Search Results: "xam"

1 November 2008

Francois Marier: Preventing accidental deletion of important files using safe-rm

Some weeks ago, I accidentally deleted half of my /usr/lib. I didn't lose anything important and was able to restore everything (thanks to my Ctrl+C'ing the process in time) but that user error did strike me as too easy to make (apparently, I'm not alone). So I started thinking about how I could prevent something like that from happening again.

I realized one thing: there is no way I would ever want to delete /usr or /etc for example. I figured that "rm" should, by default, refuse to delete certain critical directories (or files). Of course, that would be a very controversial patch to "rm" itself and the chances of this approach succeeding were pretty close to zero.

So instead, I decided to build a wrapper around "rm" which prevents the deletion of important files by checking each one against a blacklist. Anything you add to the blacklist will not be deletable using "rm" unless you override this protection by calling "rm.real" directly.



This tool, safe-rm, ships with a default system-wide configuration file (/etc/safe-rm.conf), but each user can supplement that list of "protected" directories and files by adding lines to ~/.safe-rm.

Debian and Ubuntu packages are available from the usual places.

There are of course different approaches to preventing these kinds of problems...

30 October 2008

Decklin Foster: A long-overdue explanation

Regarding that last post. I received the list via email from Alan Sondheim earlier in the week, and felt like putting up a link to it. No particular reason; it seemed appropriate for one of those sui-generis enigmatic tumblelog things. I was disappointed to find that none of the mailing lists where I might have been able to find it had public archives. (One way of dealing with people who complain about spammers harvesting their address, I suppose...) So, I said to myself, I've got 8+ years of this guy's email work, I'd like to share it with the world, and I have Mnemosyne, which I had always thought, in the back of my mind, would be a neat way to archive email written as email rather than written as a "blog". So, a little hacking later... The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive (Warning: some parts are NSFW). It has already given me some ideas for improving the example templates; I'll release 0.12 soon with the changes I had to make to get this running. (Final tally: 4500 messages, 75 seconds from a clean htdocs, 12 to no-op. On whatever the cheapest Linode [1] [2] is. Eh. I can do better.)
[1]Incidentally: Linode has been great. Highly recommended.
[2]Also: yeah, I know my footnotes are broken. Working on it.

29 October 2008

David Welton: Nokia 6120

I finally got around to getting myself a new mobile phone, as it looks like the Android phones may take a while to arrive here in Europe, unlocked, and my old phone was fading. I ended up selecting a Nokia 6120 in order to get something that runs Symbian, which has a decent amount of apps above and beyond the Java ME stuff. So far, I'm fairly happy with the phone. Here are some notes:
  • It's small and light. Nice!
  • It runs Java ME (J2ME) applications surprisingly slowly. I'm non-plussed by this. And no, it's not just Hecl, even ShopList, which is quite simple and small (~ 6K), takes several seconds to start up. This is not appreciably faster than on my cheap phone from several years ago.
  • My old, cruddy phone was able to recharge (slowly) via USB. This one doesn't, as far as I can tell.
  • I bought it from Amazon.de, and the bozos who were the 'real' sellers sold me a phone intended for the polish market, meaning the dictionary languages installed are all eastern European - no Italian, which I need. Not the phone's fault though, and I guess it's probably possible to replace that stuff.
  • The camera has some weird issues where it leaves streaks. I realize that it's only a phone camera, but it ought to be able to do better. Here's an image from my recent trip to Oslo, by way of example:
Oslo Fjord
  • Creating videos wors pretty well though.
  • Playing video is just a bit jerky - it mostly keeps up, but not 100% of the time, when you lose a few frames.
  • Nokia ought to do a better job making sure that it's integrated with Linux (Ubuntu in my case). That said, things work quite well, by and large, and I was able to get things done with relatively little fiddling.
  • The amount of progress over a few years is very impressive. This phone completely blows my old phone out of the water. Sure, it's a bit pricier, but it's way more capable.
All in all, I'm happy with it, but I think that my next phone will be some kind of Android-based device, as that system is way more hackable than Java ME, and the people developing it seem to 'get it' a bit more. That said, I'm glad I got it - I needed something modern to play with Hecl on, and hopefully I will be able to work on using some of the fancier bits of the phone from Hecl. Oh, and by the way, I'm always on the lookout for phones to try Hecl with - even if they're old and worn out, the only thing that matters is that they are able to run Java ME applications. Contact me for shipping information:-)

