I got bored recently, so I rebuilt the whole Debian archive on one of my machines. To make this not a completely useless excercise, I used the Open64 compiler instead of gcc and created build logs for your perusal. So what is Open64? From the Wikipedia page:

Open64 is an open source, state-of-art, optimizing compiler for the Intel IA-64 (Itanium), AMD Opteron and Intel IA-32e architecture. It derives from the SGI compilers for the MIPS R10000 processor. It was released under the GPL in 2000, and now mostly serves as a research platform for compiler and computer architecture research groups. Open64 is licensed under the GPL. Open64 supports Fortran 77/95 and C/C++, as well as the shared memory programming model OpenMP. It can conduct high-quality interprocedural analysis, data flow analysis, data dependence analysis and array region analysis.

Open64 installation The installation is pretty easy fortunately:

$ wget http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open64/open64-4.0-src.tar.bz2
$ tar xfvj open64-4.0-src.tar.bz2
$ cd open64-4.0
$ export TOOLROOT=/opt/open64
$ make
$ make install (as root)

I think you need gcc-3.4 (gcc 4.x is not yet supported), and for some odd reason you also need csh as one of the install scripts seems to use it. It would be nice if someone could package Open64 for Debian, I definately don't have the time to maintain such a huge package (a whole maintainer team would probably be good here). Rebuilding the Debian archive There are several possible ways (and tools) to rebuild the Debian archive; I've used pbuilder/cowbuilder with the rebuild scripts from Bastian Venthur, which are now included in pbuilder. First we need to install the required packages, setup a cowbuilder base chroot, and get the list of packages:

$ apt-get install cowdancer grep-dctrl wget devscripts sudo
$ cowbuilder --create --distribution lenny --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow
$ cp -r /usr/share/doc/pbuilder/examples/rebuild .
$ cd rebuild
$ ./getlist lenny

Now we add Open64 into the cowbuilder chroot and fix up the chroot by pointing the gcc/g++ symlinks to Open64:

$ cp -a /opt/open64 /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow/opt
$ chroot /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow
$ cd /usr/bin
$ mv gcc gcc.orig
$ ln -s /opt/open64/bin/opencc gcc
$ mv g++ g++.orig
$ ln -s /opt/open64/bin/openCC g++
$ exit

In addition, we set the CC and CXX environment variables to Open64, which will make 90% of all (autoconf-using) packages automatically use Open64. We need a small script for that:

$ cat c.cfg:
export CC="/opt/open64/bin/opencc -m32"
export CXX="/opt/open64/bin/openCC -m32"

Now edit the buildall script. Change the Debian mirror used there (optional) and make it use our c.cfg script by adding the --configfile /path/to/rebuild/c.cfg option in the "pdebuild" line. We can now finally start building the archive:

./buildall list.lenny.i386 lenny

You can also run multiple buildall instances at once to speed up the archive rebuild on SMP/multicore machines, and you can even abort the command and simply restart it later. The script will continue where it left off. Results The whole rebuild (with 2 instances of buildall running at the same time) took ca. 9 days on an AMD64 Athlon64 X2 (dual core, 1.8 GHz each) machine with 1 GB of RAM. I really should have used something like apt-proxy to speed up the rebuild and save some bandwidth, but I read about apt-proxy too late... All log files from my rebuild are available for detailed analysis if anybody is interested (you can browse the logfiles online or download all of them as tarball). I didn't perform any detailed analysis, just some rough numbers here:

• Succeeded package builds: 8425
• Failed package builds: 2509
• Total number of packages rebuilt: 10934

If anybody does some more elaborate analysis, please let me know.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

udev 0.113-1 mounts /dev noexec, and this breaks the proprietary NVIDIA driver. So far I am inclined to revert the change, but I am soliciting opinions about applications mmap'ing PROT_EXEC /dev/zero and if it is a good idea and should be allowed, or not. Feel free to post to #435250.

