Search Results: "nate"

2 February 2008

Joerg Jaspert: DebConf8 Call for papers and registration opened

Finally I was able to open the registration for DebConf8 and send the Call for Papers. For the full details please read the whole mail. We had a lot of work in the last few weeks to make this possible, as we set us the goal “We will keep all data entered last year, people won’t have to enter that again”. And we made it! It wasn’t all that easy to do, as we switched from the old 0.2.10 version of Pentabarf to the more recent, completly rewritten 0.3.9 release of it. Which had a completly new database schema, making the database upgrade a fun task, having had a lot of changes for our own data… After Mark and Stephen finished the database it was my task to get all the changes to the interface back which we had done. Which took about a week longer than I expected it, unfortunately delaying the CfP about 4 days. But hey, the new code is way better now. The actual difference between us and plain upstream is about 30% of that with 0.2.10. Which is nice. Of course we still miss a few things, but those aren’t important for the CfP and will be readded soon. Some of those features also will be sent (and most possibly merged) upstream. A big thanks go to Mark (mhy) Hymers and Stephen (sgran) Gran who did the database upgrade (keeping all our own data in it!) and to upstream who did help me out multiple times to get this running. (Yes, this stuff is also the reason why NEW got that huge again. No worries, I will fix that this weekend, shouldn’t take more than one or two “NEW-sessions”).

Adeodato Sim : Markdown links with newlines in the anchor text

Links in Markdown can be done in a couple ways. First, similarly to HTML links, where you place the link next to the anchor text, like this: 
  I am a [Debian](http://www.debian.org) Developer.
Or, if you feel this clutters your paragraphs too much, you can choose an alternate syntax, which I prefer (particulary handy for very long links): 
  I am a [Debian][] Developer. Bla bla bla...
    [debian]: http://www.debian.org
There is however a gotcha with this alternate syntax, namely, anchor text with spaces in them. This works fine: 
  I study Computer Science in [this University][].
    [this University]: http://www.ua.es
But this does not: 
  Some years ago, I started studying Computer Science in [this
  University][]. Bla bla bla...
    [this University]: http://www.ua.es
This actually happens quite a lot when formatting the paragraphs in the editor, which made this otherwise-pleasant syntax almost a no-go for me. (Well, to be honest you could use it like this, but still: 
  Some years ago, I started studying Computer Science in [this
  University][uni]. Bla bla bla...
    [uni]: http://www.ua.es
)
There is a beta version of Markdown in experimental that almost fixes the problem. This version introduces a new but similar syntax for links: you can omit the second pair of empty brackets. And when using that newer syntax, there is code in the program to change newlines into a space when looking for the link definition. It is not applied to the code path of the old syntax, though, which is a pity. This is all explained in bug #459885, with a patch as well (that applies both to 1.0.1 and 1.0.2). You can find packages with that patch applied here.

1 February 2008

Ian Wienand: Compare and Swap with PIC

Our Dear Leader Sam Hocevar has previously blogged about PIC and inline ASM. Today I came across a sort of extension to this problem. Consider the following code, which implements a double word compare and swap using the x86 cmpxchg8b instruction (for a bonus you can lock it to make it atomic). 
#include <stdio.h>
typedef struct double_word_t  
	int a;
	int b;
  double_word;
/* atomically compare old and mem, if they are the same then copy new
   back to mem */
int compare_and_swap(double_word *mem,
		     double_word old,
		     double_word new)  
	char result;
	__asm__ __volatile__("lock; cmpxchg8b %0; setz %1;"
			     : "=m"(*mem), "=q"(result)
			     : "m"(*mem), "d" (old.b), "a" (old.a),
			       "c" (new.b), "b" (new.a)
			     : "memory");
	return (int)result;
 
int main(void)
 
	double_word w =  .a = 0, .b = 0 ;
	double_word old =  .a = 17, .b = 42 ;
	double_word new =  .a = 12, .b = 13 ;
	/* old != w, therefore nothing happens */
	compare_and_swap(&w, old, new);
	printf("Should fail -> (%d,%d)\n", w.a, w.b);
	/* old == w, therefore w = new */
	old.a = 0; old.b = 0;
	compare_and_swap(&w, old, new);
	printf("Should work  -> (%d,%d)\n", w.a, w.b);
	return 0;
This type of CAS can be used to implement lock-free algorithms (I've previously blogged about that sort of thing). The problem is that the cmpxchg8b uses the ebx register, i.e. pseudo code looks like: 
if(EDX:EAX == Destination)  
    ZF = 1;
    Destination = ECX:EBX;
 
