Search Results: "reg"

7 December 2009

Martin Meredith: Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Transforming data is hard. When I joined my current company, there were stupendous amounts of Perl/PHP/Bash/<insert random programming language here> scripts that would run on a cron job and do magic things to our data. They d create reports, they d tell the purchasers when we were running out of stock, they d synchronise data between our Frontend and backend databases, they d collect, they d collate, they d do everything and anything. Except, with all these scripts, in all these random languages, written by a multitude of previous developers (at different skill levels), they weren t particularly maintainable (and sometimes, they weren t particularly readable or understandable either imagine a 6000 line perl script that pretty much ran different permutations of the same data over and over again) Enter Pentaho, and specifically it s Kettle project. (since renamed Pentaho Data Integration ), a tool that lets you manipulate your data in pretty much any way you can imagine, in the simplest and easiest way imaginable.

That s right, it s a GUI for data manipulation.

I know a lot of you are probably sceptical right now. The first time I ever saw this was when a previous boss of mine put it forward as a potential solution for one of our problems (getting our orders from the front end database down to the office/warehouse). I saw it, and I thought GUI? Nah, that s not how real programmers do things! , so after the development team put forward another proposal to solve this, and it got accepted, I thought I d never see the thing again.

That was until my current boss started playing with it, trying to work out what it was doing so that he could get these evil GUI based scripts into something manageable, like nice, pretty code. Thing s, when my boss plays with things that he doesn t know about, he tends to read up, research, and, 9 times out of 10, change his mind.

We wiped the previous server (it was rather noisy! We re glad it s no longer switched on!) and set up a new server to house our BI platform . Starting off with a few scripts, my boss learnt to love this tool, and then, as I m his 2nd in command (aka general lackey) started making me learn how to use it.

Again, I was sceptical, I didn t want to learn, and I put up resistance, but my boss was going away for nearly a month, and by this time, a few of our key business processes relied on Kettle, so, grudgingly, I sat down, and started to learn.

You may be wondering now, why I started off this story talking about all those magical and wonderful scripts that no one seemed to know the inner workings of. These scripts, as I ve already mentioned were unwieldy, and at times, god-damned awful. The plan was to move them to the BI system (as my boss had been doing already).

I like to think of Kettle as a bridge between the process-flow diagram, and the code. I started converting these scripts, and I was astonished by the fact that most of the conversions I was doing was converting a long perl script into 3 or 4 Integration steps

I m totally besotted with this program now. Any time I have to do data manipulation, I turn to it. I can t describe how (once you ve got used to it s quirks) easy it is to use, how simple it is, and how much it just makes sense. Best of all, most of those evil scripts are gone now, and replaced with pretty diagrams that do the work for you.

If you have to play with large data sets on a regular basis, I urge you to try it out. You can buy me a beer for reccommending it next time you see me at $conference.

Stephan Peijnik: Introducing ujail & proof of concept

Lately I have been thinking about methods to provide a stripped down, secured environment for running untrusted code on GNU/Linux. With this post I would like to present you with the first results of my research.

ujail - brief introduction

I have chosen ujail as the name for the technique I am proposing. ujail stands for micro jail in userspace and, in itself, describes the concept briefly. The main idea is to have a userspace process monitor system calls of one of its childs and emulate some calls, if needed. This is done using ptrace and namely both PTRACE_SYSEMU and PTRACE_SYSCALL.
The ujail process should not be able to monitor syscalls, like strace does, but also intercept and emulate them.

This sounds a lot like user mode linux (uml), but the method is different. Whilst uml comes with a complete kernel, emulates all system calls and this way provides a virtualized system, ujail is intended to only emulate some systemcalls, without emulating the kernel.

Revisiting PTRACE_SYSCALL & PTRACE_SYSEMU

To better explain how the ujail technique works I would like to have a quick look at PTRACE_SYSCALL and PTRACE_SYSEMU again.

PTRACE_SYSCALL allows a userspace process to be notified whenever a traced process enters or leaves a system call. This means that two notifications are normally sent: one before system call entry and one afterwards. Even though one is able to change the parameters of system calls this method does not allow system calls to be fully emulated (think virtual filesystem here).

PTRACE_SYSEMU on the other hand provides one notification on syscall entry and expects the receiver of the notification to emulate the syscall. This method alone sounds great, but this also means that memory allocation needs to be emulated too, which is quite complex in userspace.

