I just uploaded the 0.5 release of the newsbeuter RSS feed reader to unstable.
Apart from improvements in HTML rendering and lock file handling the new release:

• adds unicode compatibility


• a new filter language


• support for notifications

and finally you are also able to freely configure all key bindings.

The new filter language is pretty cool, you can now filter feeds for title, url, author etc. (see the documentation for all fields) using regular expressions like:
rssurl =~ "^http:\/\/nion\.modprobe.*", you can use the comparison operators and you are able to logical connect them.

The regexp support also enables you to killfile certain articles using the new ignore-article option, ignore-article "*" "title =~ \"SuSE\"" for example ;-P (press F to try it out)

With the notification support you are allowed to execute a specified program if a new article arrives, easy and useful for blog junkies.

Hopefully newsbeuter will become a good alternative for raggle and snownews users now as the snownews author is not really working on it anymore and raggle seems to have a stalled development as well.

Firstly for the benefit of people who haven’t heard of it, the Advogato FAQ and the Wikipedia Page describe what Advogato does. Pete Zaitcev posted a strange article about me to Advogato. In it he accused me of “pumping hateful leftist propaganda into Advogato“, said propaganda being my regular blog posts. In an addendum he accused me of insanity, and said that my “attacks” were “divisive“. I considered writing an Advogato post in response but first read the Posting Guidelines which say:

• Please keep articles about Advogato itself to a minimum


• Personal complaints, rants, and flames belong in your blog, not here

Both of those criteria rule out Pete’s post and any response that I might make would risk being in breach of such conditions - so I will use my blog as the Advogato admins recommend. Pete’s ad-hominem attack on me claiming that my posts are hateful is bizarre. Pete, for the benefit of all the interested onlookers could you please inform us which of my posts you consider hateful and why you have such an opinion? As a general rule you should always cite articles that you reference. When you make accusations without any evidence to back them up it makes you look bad and prevents any positive discussion of the acts in question. As for the accusation of being divisive, that only happens when people are forced to choose sides. For example when you encourage other people to rate me down on Advogato because of my political opinions that can divide the community (in a small way, neither you, nor me, nor Advogato is important enough to cause a serious problem in this regard). The idea that I was intentionally pumping anything into Advogato was also strange to me. When I entered the URL for my blog into the Advogato settings page I didn’t even realise that it was being syndicated until I reviewed my web logs some time later. It seems that Advogato only has a small number of readers, a recent post about strange ZCAV performance included a graph and judging by the referrer tags it seems that 412 people read the post from Advogato out of 10468 total (so Advogato gets less than 4% of my readers). Planet Debian seems to get more than 15x the number of readers of Advogato. Incidentally if you don’t currently include images in your blog the reader tracking ability is one reason for including an image in an occasional post. Another strange ad-hominem attack was the reference to “college indoctrination“. When I was in university I supported the Liberal party (the Australian equivalent of the Republican party in the US). The influence of Linux programmers (including some of Pete’s colleagues at Red Hat) had much more of an effect on my political opinions than that of my university experience. I am not criticising Pete for disagreeing with me in regard to politics (I don’t even know what he disagrees with). Here are my specific criticisms of Pete’s behaviour:

1. Ad-hominem attacks


2. Encouraging mis-use of Advogato trust metrics for political reasons (this one may not have been deliberate)


3. Non-specific accusations which do not allow me to either defend myself against the accusations or change my actions if he turns out to have any reasonable points


4. Hypocrisy - he breaks two of the posting guidelines for the purpose of criticising my blog posts which supposedly break some unwritten rule


5. Not reading the Advogato FAQ - it has a specific section about political disagreements

But I’m not going to advocate voting him down on Advogato. He does write some interesting things on occasion. Check out his page on guns for example.

