I'm sitting in our suite in the Doubletree on Times Square in New York City, catching up with some email and generally trying to pull myself together. It's been a remarkably busy week and this is the first time I've been able to sit down to blog for a while. We moved to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac last Wednesday, and most of my time last week was taken up either packing things (clothes, computers, dishes), unpacking the same things, or taking things that I didn't want to pack/unpack to various charitable organizations. Our move-in went smoothly -- the hardest part was moving our old fridge and stove to our new house, then moving the fridge and stove and deep freeze from our new house to the old apartment for Julia and Antoine to use. The new house came with a lot of new goodies, too. We bought a new couch for our new livingroom, and a new king-size bed for our new bedroom. On top of all that, I signed us up for Vid otron cable Internet instead of our old reliable Bell Canada DSL, and it's turned out to be quite fast and easy to use. So on top of the excitement of having a new place to live, there have been a lot of new toys to play with. Thankfully, our cats and our daughter have adapted quite well to their new environment. Amita June has a new bedroom, but she's been through so much travel -- hotel rooms and friends' homes -- that she's able to sleep just about anywhere. Topaz and Xe (the cats) don't usually adapt very well, but Maj kept them in the upstairs bathroom for a few days The thing that's surprised me the most about moving into the new house is how seldom we go upstairs. All our bedrooms are downstairs, as well as the new office/den, and we seem to get a lot of our needs met down there. The upstairs area is really really nice, though: lots of light and air. But the stairs are a real energy barrier. I guess my legs are going to get stronger and I'll get used to running up and down them several times a day. Probably the biggest disappointment of the move-in was that our new paint job, which had been so lovingly planned, got pretty marked-up in certain parts of the house -- specifically, the halls and stairs. We'll be doing some touch-up painting ourselves, but it is still kind of a bummer to see all these nicks and scratches on the otherwise pristine walls. tags: moving newhouse 4690ruepontiac

Train in vain We're in New York City for the awards ceremony for the Webby Awards. Wikitravel won the Webby award for best travel Web site of 2007 -- quite an honor. We came right after our move-in, so it feels a little rushed. We're just here for about 72 hours. We'd thought about going down to visit family in New Jersey, but we really need to finish getting unpacked and settled in to the new house. We're planning on coming down for a relaxed family visit in NJ later this summer, instead -- maybe combining it with a trip to the Jersey Shore. Although there are plenty of flights between Montreal and New York, and it's only about a 6- to 8-hour drive, we decided to try something different this time. We took the Adirondack (Amtrak) train, which runs down the shores of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River Valley. My theory was that the train trip would let us stretch our legs, read, and get some work done, and that AJ could run around and enjoy herself, rather than being cooped up in a car or airplane seat. Although the train was the slowest option (it's scheduled as a 9-hour trip), it might end up being the most comfortable. I think the results were mixed. Indeed, the trip was a comfortable one, and Amita June got to run up and down the aisles and climb all over the empty seats. However, we got stopped at the US border due to an elevated terror alert, and what was supposed to be a 30-minute scheduled customs stop dragged into a two-and-a-half hour inspection. By the time we got to New York, we were more than two hours late. Among other things, this meant that I missed the opening cocktail reception for the Webbies, which was kind of a bummer. It was dumping down rain in torrents when we finally got to Penn Station, though, so I think that the rooftop reception probably wasn't all that much fun. I got soaked trying to get us a cab, but we had a decent ride to our hotel -- the functional but unexciting DoubleTree Suites on Times Square. We had a hard time finding a hotel that would be even remotely affordable, in Manhattan, and had junior suite rooms. Suites are great when you're traveling with a toddler -- it means you can put them to bed at 8PM and then go in the other room to stay up the rest of the evening. We had a decent room-service dinner -- Caesar's, nachos, 2 Heinekens -- and crashed out. This morning I woke up to a text message from my friend Ben Cerveny. He's also in New York for a few days -- he figured out that we were both going to be here using the cool Dopplr service. I rousted up Maj and Amita June -- late sleepers, lately -- and we all went down to Greenwich Village to meet Ben at The Grey Dog. The caf had decent coffee and pretty hearty breakfasts. We stayed for about 2 hours. We ambled over to the Center for Architecture to check out a few exhibits and stretch our legs. It turned out to be a great place to bring a toddler -- not too crowded, and pretty noise-tolerant. Amita burned herself out running through the exhibits. We left Ben behind and headed back to the room for naps and computer time. I was going to try to go to the Webby event for film and video tonight, but there was some complicated signup thing I was supposed to do, and I ended up failing to do it. It's probably just as well -- Maj isn't feeling great. So we're going to just get some dinner together and call it an early evening. tags: newyork wikitravel travel

