Yesterday was a very, very intense day, and I had lots of fun. Clint, sladen and I headed to Chinatown walking, with a few detours to be able to checkout Manhattan's skyline. The view from the other shore is awesome, even with the two towers missing. When I compare the current view with how it was four years ago, I understand how much the city has changed without them. They were so impressively big that I just can't picture them too well in my mind.

The skyline of South Manhattan We walked over the Brooklyn bridge, giving me other very cool views of Manhattan, while I hammered Clint with questions about this and that. I saw that since 9/11, you can't go past the Town Hall. "Security reasons", of course. I was very surprised to see police cars in every single street. It's like a Police State, and if you ask me, it didn't make me feel safer. After some walk, we finally got in Chinatown, which is the craziest place ever. People sell stuff on the sidewalks, and many streets are packed with people. We had to meet with mikah, biella, dilinger and his cat at some Chinese place for breakfast/lunch. The place, as Chinatown itself, was crazy. As soon as we sat down a few waitresses landed a few plates on the table, without asking or anything. A few minutes later I could see that the way they serve you is going around with carts with lost of food, and you either want it or not. We left dilinger at the metro station, and moved on to the SoHo. I wanted to go to the SoHo Apple Store to see if they knew about replacement Spanish keyboards for my Powerbook. My powerbook was bought in the US last year, so it has a US keyboard. This is mostly ok, but only mostly as it's missing a key. After SoHo, we went back to Chinatown to pick up bubbles. It was nice to see her after Debconf, and she made the effort to come just for a few hours even if she was ill and had lots to do in Philly. We headed to South Street Port, where I had a long chat about Cuba with micah while we sat on a bench looking at Brooklyn bridge. And then, we gathered all our braveness and headed to the heart of the beast, to the kernel of the system. We walked into the Financial District, and soon enough I was walking in Wall Street no less. If I breathed hard, I could smell the money. The road was paved in gold, and there were skyscrapers everywhere. I discovered the rulers of this world had opened a "public space" in JP Morgan's building. To their despair, probably, it had been taken over by the poor. I wonder what Bloomberg will do about it. As I walked up the street, a strange feeling in my heart grew and grew, until, behind a corner, I saw it. The source of all evil was ahead of me, guarded by George Washington himself.

The New York Stock exchange and it's black evil aura of Capitalism I was standing ahead of this building where so many people behave like bastards everyday, pushing millions to povery for a bit more profit margin. The doors were closed and surrounded by security officers, which despite being asked politely, didn't let us in for "security reasons". Next to it was the Church of Capitalism, at the end of the street. It's curious that such an old church still stands where it was build near the harbour probably a century ago, now surrounded by some of the most modern and tallest buildings in the planet. And then, we visited the bull, which I didn't know is the "friendly" symbol of how Capitalism works.

I had Capitalism by the balls We moved down to Battery Square, past the old US Customs building with the four statues representing the four continents. We saw the damaged sculpture which lived in the WTC, and sat down at the pier to watch a beautiful sunset over the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty seen from South Manhattan At that point, biella and micah had to meet some friends at one cinema to see the Wal-Mart documentary. We went to a funky place to have some tea, decided to go see Times Square and then walk to Central Park. At the time, mako was arriving to NYC on the Chinatown bus, so we agreed to meet in a restaurant to have lunch. Paul Sladen finally managed to get lost, after many tries during the day, and wasn't seen until we got back home. Mako and Mika waited for us at the door of an... ethiopian restaurant in the SoHo, despite Mako knows I can't stand spicy food. But in the end it wasn't so bad, I just needed a few more glasses of water than average. And I finally got to know mika, after lots of time of chatting over IRC. Greg, SPI's lawyer, also appeared, and was a nice addition to the group. Mako knew where to take us after that. The Belgian bar was packed, but there was a private party in one of the spaces and we took over some of that space. After a few rounds, we were ready to leave the pub and go for Falafel and some tea. I was terribly falling asleep though, so instead of tea we took a cap back to Brooklyn, where we found Paul waiting at the door. After an hour of inflating a mattress, we were ready for sleep, at 4AM. It didn't look like the morning after would be very productive...

