# Bzip2 compression for debian.tar
compression = "bzip2"
compression-level = 7
# Do not generate diff for changes in config.(sub guess)
extend-diff-ignore = "(^ /)config.(sub guess)$"

# tw_cli /c0/u0 migrate type=single

# mount -o ro /dev/sdcX /mnt
# cd /mnt/
# pivot_root . mnt/
# exec chroot .

• either do a bit-for-bit copy, using dd, from /dev/sdc to /dev/sda, then run sfdisk -R /dev/sda to re-read the changed partition table on the target drive
• or repartition /dev/sda if you also want to change the partition layout

• fdisk -cu /dev/sda, and created partitions accordingly
• then re-did my physical volume for LVM, but with --dataalignment 1024k, to have the same megabyte alignment (yes, I went a little overboard)

# tw_cli
/> /c0/u2 delete
blah blah [y/n] y
/> /c0/u0 migrate type=raid1 disk=X

[Emphasis mine]

At what point does human culture depart from the Natural? With the invention of computers? TV? Cars? The cotton gin? Electricity? Taco stands? Gunpowder? The printing press? Written language? Shoes? Crop cultivation? Yurts? The wheel? Did humans become unnatural when the good old days of picturesque, endless agrarian toil, feudal oppression, unchecked disease, ignorance, and death from dysentery at 35 turned into the bad new days of urban post-industrial capitalism where a pound of fair-trade organic coffee costs $12.99 and your email inbox is full of spam?

ah. Everything humans do, or have ever done, is natural. We can t do anything else. The idea that modern culture is un-natural is nostalgic and inaccurate. Living off the grid in a yurt is good in some absolute sense, whereas driving an SUV from a suburban bungalow to the stripmall is bad ? Come on. This a romantic, but misguided view. The cosmic reaction to a 20 Ford Expedition is the same as to a sanctimonious Prius: bupkis. The universe doesn t give a fuck about you or your lifestyle choices. It doesn t give a fuck about the economy, oil spills, or civil unrest in Blargistan. It doesn t give a fuck about katydids. Eventually our whole planet will be erased from space, and the galaxy won t bat an eye. The inevitable extinction of our species (imminent, according to research here at Spinster Laboratories) via the exhaustion of available resources is as natural as a fresh-picked peach. As Andre 3000 and other dude philosophers have observed, nothing is forever.

Yes, yes, when people use the word natural what they really mean is free of chemical additives and maybe some of the assorted hippie concepts that go with that narrative. Barter economies, home furnishings made from bamboo, vegan cookbooks, living in the country. While I would argue that it is just as natural for people to put chemical additives in things as it is to not put chemical additives in things, I admit that it is appealing to fantasize that the source of human misery is an unnatural isolation from Nature, and that doing yoga on an organic rubber mat and drinking organic spinach smoothies will put me back in sync with the cosmos.

But alas, I m already in sync with the cosmos, and so are you. In other words, this is it. This is what we ve become, and this is what we get. Which is not to say that a person can t fantasize about a verdant paradise full of songbirds and polar bears and Bengal tigers, untouched by human influence. Only, that world isn t a world we could actually live in. The minute you add contented children, lazy from a carefree day at the swimming hole, eating ripe plums on the porch at sunset to that scenario, natural history changes, and it s right back to our scorched-earth dystopia. Our giant brains use up resources, it s as simple as that.

As long as we re still here, though, we might as well try to make the best of it.

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2010/06/19/heads-up-art-week-starts-on-monday/

XPC.mfasl
XUL.mfasl
cookies.sqlite
localstore.rdf
places.sqlite
pluginreg.dat
urlclassifier3.sqlite

• the size of some libraries, like REXML
• the fact that some libraries, like OpenSSL, readline, gdbm and tk require other library packages to be installed
• licensing concerns about shipping some code (a .so) linked with OpenSSL, and some other code (another .so) linked with readline, in the same package.

