Kiwis have to be one of the cutest birds of all time. A bit chubby and clumsy looking, they are (to me, at least), walking, breathing icon of furry cuteness. Truth be told, I did not see one live in action during my recent trip to New Zealand, but I did see a Weka bird which is pretty similar. (Micah and I just consulted the Internets and agreed that we did in fact see cherubic Kiwi not a Weka. In fact, Micah almost ran one over on the west coast of the southern island but his quick reflexes born from years of saving servers while typing saved the bird. So as you can tell by now I finally got to go to New Zealand for a few weeks, even able to travel the south island before attending THE Linux conference of the region, LCA where I gave a talk (video to be posted when available). I jumped at the opportunity and was thrilled to find out that I could actually spend some time traveling around before the intense week long conference. So on January 5th I headed down with Micah to what I have found out is one of the windiest cities on earth ( Windy Wellington ) for a few days before heading to the south island to do a loop on the northern half of the island. I wanted to conquer the mountains made famous by a certain set of movies, but last semester was all about sitting in front of the computer, a sort of agonizing life of the mind, which did not prepare me physically for mountain trekking or as it call it there, tramping. So we decided to stick close to the coast (with one transalpine train that serenaded us through some awesome mountain passes) and hike along the coast, snorkel and swim, and kayak. After Andrew showed us around Wellington, we headed to the sea town of Kaikoura brimming with sea life, such as seals, dolphins, and birds. The two highlights there were our snorkeling trip and a hike along the peninsula. Originally we were going to go diving but I arrived to NZ with a head cold so we opted for the sinus friendlier version and snorkeled in the massive kelp forest, which was strikingly beautiful (I am used to tropical reefs and waters). There happened to be a lot of seals and given their curious nature, they would dart over right next to you and play. One seal I called him the twirler was chubby and mellow and twirled next to me for a long while. The lady seals were sleeker and faster and liked to dive deep down and the zoom up and surprise you. As someone who has spent a lot of time underwater, I found it fun and weird to be with animals that pay attention to you given that most of the sea life ignores you. The hike in Kaikoura was fantastic as well. You go high on a bluff and stare down at this water sparkling with the most beautiful blue hues brought out even more majestically by the white rocks. If I were to go back I would hike along the water and up above on the bluff. After a brief stopover in Christchurch to visit a friend, we took the transalpine train (across Arthur s pass) which was superbly beautiful and arrived on the west coast whose seas are far more rough, rocky, andtemperamental than on the east coast. The vegetation is lush as lush can be and you get the feeling that dinosaurs would have been a happy lot in these parts. The cool part about this area are the many rivers that feed into the ocean (we spent an afternoon swimming and exploring the caves in one) and then what are called the pancake rocks, which are odd geological creatures that really amaze. We then made our way to the Marlborough Sounds area, which includes the city of Nelson (apparently the sunniest in New Zealand) as well as many olive and grape vineyards in outlying areas. We spent some time in the Alpine lakes region hiking but more of the time on the coast. The highlight for me and it is a place I would love to go back to is the Abel Tasman National Park. We spent time hiking and kayaking there and you can even hike down the coast for 5-6 days (there are excellent camping facilities along the way). The coast is simply majestic with alpine like forest conditions (unfortunately a cool old tree whose name I can t remember is no longer common). This forest is situated along the most stunning waters, an electric but totally clear turquoise blue deceivingly inviting because the water was quite cold (but not as cold as the Oregon coast over the summer, which I went swimming in only once after weeks of bike travel). Along with the blue, parts of the coastal waters were a stunning clear green that I have never seen despite my many sea travels. If you ever plan on going to the South Island, I would not miss this area and might even try to spend a few days or more hiking the coastal trails and listening to the cool-as/sweet as birds, one of which has double vocal cords so it sings what sounds to be like totally electronic bird calls. We returned via the same ferry a massive 7 story ship from Picton to Wellington but the conditions were far far worse during our return trip. When we got out of the sounds, we hit the Cook Straight, notorious for being rough and tumble. And indeed, once we hit the waves, I felt like I was no longer in a boat but amusement park ride, the bow of the ship thrown high only to fall hard on upon the waves. It was sort of fun or fun for about 10 minutes until people, most especially kids, started yaking all over the place. It was really the most flagrant yakfest I have ever experienced (I mean it is a 7 story ferry, you can fit a lot of people on that boat) and that made the sail particularly difficult. I have pretty strong sea legs, never once getting sick sick during the year I spent at sea but massive yaking will bring out the sea sick feeling in even the hardiest of sea souls and I was thrilled to arrive in Wellington. Wellington is the only large city I spent any considerable time in and it is a pretty awesome one. The city center area is flat and by the water, with a magnificent area filled with museums, the national library, parks, breweries, and piers where kids like to jump off high things. The botanical gardens were the most beautiful I have been to and since I am a flower nut, I was in high heaven. In this area there are a ridiculous number of great coffee shops (NYC has a thing or two to learn as we don t have enough, I suspect it has something to do with insane real estate prices). The city is surrounded by hills populated by houses, some of the precipitously perched on cliffs that require lifts to get to! It was a wonderful home base for what was a sweet as conference (as they would say down there). And I hope to write about it sometime soon.

