Search Results: "reg"

25 January 2010

Andrew Pollock: [life] Mostly moved

Moving today went as about as well as you could possibly ask for. The movers arrived at a few minutes to 9, had most of the place packed up within 30 minutes, and I think we headed to the new place in a little over an hour. Mad props to Handle With Care Moving. The guys were really great. The rain also held off for the duration, thankfully. There's just dregs left at the old place, oh and the entire kitchen. I think we're both subconsciously dreading (and therefore avoiding) moving the kitchen stuff, because we really don't want to unpack at the new place, because the kitchen is going to get totally destroyed in hopefully a couple of weeks time. I'm finding wall space to be a bit of a premium at the new place. We're trying to keep the second bedroom as usable as a bedroom as possible, while primarily using it as a study, so that when we have house guests, we can throw some sort of bed down in that room and not have it all become ridiculously cluttered. When you've got desks all against one wall, a built-in wardrobe against another wall, and a full length sliding door on the other wall, that doesn't leave too many options for a bookshelf and retaining space for a bed. I think we might have to avail ourselves of some more elfa shelving and ditch the Ikea bookshelf we currently have. On the other hand, our bedroom is looking pretty good. For the first time in ages, it's just going to be a bedroom. No desks, no filing, no storage. The wardrobe has less space than our old place, so we're having to be pretty ruthless with clothing. Oh, and the bathroom storage: way less. Not sure how we're going to sort that one out at the moment. The phone and cable TV should get hooked up tomorrow, and then I'll get the DSL moved over, so hopefully by Wednesday, we'll have Internet connectivity. We brought the cats over this afternoon. They're still confined to our bedroom at the moment until they calm down a bit. We have until next Sunday to officially be out of the old place.

24 January 2010

Gregor Herrmann: BRU revisited

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

I enjoyed being at FOSDEM last year, so I'll be going there again in two weeks' time. & I'm really looking forward to meeting some nice people again!

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2010/02, 2010/03

during the last two weeks I focused on the FTBFS bugs in the Debian Perl Group, only one NMU:

Russell Coker: Preventing Children from Accessing Porn

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

22 January 2010

Randall Donald: 190.53 + 173.14.22 = double barrel of fun


The current 190.53 nvidia-graphics-drivers were uploaded to NEW and the latest 173xx legacy branch is now in unstable. Now back to your regularly scheduled Friday

Steve Kemp: We have to be ready to do anything. Do you hear me?

Good people steal ideas, right? On that basis I setup a static domain to host the javascript and icons I use upon a few different sites & projects. This was preempted by the release of a new version of the excellent jQuery library. I also managed to put together a tremendous hack to solve a pretty annoying problem running multiple distributions from a single external kernel under KVM. Ubuntu users, in particular, will be well aware of dmesg SPAM coming from the use of CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED. In short the way that the kernel presents information beneath the /sys tree has changed over the life of the kernel - and this has a knock-on effect to the userspace supplied by different distributions and releases of GNU/Linux.
Some distributions need an "old" kernel and an "old" udev with "old" udev rules in order to create the appropriate device nodes such that the kernel will boot & mount its filesystems. (i.e. These need CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED to be set.) Conversely some distributions mandate a "new" minimum kernel version, and supply a "new" version of udev with "new" udev rules and they absolutely will not function when presented with an "old" kernel. (i.e. They must have kernels without CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED set.)
I've solved this problem via a kernel patch which is both evil and genius. The details are a little me-specific, but in short: Ultimately udev doesn't get an empty /dev tree to play with, instead it finds one already pre-populated, such that any devices it cannot create are there regardless - because the devtmpfs implementation has already created them. Genius. And evil. So very evil. Meh. Steal that idea. I dare you .. (I'm impressed at how well devtmpfs works, and how easy I was able to make my "patch of evil"tm. Just a few lines in fs/namespace.c.) ObSubject: The Last House On The Left

