Search Results: "pm"

20 May 2006

Evan Prodromou: 1 Prairial CCXIV

It's the first day of Prairial -- dedicated to luzerne (wp:alfalfa) -- and I'm in wt:Mont-Tremblant for the wedding of friends Anne-Marie and Jeff. We got a late start last night, and we didn't get into the rental until 9PM. By then, we were too exhausted to do anything but order pizza and beer for delivery and crash out.

Gunnar Wolf: I have been hugged

Debian is love. After my scream for help a couple of days ago, and after a mountain of hard work, things are just running. No, we are not -by far- free of incidents, and it would be foolish to expect it to be so, but we are working nicely. And by the way, thank you, I have been receiving the largest amount of hugs ever, and believe me, each of them has been important. We are not over yet. At least two more days of work, and onem more day of taking all the shop back home, and that only means that the next step in the round will start: Handing back all the lent equipment, doing the travel reimbursements, closing all of our accounting stuff... And, of course, get the ball rolling towards Debconf 7. So... Well, six days into Debconf, I am currently sitting in the third talk I have opportunity to attend (of course, I have missed most of the ones I was interested in - Video team, I trust you to make a brilliant end product ;-) ), Nadezhda is printing 150 beautiful new T-shirts Pixelgirl designed a couple of days ago, and... Trust me, I still have a stressed face - but I am finally enjoying every minute of this fscking mess we decided to put up. Thank you all, folks. I am in Cristoph Berg's talk about reworking NM - And this comes very good to wrap up my post. Debian is much, much more than technical work. It is a social club. I love this social club. Just sitting here makes long months of work really worth it. A great hug back to you all!

19 May 2006

Thom May: colophon

Quick entry on how this blog is coming to you, should anyone happen to care.
It’s a Typo install off Typo’s Subversion trunk. This pulls in trunk of Rails via an svn:external.
Originally I was going to be super-brave and use the FCGI proxy module backported from Apache trunk, but I decided I’m not that brave, so I used some slightly less bleeding edge code.
I upgraded to Apache 2.2.2 and ensured I had mod_proxy_balancer , mod_proxy_http and mod_proxy loaded.
I then installed Mongrel and ran that in my typo checkout like so: mongrel_rails -d -e production -p 3000; this brings up mongrel on port 3000 and sets Rails into production mode rather than the standard development mode.
Having checked that the install on the high port was working correctly, I then configured Apache to properly connect to it. First I set up a very small - I only have one server, but I wanted to play with the technology - balancer config:
<Proxy balancer://server>

BalancerMember http://server:3000

</Proxy>
</Proxy>
I then set up a VirtualHost as usual, but added the following lines to force content onto the load balancer.
ProxyPass / balancer://server/

ProxyPassReverse / balancer://server/

Thom May: Leaving... on a Jet Plane

I’ve already posted about this elsewhere, so those who’ve seen that can probably skip to the bottom of this post. For everyone else, I’m leaving Claranet at the beginning of June to go and seek my fortunes in a brave new world. (eventually!) Without the flowery language, this actually means I’m going to be working for Mochila, based in their New York office. Of course, this is all subject to the whims of the US Immigration Service, and up until October or November (in theory, anyway) I’m going to be splitting my time between working in London, San Francisco and New York. I’m going to be a senior sysadmin, but this is a startup so I guess the job role will cover just about anything and everything, which should be fun! I’m really looking forward to this - the chance to move to New York for a few years is really the icing on the cake - because the job’s going to cover a lot of my interests, including a lot of design and development work for test and deployment infrastructure.

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf6 day 3: BOOT!

May 16th. In the morning I was kind of lazy and watched the talks via the webcast which worked very nice. I was even able to give some comments via IRC feedback. Very nice experience. One good idea popped up in the IRC there - it would also be useful to have an audio only webcast to conserve bandwidth. The "early" morning discussion about etch release and kernel to use in it was quite interesting to watch while I did not necessary got all the things that were said there. Then in the tower there was a great BOF session about speeding up the boot. It was a very nice session because there was a lot of discussion, lot of questions and comments from the audience. A GPL license talk followed the boot BOF and again I watched it via the webcast from the hacklab. Convenient. But then my network went down somehow I found it faster to walk to the tower then to get it back up. Several good questions were asked about the problems with current GPLv3 draft. Some ideas formed about how to fix the Affero clause using "public performance" phrasing. An insightful insight into the brain of debian-legal. Mao is deep ingrained into the brains of Debian Developers 
marga: it has been observed that debian members respect each other.
Myon: are you explaining the rules?
marga: Myon, actually, I wasn't, but I wouldn't mind explaining them
dondelelcaro: Myon, is that against the rules?
Myon: I would have to take a penalty card if I said 'yes'
dondelelcaro: talking.
Enrico did the social guidelines dance outlining the recommendations for peaceful coexistence without resorting to telletubbie or inquisition practices. It sounded very reasonable as recommendations, but those must never be promoted to any kind of policy. Enrico also mentioned that. Penny Peach, we miss you. After dinner a bunch of small mexican-looking females bunched first around the Japanese guys and then around the group where I was in. They were all smiling and very exited. They spoke very fast Spanish while rubbing their clothes and making horizontal back-and-forth motions with their hands. Nobody of us spoke Spanish. And they kept speaking and rubbing. My mind raced to present one unlikely reasoning after another, but nothing really fitted the situation. After a few minutes of total confusion we found a Spanish speaker who found out that they wanted ... an iron. An iron to iron their clothes. Doh! I was so confused that I only got 1 blurry photo from the ... incident. Random note: the fan control system here is quite ... buttony. Then we had a BOF about packaging of web applications and other applications that need database access. Maintainers and users of such things will be happy to hear that the situation is being resolved and there will most probably be a policy for etch+1 for that. Large ISPs and hosting providers will be happy to hear that their need are also heard (or will be heard if you join the process) and most probably it will be possible to activate/deactivate a web application for a certain user at a certain path of a certain virtual host with a single command that can also be scripted. In any case if you are interested in this development, please participate now, so that your need can be heard too. After the BOFs the, now official and scheduled, wine and cheese party started. It was briefly interrupted by rain, but the tables were moved under the roof in seconds and the party continued. There were around 40 different cheeses. Most of them were French and almost all of them were very tasty (some were .. an acquired taste :)). I can't say anything about the wine (I do not like the taste of alcohol), but other tasters were expressing very positive remarks. The party went on for a long time with more and more cheeses and vines brought up with time. There was some more hair coloring going on. Then there was the demonstration of use of duck tape on an almost professional HD 1080i video camera. And then there was the public demonstration of present Debian swirl tattoos. Impressive. When I was just going to go to the bed, I was lured into another game of Mao. I must say that playing Mao right after the wine and cheese part is ... interesting. Some girls got ... lucky ... seven. And there was still quite a lot of hacking going on around two in the night when I went to sleep. Tomorrow is the daytrip.