Kiwis have to be one of the cutest birds of all time. A bit chubby and clumsy looking, they are (to me, at least), walking, breathing icon of furry cuteness. Truth be told, I did not see one live in action during my recent trip to New Zealand, but I did see a Weka bird which is pretty similar. (Micah and I just consulted the Internets and agreed that we did in fact see cherubic Kiwi not a Weka. In fact, Micah almost ran one over on the west coast of the southern island but his quick reflexes born from years of saving servers while typing saved the bird. So as you can tell by now I finally got to go to New Zealand for a few weeks, even able to travel the south island before attending THE Linux conference of the region, LCA where I gave a talk (video to be posted when available). I jumped at the opportunity and was thrilled to find out that I could actually spend some time traveling around before the intense week long conference. So on January 5th I headed down with Micah to what I have found out is one of the windiest cities on earth ( Windy Wellington ) for a few days before heading to the south island to do a loop on the northern half of the island. I wanted to conquer the mountains made famous by a certain set of movies, but last semester was all about sitting in front of the computer, a sort of agonizing life of the mind, which did not prepare me physically for mountain trekking or as it call it there, tramping. So we decided to stick close to the coast (with one transalpine train that serenaded us through some awesome mountain passes) and hike along the coast, snorkel and swim, and kayak. After Andrew showed us around Wellington, we headed to the sea town of Kaikoura brimming with sea life, such as seals, dolphins, and birds. The two highlights there were our snorkeling trip and a hike along the peninsula. Originally we were going to go diving but I arrived to NZ with a head cold so we opted for the sinus friendlier version and snorkeled in the massive kelp forest, which was strikingly beautiful (I am used to tropical reefs and waters). There happened to be a lot of seals and given their curious nature, they would dart over right next to you and play. One seal I called him the twirler was chubby and mellow and twirled next to me for a long while. The lady seals were sleeker and faster and liked to dive deep down and the zoom up and surprise you. As someone who has spent a lot of time underwater, I found it fun and weird to be with animals that pay attention to you given that most of the sea life ignores you. The hike in Kaikoura was fantastic as well. You go high on a bluff and stare down at this water sparkling with the most beautiful blue hues brought out even more majestically by the white rocks. If I were to go back I would hike along the water and up above on the bluff. After a brief stopover in Christchurch to visit a friend, we took the transalpine train (across Arthur s pass) which was superbly beautiful and arrived on the west coast whose seas are far more rough, rocky, andtemperamental than on the east coast. The vegetation is lush as lush can be and you get the feeling that dinosaurs would have been a happy lot in these parts. The cool part about this area are the many rivers that feed into the ocean (we spent an afternoon swimming and exploring the caves in one) and then what are called the pancake rocks, which are odd geological creatures that really amaze. We then made our way to the Marlborough Sounds area, which includes the city of Nelson (apparently the sunniest in New Zealand) as well as many olive and grape vineyards in outlying areas. We spent some time in the Alpine lakes region hiking but more of the time on the coast. The highlight for me and it is a place I would love to go back to is the Abel Tasman National Park. We spent time hiking and kayaking there and you can even hike down the coast for 5-6 days (there are excellent camping facilities along the way). The coast is simply majestic with alpine like forest conditions (unfortunately a cool old tree whose name I can t remember is no longer common). This forest is situated along the most stunning waters, an electric but totally clear turquoise blue deceivingly inviting because the water was quite cold (but not as cold as the Oregon coast over the summer, which I went swimming in only once after weeks of bike travel). Along with the blue, parts of the coastal waters were a stunning clear green that I have never seen despite my many sea travels. If you ever plan on going to the South Island, I would not miss this area and might even try to spend a few days or more hiking the coastal trails and listening to the cool-as/sweet as birds, one of which has double vocal cords so it sings what sounds to be like totally electronic bird calls. We returned via the same ferry a massive 7 story ship from Picton to Wellington but the conditions were far far worse during our return trip. When we got out of the sounds, we hit the Cook Straight, notorious for being rough and tumble. And indeed, once we hit the waves, I felt like I was no longer in a boat but amusement park ride, the bow of the ship thrown high only to fall hard on upon the waves. It was sort of fun or fun for about 10 minutes until people, most especially kids, started yaking all over the place. It was really the most flagrant yakfest I have ever experienced (I mean it is a 7 story ferry, you can fit a lot of people on that boat) and that made the sail particularly difficult. I have pretty strong sea legs, never once getting sick sick during the year I spent at sea but massive yaking will bring out the sea sick feeling in even the hardiest of sea souls and I was thrilled to arrive in Wellington. Wellington is the only large city I spent any considerable time in and it is a pretty awesome one. The city center area is flat and by the water, with a magnificent area filled with museums, the national library, parks, breweries, and piers where kids like to jump off high things. The botanical gardens were the most beautiful I have been to and since I am a flower nut, I was in high heaven. In this area there are a ridiculous number of great coffee shops (NYC has a thing or two to learn as we don t have enough, I suspect it has something to do with insane real estate prices). The city is surrounded by hills populated by houses, some of the precipitously perched on cliffs that require lifts to get to! It was a wonderful home base for what was a sweet as conference (as they would say down there). And I hope to write about it sometime soon.

Work doesn't often send to me places as great as Manilla in the Philippines, but here I am. It's a reasonably modern place and to me feels more like America than Asia in so many ways, posssibly because of its history. One thing is for sure, noone follows road rules here. Red lights are a suggestion and a zebra crossing is just some painted lines that you do need to stop at.

As for food, it's not that different, in fact this sad lot is about what was different:

• McSpaghetti - Was supposedly sugar coated spaghetti but actually was very tame, my son would of loved it.
• Wow Steak from KFC - Neither Wow nor Steak, like a big chicken nugget with gravy and rice
• Halo Halo - A dessert drink which was sugared or preserved fruit, milk and ice.

Generally though the food has been pretty good but nothing I could get at home.

Good news about Gjay, the previous maintainer said it was ok for SourceForge to hand over the control of the program to me so I've set it up in git and started working on it. Most of the work was getting the code up-to-date to the later gtk APIs and making it work with audacious instead of xmms. It's almost ready for (re)initial release and there is even an ITP ready to go.

Git is a rather interesting and new (for me at least) version control system. I've been using cvs for more years than I'd care to think about and svn but while it is a bit different as you'd expect I haven't had it get in my way. In fact I've been so impressed with Git I have put a few other projects into it, mainly with the collab maintence Debian project for a few of my packages.

Just an update about sgeps, because it seems to have made a small stir (which is more than I expected).

• Yes, I know about emacs foo.gpg. Admittedly I found out while I was developing sgeps, but I kept on my track anyway. The real reason was that I was having fun, but I could also mention that sgeps doesn't store data unencrypted on disk, not even temporarily. I'm not sure about vim foo.gpg. (Update: Joey Hess telle me it does the right thing.) Anyway, I don't want to fire up an editor (or switch to an already opened one) just to get a password.
• I had also found out about pwman too. My script started as pwman.pl but it was renamed later. I like the simplicity of sgeps better, especially the lack of any UI besides the CLI, but pwman is probably good in its own way, but it doesn't fit my usage pattern.
• It seems the Gentoo people don't share my qualms about making very small packages, and apparently sgeps is now packaged for Gentoo Linux.
• Mehdi Dogguy already contributed suggestions (including better error handling) and even a patch implementing sgeps --delete. Thanks to him!
• An anonymous commenter suggests that sgeps should be able to store notes as well as passwords. That wasn't a requirement I initially had, but I won't reject the patch if it comes He also argues that it should be able to push the password into the X11 paste buffer. Again, why not, if it doesn't break anything.