David Welton: Nokia 6120

I finally got around to getting myself a new mobile phone, as it looks like the Android phones may take a while to arrive here in Europe, unlocked, and my old phone was fading. I ended up selecting a Nokia 6120 in order to get something that runs Symbian, which has a decent amount of apps above and beyond the Java ME stuff. So far, I'm fairly happy with the phone. Here are some notes: Oslo Fjord All in all, I'm happy with it, but I think that my next phone will be some kind of Android-based device, as that system is way more hackable than Java ME, and the people developing it seem to 'get it' a bit more. That said, I'm glad I got it - I needed something modern to play with Hecl on, and hopefully I will be able to work on using some of the fancier bits of the phone from Hecl. Oh, and by the way, I'm always on the lookout for phones to try Hecl with - even if they're old and worn out, the only thing that matters is that they are able to run Java ME applications. Contact me for shipping information:-)

Benjamin Mako Hill: An Invisible Handful of Stretched Metaphors

The following list is merely a small selection of scholarly articles listed in the ISI Web of Knowledge with "invisible hand" in their title: And, finally:

28 October 2008

Ondřej Čertík: Google Mentor Summit III

On Sunday I checked out from the hotel and enjoyed the breakfast, basically the same as the first picture here. Which is cool, the best way to start a day is with a good breakfast in the morning.



At Google I finally met with Bart Massey, who works at the Portland State University where I was an intern (in 2005) and also he was sponsoring one SymPy GSoC student in 2007.


Then we started to port SymPy to Jython with Philip Jenvey. I first installed openjdk-6, which is in Debian main, then checked out Jython svn, typed "ant" and it just worked. This is so awesome, that we finally have a truly opensource and fully working java implementation in Debian. Philip fixed some bugs already, so SymPy imports just fine. Most of the tests run, but also quite a lot still fail.

We managed to isolate two bugs: issue 1158 and 1159. Then there was an annoying recursion bug, that took us several hours to dig into and I then had to leave at 6pm without a clue. But Philip kept saying, I just need to look more at the java stacktraces that Jython was generating and I'll figure it out. And he did! The next morning he filed an issue 412 in the PyPy tracker, because they seem to have the same problem. There are subtle differences in how to handle __mul__ and __rmul__ methods that are not well documented, so it works in CPython but fails in Jython/PyPy. I think we can fix that in SymPy too in the meantime, so I am very excited, because it seems SymPy will work on top of Jython soon.

There was also a git vs hg session with both hg and git developers. Since I recently switched from hg to git for all stuff where I can choose the vcs, it was very interesting for me. And I must say I am glad I switched. Mercurial works fine enough and with the recent rebase feature I think it is usable, but git just has a bigger momentum at the moment and it just doesn't get in my way.

During the day Steve sent an email to the GSoC list that Dirk forgot his jacket in the hotel room, so I said to myself, haha, that's a pity. And then I realized, oh shit, I left my jacket there as well. They didn't have it in the evening when I stopped there, but fortunately they sent me an email yesterday that they found it, so I'll stop there on my way back.

We also took couple of group pictures, here is just my lame attempt (I am sure people will soon post better ones):


On Monday morning I met with Fernando Perez, the author of ipython, he know works with Jarrod. Then I rented a car and came to visit Brian Granger and his family in San Luis Obispo.

