Ten Years of Catalyst IT It's our tenth anniversary at Catalyst this year. Since we have our company 'birthday' in the middle of the year we normally have a private party and, while that's been good in the past, we felt ten years was a milestone of some kind and we wanted to do something a little more special... So this year we decided to set up the New Zealand Open Source Awards, which are all set to go in October. There have been lots of entries rolling in to recognise all sorts of interesting projects and unsung heroes of the revolution, but I'm sure there are still a few out there that we haven't heard of. If you think we might have missed one you've only got 10 more days until nominations close at midnight, New Zealand time, on the 17th of August. Nominate your favourites now in the following categories:

• Open Source Ambassador
• Contributor
• Software Project
• Use in Government
• Use in Business
• Use in Education
• Use for Community Organisations

Note that this is not a vote. All entries will be judged on their respective merits by a panel of New Zealanders with a broad technological background. Good luck, and may the best people / teams / departments / organisations win :-)

So, depending on who you talk to, we've got about 9 weeks to go, or maybe 8 weeks. It all depends on whether we can have our way and have a caesarean on the 8th of October. Of course, the baby may have other thoughts on the matter as well... We've had our last planned house guest until Sarah's Mum and Aunty arrive, so we've put the mattress in storage and donated the bed frame to Goodwill. We've acquired a crib (I keep wanting to call it a cot) and a changing table/chest of drawers and put them in place in the baby's room. Last night we bought a car seat. I think the only major item left to get is a stroller. Sarah's pregnancy is still going well. The baby's still extremely active, and has had the hiccups quite a few times in the last week. Apparently that's him trying to breathe. I'm somewhat surprised they don't drown in there trying to do that... Speaking of breathing, our overly cautious obstetrician wanted Sarah to have two shots of steroids, to aid in the baby's lung development "just in case" he was born (or had to be delivered) very early. We felt it was somewhat unnecessary, but thought we'd be kicking ourselves if something happened and we didn't do it. There didn't seem to be any outrageous adverse effects from doing so, so we went along with it. Twice in a week (the second time today) Sarah's had blurry vision followed by a headache, so she called up the hospital today when it happened, and they told her to come in and get checked out. We spent about 4 hours in labor and delivery this afternoon. It turns out the reason they wanted us to come in was because the symptoms could be a sign of preeclampsia. The tests proved otherwise, and they couldn't really offer an explanation for what was going on other than migraines, so they eventually sent us home again. It was nice to get a preview of hospital's labor and delivery ward.

A friend recently asked for advice on a “REALLY small laptop/word processor thingy that would pretty much fit into a (big) pocket, and that only needs to write/word process“. The first problem here is that most people associate “word processing” with desktop publishing and document management. Programs such as MS-Word are considered as having the features required of a word-processor (which includes spelling and grammer checking/correcting, annotations, colours, etc). Programs that have all those features take a lot of CPU power. A Pentium-4 system might be considered the minimum requirement for running a recent version of MS-Word. But a hand-held device can’t have such a powerful CPU (it’s too small to be able to dissipate the heat from such a CPU or contain batteries that can produce enough power to tun it). The next problem is the issue of screen space. A VGA resolution screen (640×480) is regarded as high resolution in the PDA market. Such a resolution does not work with a word-processor that has three toolbars at the top of it’s screen and a paperclip taking up space at the bottom right! I’m sure that everyone who was using computers in the early 1990’s can recall the minimal word-processing programs. One thing to consider is that 640×480 in a 15 inch CRT screen is much more useful than 640×480 in a hand-held device as the larger screen can have fewer pixels per character and therefore display more text on the screen. An added complication is that there are two methods of input for PDAs. One is to have a hardware keyboard (which may be a separate device or may be part of the PDA) and the other is to have a keyboard displayed on the screen. A hardware keyboard makes the device larger and a software keyboard takes up precious screen space (you just can’t win). My PDA is an iPaQ model h3900. It has 64M of RAM, 32M of flash, no hardware keyboard, and a screen resolution of 320×240. I have done some serious writing on my iPaQ (including writing an entire article for Linux Journal) and it works reasonably well. For serious writing you can produce plain text on a PDA and then easily paste it into your program of choice on a PC later (PDAs generally support connection to a PC via serial port and/or USB). The challenge is editing files that originate on a PC using a PDA. Generally I try and use HTML and TeX for my formatted documents so the text versions of those formats are easy to edit once you have learned them. Taking data from a MD-Word file, editing it on a PDA, and then taking it back to the PC would cause many problems and probably wouldn’t be worth attempting. Recently I have been using my iPaQ for writing notes about email and blog posts that I will write. If I get an idea then I immediately write some notes about it on my iPaQ and then usually type it again instead of downloading it. For example the notes for this post were “write about RAM, storage, and screen resolution”. Often getting the initial ideas to start writing is the hard part. Writing a 500 to 1000 word blog post or message is easy once I have the ideas. If I was going to buy a new PDA now I would prefer one with a hardware keyboard, the loss of screen space for a keyboard on the touch-screen is a serious impediment to writing. The maximum amount of text that can be displayed on the screen at any one time limits the complexity of what I work on (see my post about monitors for developers). Another factor is the fact that for small notes the amount of time taken to remove the stylus from it’s bay is greater than the amount of time saved by using it. So I end up writing small notes using my finger-nail on the touch-screen which is significantly slower than using a keyboard (even the crummy ones that PDAs have). Of course the keyboard would still have to be QWERTY and have raised keys so that I can touch-type. I haven’t investigated this seriously as my iPaQ is good enough to last me for another year or two at least and I’ve got an unused spare iPaQ to replace it when it fails. But if anyone has any recommendations of Linux based PDAs with keyboards then I would appreciate some comments.

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The debian armel port reached one milestone yesterday: Being able to run debootstrap from DD-signed, upto-date unmodified debian/unstable packages.