I tried switching from identi.ca to brainbird today, when my always present frustration with 140 character limit in microblogging boiled over. Again. In the process, I've found some warts in the OpenMicroblogging system, beyond its obsession with fitting into an obsolete sideband communication medium that I will never actually use. Rant mode on. Let's assume that OpenMicroblogging catches on, in a big way, and we're all using it in 10 years. So, it will be something like email. And its federated design allows for that; there can be multiple servers that communicate, and so on. (Which is a very good thing, compared to the twitter monoloth.) But: How many times have you changed your email address? When you did, you probably set up a .forward for the old email address, and emailed some people from the new address to let them update their address book, and it was not a big deal. But the experience when changing an OpenMicroblogging site is not the same. You have to go out and re-follow everyone. For each person, you have to go through a multiple screen (OAUTH) process. This process may not even be automatible. Second problem is that OpenMicroblogging does not use addresses. So to talk to me, one uses @joey'. It's not clear to me how sites determine whether to direct that to joey@identica or to joey@brainbird. Seemed like, if I switched to brainbird, I would need to pick a new username, to avoid having to check both places. Finally, the OpenMicroblogging spec, while really quite a neat approach to piggyback on OAUTH, has some absurd limits. 140 characters for a biography. Even the limit for one's full name is longer than that. Absurd. Suprisingly, no 140 character limit on messages actually exists, that's just a recommendation. But it's unclear how a system that sends a longer message interoperates with systems that use shorter messages. Probably the message will be truncated. And there is no way in the protocol to discover the message limit of a remote system. All in all, I think I prefer RSS, or Google Wave, or even IRC from a protocol perspective. And from a usability perspective, Facebook does not have absurd message limits, and most people read my messages there anyway. Meh.

In a couple of weeks at FOSDEM, I ll be giving a talk in the GNOME developer room on the semantic desktop and showing the new world of interaction that RDF, SPARQL and Tracker make possible. I ll be joined by Philip Van Hoof and Roberto Guido. We ll be digging behind the buzzwords, explaining what it s all about and most importantly showing off cool real-world apps using this stuff. We ll also announce a competition for the coolest app using Tracker and RDF, for which Codethink will sponsor a prize. See you all there!

Lucas asks about how free the N900 is, whether he can download and recompile and reflash. I'll try to answer some of those questions. No, you can't download all the source. Part of it is just not open. I am not privy to Nokia's decisions on why or why not to open up, but it seems like the user interface bits are only partially open. Hildon itself is open so you can poke at widgets and see how those work. The address book is not open. The telepathy component that talks to the cellular modem is not open. As for having to accept EULAs, I honestly don't remember accepting one of those, but I'm not going to say there are none. There's at least one which is every time you install a package where you have to check a box saying "Yes, I know this package is third party and will not sue Nokia if it causes my house to burn down, my wife to divorce me or causes somebody to steal the car". It's annoying, but I'm willing to live with it. The contents of apt's sources.list is:

deb https://downloads.maemo.nokia.com/fremantle/ssu/apps/ ./ 
deb https://downloads.maemo.nokia.com/fremantle/ssu/mr0 ./ 
deb https://downloads.maemo.nokia.com/fremantle/ovi/ ./ 
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ fremantle free non-free
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/ fremantle free non-free

(technically, it comes from /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hildon-application-manager.list, not sources.list.) I believe the built-in applications are generally not free, so rebuilding everything that is free will for instance leave you without any address book UI, the built-in map application or camera. Sadly, the X driver is also proprietary, so you won't be able to see anything either. I don't think you can usefully install another free distro on the N900. You might be able to, at some point, assuming somebody goes to the effort. The last question is "- Besides the non-free telephony stack, are there any other antifeatures I should be aware of?". The telephony stack is implemented around Telepathy, which is LGPL-ed free software. While it's correct that telepathy-ring (which talks to the cellular modem), the call UI and most of the address book are proprietary, the rest of Telepathy is free. There are SIP and XMPP connection managers that are free, and you can install more connection managers for MSN, IRC and so on. Also, I think it's important to emphasise that the telephony stack does not contain any antifeatures. The closest thing you would be able to find is probably the restriction to one active and one held call at the same time, but as one of the developers said: "That's to prevent the UI from going mad". While I like to tout the N900 as a free phone, it is in no way completely free. Large parts of it are free, and almost as importantly: most of the programming interfaces are free and at least somewhat documented, so if somebody wants to replace the built-in camera application with a free one, they can replace the DBus interface that the camera app provides. Ditto for maps applications, the address book and so on.

Coming to New Zealand for an extended period of time, I figured it would make sense to purchase a prepay mobile plan to make it easier to mix with locals. Not knowing better, I went with Vodafone, which I whole-heartedly regret: their website is a massive pain in the ass, their price plans completely over the top, and their customer service representative incompetent and unfriendly. My latest experience eclipsed all previous encounters, and makes me want to tell you about it: Between all the obscure add-ons Vodafone threw at me when I bought this SIM card, two weeks ago I couldn t figure out how my balance had decreased from $30 to $0 when I rarely ever made calls. I wrote an e-mail to their customer service hotline, and it took them a week to get back to me, with the following text:

Due to being a Prepay Customer, unfortunately usage details are not available as per terms and conditions. I have although checked your usage and can confirm that all charges are correct.

Obviously, I wasn t going to accept this claim of omniscience, so when last weekend, $20 disappeared over the course of a day, that was the catalyst for me to reopen the ticket and reply along the lines of:

Only I know when I used my phone and thus only I can determine whether the charges are correct. Please show the full records to me, or else

This seemed to convince the representative, and 8 messages and 11 days after my initial request, I was told I could request the records at $5/30 records. Yes, you read that right: they wanted to charge me to view the records. I thus replied:

I am NOT willing to pay for that. If you are unable to comply with my desire for transparency, then I shall terminate the contract and make sure to inform the media as well as the consumer institute of this conduct. As stated previously, I shall also consult with a lawyer. Charging consumers to view data that is obviously available is a strong indication that you do not want me to see it. I can t imaging why this would be the case other than the data being inconsistent with reality.

That worked, and I finally got an Excel sheet with my usage data, which allowed me to track down the depletion of my account: to lure customers in, they promise free calls to other Vodafone numbers for the first four weekends. There are three problems with that though:

1. Having purchased my card on Saturday afternoon, I was annoyed to find out that the remaining 34 hours of that weekend would be counted as a whole weekend.
2. They don t provide a way by which to find out whether a given number actually belongs to Vodafone or not. The 021 prefix is not enough of an indication.
3. They don t actually tell you anywhere but the aforementioned horrific website that the addon has expired.