else  
    ZF = 0;
    EDX:EAX = Destination;
PIC code reserves ebx for internal use, so if you try to compile that with -fPIC you will get an error about not being able to allocate ebx. A first attempt to create a PIC friendly version would simply save and restore ebx and not gcc anything about it, something like: 
  __asm__ __volatile__("pushl %%ebx;"   /* save ebx used for PIC GOT ptr */
		       "movl %6,%%ebx;" /* move new_val2 to %ebx */
		       "lock; cmpxchg8b %0; setz %1;"
		       "pop %%ebx;"     /* restore %ebx */
	    	       : "=m"(*mem), "=q"(result)
		       : "m"(*mem), "d" (old.b), "a" (old.a),
		         "c" (new.b), "m" (new.a) : "memory");
Unfortunately, this isn't a generic solution. It works fine with the PIC case, because gcc will not allocate ebx for anything else. But in the non-PIC case, there is a chance that ebx will be used for addr. This would cause a probably fairly tricky bug to track down! The solution is to use the #if __PIC__ directive to either tell gcc you're clobbering ebx in the non-PIC case, or just keep two versions around; one that saves and restores ebx for PIC and one that doesn't.

31 January 2008

Frank Lichtenheld: Some packages. debian.org,ubuntu.com updates

Aigars Mahinovs: Slow starting USB storage in Linux

I have this USB hard drive enclosure that can also share the files on the local network (LAN DRIVE HD9-U2LA, vendor id - 05e3:0702). Due to that it has an operating system and some other software inside. Unfortunately this software is rather slow to start and that cause the following kernel error when trying to mount this enclosure:

[90459.236000] usb 5-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
[90459.368000] usb 5-5: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[90459.368000] scsi4 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[90459.368000] usb-storage: device found at 9
[90459.368000] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[90464.368000] usb-storage: device scan complete
[90470.148000] usb 5-5: USB disconnect, address 9
[90470.148000] scsi 4:0:0:0: scsi: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
 The device is fine, it is just slow to start. To work around this bug you can change /sys/module/usb_storage/parameters/delay_use from a default 5 second delay to something larger. 60 seconds worked fine in my case.
echo 60 sudo tee /sys/module/usb_storage/parameters/delay_use
 Anyone know what a proper solution could be?

30 January 2008

Russell Coker: My LCA Talk

Last year at LCA Crispin Cowan suggested to me that I make a joint offer of a combined tutorial on SE Linux and AppArmor as a way of publicly comparing the two technologies. I ended up not accepting the challenge, among other things I had a long-term project going in production in early December that needed some ongoing support. Crispin’s plan B was to just give a lecture about AppArmor. Recently Crispin joined Microsoft [1] and John Johansen of Suse was going to give the talk in his place. The LCA people made a minor mistake by having the conference web site give the description of the tutorial option [2] (which I don’t believe was ever going to happen as I had not accepted the offer), but it’s easy to understand the webmaster copying the wrong description when the one person makes two offers (which I believe is not a common practice). So this morning I and about 150 other people were waiting in the main lecture theatre and no-one from Suse turned up. Being fairly audacious when the announcement was made that the event was officially cancelled I stood up and asked if anyone would like an impromptu talk about SE Linux instead. The audience received that idea quite well. My talk wasn’t as good as I had hoped, not having had a proper breakfast or any caffeinated drinks reduced my mental stack space. So I could talk well on one topic but when questions diverted me to a side topic I found it difficult to remember the previous point I was making. Fortunately when giving an impromptu talk with no notes or presentation materials the audience expectations for a consistent plan of the talk seem reasonably low. ;) I started by talking about my SE Linux Play Machines. Some of that material had been covered in previous talks at other conferences (such as at a previous SE Linux Symposium), but some things (such as my use of Xen) I had not previously covered, but none of it had been mentioned in a talk in Australia for a while. Having given an hour-long talk about SE linux yesterday to an audience with many of the same members I wanted to start by talking about something that they hadn’t heard before, and I was also wearing a Play Machine T-shirt (with the root password printed on it) [4]. After I finished talking about my Play Machines and started covering some of the same material as yesterday about a quarter of the audience left (which was fair enough). I then spoke about general SE Linux issues, largely in response to questions. I covered the differences between the policies (including the history of policy development), the JFFS2 XATTR development (and how SE Linux couldn’t be used on an iPaQ without it), issues of disk space usage for XATTRs for SE Linux labelling on various filesystems and how it drives the use of context mount options, poly-instantiated directories (including some discussion on how the actual storage location for such directories can be on a different filesystem and how this could be convenient when using encrypted filesystems), how Apache/PHP work in a SE Linux environment, and a lot more. I couldn’t resist mentioning to the audience the irony that I had declined a challenge for a joint presentation and then got a sole presenter spot (and a large audience) due to the Suse guy not showing up. For future situations I plan to load lecture notes from all my common talks on my iPaQ. Then next time I have such a speaking opportunity I can give a better prepared talk. Update: It turned out that the LCA people had been informed that the Suse talk was cancelled and had made a mistake, see this link for details.