Russell Coker: How to Lose Customers

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

Theppitak Karoonboonyanan: Thailand Mini-DebCamp 2010

Hello, Planet Debian. I'm pleased to have announced about the first Debian event in Thailand: Thailand MiniDebCamp 2010. This is a follow-up to Taiwan MiniDebConf 2009 in last September in Taipei. At the end of that event, we discussed about having a mini-DebCamp in Thailand during the New Year holidays. However, with many factors, it has been moved to this March. And the date has been settled on 13-19 March. The place will be Khon Kaen University (KKU) in Khon Kaen, a north-eastern province of Thailand (close to Lao, if you look for it in a map). In this event, we plan to arrange a Bug Squad Party for the Squeeze release, and some meetings between DDs and local people, to encourage more Debian activities in Thailand and nearby countries. Thailand has started its GNU/Linux development and usage since no later than 1997. Currently, we have projects like Thai Linux Working Group for upstream Thai resource developments; OpenTLE.Org and thaiopensource.org for local distros (Ubuntu-based); and some communities like ubuntuclub, debianclub, and more others for other distros. The user base is slowly growing, while developer base is yet growing more slowly. We have had domestic events occasionally. But certainly, an international one like this would effectively encourage more prospecters, as well as create closer cooperations with the global projects. We also hope this event to be a meeting point for developers from nearby regions. And internationalization, among other issues, can be discussed and worked out. So, please be invited to join and discuss. Please make sure to add your name to the Wiki page so we can prepare things for you, including accommodation. And feel free to propose your agenda in BarCamp style. It will be summarized some time before the event date. We also have a mailing list for updates and discussions.

Russell Coker: Three Monopolists

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

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

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

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

20 January 2010

Thorsten Glaser: Various topics, and, at least *some* people think!

Marc Fleury, JBoss founder joins the ranks of Tonnerre, me, and other people requesting that MySQL (and MariaDB!) please finally die. Everyone, don't even fork it. Use a real database instead. Or, at least, SQLite. Really. We're going to FOSDEM 2010 (of course I've been at every FOSDEM that was not just an OSDEM, Benny and gecko2 are regular attendees as well, as are other projects of mine such as FreeWRT and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, by proxy). There will be a recent MirBSD snapshot I've yet got to build, with the new floppy format ustarfs (idea, but no single line of their stinking ridiculously huge code, stolen from NetBSD ) and other improvements (albeit less than I wanted to get done by then). The days before, I'll attend the first FusionForge meeting to break up the French Cabal, with my work hat on. That is also my first time in France (outside of the Elsa ). People, make a good impression on me to overcome the classic prejudices ;-) This weekend I'm going to meet my Debian Application Manager zack, have some good beer (ugh... first this, then Paris, then good belgian beer...) and fix some bugs, all while learning even more. Sounds like fun, but I almost feel overwhelmed, in contrast to the years of much less travelling from my past. I've also started sort-of mentoring Simon, one of our apprentices at work, into the Debian processes. (On an unrelated side note, formorer recently said bpo will become bp.d.o soon. Great!) Please don't laugh at this excuse for a webpage, as I've yet to fill it in, but my CLI for the KDE Wallet is hereby deemed ready for public consumption, with a bug-fix release 2.01 (bugs actually found during preparation of a port to Debian sid and KDE 4, which is much much worse than KDE 3, plus it looks so absolutely disgusting I'm not even sure Windows Mistda is worse). I hope the package will end up in NEW soon (and once progressed to testing I may be able to make the KDE 3 variant official via lenny backports; my WTF *.deb repo will hold them until then.