So thanks, Vodafone. You ve lost a customer, who should have gone with 2degrees in the first place, who have much lower rates, even though their data coverage doesn t seem as good. I don t need data anyway. I ll still insist on Vodafone providing the data in a Free format. You can find more information about NZ mobile phone providers on the LCA2010 wiki page. NP: Age Pryor: Shank s Pony

The following was written by Stefano Cosentino in regard to the ongoing efforts of the Australian government to censor the Internet with protecting the children as an excuse. All these Internet filtering ideas that have been in the news lately has made me voice my own opinion on the matter as a non-expert. I m an IT advisor. I take someone s problem and help them fix it. I have a few clients who provide laptops to their students, everything is done with these laptops. The students have no books. The school provides laptops to their primary school students as well as their high school students. They have done this long before the public system started to hand out laptops to a select number of high school students. When you provide a child with anything, there are always areas where a child will find that you may have overlooked. In fact, a young kid will probably find a host of things that you might have totally missed or didn t ever know about. One of these things is the inappropriate nature of information you may find that are associated with computers. This can be anything. But specifically, what the filtering argument has been about has been leaning towards Internet pornography and I would imagine, more specifically content of a pedophiliac nature. I m not against child pornography being banned or filtered. I personally think this is one of the most cruel, inconsiderate, disrespectful and self centered behaviors a person could display. Their psychological makeup isn t the scope of this article. However these ideas must be conveyed when discussing the Internet as a modern technological device that can be used for both good and bad. The primary school students that I attend to aren t very interested in this stuff and as it has been mentioned long ago by others who have joined this argument, are more interested in online flash games that include characters such as Ben 10, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. When I m called in to scan these computers during the school holidays and hand the laptops back to the kids or when they get handed back after 3 years for new ones, I find that the older primary school kids computers are usually more prone to the adult orientated content. To me this is the first sign of a filter s failure. This customer of mine spends more money on the filtering devices they use on campus than I charge them for a few days of work. Does it work? Sadly, I hate to report that no, it does not. It s completely useless. The kids still have files and traces of files on their computers that isn t suitable for young children. Not only pornography but also content of a violent or morbid nature. As young and impressionable people, everything they read, see and hear is absorbed. This shapes the way society will become in years to come. Since no one can realistically tell the future, wouldn t it be nice if we could make sure that the people looking after us and our lives forty or fifty years from now have a sane mind free of blemish? It s a different story for the high school children. While scanning their laptops I have to contact the police on a daily basis because of the nature of the content I find during my day. Some things you can let slip, today s version of a pinup girl, or a provocative pic of whatever skimpy clad girl the record companies are flogging off these days as musicians. But sadly that s rare. I won t go into detail of what I find on these laptops of 14 year old boys, but it ranges from some innocent growing up curiosity right to perverted, sick and most if not all of the time, illegal content. The filters fail again. The kids find a way around it. And they find it easily. I ve seen filters work and not work at all with young kids right through to young adults. All the filters do is either hinder the poor kids actually trying to do research of scholastic nature or prolong the inevitable and temporarily block a determined child s interest in the search for some adult related material. The filter might prevent accidental viewing but it doesn t stop the deliberate finding of pornography and other illegal content. How does a filter stop this from happening? How does a filter stop a child taking their parents adult videos and copying them to their laptop or finding dad s stash of Penthouse? How does it stop a school mate bringing this stuff to school to show everyone at lunch time or to trade for other content they found by other means. Remember back to when you were their age and caught a glimpse of your big brother s room wall. How many times did you try and catch a peak at that Samantha Fox poster hanging off the wall? Where s the filter now? Here s some thing to think about. The filter shouldn t be a thing, it should be a person. They re called responsible . They re called parents. What priorities do parents have if their child feels that what they look at online that is of an adult nature is acceptable? Or maybe the kid knows better, knows it isn t acceptable but still goes out of their way to get the stuff on their computer? Sneaker Net still exists, USB memory sticks are cheap and can now have two or three straight DVD rips on them, or perhaps five or six encoded films on there. Hundreds and thousands of images and so on. Filter failure again. When the kids go online, they know of the technology used to block them from gaining access to what they want to see. Chances are, they ll know what a proxy server is and does. Then they ll figure out what they need to do to get around the filter. I, myself did this back in high school and TAFE when I couldn t find photographs of a particular device I was researching. Turns out the name is also a form of sexual activity, in another language, but still. The filter stopped me from not only looking the offending content but also to look at the legitimate data that I needed to complete an assignment. I got around the problem by researching some more information and the following day I was breaking through firewalls and proxy servers with easy. Filter failure. How do I get around this issue when speaking to younger kids that need guidance and knowledge on how to deal with this situation? I hold talks at the school I provide my services to. I talk to the parents, no kids. The talk costs less than a broken filter they keep throwing money at keep up-to-date. The school puts these filters in place to appear responsible, because while the kids are attending their school, the school is in fact responsible. In fact, there is nothing more the school can do. They could educate the children, but you can tell someone what to do, and the chances of them doing it are pretty dismal. Music is not allowed on their computers either. Yet we constantly find iTunes on there and a host of music that traces to certain peer to peer applications where they acquired the stolen music. If a kid can learn how to do that, imagine what sort of influence can be placed on them from a more positive angle. Like maybe parents providing an explanation for starters of what it is they re looking at. What it is they ll find online. What material is inappropriate. What material should you tell an adult about. Why do I get stupid emails with Russian girls wanting to marry me. Kids absorb everything. Parents have relegated responsibility but not delegated it. This filter idea might help slow down a child s enthusiasm to learn about everything, both good and bad. But educating the kids from an early stage in life about morals and the modern world where lets think about it, we have absolutely everything we need and want at our finger tips will be more valuable than any filter. But the fact that we have so much available makes it difficult to say what is and isn t appropriate for a child to see. It is up to us to inform the children of what s out there is the world. It may or may not stop them from seeing the adult related content, but it will help them respond to it in a mature and adult manner. We all know, kids aren t stupid. So, if the filters worked, why am I called in once a year, every year to give my talk to parents?

I received a surprising 13 responses to my previous post, which was certainly more than I expected and is one reason it's taken me a few days to follow up on it. (How do you pick someone from a group of 13 people based on just a paragraph or two? Clearly I'd like for someone to help all of these people get involved in Debian, but to do so solely by myself would be making a commitment that I just don't have time to come through on. So, it ends up being quite arbitrary. I pick who I think I'd most like working with and could make the most out of the opportunity, and even that is an arbitrary judgement based on very little.) One question asked by one of the people who emailed me was, "Why did you ask for someone who isn't involved in Debian already and who doesn't necessarily have the technical skills needed?" The answer to this question has several facets. For one, people already involved in a free software project tend to be busy people. The workload in projects tends to be concentrated in few hands, and many of those people who are already involved in a project don't need or want any more work. So, asking for someone not already involved in Debian increases the pool of people who might respond to such a request and actually be able to follow up on it. While this a valid reason, it still doesn't explain why I didn't just say, "it's okay if you're not already involved in Debian or don't know python" and not state a preference as to the skill level of the person who would respond to such a request. I did, however, have a specific reason for stating my preference. I asked specifically for someone who wasn't already involved in Debian and who didn't necessarily know python or consider themselves a competent programmer because I wanted to encourage people who don't consider themselves to already know enough to be a useful comaintainer to contact me. I've picked up a lot from following Geek Feminism on what sort of language turns minority groups like women away, and I wanted to ask in such a way that it didn't turn away people who aren't good at self-promotion or who are less sure of their skills, or who don't yet have the skills, men and women alike. Even I still sometimes internally question my own competence as a programmer, and my self-confidence has increased over the past few years. (For the curious, the responses I received were, at my guess, 85% male, 15% female. Whether that's a success or not depends on the demographics of those who read the post, but it is better than the ~98% male involvement in the FLOSS world altogether.) And I do think it's more of a contribution to the project to help someone new get involved than to try to convince someone who's already overcome the barrier to entry to take on some more work. We'll see how it turns out in the end. I have high hopes. (No pressure, soon-to-be-selected mentee.)

