Search Results: "nate"

27 February 2008

Neil Williams: Problems with minicom over USB

Embedded systems (especially bootloaders) need serial connections but many laptops and modern desktops simply do away with the serial port altogether. Up until now, I've kept my previous desktop machine around (which happens to also have a parallel port so acts as the home network print server because I don't have a USB printer either) and then connect to minicom over SSH.
Now, yes, I can configure networking over USB once the device is installed but to actually fix installation problems, I need serial on my other machines. I've got a USB to serial converter, turns out to be a Prolific 2303 chipset (it's the basic one with a cable from Maplins) which is quite well supported.
Now the weird stuff.
My powerpc laptop sees the Prolific chipset and configures a USB device that, initially, minicom complains about - but if I set the port from 'dmesg' (/dev/ttyUSB0) in minicom -s, it works. Well, almost. I can see the output of the device but no keyboard strokes are passed on to the board which means it's almost workable whilst still being completely useless.
My problematic HP laptop accepts the Prolific chipset but does not configure a USB device node. Without a device node, minicom just fails.
Bah.
This HP laptop is still causing me grief. USB seems to fail after hibernation and only works at all if irqfixup is added to the kernel boot parameters. With irqfixup, the laptop randomly hangs. I almost need to setup parallel configs in grub of "run USB but don't hibernate" and "run for more than 1 hour" as mutually exclusive. Oh, and the external monitor connection used for presentations is only seen if the projector is connected during a reboot of the HP laptop.
Bah x 3.

Russell Coker: Redirecting Output from a Running Process

Someone asked on a mailing list how to redirect output from a running process. They had a program which had been running for a long period of time without having stdout redirected to a file. They wanted to logout (to move the laptop that was used for the ssh session) but not kill the process (or lose output). Most responses were of the form “you should have used screen or nohup” which is all very well if you had planned to logout and leave it running (or even planned to have it run for a long time). Fortunately it is quite possible to redirect output of a running process. I will use cat as a trivial example but the same technique will work for most programs that do simple IO (of course programs that do terminal IO may be more tricky - but you could always redirect from the tty device of a ssh session to the tty device of a screen session). Firstly I run the command “cat > foo1” in one session and test that data from stdin is copied to the file. Then in another session I redirect the output: Firstly find the PID of the process:
$ ps aux grep cat
rjc 6760 0.0 0.0 1580 376 pts/5 S+ 15:31 0:00 cat Now check the file handles it has open:
$ ls -l /proc/6760/fd
total 3
lrwx—— 1 rjc rjc 64 Feb 27 15:32 0 -> /dev/pts/5
l-wx—— 1 rjc rjc 64 Feb 27 15:32 1 -> /tmp/foo1
lrwx—— 1 rjc rjc 64 Feb 27 15:32 2 -> /dev/pts/5 Now run GDB:
$ gdb -p 6760 /bin/cat
GNU gdb 6.4.90-debian
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc
[lots more license stuff snipped]
Attaching to program: /bin/cat, process 6760
[snip other stuff that’s not interesting now]
(gdb) p close(1)
$1 = 0
(gdb) p creat(”/tmp/foo3″, 0600)
$2 = 1
(gdb) q
The program is running. Quit anyway (and detach it)? (y or n) y
Detaching from program: /bin/cat, process 6760 The “p” command in GDB will print the value of an expression, an expression can be a function to call, it can be a system call… So I execute a close() system call and pass file handle 1, then I execute a creat() system call to open a new file. The result of the creat() was 1 which means that it replaced the previous file handle. If I wanted to use the same file for stdout and stderr or if I wanted to replace a file handle with some other number then I would need to call the dup2() system call to achieve that result. For this example I chose to use creat() instead of open() because there are fewer parameter. The C macros for the flags are not usable from GDB (it doesn’t use C headers) so I would have to read header files to discover this - it’s not that hard to do so but would take more time. Note that 0600 is the octal permission for the owner having read/write access and the group and others having no access. It would also work to use 0 for that parameter and run chmod on the file later on. After that I verify the result:
ls -l /proc/6760/fd/
total 3
lrwx—— 1 rjc rjc 64 2008-02-27 15:32 0 -> /dev/pts/5
l-wx—— 1 rjc rjc 64 2008-02-27 15:32 1 -> /tmp/foo3 <====
lrwx—— 1 rjc rjc 64 2008-02-27 15:32 2 -> /dev/pts/5 Typing more data in to cat results in the file /tmp/foo3 being appended to. Update: If you want to close the original session you need to close all file handles for it, open a new device that can be the controlling tty, and then call setsid().