There are more webpages I need to fill in... mksh's TaC, arc4random (which needs some major redesign as well) and BSD::arc4random, the RANDEX protocol (entropy exchange over IRC) and its plugins and patches, ... Not just Mac OSX (and, I hope, iPhoneOS) will soon come with mksh(1), but also Android (I prepared patches to make it /bin/sh, which works quite well although I need to find out how to make a hardlink so that #!/bin/mksh scripts will run) and Maemo, for which I wrote an mksh package in a garage project, which also needs some love w.r.t. testing on actual devices, menu integration, etc. (Please contact me if you can help with either of the three.) We also have lewellyn:#ksh making a package for the new OpenSolaris system (thanks again). People persuading Apple to put it on the jesusPhone are also welcome. (This does not mean I endorse any of these right now, I'd probably get the most of a WinCE PDA with built-in GPSr, WLAN and maybe GSM/GPRS.) English and French native speakers, please review, and Dutch native speakers may contribute a translation of, our flyers. (Source code for these is not available, sorry. Benny makes them in Quark on System 7 in Basilisk II, used to be Classic until Apple yanked it. But still, they use only free fonts, free imagery or such the MirOS Project is allowed to use, and beat every single other FOSS project flyer I've ever seen by far!) There's probably more I could write, I bet I forgot half of it anyway, but I'll leave it at that for now. Get yourself a nice cup of hot chocolate, pour an Espresso into it, and enjoy the mix with a piece of cake (I'd say strawberry or mousse-pear but all they had was cassis-cr me) and pity me for not knowing any French next month.

19 January 2010

Lior Kaplan: Hamakor, the Israeli Free Software Society, calls for the annulment of Software Patents


Following a call for submissions from the Israeli Patent Authority, the Israeli Free Software Society, Hamakor, submitted a memorandum calling for the annulment of the Software Patents. A Memorandum drafted by Adv. Jonathan J. Klinger, Hamakor s chief legal counsel, presented a tough and strict approach claiming that software patents harm innovation and incur high legal costs on software developers.
protecting software through patents shall provide protection on ideas, which are usually expressible in more than one manner, and shall be the beginning to a race to the bottom where every person shall register as many patents possible and incur high costs on each player in the software field , said Klinger, and added that the chilling effect created by the fear of using software protected by patents, be it free software or proprietary software, and incur costs on the system solely in order to purchase insurance from the theoretical patent infringement. In such case, any independent development of software without legal assistance from the first day of development shall be problematic, and deter developers from developing free software or promote innovation .
Until recently, the Israeli patent authority rejected Software Patents and provided protection only regarding hardware (in re Eli Tamir). However, the recent call for submissions had raised the fear that software patents shall be used to deter innovation. Currently, Israeli venture capital funds and technology evangelists often see patents as the core asset when protecting software companies from competition, which creates a race to the bottom that requires startups and innovative companies to register patents in order to raise funds. Hamakor presents, in its memorandum, a new approach focusing on people and not patents, as the core asset of the Israeli Innovation. See Also: Posted in Israeli Community, Software Patents Tagged: Hamakor, israel, Software Patents