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After much blood, sweat and tears, Poky Linux 3.0 (also known as Blinky) is released. Poky is an OpenEmbedded derivative, focused on building GNOME Mobile-based images for embedded and handheld devices such as the Sharp Zaurus or the Nokia N800. Aside from the usual set of software updates and infrastructure improvements, Blinky contains the first public release of Sato, an example GTK+/Matchbox based PDA environment aimed at devices with high resolution, physically small screens. This includes a new Matchbox panel and desktop, the Pimlico suite of PIM applications, and a fast, clear GTK+ theme. Pretty much everyone at OpenedHand has been involved in Poky to some extent, so it's great to see a release. Personally I'm really pleased with how far Blinky has advanced over the last release, Clyde, and will shortly be working on a branch of Blinky to integrate the complete GNOME 2.20 release set. If anyone is interested in Poky then it is easy to try: there are for a several devices: the Nokia N800 and several Sharp Zaurus models; and Qemu images for both ARM and Intel. Give it a go and tell us what you think! NP: Love and Affection, Joan Armatrading

From an article in the Daily Mail this week:

Previous studies have found that cannabis claims 30,000 lives a year by causing cancer, heart disease and bronchitis, and that it can double the risk of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Now, I wonder where that data is from. Oh look, the British Medical Journal:

It may be argued that the extrapolation from small numbers of individual studies to potential large scale effects amounts to scaremongering. For example, one could calculate that if cigarettes cause an annual excess of 120 000 deaths among 13 million smokers, the corresponding figure for deaths among 3.2 million cannabis smokers would be 30 000, assuming equality of effect.

Genius. Thanks to Dr Ben Goldache for spotting this. NP: The Good, The Bad & The Queen, The Good, The Bad & The Queen

Russell Coker has recently started posting random tech-tips and recipes in his blog :

To improve things in this regard I plan to increase the number of posts I write with solutions to random technical problems that I encounter with the aim of providing a resource for google searches and to randomly inform people who read my blog.

This is nice to see on Planet Debian - although I hope we continue to see the personal entries. For anybody else who is considering posting things like this I would be delighted if you'd copy them to the Debian Administration website. There have been numerous times when I've been just about to write something on a topic, seen it posted elsewhere and figured I shouldn't do so:

• Because it would be duplication.
• Because it would look like plagiarism

(Notable examples off the top of my head: Introduction to OpenVZ, Introduction to GIT, several Xen pieces.) I don't get many submissions, which I'm getting resigned to, but it is easy and people really really are greatful for new posts. In other news linuxlinks.com are a bunch of spammers and will be reported as such. I utterly fail to care that they've added "my software" to their list; if I cared I'd join their site and agree to receive emails from them..

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

Rapha l, you don't carve into stone (aka pass through a GR) a proposal that has not been tested yet. The sponsoring example you took before is excellent: it was implemented and tested without a GR. Because that's what we do with excellent ideas: we test them, and if they are proven good practice, it becomes the de facto standard. You don't force things like that.

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

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Being in any reasonably large free software project one tends to be confronted with endless little annoyances, frustrations and letdowns. Often it happens that these little things keep growing in our perception the longer they last and the more they trouble us. In these times it is good to be reminded that the actual thing we invest so much time and energy in is not those little issues that often annoy us so much, but the overlying ideal of free software which is still a great thing, even in view of all the little frustrations that we have to deal with when working on it. Yesterday I had one of these little experiences that just remind you, just how good a thing free software is:

• At Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:38:49 I filed a whishlist bug against a software I recently started using.
• At Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:04:35 the bug had been passed on to the software's upstream and I got an email from the upstream author telling me that the feature I wanted was already in the current development version of the software, where I could download the tar.bz2 and how to contact him on jabber.
• At about half to ten I downloaded the code, rolled it into a package and tried it, but couldn't get the new feature to work, so I wrote another email.
• An half hour later I got an answer telling me what I'd done wrong. I fixed my mistake, tested the new feature and found that it did right what I wanted. However, there was one more option I thought would be useful so I contacted the author via jabber.
• In the following 2.5 hours he implemented the additional option that I had asked for, renamed a button I found a bit unintuitive and fixed two bugs I discovered in the process of testing the new feature, sending me new code versions to test after every change.
• I am now using the software with the new feature I asked for and with all the options I wanted from a homemade package but expect the proper Debian package to show up in the archive any day.
• The whole process took three days.