Certifi.ca re-certified For the last month I've had a TODO item on my list: New SSL cert for certifi.ca. Of course, I let it slide and slide -- definitely not an urgent item, right? Well, not until the cert expired last Sunday. Oops. It took me a while to get certifi.ca a new cert -- I wanted to get it with the name of the new corporation I've started to manage my OpenID sites, called Control Yourself, Inc. or, in French, Contr lez-vous, Inc.. (I'm not even sure if contr lez-vous makes any sense, actually.) The folks at Comodo had a hard time with the Quebec corporate registration and asked for a lot of extra documentation, which dragged things out a few days. On top of that, I got distracted by the move, so I haven't had much time to think about SSL certs. But I got the cert late last week, and ended up with another problem: when I replaced the old cert and "ca-bundle" files with the new ones, Apache mysteriously failed to start up -- at all. It just kerploded with no error log information. I was unable to find any documentation on why this would be the case. I spent some extra time debugging this afternoon, and came to an embarrassing conclusion. The program I used to feed a password to Apache (using SSLPassPhraseDialog) was giving it the password for the old key. Doh! Fixing that made Apache start up just fine. I wish I had a good way to attract Google searches for this, but maybe this sentence will work: If your Apache server with mod_ssl fails mysteriously right after startup, make sure that the passphrase is generated correctly. tags: apache certifica comodo sslpassphrasedialog mod_ssl passphrase

Creative Commons shrinks a bit Kudos to Creative Commons, who have retired their controversial Developing Nations and Sampling licenses. Critics have pointed out that all CC licenses allowed a basic universal right -- verbatim, non-commercial copying -- except for the Sampling and DevNations. I think the move has helped to focus CC somewhat. Although Creative Commons started as a way to explore novel methods for letting people share certain rights to their works, this move will set a baseline for what's an acceptable CC license and what's just not enough. As Lawrence Lessig says in the announcement: There is a strong movement to convince Creative Commons that our core licenses at least permit the freedom to share a work noncommercially. Creative Commons supports that movement. We will not adopt as a Creative Commons license any license that does not assure at least this minimal freedom at least not without substantial public discussion. It's a good idea, and I'm glad CC is taking this tack. I hope that those people who've criticized CC in the past for not having such a baseline will take the opportunity for a rapprochement. tags: cc devnations sampling creativecommons richardstallman

Funds for Standout Jobs Congrats to Montreal entrepreneurs Fred Ngo, Ben Yoskovitz, and Austin Hill. Their new high-high-end recruiting engine, Standout Jobs, just got an angel round of funding to the tune of $1.5 million. Yeah, they're only Canadian dollars (see Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV), but that means a lot more today. Fred, Ben and Austin have all done a lot to advance the local technology community. I'm glad to hear that their project is taking the first steps to success. tags: standoutjobs fredngo benyoskovitz austinhill

Matthew Garrett: “[I]f you create procedures before you create community, the people who end up enforcing the procedures tend to be the sort of people who find enforcing procedures to be the interesting part of the job rather than the ones who see them as necessary evils to enforce moderately sensible community development.”