• ruby1.8: binaries (ruby itself, irb, rdoc)
• libruby1.8: the standard library, except ruby-tk
• libtcltk-ruby1.8: ruby-tk (merging it with libruby1.8 would add several megabytes)
• ri1.8: contains both the ri binary and documentation
• ruby1.8-dev: development headers (to build applications or gems linked against the Ruby C API), and statically built version of the library
• ruby1.8-elisp: Ruby emacs mode
• ruby1.8-examples: Examples
• libruby1.8-dbg: debug symbols

Replacing the power supply As I would never ever trust the PSU (see my last blog post for the gory details) and some additional free space in the case is necessary, it is time to rip it out. As replacement I've ordered an external 5V/20W PSU. To connect it to the plug I've drilled a hole into the case and added a proper connector after soldering the original cable from the old PSU to it. Make sure to add some retainer to stop the cable from touching the CPU/memory heat sinks later.

Proper heatsinks One of the biggest problems in the original GuruPlug design is the heat spreading and collecting piece of alloy, which probably makes things even worse than better. After some discussion in #debian-devel the idea came up, that the board should be able to run fine without a heatsink - at least when idling. That is the case, indeed. So let's get rid of that piece of alloy, together with the holders and springs. Unfortunately heat things are necessary to handle some work load. To mount them make sure you get some good thermal glue as you don't want to insulate the chips from their heat sinks. I've used Arctic Silver II thermal glue - not cheap, but working well. Make sure to clean the heat sinks and chips properly with alcohol (2-Propanol is my favourite for that), so there is no fat and dust left. When you use the glue be careful to read the documentation properly and make sure you apply only as much as necessary - a thin coating is enough. After applying the glue and mounting the heat sink you need a clamp to put some pressure on it while the glue dries.

Heat sinks for the memory As there is a lot of space around the memory chips, I've got some 14x14x6mm heat sinks. Luckily there are only small parts on the other side of the board, so it was not hard to attach clamps to ensure the glue is able to dry properly. In case largish amounts of glue are squeezing out between heat sink and chip you probably want to start from scratch and clean everything (quickly!) with alcohol again.

Gigabit Ethernet PHY and CPU heatsinks PHY and CPU need proper heatsinks as they're becoming pretty hot under load. Due to space limitations I had to stick with a 17x17x20mm heat sink for the PHY. I've tried to get a largish heat sink with BGA mount for the CPU, but I was not able to find one in short time and without ordering 1000 of them. So I've got another one of the 17x17x20mm model for the CPU. Later I found two other heat sinks which might fit on the GuruPlug's CPU: Malico 19x19x25mm or a Advanced Thermal Solutions Maxigrip. But for now the smaller one will have to do the job, also I'm scared to removed it without destroying the CPU. To mount the heat sink on the PHY a bit of preparation is necessary to ensure that the glue doesn't result in short cuts on the IC's pins. The arctic silver documentation recommends to use silicone on the pins to stop the glue. As I neither had the proper silicone nor did I want to make such a mess, I've decided to get a sticky insulating tape and some tooth picks to mount it properly on the IC pins. Make sure to do a proper job here! With good clamps you can work on the PHY while the memory heat sink glue is still drying. The other problem on this side of the board is that some higher parts are mounted on the lower side of the board, so make sure to get some foam to protect them from your clamps. Except of the size of the heat sinks there is no real difference to the small ones: add glue, mount the heat sink and fix it with a clamp. Before the glue dries completely make sure you remove the duct tape strips again. Be careful not to wipe any excess glue onto the IC pins. If you manage to do so you might want to remove and clean everything properly. So just be careful and everything should be fine. Mounting the heat sink on the CPU is easier as the CPU is a nice BGA package. No need to protect pins an there are none.

Finished As you're able to see on the photo I did not the very perfect job, but fine enough to work properly.

First tests with the new heatsinks Some tests with stress and some heavy network traffic showed quickly that the heat sinks are working well! But not well enough to be able to mount them into the original closed case (how the hell was this supposed to work before!?). Without any air to breath the temperature on the CPU heat sink went up to 85 deg C quickly. So on the CPU's die are > 100 deg C, which is at least close to the max allowed temperature.

Adding air holes Obviously some additional air holes are necessary. After meeting my drill and cutter, the original case looks a bit like a piece of cheese now. Some more tests show that the temperature sticks around 76 deg C under heavy load now. That is still pretty hot, especially when the temperature in the room becomes hotter in summer. As I'm not going to run a lot of traffic trough it (my cable connection is limited to 20 MBit/s anyway), I guess it will work. Below is a graph I've recorded with my multimeter and qtdmm. It shows that the temperature rises to ~76 deg C and stays there. Not sure if I could introuce some more load, the CPU had a load of 6 running stress. Network traffic was around 2x100MBit/s again. I could imagine with 2xGBit the CPU and PHY would become much hotter (no idea if it would be able to handle it at all, though). The PHY was usually a bit cooler than the CPU, so I didn't spend time to measure the temperature properly.

