss insisted on replacing them), so we got them to come. The answer they gave me? Upgrade your firmware to version 2.50 (not available at their website, of course) and disable spanning tree functionality at the switches.
I have to admit the big problem immediately ceased. This is not to say I was pleased with the response time or with the switches' software quality, but at least we could work.
Happily, ~7 weeks passed by with no major outages (although with a few small ones).
Yesterday, we got back the complete chaotic conditions. This time, though, I was able to get a good and useful tcpdump snapshot, passed it through Ethereal, and actually got something interesting (available to whoever requests it to me if it sounds interesting). In short: Something happens that confuses a switch (I guess it's a faulty NIC), and makes it request to all of the neighbouring switches (via spanning tree protocol - Yes, it's disabled, but still) for their complete ARP tables. But somehow, this noise or whatever keeps confusing it, so the spanning tree requests start repeating every two seconds for slightly over one minute. Then, the same switch which requested this information gets tired of too many ARP tables being thrown at it, and sends out a storm of packets (one each 0.04 seconds) asking every other switch _not_ to send updates anymore. This is broadcasted to all of each of the switches' ports, and the network dies.
My grudge against 3Com is: How come this frigging noise (at least that's what I assume it to be) on one of the ports kill all of the network? If a switch is supposed to be smart, would it be too much for it just to disable the misbehaving port?
Anyway... One and a half days went down the drain trying to find the cause for the problem, sending the report to the 3Com guy (who is very nice in person, yes, but that's by far not enough!), running up and down the stairs to reset different switches, lock down on the source of distress... And as my 3Com contact was busy with another client (who presumably had not yet given them money), I never got a call back from them.
All my good intentions to spend a nice quiet time coding for three projects we currently need to have ready soon (one of them is in production and many of you have used, my dear Comas conference management system, but requires heavy tinkering to be able to extend it) were stuck at that: Good intentions.
I seem to have locked down the problem in one of three computers (that is, network seems stable again once I disconnected them). I insist it must be a faulty NIC. My boss bets it's an ber-contaminated Windows machine. My boss' boss insists we should get the switches double-grounded just to be sure that's not the reason for failure. I am tired, bad mooded, and -again- bored you to death with a too-long blog entry.
Blame it all on 3Com.

I'm noticing some strange behaviour in yaboot lately: when I switch on my laptop, there are times when it simply doesn't boot; instead, it gives me an error message about memory and something being too small (I'll write down the exact message next time if someone needs it to debug) and then drops me into OpenFirmware. I can switch it off and on again at that point as much as I want to, but it will continue to fail. At one point it didn't even drop me into OpenFirmware anymore; instead, it looped over the first-stage booter all the time. The only way I have found to make it boot again is to put in a bootable CD-ROM that uses yaboot to start, such as a Ubuntu live-CD. It doesn't even have to actually boot; just making sure I start yaboot from that CD once is enough. I find this very strange, especially as the second time it happened, I didn't change anything that could remotely be related (the first time I did remove a kernel image). So before I start debugging my hardware: anyone else seeing this?

Debian has currently two copies of the toolchain in the archives, namely the individual packages for binutils and gcc, and the toolchain-source package, which has traditionally lagged a bit behind the upstream release cycle but can be used to bootstrap a cross compiler environment. However, since there is a nearly endless number of targets, none of these exist as readymade binaries in Debian.
Today, I have been challenged with packaging a tool that offers an image to netbooting hosts, and this image is obviously only dependent on the target architecture. So I'd like to add the images as arch-all packages, but I still need to build them somewhere. Depending on a compiler that is only available on my system is a bad idea. Introducing i386 and powerpc cross toolchains into the archive is not a good idea either, as I would either leave out the libc stuff and end up angering those who want to do actual cross development, or introduce lots of duplicate headers.