Uwe Hermann: OS Install Experiences - Part 1: Debian stable + unstable [Update]

Debian Open Use Logo 
Note: This article is part of my OS Install Experiences series.
OK, so let's start with something simple: Debian. Simple in the sense that there probably won't be too many surprises for me as a Debian developer (or for most readers of Planet Debian). For other people this might be interesting, though, and some facts are probably interesting to one or the other experienced Debian user/developer, too... Hardware A few words on the hardware I'll be installing all these OSes on. It's a cheapo (200 Euros) x86 PC (Intel Celeron, 2 GHz), 80 GB IDE hard drive, 256 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9200 SE graphics adapter, Realtek PCI ethernet controller, CDROM, USB, and all the other standard stuff. Nothing fancy, really. Install
  1. First, I downloaded a Debian sarge 3.1r2 CD image, burned it on a CD, and booted from that.
  2. An installer menu showed up, where you can press F3 for boot options. I chose "expert26", which will ask me more questions and give me a 2.6 Linux kernel instead of 2.4.
  3. The installer (newt-based, i.e. not graphical) will now start to boot a base Linux system.
  4. Now, you can choose your language (used in the installer), country, region, and keyboard layout.
  5. You'll be asked which additional kernel modules you want to load (default: all), and whether you want PCMCIA support. Also, you can choose which extra installer components should be loaded (LVM, PPP, serial, IrDA, ...).
  6. Your hardware can be automatically detected (my Realtek card was successfully detected, the "8139too" kernel module was then loaded).
  7. The network was successfully auto-configured via DHCP within seconds.
  8. Now you can choose a hostname and domain name for the box. I used "hydra" as hostname (guess why), and "local.domain" as domain name.
Partitioning Now the funny part starts: partitioning the disk. As I will be installing >= 10 OSes, this needs a bit of consideration. I have chosen to create a 10 GB (primary) partition for a Redmond OS I'll be installing later (for games, testing, proprietary software I'm forced to use, and similar things). This will be the first partition and I marked it bootable, as Windows might choke otherwise. For the rest, I reserved 5 GB for each OS — that should do. So the next two (primary) partitions are 5 GB each. I'll leave these empty for now, as I might encounter obscure OSes which must be installed on primary partitions. Let's hope it won't be more than two ;-) As you can only have four primary partitions, I then had to create a logical partition, which will "contain" any further partitions. The next three (secondary) partitions are 1 GB each, intended to be used as swap. One of those I marked as swap in order to use it for Debian. Other Linux installations will be able to reuse this one. The other two are reserved in case I encounter OSes which have another form of swap and cannot use Linux swap partitions... The rest is easy: create twelve 5 GB partitions => lots of space for more OSes. Here's the resulting fdisk output: 
Disk /dev/hda: 81.9 GB, 81964302336 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9964 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/hda1   *           1        1216     9767488+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda2            1217        1824     4883760   83  Linux
   /dev/hda3            1825        2432     4883760   83  Linux
   /dev/hda4            2433        9964    60500790    5  Extended
   /dev/hda5            2433        2554      979933+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
   /dev/hda6            2555        2676      979933+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda7            2677        2798      979933+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda8            2799        3406     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda9            3407        4014     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda10           4015        4622     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda11           4623        5230     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda12           5231        5838     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda13           5839        6446     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda14           6447        7054     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda15           7055        7662     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda16           7663        8270     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda17           8271        8878     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda18           8879        9486     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda19           9487        9964     3839503+  83  Linux
Install, continued
  1. The Debian partitioning tool allowed me to do all of the above via a friendly menu. As it does not modify the partition table until you say "done", I could revert many changes, and play around with different layout ideas until I was satisfied.
  2. Next thing you can choose is the Kernel flavor (386, 686, smp).
  3. You may now configure and install GRUB, the bootloader. I installed it at "(hd0)", the master boot record of the hard disk.
  4. Soon the CD ejects, and you have to reboot.
  5. After a restart (which also shows whether GRUB works fine), you can now choose your timezone, and decide whether you want shadow passwords (say yes!).
  6. Now enter the root password, and decide whether you want to create an additional user account (say yes, and enter a different password here).
  7. You can now configure apt, e.g. tell it which sources you'd like to use (CDROM, FTP, HTTP, ...). You'll be asked whether you want to install software from Debian's "non-free" archive. After choosing a mirror (and proxy settings, if you like), you can (should!) also say yes to the question whether you want security updates...
  8. Finally, you may now choose "tasks" (desktop, web server, file server, ...) your machine should be able to perform; this will influence which packages will be installed. You may choose "manual package selection", of course, if you want more control. I used "desktop".
  9. That's about it. You'll see a few more application-specific questions (configuration of MTA, ssh, fonts, X11, gdm, and others), and after that you'll be left with a GNOME login window.
Security I collected some (partly) security-relevant information after that. Ok, so that's it for Debian stable. Unstable is 99% the same, except that you do a "vi /etc/apt/sources.list; apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade". I'll do that later maybe, compare the findings, and report notable differences here, but it shouldn't be too many (I guess). Not today, though, I need some sleep now. Comments, suggestions, flames? Update 2006-05-19: Updated "why is Debian-exim capitalized?" info as per comments, thanks!