26 February 2008

Vincent Fourmond: Today's dirty command-line trick: progress statistics for dd

Who has already been using dd for endless data transfer without really knowing what is happening ? That is rather annoying. Sure, when the target is a normal file, you can always use

watch ls -l target

But, that won't tell you the rate of transfer, and it won't work if the target is a special file (device, pipe, ...). Fortunately, dd accepts the USR1 signal to print out some small statistics... Well, combining that with the watch tricks gives this:

watch killall -USR1 dd

And there you go, dd is now regularly printing out statistics. Pretty neat, isn't it ?

Ondřej Čertík: XFS is 20x slower than ext3 (with default settings)

Is XFS that bad? Well, at least with default settings, XFS on Debian seems to be blown away by ext3 completely in terms of speed. I don't mind 1.5x slowdown, maybe even 2x, but 20x is a show stopper. I am already using ext3 for any pbuilder builds, because it's a difference to wait for 30s with XFS, compared to 3s with ext3 to extract the base image. And I'll probably switch to ext3 completely, unless someone finds a way how to fix this.

I recently got burned by this when running Sage on my computer, because it compiles a lot of Python files when started for the first time. Normally it should take roughly 15s, but instead it took 6 minutes on my comp and then it triggered a so far undiscovered bug in Sage, that I reported.

Michael Abshoff, the release manager of Sage, suggested that something is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond Any Recognition) on my shiny Debian amd64 sid system running on Intel Core Quad, so I said no way, because I really care about this machine, as I use it for larger finite elements calculations and other stuff (like compiling huge deb packages in parallel, like paraview).

So I offered a bet, that I give him an access to this compter, he finds the problem and if it's a problem in my Debian configuration, I'll write to this blog that I am lame, while if it's a problem in Sage, he will write to his blog that he is lame. And I was smiling to myself, how good I am and that I will have some fun too reading planet.sagemath.org with the top post from Michael saying that he is lame.

But then I remembered my old struggle with cowbuilder and XFS and I stopped smiling. See e.g. this wiki I created half a year ago. Something is FUBAR with XFS and Debian. I also asked on the Czech server Root, that is famous for having a lot of experts willing to share their knowledge, and it was quickly revealed, that the problem is with the "nobarrier" option of XFS (my post is here, but it's in Czech).

First, on that amd64 machine, the above problem was fixed after issuing this command:


mount -o remount,rw,nobarrier /dev/sda3 /home/

(notice the "nobarrier" option). You can read some background behind this on the lkml list. Unfortunately, I also have my laptop, and there I already use this "nobarrier" option, and it doesn't help at all. I just created a new ext3 partition and verified that on my laptop, ext3 is around 10x faster than XFS with nobarrier (that was supposed to fix this). I use the latest 2.6.24 kernel from unstable on both.

Time to move from XFS to ext3 on my laptop? Seems like that. I'll leave XFS on the other machine, because I know some other peole have good experience with XFS and the "nobarrier" option seems to fix the problem there.

But as to the bet, yeah, I am lame and I should still learn a lot from Michael. :)

24 February 2008

Wouter Verhelst: FOSDEM, day two

This is no doubt one of the best FOSDEMs, ever. At least to me it was, and I've been to every FOSDEM, and to the second day of the original OSDEM as well. Great weather, great people, great talks, and great fun. What more can one want? Where I had to nag about a few things yesterday, today I can only feel exhausted, but happy. Some loose ends:

Apparently someone forgot a camera in the Debian Developer's room; this is a Kodak EasyShare ZD710. If you're quick, you may be able to still get it at the info desk; otherwise, contact either me or "Chipzz" on the Freenode network (perhaps in the #fosdem channel). If you're still in Belgium, we may arrange for you to pick it up, otherwise we'll have to send it to you.
Thijs said it after the last talk in the Debian devroom, but let me repeat it here: if you have comments about the Debian presence at FOSDEM (and I mean about any subject, really), just let me know. This was a great FOSDEM already, but there's always room for improvement. Oh, and yes, we need a bigger devroom, and the FOSDEM people know this, and they can't really help us but they'll do what they can. Unfortunately "too many people" is a general problem at FOSDEM.

See you next year!

