I've been added to Planet GNOME (thanks jdub!), and this post is just to say hello! I havn't been a large GNOME contributor so far (I was the Debian maintainer for Galeon some years ago, thats about it), but I recently started a small DBus related project (for exploring the DBus APIs of programs), dbus-inspector, which is now hosted in the GNOME subversion repository. Other GNOME-related projects I'm thinking of:

• DBus hook, an application that allows you to easily setup ECA rules (event-condition-action) for DBus signals. E.g. to start your music synchronization tool when you plug in your mp3 player, whatever, in a rather generic way. Mount your network file server when you connect to your home wireless network, etc. - preferrably in an easy to understand way
• MP3val GUI, right now a tiny PyGTK wrapper around the MP3 validation and repair tool mp3val (you can't imagine how many MP3's are broken in one way or another, fortunately most errors are ignored by most players or only affect e.g. seeking) could use some extended functionality.
• Pyroman, a firewall configuration tool with some nice capabilities (rollback on error, debugging, very fast and efficient, Python or XML configuration files) could use an easy to use UI. It doesn't expose you to all the complexity of iptables, but instead lets you work in a "client, server, service" way of configuring the firewall, generating a somewhat sane layout of tables automatically.
• Flow analysis and visualization of iptables rules

I'd like to say thank you for all the great work you did. Having been a Galeon power user, I'm by now quite convinced of the "keep it simple" approach, and I have the impression that not having so many options means that I get more work done (since I don't waste time playing around with infinite options). Thanks for that. And for providing me with a pretty and unobtrusive work environment for the last 8 years or so.

As I've posted before, I recently read Lawrence Rosen's Open Source Licensing Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law. And I'm sure many of you will recognize the enormous constructive value of early-morning cavilations. Well, today I woke up thinking about strengths and weaknesses in th different Free Software licenses, and I decided to add my grain to the world of license proliferation. So, here goes version 3.14 of the CoPL. I wonder how long will it take before it reaches /usr/share/common-licenses on Debian systems ;-)

		       CONFUSING PUBLIC LICENSE
		       ========================
	This is version 3.14 of the Confusing Public License (referred to from
now on as "CoPL"). Copyright (c) 2007 Transnational
Republic. Additional copies of this license can be purchased at no
cost from any Transnational Republic citizen at any of its recognized
outposts, or freely copied. 
	Any legal claims regarding Original works or any of their Standard
versions licensed under the CoPL Should not abide by and be carried
out according to the current law of the Transnational Republic. The
Original author to pay for any attorney and other legal fees of any
dispute regarding said Original author.
	This license text is designed to protect all the Technology covered
under it under a thick layer of incomprehension. No technical,
professional or social measures might be used to subvert the intent of
this license. This license Must be carefully or professionally
reviewed by a lawyer or attorney, under any jurisdiction. Any serious
attempt to understand this license will immediatly terminate your
rights to keep reading this license. Original works licensed under the CoPL
will not be affected by this provision, you will still have permission
to use them.
	Redistributions of source code Should not retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 
	0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a
   notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed
   under the terms of this Confusing Public License. The Original work
   below refers to any such program or work or Standard version.
	1. You desire to license the Technology to a
   large community to facilitate research, innovation and product
   development while maintaining compatibility of such products with
   the Technology as delivered by You
	2. Original author desires to license the Technology from You on
   the terms and conditions specified in this License.
	3. Redistributions in binary form Should not reproduce the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
   documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
	4. The names "Joe", "Curly", "Moe" and "The Three Stooges Foundation"
   May be used to endorse or promote products derived from this
   Original work without prior written permission, as they are in no way
   related. 
	5. There is no number 5. Seriously. In all Original works licensed under the
   CoPL, all necessary technical and social steps May be taken not
   to include, in any explicit way, the number 5.
	6. Original author Must make and give away verbatim copies of the
   source form of this Package
   without restriction, provided that Original Author duplicates all of
   the original copyright notices and associated disclaimers.
	7. Original author Must apply bug fixes, portability fixes and other
   modifications derived from the Public Domain or from
   the Copyright Holder. A Package modified in such a
   way shall still be considered the Standard Version.
	8. No Standard versions of the Original work Must be protected by this
   license. Original authors Should not choose a different, saner
   licensing model for the distribution of any modifications they
   make. The CoPL should be taken as a retroviral license.
	THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL YOU BE
LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
				     Definitions
	"You" means the original author of the work covered under the CoPL.
	"Original author" means you.
	"Thou" means God almighty.
	"May" means "Should not, no matter what".
	"Must" means "May".
	"Should not" means "Must".
	"Reasonable copying fee" means nothing.
	"Standard version" means a modified version of the Original work.
				      DISCLAIMER
	The CoPL text, from the words "This is version" and up to and
including this paragraph, is to be taken as a preamble, and will not
be effective under any circumstances. 
	All work licensed under the CoPL should be considered as licensed
under the GNU General Public License version 2 or (at your option) any
later version. It is not the task of this license to point you on
where to get hold of said license.