18 May 2006

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Four

Day trip. Six busses full of Debian developers, maintainers, and supporters toured the area around Oaxtepec today. We clambered over several Mexican pyramids and a ruined mountain-top city. Walking in the main entrance I immediately felt that it was very familiar. I identified the pool where they purified themselves before entering the complex, and several altars. Some of the things the archaelogists called "altars" looked more like bed platforms. I told the guide maybe they were both; ancient religions were known for their homosexual sex rites. Then we saw the palace of Cortes in the city of Morelos. It is a very swank city, fun to walk around and shop. We got back at 10pm, tired but satisfied. Bought a t-shirt that says "100% GUAPO". The Hispanic contingent at Debconf went wild. They may give me some photos to post soon. Lisp redux. Kevin Mark read my summary of Peter van Eyndes presentation yesterday, and sent in this email:
Hi Ted, you seem to be having fun at Debconf! Saw your post about a book by Peter Seibel. Strangely enough I attended a meeting at lispnyc with him this week. They shot video which hopefully you can see. Checkout http://www.lispnyc.org/home.clp cheers, Kev
Well, thanks Kev! At lunch yesterday, a fellow developer, whose name I forget, told me that OCAML is far superior to Haskell in terms of performance because it is "statically typed at compile time" or something. I thought that was a characteristic of Haskell as well. I mentioned the benchmarks that Haskell is currently winning, and he brushed this aside. Which may be appropriate; optimizing for benchmarks isn't the same as optimizing for the general case. Food. We had lunch yesterday at a restaurant. I hate zucchini, but their zuchini stuffed with quesa (cheese) was delicious. I haven't found birria (shredded goat meat) in the market here yet, but the restaurant had some. At the end of the meal a vendor came into the restaurant with some crisp, deep fried confection called "churros", coiled like a big hose. Its cross section looks like a five point star. For P10 the vendor broke off four pieces, 5 inches long. Knut shared his with me; it was like a donut, only crunchy. John Sokol. John Sokol, part of the original 386BSD team, arrived late Tuesday night. Carrying 80 pounds of luggage, he not only took the Metro, but he walked up the mile longer hill from the resort entrance to the conference. The Metro is nice, but it has a lot of stairs. I was tired after traversing it; I could not have walked up the hill if I tried afterward. He brought a VOIP phone with him, but it gives an error saying his account has been compromised. It is probably looking at his Mexican IP address and blocking it. So John and I have no way of phoning the outside world.

John Goerzen: Why I Like HP

I've been managing servers professionally for some years now. Support is one of the most important things when you are managing computers for work. You don't need support to help you out with a printing problem or an e-mail problem. You need support because every minute the machine fails to power up, your company may lose twice the value of the entire machine. Or even more.

My first day job managing servers involved Dell hardware. What a nightmare. I've never had a good experience with Dell support, ever.

First off, Dell support never puts me straight through to an intelligent support rep. I don't care whether I get to the Indian call center or someone in Texas. The first support person I speak to at Dell has less computer aptitude than my grandmother. One conversation I will always remember went like this:


Me: We have a disk in our array that went bad on our Linux server. The red light on the disk itself is on. Please send us a replacement.

Dell: Have you tried rebooting?

Me: No. This is a production server. The reason the disks are redundant is so I don't HAVE to. Besides, the light ON THE MACHINE ITSELF is on.

Dell: Ah, OK. Have you run scandisk?

Me: No. This is a Linux server, as I told you, and scandisk wouldn't see a problem anyway since this disk is in an array and the array is still up.

Dell: OK, great. How about you download the diagnostics .exe from our website...

Me: Can't. We don't have Windows on this machine. You did say you support Linux when we bought it.

Dell: Ah. Can you right-click on My Computer...