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Sylvain Le Gall: OCamlMeeting in Paris -- Debian summary

On January 26th 2008, the OCaml community has its first meeting in Europe. There was 5 different talks, including one from me. The meeting was pretty constructive and i think some great things should come out of it. In this post, i will focus on the Debian maintainer point of view. The meeting was organized by me, with the help of Garbriel Kerneis and Vincent Balat. I wish to thank Mme Turgis from ENST/ParisTech who has made possible all this to happen. Introduction: I announce the creation of OCamlCore, a SS2L. It will provide commercial support for OCaml and related products. It will also provide community with some resources (including a GForge, a planet, some SCM repository...) For now, i will open administration to Debian people who wish to help (for root rights) and from the whole community for other task (gforge and general administration). For now, i will choose alone who can administrate and who cannot... This is not a very open position, but this server is also for my company. Xavier Leroy give us a nice talk that has let us see some future direction: But above all, Xavier talked about the fact that there is a lack of manpower at INRIA and invited the community to build tools and other things (including a CPAN like distribution) to make the language more widespread. He also stated that a lot of things will stay in place in the name of backward compatibility. OCsigen Vincent Balat has given us a nice talk about OCsigen, a new framework for programming web application. This program is already in Debian and it is at the root of Debian discussion about moving .cm[ao] into libxxx-ocaml package. This new framework allows to program web application using continuation, which should ease a lot of aspect. It also features static type checking, including static verification of the generated HTML pages. GODI I was impressed to see G. Stolpmann coming to the meeting. Unfortunately, i cannot follow the whole talk, since i have some phone call to make, in order to book the restaurant. From what i have seen, it seems that GODI is growing, in term of manpower. They have some issues with OCaml 3.10, because of camlp4 and some packages. At the end of the conference, he was pushing for a more general use of GODIVA. In particular, it requires to have a very uniform way of building software. It should be the foundation of a build standard for OCaml software. In my humble opinion, i don't agree on this point. Basically, its proposal was based on configure/make all, which is too C style way of doing. It is not bad, but just exclude ocamlbuild enabled software. ocamlbuild Nicolas Pouillard has made an introduction on how to use ocamlbuild. I have discovered how it was working, since i didn't have time to work on this topic. It seems a good thing. I hope to be able to try it at some point. The conclusion was about modifying ocamlbuild to allow the use of multiple plugins. For now, the plugin is a separate file which is compiled first and then loaded, as a special case. Nicolas is looking for a full OCaml way to handle this for multiple plugins. OCaml in Debian I have spoken about different aspect of Debian packaging. After a short introduction and some history about OCaml in Debian, I come to some conclusions/problems: Talking with Xavier give me some additional informations: At the end of the presentation, there were some questions. I discover that many people are ignoring the ABI problem with OCaml and its libraries. They seem to discover that it requires regular rebuild of our packages. I also have a discussion about the fact that Debian binary distribution doesn't fit developers need. It seems that developers prefer to have the source of libraries they compile and also the most recent release. But at the same time, people avoid using GODI, which also have the problem of needing to wait for a particular library to be released... After some discussion, I point that some companies prefer to live in a frozen world, which Debian stable can provide. Living in a frozen world helps company developers to have the same environment from the beginning to the end of a project - which can last years. It also help to avoid build environment de-synchronization between company developers. There was also a question about interaction between installed OCaml package and GODI software. I cannot answer it, expect with a "patches are welcome". OCaml on a JVM using OCaml-Java Xavier Clerc explained us how he has achieved running a full OCaml environment on a JVM. This work was pretty impressive, because he was able to compile OCaml top level and provide it as an applet. This is something amazing (and working). He stated also that this should allow to do some binding with java graphical user interface from OCaml. I was pretty busy with a phone call (to a restaurant for the dinner), so i don't have attend the whole conference. Anyway, the project is promising, but it needs to recompile every library using its compiler. I think this is not suited for Debian for now. Workshop The workshop was shorter than it should have been. This is due to accumulated time shift during the day. However, it was pretty interesting, because everybody can talked almost freely. The initial discussion was about the "Unicode situation". This was a question about Unicode in Unison, but there is no real solution about it. For reader information, unison has problem with filename containing UTF-8 char. In particular when syncing two directories which are on two file system with a different encoding on each. Even if the file can be represented on the two file systems, the comparison (between UTF-8 and ISO8859-15) fails. This is because the comparison is a byte to byte comparison. We discuss further the idea of OSR (OCaml standard recommendation) which was briefly discussed in the morning. I think David Teller (who have also done a great part of the IRC retranscription) was very keen on this idea. I invited Nicolas Pouillard to discuss the three following subjects. About camlp4 documentation, Nicolas told people about the he set up. About ocamlfind and ocamlbuild, he went back to the multiple plugin problems. About ocamlbuild and GODI, Gerd, Nicolas and Xavier tried to build a list of what metadata can be shared. This includes list of files to be installed (PLIST in GODI). Concerning the "feedback from the Gallium", Xavier explains that he has done this in the morning (which is true). I think that Xavier implicitly agreed on the fact that if this kind of event happens again, he can do another talk about future of OCaml. Concerning Summer of Code, I just remind that people can write description of Google Summer of Code project in the cocan wiki. Another one remind about Jane St Capital summer of code. Points concerning common interfaces raise the discussion about OSR. The organization of next year events doesn't raise particular interest. I think people would be interested to have one next year, if something comes out of this meeting.