So, I've (only just) got round to watching most of Tru Calling, I'm nearly at the end of season one, and then I looked at the number of DVDs left and went "erm, err, what happened with season two, then?"... This appears to happen rather often with anything shown by Fox... The other show that I really liked but didn't see till a long time after they'd cancelled it was Firefly. Why do Fox do this?! Annoying gits! Of course, the other show that I'm waiting for on DVD/Blu-Ray is Dollhouse Season 2, after which we get no more of that either (go Fox!) - I've also just finished The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season 2... which I believe has also been cancelled... Mutter - it just all mostly sucks. With that and the stupid schedule that Disney PIXAR are releasing things, I'm sure that the entertainment industry is just out to piss me off, there's no way that they needed so many months between the US premier of Up and it coming to the UK (OK, so when it did come out here, I didn't go and see it in the cinema, but that's mostly cos I was still pissed off with the release scheduling, and that I'll have it on DVD/Blu-ray as soon as it's released here on that... I own the rest of the Disney PIXAR movies, so meh).

Bruce Everiss who is famous for being threatened with legal action by Evony has been writing about the supposed losses from game piracy, in his latest missive he copies the text from a number of blog comments without citing the original authors [1]. He copied my text without citing me as the author (which is at best shoddy journalism and by a fundamentalist attitude such as his could be considered as piracy). He also copied my text in with a bunch of other comments which he attributes to The thieves . It s unfortunate that Bruce doesn t seem capable of understanding irony, he wrote There is no doubt whatsoever that downloading and playing a game that should have been paid for is theft and then copied part of the text of my comment where I provided a dictionary definition of theft that directly contradicts his claim. If he was at all interested in quality writing he would cite his references and then when a dictionary is cited which disagrees with his opinion he would at least try to find a dictionary with a more agreeable definition. It shouldn t be THAT difficult to find a dictionary that has multiple definitions of theft of which one is agreeable to the MAFIAA [2]. Now if Bruce had properly read my comment he would have seen I ve started watching content from sites such as blip.tv (in the little time I have for such things) and I only play games that are part of the Debian distribution of Linux (free software) which makes it very clear to any reasonable interpretation that I am not a game pirate and probably not even a movie pirate. I did mention in a comment on Bruce s blog that the DVD experience of being forced to sit through a whinge about piracy was a factor that made buying a DVD a worse experience than downloading it, a concept that I expanded into a blog post on the relative technical merits of DVDs and pirate MP4 files [3]. That post received a number of interesting comments including one from Josselin Mouette which had some useful technical detail about subtitles and audio track storage. I had believed that there were some real technical advantages of DVDs but Josselin corrected me on this matter. Also one thing that is noteworthy is that Bruce seems to use a copyright picture in almost every post but he doesn t attribute any of them. It does seem unusual for someone to use commercial artwork without any copyright or trademark notices attached. This usually isn t a big deal for a blogger, a liberal interpretation of copyright and trademark law is usually expected in terms of blogging corporations will tend to be hesitant to invoke the Streisand effect by suing a blogger (EG Bruce blog came to fame when he was sued by Evony). But when a blogger is writing about the importance of not pirating anything it would seem sensible to go to the effort of citing trademark and copyright references and also mentioning the licence agreements under which the IP was used. I believe that any loss of customers and revenue by the MAFIAA and the gaming industry is due to the actions of the companies involved. They should just try to make their customers happy, otherwise they lose the customers. The same goes for bloggers. I read blogs written by people who disagree with me, and sometimes by people who offend me on occasion. But Bruce is making baseless claims while deliberately ignoring evidence. He is calling for strong anti-piracy measures while doing what could be considered as pirating my work. He uses words in ways that conflict with dictionary definitions, and he calls for an end to our current legal system by demanding punishment based on three accusations rather than any legal process. I even pointed out to Bruce that if there was a three strikes law regarding accusations of copyright infringement then his blog would be offline after three accusations by Evony. Sorry Bruce, if I was looking for irrational rants about copyright then I would look at what the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) are doing [4]. The SFWA people demonstrate as much knowledge of computers and the Internet as Bruce does, but they are at least really good writers. If it was just me unsubscribing from Bruce s RSS feed then it wouldn t matter (I m one of tens of thousands of readers). But I expect that a large portion of the new readers Bruce acquired after being attacked by Evony will disappear when they see Bruce as the attacker and everyone who uses the Internet as a potential victim of the Three Strikes law.

• [1] http://www.bruceongames.com/2010/01/22/what-game-thieves-have-to-say-for-themselves/
• [2] http://mafiaa.org/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/06/which-is-better-original-dvd-or-pirate-mp4/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/09/23/dmca-and-sci-fi/

I know this is quite premature as we're just about to release 3.3, however development on 3.4 has already started in SVN and we've already implemented more than 20 requests from our features tracker. This is even bigger number than release 3.3 will have! Well the fact is that most of these things are cosmetic or tiny improvements, on the other side some of them were requested for very long time (the oldest one currently dates to 2003). The new features bring things such as direct blob download (thing we definitely should have earlier), links to documentation for SQL commands in highlighted SQL (what was quite easy, but nobody requested such thing and I added the feature after seeing that Adminer does this), possibility to directly bookmark most pages or exporting user privileges. See ChangeLog for more detailed list of features. You can try all new features on our demo server.