I previously mentioned in a sidenote to another post that I've been involved in a court case over the last few weeks, and I promised a few people I'd blog about my adventures there. Obviously, not quite everything can be discussed in an open forum, but I checked with the legal beagles and I'm OK as long as I stick to generalities. Which is fine by me, since the detailed specifics are actually immensely boring. Executive Summary: It's the law Jim, but not as the TV shows it. I have to recommend that everybody spend a bit of time watching a case or two at their local court. It's surprising how different reality is to what you see on TV (of course, Australian courts are going to be different to the US courts we primarily see on TV, but even the dramatic representations of Australian courts I've seen are fairly inaccurate). The legal system, while appearing to be out in it's own little world, is a vital and integral part of most societies, so it's useful to have at least a basic idea of what goes on in them -- not because you'll end up in one (and even if you did, your lawyer will tell you what to do) but because it's an interesting insight into a part of our world that often affects us, but we don't like to look at. (Going and watching your houses of parliament, or an abboitoir, is a similar thing). Second, if you can possibly avoid it, don't get involved in a case. Not as a defendant, not as a litigant (in a civil case), and not as a witness. Litigants and defendants get screwed because they're stuck in a small room with a bunch of people they don't know or particularly like, for days or months, with a limited understanding of what's going on. Boooooooring. For witnesses, it's a different kind of pain. But I'll leave the details of that for another post. One of the things that quite surprised me is the general good nature and decent relationship between all of the legal professionals involved. They're willing to help each other out, they concede points graciously, and there's a surprising amount of banter between all of the lawyers and (in some cases) the witness as well. I'm told that this was peculiar in my case because I was involved in a voir dire[1], and everyone's on their more formal behaviour when there's a jury in the room. At times, it was almost a pleasure to watch the proceedings -- like a slightly dry but nonetheless compelling play. Most of the time, though, I characterised as "Snail Racing" -- about the most dull activity one could imagine, but nevertheless you just can't tear your attention away in case something interesting happens while you're blinking. When I say that the lawyers are good natured, that's not to imply that they're not vehemently arguing their case. Toward the end of the voir dire, in particular, counsel for the defence started to get rather vocal as to the lack of proper procedure on the part of the Crown. Over the entire voir dire, too, both counsel were always pressing hard and always trying to get their case seen in the best light. But their vigourous pursuit of the case never got personal or competitive. I think that's actually something that a lot of free software people could take on board (myself included) -- argue strongly for your position, but never internalise it or make it personal. Your position may be rather important (the defendant in my case was looking at up to 14 years if he got sent down) but making it a personal attack isn't going to help your case. I was amazed at the speed with which counsel picked up on new concepts and ideas. Unsurprisingly, the expertise I provided was quite technical, and counsel were not particularly computer literate. However, over lunches, I was able to essentially brain dump fair chunks of knowledge at the barrister, and he then went inside and laid it all out, usually accurately and very good presentation. It's also intensely satisfying to know that the questions that are being presented were suggested by you, and the skillful way that the ideas and queries were weaved together. I guess you'd get a similar buzz writing a play and then watching skilled performers bring it to life -- not necessarily exactly the way you imagined, but with an undeniable skill and vibrance. I've got a lot more material about my adventures in the legal system, which I'll be posting over the next while, but I figure this is probably well enough to be going on with for now.

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1. A voir dire (as explained to me) is a sort of "trial within a trial", used to determine a point of fact or the admissability of a particular piece of evidence. It is run in the absence of a jury. They're only supposed to run for a couple of days; apparently mine was extraordinary at three weeks, although mention was made of a six week marathon (in the context of "this better not be like $OTHER_VOIR_DIRE").

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.

After a not-so-easy ride with James Blackwell, and the last minute surprise of Paul Sladen joining us, we arrived in New York. The sky was dark already. Instead of arriving at 15:00 or so as expected, we arrived at something like 20:00. Behind, we had left great perils like an empty gas tank and finding no gas station, and noticing one tire could use some pumping; evil officials at the US border not liking the fact that it was the first time I entered the country, which involved fingerprints and a smily face at the customs offices after a long wait; a great meal (after a long wait to get served) at probably the best restaurant in the whole State of New York; the three of us becoming terribly sleepy half an hour after resuming the drive, and having to stop for a short nap and stopping for gas once again around 70 miles away from NYC. When we did arrive, we managed to get lost a few times around the city. We crossed four bridges on our way to Brooklyn, which accidentally let me admire the Manhattan skyline by night, and finally, got to Clint's place. When we were parking, I noticed the tire was mostly flat now. Surely not the best way to land in the city. We also found out Clint and the rest had left for dinner after a long wait, as neither they or us expected to arrive so late, and we were way too freaked out with the crazy traffic and finding our way to phone them. After a while, both problems were sorted out; Clint appeared and James was able to leave. James, thanks for all you did! I owe you a big one next time! We spent some time with Clint, dilinger, biella and micah, saw the great view of Manhattan from the roof of his appartment, and eventually went to bed. Apparently, they are taking me to a place called "Dim Sum" for breakfast. I wonder how dilinger's cat tastes.

