When I was back in Canada last we got a nice rain storm while driving to see Kevin, his wife and little son Tank. Tonight in Belo Horizonte our football game was cancelled because of rain. The rain really was something, the thunder was fantastics, a few of the strikes were big enough to make me drunk.

Oh, other good thing, I have internet in the Hotel now.

In a comment on my previous post about SE Linux and worms/trojans [1] a user enquired about which methods of gaining local root are prevented by SE Linux. A local exploit is one that can not be run remotely. An attack via TCP or UDP is generally considered a remote exploit - even though in some cases you might configure a daemon to only bind to localhost (in which case the TCP or UDP attack would only work locally). When compromising a machine it’s not uncommon for a local exploit to be used after a remote exploit or social engineering has been used to gain non-root privileges. The two most common types of local root exploit seem to be those which attack the kernel and those which attack a SETUID process. For a non-SE Linux system it usually doesn’t matter much how the local exploit is run. But a SE Linux system in a default configuration will be running the Targeted policy that has almost no restrictions on a user shell session. So an attacker who wants to escalate their privileges from local user to local root on a typical SE Linux system has a significant benefit in starting from a user account instead of starting from a web server or other system process. In the SE Linux model access is granted to a domain, and the domain which is used for a process is determined by the policy based on the domain of the parent process and the labelling of the executable. Some domains are not permitted to transition to any other domains, such as the domain dhcpd_t (used for a DHCP server). Other domains are only permitted to transition to a small set of domains, for example the domain httpd_t (used for a web server) can only transition to a small number of domains none of which has any significant privileges. On a machine running without SE Linux a compromise of a DHCP server is game-over as the server runs as root. A compromise of a daemon such as Apache on a machine without SE Linux gives unrestricted access to run applications on the systems - if a SETUID-root program has a security flaw then you lose. The same bug in a SETUID program on a machine running SE Linux is not fatal because SE Linux will prevent the program from doing anything that it’s parent could not do - even if an attacker made Apache run a buggy SETUID program the broken program in question could do nothing other than what Apache is normally permitted to do. A security flaw in a SETUID-root program on a SE Linux system can still be exploited by a local user (someone who has logged in) when running the Targeted policy. When running the Strict or MLS policies many such vulnerabilities will not be exploitable by local users (for example exploiting PING would only permit network access). As a rule of thumb you should consider that a kernel security flaw will make it possible to bypass all other security features. However there are some situations where SE Linux can prevent local exploits. One example is a bug discovered in July 2006 which allowed the creation of SETUID files under /proc [2], the targeted policy of SE Linux prevented this from working. Another example is CVE-2003-0127 [3] (a kernel security flaw that was exploited by triggering a module load and then exploiting a race condition in the kernel module load process), the commonly used exploit for this did not work on a SE Linux system because the user process was not permitted the socket access used to trigger the module load (it is believed that an attacker could have written a version of the exploit to work on a SE Linux system - but AFAIK no-one ever did so).

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/10/08/selinux-storm/


• [2] http://lwn.net/Articles/191954/


• [3] http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2003-0127

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Disclaimer: I am 100% newbie on SELinux, so any inaccuracies, mistakes or fallacies are almost sure due to this fact.

After reading Russell's latest post on SELinux, and reading the 5 minutes tutorial on SELinux I decided I should try SELinux on my laptop, too.

Now I have it enabled/enforcing/permissive/refpolicy-targeted.

First issue, hal didn't start in my GNOME session, although the hal module appears to be loaded:

bounty:/emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/dri# semodule -l grep hal
hal 1.4.0


It seemed that gdomap indirectly required execstack. I cleared the execstack bit (or whatever it is) on libcallback.so.0.0.0 and libavcall.so.0.0.0 and gdomap started.