A hybrid of PTRACE_SYSCALL & PTRACE_SYSEMU

Now on to the concept behind ujail. The method I am describing works by calling PTRACE_SYSEMU for a specific process and this way taking over emulation of all system calls. However, some system calls are complex to emulate in userspace, and so a hybrid of both PTRACE_SYSEMU and PTRACE_SYSCALL is needed. In short this works by checking whether the syscall needs to be emulated when the PTRACE_SYSEMU event is received.
Now one way is emulating the syscall, filling the processes' registers and resuming execution of the process. This is simple and straight-forward.

The second way is forwarding the system call to the kernel. The problem here is that calling the syscall in the monitoring process will make the new resources available to that very process, and not the process to be jailed. This is where the hybrid method kicks in.

The proof of concept code creates a backup of the next instruction to be executed along with a copy of the instruction pointer at this point and patches it with the opcodes for "int $0x80", causing the syscall to be made again. After that it resumes execution with PTRACE_SYSCALL and waits again. The first event to be received now is the program leaving the emulated system call, which can be ignored. Resuming yet again will give use two PTRACE_SYSCALL events, one for syscall entry and one for syscall exit.

The first event is not really interesting, but at the second event the opcode backup is restored and the eip set from the saved value. Now the kernel has handled the syscall and the result is ready for the child process. A final call of PTRACE_SYSEMU resumes execution of the child and waits for the next syscall.

Proof of concept

The proof of concept code can be downloaded from its bazaar branch at launchpad.net. It is intended to be used on i386 systems only and works with simple programs, but is known not to work with anything using fork, vfork and most likely will not work for binaries using threading.

Finally, I would like to thank Pradeep Padala for his "Playing with ptrace" articles [0][1], which were fun to read and worked as a great introduction of ptrace for me.

Now there is only one thing left to say: if you are interested in this method, see loopholes or problems or want to contribute, please go ahead and contact me:

debian at sp dot or dot at

Cyril Brulebois: RBCN

I really liked doing stuff like Zack s RCBW in the past, but nowadays I m busy with some buildds, reporting RC bugs because some maintainers don t test their uploads, as well as posting patches to fix FTBFS on GNU/kFreeBSD. But from time to time, it s also fun to close RC bugs. Here s a new concept (that I probably won t reproduce as regularly as Zack and his minions, though): RCBN for Release-Critical Bugs of the Night. Those are now closed: Many thanks to Peter Green, to Ruben Molina, and to Ilya Barygin for their patches. Special thanks to Richard Darst for orpie s patches: he even managed to get rid of embedded code copies while addressing the FTBFS. Nice! Unfortunately, in the same time, I had to open some FTBFS/RC bugs: So, what s next? Get back to work!

6 December 2009

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 13

RCBW - week #13 Here are this week squashes, by yours truly: And here are the usual highlights:

David Welton: So Long, Debian

I went ahead and officially retired from Debian today. It's something I probably ought to have done a while ago, but have been putting off. I've had some great times with Debian and met a lot of good people. Debian is also where I really got my start with free software. For me, and others, Debian is something of a stepping stone: it's fairly easy to start packaging up some program, and before you know it, you're hooked on the whole open source thing. These days I mostly use Ubuntu, but hold Debian in very high regard in terms of the technical quality. And I'm also glad that they've held the line on free software over the years: with a Debian CD, I know I can make as many copies as I want for anyone, and use it both myself and for whatever commercial applications my clients need. How cool is that?