... and this is exactly why free software (and the people in it) is so great. Because if there is something you'd think would be useful, all you have to do is ask and maybe lend a little help in testing and you got it. And this is why it's worth to put up with all the little annoyances, frustrations and letdowns that working with humans brings with it. Even if they sometimes seem to be overwhelming. PS: I know that there are also enough examples where things didn't go as smooth as this one. But this just makes it more worth and important to highlight and appreciate these examples where everything just worked out perfectly and not just take them as granted. So, inbetween posting rants and fuming at all the things that tick you off, how about if you think of a nice FLOSS experience you had and share it with the rest of the world?

Following my previous article, I had some interesting comments introducing me to git-filter-branch (which is a new function coming from cogito’s cg-admin-rewritehist). This command is really designed to rewrite the history and you can do much more changes… it enabled me to fix the dates/authors/committers/logs of all the commits that were created with git_load_dirs. It can also be used to add one or more “parent commits” to any commit. In parallel I discovered some problems with the git repository that I created: the tags were no more pointing to my master branch. This is because git rebase won’t convert them while rewriting history. This lead me to redo everything from scratch. This time I used git-filter-branch instead. The man page even gives an example of how to link two branches together as if one was the predecessor of the other. Here’s how you can do it: let’s bind together “old” and “new”… the resulting branch will be “new-rewritten”.

$ git rev-parse old
0975870bb1631379f2da798fa78736a4fe32960a
$ git checkout new
$ git-filter-branch --tag-name-filter=cat --parent-filter \
"sed -e 's/^$/-p 0975870bb1631379f2da798fa78736a4fe32960a/'" \
new-rewritten
[...]
Rewritten history saved to the new-rewritten branch

Short explanation: the only commit without a parent commit (thus matching the empty regex “^$”) is the root commit and this one is changed to have a parent (-p) which is the last commit of the branch “old”. At the end, you remove all the temporary branches, keep only what’s needed and repack everything to save space:

$ git branch -D old new
$ git prune
$ git repack -a -d

Fudge Update

Yesterday I blogged about the guy handing out fudge. He saw my post and explained why he was doing it. Today he was around handing out fudge, and I thanked him for his comment. He gave me two pieces of fudge for blogging about it.

Pineapple

At most of the breaks, they have this truly wonderful real (non-canned) pineapple. I think I have eaten more pineapple this week than any other week, ever. Very insidious, O'Reilly.

Conference materials

Slides of talks are available. Apparently keynotes are being posted on Youtube and Google Video, though they haven't provided a specific link AFAICT.

Philip Rosedale, Founder/CEO of Linden Lab

Second Life and the XPrize are two examples of escapism: you can escape to virtual earth, or escape the planet entirely.

In order for Second Life to grow, it has to become profoundly open. It has to be a standardized protocol. They are working on code to let people run their own servers. They are trying to make the server trusted and make it able to be open sourced as well. They see openness as the key way for it to grow.

If you are writing a web app that depends on the network effect -- such as Facebook -- you should open source everything right from the beginning. Not because it's best for humanity, but because you will win.

Jimmy Wales

He's trying to do open source search. Nice idea, could have been summarized in 45 seconds, I think.

Simon Wardli

Was going to talk about Zimki, which was going to open sourced, but they decided not to.

Funny and interesting talk, I sorta forgot to take notes while listening...

Nat Torkington

OSCon program chair.

Funny talk about Linux, an adolescent at 16 years old. Thinking about different languages and how they're doing. How the Linux community is organized: are we fighting battles, and do we need to?