In the last few days, I found the time to spend some with KVM and libvirt. Unfortunately, there is a subject that I haven t yet found a satisfying solution: Naming of block devices in guest instances. This is surely a common issue, but solutions are rare. Neither an article on Usenet (in German) nor the German version of this blog article has found solutions for the main question. I should have written this in English in the first place and am thus translating from German to english, hoping that there will be some answers and suggestions. KVM is quite inflexible when it coms to configure block devices. It is possible to define on the host, which files or whole devices from the host should be visible in the guest. The documentation suggests that devices should be brought into the guest with the virtio model, which needs suppport in the guest kernel. Importing a device as emulated ATA or SCSI device brings a performance penalty. The devices brought into the guest via virtio appear in the guest s dev as /dev/vd<x> and do also have their corresponding entries in /dev/disk/by-uuid and /dev/disk/by-path. The vd<x> node is simply numbered in consecutive order as hd<x> and sd<x>. /dev/disk/by-uuid is the correct UUID of the file system found on the device, at least if it s a block device partitioned inside the guest and formatted with ext3 (I didn t try anything else yet). The terminology of the /dev/disk/by-path node is not yet understood, and I am somewhat reluctant to assume the PCI paths of emulated hardware as stable. Looks like I am forced to configure inside the guest when I have changed the host s mass storage system (for example, after migration to a different file system or after new block devices have been added) to accommodate for the new order of the /dev/vd<x> or to have the UUID correctly configured. This is like calling for configuration errors. This is a reincarnation of the same issue that has been killed by LVM on Linuxes running on bare metal : The block device itself has a mnemonic name which is constant even in migration and copy actions. This works without file-system specific stuff like UUID or label, and wouldn t even be possible with a UUID (which won t be unique in this case). The mnemonic names of LVs are also available when the data is directly written to the raw device such as a CNFS buffer of a news server. I would love to have something like a paravirtualized device mapper interface which would allow to say in the host s configuration which of the host s LVs should be visible in the guest with which name in /dev/mapper. That way, the guest s configuration could remain stable during data wrangling operations on the host. One solution is to have a single LV for each guest and import this LV as /dev/vda into the guest. /dev/vda would then be partitioned like a real disk and have its own LVM installation. This would however need kpartx if one wants to access the data from the host, and loses flexibility when resizing file systems. These issues appear in every installation of KVM virtualization, and I would expect that there are gazillions of other possible solutions. I am interested in knowing how other people have tackled this issue and whether there are more possiblity that I haven t thought of before. Maybe there is a solution that doesn t leave me with the feeling of having implemented something ugly. Does the interface between the host s KVM and the guest s device mapper that I have been dreaming of maybe exist. Or is there any other possibility of configuring the device node s name in the guest Linux on the host side?

Whoa. Kim Clijsters, Belgium's number 1 female tennis player of the moment, just got booted out of the Australian Open by Nadia Petrova. Not what I'd expected especially not with this kind of score; 6-0 6-1. To call this "unexpected" would be a severe understatement. Seriously. That leaves Belgium's hope with Justine Henin or Yanina Wickmayer. I say "or", because they'll next meet eachother in Melbourne. Sounds like an interesting match, indeed.

1. This afternoon I tried to unlock my old Three mobile phones for the purpose of getting cheap net access as described in my previous post [1]. I wanted to use Dodo 3G Internet (via the Optus network) for my parents which would cost them $139 per year and I wanted to use my old Three phone tethered to their PC as the 3G modem (cheaper than buying a new 3G modem). I took in 3 Three phones to the Three store to get unlocked, I actually have 4 old Three phones (my wife and I are each on our third Three phone) but I seem to have misplaced one. It turned out that the two newer phones (LG U890) can t be unlocked as they are permanently locked to the Three network. The older LG U8110 can be unlocked, doing this took 30 minutes of the Three employee speaking to other Three employees on the phone and I will now have to wait 4 days to receive an SMS with the unlock code. So the Three anti-competitive behavior of making it unreasonably difficult to get a phone unlocked and of selling phones that (supposedly) can never be unlocked wasted them 30 minutes of store employee time when other potential customers were queuing up as well as 30 minutes of employee time in their call center. If the call-center employee was based in Australia then as the minimum wage is $14.31 per hour [2] that would have cost them at least $14.31 for 2*30min of work, as a rule of thumb it s generally regarded that the costs of employing people are twice the salary (including costs of maintaining office/shop space, paying managers, doing paperwork, etc). So it probably cost Three about $29 to unlock one of my phones and tell me that the others can t be unlocked, when I find phone 4 it will cost them another $29. As $29 is my typical monthly bill this has got to make an impact on the profitability of Three. If they were smart they would have sent me an SMS when I got a new phone telling me whether the old phone can be unlocked and if so giving me the code to do so. For phones that can be unlocked I doubt that would make anyone unlock their phone who wouldn t do so anyway, and for phones that can t be unlocked they could encourage the owner to give the phone to someone who wants a phone for pre-paid use (thus locking in a new customer). It probably won t be worth the effort of cracking an LG U890 phone to save my parents $10 per annum. As I couldn t get the LG U8110 to talk to my laptop I guess that forces my parents to eventually use Three for 3G net access. But they could have just matched the Dodo price and got the same result without having me spend half an hour in their store. Update: I just enquired about ending my Three contract for 3G net access ($15 per month for 1G of data) in favor of the yearly prepaid option of $149 per annum for 12G. The prepaid option would save me $31 per annum and allow me to use more than 1G in the busy months. But it seems that I subscribed to a two year contract for that one and I have 6 months to go. Over those 6 months they will make about $15 extra in revenue from me while annoying me in the process, this probably isn t a good deal. As my 3G modem is locked to the Three network even if I didn t have a contract I would still be unable to use a different provider.


2. My mother phoned Optus about her Internet connection and discovered that she had supposedly renewed her Optus cable Internet contract in September last year. Presumably someone from Optus phoned my parents and asked what seemed like a routine do you want to keep using the Internet? question but was really a do you agree to a 2 year contract with a $250 penalty clause for exiting early? . This isn t the first time that Oprus has scammed my parents (previously they charged them rental for a phone that they never supplied), I guess that they have a practice of pulling such stunts on pensioners. I guess I ll have to call the TIO, which will end up costing them more than the $250 penalty clause. The irony here is that as Dodo uses the Optus network I would have used Optus by choice for my parents, but now that they are being scum I will willingly pay the extra $10 per annum to use Three (which while annoying aren t actually hostile).


3. Finally while Google is admirably living up to their don t be evil motto in regards to China [3] their conduct regarding Google Talk leaves a lot to be desired. Two employees of a company I work for use Google Talk for their instant messaging, this has a Windows client but also allows general access via the Jabber protocol. So these two guys wanted to talk to me via Jabber but Google would just send me email saying X has invited you to sign up for Google Talk so you can talk to each other for free over your computers , I received 5 such messages from a colleague who was particularly persistent. It seems impossible for the Google Talk server to send a chat request to my personal Jabber server (which works well with a variety of other Jabber servers). So I have now started using my Gmail address to talk via the Jabber protocol to other Gmail users. This means that I have a TCP connection to the Google servers open most of the time and Google can boast of having one more active Gmail user. But it doesn t seem to really provide them a benefit. I am going to keep using my main email address as my primary Jabber ID and only use my Gmail address for talking to Google Talk users and only when paid to do so. But as a result of this I recommend that everyone avoid Google Talk as much as possible. Use open Jabber servers such as the ones run by Jabber.org.