I've been looking with interest at the Google Web Authoring Statistics report, having just completed an overview for IBM developerWorks of the two contenders pushing forward on HTML, WHATWG and XHTML. A snapshot of HTML tags in use tells us a lot about the current usages of HTML and the take-up of future pathways such as XHTML. That said, I'm quite disappointed with the ways these results have been presented. Firstly, the report as published has no author attribution. From the writing and other sources, I am given to understand it's Ian Hickson, the prime proponent behind WHATWG, but nowhere is this made plain. A date of publication would also be useful on the document. Secondly, the graphs are given as SVG, which is laudable, but leaves those using IE or pre-1.5 Firefox browsers out in the cold. There's nothing in the data that means they couldn't be presented as PNG images. This is simply making a statement about browsers. Thirdly, the report mixes political viewpoints about the HTML standard in with observations about the data. The report references WHATWG's HTML5 in various places without setting it in the context of the various ways forward. Hickson's views over XHTML 1.0 and the text/html media type were presented without recognition of it at least being a contentious issue, rather than a matter of fact. If authorship were attributed, this bias could be contextualised somewhat, but as it is it can only be construed as Google's endorsement of a particular viewpoint. Don't get me wrong, I think this survey is highly valuable and congratulate Google's staff on the work done. I enjoyed reading the commentary very much, within the context I was able to place it in. However, I think Google needs to raise their game here, by attributing authorship and separating the editorialising from the presentation of the results. The exclusion of non-SVG capable browsers from the results is also inexcusable, and rather against the general spirit of scholarship and the web. Fascinating and enlightening as the current report is, without some basic information such as authorship it's hard to take it seriously as an addition to the body of research on the web.

I couldn’t resist the temptation, and started to write yet another Scheme logging library; this has been on my TODO-list for quite some time now, but now it became more urgent, since we need a logging facility for conjure. I hope jao will be pleased to see that my branch of conjure already makes use of the new logging module . Of course, I didn’t in fact start from scratch, but had a look at the various logging libraries available; the Scheme ones being:

• The logging package in guile-lib. I couldn’t really use that code, since it’s uses GOOPS, Guile’s CLOS-like object system. Also it doesn’t support hierarchies of loggers, which I consider an important feature, since it allows flexible configuration of the logging behaviour for a software system that is contains of multiple subsystems. For example, you may want to enable debugging output in a specific subsytem, while only getting warnings and errors for everything else.
• log4scm. I don’t know what to say about that but: strange. While named in the log4X tradition initiated by log4j, a rather powerful (and complex, IMHO) logging system for Java, it seems very unflexible, and not suitable for a general-purpose logging system. Nevertheless it uses threads, a callback system for fatal logs, and SSAX to parse XML files for configuration - speak about heavyweight! Strange license, too. I will refrain from commenting further .

I also had a look at log4r and the Python logging package; both seem worthy taking as a starting point. What I’ve come up with so far has a pretty similiar model to these systems; you send a log entry that should be logged to a logger, which has zero or more handlers that are responsible for actually doing anything with the log entry, such as writing it to a port. All loggers, besides the root logger have a parent, (also a logger) which log entries are sent to, in addition to being processed by the handlers attached to the logger; the propagation to the parent can also be turned off. The logger hierarchy is established by a hierarchical namespace: The logger with the name '(conjure cc) is a child of the logger named '(conjure). This may all sound overly complicated, but getting started is very straightforward:

;; ,open spells.logging
(define log-info (make-log ‘(test) ‘info))
(configure-logger ‘())
(log-info “hello world!”)

make-log creates a logging procedure. Logging procedures take a single argument to be logged; the argument may be an arbitrary object; it is up to the handlers on how to go about formatting this object. The argument passed to the logging procedure is wrapped in a log entry, which additionally contains the log level. The name of the logger that is to be used is '(test), and 'info is the log level. If the logger '(test) doesn’t already exist, it is created on the fly with no handlers and the root logger as a parent; it can be configured later. This separation of logger creation and configuration is important: In a real application, the logging can be configured from the command line or a configuration file; you don’t want to (hard-)code it into the same module that uses the logger. (configure-logger '()) configures the root logger (which has the empty list as name) with a default configuration. configure-logger also has an optional argument in which you can provide a custom configuration, but I won’t go into this now, since this part of interface is most likely to change. The default configuration amounts to logging everything on (current-output-port). Finally, we log a simple string through the logging procedure log-info. The output looks like this:

(test: [info] hello world!)
Well, enough of this for now; if you got curious you can take peek at the code.

This post, (via Ian M) meshed with some things I've been mulling on for a while about how we treat different types of data today. The relevant quote from that post is this:

I'll bet that we will look back of this era of quasi-networking and wince, "How did we ever live that way?" And the idea of wanting to carry all of your content with you will seem both old-fashioned and rather ridiculous.