OTOH, oolite failed to start since it required execmem:

0 eddy@bounty ~ $ oolite
trampoline: cannot make memory executable
Aborted

And after allowing execmem it worked:
# setsebool allow_execmem=1

0 eddy@bounty ~ $ oolite
2007-10-09 01:42:04.686 oolite[26717] initialising SDL
open /dev/sequencer: No such file or directory
2007-10-09 01:42:04.789 oolite[26717] init: numSticks=0
2007-10-09 01:42:04.789 oolite[26717] CREATING MODE LIST
2007-10-09 01:42:04.789 oolite[26717] Added res 1024 x 768
...

I also seem to have some other denied messages, but I hope I'll understand this soon enough to make it work.

I would like to know if is possible to allow execmem only for oolite, and since I suspect it is, how can I accomplish this?

So, now my question is, where is the fine manual on setting SELinux? I digged the whole evening to get oolite to start.

Bruce Schneier has just written about the Storm Worm [1] which has apparently been quietly 0wning some Windows machines for most of this year (see the Wikipedia page for more information [2]). I have just been asked whether SE Linux would stop such a worm from the Linux environment. SE Linux does prevent many possible methods of getting local root. If a user who does not have the root password (or is not going to enter it from a user session) has their account taken over by a hostile party then the attacker is not going to get local root (unless there is a kernel vulnerability). Without local root access the activities of the attacker can be seen by a user logged in on another account - processes will be seen by all user sessions if using the SE Linux targeted policy and files and processes can be seen by the sys-admin. If while a user account is 0wned the user runs “su -” (or an equivalent command) then in theory at least the attacker can sniff this and gain local root access (whether enough users do this to make attackers feel that it’s worth their effort to write the code in question is something I couldn’t even guess about). If the user is clueless then the attacker could immediately display a dialog with some message that sound urgent and demand the root password - some users would give it. If the user is even moderately smart the attacker could fake the GUI dialogues for installing updated packages (which have been in Red Hat distributions for ages and have appeared in Debian more recently) and tell the user that they need to enter the root password to install an important security update (oh the irony). In conclusion I think that if a user is ill-educated enough to want to run a program that was sent to them in email by a random person then I expect that the program would have a good chance of coercing them into giving it local root access if the user in question had the capability of doing so. Even if a Linux trojan did not have local root access then it could still do a lot of damage. Any server operations that don’t require ports 1024 (which means most things other than running a web, DNS, or mail server) can still be performed and client access will always work (including sending email). The trojan would have access to all of the user's data (which for a corporate desktop machine usually means a huge network share of secret documents). If a trojan only attempts to perform actions that SE Linux permits (running programs from the user's home directory, accessing servers for DNS, HTTP, IRC, SMTP, and other protocols - a reasonable set of options for a trojan) then the default configuration of SE Linux (targeted policy) won't stop it or even log anything. This is not a problem with SE Linux, just a direct result of the fact that in every situation a trojan can perform all operations that the user can perform - and if the trojan only wants to receive commands via web and IRC servers and send spam via the user's regular mail server then it will be a small sub-set of the permitted operations for the user! If however the trojan tries more aggressive methods then SE Linux will log some AVC messages about access being denied. If the sys-admin has good procedures for analysing log files they will notice such things, understand what they mean, and be able to contain the damage. Also there have been at least two cases where SE Linux prevented local root exploits. Finally, in answer to the original question: SE Linux will stop some of the more aggressive methods that trojans might use. But there are still plenty of things that a trojan could do to cause harm which won't be stopped or audited by SE Linux policy. When Linux gets more market share among users with a small amount of skill and no competent person to do sys-admin work for them we will see some Linux trojans and more Linux worms. It will be interesting to see what methods the trojan authors decide to use.

• [1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/10/the_storm_worm.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Worm

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The name Stormbaan Coureur means “Assault Course Driver” in Dutch. It was previously called Sturmbahnfahrer as a joke, playing with the words in german, but some people considered that name offensive, and the author, Bram Stolk, kindly decided to change it. Put a car into a course full of obstacles, and give the whole world a physically realist behaviour, and you have the basic design of this game. the game also has support for quad buffer stereo and passive stereo setups. The game has only one track for practice and another one for competition right now, but once more tracks are developed, I’m pretty sure many people will stick to it. The package for the game has entered Debian repositories today, so it’ll soon be in the mirrors, available for everyone. You can see the game in action in this MPEG movie. Impressive, isn’t it?