We went to the beach in the evening:





And had a dinner together. Brian showed me his options pricing example he did with SymPy, so I made him create an issue 1175 with the code.
Then we played with the parallel stuff that Brian contributed to ipython and we tried sympy with it and to our disappointment, we found pickling bugs in sympy, it works with protocol 0, but not protocol 2, see the issue 1176 and 1177. This almost smells like a bug in Python itself, but I need to investigate that later more deeply.

Today is Tuesday and we'll work on doing atomic physics calculations with sympy. See also Brian's email to the sympy list about it.

Stefano Zacchiroli: releasing yummy cookies

Cookies, bugs, and releases Christian knows how to be very inspiring and provocative with his blog posts, the APT case is a very good example of how useful that can be. I believe today's post is yet another example of that, many thanks Bubulle! Still, I stopped believing in the incompatibilities among having discussions (possibly heavy, possibly flamish) and releasing. Fact is: The BugSprint has been anticipated well before the inflamatory membership reform proposal, and repeatedly advertised by Joss in various ways (kudos). Still the participation has been way too low. That has nothing to do with other "distractions".

27 October 2008

Decklin Foster: We could customer care less

(And now, a cathartic "I hate this company and I am never patronizing them again, please don't either" post. I should have done ones for at least Speakeasy/Covad and IBM's server division last year. Ah well.) I went to go register a new domain yesterday (announcement soon! Probably this weekend). I've been using Joker for a while, IIRC on the principle that the cooks were using it so it must be decent enough. While registering, I had a bunch of problems with the horrid, useless "Verified by Visa" popup [1] that you see everywhere these days, and eventually this must have looked like suspicious activity to the bank so my card was declined. I only actually found this out when I got mail saying my order was canceled. Okay, sure. I wrote back and explained what I thought was going on and that I'd like to resolve it. Another half hour later, I got this response: 
Hello,
please use
   https://joker.com/goto/support/
for all support inquiries.
Regards, your Joker.com team
This is complete and utter bullshit [2]. If a company is going to mail me, I expect to be able to mail them. I have a mail client; it manages communication the way I want it to, and runs my preferred editor to compose messages (which is, in fact, how I am writing this very blog post). I am sick of dicking around on JavaScript-requiring web forms that all work differently and typing in postage-stamp-sized little textareas. Anything I do type in them is lost, because unlike my email client, web forms don't save sent messages unless the authors feel like letting you have a Cc:. When a company forces me to do this, I take it as a sign of disrespect. I tolerate a web browser [3] for reading pages; "applications" are universally painful [4]. One of the things I used to like about Joker was the PGP mail interface. AFAIK, they have not killed it (I didn't bother to check), but with automatic "we don't want to listen to you unless you inconvenience yourself" bounces like this, what's the point? I surmise that there is, or was, some smart person there who understood how (and more to the point, why) to hook a pseudo-mailbox up to a software system, and that they have been overridden by someone in management who realized it's much easier to have dime-a-dozen webmonkeys hook a form up to the same system since 90% of users just don't care (and even people who do notice and dislike this, but are not as inflamed as I, have come to expect it because everyone else refuses mail, so, y'know, pick yr battles son, etc.). Not the sort of culture I put faith my in. The irony of it all was that I was registering this domain to run a service I had decided to create specifically because of another site refusing mail and directing me to an even lamer web form. That would