29 January 2008

Christine Spang: Real Life Accessibility

I live in a cooperative living group, and during the fall semester a person who we’d invited to live with us who is a dwarf and relies on a scooter for most of his transportation decided he’d like to move in. Unfortunately, while he can get out of his scooter and come inside by himself, we had no stepless entrances such that he could bring his scooter inside to protect it from the angry Cambridge winter. Mmm, frozen batteries. So, we’re a coop and we maintain the house ourselves—so we decided to build one, of course. A ramp up to the back porch! Nevermind the fact that we need to sink four-foot foundation holes in the ground in January. We got started right away at the beginning of IAP, while people were still trickling back into town from all over the country. First we surveyed out where the posts should be sunk: Then it was time for excavating the holes where concrete would eventually be poured. This involved a power auger of DOOM: It’s advertised as a 2-man tool. Two 200-pound construction workers, that is. We had to put four people on it plus one person with a shovel clearing dirt to make it manageable, and even then it was a pain. There’s a delicate rhythm you have to get into to avoid getting the bit stuck—DOWN. UP. CLEAR. And inevitably there are rocks and roots that have to be dealt with. We lucked out with a fairly warm weekend to do the digging on, but on the first day we still had to deal with a couple inches of frozen ground: There was also some fun stuff involving having to clear away our (frozen) mulch containers and use a concrete cutter on a weird old concrete pathway that used to run through the same area: Next we mixed and poured concrete: And placed hardware in the concrete to hold the posts: Framing: Eventually it became functional, woo: And done! (except for metal handrail): This all took place over the course of about three weeks. And now our scooter-bound housemate can bring his wheels inside! The house still isn’t totally accessible to wheelchairs/scooters, but at least the first floor is. It really brings me pride to see things like this go from start to finish here. We can do it! This guy who is moving in has really influenced my life—he’s really good at making people feel comfortable talking to him, and for me it’s gone from “wow this is awkward, I have no idea what to say” to “talking to a person with different physical abilities and characteristics seems normal”. And that’s made me a better person.

David Welton: Munich Android Mobile Meeting Report

I'm a bit tired after driving up to Munich for the Android developer meeting, hosted by Google, and being "on" all day, but it was worth it. I was a bit apprehensive that it might be too 'introductory' in the sense of the Google guys telling you in person things that you could have easily looked up on the web, without spending a bunch of time driving around Austria and Bavaria. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. There was some of that, but also plenty of unstructured time to chat with Dan Morrill and Jason Chen, the two Google "Developer Advocates", who are both very friendly, informative and informed, approachable and put a lot of energy into what they do, despite being a bit tired from flying over from the US. It was nice to get a chance to talk with them, and considering that the platform is still changing, useful as well, because they were definitely listening to what people had to say to them. My thanks to them for a job well done. Here are some "impressions" I took away - note that they're not what anyone said, just ideas I got about what they said: There's still really a sense of Android continuing to evolve, in a true spirit of openness. I liked that, as it means there is space for people to tell Google what they want, rather than simply being given a finished product and told that that's that... but then again, I would, being the open source guy that I am. I didn't get to show off Hecl quite as much as I would have liked to, but I did get to mention it a few times, so I guess I did ok.