Hmmm, dear LWN, Anthony Towns is not alone when claiming that the reaction of the Debian community towards Nexenta after they announced their work was probably overflated and certainly too much aggressive. I remember having done so already and I did it again later. I usually avoid debian-devel flamewars but here, this is not really a flamewar. This was a rude action against people who may have done mistakes, errors and certainly need to talk deeper with the Debian community. Even if the contributors in this thread do not think they have been rude, I'm pretty much sure they have been "perceived" as being rude by outsiders. I'm afraid that such behaviour is very likely to enforce a very commonly feeling among the free software community of Debian being a kindergarten of free software bigots completely disconnected from real life. We know we are not this so we should try to avoid people thinking we are. This is not why I work in this project. When it comes at Free Software, I'm a kind of "bigot" too, but I usually try to not enforce my bigotry to other people by being uselessly aggressive. This also is a key point for Free Software and we should more often think about it. (don't take the word "bigot" as first degree, please...) We (as a community) have been aggressive with Nexenta about this issue, just like we have been in the past with, say, Ubuntu. So, I wish that we'll sing along with Erast Benson at next Debconf just like some did at Debconf 5 with the Shuttleworth gang. I wish I would see more Debian contributors bringing this feeling in -devel, especially our "historical" contributors, just like Ian Murdock did. Don't be shy, people..:-)

# metadata <p> I woke, not for the first time today, and there were people all around. Dressed up and talking. And drinking. </p> <p> Ahh! I'd fallen asleep at a bar. <em>Again</em>. Fortunately that is enough off a clue for me to realise that I should go home. Getting home, is where this adventure starts. </p> <p> I started off at <a href="http://www.sydneypubguide.net/pubs/Cruise.aspx">Cruise Bar</a>, which has a great view of the Opera House [<a title="Sydney Opera House in the afternoon" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-in-afternoon.jpg">1</a>], [<a title="Sydney Opera House at dusk" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-at-dusk.jpg">2</a>], [<a title="Sydney Opera House at night" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-at-night.jpg">3</a>] and (somehow) staggered my way to the <a href="http://www.sydneypubguide.net/pubs/Ship_Inn.aspx">Ship Inn</a>. Unable to flag down a cab in this area &ndash; lots of people going home around 23:00 &ndash; I resolved to get myself to North Sydney, where lots of cabs are. </p> <p> For those of you unaware, Sydney Harbour Bridge now has security personnel stationed at all pedestrian entrances and across its length. At least six of them "patrol" the bridge. </p> <p> By "patrol", I mean of course you'll be queried as to why you wish to cross the bridge. <q>Mate [sic], you can't cross the bridge. You aren't allowed here</q>. <q>Mate, are you fucking deaf?</q>. (on radio, to pals)<q>Yeah the fucking wog is crossing, shall I intercept him and hold him?</q> </p> <p> Followed while crossing the bridge. In my case I had (at one stage 3 security personnel behind and adjacent to me and 3 policemen ahead of me). And abused (I was repeatedly cursed at, racially slurred against, by the people from IVS Security) during your walk over the bridge. It amazes me that they even had police waiting to talk to me. Fortunately I know that the best thing you can do when confronted by the police is not to say anything. </p> <p> In this case there is nothing they could do -- since crossing the Harbour Bridge, and not responding to the security guards who harass you is not (yet) a crime. Today, 2 Nov 2005, though the Parliament of Australia is rushing through laws which might mean that I can be "detained" and held incommunicendo indefinitely. </p> <p> These laws &ndash; part of the War on Freedom &ndash; would make the rest of this entry illegal. </p> <p> I've been thinking about terrorism and Australia. How would you get access to restricted locations, determine sensitive areas and generally get information not available to the ordinary public? Become a security guard. </p> <p> In Australia, things like <a href="http://smh.com.au/news/national/braindamaged-man-told-to-pay-up-after-bashing/2005/11/01/1130823210703.html" title="victim of security guards">this</a> are not uncommon. (c.f. David Hooks killed by a security guard; a female security guard shooting someone, etc.). Worse is that security guards often enjoy a fairly close relationship with the Police. Meaning that if you join up, you also get to know some of the procedures that might be applied to deter you. Bottom line: every security guard is a potential terrorist. </p> <p> Terrorists, like modern-day Politicians, seek to curtail the liberty of others for their own purposes. The best way to do this is by planting fear and doubt into the hearts and mind of the general populace. In America, this was done via the September 11 plane hi-jacking; in the UK, by exploding bombs on the mass-transit system there. </p> <p> How, or where, should Australia be targetted? Australians are renowned world-travellers (I believe the figure is that 10% of Australians are outside the country at any one time), so attacking transportation isn't the way to go. You need to go after the life-style. </p> <p> Large community events, like Melbourne Cup day, the various Grand Finals and, of course, Cricket would be the perfect targets. High visibility (the media are already at these venues!), high impact (you are talking 30,000+ people in these stadiums), for minimal cost (a stadium has few seating area &ndash; probably 6 to 8 attackers could bring down most stadiums). </p> <p> Another good location would be to pick your local Westfield shopping centre / mall. Lots of people, lots of fear instilled. Plus we'd be rid of the stupid things. </p>