take incoming mail and, you know... process it with software. Suffice it to say, I am no longer going to be their customer. In deciding who to use instead, I figured I'd do a survey of where the domains in that "Subscription" column [5] on Planet Debian were registered, but... WHOIS is basically useless. Every server just returns free text, formatted differently by (apparently) every implementation under the sun. Cheaply parsing something out from .com/.org/.net is possible, but InterNIC kindly blacklists your IP after making more than a few requests in a few minutes. I guess I'm just gonna go with Gandi (but other suggestions would be welcome). In somewhat unrelated developments, I went to nic.at to update my nameservers for Where the Bus At? last week. There was no authentication or anything on the request form, so I just filled it in and sent it off. I got some automatic mail saying I need to print out a PDF, sign it, and fax it internationally. Annoying, and hardly as secure as mailing them with PGP, but whatever. But then, also yesterday, I got another mail saying the update was complete (lo and behold, it was). I am now somewhat concerned about the security of my domain: it seems like anyone can come by and put something in the form and if I'm not around to notice the courtesy mail and ask that they stop the request, it'll eventually go through, no questions asked. I have not yet written them to figure out what the deal is, though. Kinda burned out. I guess I didn't really have high hopes for dealing directly with a ccTLD registrar (this was the first time I've done it... I can't believe I blew 60 on a cutesy domain name) rather than a reseller who competes in a market, but then, I go and google "domain registrar" and look at all the AdWords dollars spent trying to compete with GoDaddy [6] and just kind of want to put my head in my hands. On DJB's DNS pages there's this bit about setting up a domain. It doesn't say "How to (buy register whatever) a domain name". It says, "How to receive a delegation from .com". Which is of course, how it works. And what I want to buy. I don't want "parking" or even gratis nameservers. Just a delegation from .com. Please. No AdWords came up when I googled for that phrase to copy the link. Sometimes I guess markets just sink to the bottom. Anyway. I feel like there's a free-software angle here. My continuing irrational hatred of using other people's forms, web-based mailing-list substitutes, nameservers, etc. stems not so much from their suckage but from the fact that there is no longer any software there, in front of me, for the four freedoms to possibly apply to. Being able to run your mail reader for any purpose doesn't win you much if no one uses mail. I don't really know what to do about this.
[1]It was only twelve dollars! If I go to hipster market or some other place with brand-new POS systems they don't even make me sign a paper slip for less than $20 or so. But this is the sort of thing dreamed up by people who think good security is setting a cookie to denote that I've answered "what was your first dog's name" or whatever. IF YOU WANT TO BREAK INTO MY BANK ACCOUNTS: I've set the answer to every single one of these questions to "security theater". Easy to remember.
[2]Not to mention a glaringly RESTless URI.
[3]Also, as a rule I normally try not to have anything up on my desktop that I can't close and re-open at any time, thanks to screen, MPD, emacsclient, actually using my browser's bookmark function and resisting the lure of tab-bar.js, etc. Web browsers are supposed to suck at preserving state; HTTP is stateless. See also here (and for further reading on that in the Haskell world, check out Yi. I'm hoping to switch to it someday).
[4]Debbugs, for example, may not have the slickest interface, but if I want to do flags, labels, archiving, threading, or whatever, I can; I'm not at the mercy of some front-end web developer. But we've all heard this litany before.
[5]Thanks, Hpricot!
[6]Even if GoDaddy's customer service were completely hacker-friendly, I would not use them, because their president Hates America.