The gloom from my last entry has more or less lifted. To refresh, my desktop died shortly after a lightning storm; no definite cause and effect relationship, but a strong correlation. I shut it down, and after the next reboot I got scary errors all over the place, starting with this disclaimer:

HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor

Now, that may be true, or it may not be. Certainly the disclaimer is sensible, since machine checks are usually caused by failing components. And it persisted for most of a day every time I tried to boot the machine, but there was quickly a new addition: different scary errors on ata1. And it got rapidly worse. On Friday morning, having let the machine cool and relax overnight, I brought it up on a rescue CD and could get at /boot (a separate partition), but not at /etc (from inside my RAID/LVM setup). I went out and bought a new SATA drive and attempted to recover /boot onto it, but I had waited too long; at this point I could still get at the partition table, but not the contents of /boot. Some things to note here.

• As far as I know, you still need a separate /boot if your root uses RAID + LVM.
• Therefore your /boot is obviously not backed up by your carefully constructed RAID.
• But that’s fine because all that really mattered was your kernels, and you have them still lying around on your mirrored disk. Right?
• Of course, right. But dynamically generated initrds, while technically awesome, are awkward to recreate from a rescue CD. Especially a 32-bit rescue CD when your root filesystem is all 64-bit.
• It can’t be hard to find a rescue CD with a 64-bit kernel, right? No, not right either. I did eventually find a 50MB Gentoo install CD that worked serviceably well.
• Your laptop has a convenient CD burner, right? No, not right, turns out it doesn’t write CDs after all. Oh well, Windows file sharing plus the wireless plus the Mac Mini in the other room… there you go.
• You didn’t need anything else from /boot, right? Like your carefully constructed voodoo incantation to boot Windows… whoops… hopefully you remember how that worked…

So, after some futzing around I was able to boot the Gentoo rescue CD, partition the new hard drive, mount the remaining disk in degraded mode, reinstall the handy Debian packages of my kernels, have it magically recreate ramdisks, and then reinstall grub. By the way, --no-floppy obviously means something different to grub than it does to me, as most of the reinstalling grub process was still spent waiting for my non-existant fd0 to time out. Then I added the new disk to the array, let it reconstruct for two hours, and rebooted. Lo and behold… no more machine checks! I am a happy camper. Despite the tribulations above I came out remarkably well, since I seem to have lost nothing but my grub menu.lst file. And now I have rdiff-backup configured to back up /boot onto the array in case I ever need to do this again.

My desktop seems to have melted something precious in this morning’s lightning storm, despite the recent and rather hefty UPS sitting behind it. I am, to say the least, annoyed. It was a nice self-built Shuttle system from 2005, but now all it is is a machine check generator:

HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor
CPU 0 4 northbridge TSC 6eb92ec370b
  Northbridge Watchdog error
       bit57 = processor context corrupt
       bit61 = error uncorrected
  bus error 'generic participation, request timed out
      generic error mem transaction
      generic access, level generic'
STATUS b200000000070f0f MCGSTATUS 4

It’s not even bad RAM or a bad RAM socket, the way most memory errors seem to be; I had two DIMMs in two sockets so I was able to try for both possibilities. Unless it fried both somehow, of course. It seems to boot a little further when left cold for a while, and not as far just after crashing. I am inclined to suspect the motherboard. I think I’m going to have to write it off as a loss. Which means I need a replacement. I can get by with just my laptop for a little while, but not indefinitely. Are there any good options for pre-built Linux systems yet? I was somewhat underwhelmed by Dell’s. I usually build from parts, so looking at pre-built systems always has a certain amount of sticker shock. My main concerns are CPU / memory performance (a lot of compiling here), room for at least three hard drives, and reasonably quiet. Otherwise it’s off to newegg again…