28 January 2008

Martin F. Krafft: Consolidating packaging workflows across distros

I speculate that most of what we do for Debian squares with what others do for their respective distro. Thus, it should be possible to identify a conceptual workflow applicable to all distros, consolidate individual workflows on a per-package basis, and profit from each other. Jonathan let me have the after-afternoon-coffee slot of the Distro Summit for an impromptu discussion on the various workflows used by distros for packaging. The discussion round was very short-notice and despite the announcement sent to the conference mailing list, only ten people showed up: two people familiar with Fedora, and ( versus ) eight Debianites. Regardless, I think the discussion was success- and fruitful. We were able to identify a one-to-one mapping between the Fedora and Debian workflows, even though we use different techniques: Many Debian package maintainers use version control systems to maintain the ./debian directory, and if patch files are stored in ./debian/patches/, then Debian and Fedora both store patch files in a version control repository, which seems awful. Just as I am only one of many who are experimenting with VCS-based workflows for Debian packaging, the Fedora people are also considering the use of version control for packaging. Unlike Fedora, who seem to try to standardise on bzr, I try to cater for the plethora of version control systems in use in Debian, anticipating the impossibility of standardising/converging on a single tool across the entire project. It seems that our two projects are both at the start of a new phase in packaging, a paradigm shift . What better time could there be for us to listen to each other and come up with a workflow that works for both projects? My suggestion currently centres around a common repository for each package across all (participating) distros, and feature branches. Specifically, given an upstream source tree, modifications made during packaging for a given distro fall into four categories: Given a version control system with sufficient branching support, I imagine having different namespaces for branches: upstream-patches/*, distro/*, rpm/* or debian/*. Now, when building the Debian package, I d apply upstream-patches/*, distro/*, deb/* and debian/* in order, while my colleague from the Fedora project would apply upstream-patches/*, distro/*, rpm/* and fedora/*, before calling the build tools and uploading the package. There are surely problems to be overcome. Pascal Hakim mentioned patch dependencies, and I can t necessarily say with a clear conscience that my workflow isn t too complicated to be unleashed into the public yet. But if we find a conceptual workflow applicable to more than one distro, it should be possible to implement a higher-level tool to implement it. Also, the above is basically patch maintenance, not the entire workflow. Bug tracking system integration is going to play a role, as well as other aspects of daily distro packaging. I ll leave those for future time. For me, this is the start of a potentially fruitful cooperation and I hope that interested parties from other distros jump on. For now, I suggest my mailing list for discussion. You can also find some links on the Debian wiki.

Colin Watson: UTF-8 manual pages

See Encodings in man-db for context. Yesterday, I uploaded man-db 2.5.1-1 to unstable. With this version, not only is it possible to install manual pages in UTF-8 (as with 2.5.0, although with fewer bugs), but it's also possible to ask man to produce a version of an arbitrary page in the encoding of your choice, and have it guess the source encoding for you fairly reliably. This finally provides enough support to have debhelper automatically recode manual pages to UTF-8. It'll probably take a little while to shake out the corner-case bugs, but I'm generally pretty happy with this. Once the new man-db and debhelper land in testing, I'll send a note to debian-devel-announce and push harder on my policy amendment. Considering the historical state of man-db when it comes to localisation, and all of the dependencies and general yak-shaving that had to be tackled to get here, this represents the end of probably several hundred hours of work, so I'm pretty happy that this is out the door. The only remaining step is to add UTF-8 input support to groff, which fortunately Brian M. Carlson is working on. After that, we can reasonably claim to have dragged manual pages kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Computing in the Cloud Recordings

As I mentioned I would a month or so ago, I attended a workshop on Computing in the Cloud organized by Ed Felton's Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. The conference aimed to discuss the policy issues that are raised by the shift from computing on machines we own and have direct control over to computing on servers owned by others. Think Google, Facebook, MySpace, and that lot. I talked about what all this might mean for free software and for open source and our communities, a bit about the AGPL, and discussed some ideas of how might proceed as a community. Princeton has been organized enough to post audio and video of the whole conference, including recordings of my talk, in a variety of formats and qualities (although unfortunately not in Vorbis and Theora). As I said in my FSF membership appeal last month, I think complications raised by "cloud computing" are one of the most important sets of challenges facing free software this year.

Simon Richter: Building software II: now with more evil

As written earlier, I'm switching build system for one of my projects. In the end, I decided to roll my own. Yes, another build system out there. The general idea is to combine the strengths of automake and MSBuild, and take them to new extremes by not compromising where they have (that makes my build system a tad inflexible though). Automake's biggest strength is that it is descriptive, rather than imperative, and while it allows for rules to be entered directly to allow for some flexibility, this is usually the point where the Makefiles that are produced become unportable. But in general, the idea of having a tool deduce what exactly should be done to transform a set of input files into a set of output files is a good one, I think. From MSBuild, I stole the idea of making an explicit distinction between higher-level integration projects ("solutions" in their lingo) and actual build projects. Build projects only have one (main) output, which usually is a program or a library, and several auxiliary outputs (development files, translation templates, ...), while integration projects coordinate the build process (for example, if one of the build projects builds a tool, all projects using that need to be re-run if the tool is rebuilt, but only then. Automake's biggest downfall is stuff that is not explicitly supported. One of my projects uses IDL extensively, which leads to quite a lot of explicit rules supporting different ORBs. If I wanted to teach automake about that, I'd have to understand lots of perl code that emits code fragments that, when combined, will do the right thing. In a way, automake is a compiler, but based around the idea that since we start out from a Makefile compatible syntax, just adding things will magically work. Where it doesn't, special cases are invented, such as for libtool support, but stacking special cases is really difficult. MSBuild, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to project-to-project integration. There is no way to tell it "publish these include files under the such-and-such directory for use by other projects", rather, you are expected to have the project using them explicitly reference your project in the include directories. If a project uses includes that reference includes from yet another project, it gets worse. Milestone 1 is going to be when the main binary can build itself on Windows and Linux.