Me: NO. This runs Linux, and the BAD DISK LIGHT ON THE MACHINE IS ON.

Dell: Ah, OK. I wonder if the problem really is that you have a bad disk.

Me: Could be!


Our first HP server purchase happened to be at a time when HP had undercut Dell by several thousand dollars. I liked the hardware, but it wasn't anything that much more special than Dell.

But what I really like is the support. I haven't had to call HP support often, but when I do, I am almost always speaking to a live, experienced person within 5 minutes.

With only one exception, all the HP support people I've talked to have been very experienced. They all sound like they've been working with HP hardware since the late punched card era. They know what is going on and assume that I do too. The HP people don't make small talk (it *really* ticks me off when someone obviously in Calcutta or something asks me about the weather in Kansas, because you *know* they are reading it off a screen and don't care). But that's fine. I'm not calling them to talk about the weather, I'm calling them because my server is down.

We had a bad disk in an array on a HP server once. That conversation went more like this.


HP: Server support. Serial number please?

Me: [gives it to them]

HP: OK. What's the problem?

Me: The array dropped a disk. The failed disk light is on and the controller logged a disk error.

HP: OK. That's a 146GB SCSI, right? 15KRPM or 10K?

Me: 15K.

HP: OK. Is 1PM tomorrow good to send out the replacement?

Me: Fine.

HP: OK, your case number is xxxxx. Can you give us directions to your location?

Me: Sure...


So recently we got in our MSL4048 tape library. A very nice unit. And faster than most *disks*. 48 Ultrium3 tapes -- 400GB native each -- very nice. And a barcode reader built in.

So anyway, one small problem. When you open up a magazine to put tapes in, you can close the unit back up. It says "scanning", but it doesn't notice that we've changed tapes until we give it a command on the operator panel (yes, this tape drive has a LCD screen built in). This can be worked around, but is annoying and is just waiting to cause confusion. Plus it's not how it should work.

So I call HP support yesterday.

Turns out this MSL4048 is a brand-new unit. Had only been on the market a few weeks. Our support rep has never seen one or taken calls about one, and they haven't even given him all the HP technical docs yet. But no matter, he is willing to try to help us out.

He calls me back twice yesterday with tips and questions after speaking to colleagues. He asks intelligent questions, doesn't bother with the "are you sure you're putting the tapes in the right way around" or the "is the power cord securely plugged in" crap, and generally doesn't waste my time. He called me back about four times more today -- they duplicated our setup in their lab, right down to the exact firmware version, but didn't have the problem. Two of those callbacks were apologizing for taking so long, and explaining that they were learning about this machine as they went along. So a HP rep will be out to our location shortly.

Now THAT'S what I call service. No blaming it on someone else, no trying to make me do stupid troubleshooting things, and returning calls.

My *one* bad experience with HP was one time we put a new internal tape drive in the machine, and it was acting flaky. I got the only not-very-experienced HP rep I ever had spoken to that time, and they tried to blame Debian for what turned out to be a bad SCSI cable. (The symptoms weren't very similar to what I'd expect for a bad SCSI cable, and the cable had been working fine.) Oh HP, you donate to Debian -- why don't you support your hardware under it?

(In fairness, that is the ONLY time they have flinched when I said I run Debian, though it does make them hesitate sometimes)

16 May 2006

Barry Hawkins: A bit chilly in a hot place; a distributable Java JRE and JDK arrives

So it’s finally OK to mention it now; Java has made it explicitly possible (read legal) to distribute the Sun Java JRE/JDK on a GNU/Linux distrubtion. The new license is for Java SE 5 on Linux only, called the Operating System Distribution License for Java, or DLJ for short. You can read the license in text or pdf form. The FAQ for the DLJ is also available in text and pdf. Heck, go through the README for the JRE and JDK while you’re at it. So what does that mean? Well, GNU/Linux distrubtions like Debian can now package a Java runtime environment or Java development kit in their repositories. That was previously not possible due to restrictions present in Java licensing. Users still have to accept the Java SE 5 binary code license that is totally not free and has the same restrictions Java has always had, but this at least makes packaging and supporting Java less painful for distributions. Sun is coordinating the efforts via a java.net project, jdk-distros. This is an unprecedented level of cooperation from Sun with external parties in anything related to Java. I consider myself fortunate to have been a founding member of the project. It has been a pleasant and refreshing experience to meet a few optimistic and forward-thinking people from Sun who have a keen interest in Free Software; a big thanks to Simon Phipps and Tom Marble. I was encouraged that they allowed our contributions to be covered under the MIT license. If you would have told me that a month ago I would have laughed at you. The Debian announcment should be posted on the debian-devel-announce list today. I am sure this will draw both praise and ire from the Debian community. That’s cool, though; the rich diversity is part of what makes it such a vibrant organism.

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Two

Photography. My roommate Aigars is quite a photographer, he came with his digital SLR and several lenses, an item I've lusted after for some time. Large apertures and manual controls are what every real photographer demands, and digital SLR's deliver. I told him my idea for a small sky recording station so that people could make movies of the paths that the stars take, and how it changes over the year. Ultimately I want a network of these stations, all uploading their pictures so I can examine them for anamolies. This is a hard problem, because stars are so faint. Aigars said to take a picture of the whole sky, a 1000 millimeter lense and a $50 computer scanner with some modifications should be able to do the job.