Mark Brown: Getting kernel support

[This is a slight modification of something I posted to the alsa-devel list earlier today.] One of the biggest surprises that people starting to use Linux seem to run into is that you can’t rely on any particular support level from the community - everything is done on a voluntary basis and the responses will depend on a range of factors, including things like how busy the people involved are. People moving to Linux for reasons other than freedom, particularly those using it commercially, often don’t seem to notice this distinction. You can normally help getting a response by providing as much information as possible about your problem and the steps you have taken to resolve it - this makes it very much easier for people to reply since, for example, it’s more likely that something will jump out at them. These web pages contain some suggestions on the sorts of thing to do in your e-mail to help get the best response: How to ask questions the smart way
How to report bugs effectively (this is targeted at end users more than developers). With the kernel community it can also help to send direct copies of your mail to people who have worked on the relevant code since people may either miss postings on mailing lists (there is often a lot of traffic) or in some cases not be subscribed to the lists at all. This doesn’t apply to all free software projects - you should check the normal standards for a given project before doing this. If you need guaranteed responses or more detailed responses than you are able to obtain from the community the usual approach is to work with people with whom you have a commercial relationship - for example, your chip or software vendors, or consultants you have employed.

Raphaël Hertzog: Debian membership reform

Following Ganneff’s post to debian-devel-announce, several discussions have again started on the topic of Debian’s membership and several proposals have been made. Unfortunately none of these proposals try to resolve the underlying trust problem that has been growing over the years. Despite the NM process (or maybe due to it), we managed to give DD status to people who are motivated but whose technical skills are doubtful (at that point people ask for an example, and as much as I hate fingerpointing, here’s an example with #499201. The same maintainer created troubles with libpng during the etch release cycle and tried to take over a base package like mawk recently). With our current model, all DD can sponsor, NMU, introduce/adopt/hijack packages without review. This is fine as long as we trust the body of DD to contain only skilled and reasonable people. I believe that premise to be somewhat broken since Debian has become too big for people to know everybody and since the NM process had no way to grant partial rights to volunteers who were motivated but that clearly had not shown their ability to handle more complex stuff than what they had packaged during their NM period (like some trivial perl modules for example). Thus I strongly believe that any membership reform must provide a convincing answer to that trust problem before being implemented. I took several hours to draft a proposal last Friday and I’ve been somewhat disappointed that nobody commented on it. I hope to draw some attention on it with this blog post. The proposal builds on the idea that we should not have classes of contributors but simply two: a short-term contributor and a long-term contributor (those are called Debian Developers and have the right to vote). But all contributors can be granted privileges as they need them for their work and each privilege requires the contributor to fulfill some conditions. The set of privileges and the conditions associated all need discussions (but I have personal opinions here, see below). There’s however one privilege that is somewhat particular: it’s the right to grant privileges to other contributors. Handling it as a privilege like another is on purpose: it makes it clear that anyone can try to get that privilege and the procedure is clear. In practice, imagine that set of people as a big team encompassing the responsibilities split over DAM/AM/FD/DM-team and where all members can do all the steps required to grant/retire a privilege provided that 2 or 3 members agrees and that nobody opposes (in case of opposition a specific procedure is probably needed). I called that set of people the Debian Community Managers. It should contain only skilled and dedicated developers. One of their main duties would be to retain the trust that the project as a whole must have in all its members. They would have the powers to retire privileges if they discover someone that has not acted according to the (high) expectations of the project. Among the privileges would be limited upload rights (like DM have currently), full upload rights (like DD have currently although it might be that we want to split that privilege further in right to sponsor, right to package new software, right to maintain a package of priority > standard, etc.) and developer status (email + right to vote, once you can prove 6 months of contribution). There’s lots of stuff to discuss in such a proposal (like how to decide who gets what privileges among existing DD) but I think it’s a good basis and need some serious consideration by all the project members. The NM process is there only so that we can collectively trust that new members are as good as we expect them to be and trust can only be built over time so it’s good that we can grant privileges progressively. Some people believe that I’m reinventing a new NM process that will end up to be very similar to the current one. My answer is that the conditions associated to each privilege should be based on the work done by the contributor and the advocations that he managed to collect. It should not be a questionnaire like Task and Skills . This, together with the distribution of the power/work on many people, would render this system very different from today’s NM process. Some people believe that I’m copying Ubuntu when designing this since it’s somewhat similar to the process to become MOTU and/or get upload right to Ubuntu’s main component. Let me say that I’m not copying deliberately at least, I simply took the problem from the most important side. But remember that many aspects of Ubuntu have been designed by Debian developers that tried to avoid known pitfalls of Debian, and maybe they got some things right (or better at least) while doing this. Partagez cet article / Share This

26 October 2008

Christian Perrier: I'm already hearing the laughs...