Note: All of this is specific to Australian law. Similar principles may apply elsewhere, but I've got no idea where, if any, they might apply. Also, I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, and my writings here (and for that matter, everywhere else) are for entertainment purposes only. If swallowed, do not induce vomiting. In the middle of a cogitation this morning, my thoughts turned (as they occasionally do) to the much loathed EULA for Nobody's Favourite OS. As we all know, this EULA is pretty brutal in the things you agree to allow other people to do to your machine, and the rights you agree to give up. As I was, in general, thinking about issues of copyright law, the EULA got looked at through copyright-coloured glasses. And it was... weird. As we all (probably) know, copyright law is about limiting the actions that can be performed with a work of creation, and giving the author of the creative work the ability to be the sole arbiter of who can perform those actions. The Australian Copyright Council has a nice information sheet on Copyright and Computer Software if you'd like to get the full story. The set of actions which the Copyright holder has exclusive rights to is fairly well proscribed. The statement "All Rights Reserved" doesn't mean "every possible right is reserved", it means "those rights which I can control (by virtue of the legally-protected monopoly of copyright law) are reserved". As far as I can tell, there is no right which allows the copyright holder to control the use of the creative work. It's important to think about what "use" actually means. The Copyright Act and the above info sheet tend to apply the word "use" to include the act of making copies, as well as other dealings (protected or otherwise) in the copyright work, but that doesn't seem particularly useful for this discussion, because I can't think of another appropriate word to use to describe a non-copying action involving the work. So I'll stick with "use" for that, and go with "copying" for any duplication. Obviously, the type of work that we're looking at determines what "using" that work means. A book is read, or perhaps burnt for warmth. A picture is stared at. A computer program is run. I can't find anything in Copyright law that covers reading, burning, or staring, but section 47B of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) deals with the "normal use or study" -- basically, the act of using the thing. It says that users are allowed to copy the program into RAM to run it[1]. Goody. So far, it looks like there's no way the copyright holder can stop us from running our legally acquired copies. There are two flies in the ointment, though. The first is s47(2)(b) of the Act:

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply to the making of a reproduction of a computer program:
[...]
(b) contrary to an express direction or licence given by, or on behalf of, the owner of the copyright in the computer program to the owner or licensee of the copy from which the reproduction is made when the owner or licensee of that copy acquired it.

Aaaargh! Does this mean that the copyright holder can force a licence on us, against our will? I really don't know the answer to that. Hopefully, at the very least, the protections of contracts law[2] would apply to such licences. If licences can be treated as contracts, then they can be rejected. If the copyright holder can't restrict the running of a legally obtained copy of the program, then how can they compel the acceptance of a licence? One idea that comes to mind is the process of installation. That is neither an incidental nor an automatic copy, and hence doesn't fall under the allowances of s47. So, without the permission of the copyright holder, making an installation from CD to your hard drive would seem like an infringemnet. On the other hand, the installation program usually runs directly from (for example) the CD, and if it wants to make copies of other copyright material owned by the same person or company as part of it's ordinary operation, then who are we to stop it? But back to the idea of compelling acceptance. Looking at the XPToy Retail EULA for a moment, part of the agreement is that you agree to be bound by the terms by the action of installing, copying, or "otherwise using" the software. But if you don't agree to any of the EULA, I'm not sure how you can agree that you agree to be bound by the EULA by performing an action which the copyright holder cannot restrict you from doing. On the other hand, perhaps I've drunk too much of the GPL "You don't have to accept this licence, but nothing else gives you the right to copy this software" inplied-licence-acceptance kool-aid, and there is provision in law for licences to specify other positive means of signifying acceptance. I know that contracts can be accepted by written agreement between the parties, and with a suitable verbal exchange, so perhaps you can add "Installing, copying, or otherwise using" to that list. I wonder if "You agree to the acceptance of this agreement to give me your first-born child by blinking within 15 metres of me" would be valid? No, I didn't think so either. Does anyone know where the descriptions of permissible means of agreeing to a contract are defined in Australian law? To get back on track, let's assume for a moment that we can refuse the EULA. Can we still use the software? s47(2)(b) says we can't contravene licence terms, but if we can refuse the EULA then it doesn't look like there are any licence terms. So we're back to relying on s47(1), which says copying for running the program isn't a problem. If you can avoid accepting the EULA, and don't do anything otherwise naughty with the software, I can't see how anyone can have any complaint, in Copyright law, with your actions. Of course, the next trick is to avoid clicking-through the EULA "you accept" notice without falling foul of any other provisions, but if we've already knocked the paper-EULA on the head with contracts law or something, then I don't think that your click-through acceptance (coerced, as it were) is going to worth a hell of a lot more. I know the DMCA in the US did a lot to strengthen the power of click-wrap licences; perhaps those provisions got written into AusNSFTA. Of course, this whole thing is based around a lot of conjecture and a lack of real, detailed knowledge of the law. Perhaps there's even some bits of the Copyright Act I've missed. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the matter. Do we need a licence to use software we've legitimately purchased? I'm interested in your comments. E-mail me at mpalmer@hezmatt.org.