Happy BOFH^W sysadmin day for you! For those who aren't sysadmins, don't ask stupid questions for him/her today. Come on, just give a gift and enjoy the reaction.

By the way, Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction (AFD) turned 20, six days ago so real, raw, unique! Unlike autotuned crap all over the place that we hear today from non musicians... "But Appetite was also among the last classic rock records to be mastered with vinyl in mind, to be edited with a razor blade applied to two-inch tape, to be mixed by five people frantically pushing faders at a non-automated mixing board. "We used classic instruments and classic amps," says the album's producer and engineer, Mike Clink."

Marco, if you do not want to rebuild the package you were asked to sponsor, you can just upload the binary they built. After all, it's not more of a security issue than allowing them to upload in the first place.

I voted in favour. People arguing that we should "just fix the NM process instead" are missing the whole point: even if its problems could be fixed soon (but they will not be, since many smart people have been working on it in the last few years and have not found a magic solution yet) I do not believe that becoming a Debian Developer should be easy. OTOH I like the idea of allowing full Developers to delegate co-maintenance of one of their packages like they currently do with sponsorships but without requiring them to rebuild the packages, which can become very time-consuming.

Recently, Jurij Smakov resigned from maintenance of the Debian torrus packages. This leaves me as the sole maintainer, and I need help. torrus is an extremely powerful framework to collect and display round-robin data. It can do much more than mrtg, is cricket “done right”, but is not configurable via the web as cacti is. Its upstream is busy with their work, but active. It is written in perl and uses XML as configuration file format. It is mainly used to collect operational data from SNMP hosts and network components. It would be great if any co-maintainers offering to help would have knowledge in perl, XML and SNMP. I am currently in the process of fixing the RC bugs and, in a next upload round, other bugs that are pending. torrus is team maintained (but I am the only active team member at the moment). Its maintainer address will be set to a mailing list with the next upload. If you want to help, just subscribe to pkg-torrus-general and/or pkg-torrus-maintainers and say hello. Your help is appreciated.

Some prominent debian-legal posters frequently make use of disclaimers like IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), TINLA (This Is Not Legal Advice), IANADD (I Am Not A Debian Developer). While this helps to avoid misunderstanding about the value of their opinions, I propose that a new disclaimer is used where appropriate: IAAM (I Am A Moron).

I've just uploaded a new version of frysk in experimental. Frysk is composed of a GUI and many command line tools. Here are a few of them:

• fcore, to generate a corefile from a running process
• fhpd, a debugger with a text user interface
• fstack, displays the stack trace of a running process
• ftrace, a sytem call tracing tool
• frysk, the Java-Gnome GUI
• /usr/lib/frysk/funit, the JUnit testsuite, used to test frysk and the kernel

Please give frysk package a try!

On Thursday I bought a $99 (discounted from $199) MP4 player from Aldi (a German supermarket chain that has recently opened up here). The player is a Tevion model M6. By a long way it’s the cheapest and nastiest piece of consumer electronics that I have ever owned. It has very flimsy construction (feels like it will crumple in my pocket - not like a solid iRiver) and poor design all around. The viewing angle of the LCD screen is very small, so if I hold it close to my face then the viewing angle will be wrong for at least one eye. There are two power switches, an electronic one on the top (which is also sometimes used as an escape key for menus that don’t recognise the key labelled as ESC) and a slide switch at the side. When I use the electronic switch to turn the power off the back-light will usually flicker - I guess that they wanted to have an electronic switch and then put a mechanical switch in the design when they couldn’t get it working. The menus are strange, they have a game menu that only has Tetris - why not have a Tetris menu instead? The FM radio function doesn’t seem to work and the option to select a European frequency range is lost when the power is cut, along with all saved station frequencies. I never got around to testing the voice-recording function (one of the reasons for purchasing the device) as it failed in too many other ways. The device has an AVI of Barbie Girl by Aqua and also a MP3 with a text file that has the lyrics for Karaoke, this is probably the only good feature of the device. Unfortunately it appears to have some sort of DRM as it gave a padlock icon and stopped working after I played it a few times (fortunately it’s unable to store settings so a power cycle solved that problem). When I connected it to my PC via USB it showed two devices, /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. /dev/sdb gave an IO error (apparently due to not having an SD memory card installed) and and /dev/sda was not in any format recognised by file -s /dev/sda. I’m going to have to return this, even $99 is too much for a device of such quality. Maybe I’ll buy an iRiver to do this if they sell one without DRM.