Me and Andreas Schuldei
Programming. Finally made progress in programming, now that I know where everything is in Oaxtepec. My IRC bot didn't handle things gracefully when the server refused to let it log in, but that is fixed now. Tomorrow I hope to add multi-channel support. Reading through the new IRC RFC, I have the information I need to make a proper configuration file for the software. The design is sketched out and feels right, finally. Weekend vs. Weekday. Oaxtepec is much quieter today. Saturday and Sunday there were far more vendors on the street, and they stayed open much later. Today everything closed down around 6pm when the church bell tolled the summons to mass. I couldn't find the coconut man; maybe he only comes on weekends. Half the stalls at the mercado were empty. During the weekend, the resort was full of vacationers swimming, barbecuing, picnicing, playing soccer, or just sunbathing while the kids ran around. Everyone, young and old, but mostly young adult men and women, were running around in bathing trunks and bikinis. The happy noises were great to wake up to. This morning the sounds were quieter, but still present. The swimming pools here get a lot of use. During the weekend, there was a large tent where some ladies were giving body massages for $10. I didn't see them today. Probably they will be here again next weekend. Food. Tried a dish called "pancita" today. I saw people eating noodles and assumed pancita was a noodle dish, like the Filipino pancit. But no. It is a type of tomato soup filled with chopped up beef rind and chunks of fat. For only P31, I bought a small chicken. It was perfectly marinated and roasted, better than Kentucky Fried Chicken. I paid the money, and the shopkeeper brought out a pair of scissors and cut the chicken into all the appropriate pieces for easy eating, just like they do in Korea (viz the use of scissors) Church. Attended mass tonight, since the church was so close. The church is magnificent. It really is a cathedral inside; to see the ceiling you have to crane your neck. And when you do, you see paintings of angels playing instruments. I went into the nave to pray, and saw a giant depiction of the ark of the covenant. It was very realistic, with the cherubim covering it with their wings. And above it, was a painting of the wine and bread offering, which were offered on the altar daily. The priest was a black man from Illinois; after a bit of attempting to speak to each other in Spanish, we realized we both spoke English, and got on famously from then on. The cathedral opens at 10am, closes for lunch from 2pm-4pm, and then is open until mass is finished. This must be what the church was like in the beginning; a place where believers could drop in any time to be with others of their kind, to meet, eat, drink, discuss, and elevate each other to a higher plane. I am sad that we don't have this in Canada. Debian. There were some Debian talks and presentations, but nothing too interesting. Finally met Mark Shuttleworth, Anthony Towns, Manoj Srivastava, and Roblimo Miller. Clifford Beshers of Linspire almost convinced me to look into the Haskell computer language. I couldn't quite tell what Haskell has that LISP doesn't, apart from forcing strong types on you and being very fast and efficient in benchmarks tests. Marga didn't give me meal tickets before, so Graham printed some up for me today. By pure serendipity, I sat at dinner with the only other Canadian developers at the conference; Simon Law and Eric Dorland from Montreal. The drinking started at 11pm and is still going strong; the atmosphere is very convivial right now, but half of us are still tapping away at our keyboards.

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf6 day 2: Java is non-free, at last!