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1. I'm not quite sure why this is so majorly different to a person with an eidetic memory reading a book, but I guess it's better to cover the issue to stop lawyers getting richer. 2. There's all sorts of goodies in contracts law, from what I recall -- prohibitions against coercive contracts, and contracts presented as a fait accompli (AKA "take it or leave it") without any ability or intention to negotiate. Certainly sounds like a EULA to me...

My friend Kim, who's done the Brisbane → Melbourne → Brisbane thing (like I've done the Brisbane → Canberra → Brisbane → Canberra thing) is finding summer back in Brisbane a bit uncomfortable. When I moved back to Brisbane I did it around this time of year, and coming from Canberra's late spring (which actually behaves like a late spring) to Brisbane's eternal summer of a spring is a bit of a shock to the system. The humidity was the prime factor in me wanting to return to the blissful dry heat of Canberra's summer. Kim, I feel your pain, furthermore, I'll be in Brisbane this weekend to feel it in person.

Hmmm, dear LWN, Anthony Towns is not alone when claiming that the reaction of the Debian community towards Nexenta after they announced their work was probably overflated and certainly too much aggressive. I remember having done so already and I did it again later. I usually avoid debian-devel flamewars but here, this is not really a flamewar. This was a rude action against people who may have done mistakes, errors and certainly need to talk deeper with the Debian community. Even if the contributors in this thread do not think they have been rude, I'm pretty much sure they have been "perceived" as being rude by outsiders. I'm afraid that such behaviour is very likely to enforce a very commonly feeling among the free software community of Debian being a kindergarten of free software bigots completely disconnected from real life. We know we are not this so we should try to avoid people thinking we are. This is not why I work in this project. When it comes at Free Software, I'm a kind of "bigot" too, but I usually try to not enforce my bigotry to other people by being uselessly aggressive. This also is a key point for Free Software and we should more often think about it. (don't take the word "bigot" as first degree, please...) We (as a community) have been aggressive with Nexenta about this issue, just like we have been in the past with, say, Ubuntu. So, I wish that we'll sing along with Erast Benson at next Debconf just like some did at Debconf 5 with the Shuttleworth gang. I wish I would see more Debian contributors bringing this feeling in -devel, especially our "historical" contributors, just like Ian Murdock did. Don't be shy, people..:-)

I've reached the one-fifth mark in my quest to write a novel in a month. I'm five thoudand words behind of the linear pace, though.

From now on, I’ll be using dato(at)the-barrel.org as my main address, instead of asp16(at)alu.ua.es. (But this second one, provided by my Uni, will continue to work for some more years, and not unlikely forever.) I was not that dissatisfied with the MX host for alu.ua.es, but it has been getting on my nerves on occasion during the last five years, so I decided it was better for my health to make the change. Kudos to Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta (agi@d.o) for being my postmaster from now on, since I really didn’t feel like running my own mailserver. The story behind the-barrel.org is certainly not unrelated to this Google search.