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For the last couple of months, both at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View and on the #upstart IRC channel, we’ve been discussing the changes we want to make to upstart for the Feisty Fawn release of Ubuntu. This will ship with a version of upstart based on the 0.3 series (it may end up getting called 0.5 before release); the primary goal for this are to have an init system that is suitable for general standalone list in any Linux distribution. I’ll be giving a talk at linux.conf.au 2007 in Sydney with that aim, I hope to persuade at least one other major Linux distribution that it’s the right solution. A complete list of the specifications and bugs being targeted for the 0.3 release can be found in Launchpad. The rest of this post will introduce some of the shiniest new things. Writing Jobs Upstart takes care of starting, supervising and stopping daemons itself; unlike in the init script system where you have to write code to do that yourself, often using a helper like start-stop-daemon. All you need to is give the path to, and arguments for, the binary you wish to be started.

exec /usr/bin/dbus-daemon

Some jobs, especially quick tasks, will usually be written as shell scripts. To save having to write a separate file and invoke it, you can include shell script code directly in the job file instead of using the exec stanza.

script
    echo /usr/share/apport/apport > /proc/sys/kernel/crashdump-helper
end script

Usually it’s not sufficient to just start a binary and wish it well; you frequently need something to be run before it is started to prepare the system, and sometimes something after it terminates to clean up again. For these purposes, additional snippets of shell code can be given – to be run before the binary is started, and after it has finished. Unlike init scripts, these do not need to start or stop the daemon itself; that’s done automatically based on the exec stanza.

pre-start script
    mkdir -p /var/run/dbus
    chown messagebus:messagebus /var/run/dbus
end script
post-stop script
    rm -f /var/run/dbus/pid
end script

For consistency, executables may be specified with pre-start exec and post-start exec instead of shell scripts as above. It’s sometimes useful to be able to run something after the binary has been started; for example, you may wish to attempt to connect to the daemon to determine whether it is ready to serve requests. post-start script or post-start exec can be used to this.

post-start script
    # wait for listen on port 80
    while ! nc -q0 localhost 80 </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1; do
        sleep 1;
    done
end script

It’s also useful to be able to notify a daemon that it may be about to be stopped, or delay it for a while. pre-stop script or pre-stop exec can be used for this.

pre-stop script
    # disable the queue, wait for it to become empty
    fooctl disable
    while fooq >/dev/null; do
        sleep 1
    done
end script

Events Events are now quite a bit more detailed than in previous versions; they’re still named with simple strings that are up to the system sending the event, but they can now include arguments and environment variables which are passed through to jobs being started or stopped as a result.

initctl emit network-interface-up eth0 -DIFADDR=00:11:D8:98:1B:37

This command will now output all of the effects of this event, and will not terminate until the event has been fully handled inside upstart. Events such as the above can be used by jobs that examine the event arguments and environment within their script:

start on network-interface-up
script
    [ $1 = lo ] && exit 0
    grep -q $IFADDR /etc/network/blacklist && exit 0
    # etc.
 end script

or matched directly in the start on and stop on stanzas:

start on block-device-added sda*

The events generated by job state changes have also changed. Previously both jobs and events shared the same namespace, which not only caused confusion but actually caused some problems when one accidentally named a job after an event. The two primary events generated are now simply called started and stopped; they inform you that a job is fully up and running, or fully shut down again. The name of the job is received as an argument to this event.