Sam Hocevar: Bits from the DPL: FTP assistants, marketing team, init scripts, elections

Hello, dear developers. I suppose many of you are currently at FOSDEM, but unfortunately I could not attend the event this year. Here are some news for you anyway! FTP assistants I am very pleased to let you know that yesterday Peter Palfrader (weasel) added Kalle Kivimaa (killer) and Thomas Viehmann (tviehmann) to the list of FTP assistants. I still hope that more people can be added soon to this team, but this is definitely good news. Marketing team At the various conferences I attended I have paid much attention to how other distributions and FOSS projects were promoting their work, and despite us often having t-shirts, stickers and posters like the others, we really miss a few things which would make Debian as appealing as other, dynamic projects. I would like to set up a Debian Marketing Team, whose work would be to organise all the promotional stuff (logos, t-shirt designs, wallpapers, etc.) so that the project can officially endorse good designs, and to make the ultimate decision on visual stuff such as CD covers, splash screens, etc. This team would have official DPL delegation, but I hope that it can also work with non-Debian-developers, as many packaging teams already do, because the non-DDs know better than us how to draw people to Debian. So please let me know if you are interested, even if you are not a DD, and especially if you are not a programmer! I also would like to spend some Debian money on a contest, similar to the FreeBSD logo contest, to create a friendly mascot for the Debian project (in a similar way to the Linux penguin or the GNU gnu) that we can use where the logo is not enough. More on this in a few days. Development news Last month Petter Reinholdtsen (pere) gave some news about his project of improving the init system. This is almost as simple as adding LSB headers to your init scripts, and work is advancing towards this goal, though not as quickly as desirable. If your packages have init scripts, or if you wish to help, I urge you to have a look at the proposal so that we can have it in Lenny. DPL elections The new DPL term is in almost 2 months, but campaign starts next month. I have already stated that I would not run again, and haven't changed my mind. As many, many Debian developers are attending FOSDEM, I hope you can use some real-life meeting time to discuss the people you think would make good DPLs and tell them. Maybe they haven't thought of running (or re-running). Being DPL does have an impact on your real life. If you are still wondering whether to run, or have any personal questions, feel free to ask me, I'll gladly share my experience.

23 February 2008

Wouter Verhelst: FOSDEM 2008: Day one

Day one of FOSDEM 2008 has now ended, and almost everything seems to have gone fine from my end. Note, "fine" is not "perfect"; there were some issues.

Unfortunately, Lars fell ill, and couldn't make it. Shame; I was actually looking forward to meeting him again. Fortunately, Frans Pop offered to hold a replacement talk, and that talk went well, given the low amount of time he had to prepare it.
The Debian developer's room is now really too small. Last year, we were having issues with the room being too full to accomodate new attendees, but this was very much dependent on the actual talk going on; the room couldn't accomodate the audience for all the most popular talks, but in general there were no issues. In contrast, this year around I haven't yet seen the room not being too small.
The security staff sucks. Again, they kicked us out of the DevRoom before the agreed-upon time of 19:00. I'll need to remember that for next year, and not try to assign talks until the very last moment; perhaps stop by 18:45 or so...
The idea to let my hair grow to prove to Nattie that it's ugly that way seems to have failed to meet its purpose. Darn. This is the last time I'll come up with such a lousy excuse for allowing my hair to grow.
I've been slacking with things, and not following up on stuff people sent me mails about. As a result, I needed to fix some things at the last minute while the event was already underway. Silly me. Most things worked out nicely, however; and the booth—I think I shouldn't bother to make up a schedule anymore next year.

Nothing spectacularly problematic; and as for the last item, that can be easily fixed by introducing fresh blood in organizing the Debian side of FOSDEM next year. Not that I want to stop being involved, but at least not being the only one responsible might be sensible. Other than that, no real issues, really. Well, except for one; I was so backlogged with everything that I had to postpone finishing my slides 'till the very last moment—half an hour ago. Ugh. But, well. Great FOSDEM!

22 February 2008

Russell Coker: Watching While Waiting

Over the past four years every visit to a doctor or hospital has involved some time spent in a waiting room, in the case of hospital visits it has often been more than an hour waiting. Each of those waiting rooms has had a selection of bad magazines and a TV. If I ever visit a hospital after 8PM then I might have a chance of seeing something that I want to watch on TV, but otherwise it’s all awful. Fortunately there are better things that they could do. It would not be difficult to get a basic PC and install all the content from ted.com (and possibly other sites with quality free content) and have some sort of video juke-box program running. TED not only has lectures about arts and science but also performances by musicians and dancers. The chance that a random person can find something they enjoy in TED’s archives seems significantly greater than the chance of finding something worth watching in the daytime-soap TV segment. But TED is far from the only option available, there are quite a number of free video sites and the ones that include advertising in the video stream would probably be more than happy to have their content copied on to juke boxes.