The first session in the morning that I attended was the BOF about Python. After an introduction to the current state by the Python maintainer (Matthias Klose) and a few other people we run overtime and the BOF was extended into another time slot. Also the session was plagued by the room switch hanging which affected both the network and the recording. It really looks that that strange situation with a bunch of python-foo, python2.3-foo and python2.4-foo packages will be fixed. Later in the day guys from Intel gave a talk about some kind of data mining stuff they were doing with hardware database from Ubuntu. The tool was called Toppler (from Dilbert) and basically was a hardware database. They pondered about possibilities of getting some useful information from the huge pool of data, but the examples that they showed were just lame. For example they showed how you can get a list of 1234 reports relating to this wireless card, but that is not what I want to know - I want to know if it works and if it does not work, what can I do to fix it. The showed an example of an OEM entering his computers hardware configuration to see what distro works on that hardware - that is completely useless: as an OEM I at that point would already have chosen a distro and what I really would like to know is what will and what will not work from my hardware configuration in that distro, why it will not work and how to fix that. That would be approaching useful status - so far they only have a SQL DB with a simplistic web fronted. At the same time to give out that kind of information you would need much more datapoints to make a correlation - datapoints most of which can not be tested automatically and require user interaction on submitting. On the other hand the more user interaction they need, the less users will want to submit that data. They already have at least 10 times too many questions (there were 30 + options) if they really want this to be something that users will want to contribute to. Also there is no real direct motivation for users to contribute to that database - maybe OEM's have that kind of motivation, but they must decide to use Linux first. In short I only saw mountains of social and technical problems with this project and really little in terms of benefit. That's what you get when you have too much money to burn. After that there was a "yearly" Ubuntu report from Mark Shuttleworth. Most of what Mark said was already widely known if you followed Ubuntu's development a bit. Dapper will release on 1st of June and will be supported for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the servers. Edgy Eft will be a developer driven highly experimental release that will be done in 4 months and its planning will be done in Ubuntu conference in Paris (18th-23rd June). In Dapper KDE is given equal weight to Gnome and in Edgy the same will be done to XFCE. There is a graphical installer - Ubiquity and a graphical upgrader that works around strange things that APT has not been designed to handle. Mark can only guess what will be in Edgy as developers will decide this one, but most probably Xen and XGL will be integrated, startup will be reworked by adding paralel init scripts with dependencies and maybe even APT will be replaced by some kind of SMART tool. I have not heard anything about it before and Mark also gave no further detail. but in any case Edgy promises to be "the Ubuntu equivalent of a release of Debian experimental". Way to go not to stick into the enterprise stability. I am really looking forward to that. Another announcement came from Sun - thanks to hard work of many people the license of Sun Java was changed to allow it to be included in Debian non-free repository. FHS and Debian Policy compilant packages have been produced and are uploaded to Debian sid non-free. Congrats to all involved! Now we only to move it to main somehow. Unfortunately I missed two BOF that I wanted to see due to scheduling changes that I did not follow at the time: i18n BOF and Debian representation BOF. I have been doing quite a bit of both during last years, so I wanted to be there, but missed it. Doh. In the afternoon I was twice recruited by the organizers to do the group photo. Last year there was a huge collection of dSLR's around Debconf5, but this year either the dSLR owners did not come or did not want to lug their cameras across half the globe, so I with my Canon 350D and a few (cheap) lenses have become the de-fact photographer of the Debconf6. It was only natural that the group photo also had to be taken by the best camera around. I, naturally, am very honored by the opportunity even if that would mean that I myself am not on the group photo. I could just gimp myself into the corner of it after the fact :) In any case the place to take the picture had to be found. The amphitheater where the Debconf5 group photo was taken was a perfect place, but lacking that a trick all the way back from Debconf3 could be employed - standing at a high place and take the picture at a sharp angle down. The best place for this that I found around here is the 10m diving tower - there is a platform aprx. 8 meters from the ground where one can clearly see to the back area of the tower where a large grass area is located. I still need to confirm whether I can take the group photo from there with my best lens (Canon 50mm f/1.8 II) and what amount of light will we have on time point when we have the ability to actually take the picture (18:00). There will still be a bit of a chance with the weather, so an alternate group photo time should also be planned. There will be an announcement mail that will probably go public before this email will. Oh and later in the evening I found a guy (sorry, names escape me is seconds) who has a Canon 17-40mm f/4 L lens which I will borrow from him for the group photo. That will make the photo a lot sharper and make us much more flexible to the group size which is very helpful. Just before the dinner I want to see the saunas that i was told long ago. Basically it was a headed room 3x1 meter with a temperature control outside that was set to 0. Nobody uses the sauna here and that is no wonder - the whole place is like a large sauna. In the same club (just above the restaurant where we have all the meals now) there was a ping-pong table, two pool tables and a gym. In the gym I found a Mexican Gentoo spy who's mom was born in Riga, Latvia. The world is truly small. After the dinner I sent out the group photo announcement email and then took a look at the Joey Hess's BOF about debian-installer. I snook into the talk to take a few photos and watched the rest via the webcast. Unfortunately all the people spoke very quietly there, so it was hard to distinguish their voices from the background noise. Please, do not do that! Speak up, people! The tango practice took place between hacklabs tonight. Looked fun, but I would rather take a lot of pictures of it :) On a final note I witnessed a Mao game in Spanish. That was only a bit more disturbing then the same game in English. Even while I do not speak any Spanish. P.S. If you really like what I do with photos in this blog, it would be very nice if you would sponsor me a Pro account at Flickr. Otherwise my monthly traffic limit there (20 Mb) is nearly up with only select photos of two days of Debconf uploaded. I have now almost 2 Gb of photos stored on my laptop and the conference is only starting.

Eric Dorland: DebConf Fun

So I'm halfway through my 2nd full day here at DebConf 6. The trip over was fairly uneventful. Dorval Airport charges a fairly ridiculous amount for WiFi. Cost me $10 to surf for an hour. Such a ripoff. Meet Jimmy in Newark. A bit of a mad rush from the Mexico City airport to the bus station to catch the last bus to Oaxtepec. Mexico city is big (says Captain Obvious). Arrived at the resort after midnight, and was greeted by a nice gift bag and many developers, including one of my roomies for the week, [info]sfllaw. There are wild cats everywhere on the resort! They're adorable, but a little heartbreaking. There's waterpark here too, need to try to find time for that. The swimming pool closes at 6pm, just around the time I'm most keen for a swim. Yesterday, the conference officially began. [info]sfllaw, I and few others (including important spanish speakers), went into town for breakfast. I had a chorizo echilada, very nice and not sick yet. The talk level was fairly light, and [info]sfllaw went to town again to get some beer, limes and water from town. The deposits on the beer bottles were almost the same as the price of the beer! [info]sfllaw theorized that it was to discourage destroying the bottles. The day caught up with me in the evening and I fell asleep and almost missed dinner. Luckily we made it just in time. The conference food has been fairly good, and I can't argue with the price. The net connection seemed to have problems in the evening, I was feeling a mite anti-social and the previous 24 hours had caught up with me, so I totally crashed around 11. Today was some interesting talks, the most interesting being the Ubuntu Annual Report by Mark Shuttleworth. During the QA, a lot of the same objections seemed to be raised (LaunchPad non-freeness, passing back to Debian. The same soft answers were forthcoming. I mostly have no problem with Ubuntu, and think sometimes we're a bit whiny about them. This is free software, we can't compel anyone to do exactly what we want, nor do they owe us. I'm happy to get what help I do from them.