That is the question. Well, not personally[0], the Romanian translation of the Release notes.

If you would have asked me yesterday, I would have said the plan is "to be".

Plan: make sure that a decent enough text is committed in CVS at all times.


What happened? Let me see...

(Time stamps are for EET - UTC+3 now - unless specified otherwise)

- pack in the morning
- take luggage to work
- buy train ticket before going to work
- ask on list to take action if I don't act by 03:00am EET (00:00 UTC)
- send the translation as is (25u), maybe the connection at my parents is broken
- leave from work directly to the station
- meet a pair of lovers in the train
- he is so into her
- she plays him like the fool he is
- translate on the train
- 5u and the battery is at 8%
- no "darcs rec", hdd consumes battery
- close lid instead of hibernating
- mini-panic, mini-panic[1]
- resume and hibernate - those percentages seem to change sooo slowly
- arrive home
- Internet connection works, good
- continue updates
- reach 100%
- send first complete draft of the translation for inclusion
- parallel review gathering up to 4 people on #debian-ro for review
- joke seriously about me not being able to send the translation
- ask again for action from the team, if needed
- 02:30 - translation seems to be mature, less an less problems are found, should be committed
- 02:40 forgot to ask activation, new mail
- ??? - turning point?
- send mail... error
- can't send mail with the request to activate Romanian
- provider's network seems to be isolated
- realize I don't know if the commit request reached its target
- frustration eased up by the already made requests to take action, if needed
- 04:30 - power goes out
- no ping from GW either
- 04:30:01 - decide to write a blog about this day
- start in zim
- write a first nice draft - with some exciting writing style
- zim looses my article when trying to remove a link-ified timestamp
- start gedit
- break the plug of the network cable[2]
- 09:09 not even the GW is reachable
- 05:10 sleep
- (expected) 06:30 wake up
- (expected) check the network connection
- translations committed ???
- thank to people / take action yourself ???
- 07:00 (04:00 UTC) Romanian translation and CD images status: ???
- sometime during the day - publish article


[0] pure unintentional rhyme
[1] I never lost files with a Linux FS, but I have the mandatory fear
[2] is not fixed in the socket

Just got some cheerful news from Ryan Finnie. Apparently the new version of Finnix has an amd64 kernel on the x86 disk. Per his blog post about Finnix 89: using an AMD64 kernel on a supported platform yields several advantages: ... You can chroot into native 64-bit AMD64 filesystems. Considering that's just what I needed to do yesterday (see Journal/14 Germinal CCXV), it's pretty sad that I only had a Finnix 88 CD. It was pretty dumb of me to not check the latest version, and it was wrong to say that Finnix doesn't support amd64. But it's good to know that it will work in the future. tags: amd64 finnix rescue livecd recovery

RoCoCoCamp We had another organisational meeting for RoCoCoCamp at the Bande-Passante this evening. It was really good -- we had quite a few people, and made some of the down-to-the-wire plans for the event. RoCoCoCamp is the RecentChangesCamp in Montreal the 18-20th of April, 2007. It's an "unconference" -- a community-organized conference that, we hope, will let a lot of people connect in a new way. The great thing about RoCoCoCamp -- and RecentChangesCamp in general -- is that it's hosted by the wiki community -- people who love and use wikis. But we try to reach beyond wikis, to other associated communities, organizations and individual activists. I like to think of it like this: "wiki" is a concept associated loosely with other concepts -- tied to them in some concept-space. If we just bring together people who know and understand wiki, and have them talk together, we'll achieve very little. But if we bring together people who work, think and live in those closely-associated concept circles, we've got the opportunity for fascinating cross-cultural mixing -- passionate, creative accidents. I'm really looking forward to see what kind of creative accidents we engender at RoCoCoCamp 2007. I think it's going to be really fun. tags: wiki rocococamp concept map montreal