I was recently very happy to acquire a large quantity of data files (about 15 thousand), each of which would take me hours to days to do anything with. And I have a few hundred CDs and DVDs with a terabytes or so of achived data on them. There is probably more stuff here than I would ever be able to look at in a regular lifetime if that were all I ever did. I'm adding stuff to the collection regularly. All of this is data that is not freely available; some of it is private stuff like email archives, some more is music, and every other sort of digital media known to man. Except oddly, software, which is almost nonexistant from the hoard except for a few bits that slipped in by accident. The chance that I'll ever look at any single one of these files is probably on the order of one in a thousand, although it's certianly possible that a computer might look at them all and search out some that I will be more likely to look at. Even though I know that I will probably never use most of this stuff, I hold onto it as archives mostly because it's easier to do that, than to decide if I really need to keep it. Or to get it back if I mistakenly discard it. That basic tradeoff, plus the fact that it's very easy these days to aquire large quatities of data and hold onto it cheaply, are the main factors behind this hoarding. What I've described might seem extreme, but it's not very uncommon and most of the people reading this probably do it too, to some extent. But the really interesting thing to me is that if this data were the only data I was able to use, I'd be very unhappy and bored and unable to accomplish much. The interesting thing is all the other data that I don't bother hoarding, because it seems so likely that it will be easy to get it if I need it. Some examples of this data -- and there are untold terabytes of it out there -- include: the complete source and binaries for a dozen operating systems; the complete revision control history of a thousand free software projects; tons of archived web sites, concerts, and movies in the internet archive; every usenet post ever made; every mailing list post I've ever read (or ignored); dozens of bug tracking systems with millions of bug reports; probably not very good scans of any artwork of any significance; more ephemeral blog posts than even boing boing can link to, etc. I don't hoard that data. The tradeoffs dont make hoarding it worthwhile; it's easier to just hope that most of it will always be available, and use my limited resources to keep the small parts of it that I'm responsible for backed up and available to others. Which tends to feel like a better use of time and resources than hoarding data, by the way. I suspect that there is more of this sort of data out there that's important to me, than there is for the average person right now. After all, most people don't find old bugs in bug tracking systems and the history of software's modification in revision control systems interesting, and I understand there might even be a few to whom usenet archives from the 80's arn't fascinating. And I know that the amount of data out there that's important to me has gone up over time. So the big question to me is, will I begin to find my hoarded data is useless, will it ever stop being important, and will I stop adding to the hoard? Some technological advances, like faster bandwidth, could tilt the balance that makes some things worth hoarding now. But at least for me, data still seems to be worth hoarding if the cost of accessing it is more than the cost of keeping it on media, or if its future availability can't be guaranteed. There are a lot of services that don't meet these criteria, things like itunes, and bittorrent, and netflix. These things won't stop hoarding; they'll just make hoarding easier, despite themselves. If it were still the 80's I'd be hoarding nearly every freely available thing I listed 5 paragraphs above. Some of it no longer needs to be hoarded thanks to technological change, some of it due to new services, but it seems to me that the really important change that tilts the balance from hoarding data to not is a growth in trust, and a change in what kinds of data are valuable. I trust the Internet Archive. I (sorta kinda) trust Google. And so I trust them to keep their content available, and so I don't try to hoard it. More and more I find freely licensed data, whether it's Free software, CC licensed media, or whatever, to be more valuable than proprietary data. And because it's freely licensed it can be archived online for everyone, by everyone, with network effects, and no need for hoarding.

I'm working on new fuse (filesystem in userspace) packages and I really wonder if I should simplify their postinstallation procedure as it was mentioned in #337572. That would make my life much easier, cause there's quite many bugreports against undefined behaviour of post-debconf tasks, which are pretty hard to track for me. In fact I suppose that most users simply accept default answers so asking them about anything seems to be overhead.
Let's assume I will remove these superflous questions... now the problem is that if someone answered for them in some previous installation then I could leave unneded group and some config files on their systems. On the other head removing this group could even lead to nonworking system because of one of these bugs: #307624, 307627, 306281.
I'm quite confused what to do now. Both solutions have some advantages and disadvantages. First one at least could lead to less bugs in the future. Hints welcome.

I just came back from the vet. I left Vi and Emacs there and will pick them up after work, as today they will be spayed and neutered (450 EUR total). I am all shaky inside.
My little cats! (Well, not so little, as Emacs started acting like if she was in heat only a few hours before I had to take a plane for my Holidays, so I guess she is not so little anymore, nor is Vi, who seemed completely fascinated by her new behavior. Anyway, my vet knew this would happen one month in advance, when we were arranging an appointment for the surgery that will be performed today).

Good luck, my babies!