A random idea: rails distributions that include what "should be included in the core". I'm not the first to think of it (google finds several others), but I have been mulling it over lately, and I think it's a good idea. Nothing too fancy, simply a tarball or gem that includes rails + the stuff that you end up installing every time you set up a real web site with rails. Of course, "what to include" is the big question, so the best thing would be for lots of people to try, and see what sticks. Here's what I always end up installing: Acts as Authenticated Exception Notifier And I recently found another one that seems to be pretty small, and very handy: Condition Builder because I usually always end up having to build up complex queries with dynamic components with any sort of more advanced search, and this makes it much easier, and more fun. However, I'm sure more advanced Rails users can add to that list. The trick is to nail those things that you pretty much always end up installing sooner or later as your project grows in complexity. Perhaps at that point a gem could be created that installs them...

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

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

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

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

Copy of a mail I sent to debian-www earlier today. I don't think it warrants posting to -devel-announce, but I post it here to make it visible to people not usually following debian-www. Since I seem to sense an increased stream of offers to help out with packages.d.o coming my way (but maybe that is just wishful thinking ;) I wanted to give a short update on the development of the current code and the status of the infrastructure so that nobody can claim he wanted to help but failed due to lack of information.

• The code in the CVS is seriously lacking in many regards, especially update and CGI speed. It runs pretty stable though and since we excluded robots from using the CGI scripts it seems to run with at least enough speed to keep any big complaints from rising. (If anyone is interested, packages.d.o currently has about 200,000 page hits a day, with a notable decrease – up to 50,000 – during the etch freeze and a similar increase after release)
• packages.d.o is currently run on puccini.d.o, this host is exclusivly used for this purpose. Adminstration is be done by group pkg_maint, current members are Martin 'Joey' Schulze and me.
• The same code is also used to create the page packages.ubuntu.com, see branch ubuntu in CVS. packages.ubuntu.com is run a private server of mine and only administrated by me.
• Everybody with write access to the website has also write access to this part of the CVS. The code run on packages.d.o is updated once a day during the update cron job. Since there is no staging ground for changes, any commits should be made with extreme care...
• Last year Jeroen van Wolffelaar and I started to develop a new version with the goal to make dynamic page generation possible which allows for faster update of information and more flexible presentation. We coordinated our work by using a SVN repository located at svn.wolffelaar.nl.
• This development was stalled several times when he and/or I had no time to actively pursue it.
• In April 2007 I decided to revive the development to get the code in a state ready for deployment. Since I was by then inititated in the wonders of distributed scm, I decided to move the code to yet another repository, namely git (for cloning use git://source.djpig.de/git/packages.git) There is also a ubuntu branch there but it is in a rather sorry state atm regarding site layout.
• I think the new code is currently in a state where it could be safely deployed to packages.d.o but I'm currently waiting for an etch upgrade of the host since the code has grown some dependencies on stuff only available in etch. The next possibility for this to happen is probably during Debconf.
• I don't know yet how to handle the SCM stuff when the code is to be deployed.
• You can try out this new code base at packages.debian.net (Might be slightly out-of-date sometimes since I don't run the cronjob as often as possible to give packages.ubuntu.com more ressources)
• Bug reports and patches against this version are very much welcome, please send them directly to me (but feel free to CC debian-www if you want to have an open discussion on the matter in question).
• Bug reports and patches against the version currently in use should be directed to the BTS as usual.
• If there is interest we can make a little improvised BoF about packages.d.o at Debconf.