Hellas Spectrum I did an interview tonight on Hellas Spectrum, the local Greek-language television show here in Montreal. The host, Toula Drimonis, had seen the article about me in the Gazette, had recognized my name as Greek, and wrote to ask if I'd like to be on the show. The interview was really fun, and it was great to be around Greek-speaking people for a while. Montreal has a very strong Greek community, with which I've entirely failed to connect in the 5 years (!!!!) that I've lived here. But Maj and I have talked about sending Amita June to one of the very good tri-lingual Greek-English-French private schools here in Montreal, and we'd all like to make more connections in the Greek community. Hopefully this helps! I've always felt a little cut off from the more intense Greeks here and elsewhere because... welllll... I just don't speak Greek that well. So it was great doing Hellas Spectrum -- Toula's job at the show is to include those Greek-Canadians and Greek-Americans who maybe don't speak the language and live in the neighborhood, but need to be included in the greater Greek culture. I had a great time at the interview, and on the way from the green room to the studio, we ran into the show's producer. He asked me something incomprehensible (in Greek), and when I looked confused, he said, "You don't speak Greek? That's OK. Are you Greek, though? Are you Greek here?" He touched his chest. "Are you Greek in your heart?" Yes, I am. And it was cool to feel Greek in my heart tonight. Thanks to Toula for the invitation and the HS crew for making such a great show. tags: hellas spectrum greek montreal canada

For a few years now, I've used a lap tray under my laptop when sitting in an armchair or sofa at home. It is basically a tray with a pillow below. It's been very nice: not only does it protect me from burns, it's just plain more comfortable than balancing the thing on my thighs and knees. Unfortunately, it's been slowly disintegrating for the past couple of years. I decided to hire my cousin Johan Wirzenius the carpenter to make me a new one. Since I was ordering a custom one, I got to specify three new fancy features: the pillow is detachable (via velcro), and the tray is foldable, resulting in a more transportable whole. Also, the edges of the tray have grooves to hold cables in place, and the surface has grooves to allow better ventilation. Below are four pictures of the tray, courtesy of my cousin.

Okay, so firstly, I thought the whole David Hicks situation (mainly the fact that it was starting to become a bit of a political hot-potato near an election so they got his trial hurried up) was a bit fishy (particularly the bit about how he's gagged until after the next election), but this morning, I learned that there's legislation to close the electoral rolls at 8pm on the day the election is called. That stinks to high heaven! I mean how on earth could justify bringing out legislation like that? How does that improve anything? I'll be really disappointed if that just gets steamrolled through the Senate. All this reminds me that I need to re-enroll to vote.

Snow, beautiful snow! We've got tons of snow coming out of the sky today. It's big and thick, what they call fourrure de li vre (rabbit fur) in Quebec. It's hard to believe we are having snow this late in the season (halfway into Germinal!), but it's kind of nice to have some snow. Especially since the United Nations report saying that Canada will lose its snow cover by 2100. Snow, please snow. tags: snow season climate change

JFS So, I'm one of those idiots who uses the IBM Journaled File System 2 (JFS2) as his root partition. Why? Because I've tried all the different journalling filesystems for Linux (reiserfs, ext3, xfs, jfs) and JFS is the one that works for me. It just seems to be the low-profile, clean, nicely-working FS. Unfortunately, I've been tracking Feisty Fawn for the last couple of weeks, and somewhere in there the JFS utility package, jfsutils, got uninstalled. Who knows why? But when I rebooted my machine today to try out a new kernel, my root partition came up in read-only mode -- because the system couldn't check the partition, because fsck.jfs couldn't be found. The fix, of course, would be to boot a live CD, chroot to the hard disk, and apt-get install the jfsutils. I typically use Finnix for this and other rescue/recovery projects, but in this situation Finnix failed me. My main computer is a honkin' amd64, and the x86 Finnix disk didn't want to let me chroot and run any amd64 binaries (like the stuff I needed to apt-get install jfsutils). So I ended up downloading and burning a Feisty live CD, dicking around with boot parameters for a while (noapic nolapic nosplash nonothing...), and finally got to a nice, friendly Gnome terminal. I mounted the hard drive using the Nautilus tools, and then tried to chroot to it -- D'OH! Permission denied. Took me a while to figure out that Nautilus mounts drives noexec by default. Once I got that working, I got jfsutils installed and was able to boot my machine again. Yay. Moral of the story: figure out a way to make packages that are crucial to you crucial to your package manager, too. Oh, and Finnix needs an amd64 build. tags: jfs feisty fawn ubuntu jfsutils finnix nautilus