...of my friends, workmates and colleagues, when I will have to try to explain them that, no, I have no bloody idea of when Debian will release. Mostly because: The project is currently heavily frozen. Our bug report rate during last month was 3000bugs, to be compared to the 5000 bugs/month ratio of the normal development process. So, yes, I'm already hearing the laughs about the trust that can be put in Debian. At some point, we should remember that even our technical excellence will not prevent us from people looking elsewhere for something serious to work with. Again, prove me wrong. Release the damn installer. Stop this nonsense about the so-called freeness of whatever bit in Debian. Postpone the discusion about contributors/maintainers/developers. Release the thing. By the way, thanks to Joss for the cookies contest. From what I've seen during the week-end, it was very successful. And, un surprisingly, those working on it were those not wasting their time in silly games. Ah, and I fixed an RC bug this week-end, too...

Joerg Jaspert: Archiving sarge AKA oldstable

And finally I started to move our good old release sarge to archive.debian.org. It will actually be visible there whenever it is completly synced, but rsync is running. Tomorrow I will delete the sarge parts in dists/ for ftp.debian.org (and its mirrors) and in the next days all the associated source and binary packages will slowly get moved out of the mirror. Im using a scheme that tells dak to delete about 1000 source packages on one day only, to not have too many files to delete at once. While that will make up a few thousand files going away at once (after the usual deletion delay), it should be under normal deletion limits mirrors have. (The Debian internal mirroring scripts do stop deletions if more than 40000 files are killed.) While doing this, I’m also finally archiving sarge-backports and sarge-amd64. Both will be archived on archive.debian.org too, for the simple reason that both have been very near to Debian. sarge-amd64 for example had security support and backports will, at some not too distant point, surely exist behind backports.debian.org. Comments: 0

Sean Finney: ps3-kboot for debian

now that ps3-utils is packaged, and it seems spufs didn't take much to get to work, i'd like to turn back to the installation procedure, which was admittedly manual and not exactly as "seamless" as i think it could be. the first step as i see it is to get the bootloader working both generally and also specifically for the installer. by "working", i mean the following: the third of these being the most complicated, as will be detailed below. how a linux (kboot) "otheros" bootloader works on the ps3 okay, so i'm not intimately familiar with the powerpc architecture, nor with all the details of cross-compilation, but this is as much as i can tell. how kboot can be used on the installer including support for this "otheros.bld" bootloader on the installer is fairly easy from a technical point of view, whether it's a usb disk or netinst cdrom image. basically, in either case the media should have a directory called "ps3/otheros", in which the file is placed and named "otheros.bld". when running the PS3 in game-os mode, this is where it looks when you tell it to "scan for otheros". how kboot can be used/maintained, generally speaking beyond a kboot.conf file, nothing really needs to be done on the host os to use kboot. of course, it would be nice to be able to issue updates for an image, which should be possible with a package that makes use of ps3-flash-util from the ps3-utils package. nothing too difficult/complicated there. how kboot can be used/built within debian this is the tricky part. in additional to the standard Free Software guidelines which debian is so (in)famous for following, we also have some basic QA rules that are needed from a distribution release management / security perspective. one of these rules is that generally speaking it is considered taboo to include embedded copies of other software within a package, if that software is already available in debian. for example, i don't think it's very likely that the ftp-masters will look very kindly on some new software package that includes a copy of the entire kernel source tree, the gcc compiler, (uc)libc, busybox, coreutils, udev, etc. it may be that a certain subset will require special patches, in which case some convincing/justification will be in order, but for the big ones (i.e. the kernel) there will almost certainly need to be modifications made. ps3-kboot in ubuntu there are already source packages available for ps3-kboot in ubuntu. apart from the fact that i can't stand working with packages that use cdbs, this package can't be used because the package maintainers' solution to the previously mentioned problem is basically to ignore that it exists. it also seems that there's quite a bit of customization in this source package with respect to the initrd generation, which is probably worth some review... so i will likely still use this package as a base point of reference.

Ondřej Čertík: Google Mentor Summit II

On Saturday morning I met Steve McIntyre and Dirk Eddelbuettel, Steve took us by car to Google. Well, it was overwhelming.