It seems to me that none of these companies are really gaining anything from trying to lock customers in. They would be better off spending their efforts on being friendly to people and making them want to be repeat users/customers.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/15/cheap-net-access-australia/
• [2] http://www.fairpay.gov.au/
• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

My subject line is a little over-dramatic, but only a little. Like many states, Kansas is facing a severe budget problem. Last year, the state cut many programs to the bone and beyond. Nursing homes, schools, universities, and charities have all been hard-hit. A 10% cut in Medicaid reimbursement rates and similar cuts to education have been devastating. Institutions are wondering how they can survive. Here s the thing: in rural communities, the very survival of the community is often dependent upon the survival of its schools, nursing home, hospital, or college. Take any one of those things away and the community begins a slow and painful death. This has happened over and over, and right now the Kansas legislature has a simple choice: Do they make a temporary 1% increase in sales tax, and also some increases in tobacco/alcohol taxes, or not? If they do, they can get funding back to normal levels. If they do not, funding will be cut even further, which will certainly cripple many institutions. There are a lot of people opposed to this tax. I m not one of them; I think it s key to the survival of our rural communities and the competitiveness of the state as a whole. 98.9% of Kansas is rural. See the gravity of the situation? Please, if you are a Kansas resident, write your representatives and leave a comment here saying you did (and what you wrote, if you like). The easiest way to find your state senator and representative is to go to a state website, then scroll down to information by county , click on your county, and then click on the districts to see a map if you need one. (The find by address feature seems to be hopelessly broken.) Here s what I wrote: Subject: Please raise my taxes I write with a request I don t make lightly: please raise my taxes, and support the 1% sales tax increase with the 3-year sunset provision. The consequences of failing to do so are terrible. Losing nursing homes or schools would mean the long-term death of many rural communities. Our community leaders are fearing not just for nursing homes being gone; there is a real threat of entire communities facing a slow extinction. The 10% Medicaid cuts already made are having a devastating impact on many quality institutions, and if left in place for any length of time could result in quality organizations closing, or refusing to accept Medicaid. And even deeper cuts are being contemplated. Even for those that plan well and have long term care insurance would be harmed if the nursing homes they might contemplate living in one day have closed due to today s Medicare cuts. I fear for our schools as well. Our two boys will be of school age
soon, and we live in a district that is of one of Kansas exceptionally strong rural schools. So far, our school is coping, but I am concerned about the drive to consolidate our rural schools, which would result in unreasonable travel distances and would be unlikely to duplicate the excellence of the schools we have now. I fear for our early childhood and university systems; without a good beginning in life, Kansas will face higher costs later. Without an affordable university system, Kansas will be less competitive. If small communities lose their schools, nursing homes, college students, or hospitals, some of them won t survive as towns. This hurts everyone in the state. When my wife and I moved from Indianapolis to rural Kansas in 2002, we, like many homebuyers, carefully studied the quality of schools and medical facilities available. If Kansas wants to be able to attract residents and the businesses that want a qualified labor pool, it must remain competitive. Forcing our best institutions to close a permanent problem over a short-term budget problem isn t going to help with that at all. It will hurt all of Kansas, rural and urban alike, if vast portions of our state become less attractive due to these problems. We likely would not have moved to the state at all if its rural communities were dead or dying. How many taxpaying Kansans will we lose if we let their communities suffer? Americans these days have plenty of choices where to live. I don t see many people choosing where to live based on a 1% difference in sales tax. I do see plenty of people making decisions based on quality of schools, hospitals, universities, roads, and even nursing homes. Please help save our rural communities and keep Kansas all of it competitive.

I've recently found out a bit more about separating debug info, and thought a consolidated reference might be handy. The Idea Most every distribution now provides separate debug packages which contain only the debug info, saving much space for the 99% of people who never want to start gdb. This is achieved with objcopy and --only-keep-debug/--add-gnu-debuglink and is well explained in the man page. What does this do? This adds a .gnu_debuglink section to the binary with the name of debug file to look for. The first part is the name of the file, the second part is a check-sum of debug-info file for later reference. Build ID Did you know that binaries also get stamped with a unique id when they are built? The ld --build-id flag stamps in a hash near the end of the link. Incase you're wondering what the format of that is... Although the actual file may change (due to prelink or similar) the hash will not be updated and remain constant. Finding the debug info files The last piece of the puzzle is how gdb attempts to find the debug-info files when it is run. The main variable influencing this is debug-file-directory. The first thing gdb does, which you can verify via an strace, is search for a file called [debug-file-directory]/.build-id/xx/yyyyyy.debug; where xx is the first two hexadecimal digits of the hash, and yyy the rest of it: Next it moves onto the debug-link info filename. First it looks for the filename in same directory as the object being debugged. After that it looks for the file in a sub-directory called .debug/ in the same directory. Finally, it prepends the debug-file-directory to the path of the object being inspected and looks for the debug info there. This is why the /usr/lib/debug directory looks like the root of a file-system; if you're looking for the debug-info of /usr/lib/libfoo.so it will be looked for in /usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/libfoo.so. Interestingly, the sysroot and solib-search-path don't appear to have anything to do with these lookups. So if you change the sysroot, you also need to change the debug-file-directory to match. However, most distributions make all this "just work", so hopefully you'll never have to worry about anyway!

This is the story of a weirdly unfriendly/non-compliant IMAP server, and some nice interactions that arose from a debugging session around it. Over the holidays, i got to do some computer/network debugging for friends and family. One old friend (I'll call him Fred) had a series of problems i managed to help work through, but was ultimately basically stumped based on the weird behavior of an IMAP server. Here's the details (names of the innocent and guilty have been changed), just in case it helps other folks in at least diagnosing similar situations. the diagnosis The initial symptom was that Fred's computer was "very slow". Sadly, this was a Windows machine, so my list of tricks for diagnosing sluggishness is limited. I went through a series of questions, uninstalling things, etc, until we figured it would be better to just have him do his usual work while i watched, kibitzing on what seemed acceptable and what seemed slow. Quite soon, we hit a very specific failure: Fred's Thunderbird installation (version 2, FWIW) was sometimes hanging for a very long period of time during message retrieval. This was not exhaustion of the CPU, disk, RAM, or other local resource. It was pure network delay, and it was a frequent (if unpredictable) frustrating hiccup in his workflow. One thought i had was Thunderbird's per-server max_cached_connections setting, which can sometimes cause a TB instance to hang if a remote server thinks Thunderbird is being too aggressive. After sorting out why Thunderbird was resetting the values after we'd set them to 0 (grr, thanks for the confusing UI, folks!), we set it to 1, but still had the same occasional, lengthy (about 2 minutes) hang when transfering messages between folders (including the trash folder!), or when reading new messages. Sending mail was quite fast, except for occasional (similarly lengthy) hangs writing the copy to the sent folder. So IMAP was the problem (not SMTP), and the 2-minute timeouts smelled like an issue with the networking layer to me. At this point, i busted out wireshark, the trusty packet sniffer, which fortunately works as well on Windows as it does on GNU/Linux. Since Fred was doing his IMAP traffic in the clear, i could actually see when and where in the IMAP session the hang was happening. (BTW, Fred's IMAP traffic is no longer in the clear: after all this happened, i switched him to IMAPS (IMAP wrapped in a TLS session), because although the IMAP server in question actually supports the STARTTLS directive, it fails to advertise it in response to the CAPABILITIES query, so Thunderbird refuses to try it. arrgh.) The basic sequence of Thunderbird's side of an initial IMAP conversation (using plain authentication, anyway) looks something like this:

1 capability
2 login "user" "pass"
3 lsub "" "*"
4 list "" "INBOX"
5 select "INBOX"
6 UID fetch 1:* (FLAGS)

What i found with this server was that if i issued commands 1 through 5, and then left the connection idle for over 5 minutes, then the next command (even if it was just a 6 NOOP or 6 LOGOUT) would cause the IMAP server to issue a TCP reset. No IMAP error message or anything, just a failure at the TCP level. But a nice, fast, responsive failure -- any IMAP client could recover nicely from that by just immediately opening a new connection. I don't mind busy servers killing inactive connections after a reasonable timeout. If it was just this, though, Thunderbird should have continued to be responsive. the deep weirdness But if i issued commands 1 through 6 in rapid succession (the only difference is that extra 6 UID fetch 1:* (FLAGS) command), and then let the connection idle for 5 minutes, then sent the next command: no response of any kind would come from the remote server (not even a TCP ACK or TCP RST). In this circumstance, my client OS's TCP stack would re-send the data repeatedly (staggered at appropriate intervals), until finally the client-side TCP timeout would trigger, and the OS would report the failure to the app, which could turn around and do a simple connection restart to finish up the desired operation. This was the underlying situation causing Fred's Thunderbird client to hang. In both cases above (with or without the 6th command), the magic window for the idle cutoff was a little more than 300 seconds (5 minutes) of idleness. If the client issued a NOOP at 4 minutes, 45 seconds from the last NOOP, it could keep a connection active indefinitely. Furthermore, i could replicate the exact same behavior when i used IMAPS -- the state of the IMAP session itself was somehow modifying the TCP session behavior characteristics, whether it was wrapped in a TLS tunnel or not. One interesting thing about this set of data is that it rules out most common problems in the network connectivity between the two machines. Since none of the hops between the two endpoints know anything about the IMAP state (especially under TLS), and some of the failures are reported properly (e.g. the TCP RST in the 5-command scenario), it's probably safe to say that the various routers, NAT devices, and such were not themselves responsible for the failures. So what's going on on that IMAP server? The service itself does not announce the flavor of IMAP server, though it does respond to a successful login with You are so in, and to a logout with IMAP server logging out, mate. A bit of digging on the 'net suggests that they are running a perdition IMAP proxy. (clearly written by an Aussie, mate!) But why does it not advertise its STARTTLS capability, even though it is capable? And why do some idle connections end up timing out without so much as an RST, when other idle connections give at least a clean break at the TCP level? Is there something about issuing the UID command that causes perdition to hand off the connection to some other service, which in turn doesn't do proper TCP error handling? I don't really know anything about the internals of perdition, so i'm just guessing here. the workaround I ultimately recommended to Fred to reduce the number of cached connections to 1, and to set Thunderbird's interval to check for new mail down to 4 minutes. Hopefully, this will keep his one connection active enough that nothing will timeout, and will keep the interference to his workflow to a minimum. It's an unsatisfactory solution to me, because the behavior of the remote server still seems so non-standard. However, i don't have any sort of control over the remote server, so there's not too much i can do to provide a real fix (other than point the server admins (and perdition developers?) at this writeup). I don't even know the types of backend server that their perdition proxy is balancing between, so i'm pretty lost for better diagnostics even, let alone a real resolution. some notes I couldn't have figured out the exact details listed above just using Thunderbird on Windows. Fortunately, i had a machine with a decent OS available, and was able to cobble together a fake IMAP client from a couple files (imapstart contained the lines above, and imapfinish contained 8 LOGOUT), bash, and socat. Here's the bash snippet i used as a fake IMAP client:

spoolout()   while read foo; do sleep 1 && printf "%s\r\n" "$foo" ; done  
( sleep 2 && spoolout < imapstart && sleep 4 && spoolout < imapfinish && sleep 500 )   socat STDIO TCP4:imap.fubar.example.net:143

To do the test under IMAPS, i just replaced TCP4:imap.fubar.example.net:143 with OPENSSL:imap.fubar.example.net:993. And of course, i had wireshark handy on the GNU/Linux machine as well, so i could analyze the generated packets over there. One thing to note about user empowerment: Fred isn't a tech geek, but he can be curious about the technology he relies on if the situation is right. He was with me through the whole process, didn't get antsy, and never tried to get me to "just fix it" while he did something else. I like that, and wish i got to have that kind of interaction more (though i certainly don't begrudge people the time if they do need to get other things done). I was nervous about breaking out wireshark and scaring him off with it, but it turned out it actually was a good conversation starter about what was actually happening on the network, and how IP and TCP traffic worked. Giving a crash course like that in a quarter of an hour, i can't expect him to retain any concrete specifics, of course. But i think the process was useful in de-mystifying how computers talk to each other somewhat. It's not magic, there are just a lot of finicky pieces that need to fit together a certain way. And Wireshark turned out to be a really nice window into that process, especially when it displays packets during a real-time capture. I usually prefer to do packet captures with tcpdump and analyze them as a non-privileged user afterward for security reasons. But in this case, i felt the positives of user engagement (how often do you get to show someone how their machine actually works?) far outweighed the risks. As an added bonus, it also helped Fred really understand what i meant when i said that it was a bad idea to use IMAP in the clear. He could actually see his username and password in the network traffic! This might be worth keeping in mind as an idea for a demonstration for workshops or hacklabs for folks who are curious about networking -- do a live packet capture of the local network, project it, and just start asking questions about it. Wireshark contains such a wealth of obscure packet dissectors (and today's heterogenous public/open networks are so remarkably chatty and filled with weird stuff) that you're bound to run into things that most (or all!) people in the room don't know about, so it could be a good learning activity for groups of all skill levels. Tags: debugging, imap, perdition, wireshark