21 February 2008

David Nusinow: Two Fun Things

1. After several years of it sitting on my shelf, I finally read Kernighan and Pike's "The Practice of Programming". I was always a little intimidated by this slender little book. I felt like it was full of wisdom that I couldn't really absorb at the right pace. Now that I've spent some time working on more challenging code and trying to come to grips with at the least the basics of more advanced computing concepts it was the right time to read it. I can't recommend it highly enough, it really is packed with wisdom. I've got Kernighan's "Software Tools" on the way, and I'll post a proper review of this at some point since it's not as well known.

2. I decided to spend a little bit of time poking at the almost-but-not-quite-dead language Dylan. I'd remembered being curious about this language back from when I was a serious Mac child in the mid 90's, since Apple was hinting that it would be the future. While the Gwydion Dylan implementation was removed from Debian, there's binaries for both it and the OpenDylan implementation that can be downloaded and run on both Sid and Ubuntu.

What I can grasp of the language is interesting. It's sorta like what little I know of scheme, except that it's got an object system that is apparently like CLOS from Common LISP, which I also don't know. Most notably though, is that even though Dylan is considered a LISP it doesn't look like one at all. There's no parentheses except what you'd expect, and things are infix rather than prefix, so it looks more like algol-derived languages like C. It's strikingly easy to read, and while the object system is very different from C++-style, it's fairly easy to grasp because it relies on familiar concepts like multiple dispatch to work. It's optionally typed, which is something I've been after (give me safety when I want it, but don't force me!) and provides all sorts of cool things like closures. Additionally, it does allow hygienic macros, which are apparently LISP's claim to power and fame, although I don't understand such things yet even in Dylan. Despite all this, the language appears to be relatively simple, which seems nice. It seems to be a very well designed language that was allowed to languish in obscurity because Apple abandoned it*.

Unfortunately the implementations aren't really all there yet. I ran in to obscure compiler bugs in gwydion writing something as simple as quicksort, and gwydion doesn't really have much of a standard library yet, although it can apparently bind to C quite well and fairly easily (this is something I haven't tried). In addition, there's OpenDylan, which is even less there on Linux, because it was an opened commercial compiler (derived from the original Apple one I believe) and it's had fewer people working on it. It seems to have a very large library, but documentation is sparse on it and I haven't had any time to really go after it. I've really been using gwydion exclusively, although I'd love to see OpenDylan get up to speed. While I have no time to really work on anything outside of X right now, this seems like a good language that deserves some attention.

* This is a familiar story to all of us who lived through Apple's mid-90's

MJ Ray: The Myth Of Deregulation

Russ Nelson: The Influence of Government writes:

"Larry Lessig proposes to lessen the influence of money on legislators. Unfortunately for him, he is trying to hide a symptom without curing the disease. The disease is that governments regulate businesses. The symptom is that businesses then have a profit motive in regulating governments. If you want a government which is free of corruption, you have to eliminate the motive for corrupting them."

which looks like utter bovine excrement to me. Corporations - and the overpowering profit motive of some corporations - are artificial things, created purely by regulations. If you free corporations from all regulations, you destroy them. If you only free them from taxes, you remove some of the few restraints on their bad behaviour in pursuit of profit. See Joel Bakan: The Corporation for a better approach. In summary:-

Relegislate. Base regulations on the precautionary principle for environmental, health and safety issues;
Set realistic enforcement agency staffing levels and punishments;
Involve local elected representatives in more of the regulatory system;
Protect and enhance the role of trade unions and civil society in advising regulators.

Some of those may seem surprising, but if you read the book, you'll see why those conclusions make sense.

MJ Ray: Finance & Business / Where would you shop ethically?

Where would you shop ethically? It's a simple question, but is there a simple answer?

Tescos systematically dominate small traders, as might happen again in Mill Road Cambridge. Sainsburys are currently trying to remove delivery time restrictions in Worle which is just going to disrupt and devalue neighbouring homes.