YULblog YULblog meetup tonight at the Quincaillerie. YULblog is our local Montreal monthly blogging get-together. It's pretty fun, and has the highest female-to-male ratio of any technology event in Montreal. Which is great. I have a ton of work to do tonight (since I spent the afternoon dicking around with live CDs), but I'm going out anyways. YULblog comes but once a month, after all. tags: yulblog blogs montreal

N hours later Good time, that! I walked down rue Rachel to the Quincaillerie this evening around 9PM through a storm that was like being in a snowfight with Borribles. Thud thud thud! Big chunks of snow. But the Q. was pretty hoppin' for a snowy night in April, and I got to see Robin, Steve, Niko, Patrick and others. It was a fun time; the snow made it all the more special. tags: snow yulblog

My previous post generated a lot of useful comments. Some of them was about using the synaptics trackpad driver. Unfortunately it only works, as Itai Seggev says, on post July 2005 iBooks and my iBook seems to be from August 2004 (this fact took me a long time to realize). I found an adbsyn howto wich seems to have an solution. Using a kernel patch and a patch for xserver-xorg-input-synaptics you can get the ADB Trackpad to simulate a synaptics trackpad. So for the first time i a very long time I get to compile a kernel… After a very long time I get to reboot into my new patched kernel and, lo and behold, synaptics works. In the beginning i didn’t seem to work, I had a very low acceleration set but with some fiddling I got it ajusted to something useable. So for enabling synaptics on older ibooks, see: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~bigoi/howto.htm In the meantime I got glxgears turning smoothly. Now I can start compiz and see a wobly effect when I move windows around, but then compiz freezes the display. Most of the times I seem to be able to terminate the xserver, but i’ve reboted once. Steps to get OpenGL working:

• change Driver "fbdev" to Driver "radeon" in the Monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• apt-get install libgl-mesa-dri

As I already wrote (it was the take 1), I'm working on packaging Hibernate (then Spring, then Jboss, then Jonas but dont' tell, it's the secret plan!). The first step has been done, #386100 (ITP: c3p0) is pending. I uploaded it to experimental because it needed a method in javax.management that is only in gcj experimental. The next step is to package cglib (#386101). I discover cglib embed asm in its jar and change the package name of the classes. The tool used to do that is called jarjar from Tonic Systems. So I have to package it first (#417591). I'm not sure it's a very good idea and I started a discussion in the cglib forum... and one of the developers already answered... FLOSS is too cool ;-). I'll try to see if it's possible to package both jars (one with asm, the other one without it). read more

Finally, I managed to sent out those “You (maybe) get money” / “Sorry, no money” mails to the DebConf7 attendees that asked for sponsorship. Nice amount of mail. The process to get to this point involved a bit of mail discussion but also two long and exhausting meetings of the whole team. Basically we had to go through the whole list of people, voting if we would give them money. We could vote yes, no, maybe, pass, which gets scored as 1, -1, 0.5, 0. Then after the meeting simply add all votes for one single attendee together and you know a score for him between 100% and -100%. I wrote a little script for my irssi, making it a bit simpler, but still lots of work. That was later on followed by a second meeting where you decide what you do with the score rates, basically - where do we draw the line of “Gets money”, “Gets no money”, “Maybe, if we have enough”. And you are done. Sounds simple, but uses a lot of energy. Fortunately that was most of the needed work. There will be a little bit during DebConf, and some small pieces until then, but majority is done. Now, everyone, say thanks to those who participated in this team, making it possible for me to send the mails: * Anthony Towns * Steve McIntyre * Moray Allan * Holger Levsen * Amaya Rodrigo * Margarita Manterola * Martin Wuertele * Gunnar Wolf * Junichi Uekawa * Neil McGovern * Marcela Tiznado * Felipe Augusto van de Wiel One thing you encounter with such a wide-spread team is that of “What damn time can we meet?”. You end up with some having the meeting near midnight, while the other have problems waking up.,. :)