14 May 2006

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf6 day 0: Debian Day

While most DD's continued hacking in the hacklab, some of the Spanish speaking Debian people joined in with approximately 50-70 Mexican people for a set of Spanish language presentations about something. I have no idea what they were about as I do not speak Spanish (except manyana). The Debian Day was also the first thing that was webcasted live. The video team tested the software, tested the equipment and judging from the IRC responses at in the #debconf channel everything worked just fine. The video team also had a BOF session in the evening talking about how to improve the experience even better both for people watching the webcast and for people watching (and making) the recordings. I especially loved the exhibition from the pixelchica - wonderful pictures. A lot more people arrived today - many new faces, lots of social interaction happening even when the Internet is here. In the evening several crates of beer were acquired by the shadow beer team and the celebrations continued well into the night.

13 May 2006

Ren&eacute; van Bevern: Backports of initial set of Common Lisp packages

Now that SBCL has been accepted on Backports.org, an initial set of recent packages from the CL-Debian project is available for Sarge. Peter also hosts a repository with backports for quite some time, obviously lacking the advantage of being autobuilt for architectures other than i386 and being mirrored. So now Backports.org has the basic things of getting started: our infrastructure tools like a recent Common Lisp Controller and dh-lisp, as well as Clisp and SBCL – yes, finally I boostrapped an AMD64 package for SBCL on Sarge. Sarge-AMD64 lacked one initially, but SBCL is kind of useful to build SBCL. The development environment SLIME is also ready for usage. I'll continue with backporting most of Debian's Common Lisp libraries also and will probably get around to backport CMUCL, so that a fairly complete set of what a Common Lisp programmer needs can be used with Sarge on most architecutures.

Ben Hutchings

Today we got access to all the audio equipment and the remaining cables we needed in our main venue, the Parliamentary Tower. We've worked out locations of the various equipment (projectors, screens, speakers, microphones, camera, computers) and wired them all together. We were unable to get a sight-line for a wireless link from the tower to the rest of our network, but the centre finally agreed to let us use their house network for this purpose. We have to go through a 10 Mbps hub, but it should be sufficient. Finally this evening we were able to test streaming video and audio from the camera and mixer in the tower down to the rest of the network. The tower is now closed, but we will test from the hacklab to the outside world tonight. Fingers crossed, Debian Day should go live to the world tomorrow!

12 May 2006

David Welton: "Hydras" and "real" open source

An interesting post by Ian Holsman, one of my colleagues in the Apache Software Foundation who has similar interests to mine: http://feh.holsman.net/articles/2006/05/12/is-your-project-a-hydra I take a more lassez-faire approach, myself. Ian's advice is valuable to those sorting through open source projects to use or get involved with - a full-fledged free software project with many users and committers who are independant of one another is usually going to be a better proposition than something run by one company, or one person. A lot of ASF thinking focuses on the community being the real value in an open source project, and it's obvious that it adds a lot of value. However, the licensing is important too, because it's your escape hatch. It means that if the company goes away, or decides to create a proprietary product, that you have the option to create a community around the open source code, by taking over its development and maintainance.

David Welton: "Hydras", "real" open source, and the ASF Incubator

An interesting post by Ian Holsman, one of my colleagues in the Apache Software Foundation who is also interested in open source business and economics: http://feh.holsman.net/articles/2006/05/12/is-your-project-a-hydra I take a more lassez-faire approach, myself. Ian's advice is valuable to those sorting through open source projects to use or get involved with - a full-fledged free software project with many users and committers who are independant of one another is usually going to be a better proposition than something run by one company, or one person. A lot of ASF thinking focuses on the community being the real value in an open source project, and it's obvious that it adds a lot of value. However, the licensing is important too, because it's your escape hatch. It means that if the company goes away, or decides to create a proprietary product, that you have the option to create a community around the open source code, by taking over its development and maintainance. ASF Incubator Ian also mentions the ASF Incubator, which I've been involved with first hand through my involvement in incubating OFBiz. One of the big hurdles that the project faces is getting a scrap of paper from everyone who has ever contributed anything important to the project. And since OFBiz is a real open source project with committers all over the world, and, over the years, many contributions, that is a lot of paper to collect! Thanks to the efforts of the OFBiz team, they're doing an admirable job of completing the task. However, I can't help but observe that "incubation" is a far easier process to go through if the code arrives in the form of a corporate donation, because it all comes from one place. Unfortunately, I think that leads to some selection for "hydra style" projects, although to their credit they may be trying to break out of that by joining the ASF (they need to if they want to successfully complete incubation). Still, I think it is likely to lead to a more "corporate" organization.