It's very hard to avoid supermarkets and the leaders in ethical supermarkets are probably the Cooperative Food stores and M+S (with their Plan A) but you probably can't get a full shop from them, at least in Weston. Would you accept missing a few items (and maybe buying them elsewhere or online), or would you pick one of the others?

Or is all this ethical consumerism stuff nonsense for some reason anyway?

Russell Coker: Athlon Memory Problems

I had an old Compaq Athlon 1GHz system that seemed to be broken. It would display random things on the screen from the BIOS and fail the boot, it looked like a motherboard problem. Fortunately before I gave it away (I give away all my broken machines to members of my local LUG who want spare parts) I remembered that the machine uses main memory for video. I removed and reinstalled one of the DIMMs and it then worked perfectly, presumably it was making a poor contact. The next task was to put it back in service, I had a bunch of spare RAM and I decided to upgrade it to 768M (it previously had 384M). With the new RAM it would fail to boot, sometimes it would give a kernel message “soft lockup detected“, and sometimes it would just hang. The hangs typically occurred when running the initramfs (the first non-kernel code). I tested this with a Fedora install (what the machine used to run when it had 384M), a Debian install (the aim was to use a hard drive with Debian installed for the new purpose of the machine), and with CentOS and Debian installation CDs. The CentOS and Debian installation CDs got a little further but still crashed. Memtest86+ however reported all the RAM as good. I then tried reducing the RAM to 256M which worked perfectly. It seemed that increasing RAM above 384M would cause the problem. The next thing I tried was the mem= kernel option. As a first experiment I tried mem=400m which worked perfectly. I then tried mem=759m which allowed the boot process to proceed a little further but it still crashed. The system supposedly has 760M available (8M used for video). Further testing revealed that mem=750m seemed to work well. Being cautious (and not short of RAM) I have configured the machine to use mem=740m, and it is now working well.

20 February 2008

Vincent Fourmond: pdfnup and page size

I use a combination of pdftk and pdfnup, from the pdfjam package to arrange (PDF) graphs produced by ctioga into an array for printing. However, I find that a simple

pdfnup --nup 3x3 concatenated_graphs.pdf

does not produce an A4 output (even with --paper a4paper), but a PDF who has the same size as individual graphs. Painful. It did take me long to realize it is a feature of pdfnup, who asks pdfTeX to have the paper size adjusted to that of the input when the layout is symmetric and no orientation has been provided. To disable that, and get a real A4 paper, specify the orientation:

pdfnup --orient portrait --nup 3x3 concatenated_graphs.pdf

Wouter Verhelst: FOSDEM keysigning party: list created

This morning, right before leaving for work and somewhat in a hurry, I created the list of keys for the FOSDEM '08 GPG key signing party. You'll find it at the keysigning website. Unfortunately, I fucked up a bit in that I forgot to check my mailbox. Apparently the key server was down for most of tuesday, and I didn't notice. Some people tried to send their keys, but couldn't. Also, the mail wasn't double-checked carefully enough. Grmbl. Next time, I'll try not to forget to do such things when I actually planned them—in the evening. Anyway; if your key has been received in time by the keyserver, you should have received an email this morning, and you should be in the list that I linked to, above. If you weren't then all is not lost; if you really want to participate, print out key fingerprint slips, and bring them to the party. This is not as efficient, and some people may choose not to accept such fingerprint slips, but at least you'll be able to get some signatures. If you didn't make it because the key server was down last night, I apologise (but then again, waiting for the last moment to participate isn't very smart...). Please also note that we only have two hours, and the list contains 202 people. As such, it may be the case that we won't be able to finish the entire key signing party; it may be the case that we'll have to cut it short. In any case, you will be able to sign a significant amount of keys, and a significant amount of people will be able to sign yours, so that should be good enough -- and you can do the rest next year, or so...

19 February 2008

John Goerzen: Registrar Dynadot Conspires to Help Take Down Wikileaks?

Yesterday, Wired ran a story on the Cayman Islands bank that got Wikileaks.org blocked. This story said, in part:

When the bank's lawyers indicated they would be filing a suit, she asked them to tell her where so that Wikileaks could find an attorney in the appropriate jurisdiction to represent it. She says the lawyers refused to tell her. Two and a half weeks later, the bank filed a restraining order against Dynadot and Wikileaks in San Francisco. Wikileaks received notice only a few hours before the case went to a judge who accepted the agreement between Dynadot and the bank.