For example we met there two other Debian developers, Jeff Bailey and Daniel Burrows. There are developers from all the famous projects, like git, Wine, Turbogears, Jython, ... There are still people I wanted to meet but didn't manage yesterday, need to fix that today. My plan is to get SymPy running on top of Jython, or at least do some more progress to take the advantage, that Philip Jenvey from Jython is here. Also I wanted to fix some RC bugs in Debian when Steve is here, to make some progress on my NM finally. We'll see how it goes.

There was also an excellent presentation from people behind Android. One thing I was curious if it's going to run native C applications, like Python and it seems it will happen eventually, all the sources are out there, so someone just needs to push it forward. Another very cool thing they did that I was always looking for is Gerrit for reviewing patches (see review.source.android.com for example how it looks like) -- basically a fork of Guido's codereview, but it has many nice features, like automatically applying the patch to the git repository as a new topic branch and one can then easily pull it, as well as review it over the web interface. When I get back to Prague I am going to install this for SymPy.

25 October 2008

Ben Armstrong: Wifi roaming on the move

Preface: legal stuff Depending on where you live, use of random open wifi networks might be considered illegal. Although I know of no law in my country against doing this, where you live, things may be different, so educate yourself before following my example. Wifi roaming on the move For the past year I have used my Eee PC on the metro transit bus, as it is the perfect size for this. When I can, I take advantage of open networks to connect back home. In this article I will show how you can actually use such access, will recommend which software works best and will explain how to set it up. So, what can I really do with the net while in motion? How about irc? No kidding! This shell one-liner does the job: 
while ! ssh -t 10.9.8.7 'screen -UDr' 2>/dev/null ; do echo -n "." ; sleep .1 ; done
We’re concerned about privacy and security on other people’s networks, so we use ssh. Inside that screen session, keep irssi running for a continuous irc presence. Every 10th of a second, the script tries to resume your session. Once a the net passes by, typing “[Enter]~.” drops you back out to retry again. The row of dots serves as a progress bar. If you want to get fancy, you could replace that with an ASCII ‘spinner’. I leave that as an exercise for the reader. :) Come on, is that really usable? Certainly. As the good folks on #eeepc at irc.freenode.net and #debian-eeepc at irc.oftc.net can attest, even a half dozen brief connections can be enough to provide tech support, rough out some development ideas, or just carry on some friendly chat. If your spouse or housemate is online too, it can even help you make some last-minute grocery-list changes. :) While the script is working, enjoy some offline things such as blogging, reading a cached Planet Debian feed or a PDF book. OK, so what else do I need to make it work? Well, you’ve seen so far we need on a server: On the Eee, you should also have: But what do I need wpasupplicant for if I only use open networks? Well, wpasupplicant is really handy for fast control of networks in Roaming Mode (as per /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/README.modes.gz). A GUI is just too slow. For example, you may need to filter out ‘junk’ open wifi nets: pay-per-use hotspots or nets that hide their name. You’ll not only want a “catch-all” stanza for any open network, but also a number of the most commonly found default network names, e.g. 
# Catch-all; associates with any open network:
network= 
     key_mgmt=NONE
 