Russell Coker: Taking my Thinkpad Apart and Cooling Problems

I ve been having some cooling problems with my Thinkpad recently. It s an old model T41p which is outside the service period so IBM/Lenovo won t help me (at least not unless I give them more money). If I run it for a few minutes at maximum CPU when the ambient temperature is about 20C then it gets to 90C, apparently 93C is the temperature at which it turns itself off, so obviously I need to do something to keep it cool. On the really hot days of summer my air-conditioners can t keep any part of my house below 30C, so on such days I can t do any compiles on my Thinkpad or watch videos. My Thinkpad seems to idle at a temperature that is about 35C higher than the ambient temperature. At this rate the system could get close to it s maximum temperature on a 45C day by just idling! Not that I plan to have a warm Thinkpad on my lap if I ever happen to be outside on such a hot day. I suspect that a large part of the problem is the dust that has accumulated inside the machine. I asked about this on the LUV mailing list and Andrew Chalmers suggested The Chaos Manor review of taking a Thinkpad T41p apart [1]. The Chaos Manor guy wanted to replace his CPU with a faster one so he had to get access to all the same bits. I followed the instructions until I got to the stage of prying the heatsink off the video chip. I figured that I will never be able to attach it as well as it is currently attached so I will get different cooling problems if I go any further. Taking it apart to that degree was a moderate amount of work, getting the keyboard bezel off was the most difficult part, and taking the palm-rest off required removing bits of plastic that were stuck in place to cover screw holes which will probably fall off in a week or two. Probably everyone who owns a T41p that they regularly use has a similar problem to me as all such machines have been out of support long enough to have accumulated a lot of dust. So I recommend that other T41p owners not disassemble their machine as much as I did, but instead go for my plan B which is to blow compressed air through the CPU cooling system. Doing this merely requires removing the keyboard. One tip that I have heard is that you should hold the fan in place when blowing compressed air as the pressure of the air may spin the fan fast enough to generate enough electricity to damage the motherboard or damage it s bearings. But you might want to wait until I ve got my Thinkpad done before you blow compressed air through yours, it could very well be destroyed. The other option is to try and use software to control the temperature. Patricia Fraser suggested controlling the fan speed [2]. I did some experiments and found that increasing the fan speed dramatically slowed the increase in the temperature. A 10 minute build is almost certain to bring the temperature to dangerous levels in a default configuration, but it seems that if I set the fan to maximum speed before starting the build then I can mitigate this problem. Most programs that I work on will compile in significantly less than 10 minutes. Another possibility that occurred to me is that of limiting the speed of the system. It seems that ACPI has support for reducing the CPU frequency when the temperature rises too much, but Matthew Garrett has pointed out that this effectively increases the amount of energy used (and heat dissipated) for any given quantity of work [3]. So what I want to do is to cause the CPU to idle periodically when it gets too hot. I ve been idly considering writing a program that uses SIGSTOP and SIGCONT to control the operation of programs such as make, or writing a program that creates a new pty (like script) and pauses the output whenever the CPU gets too hot. Of course the easy option would be to figure out how to set the threshold temperature where the CPU speed is limited. Which is made slightly more complicated by my choice of kernel 2.6.30 for Ext4 support. Now the kernel doesn t work with my acpid and I m starting to get forced into an upgrade to Debian/Testing. Does anyone have any ideas?

MJ Ray: Unable to Register .CN Domains

Our co-op registers domain names for others. Like most registrars, we now cannot register Chinese (.cn) domains. There s a bit of background discussion on WebmasterWorld. While it s always disappointing to offer fewer services, I don t think we ve ever registered a .cn domain and especially not for anyone in China. Most of the .cn domains we see are in spam. If this tighter control makes any dent in the amount of spam and scam sites, that s probably a good thing. I ve not felt any significant reduction in spam since this change, though. I suspect the scammers have just moved to another top-level domain with a long-time idle government, while a few legitimate users of cn domains will also be punished along with the scammers. Will we ever shut out the spammers? Even if we kick them out of all domains, they ll find some way of using IP addresses or something. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