start on started dbus

The started event is not emitted until the post-start task (described above) has finished; so the post-start task can delay other jobs from starting because they can’t yet connect to the daemon. Likewise the stopped event is not emitted until after the post-stop task has finished. The other two events emitted by a job are special; they are the starting and stopping events. The reason they are special is that the job is not permitted to start or stop until the event has been handled. This means that if you have a task to perform when your database server is stopped, but before it’s actually terminated, it’s as simple as:

start on stopping mysql
exec /usr/bin/backup-db.py

MySQL won’t be terminated until the backup has finished. This is especially useful for daemons that depend on each other, for example HAL needs DBUS, it shouldn’t be started until DBUS is running and DBUS should not be stopped until HAL has been terminated. All the HAL job needs is:

start on started dbus
stop on stopping dbus

Likewise if tomcat is installed, Apache should not be started until tomcat is running; and tomcat should not be stopped until apache has been terminated. All the tomcat job needs is:

start on starting apache
stop on stopped apache

Failure Nothing goes smoothly all of the time, sometimes tasks the job runs will fail, or the daemon itself will die. As well as providing the ability for a crashed daemon to be automatically restarted, upstart ensured that other jobs are notified with a special failed argument to the stopping and stopped events.

start on stopped typo failed
script
    echo "typo failed again :-("   mail -s "typo failed" root
end script

And if any job started or stopped by an event fails, it’s possible to discover that the event itself failed.

start on network-interface-up/failed

States While tasks such as configuring a network interface, or checking and mounting a block device are usually performed as a result of events; services are more complicated. Services normally need to be running while the system is in a certain state, not just when a particular event occurs. Therefore upstart allows you to describe arbitrarily complex system states by referring to events that define their changes. For example, many services should be running only while the filesystem is mounted, and at least one network device is up. We have events to indicate the changes into and out of these dates, we just need to combine them:

from fhs-filesystem-mounted until fhs-filesystem-unmounted
and from network-up until network-down

The until operator defines a period between two events, the and operator ensures we’re within both of these periods. Perhaps we need to be running while any display manager is:

from started gdm until stopping gdm
or started kdm until stopping kdm

Or maybe we only want to be run if a network interface comes up before bind9 has been started:

on network-interface-up and from startup until started bind9

These “complex event configurations” can appear in any job file; and any job file itself can serve as a reference for other jobs. They will be started and stopped at the same time as the named job:

with apache

Omitting the exec or script stanza from a job file means that it simply defines a state that can serve as a reference for others. As such, the multiuser state is simply a job file that defines it. As an added bonus, these states can still have pre-start, post-stop, etc. scripts.

Only in the beginning of May it became clear that we need a new wireless sponsor this year, which quite quickly was found: www.freifunk.net, which is a german grassroot movement, connecting people and communities with mesh networks. As some of them are also upstream OpenWRT developers, we didn’t only get 19 accesspoints, but I also got quite some intensive training, which resulted in this wikipage with quite extensive documentation and a nice 3D map, how+where+why to place accesspoints. So we’ll use the Kamikaze version of OpenWRT, whereever possible. Despite it’s name, Kamikaze is the new stable release of OpenWRT, the successor of WhiteRussian. The accesspoints will be simply running in bridge mode (and using DHCP to get their IP and not running a DHCP server themselves) and provide unencrypted wireless (authentification via chillispot, you’ll have to login once via a webfrontend, then your MAC address will be recorded and you don’t need to login again) on the ESSID DebConf7. We’ll have 802.11b+g everywere and additionally 802.11a in some places. We calculated that for Teviot we’ll need approximatly 15 accesspoints and three extra for the hackcenter we’ll be using at night. As we got 19 from freifunk, we should have enough. But I like to have some more, to be on the safe side and to be able to replace the least powerful ones with better ones. If you can bring an accesspoint that runs OpenWRT, please send a short mail to debconf-infrastructure@lists.debconf.org. We prefer OpenWRT, so we can easily include them into our monitoring with munin and because it’s a PITA to deal with lots of different web interfaces for administration (and look up lots of different manuals on different webpages…). If you really want to bring an AP which doesn’t run OpenWRT, make sure the config described above is possible and please pre-configure it like that. You can check if your accesspoint can run OpenWRT, a modell with broadcom or atheros chips would be best, simply because I already have preconfigured images. Alternativly, the above mentioned wikipage has instructions how to build an image. (And I have a build environment on my laptop. But that’s easy to setup.) On a personal note, I intend not to be much involved in the wireless setup this year after unpacking the hardware, there is a nice admin team this year and I want to concentrate on the video team and our work there. And last but not least, but again: don’t just plug your AP into the network in Teviot. God might kill a kitten, and we might loose our uplink if you do :-)