James Larsson

This guy takes old hardware and makes insane devices out of it. 15,000 volts running over a coat hanger used as a "game controller", for instance.

In all, awesome keynotes today.

Recently there has been some discussion and controversy about a 15yo boy being allowed to perform a Caesarian operation on a woman (without her consent). Don Marti seems to think it’s OK and gives some examples of what 15 year old people used to do in past times. However he misses a couple of significant points, one is that the knowledge of surgery was much lower a few hundred years ago and the expectations of the patient were a lot lower, the other is that the patient in this case did not consent to being operated on by a 15yo. If the boy’s mother thought that he was capable of doing the job correctly then she could have allowed him to deliver a younger sibling… Given a choice I would rather have someone like Doogie Howser operate on me than a random surgeon - but I would be extremely unhappy to discover after an operation that it had been performed by a different surgeon than planned who didn’t have a medical license and who’s motivation was to invade my privacy by making a movie of the event! Don cites the interesting essay Against School by John Taylor Gatto which makes some really good points about the state of the education system in most first-world countries. An interesting point that John Gatto doesn’t mention is that in Japan school-boys wear uniforms that are based on Prussian military uniforms. From all the evidence that I have seen the Japanese school system is more Prussian (IE worse by many objective measures) than most countries. The Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting article comparing education systems which claims that a major cause in lack of academic performance is unjustified praise. I first became aware of the extent of this problem when discussing education with a misguided university lecturer. He told me that he felt that his purpose was to make the students believe that they had achieved something and that this was much more important than actually teaching them. My response was to point out that heroin and cocaine are both good options for people who would rather feel successful than succeed and to enquire as to whether he thought that they should be advocated for children. The conversation ended soon after that and he requested that I not name him or his university when blogging about it. I take this as an admission of guilt, if you act decently in public then you should not be afraid of appearing on a blog - decent actions will either be too boring for a blog entry or things that you are proud of.

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We've had a lot of great blog traffic about Vinismo. I thought I'd try to pull together a few of the better ones.

• vinismo! wiki wine compendium from Hugh McGuire.
• Vinismo Opens Its Doors to Wine Lovers Everywhere from the Creative Commons Weblog. Thanks, guys!
• Vinismo: Wiki + Wine from Zach Copley
• Vinismo from Wendy Copley.
• DemoCampMontreal3 report from Montreal Tech Watch
• DemoCampMontreal3 Report from Josh Nursing
• Vinismo Presentation at DemoCampMontreal3 on the SearchAnyway Blog. Probably one of my favourite pieces, although it makes Niko real mad since it cuts off just before he starts talking. Make mental note: don't say "Uh" so much.
• Bienvenue sur Vinismo, le guide des vins libre by Niko. Niko also bemoaned the difficulty of keeping our project under wraps in Mon lourd secret bient t d voil . What a drama queen.
• Vinismo : un wiki sur le vin by Olivier Niquet. He's suspicious that we are sponsored by J. Lohr, because there are so many J. Lohr wines on our front page.

All in all it's been pretty good. I hope we'll get some more, though! tags: blogs vinismo

DemoCampMontreal3 report So, it's been a couple of days and I should probably get around to posting my own DemoCampMontreal3 report.