This over-the-counter medicament may help us in the future. When someone’s behavior suggests they may be in need of it, feel free to suggest it to them (this includes me). This is the European box. By clicking on the image, you will see the Engrish version…

Update: Corrected Tarja Halonen’s total vote percentage. The preliminary count in the Finnish presidential elections is finished with the following results:

Candidate	Total votes		Votes short of next*		Pre-poll
					pos	%
Tarja Halonen	1,396,161	46,3 %	not applicable		1st	52
Sauli Niinist	725,213	24,1 %	670,948	48 %	2nd	20
Matti Vanhanen	561,556	18.6 %	163,657	23 %	3rd	18
Heidi Hautala	105,086	3.5 %	456,470	81 %	4th	4
Timo Soini	103,368	3.4 %	1,718	2 %	4th	4
Bjarne Kallis	61,458	2.0 %	41,910	41 %	6th	1
Henrik Lax	48,639	1.6 %	12,819	21 %	6th	1
Arto Lahti	13,041	0.4 %	35,598	73 %	6th	1

^* The difference between the current candidate and the next (upward) candidate on the list, in votes and as a percentage of the next (upward) candidate’s votes.
The result of the last opinion poll published before the election, commissioned by YLE and conducted by phone between 10th and 11th of January. The margin for error is 2,5 %-points for Halonen and decreases when the percentage decreases. Since the incumbent failed to reach majority, a runoff election will be held on the 29th of January between the two best placed candidates (starred). A remarkable fact is the low number of votes that the independent candidate Arto Lahti received, for he had to get at least 20,000 people to sign their name in favour of his candidacy, while he received only 65 % of that number in votes. It is very likely that both runoff candidates retain the votes they received today. What decides the runoff election is how the rest of the voters behave. As a quick and dirty Stetson Harrison estimate, most of Vanhanen, Kallis and Lax’s spporters are likely to vote for Niinist , while most of Hautala’s supporters are likely to vote for Halonen. Assuming that the “most”s cancel each other (an assumption that probably favours Niinist ), this yields an additional 22.2 %-points for Niinist (total 46.3 %) and 3.5 %-points for Halonen (total 49.8 %). Hence it would seem that Halonen has the upper hand in runoff. A few words on each of the eight candidates, in reverse order of popularity, follows. Arto Lahti (b. 1949) is a professor of entrepeneurship and has experience in various positions in the private sector. He has no prior political experience and is not affiliated with a political party. Henrik Lax (b.1946) is a Member of the European Parliament since 2004, representing the liberal Swedish People’s Party. He was a Member of the national Parliament 1987 2004. Prior to his political career, he had been a lawyer. Bjarne Kallis (b.1945) is a Member of Parliament since 1991, representing the party currently called Christian Democrats. He has chaired his party since 1995. For most of his non-political professional life he has been a teacher and later principal in a business school. Timo Soini (b. 1962) is a Member of Parliament since 2003, representing the right-wing populist True Finns party. He has chaired his party since 1997, which he cofounded in 1995; prior to that, he was an active member of the since-dissolved Finnish Agrarian Party. Heidi Hautala (b. 1955) is a Member of Parliament since 2003 and before that 1991 1995. She was a Member of the European Parliament 1995 2003. She represents the evironmental-liberal Green League, a party she cofounded and later chaired 1987 1991. Matti Vanhanen (b. 1955) is Prime Minister since 2003, representing the liberal Centre Party. He previously served as Minister of Defense in 2003. He has been a Member of Parliament since 1991. He has chaired his party since 2003. Sauli Niinist (b. 1948) is currently a Director at the European Investment Bank. He served as Minister of Justice 1995 1996 and Minister of Finance 1996 2003. He was a Member of Parliament 1987 2003. He represents the liberal-conservative National Coalition party, which he chaired 1994 2001. Prior to his political career, he worked as a lawyer. Tarja Halonen (b. 1943) is the incumbent, Her Excellency the President of the Republic of Finland since 2000. Prior to her presidency, she was a member of the Social Democrat Party and had served as Minister of Social Affairs and Health 1987 1990, Minister of Nordic Cooperation 1989 1991, Minister of Justice 1990 1991 and Minister of Foreign Affairs 1995 2000. She was a Member of Parliament 1979 2000. Prior to her political career, she worked as a lawyer in a labor union.

I wonder if the line is finally crossed. From NMs we expect good interaction and reasonabl social skills. If they do not have those qualities, their ability to change themselves is checked, through a delay after which the application is re-evaluated. If one finally gets accepted as a developer, there are no guidelines in interactions to be followed. Due to lazyness anybody could then harm the project or just the work of others by behaving in a bad way. That’s just sad. It seems that the title is a pun to the topic. I originally did not intent it, but my favourite translator confirms it.