(emphasis mine)

Now, Dynadot and this Cayman Islands bank apparently had an agreement to block wikileaks.org already. Not only did Dynadot effectively take wikileaks.org down, but also they "lock(ed) the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar." The U.S. Disctrict Court for Northern California issued this injunction without ever giving Wikileaks a chance to respond. The bank only filed the request against Dynadot. Apparently Wikileaks received notification that this was going to happen only 6 hours before the hearing (an incredibly short time in legal terms), nowhere near enough time to prepare a case.

Now, the reason I post this is because I have looked at Dynadot as a registrar before. They have good prices and a whois privacy service that makes sense: where you remain the owner of record, making it easier if you need to transfer the domain or prove your ownership of it.

But before signing up, I read their AUP carefully. Among many alarming things, I noticed this paragraph:

You further agree that Dynadot, in its sole discretion and without liability to You for any resulting loss or damages, may take immediate corrective action, including, but not limited to, removal of all or a portion of Your domain services and/or deletion, suspension, cancellation, termination, or other interruption of domain services or Your customer account with Dynadot, at any time during the term of this Agreement, in the event of notice of any possible violation of this Agreement by You or Your end users, or if such service or account is used in association with morally objectionable activities, or for any reason whatsoever. In such cases, any and all fees paid to Dynadot will be non-refundable and ineligible for account credit.

So, I thought I would write to them about it. Here is an excerpt from their response:

We always conduct an investigation before taking action against a domain. We will give you a chance to respond to the complaints.

From Wired's story, it doesn't look like that really happened. The US Government has already issued advisories about Cayman Islands banks, and it is unclear (to me at least) what law Wikileaks broke, or how Dynadot could find their actions of exposing fraud "morally objectionable". What's more, collaborating with the bank to get a takedown order written, but not talking to Wikileaks, seems to go against their statements to me (assuming again that the Wired story is accurate).
Here is my entire mail. You may also find archive.org's copy of the AUP from last July to be helpful. (I wrote the email in November, and they've added some sections since then, so the section numbers don't necessarily match up)

Subject: Re: SITE: Questions about your AUP

From: Dynadot Info <info@dynadot.com>

Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 13:42 -0800

To: jgoerzen@complete.org

Hello,
Thank you for your email. Responses are below.
Best Regards,
Dynadot Staff
--------------------------------------------------
DYNADOT... $8.99 domain names... $1/mo. web hosting
http://www.dynadot.com

Hi,
I currently have several domains being hosted with Gandi.  I have long been looking for someone that can provide a level of privacy for my whois data in a sane way.  I think Dynadot is the first I've seen that looks like it can do that and still be affordable.
In preparation to transfer over a first test domain, I read your AUP and frankly am quite troubled by what I saw.  I hope that you can allay my fears.
In section 4 of part 2, the last paragraph states that Dynadot "for any reason whatsoever" may delete, cancel, or terminate my domain services or customer account.  It also lists "notice of possible violation" as a justification for that.  That makes me even more nervous -- any random person could send you an email claiming something nefarious is happing with my domain name, and I'm agreeing to just let you delete it because of that?


We always conduct an investigation before taking action against a domain. We will give you a chance to respond to the complaints.

A very similar clause appears in section 7 of part 1 ("cancellation of services").  It goes on to cast a very broad net around objectionable material and says that Dynadot decides what's objectionable.  Now, if you go to my website at www.complete.org or blog at changelog.complete.org, you'll see I'm an upstanding netizen.  But the AUP says that things that "are designed to or effectively... embarrass" third parties could get my domain cancelled.  So if I post a review of Vista that says I think Microsoft did a poor job of engineering, would my account be yanked if one of their engineers complained?  What if I (legally!) linked to a Comedy Central sketch using real TV footage to mock George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton?


The cases you described above would never happen with us. Complaining about Microsoft or making fun of George Bush are protected free speech. The service agreement is designed to give us some flexibility in dealing with customers that break the law.

I'm particularly concerned about this because apparently DynaDot felt it worthwhile to try to take down the website of someone that found a security hole: http://www.jhuskisson.com/friends/dynadot-fights-back-bans-nick-from-everything
While I wouldn't condone step-by-step cracking instructions in most cases, this is concerning to me.


He was posting a step by step guide to hacking our website, which is illegal. The hack did not work, but we noticed an upsurge in strange activity in our logs, so we requested the hacking guide be taken down.