Looking backward:

* When watching the buildd's, the worst of Debian is visible. You don't spend much time wondering on successful builds. The time goes into wondering about the crappy code that fails to compile, the maintainers who ignore RC bugs for months, code with dead upstream..
* bootstrapping a Debian port is still painful. Fortunately Lennert did that for us this time.
* Most maintainers are very responsive, and are happy enough apply patches that help even unofficial ports. The few who ignore patches or are else effectively MIA can cause long delays...
* C++ code is evil. or at least the g++ implementation of it. A random game written in C++ can take 5h to build, when even the most complex C apps compile in 2-3 hours (with a few exceptions like glibc and linux-2.6). Worse, g++-4.2 seems to be another 10-20% slower than g++-4.1... Remember God kills a kitten every time you upload a c++ package unnecessarily!.
* Esoteric language bindings suck too.

Looking forward:

There is some 500 (out of 7100) packages that in Dep-Wait state due some missing packages on armel port:
* ~290 packages that would need FORTRAN (!). specifically the old g77 version...
* ~80 packages waiting for objective C / gnustep
* ~70 packages waiting for ghc6 or related Haskell code
* ~40 packages waiting for Java (being worked on)
* ~15 packages waiting for mono (patch in BTS)
* Then there usual crop of esoteric languages, packages failing to build with current unstable on any port, and packages build-depending on stuff removed or to-be-removed packages.

Effectively this means getting armel over 90% built of Debian needs either g77 to armel or getting Debian to migrate from g77 to gfortran (which is available but not throughly tested on armel). I'm working on the second route..

* Start building d-i images. So that Eddyp can have blazingly fast softfloat rrdtool on his nslu-2 without bugs and trouble.

* Request inclusion into Debian ftp archives. I think with the latest milestones, armel should be ready for archive as a "second class citizen". Inclusion for lenny needs still some work.

* Finally: there's tablets and phones waiting to for Debian armel mobile ;)

Often there are possibilities to earn more money or gain valuable experience by working in another country. I learned (and earned) a lot while working in London and Amsterdam and recommend travelling if you get the opportunity. There are two ways of getting work in another country. One way is to work for a multi-national company and get transferred, this gives benefits of having the company sort everything out for you (creating a bank account etc). But it isn’t an option that is open to many people. Getting a job directly in another country is in some ways more difficult than expected and in some ways easier. Here are some of the factors that make it easier:

• Once you arrive in your destination country it’s usually easy to get work if the economic conditions are good. When choosing a country to migrate to and a time to migrate you will generally make sure that the economic conditions are reasonably good (or at least demand is greater than supply for your industry sector).


• It’s widely believed by employers that employees from other countries have valuable experience to bring, due to working conditions being different in other countries. I am doubtful of this (but I don’t complain when it helps me get a job).


• Employers often believe that employees from a long way away are very highly motivated and work really hard. I believe that this is correct as it applies to the employees that they get (EG Australians in the EU work really hard). Not that Australians in general would work harder than Europeans, but people who are willing to travel so far for their career will be motivated and people who have recently arrived in a country where they have few friends and no relatives have less things to distract them from work.

Here are some of the problems that you will face:

• Different expectations of employers. For example in Australia a university degree is not really required while European employers demand it.


• Getting a bank account. When I arrived in the UK I had trouble getting a bank account due to money-laundering laws. A passport was not sufficient and I needed proof of address, but renting an apartment without having a bank account was difficult too… I ended up getting an accountant to recommend me to a bank. Apparently the easiest way of doing this is to get an Australian bank that is part of a multi-national banking group to get their UK equivalent to set up an account before you leave Australia. Also I know people who had problems getting a Dutch bank account (fortunately there is the PostBank which deals with everyone). The UK laws may have changed in the last 8 years, but it’s the sort of problem that can get you in any country - as you can’t get paid without a bank account it’s serious!


• Renting an apartment. I think it’s best to plan to live in hotels until you get a job that will last a while, then you can live reasonably close to your work. Also landlords will often want to know where you work before deciding whether to accept you as a tenant. I lived in hotels in the UK for almost a year and never rented an apartment because of this. It’s not a problem if the stuff you need can fit into a couple of suitcases.


• Learning how to save money. Little things like bulk purchases of train tickets can save significant amounts of money. It’s the sort of thing that locals learn by osmosis but foreigners can take months or years to learn them. This is especially a problem when you don’t speak the local language and discount vouchers have fine print.


• Catching a taxi. Taxi drivers generally only speak the local language and if you don’t speak it then you will have problems. Showing a taxi driver a laptop screen with printed directions and a map helps.

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Xen Migration This afternoon I mostly migrated Xen guests from their old host to their new. (As part of a an upgrade of facilities. Upgrading in place would have been much fiddlier and more annoying!) The migration took almost three hours, which was longer than anticipated but shorter than I'd feared. In the future I'll know to do it differently, but I managed to script it fairly well after the first couple were done manually. Everything appears to be working correctly so I will soon nip out for some high quality beer. Xen Help?

One thing that I wanted to do with the new host was track bandwidth usage upon a per-guest basis. This should be possible with something like vnstat - however solutions counting traffic by interface name are not a good mesh with Xen - since by default a guest will have an interface with a name like 'vif20.0' - and no means of mapping that to a specific guest. Each of my guests has been allocated three IPs which are defined like this in the Xen configuration file:

vif = [ 'ip=1.2.3.4 1.2.3.5 1.2.3.6' ]

This works prefectly. This also works:

vif = [ 'ip=1.2.3.4,vifname=foo 1.2.3.5 1.2.3.6' ]

Unfortunately anything else I've tried to give each IP a static interface name fails. I've seen reports of this online but no solutions. Given a configuration file like this the Xen guest doesn't receive any traffic upon the second + third address:

vif = [ 'ip=1.2.3.4,vifname=foo1',
        'ip=1.2.3.5,vifname=foo2',
        'ip=1.2.3.6,vifname=foo3' ]

Any suggestions welcome.