A dramatic title for a not so dramatic post. The Sydney suburban train network runs several sorts of rolling stock. The newest of these are the much-maligned "Millenium Trains", which bring local train users (all 18 of them) into the 20th century. One of the features of these technological masterpieces is an irritatingly obsequious voice which announces the current and next stations on the train's journey, and an LED board displaying the same info. So far, so good. Of course, I was a little curious as to how the boards and little-miss-noisy were kept in-sync with where they were. I was thinking transponders, maybe something that the train guard did. Then, last week, I found my explanation. This train announced each station as being the preceding one. So, we'd stop at Central, l-m-n would announce "This train will stop at Museum". We stop at Green Square, l-m-n says "This train will stop at Central". And so on. At least the voice and the board were in sync, even if the voice and reality were eyeing each other off at quite some considerable distance... My goal now is to find a train which is announcing stations for the wrong line completely, rather than just one station behind on the current line -- but considering I only get these new-fandangled millenium trains a couple of times a week (they spend the rest of their time in the sheds being fixed, apparently) it may be a while.

I am excited this evening. I just found a CD that I burned back in 1996 or 1997 or so. On this CD is some data I thought I had lost. It has copies of information on some floppies that can't be read anymore. But it also has the PowerPoint presentation I did as an 8th grader that got me to National History Day in Washington, DC. Not only that, but also the original high-resolution scans of the photos I used in that presentation. Some of these scans are of photos that date back to the early 1900s, whose owners may not be easily reachable today. I had been hoping to find this for years. I knew it was buried somewhere. And YES -- stumbled across it tonight. I will be posting some photos on this blog in the coming days. But first, I have to find a way to convert this ancient PowerPoint file to a format that OpenOffice can read -- so I get the correct story behind each photo. The scans were saved back in the days when a person got 8 characters to name a file. Not very descriptive. (And I remember how much space it took up on the hard drive I had back then, and how much I wanted to just delete those big picture files. Glad I didn't.)

A colleague introduced me to Hamachi, a software that claims to be able to connect computers without a fixed internet connection to a VPN between them… The authors say their software is secure, because no communication passes through their server, that serves just as a way to establish the connection. Apart from the fact that in some cases I don’t see how it would be possible for it to work (eg, if both ends are behind a nat…) I also don’t think their protocol is as secure as they say! It seems that if the server wants to lie about the other endpoint public key and ip address it can, and so it is able to create VPN with a man in the middle with absolutely no effort… :( So their protocol is secure only if you put complete trust in their server… What do other people think? Am I right or wrong?

Today I upgraded daedalus to 2.6.14. I had to backport yaird to stable, which wasn't a big deal. It's available here if you're interested. The kernel package for 2.6.14 from unstable worked fine otherwise. I had two motivations behind upgrading - inotify and another look to see if the situation with IPMI had changed. Well inotify just works, and is the bomb. I'm going to have lots of fun with it. IPMI, on the other hand is still broken, which makes me sad. As I've previously pointed out by way of example, LAN access to the base-board management controller via IPMI is impossible after Linux shuts down the interface. It's supposed to work, but the way Linux does it seems to stop it from working. I'd read that the problem was resolved in 2.6.12, and so dutifully tested it out on daedalus to my detriment. I also tested it on 2.6.14, but again, had the same problem (I remembered to schedule a deferred reboot this time). So IPMI with a box running Linux is all good as long as the box is actually running. I suspect if the box panicked and/or hung itself, it'd also be useful for rebooting it, but if you shut the box down and remove power, IPMI won't allow you to turn it back on again.