Finally, item (i) under the Domain Privacy Service section says that you could immediately reveal all my information upon the receipt of merely a *claim* (not even a court order), even if it's invalid.  But I thought that NOT doing this was what you were saying made your service better, over at http://www.dynadot.com/resource/article/qa.html?aid=0


Once again we need to build some flexibility into our service agreement to deal with people who use their domains for criminal activity. Otherwise we could be liable for the damages that they cause to others. So far, we have never dropped anyones privacy except in the few cases we were forced to by a FBI subpoena.

I know this is a long message, and I appreciate your time.  I really do want to use your service, but -- no offense intended -- I want to make sure I'm not dealing with scammers first, and from reading the AUP, I'm not so sure!


No offence taken. I will email our counsel to see if we can tighten up the agreement a bit.

-- John Goerzen

18 February 2008

Wouter Verhelst: ID cards, followup

I should've known that posting something about ID cards would spark a number of reactions. In fact, I did—which is one of the reasons why I posted that; nothing like a bit of discussion every once in a while. Brian M. Carlson writes:
The difference between the US and Belgium, for example, is that Belgium has comprehensive privacy legislation.
Well, yes. Obviously, ID cards require some privacy legislation in order to prevent abuse of said cards. In Belgium, only the police is allowed to require me to show them my ID card; everyone else can ask, but I can tell them to go screw themselves. Of course they can then also refuse to provide me with a given service, but I may be able to sufficiently prove my ID with other means. The point is, whether or not a designated ID card exists does not impact the need for privacy legislation; if you want to protect your privacy, you need such legislation anyway, ID or no ID. The fact that you don't have an ID card does not mean in any way that people can't ask you to prove your ID; and the existence of an ID card does not mean that all of a sudden all other ways for me to prove my ID are null and void. "Anonymous" writes:
You seem to take as a given that we need an official government-issued ID card, and from there you draw the fairly reasonable conclusion that if we need one it ought to exist separately from a driver's license. I agree that your assumption leads to your conclusion, but I disagree with your assumption.
Well, no, I do not assume that we need an official government-issued ID card. I know we do. That's not to say we need government-issued ID in all cases where we need to provide proof of ID; but when we do, there should be a way that does not overload some document into something which it was never intended to be. "bignose" writes:
You miss the main complaint of a national ID card system: that it would be *mandatory* for a person who wishes to operate in the country. That's the important part that is not true for a driver's license: not having a driver's license does not make the person an unperson.
It is not necessary for me to have an ID card to "operate" in Belgium. There are a few things where the ID card is indeed required; e.g., the last time I personally had to use my ID card was during the last elections. If I would have had an encounter with the police in that time, they could have asked for it, too; but that didn't happen. Also, when doing my tax declaration online, I used the electronic keys on the ID card, so that I could only update my tax declaration—and not, say, my neighbour's. But that's only doable when you have an electronic ID card system, which is not necessarily a good idea (in contrast to plain old paper ID cards, I do have privacy concerns with electronic versions—details on request) Of course, the fact that I can "operate" in Belgium without the use of an ID card does not mean it is legal for me to walk around without one; but that is not entirely the same thing. There were some more comments to my previous blog post, but I don't disagree with those.

17 February 2008

Martin F. Krafft: How long will this last?

At Melbourne Tullamarine airport today, I was asked to present the credit card used to book my flights as a security measure to be able to fly Bangkok-Zurich. I did not need the card for the Melbourne-Bangkok leg. Unfortunately, I left the card at home for various reasons. In the end, they just issued both boarding passes anyway. I was not allowed to take the throw-away wooden chopsticks that came with my Pad Thai lunch through the security checkpoint. For dinner on the airplane to Bangkok, we were given plastic knives and metal forks. For dinner on the second trip, we got metal knives. At Bangkok airport, I had to pass a security checkpoint changing planes. They confiscated the plastic water bottle which was given to me on the flight from Melbourne (the bottle said Thai airlines on the label). The lady in front of me was using one of those telescopic walking sticks, she apparently had a bad leg. They didn t even bother asking about the stick, which she ran through the x-ray. Terrorists don t have bad legs, nor know how to pretend. How long are we going to put up with this bullshit? NP: The Flower Kings: Stardust We Are