• Niko and I started off with our own demo for Vinismo. It was a lot of fun: we talked about the reasons for starting the site, the technical, information architecture and graphics/UI design challenges, and what our future extensions are going to be. At the end of it, we took some questions, which was fun. The most interesting for me was from Roberto Rocha, whose TechnoCit is one of my favourite tech columns in Montreal. He asked, "Your typical contributor will be much older. What will you do to make your wiki more accessible to them?" It was a good question I don't have an answer to yet, but I want to think about it more.
• The second demo was by Heri Rakotomalala, who showed off his social-networking GTD tool, WorkCruncher. It's a TODO list with a twist: items that you don't get done age off the list. You have to re-commit to doing a task on an almost daily basis. I think it's a great and refreshing design; my TODO list gets depressing long and filled with unfinishable tasks, and I get too intimidated to work on ones that really matter. I think Heri might have to make some concessions to people's expectations for TODO lists -- maybe a way to automatically archive tasks, rather than deleting them entirely...?
• The third demo was by the gang from Defensio, who are providing an great anti-spam Web service similar to Akismet. They had a few examples of where they're different, but I'm not well-versed enough in comment spam issues to understand them. My guess is that since they're getting into the market after Akismet, though, they have the opportunity to make a smarter technology. Their one downside? They used slides -- which the rules of DemoCamp. They did demo the service, though.
• Fourth up was the indefatigable Simon Law. Simon's project? To turn back time. Talk about ambitious! His effort consisted of making a typical kitchen clock turn backwards. He disassembled the clock and explained how it worked to the audience. It was great, except for two things: the clock didn't work at the end of the demo (although he got it working by the end of DemoCamp), and he took a few minutes to draw a diagram of the clock; in my mind, that's just a low-tech PowerPoint slide.
• Fifth, and quite fascinating, was a tool that Jerome Paradis showed off. It was a Google-Maps mashup that filtered special emails for an informal private jet sharing network. Apparently, companies who charter private jets often have space in the jets, so they'll make that space available. People who need a last-minute charter jet can send email from their Blackberries and such, and if there's availability they get contacted by the charter companies. The interesting part? These people use a highly structured lingo ("O/W" = "one way"), and Jerome's tool scrapes these emails to make the data into a mapping app for his customers. Very interesting!

All in all, it was a good night -- probably made better by the Argentina Cabernet Sauvignon I had. There's a DemoCampMontreal4 scheduled for August 17th, but I won't be in town for it. Too bad for me! tags: democampmontreal3 defensio workcruncher simonlaw jeromeparadis vinismo

Alex Fletcher: “The blogosphere, or at least the hemisphere which cares about such things, has been busy producing references to the latest series of events surrounding Sun Microsystems’ Project Indiana, the binary distribution of the company’s OpenSolaris operating system. For example, last week Enterprise Linux Log featured a story about the state of affairs at a recent NYC UNIX user group in Manhattan where things didn’t seem to go well. However, what I took from news of the event, including commentary from those who attended was entirely different from the way in which the article was seemingly framed.” It’s interesting how different people can take away very different things from the same presentation. If you’re at OSCON, come hear it firsthand—I’m speaking about Project Indiana today at 11:35 in room E141. And judge for yourself.

I believe that an ideal installation process for Linux would have the option of performing a Xen install. The basic functionality of installing the Xen versions of the required packages (the kernel and libc), the Xen hypervisor, and the Xen tools is already done well in Fedora and it’s an option to install them in Debian. But more than that is required. Xen has two options for networking, bridging and routing. The bridging option can be confusing to set up and changing a system from routed to bridged networking once it’s running is a risky process. I have documented the basic requirements for running bridging in a previous post, but it would be better if there was an option to have Xenbr0 as the primary device from the initial install - and there are non-Xen reasons for doing this so it would be a more generally useful feature. Another common requirement for a Xen server is to have a DVD image on the local hard drive for creating new DomU’s. If we are going to need a copy of the DVD on the local hard drive for Xen installation and we need data from the DVD for the Dom0 installation then it makes sense to have one of the early installation tasks (immediately after running mkfs) be to copy the contents of the DVD to the hard drive. Hard drives are significantly faster than DVDs - especially for random access. It would also avoid the not uncommon annoyance of getting part way through an install only to encounter a DVD or CD read error… Here are some reasons for running Xen (or an equivalent technology) when not running more than one DomU:

1. Avoid problems booting. Everyone who has spent any significant amount of time running servers has had problems where machines don’t boot. Even with a capable out of band management option such as the HP ILO it can be unreasonably inconvenient to fix such problems. Separating the base hardware management tasks of the OS from the user process management tasks makes recovery much easier. If a DomU stops booting then it’s easy to mount it on the Dom0 and chroot into it to discovere the problem.