A couple of weeks ago, Intel has released the PowerTOP utility for Linux, a tool similar to the well known top(1) utility that can help you understand why your laptop battery runtime is as low as 1 hour. You need a tickless kernel (2.6.21 at least on i386, 2.6.22 + hrt patchset on amd64) for that to work, and timer statistics must be enabled. This is an extremely bright marketing coup from Intel, for essentially two reasons:

• with PowerTOP, they’re now telling “hey look, the CPU is in C3 xx,x% of the time, it’s saving power!!!” and have some real hard data to back that up;
• with PowerTOP, they can also tell “hey look, the CPU cannot reach the C3 state for long enough periods because foobar is waking it up too often! That’s not the CPU’s fault!”, again with some real hard data to back that up.

In that, PowerTOP is an incredible PR spinning tool that can shift the blame away from the Intel CPU in your machine to about everything else in your machine - including software! They’ve done extensive and intensive internal testing, which turned up some bugs and misbehaviours here and there, which is truly great. They’re also announcing incredibly low “CPU wakeups per second” values, so low that there is no way you can reach such low values on any kind of real world setup. These numbers must be seen in the context of lab testing on otherwise idle machines. On the “CPU wakeups per second” front, you’ll most probably see that the #1 offender is your UHCI USB controller. A UHCI USB controller produces a thousand interrupts per second, effectively waking up the CPU a thousand times per second even when nothing happens. So, now it’s all the USB controller’s fault! Ah, wait, UHCI is an Intel spec! (UHCI is a joint effort by Intel and others, Intel being the lead) Fortunately, to be able to put the USB host controller to sleep, you need to put all the USB devices attached to it to sleep too. Here comes the (in)famous CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND kernel option introduced six or so months ago, the one that makes (made, I’ve worked around it in SANE last week-end) your scanner produce only “black scans” and prevents your printer from working properly. So now it’s all the USB devices’ fault. Brilliant, isn’t it ? To be honest and complete, once again, CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND exposed a lot of hardware bugs. The USB spec is probably one of the most violated spec these days (together with ACPI I’d say, though it looks like this one is improving lately). Please don’t get me wrong: PowerTOP is a very useful tool that has its uses, the tickless kernel is of course a very important feature, and CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND would be the icing on the cake if USB devices weren’t so ignorant of the spec. But the Intel marketing crap behind that really needs to stop. Produce better chips which consume less power, period. My PowerBook G4 could run 4h30 on battery (a machine designed 7 years ago). My Core2 Duo MacBook Pro, with a slightly bigger battery, can only run 1h40 with the same software and workload, with cpufreq enabled etc, etc. Granted, the ATI video card is a big sucker here too. (I wrote this entry to share my thoughts on the matter, as a reaction to the many mails I’m getting about PowerTOP and the MacBooks, so as to have a reference to point people to, instead of rewriting the same things again and again.)

A recent thread which started on the Debian Release mailing list caught my eye this week. I attempted to aid the migration of this thread to the debian-ipv6 mailing list, which is really a better place for this and sorely in need of controversial topics for discussion. It is interesting how people can so blindly decide that broken things should be destroyed. Repair often appears not to be an option, even for a long-term, wide-reaching effort like this, though we are all working on open-source software! In this case there are an unknown number of less fortunate people in the world who are located behind some kinds of broken DNS infrastructure which discards 'AAAA' lookups. Of course 'AAAA' lookups are attempts to resolve a name to an IPv6 address, and the resolver in a 'modern' libc (i.e. one from the last five years or so :-) will try to retrieve an IPv6 address before it attempts to resolve a name as IPv4 with an 'A' lookup. That is how the standard is written, so if you want to comply with the standard you have to do it that way. Other things also interfere, but this element of the specified behaviour seems to cause the most annoying and pointless whingeing I have heard. I suppose that the people who want working IPv6 make it so, and do not have problems with this behaviour. But it seems that people who are behind this kind of broken DNS either disable IPv6, or they have to whine about IPv6 being turned on by default, and can't we please all go back to the good old days. What's wrong with IPv4 anyway? Doesn't NAT solve all of it's problems? Are we sure this new (heh!) technology is safe? Fortunately some people are so good at making their pain felt by other people that they can get other people to do their work for them. So Mithrandir has written a nice elegant patch for libc6 so that it won't do the IPv6 lookups unless you have a usable IPv6 configuration. I've filed bug #435646 against Debian to get this included, but Aurelian Jarno justifiably wants a few people to test it a bit harder... So I've taken the original patch and tweaked it to apply against current libc6 sources (2.6-5) and tested it for myself. It works as desired, as far as I can see, when comparing behaviour with an unpatched system. The patch is attached to the bug report, of course. Perhaps some other people out there can put a wee bit of CPU into testing this for other environments so that we can make life easier for those people with no time / inclination to use IPv6, to ensure that they don't just disable it because it is making life too painful for them in it's current form? How to build libc6 for fun and proft If you have appropriate deb-src URLs configured, and are running Sid, then the following will let you build a local copy of libc6 with the patch. This is probably better testing than if I just make my packages available (which are only i386 in any case).

apt-get build-dep glibc
apt-get source glibc
cd glibc-2.6
debian/rules unpack
cd build-tree/glibc-2.6
wget http://tinyurl.com/3xzm3o
patch -p0 <glibc-only-lookup-ipv6-if-it-makes-sense-debian.patch
cd -
dch --newversion 2.6-5+v6 "Apply IPv6 Resolver Sanity"
fakeroot debian/rules binary

Wait a few hours for it to build... Install... And then confirm that this only does 'AAAA' lookups if (when) you actually have a global or site scoped IPv6 address. When you only have a loopback or link local IPv6 address then you should only see 'A' record lookups. Step 3: profit! Whoops! I forgot the fun bit: please update the bug report :-) What the patch does In my opinion this is quite an elegant solution from Tolleff. He has picked a single characteristic of the IPv6 interfaces to further refine whether the IPv6 configuration of some interface is actually usable. With IPv6 it is much more common to have multiple addresses assigned to a single interface. Interfaces are automatically configured with a link-local address which is not globally routable, and the loopback interface is also configured with the IPv6 equivalent of 127.0.0.1 (which is "::1"). To get a usable IPv6 setup you will also end up with a more widely usable address. In most cases this will be a global address, meaning that it is (in theory) globally routable from other people who also have global addresses, or you could have a "site" address, which is the IPv6 equivalent of RFC1918 addressing. The patch considers that for the purposes of name resolution, it will be pointless to do AAAA lookups unless you have an address of the second kind. This means that people behind broken DNS won't be impacted unless the try and set up IPv6, and people who don't try and set up IPv6 won't get the 'hesitation' while their system attempts to resolve each address in IPv6 space first. It will also mean that when people start to enable IPv6 around them, their setup will continue to work correctly.