Ian Wienand: Distance to 1 million people

On a recent trip up the Oregon coast, a friendly doorman at our hotel in Portland was inquiring about our trip. When we mentioned we passed through Bandon, OR, he quipped that Bandon was the place furthest from a city of one million people in the USA. I guess a normal person would just think "oh, that's interesting" and move on, but it has been plaguing me ever since. Firstly, I had to find what cities in the USA had more than 1 million people. Luckily Wolfram Alpha gives the answer: (I certainly wouldn't have guessed that list!) From there my plan was to find the bounding box of the continental USA; luckily Wikipedia has the raw data for that. Combined with the latitude and longitude of the cities above, I had the raw data. I couldn't figure out any way better than a simple brute-force of testing every degree and minute of latitude and longitude within the bounding box and calculating the distance to the closest large city; the theory being that from one particular point you would have to travel further than any other to reach a city of 1 million people. Luckily, that is short work for a modern processor, and hopefully the result would be a point somewhere around Bandon. I'd already become acquainted with the great circle and measuring distances when I did Tinymap, so a quick python program evolved. However, it turns out that the program picks the far south-east corner of the bounding box. Thanks to the shape of the USA, that is way out over the ocean somewhere. I can't figure out a way to get an outline of the USA to test if a given point is inside the border or not, but all is not lost. I modified the program to output the the distance to the closest large city along with the location to a log file, and then imported it into gnuplot to make a heat-map. The hardest part was finding an equirectangular outline of the USA to place the heat-map over, rather than a much more common Mercator projection; Wikimedia to the rescue! I actually surprised myself at how well the two lined up when, after a little work with Gimp, I overlayed them (big) Distance to a city of 1 million people (km) From this, I can see that Bandon, about a third of the way up the Oregon coast, is a pretty good candidate. However, probably not the best; I get the feeling the real point that is the furthest from any city of 1 million people is actually somewhere in the central-middle of Montana. However, we can also fiddle the program slightly to disprove the point about Bandon. The numbers show the closest large city to Bandon is LA, at ~1141km. Taking another point we suspect to be more remote; the closest large city to Portland (where we met the doorman) is also LA at ~1329km. So to reach the closest large city you have to travel further from Portland than Bandon, so Bandon is not the furthest place in the USA from a city of one million people. Myth busted!

4 December 2009

Russell Coker: Testing Noise Canceling Headphones

This evening I tested some Noise Canceling Headphones (as described in my previous post [1]). I first tried the ones on sale at Brookstone [2], they were the on the ear type so there was never a chance that I would buy them but they seemed like good ones to test. I wore them for about 10 minutes while I walked around the store looking at all the electronic stuff that s on sale. I noticed that they were much more effective at filtering low frequencies and regular sounds. So for the Christmas music that was playing the music was mostly filtered just leaving the sound of the singing. Also I was able to talk to the guy who worked there and hear him clearly when the noise canceling was turned on this can be considered a bug or a feature depending on your planned use. When I listened to electric fans the sound of the buffeting air was filtered just leaving the high pitched bearing noise. It is well documented that there is a hissing sound from noise canceling headphones and sometimes a feeling of pressure. I didn t hear any hissing but it did feel a little different when I turned on the noise canceling. After 10 minutes I didn t feel in any way uncomfortable, so I could probably survive an entire flight while wearing such headphones. I can highly recommend the customer service at the Brookstone store in Menlo Park. The guy who was working there was totally helpful, even by US standards his customer service was really good. Sometimes when you make an unusual request (such was wanting to try the merchandise for an extended period of time) the staff aren t particularly enthusiastic, but I had no problems at Brookstone! After Brookstone I went to a Bose store and tried the Quiet Comfort 15 noise canceling headphones [3]. The Bose store conveniently had a device configured to emulate the sound of a jet engine to demonstrate how the QC15 stopped that. I was quite impressed with that. I did feel that the QC15 was a little light for my taste, I would rather have something bigger and heavier with thicker padding to improve the passive resistance to sound. But I expect that many people would like it to be small and light as it s designed for travel. I visited a Sony store a couple of times, but no-one seemed able to serve me. I ll go there again some time when they are less busy. Finally I have to note that I have received a significant number of comments suggesting ear-bud type devices. I suggest that anyone who doesn t mind wearing such things should consider ear-bud type devices. But as I can t stand such things I will continue my search for over-ear headphones. I may end up just buying the Bose QC15, they seem to be good enough and not really expensive.

3 December 2009

Mark Brown: ASoC updates in 2.6.32

Linux 2.6.32 was released overnight. This has been a fairly busy release for ASoC, with changes including:

2 December 2009

Margarita Manterola: Women event in Argentina

Next Saturday a group of more than 20 women that work with Free Software in Argentina and Uruguay will gather to speak at a Free Software event in Buenos Aires, called Software Libre, Pasi n de Mujeres. It's your typical Free Software event, with talks related to the philosophy of Free Software and the Free Culture in general, and also technical talks related to using and developing Free Software. With one important difference: all the speakers will be women. This might sound shocking to some people and normal stuff to some others, but the reaction created by the call for talks of this event was definitely not something I expected. Women from all over the country (and many also from other Latin American countries) have contacted us, to tell us about what they do in their daily lives with Free Software and how they would like to share their work with others. The event is open for both men and women to attend, however, of the more than a 100 people that have already pre-registered, more than half are women. A ratio that is more than amazing when you have been to a Free Software event before. I think that the fact that all the speakers are women is really encouraging for many women to attend, who otherwise wouldn't. Debian will be sponsoring the event, by paying the bus tickets of the speakers that come from the whole country, which is a great help in making this event a big success. I really expect the event to be a fantastic opportunity for the women in our country to finally show all the great work they are doing... I'm very excited about it :) PS: Somehow, I screwed up Planet Debian, filling it with old posts. I'm sorry! :-\