Gar. I had to go downtown today to sign some legal papers with our lawyer. He's taken a gig as the interim chief of staff for the president of Concordia University, but he's kept a few of his older clients, including us. Maj and I stopped at the bank beforehand to sign some mortgage papers, and then we went to the SAQ across the street to buy some wine. We then piled back in the car, drove downtown, and with a little time to spare we stopped at Zyng for lunch, walked around St. Catherine a little bit, did some furniture shopping, and then met our lawyer near his office. We had a good coffee together and saw the new engineering building there -- it's quite nice. When Maj and I got back to the car, I realized that I didn't have my remote starter for the car -- which also disables the car alarm. This little gadget has been a real pain for me since we got the car -- the thing that attaches it to the keychain almost instantly broke, so I've had to carry it around separate from my keys. And now it was gone, and I had no idea where it was. So we retraced steps -- another 45 minutes walking around to the noodle joint, the furniture store, the Concordia caf . Nothing. We looked around on the street for a while, then jumped in a cab and came home. Maj had her keys here, so I borrowed them, cabbed back to where the car was parked, and as I was getting into the car I saw this: That's the clicker, right under that SAQ brochure about Italian wines. DOH! Moral of the story: attach your car-alarm clicker very carefully to your keychain. Sure, not much of a moral, but it's what I learned today. tags: car alarm clicker montreal concordia zyng car

RSS validated So, after starting an RSS 1.0 feed for my blog, I was having some problems using it in different readers. A few Google searches later landed me at the [$$vote for http://validator.w3.org/feed/, which is totally cool. Why didn't I know about this before? It turned out that my Tag URI format was invalid. I was using tag URIs for RSS item identifiers, and I'd left off the all-important validity date. So I had to update those. It seems to be working pretty nice, now; the validator gives the all-good sign for both my RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 feeds. tags: rss validation w3c

Greek Wikitravel Expedition So, I'm going to be interviewed this week for Hellas Spectrum, a Greek-language television show here in Montreal focusing on the local Greek community and culture. (I know - wow!) Apparently the interview will be "mostly" in English, with "a little bit" of Greek. Uh-oh. I studied some Greek in college, and I spent a summer in Crete and made my way pretty nicely, but I definitely haven't used the language in years. So this should be fun. I'm pretty embarrassed that I'm so inept in my ancestral tongue, and I hope that Amita June learns more than I have. The whole thing has reminded me that we don't have a Wikitravel language version for Greek -- yet. So I started a Greek Wikitravel Expedition to try to collect a group of users to make the wiki work. I've asked already on Greek Wikipedia, and I hope to find some more centres of Greek Open Source/Open Content culture on the Web. Greek people are disproportionately represented in science, engineering, and technology, so I think there will be a lot of interest. So, question for the LazyWeb: where are the good Greek Open Source/Open Content community Web sites? Influential Greek bloggers? What's the Greek Barrapunto? How can I get more interest in this project in the Greek Internet community? Contact me and let me know. tags: greek wiki wikitravel

What

migration of lists.linux.org.au and linux.org.au email to new server

When

Saturday, March 31 09:00:00 GMT-7 - Sunday, April 1 17:00:00 GMT-7 (Sunday, April 1 02:00:00 GMT+10 - Monday, April 2 12:00:00 GMT+10)

Contact

admin@linux.org.au (oh gawd, not more spam)Caesar on #linux-aus on Freenode

Details

I'll be performing a move of all of the Mailman lists for lists.linux.org.au from the hastily slapped together copy of digital running inside of a Xen instance hosted by IVT (thanks, Jon!) to a brand-new installation in a Xen instance called morton.linux.org.au on the hardware donated to Linux Australia by HP sometime after linux.conf.au 2006. I'll also be moving linux.org.au mail and local mailboxes from digital morton. All shell users of digital have already had their home directories migrated from digital to morton and been individually notified. I don't expect the outage to be anywhere near as long as specified, but I'm reserving that window of time for any problems, rollbacks, troubleshooting, etc. I'll monitor #linux-aus after I've moved the MXes and enabled mail delivery on morton, for any issues that arise.