This is by far the most stressful long period I can remember in my life. I was quite in control of things approximately until around June. Since then, things have been falling over me in a quick and heavy sucession - First of all, being co-organizer at Debconf was quite hard. I had run conferences before, but nothing ever like this - And, I should add, I never had a German boss running the show. [friend="Stockholm"], as a project leader, you really rule... But whoever works with you should be warned: It is not easy.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 2: It's easier to be the coordinator (remember I was officially the Tyrant for three years at CONSOL? :) ) than to be in the immediately subordinate team.
Back home, I expected the regular post-vacation rush, so having a hard August -trying to make everything on time- was expectable and OK. I don't remember exactly what projects was I in during August/September (I remember some minor stuff, but I think adding it all together was the mistake). There is one thing I did, though: Accepting way too many invitations as a speaker, at least one every two weeks. And, as many of you know, you cannot just travel somewhere and keep working - When I am at a conference, I want to get to talk with the people there, I want to know what are they interested in (why they invited me in the first place), and make friends with them. But this time it was (as it happens every year - Why are most conferences stuck together September-November?) just way too much.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 2: Be careful on what you accept. It's easy saying "yes" to a conference. It's hard keeping sanity afterwards.
Ok... I have been going places. For example, two weeks ago I was to San Luis Potos . Instead of staying there for two days, I left my office at 7PM, took the metro to the bus station, got the bus at 9PM, arrived at 2AM, went to my hotel, woke up at 7:30AM, had breakfast, coded for ~1hr, went to the conference theater, delivered my talk at 11AM, went for a quick lunch (which became a takeaway order) at 1:15PM, got on my bus at 2PM, arrived back in Mexico City at 7PM, got to a (fucking long) meeting at 8PM, left the meeting at 12AM, and finally got back home at 1AM. Fun, huh?
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 3: Yes, it's fun to travel. It is much more fun to travel when you actually get to know the place!
...And pressure has not given way. As soon as I finish with one project, there is another one demanding my attention right away. October has been more than hectic. I had to cancel two invitations (on which I was to go to two cities each time) I was quite looking forward to, in Peru - I am very sorry, friends at Lima, Moquegua, Tacna and Arequipa... But I won't make it there this year. I am specially frustrated by not being able to make it to Concladeb in Arequipa - I really want to see DebianPeru/DebianArequipa's good work! And I am specially sorry on canceling today my trip to Moquegua, after they had already booked (and paid) for the tickets... It seems the money will not be lost after all, but I was such a pain in the ass for them, it is not fair I am cancelling... But anyway.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 4: Remember to learn from past experiences - It feels incredibly as a deja-vu from last year.
I hope I am not spoiling any surprises: Today, instead of blogging, I am supposed to be setting up the Comas server for Debconf6. Even with all of my worries, yes, I am still determined to be the man behind the show for Debconf. It will be in Oaxtepec, don't worry, and it will be a huge success. So let me finish this post quick, and it will be sooner you can register for it ;-) There are still too many points to work on Comas, though. I am setting up a tweaked version, against my will, but with the commitment to fix it transparently and soon. Oh... Yes, and I still have to coordinate with the locals here, as it's taking forever for us to open the fscking bank account so we can start receiving funds and paying money. Did I mention Debconf would be in Mexico? Ok, I will do my best not to make lateness the norm.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 5: Try not to bore your audience with too many details. Remember you have to work, and somebody might complain you lose too much time blogging!
But before I leave you alone: You might ask why do I mention the addiction in my post title... Well, because I have started treating my main addiction. It is really not easy, and I don't ever want to know what is it like to have a chemical addiction, like people who abuse drugs. If you have seen me face to face, it should be obvious: I have a very strong addiction to food. For one month already, I have been as conscious as I can every time I open my mouth - And, yes, it was not just three times a day. I have made some advances (sorry, I cannot really measure it, as home scales make it only to 120kg). Today is a big day for me: I was admitted in a pilot obesity control follow-up treatment at my University's sports health direction. I am very happy about this, as I do need mentoring and hand-holding. This is a seriously difficult process to follow, and I really hope to carry it thoroughly. Fortunately, my health has been perfect until now - But I cannot abuse myself forever.

... and I must say: It was again worth the effort. Pretty good organized (especially when compared to the Berlinux) and a good mixture of fun, knowledge and nice people. Again we had a nice booth, with a good computer sponsored by AMD (I think...). Of course we needed to improvise a bit as usual: Since we had no white poster wall, but only a brown wooden one, we used our beamer with the big wall quite far behind our booth. Worked good, but some kind of colourless, since the wall wasn't white but some kind of greenish gray. And since we had no poster for the wooden poster wall (the mail service seem to have lost them again!) we used my sweat shirt with the big swirl on the back, to "mark our territory". Although we had some problems with the network (luckily we had several Debian mirrors on our notebooks...) we managed to solve some quite tricky problems and answer some interesting questions. One visitor even asked us, if he could bring his computer, because he had a quite interesting problem with some error messages while booting. After I while we found out, what was wrong: He installed the wrong kernel, had DMA-problems with his DVD-drive, and never ever installed any security update (beside a fourth small problem, we can't remember, but we solved it). He used synaptic and just clicked on the "update package list" button (how it is called in the English locale?)... uh... I can't remember what he did exactly... he did the synaptic equivalent of just running aptitude update without running aptitude upgrade after that. Carsten, who is more familiar with synaptic, explained him how to use synaptic, and I put "take a look at synaptic (especially if translations are misleading)" on my todo-list. We had two copies of the Debian Anwenderhandbuch by Frank Ronneburg left from last weeks Berlinux, and alphascorpii came up with an idea to find new owners for them... I won't say more; I'm sure she will tell you more about that soon. After we had finished our talks, and teared down the booth, we joined the social event. The organizers made a nice BBQ in front of the lecture hall and showed some funny movies of the "local hero" of their university: A mathematician with PhD who left the university to became a cabaret artist but is still doing some nice lectures for special events. If you read this blog entry during a boring lecture imagine that: There exists at least one lecturer, where you need to book tickets in advance, or you won't even get into his lecture! Today, on Sunday, they organized again a small round trip to the beautifully city of Dresden. Since the Frauenkirchen was consecrated on that day, it was kept short, the city was just to crowded. Instead we visited the Hygiene Museum, where they had an exhibition about games (don't ask me, why there). They did not only showed some really old games in a glass cubicle, but even much stuff where you could try and play a lot of different games. Quite funny. Last part: We went to a good Italian restaurant, and spend a nice evening chatting and telling stories. Although we are using different distributions, desktop environments and editors: After all we are a big family, scattered to the four winds, enjoying the time, we are together! But all good things have to come to an end, so alphascorpii and I left the party (friendly escorted by a local who showed us the way around Dresden's construction sites) to get to our train back to Leipzig and Frankfurt. Last highlight of the day: We had a conductor, who knew Debian, and where we came from! When we showed us quite impressed, he said: "Not all of us conductors are that stupid." (How ironic: Although using his pocket communicator to take a look at the schedule, he told us a wrong information about it.) Nice. These are the moments, where you feel, that you are doing something useful. For such moments (I had a visitor who has been at our booth last year, and whom I helped to solve a problem. He just came by to thank us.) I travel 400 Kilometers through europe. Very last thing to mention: A personal note. You know, that you really love your girlfriend, when she get's much more attendees (factor 5-6) for her talk than you, and you don't mind but are just happy for her ;)