Margarita Manterola: The tyranny of Spanish users

Caution: Latin American rant ahead. With my Latin American Spanish keyboard (xkb code "la") I can type in: But not in: It turns out that for some people it's more important to have 3 (yes THREE) asciitilde (~) in the Latin American Spanish keyboard, than to allow people to write in the language spoken by 51% of South American people, or the second official language in Paraguay (spoken by 94% of the population). The same thing happens with the Traditional Spanish keyboard (code "es"), which was initially thought only for Spain, but is now widely sold all over Latin America. It includes 2 asciitilde, but no dead_tilde. I think this is outrageous and I'm very very pissed about this. As can be seen in the posts I've made to the bugs in Debian and in FreeDesktop. However, it looks like we Latin Americans are overwhelmed by the amount of Spanish people in Free Software (particularly in Debian) who don't care that Brazil is the biggest economy in the region nor that other native american languages can't be written without a dead_tilde. For the record, there are some other European languages, that can't be written with the Latin American keyboard, such as: But in this case, it makes much more sense to not be able to write those than not being able to write Portuguese or Guaran , and it's not like there are 3 macrons and no dead_macrons, there are no macrons at all (same for all others).

Margarita Manterola: tzdata screwed up most computer clocks in Argentina.

Last year, after many years of peacefully living the whole year in GMT-3, our government decided that Argentina should use DST again. This was done in a rush, but patches were written and applied everywhere to have a correct timezone. Fixing the problem was not enough, tzdata's upstream decided to predict the future: 
# From Paul Eggert (2007-12-22):
# For dates after mid-2008, the following rules are my guesses and
# are quite possibly wrong, but are more likely than no DST at all.
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=1  0:00    1:00    S
Well, back in December 2007, October 2008 might have seemed like a long time in the future, and they assumed that sometime in the middle the correct date would be announced... But, predictably (knowing Argentina's current government), no DST has yet been announced. However, Paul Eggert's guesses had propagated to almost all UNIX distributions, so that at 0:00 Sunday Oct 5th, all our computers were suddenly one hour ahead of time. Affected systems: Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS. Devices: ipod, maemo, Nokia N95. Websites: Clarin (a major newspaper - still broken 36 hours later), Gmail. And probably many others that I don't know of. I even read that Windows was affected, although I don't know how that might be possible, since as far as I know they don't use tzdata. Anyway, not satisfied with how they mistakenly predicted the future before, a few weeks ago (not enough time in advance to fix almost any systems, only sid had this release), they added this change: 
# From Alexander Krivenyshev (2008-09-05):
# As per message from Carlos Alberto Fonseca Arauz (Nicaragua),
# Argentina will start DST on Sunday October 19, 2008.
#
# http://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_argentina03.html
# http://www.impulsobaires.com.ar/nota.php?id=57832 (in spanish)
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=15 0:00    1:00    S
So, they decided to take the word of a guy from Nicaragua (no bad feelings against Nicaragua, but I think that this kind of stuff should be informed by people from the affected country), and from a couple of articles that say that "According to some sources, we might have to change our clocks on the third Sunday of October". Would you change tzdata sources with such information? I definitely wouldn't. Anyway, Aurelien Jarno has already uploaded fixed packages, with no assumption regarding when the DST will happen, which is the sensible thing to do in a case like this. Thanks Aurel!