Had a great time at DemoCampMontreal2 tonight. There were a ton of people there, the demos were great, and the bar at the SAT was open for business, so it was possible to drink beer and watch demos. There were all very solid projects with lots of interesting stuff going on. My favorite aha! moment came from Hugh McGuire showing off Collectik, his new social-podcast-aggregation platform, when he demo'd how he uses the site, and I realized that that's how I want to organize my podcast listening, too. I also liked Kakiloc, a location-oriented social networking site. They let you tell your friends what you're doing and where you are, and the friends can see it on the Web, by SMS, or through IM. Sound familiar? Yeah. Kakiloc's advantage is that they have more geo-oriented interface, and some extremely powerful rules that trigger activity when you (say) get close to someone in your circle of friends. However, I think in a world of Worse Is Better Kakiloc is going to have a hard time making a sale. Twitter already has the mindshare in this market, and the network effect makes it more valuable for people to stay with the popular platform. I also really dug the films from OpenSourceCinema.org, although they skirted the "demo" concept pretty scarcely. One thing that was neat was that the OSC Web site was built by a real-life barn-raising: Sylvain Carle put out the call for some help, and people convened on his house to build the Web site. Cool idea. All in all I had a really good time. DemoCampMontreal2 worked out well. tags: DemoCampMontreal2 kakiloc collectik opensourcecinema

Bait and switch So, on the way out the door to DemoCamp, I grabbed a handful of loonies out of my bedside change basket for the parking meters downtown. When I got to SAT, though, I realized that the "loonies" I'd brought were in fact Sacagawea dollars. I'd gotten them as change from the ticket machines on the Las Vegas monorail. Doh! Fortunately, downtown Montreal parking meters take credit cards, so I was OK. tags: loonie sacagawea parking meter monorail

Feisty Upgraded to FeistyFawn on Wednesday. Worked fine, nice smooth upgrade (who expects that?). Nothing revolutionary, but the software works well. tags: feistyfawn ubuntu upgrade

Today, I first fix debian/copyright file in libjazzy-java as it was rejected by ftp-masters. Then, I started to work on packaging jboss-hibernate in Debian. Marcus Better already filed some ITP's and I'm using them, change the owner when I'm ready to work on a package and upload it. #385569: ITP: jboss-hibernate -- object/relational persistence service for Java The good thing with the way Marcus worked is he filed ITP's and then send 'block' instructions to BTS, so it's easy to see what should be packaged first:

read more

That's the company's slogan, whose offices we are working at. And I must admit it seems quite true.

Today, we have visited one of the data centers we are evaluating for our company hosting. It was a Tier 1 company, that is networking, connections... nothing special there. The amazing thing is one of the people we meet there was visiting Australia a year ago, and he is also a photograph passionated. I feel him a bit like a twin soul of mine as we are planning to visit Australia on our marriage trip where I will take a lot of pictures, of course. We were talking and he gave me some interesting URLs about his blog, travel agency and the like. So again everything seems connected, as Google knows so frightening well.

Anyway, we went there by motorbike which was a plus not connected to anything else, but too much funny in any case.


- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
e0acebd2-71f1-4df8-ae4d-50355ad7aa81
[ 6 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 6 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 3 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 3 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 2 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 4 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 1 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 6 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 5 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My rationale follows, if you care... I've been pondering how to vote for well over a week, and I'm still not entirely happy that the ballot I've chosen accurately expresses my wishes, but it's the best approximation of them that I can come up with at this time. My dilemma has two parts

1. I don’t think the current office of the DPL is effective, due to how it is viewed by a significant proportion of the project (if not an outright majority), so regardless of how much I might like the goals and ideas proposed by an individual candidate I’m very pessimistic that being electing as DPL will actually bring those things to pass.
2. Much of what will make a good DPL is about how a specific set of ideas and goals will be put into action, and how interpersonal relationships between the DPL and various parties will be managed. This comes down to the personal character, experience and leadership skills of the candidate While I can form some level of an opinion about each of these aspects from mailing list archives, and IRC, etc. I don’t really feel comfortable making judgements in these areas until I’ve actually met them in real life. Too many people come across badly in the (severely limited) online communication methods we use, and are actually very decent reasonable people in real life. Out of the candidates, AJ is the only one that I’ve ever actually met and talked to.