Dear Lazyweb, Ever since I reinstalled my PowerBook a few months ago, after I'd put back on all my software (including the lovely SSHKeyChain), I couldn't get the same SSH agent behaviour I used to have. Specifically, the first time I'd SSH somewhere after logging in (or after awakening the laptop), I'd be prompted (in a nice GUI kind of way) for my SSH passphrase, after which the private key was loaded into my SSH agent, and life was good from then on. That is no longer the case. I get prompted for my SSH passphrase in the terminal window and on a use by use basis, i.e. the key isn't being loaded into my agent after the first time I get asked for my passphrase. I think the root of the problem is that my ssh-agent is being started with the -c option (generate C shell commands) when I'm actually using Bash. So, the crux of my question is where the hell does ssh-agent get started from, and how can I change how it is started? Love and sloppy kisses, Andrew

Google is expanding it's empire. In fact it's becoming a threat with this big of an influence on public opinion just by being able to effectively "censor" information if they would want to. We need more diversity, IMHO. With the latest rumors - Google Base - it seems that Google will be attacking new markets soon. Google Base could be a big threat to Craigslist and EBay, actually... (from what I've seen of Google Base, I find the phrase "Google wants to host your Databases" overstretches it a bit though...) So what is Google up to? When is Google starting to sell books? Google Talk isn't really big. It seems to be a nice product, but very few people are using it. I've never seen Google advertise it, so it's no wonder most people stick to their established IM/Voice services. But what's the point of it, when they don't adequately promote it? And whats behind that VPN service on their planned WiFi network in SF? Is it about beta testing, maybe? Google obviously wants to run company intranets. Company intranet search engines are a well-known product, and they for sure would like to expand that offer - offer email service, IM/voice, ... From what I've read about their WiFi service, they would be allowed to run e.g. deep packet inspection stuff on it. Combined with Google indexing tech they could test e.g. filtering out pr0n sites. Or test a virus filter. And then offer that product to companies. So is a google firewall coming? More obvious missing products in Googles portfolio are a document management and a customer relations management solution. Or a combination of both. Google base might actually be part of an upcoming document management product by Google, I guess. And, I mean, wouldn't it be obvious for Google to offer a document management (and storage) solution to companies? As for CRM - a google CRM solution combined with their document management and indexing applications would beat any other product: add a user to the CRM and have the related files appear automatically due to google indexing, have the email correspondence added from the company gmail accounts...

Tonight was my last CLUG meeting for a while, and it was a pretty good one. We didn't have a whole lot of structure to the meeting. Bob gave a couple of short talks. I gave a short talk off the cuff about the wonders of LVM. Hugh showed off some virtual reality goggle things. Alex tried to have a bit of a hackfest on Coda, but I think there was a general lack of Coda fu, so that didn't get very far unfortunately. Steve Walsh has kindly offered to take over as the person behind the shell script that schedules the meetings, and I've moved it from caesar (in the cupboard at home on the end of an ADSL connection) to daedalus in Brisbane, so it will continue to be accessible while I'm relocating. I'm looking forward to checking out SVLUG and BALUG (which seems to have fallen off the Internet (from home) at time of writing, looks like someone needs to read the IETF's BCP #16).