David Welton: Munich Android Mobile Meeting

Tomorrow (January 28th), I'll be in Munich for this: http://www.mobile-monday.de/web/guest/android Unfortunately, the event filled up super fast and I barely managed to squeeze in, so there are probably no spaces left. Still, if anyone would like to meet up afterwards, send me an email soonish. If you managed to get in, and would like to see a demo of Hecl, let me know, because I'd like to have the chance to show that off some too! Hopefully it will be a valuable experience. Android is a pretty convincing system in many ways, but of course has yet to fully come into contact with reality, so I'm curious to meet some of the people involved and hear about it from them. I really hope it doesn't end up being a rehash of information that's available on the web, as it's a two hour drive from Innsbruck.

27 January 2008

Martin F. Krafft: Bangkok: your new door to the world?

Your new door to the world the slogan for Bangkok s new Suvarnabhumi airport tries to get people to stop-over on their trips between Europe and Asia. The airport s webpage claims that the airport currently handles 45 million passengers per year, but that it would scale up to 110 million. I don t see this happening, at all. Today, leaving for Melbourne, I waited for an hour in the security queue, as four flights were leaving concourse E (which has 10 gates) at once: around 500 passengers were queueing to be scrutinised for explosive liquids and other stuff a real terrorist would never consider smuggling on a plane via the standard passenger processing theatre in four lines behind four security checkpoints (in fact, that s how I confirmed my estimate: around 30 seconds per passenger (I timed it), it took me one hour, that s 120 passengers per queue, so about 500 total, at once). Four lines, one hour? 45 million passengers. 110 million passengers? Six lines (there isn t much more space), so 200 passengers per line, 1:40 hours? My new door to the world? Bangkok? Of course, this is in large part because of idiot passengers. While I was waiting in line, they came three times (every 20 minutes) to empty the garbage can where potential terrorists have to dump their drinkable explosive fluids. We ve had this ban for over 1 years, for crying out loud! Sure, some people don t (get to) fly a lot and a few may really not have heard about dangerous liquids yet (I felt really sorry for an elderly couple who had to ditch pretty much all their toiletries leaving Zurich for Madrid and wondering how they would survive there), but then at least open your eyes and turn on your brain, please. Unfortunately, the typical Bangkok/Southern Thailand tourist probably hasn t got brain cycles left between walking and carrying luggage. If you don t believe me, stop-over in Bangkok and look around: anything with legs in shorts and flip-flops probably fits right in, any obscenely and annoyingly loud group as well. For instance, this circus of 10 en route to London, who joined the end of the queue (read: about 1 hour to go) after their flight s final call with millions of shopping bags. They furiously tried to raise hell, but failed and probably missed their flight. Observing all such episodes around me made the hour go by fast I also had ample time left before my gate would close. There was one situation, however, that made walk over and complain to the supervisor (the one with the walkie-talkie): a couple from Canada were similarly faced with the final call for their flight to Toronto and walked straight up to the top of the lines outside the ropes. After a short discussion, one of the security attendants escorted them to the gate without subjecting either their bags or bodies to the ever-secure screening process. The supervisor (the one with the walkie-talkie) didn t speak English. All she did was smile and make motions with her hands which suggested that I should join the end of the queue. As I said before, I don t believe that the (minimal) added security we have at airports today corresponds to or justifies in the slightest bit the shit we have to go through these days to be airborne. However, if you make rules, then stick to them and don t open gaping (= inviting) security holes. Fortunately, the Canadians later had to surrender their weapons of plane destruction since, on every gate, another party of security attendants glove-hand-searched every bag a second time, with the previous security checkpoint no 100 metres behind. I don t see Suvarnabhumi as a successful or scalable airport. If Bangkok wasn t such a great place ?to kill a few hours (especially compared to e.g. Singapore), or the (best) entrance to Southeast Asia, I d probably avoid it in the future.