An hardware watchdog will reset the computer if the system watchdog daemon is unresponsive, e.g. because the OS has crashed. After enabling IPMI on a Linux system you can use this recipe to activate the watchdog in the BMC:

enable_ipmi_watchdog()  
  [ -e /dev/ipmi0 ]   return 1
  
  # default timeout of 10 s raised to allow some recovery time
  echo 'options ipmi_watchdog timeout=23' >> /etc/modprobe.d/watchdog
  modprobe ipmi_watchdog
  echo ipmi_watchdog >> /etc/modules
  
  apt-get install watchdog
  echo 'watchdog-device = /dev/watchdog' >> /etc/watchdog.conf
  /etc/init.d/watchdog start
 

IPMI is a standard protocol which allows out of band access to hardware features like reading sensors and error logs, turning the power on or off or accessing the serial console. This is made possible by the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), an independent CPU which is accessed from the operating system or by sharing an Ethernet port with the OS. Most modern servers offer an IPMI 1.5 or 2.0 interface and usually loading the ipmi_si driver is all that is needed to verify if it is supported, but some may need additional parameters and/or a kernel upgrade. dmidecode is also useful to determine if the system has a BMC. After loading the ipmi_si and ipmi_devintf drivers the BMC will be accessible from Linux, e.g. using the ipmitool command. The ipmitool package will also install the ipmievd daemon, which logs events like overheating a failed fan (beware: it uses local.* syslog facility which on Debian systems is not configured by default). It is also useful to install the ipmi_poweroff driver, which will generate an ACPI power button event when a clean shutdown is requested by the BMC (you need to install acpid too). The details of accessing the BMC over an Ethernet connection varies depending on the server model and manufacturer, e.g. IBM xSeries servers are shipped with the same default IP address, username and password which means that anybody on the same L2 network (no gateway address is configured) can shut down your system: ipmitool -I lan -H 10.1.1.97 -A PASSWORD -U USERID -P PASSW0RD shell The most convenient way to experiment with IPMI is to run ipmitool shell locally and trying the available commands. These are some trivial examples:

# show the parameters for Ethernet access
lan print
# reset the system
chassis power reset
# cleanly shut down the OS and then power off the system
chassis power soft
# at the next boot, boot from the network
chassis bootdev pxe
# turn on the locator LED
chassis identify 255
# print the system event log
sel list
# read a specific sensor
# (with enough servers you could create a 3D thermal map of the room...)
sensor get "Ambient Temp"

How much of a link having a 100 ms latency I can use if I am using a 64 kB TCP window? md@wonderland:~$ units -v '64kB / 100ms' Mbps 64kB / 100ms = 5.12 Mbps 64kB / 100ms = (1 / 0.1953125) Mbps md@wonderland:~$ How big a window do I need to fill a 100 Mbps link having a 40 ms latency? md@wonderland:~$ units -v '100Mbps * 40 ms' KiB 100Mbps * 40 ms = 488.28125 KiB 100Mbps * 40 ms = (1 / 0.002048) KiB md@wonderland:~$ (I have just found the months old draft of this post, I wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong in it or I just forgot to send it...)

A data center full of servers waiting to be installed in racks which are just two millimeters too narrow.