It's been a few days since I posted on my blog -- since I left Montreal for Taipei and Wikimania 2007. My time has been upside-down and backwards as I've traveled around to the other side of the clock and a day into the future, and I've just been insanely busy with other work. My flight to Taipei was dreamy. I travelled enough last year to get Air Canada's "silver" frequent-flier level, which earned me a couple of system-wide upgrade certificates. They came in handy, since I bumped up to business class on the leg between Montreal and Vancouver, and then to the "Premier Laurel" class on the EVA Air codeshare between Vancouver and Taipei. That was first class across the Pacific Ocean, and man, it's the only way to fly. Jimmy Wales was on the same plane (but back in business class...), so we got to chat a bit and we shared a taxi to the conference site. Jimmy's really fun to talk to -- it's always nice talking to another entrepreneur who's passionately dedicated to Free and Open Content. (We were in line for customs together, too, and I tried to peek at his passport to find out his date of birth, over which there is some confusion. But he had his thumb over the day (intentionally...?), and all I got was "Aug 1966", which everyone agrees on anyways. Dang! My personal theory is that Jimmy was born on 6 June 1966 and uses 8 Aug 1966 instead to avoid the demonic stigma.) The conference centre we're in is great -- a really big, clean, modern place. It's nice when we're inside, but Taipei in August is muggy and hot like a laundromat in rural Mississippi. I find myself rushing between buildings. tags: wiki wikimania2007 taipei evaair jimmywales travel

IM IN TAIPEI HACKING UR DAYS I came in a couple of days early to participate in the Hacking Days event. This is a pre-conference meetup for MediaWiki developers and those who love them. The meetup was really unstructured and fun because of it, although there were a few points of uncomfortable silence when people stopped talking and we all realized we had 14 more hours of meetings and not much left to say. There's also a real tension between the conference organizers, who've encouraged non-developers to come to Hacking Days, and the core developers who really want to just be left alone and get some work done. This year the 2-day event was split into "Hacking Days" and "Hacking Days Extra", with the first being invite-only and the second being open to all. I think it's a tension that needs to be resolved -- if outsiders aren't invited to Hacking Days, we just need to say that and live with it. We shouldn't let people think they're going to participate and then cut them out. That's a bait-and-switch tactic and it's unfair. I think that there's a need for an open-attendance MediaWiki conference; I also think that MW is a big enough piece of software that third-party conference organizers would be eager to make an MWCon work. And core developers could get hefty fees for coming to talk! tags: wiki mediawiki hackingdays wikimania2007

Announcements I've been having problems sleeping here. I've been falling asleep at the wrong times and waking up at the very wrong time. Last night, I missed the Wikitravel Eat-together because I fell asleep at dinner time and didn't get up for the event. Make mental note: don't miss your favorite wiki's user get-together! Fortunately Jani covered for me and apparently the event was a lot of fun. Speaking of Jani: this morning he announced a new venture that Maj and I have been helping him with. Wikitravel Press is an independent company that will be publishing a line of printed travel guidebooks (yes, paper books! That you can hold in your hand!) based on Wikitravel content. I think it's a great project and I'm really glad we're going to finally be fulfilling this important goal of the Wikitravel project. I also think it's going to be a great way to attract a new round of contributors -- people who are more reliant on their paper guidebooks than to a search engine for learning about their destinations. I think that the idea that they can change and improve the books they have will be a really important incentive for these folks. And like it or not, there are still a lot of people who don't consider digital information "real" in the same way as analog-stored info. So putting Wikitravel guides on paper is like Pinocchio becoming a Real Boy. Thank you, Blue Fairy! More info at the project's announcement and the on-site discussion (Wikitravel:3 August 2007). tags: wikitravel wikitravelpress guidebooks travel announcements

Called out This morning's keynote address by the Wikimedia Foundation chairwoman Florence Devouard was informative and interesting. She even talked about ways to bring money into the Foundation... including selling books based on the site content. I was giggling about this with Jani as she moved on to talking about the attention economy, to hear, "For example, Evan is not paying attention right now and talking to his neighbour." D'oh! Lesson learned: don't mess with User:Anthere! tags: anthere keynote books wikimediafoundation