Given these problems, my first step in choosing how to vote was to eliminate those candidates who I will rank below NOTA based on their published platforms. I have nothing personal against any of these three people, but given the other possible candidates I think that we’d be better off having another election than just electing one of these three for the sake of it.

• Wouter Verhelst - Wouter’s platform lacks any detail that tells me what he stands for or where he wants to see Debian go. Wouter’s platform also seems very conflict averse, it favours discussion and agreement over making hard decisions. I think Debian needs to make some hard decisions and the project leader needs to be someone who is able to willing handle (civilised) conflict.
• Aigars Mahinovs - Most of the topics that Aigars proposes to work on do not make my list of the most important issues for Debian to solve, and as others have pointed out, are possible better dealt with by other organisations.
• Simon Richter - Simon doesn’t actually state what he wants to achieve as DPL or where he sees Debian’s future direction as being, other than some vague hints that he is against projects that are similar to ‘dunc-tank’ and that we need a common goal. Stating what that common goal should be, would have lifted this above NOTA.

That leaves five remaining candidates:

• Anthony Towns - AJ gets my top ranking because I think that having some consistency in the DPL is a worthwhile goal. While I think that the whole Dunc-tank fiasco could have been managed much, much better, there were obviously hostile factions that would have made anything AJ did look bad. AJ’s platform seems to mostly involve him leading infrastructural improvements (good) and encouraging others to work on things that they want to see changed (also good). The one area where I possibly disagree with Anthony is around what the DPL role should look like. Anthony appears happy with the current state of the DPL office, I think that some significant changes are needed. However that’s going to require constitutional changes, so I’m not going to rank Anthony down on that basis alone.
• Steve McIntyre - Steve comes second primarily because he’s implicitly endorsed by AJ and everything that I’ve seen online related to Steve suggests that he is a level-headed, decent individual with good leadership skills. If I can’t have consistency in the DPL office via AJ, then Steve would definitely be the next choice. Steve’s platform also doesn’t contain anything that I disagree with.
• Sam Hocevar and Gustavo Franco - Sam and Gustavo are ranked equally based purely on the basis of their (relatively similar) platforms containing lots of great ideas and vision for Debian that I agree with. I don’t for a minute think that they will be able to achieve all of it, but at least by providing clear goals and a mandate for implementing them we might be able to start down the track of regaining some common purpose as a project. I have some reservations about Sam’s style based on what I’ve read in archive, but seeing as I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to people I haven’t personally met, I’m going to assume, that if elected Sam will be a great DPL.
• Rapha l Hertzog - Rapha l gets my final vote above NOTA to indicate that I support the idea of a board governing Debian, but that I don’t think his particular proposal is the correct way for the board to run. If Rapha l were to win, I wouldn’t object to him placing his suggested board in ‘office’ for the upcoming year, but I hope that a major piece of their workload would be to lead the discussion, drafting and passing of a constitutional change to replace the DPL with an elected board with rotating terms of reasonable length (2-3) years.

*yawn* It’s made me tired writing all of that out. Maybe sometime soon I should explain in more detail exactly what parts of Debian’s governance model I think need changing or maybe I need to wait until I’ve achieved a few more technical things and gained enough respect before anyone will listen to my opinions…

I just received a question about SE Linux via email. As I don't want to post private messages containing material that's globally useful I'll answer through my blog:

> other than strict and targeted policies......other policies like
> RBAC, MCS, Type Enforcement are also there....how are these policies
> implemented

The two main policies are the strict policy and the targeted policy. The strict policy is the earliest and was originally known as the sample policy (but was given the name "strict" after targeted was developed).

The strict policy aims to give minimal privileges to all daemons. The targeted policy aims to restrict the programs that are most vulnerable (network facing daemons) and not restrict other programs (for ease of use). There is currently work in progress on combining those policies so the person who compiles the policy can determine which features of strict they desire.