16 February 2008

Ben Armstrong: Bits from the Debian Eee PC team

In the past few months in the Debian-EeePC team, a number of interesting things have been happening. Progress has been made to ensure the Eee’s drivers get merged upstream. Chris Snook from Red Hat has taken over atl2 upstream and has started merging it with the atl1 driver to make a unified atlx driver that will be suitable for inclusion in the kernel. As well, there is continued progress on the madwifi driver, with a patch now included to support version 2.6.24 of the Linux kernel. In the meantime, the Debian Eee PC Install HowTo has been under constant revision, even gaining recently the beginnings of translations in French and German. ACPI, another important piece of infrastructure for the Eee, is now supported in lenny and sid through Eric Cooper’s eeepc-acpi kernel module. This is a fork of the asus-acpi module renamed so that it won’t conflict with the in-tree version. It turns out that asus-acpi is deprecated, having been replaced by asus-laptop. Eric has been in touch with the asus-laptop maintainer to ensure the Eee-specific bits are merged so that we can eventually retire our forked version. There still remains at the top of our Todo list the issue of ACPI scripts to go with the kernel module. Having at first considered patching acpi-support, we have decided instead to start with Eric’s own scripts which will be packaged shortly for Debian. This gives us more freedom to tinker before considering submitting patches to more general laptop support packages like acpi-support. Finally, after Brendan M. had to send his Eee back to Asus for repairs, work stopped for a while on the custom debian-eeepc installer. Fortunately, he just got his system back from the shop as good as new and has returned with renewed vigor to that task. He has produced a new version of the installer which we are now testing. Thanks to the efforts of numerous users and developers who are being added to our ranks daily, we expect by the time Lenny releases we will be well on our way to providing a pure Debian solution for the Eee. Whether or not everything needed for the Eee is in Lenny at that time remains to be seen. We need to allow for how long it takes to get new drivers into the kernel. But if we miss the release, we will certainly provide backports and look forward to full support in the following release.

Bastian Venthur: Good Python IDE

Philipp asked for a good Python IDE. I’d recommend Pydev, which is a plugin for Eclipse and works really well. I use it exclusively when coding in Python, and I’m very happy with it. Unfortunately the eclipse version in unstable is not the current one, so you can’t use the latest Pydev version, but even the latest one which is working with eclipse 3.2.x works well enough.

15 February 2008

Andrew Pollock: [life] Worst. Recovery. Ever.

I wonder if things could go any worse if we actively tried? So despite going back to see the cardiologist on Monday afternoon, concerned about there possibly being still some sort of infection, and being told there wasn't, on Thursday morning, the top part of the incision was looking swollen. It looked even more so by the evening when I got home from work, and Sarah emailed a photo to the cardiologist, and he agreed it didn't look too crash hot, so he phoned a prescription for another, longer course of antibiotics through to the pharmacy, but too late to get filled last night. By bedtime it was looking even more ready to blow, and sure enough, around 1am (it's always 1am) it erupted everywhere. Fortunately (for me), I missed all the gory details, but I think there was a fair bit of fluid built up in there. So we went back to the clinic this morning, and they decided that they needed to open up part of the incision to let it drain and heal properly. They took another swab to run another culture, and then got a physician's assistant to take to her with a scalpel. I've seen my poor wife go through too many painful things in the last six months. Today's was no better. Most of the problem was the local anaesthetic injections, but watching them open up the incision again wasn't much fun either. No one should have to go through as much shit in a short time as what Sarah has had to. It's just not fair. She now has a gaping hole in her chest with some gauze packed in it, which has to be changed twice a day (by lucky old me). The idea is to let it heal from the bottom up, rather than the top down, as it seems an abscess had formed in the wound, and that was were all the trouble was. So by leaving it all open, it can drain properly, and heal from the bottom up. $DEITY only knows what sort of mess it's going to make of the incision area, but we can deal with that later. They reckon it'll take another 4-6 weeks to heal. I'm really hoping now that with it draining, and another course of antibiotics, Sarah will be in much less pain. I just did the evening gauze change. Fun. The opening in the incision is longer than I remembered them making this morning. It's about an inch long, and a centimetre deep, and there's a small hole in the bottom that presumably leads to the "interior". It's not as bad looking as I thought it might be. Packing the gauze in didn't seem to hurt Sarah too much, which is just as well. This really is the pits. I really hope this is the end of this, and the infection goes away for good, and the incision heals quickly. In terms of recovery, this is a pretty major setback in my opinion. From now on, we won't be relying on the cardiologist for surgical opinions, we'll be insisting a member of the surgical team checks Sarah out.

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