The command crm_resource allows you to do basic editing of resources in the Heartbeat configuration database. But sometimes you need to do different things and the tool xmlstarlet is a good option. The below script can be used for testing Heartbeat OCF resource scripts. It uses the Heartbeat management program cibadmin to get the XML configuration data and then uses xmlstarlet to process it. The sel option for xmlstarlet selects some data from an XML file, the -t -m options instruct it to match data from a template. The template is the /resources/primitive part. The --value-of expression will print the values of some labels from the XML. The script will concatenate the name and value tags and export them as environment variables (see my post about Configuring a Heartbeat Service for an explanation of the use of the variables). The TYPE variable is the name of the script under the /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat directory. In recent versions of Heartbeat (2.1.x) the OCF_ROOT environment variable must be set before an OCF script is called. Setting it on older versions of Heartbeat doesn’t do any harm so I unconditionally set it in this script (which should work for all 2.x.x versions of Heartbeat). The first parameter for the script is the id of the service to be operated on and the second parameter is the operation to perform (start, stop, and status are the only interesting values). The script will echo the exit code to the screen (0 means success, 7 means that the service is not running or the operation failed, and any other number means a serious error that will trigger a STONITH if Heartbeat gets it). #!/bin/sh
$(cibadmin -Q -o resources xmlstarlet sel -t -m \
"/resources/primitive [@id='$1']/instance_attributes/attributes/nvpair" \
--value-of "concat('export OCF_RESKEY_',@name,'=',@value,'
','TYPE=',../../../@type,'
')")
OCF_ROOT=/usr/lib/ocf /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/$TYPE $2
echo $? Below is another version of the same script that instead uses crm_resource to get the XML data. The output of crm_resource has a couple of lines of non-XML data at the start (removed by the grep) and also only gives the XML tree related to the primitive in question (so the /resources part is removed from the xmlstarlet command-line). #!/bin/sh
$(crm_resource -r $1 -x grep -v ^[a-z] xmlstarlet sel -t -m \
  "/primitive/instance_attributes/attributes/nvpair" --value-of \
  "concat('export OCF_RESKEY_',@name,'=',@value,'
','TYPE=',../../../@type,'
')")
OCF_ROOT=/usr/lib/ocf /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/$TYPE $2
echo $? The problem with both of those scripts is that they rely on Heartbeat being operational. Performing any operations other than a status check while Heartbeat is running is a risky thing to do. If Heartbeat starts a service at the same time as you start it via such a script then the results will probably be undesired. One situation where it is safe to run this is when a service fails to start. After it has failed repeatedly Heartbeat may stop trying to restart it (depending on the configuration) in which case it will be safe to try and start it. Also you can put in temporary constraints to stop the resource from running by repeatedly running crm_resource -M -r ID until all nodes have been prohibited from running it (make sure you run crm_resource -U -r ID afterwards to remove the temporary constraints). The following script does the same thing but directly reads the XML file for the Heartbeat configuration. This is designed to be used when Heartbeat is not running. For example you could copy the XML file from a running cluster to a test machine and then test your OCF resource scripts. #!/bin/sh
$(cat /var/lib/heartbeat/crm/cib.xml xmlstarlet sel -t -m \
  "/cib/configuration/resources/primitive [@id='$1']/instance_attributes/attributes/nvpair" \
  --value-of \
  "concat('export OCF_RESKEY_',@name,'=',@value,'
','TYPE=',../../../@type,'
')")
OCF_ROOT=/usr/lib/ocf /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/$TYPE $2
echo $?

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A year ago I setup a xen hosting platform, because I was selfish and wanted a lot more resources than I could otherwise buy within my budget. At that time I managed to setup a system which gave 7 users 256Mb of memory, 10Gb of disk space and 3 IP addresses all for 11.50 a month, or 138 a year. On the first anniversary I've managed to increase those resources such that our users can now have:

• 40Gb of disk space (x4!)
• 512Mb of memory (x2!)

All for the same price. One user decided to buy two accounts upon the machine, so that he could have a combined 512mb+20Gb account, and as the resources have increased this year this is no longer required - so we have a space free for one more user. Last year several people asked for accounts and I had to reject them - I don't want to be a hosting company I just want to have enough users to fill a machine so that I can be selfish and get a higher spec for myself! So if anybody who asked last year is still looking for cheap hosting there will be one space at the given spec and price available from this coming Friday / Saturday. (Unfortunately I must insist upon a years payment in advance.) Uptime last year was good I can recall two reboots with minimal notice, which is reasonable enough I think. You'll get as much support as I can offer, my mobile number, and a clean install of any Debian derived distribution. (The xen-shell package was developed for this service last year, and allows you to reboot your machine remotely, manage reverse DNS, and connect to the serial console if you break your networking. You'll be able to use that over SSH.) Please comment if you're interested - If there are more people interested I guess I'll work though the list in order of comments until somebody commits to paying.. Questions welcome,. TODO: Update website, get great testimonials about my "service" ;) Update: Space gone.

It seems like everything's coming up wiki these last few days. I guess it's just part of going to Wikimania -- wiki is in the air. For example, I'm glad to see that Wikispaces now supports OpenID for login. That's excellent news for the wiki world -- Wikispaces joins a growing number of wiki projects and wiki providers who support OpenID: WetPaint, Wikitravel, wikiHow, AboutUs, and many others. OpenID is really coming together as a global sign-on for wikis. This is good news, because it means we can start talking about distributed reputation systems for wikis, making for one big wiki family. I think it would be great if Wikipedia and Wikia were ready to come on board with OpenID sometime soon. It's unfortunate that OpenID deployment at Wikimedia is dependent on the single user login system, which is a huge effort that's taking longer than expected. Wikia is waiting to see what Wikimedia does. I tried out Wikispaces's OpenID support, and it seems pretty good. I got a spurious error when I logged in -- it responded to my automatically-provided nick, "Evan", with a message that made it sound like I'd just typed in that nickname. Other than that, it worked quite smoothly. Good job to Wikispaces, and real bonus for OpenID. tags: openid wiki wikispaces

The other day, I ended up watching the new Simpsons movie; unfortunately, however I found it to be somewhat less than what I'd expected it to be. I think that unfortunately the format has become boring to me; the gags are no longer new, and it was too much like watching a long episode on TV.
In other news, I'm still in Oslo until the 6th; trying to sort out employment and studies for next year.
That is all.