18 January 2010

Russell Coker: Why Internet Access in Australia Sucks

In a comment on my post about (relatively) Cheap Net Access in Australia [1] sin from Romania said Somebody needs to whack the aussie ISP in the head with a cluebat. The prices that you pay are insane . In Eastern Europe you have optic fibers from Germany and other western European countries that carry vast amounts of data. As the demand for capacity increases it s not THAT difficult to lay more fibers. You also have competition between different companies that lay fiber. To get data to Australia you must lay cables under the sea, this is expensive and can t be done quickly. Therefore all international data transfers are expensive to cover the expense of laying the cables. I don t think that we have any real competition in the market for International connectivity from Australia either. Now the links between Europe and the US aren t cheap either, but I believe that there are economies of scale (as well as shorter distances) that make them significantly cheaper than the links to Australia. Also a good portion of the traffic that you generate as a customer of a European ISP will stay within Europe as there are heaps of good sites in Europe. The number of people living in Europe who speak English as their first language is more than twice that of Australia. The number of Europeans who communicate in English almost as fluently as the native speakers (such as about half the population of the Netherlands) is also quite significant. I expect that the amount of English-language material on the net that is published from the EU is more than three times greater than the quantity published from Australia. People who speak languages that have a more limited geographic spread (IE anything other than English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese) will have a higher portion of local traffic which is therefore cheaper for their ISP. So based on the relative population sizes we should expect to have Australians making a higher portion of their Internet bandwidth be expensive international data transfers than that of Europeans. Then of course there is the issue of server costs. Running servers in Australia is horribly expensive, while user access to the net is merely annoyingly expensive, the costs of hosting servers are significant and usually the offers have slower hardware and slower transfers (particularly to the important US and EU markets). My blog is hosted in Germany because the company that was offering me free hosting in Australia encouraged me to host it elsewhere due to the price. Also hosting in Germany gives me slightly lower ping times to the US and significantly lower ping times to Europe. As about half the readers of my blog are based in the US, a significant quantity of the readers are based in the EU, and Australia only contains a small portion of the readers the overall experience for readers of my blog is improved by having it hosted outside Australia. It would be better to have it hosted in the US (where most of my readers are located) but I was offered free hosting in the EU. It would be nice if there was a cheap and easy way of getting a mirror of my blog running in Australia with Geo-DNS so that people using Australian IP addresses would get a local server. Putting the static images on an Australian server would be trivial, setting up Geo-DNs would be painful and probably increase reliability issues later on but isn t insurmountable (I have root on both DNS servers). The Debian blog gives some basic information on how to setup GeoDNS [2]. Then I would need to set up a MySQL slave for Wordpress data and modify Wordpress to send it s writes to the master server which is probably impossible for me unless someone else has already written a Wordpress plugin for this, I m really not good at PHP programming. Another possibility would be one of the Wordpress cache plugins that maintain static files to avoid needless database lookups. Until/unless I do such things, every Australian reader of my web site (and those of my friends who do similar things to me regarding hosting) will slightly tilt the balance of Internet transfers in favor of expensive data from foreign servers instead of cheap content from local servers. Sometimes it just sucks to live on an island.

15 January 2010

John Goerzen: Netbook or thin & light notebook?

I am a big fan of thin and light notebooks. I ve been using the 9 EeePC 901 for awhile now, almost since it first came out. I initially loved it. The keyboard, while an obstacle, wasn t as much as I feared. The thing got insanely long battery life (5-6 hours or more typical), and was so small that my laptop bag is a DVD player bag . Now for the downsides. I am getting into a time where I m spending more time on the laptop, and I m starting to be far more acutely aware of them. #1 is performance. Let s face it: the 901 is just a slow machine all-around. The video performance isn t great, and I can watch the Thunderbird interface being drawn as it loads. But the real killer is the SSD storage. It is exceptionally slow, and gets in the way of multitasking in a serious way. (Syncing mail? Kiss performance in Firefox goodbye.) Problem #2 is the 1024 600 screen. This is becoming a serious inconvenience, as when you combine the need to do a lot of scrolling with slow scrolling performance, the result is unpleasant. Coding is pretty difficult at that size. #3 is the keyboard size. It is OK for light-duty work, but it is getting in the way for more serious work. So I m looking for a replacement. I m thinking something in the 10 to 12 range, thin and light, would be ideal. My main criteria are size, weight, performance, and compatibility with Debian. Durability is an added plus as it will be riding in my bicycle bag on a regular basis. This puts me in something of a grey area: there are netbooks in that range, and then there are machines like the Macbook Air (which may actually be a bit bigger than I d like). I have recently been hearing good things about the EeePC 1005PE (Atom N450) and the 1201N (N270 with Nvidia Ion). The 1201N seems to beat the 1005PE in terms of performance (especially video-related), but with far less battery life. I think I could live with the slower CPU, but the 1005PE still has only 1024 600 resolution, which would be a big problem for me. Lenovo has an IdeaPad U150 with an 11.6 1366 768 screen, and in the 12 size, they ve got various options, both Atom and Core 2 Duo. The X200 and X200s look interesting, but lack a touchpad. (The X200s appears to be their long-lasting-battery version.) The HP EliteBook 2530p also looks interesting; it has a touchpad, but is heavier and appears to have inferior battery life to the X200s. What ideas do people have?