Although the recent Inner European quiz meme is currently much more popular on Planet Debian, the following quiz somehow shows how the result of such a quiz should look like and what the quiz system, which the Inner European quiz used, misses: Having more than only bit-like answers. With answers like this, neither I would have had to change answers to see how close I was to different answer nor would have Christian Perrier had to do the quiz with worst fitting answers.

You scored as Engineering. You should be an Engineering major! Engineering 100% Philosophy 92% Journalism 92% Art 83% Mathematics 75% English 75% Biology 75% Chemistry 75% Theater 75% Psychology 67% Sociology 67% Linguistics 50% Dance 42% Anthropology 25% What is your Perfect Major? created with QuizFarm.com

Since I always saw computer science more as an engineering discipline than a derivative of mathematics (at least the way I studied and like it ;-), I seem to have taken the right major. But also most of the other highscorers aren’t that unfamiliar:

Philosophy

Well, if you see how much philosophy is behind open source or politics, being engaged in open source software and interested in politics doesn’t seem to be that wrong. ;-)

Journalism

I like journalism somehow and I sometimes think about if this could have also been (or even be) a nice profession for me, especially since I managed to combine journalism and computer science in being an editor at Symlink.ch, a Swiss based and German written news and discussion site all around Open Source, IT politics and privacy. Sure, it’s no professional journalism and also not classical journalism, since it’s built on the same ideas (and software) as Slashdot.

Art

If I would have more time and leisure, I probably would also try to draw, paint or sculpture more again as I did during my school time. And since my brother and my mother are both active artists I expect that the results wouldn’t be that bad either. ;-) On the other hand, I also like to design CSS styles which IMHO can also satisfy my artistic bone…

Mathematics

Although I see more the engineering than the mathematics in computer science, mathematics still was one of my two majors in school (the other was physics) and in comparison to many other people I can say that I like maths.

English

That’s the only thing IMHO not fitting in here in such a high position since I’m neither good at foreign languages (see my English in the blog… ;-) nor do I like studying languages. And even if I should see that as “Literature” or “German” (my mother tongue) instead, it just doesn’t seem to fit. (Ok, journalism also has to do with language(s)…)

Biology

Biology was the voluntary science course at school I took until I finished school. At university it became my minor subject. I wonder why it’s that deep down in the statistics?

Chemistry

That was my second voluntary science course at school, but I dropped it before I finished school.

Theater

Well, no, I don’t think that actor would be good idea for me…

Psychology

I’m not sure, if sometimes being glad not to understand how my brain works is a good base for diving into psychology. (On the other hand: Would I write so much text about this quiz, if I’m not at least a little bit interested in psychology? ;-)

Sociology

That’s again more interesting.

Linguistics

If this can include computer linguistics, than it’s definitely something interesting for me, since it usually involves artifical intelligence and I wrote my diploma thesis about an AI subject and our research group did work a lot in the area of computer linguistics.

Dance

No. I’m glad it’s that far down there. Just wonder how it got even 42%.

Anthropology

Well, that’s again an interesting subject, but probably not a subject I would work in. So being that far down is completely ok.

So in general, I think the quiz works mostly fine as well as I probably did choose the right subjects for me. *grin* Only thing I missed in this quiz was Physics as a possible result since I don’t think, it’s impossible (especially compared to the rest of the result) that I haven’t scored for anything typical for physicians.

Now Playing: Falco — Mutter, der Mann mit dem Koks ist da!

College is not the launching pad for a job. It's the launching pad for the rest of your life. High school is a mini-jail with strict standards that everyone must live up to. College is when you get to make your own choices. This is the sentiment behind this article. I agree with it on principle, but not completely on content. Computer Science in the past 7 years has gone through an evil transition - almost all of the Colleges out there shifted to a Technical style curriculum because that was what was in demand. While TAing the introductory classes here at the U of M, the most common complaint was that they weren't learning things which will be useful in the future. The classes are taught in Scheme, for reasons that I completely agree with - the students would rather have them taught in Java, because that would be useful in the market when they leave college. What were they missing? The knowledge that programming concepts are what make good programmers, not language skills. Students want cookie cutter code which solves the problems that they are given. That is why people are lambasting the teaching of Java: people aren't learning hard thinking concepts. In my opinion, college is not supposed to teach you the skills you need for your job - instead, you are there to learn your specific learning style. This will allow you to learn anything you need for your job. Most jobs which exist in the Real World™ aren't looking for people from a specific major, they're looking for experience. I also share the views that you don't need to get perfect grades - the effort required to get an A over a B+ or a B is not worth it for the slight bump in your GPA, and you will have much more fun in college. Meeting friends in college is just as important as your actual classes. The Real World ™ calls this "networking". Choosing your major in order to get a job is also such a crap shoot otherwise - you're betting that in 4 years, the market will need the skills that you learn in a major.