Biella Coleman: The Politics of Piracy and Spicing the Political Life

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Stephen Duncombe
This fall I have been awash in a few obsessions including book piracy and spam. I recently got to talk about one of these obsessions when I was interviewed about book piracy by Nora Young for her weekly CBC radio and podcast show Spark. I mostly gave a lay of the land panorama with a nod toward some of the conditions, technological and social, that can help us grasp the contemporary explosion of book piracy and also raised some thoughts about what might change the future landscape. What I don t raise is whether a politics built around an explicit embrace of piracy is regressive, progressive, or something else but these ethical questions were posed in the comments left for the full interview. Some of the comments pointed to the pitfalls and shortcoming that can follow the terminology of piracy many of which I share. But what keeps me interested in the politics of piracy is how it can speak the language of spectacle, which can be a powerful tactic and technique for broadcasting a political message. Here I just paraphrasing and cribbing the work of Stephen Duncombe, who has argued, I think quite persuasively, that we cannot rely solely on reasoned debate for building political programs. Duncombe does not argue that we must toss out rationality and truth seeking (these are absolutely necessary) but notes how on their own or if not clothed in some other cloak, they may not be enough to convey and compel, especially in this day of total media saturation. Or to put a but more poetically by him Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Much (though not all) of contemporary digital piracy follows the logic of spectacle. It builds and conveys a fantastical drama of right and wrong, of new possibilities, of freedom from the noose of the law; it signals and speaks to the thrill and fun in twisting, even breaking, existing structures and constraints; and provides a window into another way of acting/behaving. In many cases what it provides is a commons (and I will be exploring it in depth in my class next semester on the commons) and many folks, I imagine, turn to piracy simply for the free stuff, and a number of them come out of the other side transformed into copy fighters willing to engage in a politics beyond sharing stuff and waving the pirate flag. For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward. I guess what I embrace is a diverse political ecology. For some, the drama of spectacle and thrill of transgression are what turns their political mojo on; for others it is the cool and reasoned debate common to policy and reform; for others, they want to focus on building alternatives as we see with Free Software or radical tech collectives. For some, it is both the reasoned salt and the transgressive pepper that spices their political world. And I would rather have more spice than less, especially in an era where the blandness of political apathy is that which is our most dangerous enemy. Related Links: Here is a wonderful animation by the NZ Book Council that captures what I love about books and renders its materiality wonderfully alive. On the Media has a episode on book publishing and Cory Doctorow has penned some thoughts about the future of book selling. If you want to keep abreast on the politics of liberating books, check out Free our Books. If you are more interested in the technical side of things, check out the book liberator project.

Biella Coleman: The Politics of Piracy and Spicing the Political Life

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Stephen Duncombe
This fall I have been awash in a few obsessions including book piracy and spam. I recently got to talk about one of these obsessions when I was interviewed about book piracy by Nora Young for her weekly CBC radio and podcast show Spark. I mostly gave a lay of the land panorama with a nod toward some of the conditions, technological and social, that can help us grasp the contemporary explosion of book piracy and also raised some thoughts about what might change the future landscape. What I don t raise is whether a politics built around an explicit embrace of piracy is regressive, progressive, or something else but these ethical questions were posed in the comments left for the full interview. Some of the comments pointed to the pitfalls and shortcoming that can follow the terminology of piracy many of which I share. But what keeps me interested in the politics of piracy is how it can speak the language of spectacle, which can be a powerful tactic and technique for broadcasting a political message. Here I just paraphrasing and cribbing the work of Stephen Duncombe, who has argued, I think quite persuasively, that we cannot rely solely on reasoned debate for building political programs. Duncombe does not argue that we must toss out rationality and truth seeking (these are absolutely necessary) but notes how on their own or if not clothed in some other cloak, they may not be enough to convey and compel, especially in this day of total media saturation. Or to put a but more poetically by him Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Much (though not all) of contemporary digital piracy follows the logic of spectacle. It builds and conveys a fantastical drama of right and wrong, of new possibilities, of freedom from the noose of the law; it signals and speaks to the thrill and fun in twisting, even breaking, existing structures and constraints; and provides a window into another way of acting/behaving. In many cases what it provides is a commons (and I will be exploring it in depth in my class next semester on the commons) and many folks, I imagine, turn to piracy simply for the free stuff, and a number of them come out of the other side transformed into copy fighters willing to engage in a politics beyond sharing stuff and waving the pirate flag. For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward. I guess what I embrace is a diverse political ecology. For some, the drama of spectacle and thrill of transgression are what turns their political mojo on; for others it is the cool and reasoned debate common to policy and reform; for others, they want to focus on building alternatives as we see with Free Software or radical tech collectives. For some, it is both the reasoned salt and the transgressive pepper that spices their political world. And I would rather have more spice than less, especially in an era where the blandness of political apathy is that which is our most dangerous enemy. Related Links: Here is a wonderful animation by the NZ Book Council that captures what I love about books and renders its materiality wonderfully alive. On the Media has a episode on book publishing and Cory Doctorow has penned some thoughts about the future of book selling. If you want to keep abreast on the politics of liberating books, check out Free our Books. If you are more interested in the technical side of things, check out the book liberator project.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Introducing Between the Bars