26 January 2008

Amaya Rodrigo: H ctor's Birth Day

Today is H ctor s birthday. We celebrated with his family and a couple of close friends. He cooked a wonderful meal for us (he is a great cook) and we had a very nice afternoon, despite having a flu (again!) and a very runny nose. I am at this very moment preparing a sponsored upload for Carlos, one of the close friends who attended. He will become an excellent Debian contributor some day.

I got H ctor a couple of cookbooks for his birthday, but much to my surprise I received a brand new server from him (late Xmas present, but I am to blame for the delay). I can now get rid of this damn noisy and slow thing that sits under my desk, aka nima. This has been a faithful server for many years and I think it deserves to be donated to the local hacklab, as I believe it can still be of use.

I hope I can put all this CPU power to good use in my Debian QA work (which I am slowly coming back to).

H ctor has been my best friend for almost 10 years. We also are co-workers at soitu.es now. He was the one who made me believe that I could contribute to Debian and that I should apply to become a Developer (although Santiago Vila was actually the first one to spot me). He was the one I run to when I felt like dying shit after my divorce . He is still the one I run to most of the time when I need support or advice, and he has this wonderful way of making me feel safe in this scary world. Even though we naturally don t agree on a lot of stuff, he does his best to respect my eccentricities, and I always carefully listen to what he has to say. I am very lucky to be his friend. May this friendship last many, many more years. H ctor, keep rocking!

25 January 2008

Martin F. Krafft: Singing: One Day in Bangkok

After a few amazingly efficient days at home, working on netconf (but not getting to where I wanted) and preparing the presentation I deliver on Thursday at LCA 2008, and tying up other loose ends, I found myself in front of a television set Friday morning to witness the beginning of Federer s defeat in the Australian Open half finals. Unfortunately, I had to leave at the start of the third set and no-one in the airport knew of the game, so I had to call a friend from the plane to get the final result: 7:5, 6:3, 7:6, Djokovic won. I like Federer, and enjoy the Swiss fandom from everywhere, but his tennis wasn t up to his normal level, a true shame. Djokovic has been my favourite for about a year now, so I am excited by the result, but it would have been better to see a bit more of a battle between the two. I trust he ll win on Sunday and cross my fingers! It kind of bites to arrive in Melbourne on the day of the finals, knowing that I would have had a chance to get a ticket and could have travelled a day earlier. Oh well So I am sitting here in a crap Bangkok Internet cafe, finishing off my presentations. In addition to the netconf talk, I am also talking twice at the Debian Miniconf on Monday: first, the State of the Debian project address , which I agreed to do very short notice but knew that I could count on my colleagues to help (don t read the thread before the talk ); second, I also have a slot to talk about version control systems and Debian packaging, a topic that has been on my mind for almost three years now, resulting in elaborate workflows and many discussions. It s also becoming more and more of a hot topic for the entire project. I am tired. We landed at 5:30 and I was shattered, not having been able to shut an eye throughout the ten hours of flight. Fortunately, they let me into the lounge in the arrival area, where I crashed in one of their slumber rooms and got close to four hours of sleep, successfully ignoring the chatter from outside why did Thai Airways lay out their lounge in such a way that the slumber rooms are right next to the staff rooms with the squeaky doors? One thing about living in Asia, where space is scarce, is that people here never seem to mind about noise and sleep through anything. So I did too. I took a shower, ate some breakfast and headed into the city. I was impressed by the new Bangkok airport Suvarnabhumi , which definitely is a step up from the old, horrific one. However, I tend to doubt their claim that they could scale from the current 45 million passengers per year to 110 million. The walkways are too narrow, there are way too few toilets around, and immigration is painfully slow despite the large number of open alleys. Now in downtown Bangkok, I am biding my time. I have been here a few times before and have a number of routine stops, such as visiting the retail manager of the Jim Thompson Company, a loveable lady who speaks fluent English and is very fun to talk to. I met her during my last trip to Southeast Asia, but have since not been in touch. I now plan to head to a massage place, where they deliver merciless (and thus excellent) Thai massages, and then on to some market or Chinatown for food. I ve been training myself on chili ( Thai chocolate ) consumption for this moment: to walk up to a food stall, order a curry, and answer Thai hot when they ask for the degree of spicyness, given that I m a foreigner. At midnight, my plane leaves for Melbourne to arrive on Sunday afternoon. I have little clue as to what awaits me. I ve been to quite a number of conferences, but always perceived LCA to be somewhat special. I am definitely looking forward!