My desktop seems to have melted something precious in this morning’s lightning storm, despite the recent and rather hefty UPS sitting behind it. I am, to say the least, annoyed. It was a nice self-built Shuttle system from 2005, but now all it is is a machine check generator:

HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor
CPU 0 4 northbridge TSC 6eb92ec370b
  Northbridge Watchdog error
       bit57 = processor context corrupt
       bit61 = error uncorrected
  bus error 'generic participation, request timed out
      generic error mem transaction
      generic access, level generic'
STATUS b200000000070f0f MCGSTATUS 4

It’s not even bad RAM or a bad RAM socket, the way most memory errors seem to be; I had two DIMMs in two sockets so I was able to try for both possibilities. Unless it fried both somehow, of course. It seems to boot a little further when left cold for a while, and not as far just after crashing. I am inclined to suspect the motherboard. I think I’m going to have to write it off as a loss. Which means I need a replacement. I can get by with just my laptop for a little while, but not indefinitely. Are there any good options for pre-built Linux systems yet? I was somewhat underwhelmed by Dell’s. I usually build from parts, so looking at pre-built systems always has a certain amount of sticker shock. My main concerns are CPU / memory performance (a lot of compiling here), room for at least three hard drives, and reasonably quiet. Otherwise it’s off to newegg again… Or I could always buy an equivalent computer to my current one, for a fraction of the original price, at a local consumer electronics megastore! How’s that for a different idea.

So the journey of David Noble and I began. (Actually a few days ago I just couldn’t be arsed to write anything before now).
After driving to Cambridge and staying in Norwich for a whole dreadful week, we went back to Cambrige for a couple of nights, where I ended up playing Zelda on the wii for a good 11 hours. On our way to the airport, at 4am, the bus was late due to someone leaving a bag at the busstop, so they ofcourse took this as a bombthreat and closed down the entire road leaving the bus 45 minutes late.
We then arrived at Stansted, which was surprisingly non-hell-like this time as opposed to last time where I was treated as a terrorist for bringing vaseline.
An interesting planeride with paper IRC in the google notebook (Which will never be spoken of again) later, we arrived Stockholm, or, atleast what Ryanair calls Stockholm. It was two hours away from the actual Stockholm so we had to take the bus. I saw the sun for the first time in three weeks and it was the happiest day of my life, until the event that followed..
Our boat tickets for Turku were the only things we hadn’t printed out, so we ofcourse went to the wrong side of the shore in the city. They said they couldn’t find us in the system and assumed it was because our boat wasn’t arriving for another six hours. We locked our bags in the lockers and ran off into the city and had wonderful wonderful sushi and sun.
A few hours later when we returned, about an hour before our boat was to leave, they still could not find us in the system. Upon where we thought ’shit’.
Struggling to get online, we found out our actual boat terminal was on the other side of the city.
We rushed down, and actually DID make it to the boat in time. The boats had sauna ohmygod.
However, Dave had booked us a nightboat with no room or beds, so we had to spend the night on a cold floor. After not sleeping for two days already that is not very pleasent.
We eventually arrived Turku, took the train to Helsinki, and went to Teemus place and passed out on the grass in the sun. This ended in sunburns for my sunintolerant useless norwegian-english skin. Totally worth it though.
The day after we left for the festival Konemetsa with Hanna/Tulitar. The weather was nice uptil the middle of it where a huge rainstorm covered the area. It was literally bucketing down with rain, which resulted in a wild crowd, tons of mud, and us jumping and dancing around in it being very much into the music (I’ve never been so happy to have a shower my entire life once we got home). I can’t believe none of us are sick after that actually, one would think it would result in a heavy cold doing this for three days.
Tomorrow we will head for Copenhagen by plane, followed by train to Amsterdam. New adventures await us!