2. Easier upgrades. Often you have users demand that you install software that only works with a newer version of the OS. You can install the new version under a different DomU, test it, and then replace the old DomU when you think it’ll work - this gives a matter of minutes of down-time instead of hours for the upgrade. If the upgrade doesn’t work then you destroy the DomU and create one for the old version. Running two versions of the OS at the same time with NFS shares for the data files is also possible.


3. Security. If a DomU gets cracked the Dom0 will not necessarily be compromised, this puts you in a good position to track down what the attackers have done. You can get a dump of the DomU’s memory to enable experts to examine what the attackers were doing. Reinstalling a DomU to replace data potentially corrupted by an attacker is much easier than reinstalling an entire machine.

Even in situations when reason #2 was the motivation for installing Xen I believe that most systems will want to have a Xen DomU running the same version as the Dom0 for the initial install. Therefore integrating the installation process would make things easier. Among other benefits if you have a server with multiple CPUs (the minimum number seems to be two CPUs on all recent machines) and hardware RAID then doing two installations at the same time is likely to give better performance overall. Also I believe that it will often be the case that the Dom0 will exist purely to support DomU’s, therefore if you only install the Dom0 then you have done less than half the installation! For a manual installation there are some reasons for not doing this all at the same time. Having the sys-admin enter configuration data for some DomU’s at the same time as the Dom0 can get confusing. However for an automated install this would be desirable. I would like to boot from a CD and have the installation process take all configuration from the network (either via NFS or HTTP) and then perform the complete installation of the Dom0 and the DomU’s automatically. Let me know what you think of these ideas, it’s just at the conceptual stage at the moment.

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Preface to the last post: I'm aware that my surprise at FSF using Skype does raise the old question "where do you draw the line?" - For example, do you refuse to use the fixed-line telephone system if your exchanges are not running free software? Me, I use the telephone system because it's effectively a monopoly and we don't have an alternative that works for me. I sometimes try to nibble at the system with the Phone Co-op and more VoIP use, but it's no fun banging my head against a wall. However, I boycott Skype because I can't tell what it's doing, there have been enough bad reports that I don't trust it and the alternatives of SIP and IAX work for me, but I expected FSF not to use Skype for idealistic reasons. FSF leaders like RMS have promoted things like Why schools should exclusively use free software [by Richard Stallman], carefully corrected inaccurate claims about free software and refused to mention some proprietary software products. They were often criticised for it, but they continued to do it (for good reasons IMO, even when I disagreed with them). So, FSF's Controller giving an interview over Skype seemed a rather surprising about-face. Then the interviewer claimed "Skype is free" and it went unchallenged. After the show, I sent the email...

One and not uncommon way of granting privileges or positions to somebody else is waiting until it’s obvious it’s time to. As in, for example: “Oh, you don’t have commit access already? Here, let’s fix that.” Or: “Oh, you’re not a release assistant already? Here, have fun.” It’s not useful, however, when there aren’t any people spontaneously jumping into doing some of the required work. Anyway, the point of this post was to say that I can imagine myself applying this method in some non-free-software areas of my life as well: “Oh, we’re not married already? Here, let’s fix that… tomorrow.”