Roland Mas: FusionForge developers/users meeting coming up

News is slow this month on the FusionForge development front. We're all busy gathering all the things that we want to go into the next release, but there's no big news from the code. However, there is something of interest. You may have heard about the Coclico project, which is an initiative aiming at collaboration and convergence between several forge engines, most notably FusionForge, Codendi and Novaforge. That project was started last October, and it holds regular meetings with its members. The next meeting is scheduled for the 2nd of February in Paris, and we thought we could host an open meeting on the 3rd for non-Coclico members, a bit like the forge meeting we had last year (which is when FusionForge was officially born), but with an emphasis on what Coclico did so far. Since most of the FusionForge hackers are in Western Europe, and several are in Paris (especially if we add those who go to Paris for the Coclico meeting), we thought it would also be a good opportunity to gather for a technical and social meeting. It seems the Coclico open session didn't generate much interest this time (at least, it hasn't so far), so I proposed to hijack the room for this FusionForge meeting, and I didn't hear any objections. I have several themes I'd like to discuss with people, and possibly start implementing during that day: and so on. These are in no way specific to FusionForge, and in fact I think it would be great if hackers/users of other forges were present, because we could benefit a great deal from their experience and plans. But if we find ourselves amongst FF people only, I think these would be good to discuss, possibly write some code for, and go home with a clearer picture of where our efforts should focus in the near future. I'd therefore like to invite interested people to mark the 3rd of February on their agendas. The meeting will take place in Issy-les-Moulineaux (near Paris, within reach of the tube). If you're interested, please get in touch with us (#FusionForge on the FreeNode IRC network, or the fusionforge-general mailing-list), so we can have a rough estimate of how many people to expect. The meeting room is provided by France T l com, and they're probably going to need numbers if not names. Further details will be announced when known.

14 January 2010

Jonny Lamb: Monorail

Recently, I've been working on a file transfer app for the N900. It's called monorail and I uploaded it to extras-devel last night, so you can try it out right now. Click for full-sized image I implemented an OssoABookContactView with support for filtering on Contact Capabilities (or a draft of it, at least) as old-style caps aren't great. This gives a nice list of address book contacts who have at least one account that should support receiving file transfers. It would be nice if these extra caps could go into the address book which is where they belong, but it won't. If someone would find this widget useful, I'll clean up the code and maybe throw it in its own library. Click for full-sized image
Choose one of the accounts which support file transfer. I also started to implement a sharing plugin, but it turns out it's poorly documented and appears to be impossible to do anything useful for my use-case, like popping up a dialog when the user taps "Share". The example isn't very exemplary, but does contain some amusing code. This sharing plugin is only half-written and impossible to debug. If anyone has any pointers on writing these plugins, I would appreciate them. Click for full-sized image It's a shame that although Hildon widgets can look really good on the device, it can often take some fiddling to make them look consistent with the rest of the UI. Additionally, oddities in some widgets can leave you baffled, or amused. The most annoying thing I have come across regarding this app is just how little I can get it integrated. The file manager is all hard-coded so there's no way to add a Send to Contact menu item, and no buttons can be added to the libsharing dialog (which appears when the user shares a photo) which is annoying as it looks like it's missing this feature. Click for full-sized image Oh, and Telepathy is pretty sweet.