Someone in the #mediawiki channel the other day asked, "Would it be possible to have easy-to-parse error messages?" and I thought, "Wow, that sounds like a microformat in the making." Probably one of the most common HTML patterns in Web applications is error messages. We see them all the time on the Web: login errors, form validation errors, backend errors and user input errors. But what if this common pattern was standardized? If HTML error messages all followed a similar format, we could have browser plugins that recorded and analyzed the errors that come up. They could either feed back this structured error data when we needed it -- say, when filing a bug report -- or use the error data to help us find workarounds or documentation online. I brought the idea up in the #microformats channel on Freenode, and it got a good response, so I took the next step and created a list of error message examples and some error message brainstorming on the microformats wiki. Hopefully this can be the start of some interesting feedback loops in software errors. tags: errormessages microformats

Partly because of a lack of funding for debconf, partly because of bad organisation (long story, may be told later) and partly to get back to work (got a new contract on Thursday, so it was worth it), I left debconf on Wednesday, the day of the day trip. Those of you who were there may have noticed it rained pretty damn hard. After I checked out, I sat in the lobby and lined all my luggage with plastic, to make really sure it was waterproof. I left a few things which didn't matter, like bottles, in the side pockets, outside the plastic. I headed out with the intention of visiting Teviot one last time, to pick up things from the Front Desk which arrived after I did, but as I waded uphill, I changed my plan and headed straight for Waverley station. There I sat, snacking and drip-drying until my train left. I watched the day trippers leave, but I don't think they looked up to the bridge where I sat. There was a very strange sign fragment on the ground on the far side of the train tracks at Waverley platform 7: it said

"How many assassins does it take to kill one man?"

How debconf-coincidence is that? I tried to get a picture, but my camera wasn't happy about the light levels. Anyone else see it? Is it still there? I met some very nice people on the train to Manchester. Sat at the same table as me were a young web designer and someone who was stationed in London (during World War 2, IIRC). Both had interesting stories and both had connections to France. A fourth person got on in Lancashire and just sat quietly, reading the University of Lancaster Travel Plan 2004. Manchester city centre was fascinating. I travelled through it quite a few times more than 10 years ago, but it has poshed up since then. Most buildings seem relentlessly gothic, like someone took London St Pancras as the inspiration for an entire city, but there's the occasional classical and modernist building punctuating things. I'll put the photos up soon. After a quick walk around, I felt it was about to rain again and I didn't fancy a second soaking in one day, so I headed into a pretty good cafe called "Java" by Oxford Road station and waited for my train. The rest of the journey back was pretty uneventful, as far as I can recall. Unfortunately, once I got home, I discovered that some of my hardware was outside the plastic lining and was soaked by the first rainstorm... these posts have been delayed while I got some of it working again, but it seems that the infernal Samsung YP-U2 audio player is totally dead.

According to the current issue (#93) of Linux Format, Ubuntu 7.04 (“Feisty Fawn”) is “…a dull release for Ubuntu, leaving Fedora to storm ahead…” (p. 23) whilst “shaping up to be one of the most innovative Linux distro releases of the year.” (p. 38) Especially amusing for myself is that, with Upstart, they “seldom notice any difference in boot speed” (p. 42), yet “Ubuntu 7.04 boots up in record time, leaving other Linux distros in the dust.” (p. 22) (As anyone who’s ever read anything about Upstart will know, Ubuntu still uses the SysV-rc scripts so there should be no difference in speed at this point. Funnily enough, they identified the reason Ubuntu boots fast in the same issue; “Changing the /bin/sh symlink to point to Dash instead of Bash can significantly shorten boot times” (p. 33) – unfortunately they simultaneously claim that Dash is only “almost POSIX compliant”, without explaining why they think it isn’t.) In this modern world, the lack of any editorial direction or basic research into what’s being printed is quite refreshing.