Before I start with my report I need to fulfill my promise for those who stumble here from kushaldas.in: The URL of the web interface for the package description translation framework is for now: ddtp.debian.net (It's easy: Debian Description translation pproject). There might be some changes after DebConf, our annual conference, which will take place this month. So keep an eye on your language's team mailing list. But more about Kushal Das later. The first part of my report will cover a bit of our DebianDay and of course especially my talk ;) More will follow later. Friday was DebianDay and I attended Holger's talk about debian-community. It's a quite interesting project, trying to solve the problem, that there's not much between real DDs and the rest of the world. It's more low level than the Debian maintainers idea floating around for a while: Look around, you'll see much contributors to Debian, who are not maintaining any package. The idea is basically to have kind of bonuses for contributing to Debian, as a more direct way to say Thanks!. Have look at the website, and think how you could help to get things rolling. After his talk it was my turn. I did a Debian package building for beginners talk... Well, actually it's a workshop stripped down by the practical part leaving only the slides of the introduction. But who cares ;) Again I was surprised how many people where interested in that topic. I always thought it's kind of special and not that interesting, but the room was quite stuffed. Some people where even sitting on the floor. I neither counted how many people attended my talk, nor how many seats where available. I guess I had something between 80 and 120? Perhaps Wolfgang Borgert, who moderated DebianDay, can correct me, if I'm wrong. Since I stripped down a workshop to a talk, I needed to take special care about the timing. Well... I didn't work perfectly. I took a bit too long while answering questions, but I think all in all it was quite right. As usual I took gnujump as example; easy package, works without much tweaking of the templates created by dh_make, and if you have some time left at the end, you can show some additional stuff, like splitting of a -data package. After the talk I got some quite interesting questions; the three most interesting ones were the following:

• Non English license texts: One guy asked me about non English licence texts (in his case: A Japanese license text for some special printer driver).
  I asked him, to seek help by a Japanese DD, which might be okay to let the package pass ftpmaster. Sorry, but THIS IS NOT ENOUGH! I just asked J rg Jaspert, one of the ftpmasters, and the Debian Project need's (of course) a translated version of that licence, as well as a statement of the upstream author, that the translation is okay. Otherwise the translated text has no legal binding and is therefore useless.
• Installation packages: Packaging non-free stuff, which you need to download yourself, is a) sadly sometimes needed, b) useful for some people who need it and c) some kind of tricky. I could help much here; didn't did anything similar, yet. So I answered to take a look at either , msttcorefonts or java-package. Question to the others: Is there some kind of common infrastructure to build an installer package upon?
• The Joomla! problem: Again a thing I have no experience myself in; packaging web applications. According to the Joomla! guy I talked, too, there is a special problem with that (please correct me, if I understood something wrong; as said: webapps aren't my speciality).
  There is demand for Joomla! packages, but so fare none exist. Major problem: While Joomla! is capable of running at multiple aliases, it is not (yet) capable of handling them to serve different content to them. So he wanted to be able to install Debian-Packages to different directories, where he would add different configurations of them. Short term solution could be to install it to /usr/share/ or so, and create a script, creating a symlink farm... long term solution should be to fix Joomla! ;)

So much for now; I'll write some more about the event in general, a goodie from an old friend from Treuchtlingen (rather short; the german entry is longer), and a small talk I had with an other J rg later... I'm kind of tired right now.

This thread on the Sun initiative to produce a more Linux-like distribution of OpenSolaris is interesting not so much for the technical goals, but as an insight into the community. The immediate response to the proposal? A set of complaints that it hasn't followed the correct process.

Now, to be fair, there have been other threads discussing the technical and social desirability of such a distribution already and some are still ongoing - it's not like the OpenSolaris community has ignored it entirely in favour of process fetishising. However, it's indicative of a community that's more concerned with procedure than it is with producing high quality software. What I suspect has happened is that Sun felt it was important to ensure that procedures were put in place before creating a community in order to avoid the problem of it immediately turning into low-grade anarchy. The problem with this is that if you create procedures before you create community, the people who end up enforcing the procedures tend to be the sort of people who find enforcing procedures to be the interesting part of the job rather than the ones who see them as necessary evils to enforce moderately sensible community development.

Sun's clearly stuck between a rock and a hard place here. They don't want to be seen to be directing the community too strongly, or they'd end up like Red Hat did with Fedora - you alienate your community by giving them the impression that they have no influence over the direction of the distribution. On the other hand, the rapid growth of the Ubuntu community strongly suggests that having a strong leader can ensure that people don't get too bogged down in procedure at the cost of technical progress.