I've been working with Charlie DeTar and the Center for Future Civic Media on a project called Between the Bars which is a blogging platform for prisoners. The current platform is essentially a snail-mail to web gateway: prisoners send letters which semi-automatically scanned and posted to the site; comments are printed and mailed back. As we plan the launch of the project, we are trying to talk to as many stakeholders as possible -- this includes ex-prisoners, families and friends of people who are or have been in prison, non-profits working with prisoners, victims of people in prison, people who work in prisons or in corrections, probation officers, or almost anyone else with a perspective or set of experience that might help us understand the difficult space our project is trying to negotiate and who might be able to help influence the design. At the moment, we're not talking to current prisoners due to rules regulating research involving prisoners, but almost anyone else would be someone we'd love to connect with. We're interested in hearing from people about their experience with prisons or prisoners, about staying connected to families and friends while behind bars, and, ultimately, about how we might design, deploy, and support technology to help folks out. If you or someone you know are stakeholders and would be willing to talk about your experience and opinions with prisons, communication, and technology, please drop us a line at betweenthebars@mit.edu.

1 December 2009

Raphael Geissert: about scams

Email scams have changed... for good and for bad (depends on the POV and the case).

I decided to pick two samples that demonstrate two directions scams seems to be taking:


NAME
ADDRESS
TELEPHONE
SEX


As simple as that. Now the subject takes a more important role than the content: "Your email ID has been awarded one million pounds. in our Tobacco Promo". This, I must say, seems to be one of the worst scam emails I've ever seen. Compare it to the following:

Dear Raphael,

This email might come to you as a surprise and the temptation to ignore
it as not serious could come into your mind but please consider it and
accept it with a deep sense of humility.
[...]
The sum of ( 10,700, 000.00 Million Pounds), has been floating as
unclaimed since 2002 in my bank as all efforts to get across the
relatives of our customer Mr. Ruben Geissert who deposited the money
have hit the stones. Unfortunately, He died of Cardiac Arrest in the
year 2002, without a registered nest of kin.


I've highlighted the important bits of the email; the difference is clear.

I was already wondering some time ago when this kind of "improvements" to the scam (and spam in general) emails would be seen.

What's next?


P.S. if you haven't voted at the Earth Hour website please consider doing so.
If you are having problems voting because of the flash application, here's a direct link.

30 November 2009

Martin Meredith: (UK) The Gadget Show PC vs Mac

Today, an episode of The Gadget Show aired in which they compared PC and Mac to put on their wall of fame . I was shocked that there was no mention of Linux at all in their rundown. Here is the email I just sent to them in response to the show:-
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:16:28 +0000
From: Martin Meredith <mez AT debian DOT org>
To: gadget.show AT northonetv DOT com
Subject: PC vs Mac Yes, you mention windows But both PC s and Mac s have the ability to run a little thing called Linux Linux is the base of an operating system that s been around for years, often
making innovations BEFORE Windows or Mac are able to. It s an Operating system that s written by the people, for the people, which
shows in the fact that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of distributions
available to download and use for FREE!!!! A large motive behind the Linux movement is the fact that it s completely free.
Both in the sense of Free Speech, and in the sense of Free Beer. You don t have to pay for it, and you can do what you like with it. Compare the above to a Mac. With a mac, you re limited to the hardware you can use, you re limited in the functionality, etc etc. Comparing to Windows, you can see the benefit of the price. Constantly upgrading windows can cost a LOT of money. Ok, Linux does have it s flaws. Some hardware isn t supported correctly, and a lot of the software you ll find on the shelves of your local shop probably won t work with it. But, nowadays, with the advent of the iPhone, and to a lesser extent, Android based Mobile Phones, people are coming to expect easily available software. Enter the package Manager. Most distributions of Linux now offer an easy way to find and install applications, and some go a step further and give you an application that makes life even easier (See attached screenshot) Linux also has the benefit that, like the Mac, the fact that it s not Windows,
and something that 90%+ of people use, it s not a target for Viruses. Add that
to the fact that it has Least Privileged Access built in (Think Windows Vista
are you sure that you want to run this program as an admin? ), and has done
since the very beginning, and it makes it one of the most secure operating
systems you can find. Linux has come along in leaps and bounds in recent years, and is surely a
competitor for any operating system out there. While it may be unfamiliar,
with the advent of new technology, it s perfectly placed. This has been shown
by the fact that until Microsoft made a sly move to relicence Windows XP for
netbooks, it was hard to find a netbook with anything but a Linux based OS on it (and all those who tried out my eeePC 701 when it was new and shiny out of the box tended to prefer what was on that than Windows!)
Regards,
Martin Meredith Freelance Writer for Future Publishing
Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/
Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com/
Deputy IT Manager for Mobile Fun Ltd. http://www.mobilefun.co.uk/