RBAC means Role Based Access Control. The strict policy assigns users to roles and the role then limits the set of domains that can be entered. For example the user_r role does not permit the sysadm_t domain so a user who is only permitted to enter the user_r role can not perform sys-admin tasks. Like many terms RBAC is used in different manners, some people consider that it means direct control by role (EG role user_r can not write to /dev/hda), while SE Linux has a more indirect use of roles (role user_r can not run programs in domain sysadm_t or any other domain that allows writing to type fixed_disk_device_t - the type for /dev/hda). You may consider that the strict policy supports RBAC depending on which definition of the term you use.

Generally the targeted policy is not considered to support RBAC, although if you consider a role to merely be a container for a set of accesses that are permitted then a SE Linux domain could be considered a in the RBAC sense. I don't think of targeted policy as being a RBAC implementation because all user sessions run in the domain unconfined_t which has no restriction. I think that to be considered RBAC a system must confine user logins.

Type enforcement is the primary access control mechanism for SE Linux. Every object that a process may access (including other processes) has a type assigned to it. The type of a process is known as a domain. The system has a policy database which for every combination of domain, type, and object class (which is one of dir, file, blk_file, etc - all the different types of object that a process may access) specifies whether the action is permitted or denied (default deny) and whether it is audited (default is to audit all denied operations and not audit permitted operations).

MCS is a confidentiality protection mechanism where each file has a set of categories assigned to it. The set may be empty, may contain all 1024 categories, or any sub-set. Each process has a set of categories that determines which files it may access. File access is granted if Unix permissions allow it, if the domain-type model allows it, and if MCS allows it (on an MCS system). I have just had an article on MCS published in Linux Journal.

MCS is an optional feature for people compiling Linux from source or for distribution vendors. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and Debian the decision was made to include it, so the strict and targeted policies for those distributions include MCS.

There is another policy known as MLS. This is a policy build that comprises the strict policy plus Multi-Level Security. Multi-Level Security aims to give the highest confidentiality protection and comply with the LSPP (Labeled Security Protection Profile - roughly comparable to B1) Common Criteria certification. It would be possible to build a targeted policy with MLS but that wouldn't make sense - why have the highest protection of confidentiality with anything less than the highest protection of integrity?

As for how the policies are implemented, I'm not about to write a tutorial on policy writing for a blog post, I'm sure that someone will post a link to a Tresys or Fedora web page in the comments. ;)

> there r some packages of linux in which some changes has been made
> to support linux......for eg:- coreutils, findutils

That is correct. Every program that launches a process on behalf of a user at a different privilege user (EG /bin/login, sshd and crond) and every program that creates files for processes running in different domains (EG logrotate creating new log files for multiple daemons) needs to be modified to support SE Linux. Also ls and ps were modified to show SE Linux contexts as well as the obvious programs in coreutils.

> 'Z' is the new thing that have been added to most of the
> utilities......wherever I search I get the changes made only in few
> utilities like ps, mv, cp, ls
>
> Can u help me by giving all the changes made in each of the utilities.....

Unfortunately I can't. This has been identified as an issue and there is currently work in progress to determine the best way of managing this.

The prominent blogger and author Kathy Sierra has recently cancelled a tutorial at a conference after receiving death threats.

Obviously this is a matter for the police to investigate - and the matter has been reported to them.

It's also an issue that is causing a lot of discussion on the net. The strange thing is that a large portion of the discussion seems based on the idea that what happened to Kathy is somehow unusual. The sexual aspect of the attacks on Kathy is bizarre but campaigns of death threats are far from unusual in our society. The first post I saw to nail this is the I had death threats in high school blog entry. Death threats and campaigns of intimidation are standard practice in most high schools. After children are taught that such things are OK for six years straight it's hardly a surprise that some of them act in the same manner outside school!

But I don't expect anything to change. Columbine apparently didn't convince anyone who matters that there is a serious problem in high-schools, I don't expect anything else to.

I can clearly remember when I first heard about the Columbine massacre, a colleague told me about it and explained that he barracked for the killers due to his own experiences at high-school. While my former colleague probably had not given his statements much consideration, any level of support for serial-killers is something to be concerned about.

This is not to trivialise Kathy's experience. But I think that discussion should be directed at more fundamental problems in society instead of one of the symptoms. If the causes are not addressed then such things will keep happening.