I suspect that Sun made the wrong call here. Having more corporate influence to begin with might have put off some contributors, but it would also have allowed the development of a functional community at an earlier stage. Sun could then gradually withdraw (as Red Hat have been doing with Fedora) and let the community play a larger role. Perhaps that way we'd hear more about the technical contributions coming out of OpenSolaris and they wouldn't be left with just the same two cards they've been playing for a couple of years now - dtrace and ZFS.

On something of a tangent, I don't think their choice of license has helped a great deal here. Two of the areas where OpenSolaris is most behind Linux are hardware support and desktop/kernel integration. The choice of a GPL-incompatible license strongly discourages any Linux developers from working with the low-level code of OpenSolaris due to the perceived risk of contaminating the Linux codebase at some later point. That rules out a huge pool of skilled developers (I'm going to be potentially controversial here and say that I suspect Linux has a larger skillset here than all the BSDs put together, and quite possibly Solaris added to that) who are writing a good deal of advanced code. Meanwhile we're left with OpenSolaris having even worse laptop support than FreeBSD. These are people who could have added to the community socially as well as technically. Instead you've got a community led by a set of Sun staff who are paranoid about doing anything that might make it look like Sun controls the community. Score.

In a Heartbeat cluster installation it may not be possible to have one STONITH device be used to reboot all nodes. To support this it is possible to have multiple STONITH devices configured that will each be used to reboot different nodes in the cluster. In the following code section there is an example of how to configure STONITH for two separate ssh instances. Of course this is not useful apart from as an example of how to configure STONITH. It would be quite easy to change one of those ssh configuration entries to use IPMI or some more effective method of managing machines. My previous post on this topic has an example of a simpler ssh STONITH configuration. It is convenient that the ssh method for rebooting nodes is available both as a shared object (which is used by the following example XML) and as a shell script (type external/ssh). The shell script can be used to give the same functionality as the shared object (with reduced performance) but the benefit is as an example of how to write external plugins. For a client I have just written an IPMI module that works with machines that have two Ethernet ports. When a server has two Ethernet ports you want to send an IPMI reset command to both of them in case the failure which requires a STONITH was triggered by a broken Ethernet cable. Unfortunately I can’t release the IPMI code at this time (more…)

Last Thursday was the 2007 edition of the JP Morgan Chase Corp. Challenge. Record crowd of almost 23000 in Chicago's Grant Park. Just like last year, I didn't try hard enough to be closer to the starting line. Which means that one ends up running more or less zig-zag for some time. Oh well, my hand-stopped 22:17 is still pretty close to the PR from two years ago. Overall once again a really nice event, and we managed to have more folks from work show up, both to run, and to have a cold one or two afterwards.

Rare Earth proposes that Complex life is rare in the Universe. Paradoxically it first points out how abundant simple life is on Earth, in deep ocean vents, several km below the Earths surface, geysers: places that a few decades ago we would have considered completely inhospitable turn out to host life. But, they argue, complex animal and plant life (eucaryotic life) takes special conditions that they argue are probably unique. This book is an excellent starting location for someone learning about the state of the art in astrobiology. It summarises well the myriad sciences involved in why life exists on Earth, from astrophysics (is our place in the Galaxy special), planetary development (why only Earth appears to have life in our Solar system), through aspects of geology and biology that we begin to understand. I well recommend this book to anyone interested in these fields. It also has a sufficient reference section to continue the discussion.

read more »

Tags review, astronomy, astrobiology, exoplanets

I forgot to mention -- we got a last-minute call yesterday to be on Global Quebec at 8:40AM EDT for their morning news/entertainment show. If you're in Montreal, watch us! On a similar note, we'll be on Homerun on Friday the 1st of June (12 Prairial) at 4:10PM EDT. Craig Silverman, Writer did a good piece about Wikitravel in the Hour this week, and Montreal media being what it is, we're now getting all this attention. Yay us. tags: wikitravel montreal globaltv homerun cbc craigsilvermanwriter media hour

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.2. That took all of 18 seconds.