DebConf6 Blog: Desperate - written some hours ago (Posted by Gunnar Wolf)

Note: This entry was written at least 24 hours ago. After a very long day filled with frustration and hope, the situation right now is quite different - But I still want to share what I already wrote ;-)
I’m sad. I have worked towards having a Debconf in Mexico for a long time - I started playing with the idea maybe three years ago, after being at Oslo, and started pushing for it one year later, in Brazil. Last year, before leaving to Finland, it was a fact: I convinced everybody that our country could be a great place to host Debconf. The last month or so, basically my whole time has been devoted to making this conference something worth remembering. And this has been an exciting year of work. But a couple of weeks ago, I realized it was probably not such a good idea, probably this is not the best way in which I can contribute to Debian being better, or get more Mexicans involved in Free Software. And I fear that, if something does not change soon, we will break the impressing steady growing and professionalization of our conference. What was the problem? Lack of people. Lack of committment. Lack of time. Things that -by whatever means it has been possible- we have been solving. But right now, the main problem is the network. I trusted to have enough network quality in a semi-rural setting, we didn’t actually have the time to properly test our plans were well laid out, we didn’t test if the line of sight we supposed we would have would work, I didn’t press for the hardware to be ready on time, we had communication errors that led different teams into believing the other would provide specific equipment we needed… This is not so bad, as it is solved only with enough devoted time at the beginning of the conference itself - But once the pieces were already in place, the situation didn’t improve - Maybe because the hardware was less than what we expected, or because we rely on having access to the roof of the neighbour of the neighbour of a friend… Who knows. The fact is, we do not have network access - And when we have it, it is darn slow and with a tremendous amount of packet loss. And it seems that the only thing you really need for a good Debconf is a bunch of friendly geeks, which we have, and good network access - which we don’t. I wanted also to misspell the bad impression many people have of Mexicans, about us being informal, never really committed, and always having an excuse. But… Well, I also failed miserably on that. I really didn’t want this to be the “mañana” Debconf. That is a sad prejidice I don’t want my country to have - As many of you surely know by now, I love this country and talk about its beauty and good things every time I can. Of course, not all problems are to be blamed on Mexicans, it would be foolish for me to believe so, but we do have our fair share of guilt. Still… Hope is not yet lost. Debconf hasn’t formally started - We are at Debcamp still. Up to today, we are a group of forty-something geeky friends having a good time, talking, having sun and pool time, and laughing and complaining about the network and about the heat. The Debian community will not forget Mexico. And progress is being made every day. There are some really really cool things about this, and I’ll try to cool down and enjoy what we have. The strongest stress seems to be over (at least for now, wait until most people arrive on Friday/Saturday/Sunday). And it is good that I can identify a forming depression - maybe this can help disspell it before it is too late - We only have Debconf once a year, and I do not want to be sad during it.

9 May 2006

Ross Burton: UKIP U-Turn

Amusing news yesterday, as it's revealed that Roger Knapman, the leader of UKIP (a single-issue party who dislikes the EU, and basically wants to reduce, or remove, immigration), hires Polish builders to work on his country mansion. The bonus punchline: the builders are hired through a Polish-registered company that specialises in hiring eastern Europeans to work in Britian, which is run by Mr Knapman's son.
Mr Knapman, an MEP and the UKIP's leader since 2002, recruited the workers through his son, whose company specialises in bringing foreign labour to Britain. The men have been at Mr Knapman's grade-II listed home in the village of Coryton, west Devon, for 11 months. They sleep dormitory-style in the attic. The company run by Mr Knapman's son claims that the imported labour costs up to 50 per cent less than British workers would. Mr Knapman, speaking to an undercover reporter from The Sunday Times, praised the men as "they work so much harder".
(from The Independent) NP: Boards of Pays-Bas, Poxfil

6 May 2006

Gergely Nagy: Narnia in Warcraftian light

Tonight, we've watched Chronicles of Narnia, girlfriend and I, and we came to a few interesting observations. Really, they're quite amazing! Someone has been playing World of Warcraft decades before it was released! Spoilers ahead, beware! For example, let us have a look at the Witch. She was surely a mage, as she could conjure food and water. However, she appeared to be buffed a lot, as she could dual wield swords as well - and she wasn't all that bad at that, either. She also had an instant-cast frost spell.. This latter lead to a little debate among us, as I was asserting she must have been a shaman, using frost shock. Would have fit quite well, if only she wouldn't have been able to conjure food... And the fact, that after Aslan killed her, she didn't self-res. I doubt there's any worthy shaman out there who doesn't have a stack of ankhs in the bags. That's just not possible, really. Not to mention she always wore cloth, while we all know, shamans wear mail. Next on the table - the stone-table, hah! - is Aslan. Unlike the witch, he really was a shaman. The best proof: he self-ressed.. Albeit it took him a while. However, he did not appear to have any durability loss - on the contrary, he had his mane grown back! What kind of armor he wore, I do not know, he was in ghost lion form all through the movie, sadly. We also saw him resurrect others, that part fits too. Totems - we missed those, yes... But... if a shaman is fighting in ghost lion form, he must be so powerful, decked out in epics, he does not need them anyway. And this is where we come to the part of investigation where we have a look at the levels of the characters. Aslan and the Witch were skull-level bosses for sure. Most of the armies must have been lowbies, judging by their puny equipment - and most of the time, their puny skills aswell. Thus, it is no wonder that a single boss - the Witch - could tear through almost a whole army of poor newbies. It took another boss to stop her for good. Kinda like summoning your side's bosses in Alterac Valley. With the exception that in Alterac Valley, a raid is enough - here, one needed a whole lot more than a single 40-man raid. So far, this is what we figured out. I expect more details will see the light as we watch the film over and over again, in the hope of discovering more connections between the Chronicles and Warcraft.

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