Conclusion My opinion is still the the original design of the plug is an insane QA and design failure. There is no way that it could ever work as shipped originally. If I'd have to design a new case for it, it should have a single insulated compartment for a PSU to ensure that no contact with high voltage is possible. The case around all other parts should be made of alloy with a lot of air holes. So the case could be used as heat sink (properly done, not with these insulating duct tape strips) and at the same time allow air circulation and a nice view on the LEDs on the board. Of course the case would be much more expensive than, but I'm sure it would work properly and would be worth the money. And if done peoperly, it would look much better than this blinking plastic thing. I could imagine it would sell well! So at the end I'm wondering what GlobalScale Technologies will do. I doubt it will be possible to create the 'professional upgrade kit' as they had announced before. Replacing all units is the only proper way. We'll see what happens. At least my GuruPlug is working well now and it will be used as replacement for my OpenWRT router soon. WiFi is not working, but that will be handled by my media center anyway.

• At the start the code changes between the revision running on oldbpo compared to HEAD: 303 files changed, 21227 insertions(+), 468357 deletions(-) (There had been 1723 commits in the master branch since the last time bpo got it, thats about a quarter of all we have in master!)
• Database schema version oldbpo: 5, HEAD: 35
• sub-sub-sub-optimal damn old shell scripts for the cronjobs.

• ACPI specifies a mechanism for backlight control, and the majority of modern machines implement it. It has the advantage that the brightness query interface is generally aware of anything else in the system which may have changed the brightness, so it's unlikely to get out of sync with reality if the platform tries to do something odd like change the backlight itself in response to an ambient light sensor or some other event. The main drawback is that there's typically a fairly small number of available backlight values, usually somewhere between 8 and 20.
• A platform-specific mechanism. This used to be more popular before the ACPI backlight interface took off, but some machines still require it. The idea here is that there's some sort of platform-specific way of requesting a backlight change, ranging from a vendor-specific ACPI method through to triggering system management calls by magic register writes. These methods usually (but not always) keep in sync with other firmware changes, but rarely provide any more brightness steps than the standard ACPI interface.
• Many mobile GPUs have backlight control registers built in. These usually give you a range of several thousand possible values, but using them will almost certainly leave you out of sync with reality if the firmware touches them at all. To make things worse, the firmware control of the backlight may occur after the gpu - so you could end up with two different controls that both need to be full in order to get maximum brightness. The worst case scenario is that the firmware gets confused by the values not being what it programmed and you end up with a hung machine.

, env_keep+="HOME"

# Uncomment to allow members of group sudo to not need a password

$ cat input
user@host1 root pw1
user2@host2 pw2
$ bel -e input
$ cat host2.sh
#!/usr/bin/expect -f
set timeout 10
spawn ssh -o NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost=yes -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no  user@host1
expect -re  "(% # \\$) $"
send -- "su - root\r"
expect ":"
send -- "pw1\r"
expect -re  "(% # \\$) $"
send -- "ssh -o NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost=yes -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no  user2@host2\r"
expect -re  @[^\n]*: 
send -- "pw2\r"
expect -re  "(% # \\$) $"
interact +++ return

Another week, another Emacs extension! I had (once again) a wonderful idea: what if I could have the weather forecasts in my Org agenda? Wouldn't that be wonderful? My quest started by looking for a service offering a good weather forecast API. I found nothing simple as the hidden Google Weather API, which is nice, but not documented. Not at all. Not a single line. Nah. Then, I wrote a google-weather extension, implementing a basic Emacs Lisp API to retrieve data from the Google service:

ELISP> (google-weather-data->forecast (google-weather-get-data "Paris"))
(((9 8 2010)
  (low "53")
  (high "63")
  (icon "http://www.google.com/ig/images/weather/rain.gif")
  (condition "Rain"))
 ((9 9 2010)
  (low "53")
  (high "69")
  (icon "http://www.google.com/ig/images/weather/chance_of_rain.gif")
  (condition "Scattered Showers"))
 ((9 10 2010)
  (low "54")
  (high "72")
  (icon "http://www.google.com/ig/images/weather/partly_cloudy.gif")
  (condition "Partly Cloudy"))
 ((9 11 2010)
  (low "55")
  (high "75")
  (icon "http://www.google.com/ig/images/weather/partly_cloudy.gif")
  (condition "Partly Cloudy")))

• Gnus
• Offline operation
• Searching through emails
• and make it fast!