John Goerzen: System Administrators Might Save Your Life

There s a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of system administrators. Unless you re one, it s probably hard to grasp the full weight of it. This week has been full of reminders for me. This afternoon, shortly after lunch, I got word that people were having trouble with phones. A few minutes of testing showed that calls within our city were working fine, but it was completely impossible to place or receive long-distance calls. A little while later, a local newspaper s website indicated that numerous cities over a multi-county region, all served by the CenturyLink local telephone company, were out of service in this manner. I figure that represents hundreds of square miles, or a patch of rural Kansas roughly the size of Los Angeles. Adding to the problem was the fact that emergency 911 services are accessed via these long-distance lines that were down. For roughly three hours, 911 was completely down across this entire area. What s more, many cellphone towers and Internet access options were also taken down, since they feed from these same lines. This adds up to a situation that could very easily cost lives due to delayed response of emergency medical, fire, or police services. In the end, the problem was traced to a bad controller card on a Titan 5500 owned by AT&T. Now, here s the system administration angle: If you worked for the phone company and had to troubleshoot a problem that you knew had taken down emergency services for thousands of people, what kind of pressure would you be feeling? Would you be able to keep your cool? I m glad that I don t have that kind of job. I also wouldn t like to be the engineer (or, more likely, accountant) that decided that they didn t need any more redundancy to provide good service to the area. Especially considering this is the second time in the last year or two this has happened. But, ironically, yesterday I signed a purchase order for a new Asterisk PBX (corporate phone) server. When selecting a machine for that task, I am always completely conscious of the responsibility on my shoulders: several hundred employees rely on the machine that is ultimately my responsibility to select. Our own access to 911 would be cut if the machine were to go down. I never forget that the correct operation of the systems that our team sets up and deploys could help save someone s life, and that a malfunction could cost the company dearly in terms of revenue, productivity, image or worse. Nearly four years ago, we switched from an analog PBX, with outsourced support, to a digital VOIP system running Asterisk. Note that we use VOIP in-house, but do not use it externally. Anyhow, I can not say that the Asterisk PBX has been 100% perfect; I doubt that this could be honestly said of any PBX of any complexity. I can say, though, that it saved us well over $100,000 AND has proven far more reliable than the system it replaced. Outages are exceptionally rare and brief now. Plus we have internal expertise to fix it, rather than having to wait for a technician to be dispatched from a city 2 hours away to fix anything. I know I don t have the resources to build a perfect PBX that will never go down (if such a thing is even possible), but I take my responsibility regarding a reliable PBX extremely seriously. We used to have a frequent problem: someone would call 911, then hang up. We suspected this was often on accident maybe people hit 9 for an outside line, then misdialed their number. In any case, 911 dispatch would then call our main office, saying they got a hangup. A person or team would then go across our entire campus making sure nobody was in distress that nobody had managed to dial, then passed out, for instance. With Asterisk, I was able to help this situation. Whenever somebody calls 911 now, two emails are generated: the first contains details about the call, such as the extension number that called and the duration of the call. This goes to all people that are likely to receive a callback from 911. It may not always pinpoint the source (as with somebody using a wireless phone), but almost every time will give us a very good idea where the call came from. The second email is a recording of the call, and serves as an additional clue, but goes to fewer people. I am aware that email isn t a perfect medium, but: it let us make a dramatic (albeit imperfect) solution to a problem that very few institutions our size are able to address nearly so well. There s a lot of weight on our shoulders: keeping the accounting system up, the Internet links up, the web store or the sales phone lines, the shipping systems or the document archives up. These things going down can spell deep trouble in many ways. And sometimes the systems we maintain might save a life. Such as this morning, when someone was feeling symptoms of a heart attack, used our phones to call a colleague for help, that person called 911, and an ambulance was dispatched. I know the system worked exactly as it should, because I had two familiar emails from Asterisk in my mailbox this morning when I got to work.