Debcamp is productive Shame on me for having underestimated the productiveness of DebCamp/DebConf. This year I'm overwhelmed by things to do and the first (for me) 2 days of DebCamp have really been productive. Yesterday the Zenoss packaging has taken off. We have already implemented (thanks to Fabio) the needed changes in dzhandle to properly handle ZEO databases, added user management for the zenoss system user, updated the documentation and we started working on the dbconfig-common stuff (we also have just noticed that Seanius, dbconfig-common author, is arriving tomorrow at DebConf, what a great occasion!). Today I've worked more on the OCaml packaging side. A first working version of OCaml 3.10.0 is now available in experimental .. ehm, oops, I meant in the NEW queue; CamlP4 available in there has been finally properly split into (huge) pieces and people can start rebuilding OCaml packages against it. Next day, actually hour, exciting adventures for me include:

• Vim packaging stuff (Jamessan has just arrived in EDI as well, and we plan to both kickstart the Debian Vim policy and to do some vim-specific BSP)
• OCaml automatic dependency handling stuff. In a few minutes me, Gildor, and Jcristau will brainstorming about that ... somewhere in this castle.

Wow, I'm overwhelmed, but it's actually soooo fun!

Went to Toronto last weekend for a wedding. Couldn't have been nicer -- on Toronto Island with its nice view of the city. The ceremony got slightly rescheduled because of the massive storm coming through last Friday afternoon which forced everything inside. Only drawback was that the party ended too soon due to ferry schedule. Caught up with some friends in town and glanced and a few of those fancy new digs that have come up since we left in 2000: the Opera house, lots of construction at the AGO and the neat building next door, the intriguing chrystal at the ROM. Always nice to come back, especially with the very nicest weather as it was last weekend.