• Email gets delivered (by SMTP or fetchmail or whatever) to a remote server, which can be accessed through IMAP.
• The client is running some sort of standard Unix-like system; Debian GNU/Linux for me, but it should also work with a BSD or Solaris or something else.
• There is enough space on the client to have a copy of the whole email store (or at least of the folders you want to use with this setup Gnus can of course access the others through the slower IMAP server).

• Install Dovecot (aptitude install dovecot-imapd on Debian systems and related).
• Disable its automated running unless you need it for other purposes; on Debian, set ENABLED=0 in /etc/default/dovecot.
• Decide on where you'll store your emails locally; typical place would be $HOME/Maildir.
• That's it!

• aptitude install offlineimap, or similar.
• You'll need a ~/.offlineimaprc file, with contents based on the following example:

 [general]
 accounts = MyAccount
 pythonfile = .offlineimap.py
 [Account MyAccount]
 localrepository = LocalIMAP
 remoterepository = RemoteIMAP
 # autorefresh = 5
 # postsynchook = notmuch new
 [Repository LocalIMAP]
 type = IMAP
 preauthtunnel = MAIL=maildir:$HOME/Maildir /usr/lib/dovecot/imap
 holdconnectionopen = yes
 [Repository RemoteIMAP]
 type = IMAP
 remotehost = mail.example.com
 remoteuser = jsmith
 remotepass = swordfish
 ssl = yes
 nametrans = lambda name: re.sub('^INBOX.', '', name)
 # folderfilter = lambda name: name in [ 'INBOX.important', 'INBOX.work' ]
 # folderfilter = lambda name: not (name in [ 'INBOX.spam', 'INBOX.commits' ])
 # holdconnectionopen = yes
 maxconnections = 3
 # foldersort = lld_cmp

• You will of course need to replace the remotehost, remoteuser and remotepass values with your own. If you want to synchronize only a subset of the IMAP folders, uncomment and adapt one of the folderfilter lines; the lambda can be any Python code you like, I guess.
• Run offlineimap. See the emails coming in and being replicated to your local store.
• Run MAIL=maildir:$HOME/Maildir /usr/lib/dovecot/imap. You should get * PREAUTH [CAPABILITY ... STATUS] Logged in as your-login. Type * LIST "" * in there. You should see a list of all the folders.
• The .offlineimaprc mentions a .offlineimap.py, which is where we're going to store some additional code used by OfflineIMAP. Here's a sample:

 # Propagate gnus-expire flag
 from offlineimap import imaputil
 def lld_flagsimap2maildir(flagstring):
   flagmap =  '\\seen': 'S',
              '\\answered': 'R',
              '\\flagged': 'F',
              '\\deleted': 'T',
              '\\draft': 'D',
              'gnus-expire': 'E' 
   retval = []
   imapflaglist = [x.lower() for x in flagstring[1:-1].split()]
   for imapflag in imapflaglist:
       if flagmap.has_key(imapflag):
           retval.append(flagmap[imapflag])
   retval.sort()
   return retval
 def lld_flagsmaildir2imap(list):
   flagmap =  'S': '\\Seen',
              'R': '\\Answered',
              'F': '\\Flagged',
              'T': '\\Deleted',
              'D': '\\Draft',
              'E': 'gnus-expire' 
   retval = []
   for mdflag in list:
       if flagmap.has_key(mdflag):
           retval.append(flagmap[mdflag])
   retval.sort()
   return '(' + ' '.join(retval) + ')'
 imaputil.flagsmaildir2imap = lld_flagsmaildir2imap
 imaputil.flagsimap2maildir = lld_flagsimap2maildir
 # Grab some folders first, and archives later
 high = ['^important$', '^work$']
 low = ['^archives', '^spam$']
 import re
 def lld_cmp(x, y):
   for r in high:
       xm = re.search (r, x)
       ym = re.search (r, y)
       if xm and ym:
           return cmp(x, y)
       elif xm:
           return -1
       elif ym:
           return +1
   for r in low:
       xm = re.search (r, x)
       ym = re.search (r, y)
       if xm and ym:
           return cmp(x, y)
       elif xm:
           return +1
       elif ym:
           return -1
   return cmp(x, y)