Today, Andreas Tille noticed that utnubu.org points to ubuntu.org (and not, as he expected, to the Utnubu Team’s website). This made me curious and a little whois query gave away that utnubu.org is indeed owned by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. This is not strage, they have other variations registered, like xubnutu.org (which I noticed when writing German parody news on Xubuntu).What is interesting is the fact that I announced Utnubu on debian-project at Sat, 16 Jul 2005 20:55:08 +0300 and the domain was registered at 16-Jul-2005 22:09:37 UTC by James Troup. I just assume that Canonical did that to give us the domain as soon as we need it, and they just reserved it for us since we don’t have money. Very nice. (But why didn’t the tell anyone? Well, I just assume they forgot, no need to wake sleeping dogs.

I was motivated, this morning, to look into whether my laptop chipset (Intel 915GM, for anyone interested) could do this funky multihead thing. Much to my surprise, it was (a) possible, (b) quite simple, and (c) incredibly useful. I now have a 15" Dell LCD screen on a cardboard box behind my laptop docking station. What is it useful for, you ask? Let me count the ways (with the help of the <ol> tag, of course):

1. I've gotten a couple of PDF versions of my current "must always have with me" technical books (Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development With Rails, since you didn't ask), and now I can stick them on the other monitor to refer to while I'm coding.
2. I can stick my xchat window up on the external monitor, so I can quickly glance at what's going on without having to touch anything. With the ability to stick a window on all desktops, I can have xchat no matter where I go!
3. If I want to show somebody else something, it's handy to be able to push it up onto the top screen so they can more easily see it without having to crane down at my laptop screen (plus, if they go "what about <smudge>that?</smudge>", it's work's monitor that's getting grotted on, not my laptop screen that I have to stare at for 10+ hours a day).

Since I rarely (read: never unless I'm forced to) reboot my machine, instead relying on the magical marvels of sleep/hibernate, I did have one major concern with this multihead thing -- when I'm out-and-about, obviously I'm not going to have my external monitor with me, so how do I view things that are up on the other screen (either because I left them there when I was in the office, or because the window autoplacer stuck them there)? It turns out to be a fairly trivial and rarely noticed problem (except when I shove the mouse at the top of the screen to hit a button and my mouse disappears off into the wilderness). The answer to the invisible window problem is trivial -- I wave my mouse around where I can't see it until the window I want is highlighted in the miniview, then hit Alt-M to lasso it, and drag the little beastie into the light. Much easier than trying to guess where the title bar is to bring it down. In the interests of sharing the love (and having a record of what I did for next time), here is the sum total of what I had to add to my xorg.conf to make it all work on Ubuntu Breezy (along with some comments to make it easier to understand what's happening):

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option  "DefaultServerLayout" "double"
        #Option "DefaultServerLayout" "Default Layout"
EndSection
# This Device section is effectively identical to the one for the
# primary screen, with the addition of the Screen 1 parameter to
# select the alternate display device.
Section "Device"
        Identifier      "vgaout"
        Driver          "i810"
        BusID           "PCI:0:2:0"
        Option          "MonitorLayout" "CRT"
        Screen          1
        Option          "DDC" "false"
EndSection
# external display
Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "generic"
        # I kept all these loose because most monitors support
        # autodetection.
        HorizSync       27 - 96
        VertRefresh     50 - 110
        Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "external"
        Device          "vgaout"
        Monitor         "generic"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                # I'd have added many more modes here, but
                # the amazingly crufty external LCD I'm using
                # only supports 1024x768.
                Modes           "1024x768"
        EndSubSection
EndSection
# xinerama layout
Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "double"
        # The 0 0 (I think) identifies this as the "root" monitor
        Screen          "Default Screen" 0 0
        # You can also use Below, LeftOf, or RightOf to position
        # your shiny subscreen
        Screen          "external" Above "Default Screen"
        InputDevice     "Generic Keyboard"
        InputDevice     "Configured Mouse"
        # Never, ever forget this option.  You'll get laughed at
        Option          "Xinerama" "true"
EndSection