While I usually agree that users are idiots and we know better than they do, I must recognize that the developers of the instant messaging program formerly known as GAIM are being totally wrong in their crusade against protocol icons. Hello? If I wanted a simple-minded client I would install gossip. When many people in a few days take the time to find and reply to a closed bug report then maybe they have good reasons to want a feature. And please refrain from serving us bullshit like "a preference would add too much complexity to the code", some of us actually know about pointers and switch statements. (Advanced preferences is something which the gajim developers got right. It's too bad that the Jabber transports lack many protocol features, are resource hungry, highly unstable and generally crappy.) One of the reasons for requiring native protocol icons is that each protocol has subtly different presence values, whose exact semantics are now lost. And in some situations the protocol used by your contacts has a semantic value in itself. Yes: I know that you already replied to these arguments, but you are still wrong.

I already had the idea to get LPI certified - expensive fun. Thanks to Joerg and co. for organizing the cheap exams during Debconf, I already have signed-up for LPI101 in the morning and LPI102 in the afternoon and wrote our $$$-director of the comany a mail that I’d like to get 95 more at the end of this month. Finally a little reference to the blog of Martin F. Krafft - and especially “Why? I am a Debian developer”. I think this is just bullshit, sorry. LPI is dedicated for system administrators, BOFHs, techies, however. Not that stuff what a Debian developer is doing. I mean, a DD should have knowledge about Debian including knowledge about software development, documentation, how to build packages, write some scripts… But does he need to know how to manage iptables or know where you need to set the fontserver? I think no… LPI asks many questions about old stuff, like the XFS, ISA Cards, Analog modems usw. The normal user today doesn’t need to care about this things, even a Debian developer mustn’t. I think many DDs never have touched an ISA card. So, I will participate in the exams, please don’t blame me if I fail.

So, yes these three topics, the caveat, the book Better than Well and Hot Latino Bodies are related. You just have to stick with this long post to find out why… *** As I progress slowly but surely with my book manuscript, I am really coming to see how a dissertation and book are quite different creatures. I think one of the most important and noticeable differences is that a book has a lot more short caveats and warrants than necessary in a dissertation. I think there are two main reasons for this. One of which is has to do with your committee members, the primary and (usually only readers) of the dissertation. They are a lot more prepared and adept to ingest complex ideas than lets say undergraduate students, because that is what they are trained to do and because most of them are much more familiar with your topic because they have been with it nearly as long as you have. In a dissertation you are also allowed to (and often expected) to go on and on, ad naseum, with your theoretical explanations that help substantiate what are otherwise shakier, initial claims. For various reasons, for a book, especially if you are not some FFT (Famous French Theorist), you are strongly encouraged to dump most of the theory in favor of providing a streamlined version (which really, is preferable of course, but extraordinarily hard to pull off). I have been thinking a lot of the caveat because I have just finished re-reading a book Better than Well that is not only fascinating in its own right but brings the caveat to a stunning art form. The author, Carl Elliot, is a philosopher/bio-ethicist and the topic of the book, broadly speaking, examines how the rise of new enhancement technologies (prozac, plastic surgery, sex change surgery) is bound tightly with longer-standing, distinctly American ideals, such as the autonomous, self-directed and authentic self. It is one of those rare books that can be read by your father, aunt and uncle, tossed over to a willing teenager, and assigned in all sorts of college courses and still manage to impress all sort of academics in all sorts of fields. Part of the reason for his broad appeal is because the book is thoughtful and clever and so chock-full of really interesting examples that you are hooked and want more of his tasty intellectual Kool-Aid. So while he has one main focus, which largely triangulates between enhancement technologies, selfhood, and consumerism, in the process of exploring them, you learn about a bunch of other really neat topics: suburbia, the history of cosmetics and childhood, odd social phobias, long-gone and culture- bound disorders like dissociative, fugue, amputee wanabee’s, extreme blushing, and so much more. Along with crystal clear writing, he also throws in some classically funny lines, my favorite one currently being: For better or worse, suburbia has come to stand for something than can be survived only with minor tranquilizers. Another reason he manages to pull this Houdini-like feat is because of his judicious and artful use of the caveat, which is really the only way he can bring forth complex ideas, in a fashion that is much more accessible than is usually done in a purely academic book. To take on example, when he introduces the usefulness theories of Thorstein Veblen, an economist usually known (and only barely), by academics, he opens in the following way, because in many ways, if you just decided to pick up a copy of Veblen, his style make strike outdated:

Reading Veblen nearly a century after he wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class, it is not easy to know which parts of the book to take seriously. It comes off as equal parts intellectual theory, social satire, and crackpot polemic, (and goes on for a full more paragraph) and then says Where Veblen is prescient, however, is his sense that in a consumption economy, consumer goods would become markers of who we are. p. 103

In this way he can say, ok Veblen is useful because of this specific reason” and yet communicate to his academic readers that he knows the limits of Veblen. No matter how much I love the book, and now matter how I think his use of the caveat is stunning, there are two problems I have with it. In one case, I think he fails to give one of the most important caveats. He paints a picture in which all of American society is ensnared in dominant social codes and mores (which somehow all point back to consumerism and capitalism and a desire to improve the self). While there are points he seems to back away from that sort of statement, and a few rare points where he ascribes his insights to the group I think he should mainly be sticking to white, liberal-leaning middle-class Americans I think there are more instances where he paints a picture of America as far more uniform than it actually is. According to his account, no one is immune to the forces he so eloquently writes of and so in the end the environmentalist activist, is as caught up in the traps of consumer life-style as is the investment banker on Wall Street. It lead hims to say such statements as

Many Americans today learn who they want to be by listening to a Methodist minister or a civics teacher but by watching advertisements for The Gap.

Ok while he bit about the civics teacher may be true, any consideration of lets, say… the religious right in this country, which, as we know from recent elections, don’t represent a teeny-tiny itsy-bitsy minority (and for a fascinating glimpse into the world, I would recommend Jesus Camp), would bring holes, and sizable ones, to that sort of statement. Many Americans do in fact listen to their minster. And this does not only help explain the deep divisions in this country, but I bet because they do listen to their pastors, their notions of the good, the self, etc, are going to be pretty distinct from those he describes (and gain see Jesus Camp to get at this point) It is not that the religious right exists outside of the web of consumerism we are all at least partially caught in, and indeed, a lot of the new Protestant religious movements here and elsewhere as Jean and John’s Comaroff’s work has shown can be all about securing a more robust middle class lifestyle. But we must remember that even something as powerful as consumer capitalism or dominant ideals of an authentic, beautiful self though powerful and more often than not work in concert with each other do not quite have the power to efface all meaningful difference between lets say a white, liberal middle class woman and let’s say, many Latinos, who, do, let’s not forget, comprise a huge portion of America. Many Americans have a very different picture of the ideal female body than the picture he explores, which is skinny and lanky and forever youthful (and hence the appeal of botox and lipo). Let me provide just one example drawn from the annual Puerto Rican day parade and this hold true for the one held either in NYC or Chicago. Along with a blizzard of Puerto Rican flags, what you may also notice is the abundance of really bright spandex being donned on ladies that are not by any standard of the word slim. I am sure that any middle class lady (you know, the type who spends 5 days of the week working out at the gym, wishing her thighs were just a little thinner), would feel morally repulsed in seeing that sort of image, that is if they even bothered to go to the parade. But among many Puerto Rican men (not all) a sexylicious and extra-curvy, meaty Puerto Rican woman, decked out in tight & bright spandex, will like bring on a loud HAY MAMITA, ven ac ”………………… which roughly translates into You are HOT… Like I want you NOW. (more…)

The old testing release is now Debian 4.0:

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.

That last bit needs to be proven, which I’ll be doing this week.