• You need to set up a select method for the local IMAP server. The method will be nnimap, the address can be whatever you like (it's just a name anyway), and you only need two options: nnimap-stream, set to shell, and imap-shell-program, which you set to "MAIL=maildir:$HOME/Maildir /usr/lib/dovecot/imap".
• Then browse the server, subscribe to the folders, and so on.
• From time to time, run offlineimap from a terminal, so you get the new messages, delete the old ones, and so on.
• What's that? You hate running stuff by hand? So do I. To run OfflineIMAP in a loop, uncomment the autorefresh option in .offlineimaprc. The value is the duration (in minutes) between two runs.
• Even starting OfflineIMAP is too much work? offlineimap.el to the rescue! Grab it, put it where Emacs will find it, and add the following to your .emacs:

(require 'offlineimap)
(add-hook 'gnus-before-startup-hook 'offlineimap)

(require 'nnir)

• aptitude install notmuch, yada yada.
• notmuch setup, tell it where you stored your Maildir. If you're only going to use Notmuch for searches, I suggest setting tags= to an empty value in .notmuch-config afterwards. We don't want Notmuch to intrude.
• notmuch new will get it indexing the messages you already have.
• Of course, being lazy is being cool, so let's uncomment the postsynchook line from .offlineimaprc.
• Now add (require 'notmuch) to your .gnus. Also (define-key gnus-group-mode-map "GG" 'notmuch-search), for the shortcut.
• But seeing just the message that matches is not enough, sometimes we want the whole thread. Here's a snippet of Lisp for your .gnus, based on Tassilo Horn's configuration. Do a Notmuch search, enter one of the results, type C-c C-c, you'll get transported to the folder where that message was, with the context. Note this requires code from org-mode, so you might need to install that.

(require 'notmuch)
(add-hook 'gnus-group-mode-hook 'lld-notmuch-shortcut)
(require 'org-gnus)
(defun lld-notmuch-shortcut ()
(define-key gnus-group-mode-map "GG" 'notmuch-search)
)
(defun lld-notmuch-file-to-group (file)
"Calculate the Gnus group name from the given file name.
"
(let ((group (file-name-directory (directory-file-name (file-name-directory file)))))
  (setq group (replace-regexp-in-string ".*/Maildir/" "nnimap+local:" group))
  (setq group (replace-regexp-in-string "/$" "" group))
  (if (string-match ":$" group)
      (concat group "INBOX")
    (replace-regexp-in-string ":\\." ":" group))))
(defun lld-notmuch-goto-message-in-gnus ()
"Open a summary buffer containing the current notmuch
article."
(interactive)
(let ((group (lld-notmuch-file-to-group (notmuch-show-get-filename)))
      (message-id (replace-regexp-in-string
                   "^id:" "" (notmuch-show-get-message-id))))
  (if (and group message-id)
      (progn 
  (switch-to-buffer "*Group*")
  (org-gnus-follow-link group message-id))
    (message "Couldn't get relevant infos for switching to Gnus."))))
(define-key notmuch-show-mode-map (kbd "C-c C-c") 'lld-notmuch-goto-message-in-gnus)

• offlineimap.el keeps an OfflineIMAP process running (if using autorefresh), which causes Emacs to complain about when you want to exit.
• OfflineIMAP propagates the new folders from the remote server to the local store, but not the other way round. Folders created from Gnus won't be propagated, so they'll only be visible on one computer.

import supybot
from twisted.internet import reactor, protocol
from twisted.protocols import basic
class IRCCatProtocol(basic.LineOnlyReceiver):
    delimiter = '\n'
    def lineReceived(self, text):
        irc = self.factory.irc
        for channel in irc.state.channels:
            irc.queueMsg(supybot.ircmsgs.notice(channel, text))
class IRCCat(supybot.callbacks.Plugin):
    def __init__(self, irc):
        super(IRCCat, self).__init__(irc)
        factory = protocol.Factory()
        factory.protocol = IRCCatProtocol
        factory.irc = irc
        self.server = reactor.listenTCP(12345, factory)
    def die(self):
        self.server.stopListening()
Class = IRCCat

$ echo hai2u   nc -q0 hostname 12345