I just got back from taking Zach Copley to the airport, and for the first time in a few days I'm sitting in front of my desktop computer again, trying to get back on track. I think it's probably a good idea to get my notes about RoCoCoCamp down on electronic paper while the experience is still fresh in my mind. (I wrote about the first day in Journal/29 Flor al CCXV). Saturday morning I got up considerably later than I had the day before, and I took my time getting to SAT. Which was OK, since things went much smoother in the morning. The only really annoying thing about Saturday was that I had to wash about 50 cups by hand -- we'd run out of clean cups, and I couldn't figure out how to run the dishwasher. It didn't take long, but it meant that I had my head down in the sink as people came in and didn't get to spend as much time talking to them. I was glad to hear that people had a good time going to L'Utopik on Friday night. Apparently a few people who'd flown in late on Friday got a chance to meet up with the experienced crew at L'Utopik, so they were well-prepped for Saturday. Probably the biggest buzz of the pre-sessions was SJ Klein's pair of functional OLPC laptops. They were cute and fun -- I got a few minutes to play with them, and I enjoyed the interface tremendously -- although it took me a few tries to open it. People were fiddling with them throughout the day -- including Amita June, who came late in the afternoon -- and Tristan P loquin even blogged about them. My first session was about wiki and other technologies, which I titled Wiki And.... (I borrowed the name from Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which it seems no-one eats anything but "coffee and".) My main point was that a) wiki people tend to overuse wiki where other software tools may be more appropriate and b) we need to be careful with impedance mismatches when using wiki with technologies with other cultures behind them. Wikis and blogs mismatch; wikis and forums mismatch. You need to work out ways to make them work culturally. As a proof-of-concept that there are ridiculous applications for wiki, I created in about 3 minutes before the session the wikiclock. It's a computer clock that runs on wiki technology: the time is kept up-to-date by human beings editing the page, rather than with software. I was so pleased with myself that I twittered about it, and from there it's taken on a life of its own. The clock is implemented on the amazing minimalist system pageoftext.com. I heard about p.o.t. from Liz Henry's April report from Palo Alto Wiki Wednesday, and I think it's totally great. It's a cross between a pastebin and a wiki -- like an open-edited ImageShack for text. Brilliant. The second session I did was a hyper-focused one on a particular Semantic Web problem. Both Wikitravel and Open Guides have tons of information on "places" in various cities. (That is, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, hotels, museums, parks, etc.). It would be good to export our data on these places to each other, so we could possibly keep them in sync. For example, if a restaurant changes its hours , that info could be updated on The Open Guide to London and automatically synched to the Wikitravel page on London. So we went over some ways to do this kind of interchange; we'd brainstormed before about it on the Open Guides' RDF Workshop, but it was good to sit down with Earle Martin and do some face-to-face hacking on the idea. We don't yet have a vocabulary for it, but we'll get something going on the new wikirdf.org site (which also emerged from this session). I had a great lunch with a lot of people from RoCoCo on the terrace at the Bar St. Sulpice, about 8 blocks away on rue St. Denis. The sun was out, it was cool, and we had a very nice time. It was especially nice to see Marcus Bornfreund and Tina Pipers of Creative Commons Canada, who'd come to talk about the PDwiki, a project to collaboratively document Canadian works in the public domain (see Canadian Public Domain Registry Announced). We talked quite a bit about the social challenges of getting a community excited about such a dry subject, but I think we got some good ideas about it. In the afternoon I led a session on MediaWiki. We were lucky enough to have Tim Starling sit in, and he told everyone about the new developments going on with MW. He's refactoring some very deep parts of the storage and rendering sections of the code, which will result in considerably better reliability, performance, and flexibility. I think it sounds great. I had to work the registration desk for the last session of the day, which was pretty great because I ended up baby-sitting Anoushka Jaroski-Biava for most of the time. But I missed Robin Millette's cool talk about BuzzyBee, which looks to be really fun to play with. We rounded out the evening with music, pizza, and beer at the SAT. tobias.dj played some great dance music, and we had some wiki-collaborative VJ-ing using the SAT's fancy screen systems. All the kids were there -- Mark and Allegra's daughter No ma as well as Amita June. Fun. Sunday morning I didn't have to start coffee until 9AM -- luxury! We had a great Open Space Technology convergence -- a way to turn the discussions of the previous few days into action items for going forward. I did a convergence session on the future of RecentChangesCamp. We had most of the interested parties available (except for the RCC Portland organizers, who had to fly out early that morning). We made some decisions about future RCCs, and we made some plans for next year's RCC -- in the Bay Area (California). Last night we brought back the Keiki gang to our house, since it was great to have them all in Montreal for the event. We did a big brainstorming session on next steps to launching the project, and we also did some graphic design review of potential logos. We have some great designs coming; I'm really happy we got Sarven Capadisli and Bridget to work on the site. I had to crash out at 10:30PM -- Amita and I fell asleep together -- but others were up late talking and thinking. I don't know how they did it -- I was all talked out by the end of RoCoCo. All in all I had a fantastic time -- the event far surpassed my expectations. It was hard -- too hard. I bit off far more than I could chew. But I think we did a good job of establishing Montreal as a technology city -- Wiki City Canada -- in the international mind, and I think we also brought together some really interesting people for some fruitful and productive work. You can see some of the projects that came directly out of RoCoCo on the FutureChanges page -- an ingenious name courtesy of Pm. And there are some indirect ones that we can expect soon. tags: rocococamp recentchangescamp wiki open space montreal barcampmontreal keiki wikiclock pageoftext

Cause and solution So, Technorati has a good listing for rocococamp items, but I especially liked Steve Faguy's post: Wiki: The cause of, and solution to, all of life s problems. Steve was an extremely game participant in the event, which I think was pretty incredible. He wrote a good overview of wikis in the Montreal Gazette this year. A funny thing happened on Friday evening during the daily wrap-up known as "Evening News". We had Open Space's minimalist instructions posted on the walls of the SAT, so people would see and remember them. Steve pointed out that the first of Open Space's "four principles" is grammatically incorrect: Whoever comes is the right people. He said, "In the spirit of wiki, I'm going to correct it right now!" And to applause, he got up with a marker and changed the "is" to "are". This stimulated an interesting discussion. One person noted that the "is" is there because possibly only one person could show up for a session, and that's OK. Finally, Brandon CS Sanders stood up and said, "I like 'is' because when we come together like this, we form a cohesive group, however temporary -- 'a people'. So I'm going to change it back." And he did -- to lots of applause, again. Steve came up to me at the end of the night, laughing. "I got reverted! I should have started an edit war!" It was a hoot; he's got a good sense of humour. tags: stevefaguy rocococamp wiki openspace brandoncssanders