I've been busy doing various things, so I've not had a chance to blog much lately. Time for a quick catch-up... We've had a bit of a development panic at work, so I've been working longer hours than normal. The scary thing is (and I've noticed this in the past too), I seem to enjoy the job more when there's real pressure involved. That's not to say I want it to always be stressful, but we've had more fun with a small group of us really concentrating on a single project, working well together. Outside of work, I've been really quite relieved to take a bit of a break from Debian stuff since Debconf has finished. Debconf (as always) was a really good way to be re-enthused about working on Debian, but it has taken me several weeks to get over it physically. I've finally finished upgrading all of my machines at home to Etch. In most cases it was easy, but the final one left was lump, the firewall/mail/web/foo server. I'd chickened out of upgrading it for quite a while due to the sheer number of services it hosts, and also the substantial amount of local config it therefore holds. In the end, things were thankfully mostly painless. The nice thing about doing the upgrade was that finally lots of new software has suddenly become readily available. Amongst other things, I've added iodine and openvpn, and now I'm looking into playing with voice over IP (probably Asterisk). My Nokia E70 has a VOIP client and wifi, so in theory I should be able to use my regular mobile phone as a voip handset on my wireless network at home and just get cheaper outbound calls. Yay! I visited my friend Matthew a couple of weeks ago, and also helped him upgrade/install his network of Debian machines. Unfortunately, his main workstation (dual AMD64 goodness) is still left just running Windows. BIOS/SATA RAID - just say NO! No matter what we did on that machine, we could not make it dual-boot XP and Debian without forcing him to reinstall it all from scratch. :-( The SPI board elections have just finished. Congratulations to the new mugs^H^H^H^Hmembers of the board, and best of luck in doing a good job. And comiserations to the people who lost - I'm sure most of you would have been good, useful board members too. We're having a final Debconf 7 wrapup meeting next weekend in York, where we're hoping to get the final conference report finished. There are a few more T-shirts to get finished and delivered to people and the sponsorship bags to go out, then it's all done for this year. It'll be good to meet up with people again anyway. Oh, and not long now until the big BBQ at my place. I've started getting some supplies in already, and I'm looking forwards to a bunch of geeks coming round to wreck my house again. Or something... *grin* Last but not least - I'm changing ISPs shortly. Noodles and Huggie have provided excellent service for nearly 3 years, but are exiting the business and moving on to other things. So I'll be moving my home ADSL back to UKFSN shortly. Hopefully the disruption will be minimal.

I recently received an email from RSA inviting me to read their blog (after having requested an evaluation copy of one of their products). They invited me to “join the conversation“. Often blogs are described as a “conversation” and I’ve been considering whether that analogy is appropriate. The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 has the following definition: Usage: Conversation , Talk . There is a looser sense of these words, in which they are synonymous; there is a stricter sense, in which they differ. Talk is usually broken, familiar, and versatile. Conversation is more continuous and sustained, and turns ordinarily upon topics or higher interest. Children talk to their parents or to their companions; men converse together in mixed assemblies. There are instances of blogging that can approximate conversation when bloggers cite each other’s articles in turn and leave comments on each other’s blogs. But it’s usually not that continuous and sustained. An occasional patterin is that blogger A writes a post, blogger B writes a post disagreeing with it, blogger A comments on blogger B’s post, and that’s usually the end of it. Usually it’s just a case of multiple bloggers writing posts representing their own opinions with occasional references to other blogs and no sustained interaction. The blogging interaction seems to more closely resemble academics presenting papers with alternate solutions to a problem than a conversation. One factor that I believe defines conversation but which isn’t mentioned in the dictionary is that the parties involved have an equal standing. The comments section of a blog is not such a forum, the blogger has a significantly more powerful voice (at least in connection with their own blog) than the people who comment. Someone who posts a comment may have it deleted, and it if is left then a rebuttal in another post will be seen by a significantly larger number of people (the number of people who read comments on a post is a tiny minority of the people who read the post). This doesn’t preclude conversation between bloggers who are of equal popularity in a community, for example most readers of my blog come from Planet Linux Australia and Planet Debian so any blogger who is also syndicated on those sites has an equal voice to me. Another factor in conversation is whether responses are even read. Many blogs don’t accept comments and it’s never certain that a blogger will see a track-back from a blog that references one of their posts. When one party ignores the other (or appears to do so) then there is no conversation. I’m not aware of whether a conversation with RSA people would be possible. While their blog refuses to send content to my Planet installation I guess I’m not going to find out… Is the lack of conversation a bad thing? One problem with conversation is that it often degenerates into what GCIDE defines as talk, while that is good for a friendly mailing list (EG your local LUG) it isn’t so good for the exchange of technical information. A compounding problem for mailing lists is the number of posts that can not be interpreted without the context of a thread of discussion. This often makes mailing lists unreasonably difficult to use in the search for answers to technical problems. When reading google search results I will usually read blog URLs before mailing list posts as a blog post will usually stand alone and either give me an answer or be obviously not related to my problem - sometimes I have to read a dozen messages in a list discussion to determine that it’s not going to help me! To improve things in this regard I plan to increase the number of posts I write with solutions to random technical problems that I encounter with the aim of providing a resource for google searches and to randomly inform people who read my blog. I find such posts by other people quite useful, I often get inspired to implement a technology after reading a blog post about it - there are many things that have a low priority in my todo list because they seem difficult, a blog post that reveals them to be easier than expected and advises how to avoid common problems can really make a difference!

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I've been struggling with gettext most of the day but I've finally got the solution! gpe-cash builds an application and a shared library (with API, -dev, -dbg and -doc). Source files for the application contain translatable strings, as do source files for the shared library. Unable to find documentation for how this should work with gettext, I got no end of path related errors.
Here's the clue: Keep ./po/ for the $PACKAGE.pot file, add ./po-foo/ for the second POT file. My mistake was to try to use po/ and src/po or src/po and src/foo/po.
Then, remove the symlinked Makefile.in.in from po-foo/ and copy the file from po/ so that the po-foo/Makefile.in.in can be edited to change the value of GETTEXT_PACKAGE to the alternate file.
Then, add the LINGUAS file to each po directory.
Add po-foo/ to the configure.ac output.
I also switched from glib_gettextize to gettextize (switching the configure.ac macros at the same time). I'm not sure if this is strictly necessary (and it added quite a lot of stuff to both po/ directories) but I'm not keen on breaking what I've just spent all day fixing!

Committed to cashutil SVN: r619.