Share This

A few days ago, some people in Venezuela were shocked by Mark Shuttleworth’s claims against Hugo Ch vez Government and supporting Mar a Corina Machado, a minor opposition leader in the Country. Today, at 23:59:59, the nationwide open air TV broadcaster RCTV will cease operations. In Venezuela, as in several other countries in the World, the economically profitable portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is State’s property, thus requiring a concession to make use of it. RCTV concession was granted in 1987 for twenty years, and the Government has decided to deny the renewal, which is quite unusual (right-wing governments in the past simply would have shut up the antennas) Of course, RCTV is not a pro-Government channel, accounting between 90 and 100 percent of the airtime with anti Government news and opinions, which is not bad per se, though in Venezuela there’s a law requiring equilibrium in times devoted to political ads. Both situations (Mark’s comments and the Government’s decision) pose the threats of a now common situation in our Country: people taking very valid decisions with somewhat doubtful consequences. In the first case, Mark is using his right to freely write what he likes in his blog but it seems that it has damaged a little bit Ubuntu’s image in Venezuela (not that it’s Mark’s fault, of course) In the second case, the Government is taking a lawful decision, but it has actually raised an important discomfort in the population (polls, which are not always accountable, point out as much as 80% rejection rate), the journalists of other media and most foreign observers, which state that they’re actually closing a TV channel and destroying freedom of speech in the Country. Expressing political POVs is quite critical nowadays in Venezuela. Some famous etiquette bookwriters, such as the one at Emily Post’s, always tend to promote a be honest, be respectful position while listening or expressing your points of views in order to keep a productive attitude. I do think that politics are important: I just think mixing them with practical daily tasks, including FLOSS development and promotion, is becoming obnoxious and dangerous. Cheeseconf On June 15th., I’ll be departing to DC7 in Edimburgh. I’ll stay a night in Frankfurt, probably in a hostel, and then I’ll stay at one of the hostels in EDI. I plan to carry white cheese to the Cheese and Wine BoF, and I’d love any comments on how to transport them without posing a biological threat for Europe. I’ll be carrying a 65 liters backpack. How long will it take for the cheese to become a lifeform? Any special tips and tricks to avoid that? Copying files to embedded devices I’ve been trying to copy some binary files into an Axesstel D800 EvDO modem which runs Linux over a tiny ARM processor on less than 16 MB. of memory. I’m actually trying to get netcat in so I can get more useful stuff such as snmpd in. The modem has telnetd, but it has no zmodem utilities, particularly rz. Neither it has wget, nor ftpd. It has thttpd to serve the administrative webpages, but it can’t process shell CGI programs so I can’t send the file through a CGI form. Any ideas? I would love to read comments from hackers who have already managed their ways into embedded devices such as 802.11 devices with Linux, and any generic ideas on how to provide new firmware images for devices such as this Axesstel modem.

New version of simple todo manager called Ukolovnik has been just released. Version 0.7 comes with following changes:

• Development switched to subversion.
• Added support for CSV export.
• Added support for vCalendar export.

Steve, I know that caching usually helps. But from all test I've made with MediaWiki installation on phpMyAdmin wiki, I can see that enabling any caching slows things down quite a lot. With memcached based caching, each request takes about 15 seconds, if I add XCache backend for variables, it slows down things to 10 seconds and I receive same results with file based caching. So it doesn't seem to be problem with memcached, but rather MediaWiki issue. Unfortunately it's quite a lot of PHP code to investigate and I didn't find anything obvious in low level caching interface. So say good bye to variable caching, opcode cache is enough for now and MySQL seems to handle the load quite well.