Did you know that it's the last day of Compost Awareness Week today (Saturday 12 May)? No, nor did I. I was pretty aware of the compost bin when it flew across the lawn before I bricked it down. Maybe that's not what they meant. Getting a compost bin has reduced our rubbish to less than a bag a week, but we've yet to get any compost yet, after six months of winter. So last week, I tried a coco peat brick that you reconstitute in water. Easy to transport, but it seems to need mixing with regular compost to give a decent growing soil. Are you aware of your compost? Go on, give it a hug. Update: Alex Hudson wrote:

"Actually, I was aware of compost awareness week! We have a nice local website which many local groups use, including EcoLocal - they were doing build-your-own compost bin today, and handing out soil conditioner. I actually built our composter out of fence panels which blew down in winds a while ago, and I like the idea of using wooden/constructed bins than plastic (though I suspect plastic is much more efficient)."

I moved recently. I seem to have some random tiles and bricks, but I left all the wood behind in King's Lynn. The fence panel that was lying around when we saw the house was cleared away before we moved in. I'm not sure that I'm good enough at woodwork to build-my-own anyway. I don't know if plastic is better - I guess it insulates better, but they still tell you to wrap it up in winter, which is nuts: any wrapping would blow away in a storm.

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A couple of days ago, I posted a radar image.

The above photo is the result of that (and a following) storm.

It's the muddy road at the end of our driveway. Your guess as to which road is the driveway.
Here's another road near us:



Cliff also has some photos from this same storm system.

Many of you probably know what this means. That was what I saw early this morning when the weather woke me up. I went downstairs and checked the weather on the Internet. And sure enough, a line of thunderstorms was slowly moving across pretty much all of Kansas.

This morning, when we woke up, our driveway looked like this:



It was a calm, still, pleasant scene. Birds were chatting, rabbits were hopping, and there were soft rumbles of thunder in the distance. This must be why Terah says she likes thunderstorms.

On the other hand, thunderstorms make me nervous. Given the right conditions, severe thunderstorms can spawn tornadoes with little warning.

Friday night, most of Greensburg, KS was destroyed. So far, 9 people have been confirmed dead. Estimates are that 90% of the town's structures are lost. You can see the damage in aerial and land pictures. I know that Greensburg will rebuild, better than before. Tornadoes don't seem to ever scare people off. They seem to just make them more determined than ever to stay where they are because it's home.

So this Monday was the 111th running, as they call it, of the venerable Boston Marathon, and my first time there. After the fairly serious storm warnings -- and the corresponding health warnings, delivered through two emails from the race organizers and a handout at registration, we got very, very lucky as the rain more or less stopped shortly after the start. And there was relatively little wind, and mostly laterally, rather than the 'in your face' gusts at the projected 30 to 50 mph.
There were actually six of us running from our little informal group in River Forest / Oak Park, and fellow rookie Russ and I decided to 'take it easy' and just 'go for a long run'. I ended up with a fairly even pace between 7:45 and 8:10, averaging 7:57 for a total of 3:28:24, or a few seconds faster than my very first marathon in Chicago. Which is quite pleasant, given the conditions, and the hillier course. The race went pretty well for all six us, which is nice too. Given how we trained together, it is neat how we all ended up within seven minutes of each other. The race itself is quite stunning. With the required qualifying time comes a 'seeding' system for the start, so one tends to run most of the course with runners of fairly similar speed. That made for nice cameraderie on the course -- and for beautiful sights of nothing but runners rolling through the hills of Massachusetts. I think I'll be back next year.