Daniel Baumann: EXTLINUX as Alternative Bootloader

In September, the Debian GRUB maintainers took a step further in the long way of deprecating grub in favour of grub2. From my personal point of view, grub2 is not the way to go. Mostly because of these reasons: Back in Juli, when I was listening to the talk of Giacomo Catenazzi at DebConf 9 about bootloaders in Debian (high (618MB), low (110MB)), I was reminded that I really should getting EXTLINUX splittet out of Debians syslinux packaging and made available as an alternative bootloader within Debian. Last week I hacked together an initial working version and uploaded it to experimental. Note that the two comands extlinux-install and update-extlinux do not have all the safety belts yet, the theme-ing mechanisms are not integrated yet (I'll upload a syslinux-themes-debian soon), and that the layout of the generation of the config files in /boot/extlinux may could change (debian-wise, not upstream-wise). For me, it works already well though, I'm using it on my main desktop and notebook. If you want to help finding bugs or submitting wishlist bugs for additional stuff to be added, and recovering from an unbootable system is not a problem for you, you're welcome to try it out: 
	# apt-get install -t experimental extlinux syslinux-common
	# sed -i -e 's ^postinst_hook =.*$ postinst_hook = update-extlinux ' \
		-e 's ^postrm_hook =.*$ postrm_hook = update-extlinux ' \
		/etc/kernel-img.conf
	# mkdir -p /boot/extlinux
	# update-extlinux
	# extlinux-install DEVICE
Update: Rather than having /etc/kernel-img.conf modified by users, bootloader packages should add symlinks to their update scripts to /etc/kernel/postinst.d and /etc/kernel/postrm.d. Uploaded new version to experimental. Thanks maks for mentioning it.