In a default configuration of Xen there will be a virtual Ethernet device created for each interface which will be associated with a bridge. A previous post documented how to configure a bridge named xenbr0. The basic configuration of Xen that most people use is to have a single virtual Ethernet port for each Xen instance and have them all connected to the one bridge, and then the Dom0 will have an IP address on the bridge interface that is used for routing packets to the outside world. This works really well if you have a subnet that you are using for all Xen DomU IP addresses, if you are using NAT for communication, or if the DomU needs no communication outside the Dom0 and other DomU’s on the same machine (a common case for testing). But if you have a collection of servers that you want to consolidate on a single piece of hardware then you end up using a single sub-net that spans some physical machines, some Xen Dom0’s, and some DomU’s. The solution to this is to use bridged networking. Unfortunately most documentation of bridged networking is really confusing, and non of my google searches turned up the most relevant fact: When setting up a bridge on the local Ethernet you must make your physical ethernet device (eth0 or whatever) be strictly a slave to the bridge and then assign the IP address used for the physical network to the bridge.

ifconfig eth0 up

brctl addif xenbr0 eth0

For example if you have 10.0.0.42 being the IP address used by the Dom0 on the local Ethernet via device eth0 and you want to use bridging for DomU’s then you simply make eth0 owned by xenbr0 (the typical name for the Xen bridge) with the above commands in your script to configure the xenbr0 device. Then treat xenbr0 in the same way that you treated eth0 before enabling bridging. Also there’s nothing stopping you from having one bridge for DomU’s that can talk directly to the physical Ethernet and another for DomU’s that are only to use routed networking, see my previous post about using multiple ethernet devices in Xen for more background information.

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Occasionally, I update my sidebar to reflect the current contents of my iRiver. Most people read this blog through the RSS feed, however, and never see the sidebar. So I thought I’d provide occasional snapshots here. Lately:

• Fred Frith: Cheap at Half the Price and Rivers and Tides Working With Time
  Two very different genre-evading albums (file under — alternative?). Rivers and Tides (the film) left an indelible mark on me, but the soundtrack stands alone. Cheap at the Half the Price is a good example of why we can probably get by for another few centuries just on music that’s already been made.
• Petra Haden: The Who Sell Out
  Occasionally too cute, but mostly brilliant one-woman-voice-only remake of The Who album. This one also gets its own Wikipedia article. I’m also a big fan of her album with Bill Frisell. (File under — jazz?)
• G. Love: Lemonade
  Who would have guessed the G. stands for “Good”? I recently went back and listened G. Love and Special Sauce. This one is much better. I’ll post two short clips when I have a minute.
• Paul McCartney: McCartney and Memory Almost Full
  McCartney has been a solo artist for longer than I’ve been around. His first album includes at least two tracks that rival anything from the Beatles (one of which even has its own Wikipedia entry). His newest album is not quite as good, but really, it’s hard for McCartney to really go wrong. (Typically engrossing New Yorker profile.)
• The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan
  Thanks to Steve for reminding me what a great song My Doorbell is.

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I’ve been thinking about what I’m able to write about TiVo without upsetting anyone, and so I’ve been doing a bit of research about what’s already been written. Surprisingly, a lot. So I decided that there really wasn’t a whole lot that I could say that isn’t already somewhere else on the web, and figured I’d just add in some technical explanations to questions that are likely to come up. For example, the remote that we will ship has the thumbs buttons, but the Comcast remote [pdf] doesn’t. If you compare the remotes closely (there’s a picture of the TiVo remote in the article linked above), you’ll see the Comcast remote has two buttons that the TiVo remote doesn’t: Page Up and Page Down. There you go. The TiVo UI uses Channel Up/Channel Down as Page Up/Page Down in lists, so we don’t need separate Page Up/Page Down buttons, and use them for Thumbs buttons instead. Also, to confirm what was written in that article linked to above, we really did rewrite our software in Java. Sort of. As the article states, we run on top of TVWorks’ TV Navigator middleware. It’s not a full OCAP implementation, but rather an implementation of OnRamp To OCAP, which is (from Informitv) not a precursor but “a subset of OCAP so that applications will be forward-compatible with the full OCAP specification.” In other words, we didn’t write the OCAP layer, nor the OS. And the Java-based software so far only runs on the Motorola hardware.