Thanks to Centauri Dreams for the pointer to the ESA DARWIN proposal now here (high-resolution version also here). DARWIN is a space mission to detect the presence of life on other planets by spectroscopy: looking for biomarkers such as the presence of Ozone, water and methane together on terrestrial-sized planets. These are groups of gases that collectively would imply the presence of life. Unfortunately it appears that DARWIN is slipping: its not currently hardware-funded, and has a planned launch-date of 2020, having slipped from 2012. This is when NASAs alternative Terrestrial Planet Finder and Space Interferometry Mission have been defunded indefinitely. At the same time, the French COROT mission has just announced its first month-long series light-curves. COROT hunts for Earth-sized planets: it's a small space telescope that stares at the same patch of sky for long periods, looking for changes in the amount of light from stars that indicate a planet passing in front of a star. It has been much more successful than expected, having already announced its first exoplanet detection in April. NASA is also launching a similar mission, Kepler, in 2008. So we face the prospect that any day now we may know of Earth-sized planets in a Habitable zone, and yet be over a decade from determining if they could contain life. So do we have any other tricks up our sleeves? Other possibilities include the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble. With a launch planned in 2013, it would be able to determine some atmospheric features found in COROT detections, but would be too expensive to do the planet-hunting Darwin could do. Perhaps this could be imroved with occulters such as UMBRAS (thanks to enzo). Other novel detection missions include the Voyager Interstellar Mission (via), reusing exisiting 'end-of-life' spacecraft as telescopes. And finally, could ground-based telescopes do it? tests have just started on a new 10M telescope in the Canaries that could help; in terms of larger scopes, colleagues of mine in NUI Galway have been collaborating on the design of Euro50,a proposed 50 M telescope. Together with new techniques such as spectral deconvolution (via via) may help. Tags astronomy, exoplanets

The DebConf 7 videos needed some post-processing, mostly to recover missing pieces from tape. I've done a large part of that, but it's not yet complete. The video team to-do list has details of the recordings that still need work, and the sessions that we believe were not recorded. Please tell us if we did record some of these, and we will have another look through our tapes for them. The conversion to "publication" formats (i.e. small enough to offer for download) was started at the conference and I have continued this at home over the past 2 weeks. Unfortunately this has been interrupted by some hardware failures. It looks like the CPUs in two of my PCs were running hot enough to be damaged (slowly) but not hot enough to trigger an alarm or automatic shutdown. The remaining conversions will be running mostly on my laptop, which is pretty fast and should be able to finish conversion of the recordings that are in a good state in about 2 days. However, some of the converted files may be broken and need some manual attention. My upload bandwidth is only 448 kbit/s so the high-quality files will take about a week to upload. As ever, the video files are being published on meetings-archive.debian.net.

I really enjoyed OSCon. This was the first conference I've been to in years where I've felt a bit sad that it's over. I met a lot of interesting people, enjoyed most of the talks I attended (and especially this morning's keynotes), and also enjoyed Portland. I recommend OSCon. Last year, I went to Usenix ATC. Compared to Usenix, OSCon had more talks that were relevant to things I'm interested in, more people that I met with similar interests, more people that I knew online and met in person, and a more broad program. The one criticism I would level at OSCon is that it has a disproportionately high number of web-related talks.

On to other items...

Portland

Probably the friendliest "big city" I've ever seen. Everyone from cab drivers to bus drivers seems to go out of their way to be helpful and friendly. Somewhat different from, say, Chicago or Los Angeles.

The climate is very nice and the transit system is excellent as well. While it doesn't move as fast as below-ground systems, since it has to work within traffic, one nice thing for visitors is that you actually get to see the city and see potential places to stop. Last year, we went from Boston to Cambridge on the T, but you don't see much except a whole lot of concrete along the way.

The Japanese Gardens are wonderful and deserve a visit.

Compared to Indianapolis, where we lived for awhile, Portland has some nicer parks, and a better transit system. I think that Indianapolis had a nicer walking path. Portland had a lot of friendly people, including many that worked for TriMet. MAX was very nice, with frequent departures. The TriMet system had scattered electronic signs about the MAX lines, streetcar stops, and even some bus stops I think. These listed how many minutes until the next departure in each direction, and were very helpful. Stations were announced audibly and on signs on-board. There was helpful information at stops and platforms.

Indianapolis has a really quite awful transit system, which consists of, let's see, regular buses and small buses. These run infrequently, are known for not being on-time, and a former co-worker had trouble with them just not showing up at times. They also all seemed to run between downtown and the outskirts. So if you wanted to go from one area towards the outskirts to another area there, you'd have to go towards downtown and back out.

Because of all this, I never rode IndyGo, and wouldn't ever encourage visitors to. TriMet was very different, and if I lived in Portland, I'd want to live close to MAX.

Hotel

The DoubleTree Lloyd Center is a nice, friendly hotel. Everyone here has noticed that the elevators inexplicably stop on the 2nd floor every time they go down, but other than that, we have had no real problems (other than some water dripping onto the desk when we first were here, but maintenance fixed that). It's annoying that they charge for in-room Internet access, but that is unfortunately typical for hotels of this class.

The room is also a bit small, but has worked out OK. The hotel is very close to a MAX stop, and fairly close to the Lloyd Center mall, which is convenient. The staff is very friendly and helpful as well, especially the concierge staff, which are great and helping visitors find their way around the city and the transit system.

They give you cookies on check-in, but Terah was disappointed that they didn't offer any without nuts.

Restaurants

I had opportunities to eat with various people from OSCon, some Portland area people, and of course, Terah and Jacob.

Portland has some good restaurants, and a few more iffy ones...

The Multnomah Grill in our hotel was one of the iffy ones. I had the ribs, which were not at all good. The prices were about in line with other Portland restaurants, which is too bad because the food wasn't. Because of all that, I just couldn't bring myself to try the other restaurant in the hotel, Eduardo's Mexican/American Cantina.

I had heard about Jake's Famous Crawfish from a passenger on the train. It was also listed on the OSCon wiki restaurants page. It's a historic century-old restaurant, with excellent seafood. I had parmesean-crusted Alaskan Halibut, which was very good.

I also went to the Newport Seafood Grill, which is within walking distance of the hotel, just on the other side of the Lloyd Center mall. It was also good; I had a tuna dish served rare, with a sauce that complimented it well.

Blossoming Lotus Cafe is a vegan cafe in the Pearl District. I hadn't ever been to one of those before. It was OK, but not all that great.

Across the street was Sweet Masterpiece, a chocolate and coffee house. Excellent chocolate made in-house, all sorts of desserts, and good coffee.

Rock Bottom in downtown has some surprisingly good food options. I was there with a group of local and OSCon Haskellers, and it was a little bit hard to follow conversation all the time due to the background noise, but that's to be expected in this sort of place. I'm not into beer, but those that were enjoyed their selection, I think.