At my Institute, we get the El Financiero newspaper - I like it quite a bit. It's very well balanced, with opinions from all of the political and economical points of view. Of course, it has huge business and market sections which I don't usually even care on looking at, as I won't understand much anyway. Those sections usually include advertisements for potential courses and businesses.
Today, Nadezhda showed me an ad that's just beautiful - It shows off the level of commitment and seriousness a company has. It is so beautiful that it deserves me copying it in Spanish and translating it for your further enjoyment. Of course, if somebody stumbles upon this advertisement at my personal blog - I don't know them, they might just be serious but clueless :)

GRUPO DE ASESORES PROFESIONALES
CONVOCA
A acad micos, investigadores, intelectuales, economistas y expertos en reformas estructurales para el an lisis de las siguientes:

• Econom a y finanzas
• Educaci n y empleo
• Seguridad y desarrollo social
• Pol tica y Energ a
• Reforma del estado

Para integrarse a un equipo serio y propositivo de Profesionales en estas reas que brinde asesor a puntual sobre las antes descritas.
REQUISITOS: Titulados con Maestr a y/o Doctorado. Contar con publicaciones especializadas.
Interesados enviar CV al correo electr nico:
juan_zzz_at_starmedia_dot_com
juan_3zzz_at_yahoo_dot_com_dot_mx
Bosque de Ciruelos No. 140, piso 12, oficina 1202, col. Bosques de las Lomas

And now, for your further amusement, in my hastily translated English, as faithfully as I can do it.

GROUP OF PROFESSIONAL ADVISORS
INVITES
Academics, researchers, intelectuals, economists and structural reform experts for the analysis of the following areas:

• Economics and finances
• Education and employment
• Social security and development
• Politics and Energy
• State reform

To join a serious and propositive team of Professionals in the above areas that gives punctual advice regarding the aforementioned.
REQUIREMENTS: Holders of a title, with M.Sc. or Ph.D. studies. Having specialized publications.
Interested people, send your CV by email to:
juan_zzz_at_starmedia_dot_com
juan_3zzz_at_yahoo_dot_com_dot_mx
Bosque de Ciruelos No. 140, piso 12, oficina 1202, col. Bosques de las Lomas

Yes, several of the redaction mistakes are in the original text (and several more were introduced due to my English translation, of course).
Anyway... Would you believe in the seriousness of a professional-looking group of economists, paying around US$2000 for 1/4 page in one of the leading Mexican newspapers? By the way, their offices are located at one of Mexico City's most exclusive, expensive areas. But... For $ deity 's sake... COME ON! Please tell juan_zzz to get a decent-looking mail and domain! Having their main contact addresses at two free mail providers, Starmedia and Yahoo, does no service at all to their professional image! How can people still not pay even a bit of attention to those basic details?

A while back I set up a d-i test lab, a kind of automated mechanical computer torture rack, which has been trying (and frequently failing) to automatically install Debian onto a half-dozen varied machines every day for a couple of years. Problem is that hardware sucks, even when it's tucked away in a friend's basement and so not blaring at you with its combined total of 100 fans and 50 disk drives. It has an annoying habit of dying, especially if it's oddball machines for different architectures. Cords have a habit of getting unplugged. It's hard to automate booting from installation media. And so on. A while ago I decided to go virtual. Now, thanks to Dann and Matt and HP, I've gone from this: to this: HP donated hydra, a maxed out 8-way Xeon with 4 (soon 8) disks. The idea is that it can run 7 or so virtual machines, all doing test installs, in parallel. Fast. I'm using kvm for the amd64 and i386 tests. Since Debian has mips and mipsel kernels specially built for running under qemu, I'm able to test the installer for both those arches. Hercules will cover s390, once the kernel gets fixed. This leaves some architectures still todo:

• arm should be supported by qemu, but Debian doesn't yet have a kernel for it. Please, please kernel team, add an arm qemu flavour!
• sparc's qemu support seems very rough. I haven't tried to get it working yet.
• powerpc probably has an emulator I can use. Any suggestions? I need something that can run headless. Qemu would work, if we had an appropriate special kernel for it.
• m68k I have not researched emulators for yet.
• hppa, ia64, and alpha all lack a usable emulator, AFAIK. Luckily I have machines for all of these, so I can pare the physical hardware down to just those 3 boxes.