# Commonly found default network names:
network= 
     ssid="default" 
     key_mgmt=NONE
 
network= 
     ssid="linksys" 
     key_mgmt=NONE
 
# etc. by watching scan_results closely you'll find several more
While the connect script is running, keep a separate tab open in gnome-terminal for wpa_cli. Use ‘disable_network 0’ to drop the catch-all and let the other stanzas kick in and ‘enable_network 0’ after filtering is no longer needed. Isn’t it really slow to get connected? Without some tweaks, yes. But here are a few things I have found by trial and error that help. One issue is that dhclient takes too long to retry, so you drop the delay between retries back to 1 second in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf: 
backoff-cutoff 1;
initial-interval 1;
If the signal is very weak, you’ll want the transmit power turned up to the maximum value for your hardware. For the Eee PC 4G this is 50mW, so you set this in /etc/network/interfaces for ath0, your wireless interface: 
wireless-txpower 50mW
Finally, while you’re in motion you are constantly leaving no-longer-usable access points behind. The driver needs to discard them as quickly as possible and scan for new ones. So again in /etc/network/interfaces for ath0, you bring the default scanvalid 60 seconds down to 10 with: 
pre-up /sbin/iwpriv ath0 scanvalid 10
Conclusion The netbook has changed how we use the net. Now that we can take it everywhere, we either pay through the nose for expensive cell network access or else use the patchy wifi coverage blanketing most urban areas. A few lucky cities have such things as municipal wifi nets, but the rest of us have to scrape what access we can wherever we go. You are now equipped to try this out on the bus. If you find any other tips that can help, I’d love to hear from you.

Ondřej Čertík: Google Mentor Summit I

I flew via Atlanta and had only about an hour to my next flight to San Francisco, so after my last experience, when I went to the immigration, got stuck in the line for more than an hour and then had to run to catch my flight, I decided to try a different strategy this time: first run to the immigration and then walk to my gate. Unfortunately I was sitting near the back of the plane and I got out among the last ones. Fortunately, it was several hundreds meters to the immigration, so I run as fast as I could and I managed to get there as the first one and everything took about 5 minutes. That was just awesome, I finally figured this out.

Jarrod was waiting for me at the airport, went to his place. Here's his cat:



On Friday we did some work and then went to the Golden Gate, the traffic was quite dense:




Alcatraz:


San Francisco:




Then we had a cofee in San Francisco and went to Silicon Valey, Jarrod drove me around a little bit to see SLAC, Stanford campus and other things. In the evening we went to the common pub with other mentors and Google guys, where we for example met with Robert Bradshaw.

Today I am looking forward to meet with all the people I know from mailinglists, Debian and other places.

24 October 2008

Sandro Tosi: Another month in bed

(for those who care about my health situation)

Today I had the scheduled exam at the hospital, one month later the scooter accident I had: the patella fracture is almost done (and the doctor had a lot of fun playing with it around my knee...grrr) with the tibia fracture is still on going, hence the need for another month in bed.

The advantage is that they removed the plater and now I have a donjoy support all around the leg: I can remove it (to wash the leg, thankgod) and I can "feel" the ground with the feet again, but I'm going pretty scary all the times, even if they told me it's hard I can compromise the situation (but, you know, lucky is not on my side...).

After that, I'll need 3 weeks of physiotherapy (and then I hope I've done!) just in time for Christmas.

Luckily, since some days I have a Debian laptop to use, so I can keep up with some Debian duties, tasks, flamewars and so :)

Jon Dowland: fauxonomy

An example of tag-clash on delicious: ppc. Even in the correct context of 'computer architecture', you can have Power PC or Pocket PC.

Jon Dowland: afi-2

I've ranted about AFI on-and-off ever since they moved from Nitro records (here's one such example). Their last album is in much the same vein as the penultimate one: meaning bland, chart-friendly and utterly different to their older stuff. On hearing their single on Radio 1 on the way home, I texted in a small rant to the DJ Zane Lowe. He read my text and discussed the matter on-air. Here's a sample: afi-jon-radio1.ogg, 461K. Sorry if you can't play Vorbis files, I gave up trying to encode it as something else.

Joerg Jaspert: Developer status

Nice how some people (on purpose?) try to misunderstand everything. And love to flame. (Yes, it was my mistake to not explain the meaning of we right at the top - or in that mail at all -, sorry.) Lets address a few of the issues: There are many more things on the mailing list, but this post is already a little to long, so lets stop for now. I might blog more later on and reply to a bit more. I might also try and reply on the mailinglist, but erm, thats a HUGE thread already… What I won’t reply to are those few people who wish me to die or suffer from something painful. Sorry, I have to disappoint you, none of this is on todays agenda. Comments: 5

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