Andrew Pollock: [tech] Review: iGala digital picture frame

Now that I'm not letting the cat out of the bag (I bought these as gifts) I can write a review. The use case was pretty simple: I thought it'd be a cool Christmas present for our parents to give them something Internet-enabled that would give them regular updates on their grandchild (when he/she arrives). I was thinking a picture a day type of thing. So I hunted around for a WiFi-enabled digital picture frame, and found the iGala being sold pretty much exclusively by ThinkGeek. The reviews seemed pretty good. I know WiFi-capable frames have been around for a few years, but they always seemed to be pretty lacking in terms of WiFi functionality. Like they wouldn't do any security, or they'd only do WEP. This particular product claimed to do the whole gamut, including WPA2. The fact that it was a touch screen and ran Linux also made it appealing. So I ordered a couple of them for a few weeks before we headed to Australia, with the intention of making sure that they'd work. Here's the highlights. WPA2 didn't work (nor did WPA) Despite the software on the frames claiming to be able to talk WPA2, the frame would not associate with my Linksys WRTU54G-TM. I had to drop it all the way back to WEP to get it to connect. For me, this was the most disappointing failure. I bought the product specifically on the strength of its claim that it supported WPA2, and it just didn't work. It was also pretty impossible to debug the failure. I downloaded the latest firmware update, and that added additional settings for TKIP or AES when selecting WPA2, but neither option helped. The automatic updates are brain-dead Speaking of downloading firmware updates, the latest firmware that I downloaded and installed on the frames added automatic over-the-air firmware updates. Nice enough feature, except for the implementation. The frame tried to make an HTTP GET request for a non-existent file, every 6 seconds. So the frequency of checking alone is totally ridiculous, but couple with this the fact that it's making a GET request (this is what $DEITY invented the HEAD request for, people!) and the website has a "friendly" 404 Not Found page that weighs in at a little over 10 Kb. By my calculations, that's nearly 150 Mb of failed update checking traffic a day. Taking these frames to a backward country like Australia, where ISP users still have monthly quotas, gives the frame a pretty horrendous running cost in terms of traffic. Not to mention the outbound bandwidth requirements for the server hosting the updates. Crikey, the mind boggles. I'd have thought checking once a day and on power on would be perfectly sufficient. Transitions are unavoidable It may be just me, but I hate cheezy transitions. Digital picture frames tend to come with a myriad of them, but they all look cheap. It's impossible to tell the frame to just change the picture, it has to use at least one transition effect all the time. It defaults to randomly choosing from all the available ones. At least you can tone it down to just one. Automatic on/off time I liked that it was possible to configure operating times. No need to have the thing chewing power 24x7. It just seems to turn off the backlight outside of the programmed operating hours, so it's still doing the lame uber-frequent and bandwidth-intensive checking for updates even when it's "off". Photo check frequency is configurable Another nice feature was the ability to check for new photos at varying intervals. What I wanted for my parents was to just update once a day, so they'd get a new photo every day (assuming we put a new one in the Picasa web album that it's checking). This was very doable, and coupled with the automatic on/off time, means they should wake up to a new photo every day (that we change it). Built in photos are a bit too sticky There's 3 or 4 in-built photos as part of the firmware. If there's nothing accessible or available online, it'll cycle through these. Somewhat annoyingly, you need to have at least two photos in your online source for it to stop wanting to incorporate the stock photos in the mix. The workaround is to put the same photo in the online album twice, so you don't realise it's switching between two images. Lame, but it works... Touch screen UI was adequate Given the alternative user interface for digital picture frames is a little IR remote control and some dinky menus, the iGala was nice to configure. A full on-screen QWERTY keyboard pops up for entering WEP/WPA/WPA2 keys and configuring the Picasa/Flickr connections. Fairly responsive support The main near-showstopper for me was the lack of advertised WPA2 support. I emailed the Aequitech support folks quite a bit during my "evaluation" period. They got back to me fairly quickly most of the time and wanted to know exact details of my setup so they could reproduce it in the lab. They'd be well served having an actual ticketing system, instead of hiding behind an email address, as it made it hard to keep track of the multiple issues I was raising with them. It's written in Lua?! I have no familiarity with Lua, other than I know of its existence as a programming language. I'm curious as to what their motivation was for this language choice. All of the Lua code shipped in the complete firmware refresh ZIP files is bytecode. I have no idea if it's possible to decompile it. The CPU architecture would appear to be a Blackfin based on the few compiled binaries included in the full firmware. Easy to update Prior to the new update "functionality" I've already railed against, it was pretty easy to update. Download a ZIP file and a shell script, put them in the root directory of a USB key, and plug it into the frame and stand back. The updates don't seem to cryptographically verified (even the over-the-air ones), so I wonder if it's possible to break into the frame by way of a cleverly crafted "update". I have no idea what breaking into the frame would buy you. I don't know what sort of computing power they have. Conclusion I still think the iGala is a reasonable, if somewhat immature product. If the software is going to be actively worked on, and the support people continue to be responsive, then I think it's got good potential. For the price, I expected a more polished product, though. I received an email from their support people shortly after returning from Australia saying that they'd fixed the WPA2 problem. Unfortunately I had no intention of trying to remotely talk my parents through how to reconfigure their access point or the frame (interestingly WPA2 didn't work with their Linksys WAG54G2 either, so I'd love to know what WPA2 devices it was tested with), so it's 128-bit WEP until I next go to Australia.

29 November 2009

Torsten Landschoff: New on Debian planet

Now that there is some content here, I added myself to the Planet Debian blog aggregator. Sorry for my weird head image, the shadow looked much better in Gimp. I ll have to correct that on another day Thanks to Holger Levsen for pointing me at the wiki entry which describes how a Debian developer can add himself to the Planet.

David Moreno: Vitacilina now in Debian + 0.2 released!

2046242410_e38c021cc0Remember Vitacilina? A small aggregation library I wrote last year to be intended to replace Planet on Planeta Linux? Well, it never quite replaced it but it achieved some level of stability since I was using it for a number of tasks at work. So, during this long holiday weekend, I received a notification that the Request To Package bug I had filled against the Work-Needing and Prospective Packages in Debian has already been taken care of and the library had been uploaded. Of course, I could have made this myself a long time ago, but at the time it was simpler and faster just to hope someone else would do it at some point. So, Dario did it. He packaged it and uploaded version 0.1 under the umbrella of the Debian Perl Group. Hurray! But then I realized that Alexandr Ciornii had implemented some nice changes to Vitacilina back in September that I never got to include or release as a CPAN distribution. And so I just did. I've uploaded 0.2 to CPAN and you can fetch it with cpanf Vitacilina or wait for the Debian Perl folks to update it :)

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