I also still have to write enough installation test cases to keep this monster machine firing on all 8 cores all day long. It can probably handle around 300-400 installation tests per day. Since hydra has the disk space, and these emulators are generating lots of disk images with Debian pre-installed, I have also set it up to retain the disk images. I imagine that some of these disk images will eventually be useful for devleopment, since it's much easier to boot a disk image rather than sit through a slow qemu install on an arch like mips. I haven't worked out how to make these images publically available yet, but hydra is located on the name network as gluck.debian.org, if anyone wants to get access to them. Update: I also have qemu doing a 'savevm 1' before shutting down, so you can even restore the running system from the disk images. Especially useful if the install failed somewhere in d-i! :-) BTW, I can give out accounts on hydra to any Debian developers who need a fast machine to run kvm/qemu on, or to anyone who is interested in setting up their own installation tests.

I've been using memcached for some time on phpMyAdmin wiki and it seemed to help. But recently the performance went down. I didn't have time to investigate it till today and it turns out to be caused by memcached. When I switch it off, page load time goes from 16 seconds to 0.25 seconds. I tried to search for some similar problems on the net, but I didn't succeed. So for now wiki runs without memcached and I will look at other possibilities of caching later.

subtitle: Break up GnuCash into lots of forks

With an ISP problem throttling my broadband to 4000B/s, I've switched to developing in C instead of building Emdebian packages - downloading Debian sources was taking an hour or more even for small packages.

This has made time for a long overdue project: gpe-cash - double entry accounting for handhelds. It's a spin-off from the stalled cashutil project and it just might provide the impetus to get cashutil into a releasable state.

gpe-cash uses QOF (Query Object Framework) which itself was spun out from GnuCash some years ago when it was described as "the gnucash engine without all the financial stuff". So gpe-cash is a happy reunion of the engine and the financial stuff along with Gtk+, only a lot smaller than GnuCash. Yes, it is a fork but a fork done for, IMHO, very good reasons. (Why write free software and then frown on forked projects?) There's little hope of getting GnuCash to run on any embedded hardware (it would probably end up as a laptop instead of a handheld in the process) so it has to be broken up: forked into a few smaller bits and simply dropping larger bits.

I've long wanted to break up the GnuCash behemoth and this is how this fork will work:

1. Package the basic GnuCash objects as a shared library with -dev, -dbg and -doc


2. Package the GnuCash business objects as another shared library, with ditto.


3. Leave the commodity (stocks and shares) objects for a later date due to QOF compatibility issues with the GnuCash code.


4. Use the pilot-qof Default Currency Table to create a tiny set of gnucash compatible currencies. (Also used by gpe-expenses already.)


5. Share live expense data with gpe-expenses and gpe-cash (prevent duplication)


6. Share contacts and live calendar data with gpe-invoice (calculate invoices)


7. Drop direct file compatibility with GnuCash until GnuCash itself supports a sane backend, a suitable data import or cashutil is fixed, whichever comes soonest.


8. Retain object compatibility with GnuCash at the QOF level - permits removing certain parts of GnuCash specific code from the objects whilst retaining functionality.


9. Drop all reports, graphs, CSV import, QIF import, Scheme and other complexity of GnuCash.


10. Use a simple SQLite backend via QOF.
    

Best laid plans . . . etc. It always ends up a bit different to the plan but you have to have a plan of some kind. (No?, well I do.)

The code is a combination of gpe-expenses and cashutil. It will (eventually) live within the cashutil SVN at SourceForge but I haven't committed the first changeset yet. The basic structures already work, it is tying the C objects to the Gtk that is the bulk of the remaining work.

If anyone is interested in upstream development, subscribe to the (very low volume) QOF-devel mailing list and let me know.