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Starship Troopers

Robert A. Heinlein: Starship Troopers (Putnam, 1959)
Paul Verhoeven (director): Starship Troopers (TriStar, 1997) The trouble with movies is that they fit only a short story. You can make a terrific movie out of a short story, but I have never seen a movie made of a novel that was at the same time good and faithful – most movies made of books fail in both. The novel Starship Troopers chronicles the evolution of a high-school kid into a mobile infantry officer in a world which had seen modern democracies fail and be replaced by a veterans’ rule (veterans of also noncombat and civilian service, not just military) – Juan Rico gets in just to impress a girl, and maybe to get to vote some day, goes through boot camp, makes combat drops from orbit as a private and then as a NCO, gets opted for officer training and by the end of the book is a competent officer, helping his old drill sergeant who had found the prize. Along the way we get political sermons (now I know where John Ringo got his tendency to have characters lecture on politics!), some interesting characters and just a hint of romance. The movie paints in broad strokes and primary colors. The first half of it is in fact a fairly decent redesign of the book as a movie, though I did not like at all how much in the face the romance (and two interconnected love triangles!) was played. Johnnie Rico gets in to impress a girl, goes through boot camp, makes some combat drops – And then it transforms into a horror movie (and loses any resemblance with the book). They make a combat drop, Lieutenant Rico drops his mission and goes rescue his girlfriend (the two triangles having been – eliminated by now) and totally misses his old drill sergeant finding the prize. Allegedly, the director never finished reading the book. Well, it shows. In the book, Rico would have been hanged by the neck until dead, dead, dead well before the end of the movie just for striking a superior officer; in the movie, everybody just shrugs it off. The book is an enjoyable military story, the founding father of a subgenre consisting of lots of newer books; the movie is just silly. If you have seen the movie, read the book. Don’t bother the other way around.

Wouter Verhelst: Samba v2

samba.grep.be. This machine has been my trusty publically-accessible server for about four years now. It runs my website, including this blog, is my primary MX, contains my subversion repositories, and my gallery. For slightly less than the first year of Planet Grep, it was the only machine running that site (it has now been migrated to two machines running in two different data centers, to cope with the ever-increasing bandwidth usage of that site). It runs the bacula-director for our backup system, and it contains the modem behind our fax number, allowing us both to receive faxes and to log in using PPP to our local network. Most importantly, I've been using it as an SSH jumphost and IRC box to allow me to connect to other machines whenever I'm behind an overly paranoid firewall. But now it's time to retire the machine. The high number of services combined with the, to today's standards, low number of available system resources, is beginning to be a problem. A few times now, already, I've had to reboot the machine because a load spike was making it unresponsive. So it has to go. Many people will be shocked to find out that the machine powering samba up to now was an IBM SurePos 500. No, really. The reasons are long and complex, but suffice to say that there was a point in time where I wanted to set up a server for myself, and I had an idle, never-to-be-used-anymore, 2000+ priced, machine standing by. So there I went, usurped this machine as server, and have given it near-100% uptime. If you want to know just how near-100% that is: 
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   058   058   000    Old_age   Always       -       31170
[...]
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       99
Or, in plain English: according to SMART, the hard disk has seen just 99 power cycles in four years. This machine was never designed to do that. Side note: yes, that is a touch screen on top of that box. The new machine is much, much better. We're going from this: 
model name	: Intel(R) Celeron(TM) CPU                1200MHz
to this: 
model name	: Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 1210
which is much, much better. The box actually containing this processor is also much, much better. However, there was one problem: the old processor was a PentiumIV-class processor, requiring Debian's i386 port, whereas the new one (obviously) contains a processor that will allow me to run the amd64 port; and I did intend to do this. Additionally, I wanted to migrate from a simple "root-on-partitions" system to a "root-on-LVM" system, with Xen somewhere in between. As such, simply rsync'ing the entire hard disk on the old system over to the new system (my usual way to migrate a non-critical server) wasn't going to work. Luckily Debian isn't too hard to migrate from one machine to the other, however. Or, well, that was the idea. Because I forgot about one silly detail: if I wanted to make everything work out correctly, I would have had to keep UID numbers in synch. Unfortunately, I forgot about that; and as a result, a number of files were created with the wrong owner. This made all kinds of things fail horribly; and rather than stop and think about it, which would have made me copy the old passwd file over from the old installation, add some extra lines for users that were on the old server but were not yet created on the new one, and then finally leave it at that, everything would've been fixed. Instead, I started to change ownership of files all over the filesystem, creating a mess of things. Silly me. But, well, in the end I did get everything to work correctly; even if it took me longer than expected. No worries.

24 January 2008

Adrian von Bidder: Windows vs. Debian

Freesoftwaremagazine has an interesting comparison (at the end of the article) between Vista and Debian (unfortunately, they use sarge numbers, but numbers for etch wouldn't be that different.) The (not really surprising) conclusion: Kernel + libc + X + KDE + Mozilla compared to Vista (assuming that this is about comparable, functionality-wise), Vista is more than three times as big (LoC) and, consequently, expensive (COCOMO numbers.)

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