Russell Coker: Links January 2010

Magnus Larsson gave an interesting TED talk about using bacteria to transform dunes into architecture [1]. The concept of making a wall across Africa to stop sand dunes from overtaking farm land is obviously a good one, the idea of using bacteria to convert sand into sandstone to do so cheaply is also good. But making that into houses seems a little risky. I wouldn t want to live under shifting sand with only bacteria generated sandstone to protect me. Cory Doctorow gave an interesting speech titled How to Destroy the Book , here is the transcript [2]. He talks about how much he loves books and described his opposition to the DRM people who want to destroy the book culture. Sendmail has a DKIM Wizard for generating ADSP (Domain Signing Policy) records [3]. If I knew that ADSP records were so easy to implement then I would have used them a year ago! Loretta Napoleoni gave an insightful TED talk about the economics of terrorism [4]. Apparently the US dollar used to be THE currency for international crime, when the PATRIOT act was passed it s anti-money-laundering provisions encouraged many shady people to invest in Euros instead and thus led to the devaluation of the US currency. It s also interesting to note that terrorist organisations are driven by economics, if only we could prevent them from making money Ryan Lobo gave an interesting TED talk about his photographic work [5]. The effectiveness of the all-women peace-keeping force is noteworthy. The part about the Liberian war criminal who has become an evangelical Christian and who now tours Liberia begging forgiveness from his victims (and their relatives in the case of the people he murdered). Should someone like that be permitted to remain free if his victims forgive him? Charles Stross has an appealing vision for how Apple and Google can destroy the current mobile telephony market [6]. I can t wait for the mobile phone market to be entirely replaced by mobile VOIP devices! James Geary gave an interesting TED talk about metaphors [7]. The benefits of metaphors in poetry are well known (particularly in lyrics), but the impact of metaphors in influencing stock market predictions surprised me. Shaffi Mather gave an interesting TED talk about his company that makes money from fighting corruption [8]. Instead of paying a bribe you can pay his company to force the official(s) in question to do the right thing. Apparently the cost of doing so tends to be less than 10% the cost of the bribe if you know what you are doing. His previous company was an ambulance service that charges what the patient can afford is also interesting. John Robb wrote an interesting article about lottery winners and griefers [9]. He suggests that publishing the names, addresses, etc of rich people will be a new trend in Griefing. One thing I ve been wondering about is the value of the HR database at a typical corporation. A single database typically contains the home addresses, phone numbers, and salaries of all the employees. It would be very easy to do an SQL dump and store it on a USB flash device to carry out of the office. Then it could be sold to the highest bidder. They could probably make a market in the private data about rich people in the same way that there is currently a market for credit card data maybe they have already done this but it s kept quiet to stop others from implementing the same idea. Michael Smith wrote an interesting article for the Washington Times about home schooling and socialisation [10]. It seems that people who were home schooled as children tend to be more academically successful and involved in civic life as well as being happier and having career success. Richard Seager wrote an interesting article for American Scientist about ocean currents and heat transfer from the tropics [11]. It seems that when the ocean currents shut down the UK and other parts of northern Europe won t be getting a mini ice-age. Ian Lance Taylor (most known for the gold linker) has written a good summary of the situation in regard to climate change and what must be done about it [12]. The Wrath of the Killdozer article about how one angry man converted a bulldozer into a tank [13]. This wasn t a big bulldozer (every mining company has bigger ones) and he didn t have any serious weapons (only rifles). Imagine what terrorists could do if they started with a mining vehicle and serious weapons Simon Singh has written about being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association [14]. The BCA didn t like his article criticising chiropractors for claiming to be able to treat many conditions unrelated to the spine. Remember, chiropractors are not doctors all they can do is alleviate some back problems. See a GP if you have any medical condition that doesn t involve a sore back or neck. Avoid uppity chiropracters who claim to be able to cure all ills. Nicholas D. Kristof wrote an interesting article for the New York times about how happy the people in Costa Rica are [15]. He claims that the Costa Rican government s decision in 1949 to dissolve it s armed forces and invest the money in education is the root cause of the happy population. Maybe if the US government would scale back military spending the US population could be as happy as the Costa Ricans. While there are good arguments for having some sort of military, there are no good arguments for spending more money on the military than the rest of the world combined (as the US does).

13 January 2010

Paul Wise: Another decade, another ...

Thanks to all the Debian, FLOSS and Indymedia folks out there, you've made the last decade much more enjoyable.

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