I also went to a couple of chains: Quizno's and Ben and Jerry's. Both were about what you'd expect from those chains. Good ice cream of course at Ben & Jerry's.

OSCon provided breakfast and lunch free to paid attendees. Breakfast consisted of a selection of various fruits, slightly stale pastries, and bagels. On the tutorial days, lunch was pre-made boxed lunch. For what it was, it was OK. On Wednesday and Thursday, lunch was served hot in buffet lines. They had chicken both days, which looked identical. I had tried it Wednesday so knew not to bother Thursday. Wednesday they also had salmon with cranberries, which was good. Their salads, breads, etc. were OK.

Oregon Convention Center

This is where OSCon was held. A very nice, but incredibly huge, building. They say it covers the equivalent of 13 square city blocks, and if you look on a map, you can see that it is indeed quite large. There was a lot of walking to get to everything, even though OSCon took up only one part of this huge place. Restrooms in particular were not in very convenient locations to just about anything. But it was a nice place and I wouldn't mind being there again next year.

So, let’s join the postings about the currently running Debian maintainers GR. The short text of this post is I am against the proposal as it is right now and think it does more harm than good and so I did vote for Further Discussion. See below for a bit more about my reasoning, or just skip if you are already bored. :) The current proposal does look like a “yay, we have an idea thats not really thought through. And we do not want to get it into the currently existing procedures, that would involve more work and discussions. And anyway, everyone is ranting about the current procedures anyway, so lets take that bad mood against it to get this done”. (And yes, this is a bit exaggerated, so don’t take it personal, please). As you may have noticed I wrote that I am against the current proposal when it first was on vote. I was mostly on vacation back then and didnt want to read the whole thread, so I stayed mostly quiet. I am not against the DM concept itself. I am against it being seperate to the existing NM procedure. For me a proper solution has to be integrated with the existing procedures, not seperated. The main reasons why some support this proposal seem to be

1. Slow NM process.
2. Someone doesn’t want to go through NM
3. Someone doesn’t want to be in the Debian community

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Slow NM process I am part of this, and not a small one. And yes, I feel (very) bad about it, but already think about ways this can be changed, after I got the current backlog done. Anyway, for this DM thing my backlog isn’t the main reason that people feel NM is slow. It seems to be the general “I have to wait for an application manager and then answer to a lot of questions and between that wait and wait and wait”.

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True. People have to wait at some points, and those waiting periods can be frustrating. We should do our best to eliminate those waiting places. The other point is that of the lot of questions. Yes, we have a really big set of questions in the templates, that cover a whole lot of the possibly areas a future Developer can work in. And most of those questions got added after a large set of existing Developers showed that they completly do not know something. That way the templates are constantly growing and still intend to give the future Developers the possibility to learn about things in Debian they might never have heard about. And there is the thought that, if you read about a topic and had to answer to it in the past, you will at least remember that there is something if you encounter it in the future. But - there is also the fact that an AM is NOT forced to use the templates for their process. AMs are, and have always been, free to do the process on their own. There are some questions every AM has to ask, but thats a minority. If you look at the templates you will spot the needed ones easily. Other than those every AM can freely do whatever he wants to do with his applicant (as long as the applicant agrees to do that stuff and its legal :) ). The AM only has to keep the following in mind: Both, FrontDesk and DAM, usually do not work together with the applicant. They might have heard the applicants name at some point, in some bugreport or some packages Maintainer: field. But they usually did not interact with them. Which means that the AM has to make sure that FD and DAM are able to build up their opinion of the applicant just by reading the mailbox of the AM->NM communication. Which usually means: read between 20 - 70 mails of a communication someone else had before you decide if someone should or should not enter Debian. (Leaving alone checking packages.qa, lintian, bug lists and a bit of google).

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Someone doesn’t want to go through NM Erm. Well. Then use sponsors for your packages. Or is it because you think NM is too hard? NM isn’t that hard, everyone that can read and write english texts (even if the english is bad) and use google is able to pass NM. (For the bad english - if you fear joining NM because of that: Well. If I go and reread my own report from back when I joined - ugh. I hate my english. And I know native people still hate my english texts, its named en_GANNEFF for a reason. :) It is not necessary for your English to be perfect; you only have to be able to make yourself understood. If an AM doesn’t understand what you wrote they can simply ask for clarification). DM also doesn’t help for people that don’t want to pass NM. They have to pass the advocate, the ID check and the same minimum set of of questions NMs have (as written a bit above). So you already have a large part of NM for the future DMs.

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Someone doesn’t want to be in the Debian community Then they shouldn’t be able to upload on their own. They can use sponsors. After all the only thing you must do as a DD is to read debian-devel-announce. And thats something a DM also must do, or you can’t seriously consider to package anything. And then DD only adds rights for you, like taking part in votes and so expressing your opinion and getting things changed in Debian that you may not like.

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How to integrate a concept of DM then? First - by starting in the right area - getting it into the NM system by talking to all those involved. There is FrontDesk, DAM and also the NM-Committee, the latter should be the right point for a proposal and discussion. What I can imagine that would work and do something good is a system integrated into NM that gives future Developers upload privileges after they passed a few steps with their AM. That way they can upload early in the process, which can then be part of the T&S set, and the following steps in their NM process “just” slowly add more rights to the NM until its the set of rights every DD has. Seen from the current layout of the process it would be somewhere after the ID check and the first set of P&P, ie. at the time the AM sends the second P&P part. After that point the AM could recommend to those maintaining the DM list that the applicant should be added to it, together with a list of packages where the applicant is allowed to upload them. The maintainers of that DM list could be FrontDesk + DAM + maybe someone else, but thats something to discuss. And list of packages - while one could take the current limits the GR wants to set or simply a plain list, that can be amended during the time someone is a DM. Now, one can add a turnoff for people that do not want to pass through the rest of the process at this place. Im not sure its such a good idea, but thats something one can discuss. But if so it should be attached to some rules like - must read our debian-devel-announce list, is included in regular pings of activity similar to the wat ping.