Search Results: "reg"

16 February 2009

Martin-Éric Racine: Roadmap to a better FreeDesktop: ridding us of the Firefox filth

Lately, I've been pondering how to solve one annoying aspect of the FreeDesktop, namely how to eject the piece of bloat called Firefox from the picture and get myself a fast web browser that I can rely on and that yet offers a similar UI experience based upon native GTK2 widgets rather than XUL components. Just to investigate possible options, I tested Epiphany, Galeon and Konqueror. My conclusions were than a Gecko-based Epiphany or Gaelon is incredibly fast and that Konqueror offers a similarily efficient experience albeit using QT, rather than GTK2 widgets. Why is Firefox so bloody bloated then, if it uses the same Gecko engine as Epiphany and Galeon? The only possible conclusion I could come up with is that its crappy XUL implementation, rather than leverage existing native GTK2 or QT widgets, tries to reinvent the wheel with its own UI toolkit running as a gigantic RAM blackhole. One option that I wanted to investigate but found too deficient was a Webkit-based port of Epiphany. Unfortunately, at its current stage, the GTK2 port of Webkit simply isn't mature enough to consider, although the fact that Webkit has been succesfully ported to a number of platforms and constitutes the basis for Safari on Mac OS suggests that the potential is significant. That only leaves one single aspect on which Firefox wins hands-down: its UI concept; it just works well, whereas Epiphany simply has a UI concept that is utterly inadequate, because it is too crude, lacking basic necessities such as a session saving feature that also works when purposely unloading the application, rather than only as a crash recovery measure. Simply put, Epiphany's premise that a browser should never be closed and thus ought to always remain open in the background of a desktop session is utterly flawed; it doesn't work like that in real life and Firefox acknowledges this, while Epiphany stubbornly doesn't because someone wreaked Havoc in our desktop paradigm. Anyhow, to me the solution is clear: regardless of which rendering engine it uses, Epiphany's UI concept needs to become more like Firefox, before it can truly gain acceptance as the default browser among Linux distributions.

15 February 2009

Daniel Kahn Gillmor: Stricter GnuTLS rejects outmoded X.509 certs

Recently, several people noticed that GnuTLS behavior did not match its documentation with respect to two significant security concerns, both regarding X.509 certificate validation: GnuTLS has been fixed upstream, and a fix to at least the latter problem has already propagated into etch via a security upload. The lenny packages should already behave as documented (no MD5 digests accepted in cert validation, v1 certificates not explicitly acceptable as authorities). However, this means that if you use GnuTLS-linked tools to connect to systems whose certificate chains rely on either MD5 digests (in anything but the root certificate) or on v1 certificates for any of the certificate authorities, your connections may fail due to this stricter validation. There are already several bug reports about broken LDAP connections and broken mail connections due to these problems, and there have been reasonable concerns raised on debian-release about this. So what can you do to make sure that the infrastructure you rely on or maintain does not depend on these outmoded and insecure features of X.509? Read on for concrete steps for administrators, developers/maintainers, and end users... This entry has been truncated read the full entry.Tags: gnutls, security, x.509

Michael Prokop: Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 codename Lenny - News for sysadmins

Alright, Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 AKA as Lenny has been released. Time for a Debian unstable unfreeze party! 8-) What does the new stable release bring for system administrators? I ll give an overview what news you might expect when upgrading from Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, codename Etch (released on 8th April 2007) to the current version Debian GNU/Linux 5.0, codename Lenny (released on 14th February 2009). I try to avoid duplicated information so make sure to read the release announcement and the official release notes for Lenny beforehand. Noteworthy Changes Virtualisation Virtualisation related new tools: Desktop oriented packages like virtualbox and qemu are available as well of course. Noteworthy Updates This is a (selective) list of some noteworthy updates: New packages Lenny ships over 7000 new packages. Lists of new/removed/replaced packages are available online. I ll name 238 sysadmin related packages that might be worth a look. (Note: I don t list addon stuff like optional server-modules, docs-only and kernel-source related packages. I plan to present some of the following packages in more detail in separate blog entries.) Further Ressources

14 February 2009

Joerg Jaspert: Lenny Release

I just finished most of my jobs for the Lenny release. I started, together with Mark Hymers, at 10:23 UTC. This was ahead schedule, which said 12:00 UTC, but better early than late. After disabling all our ftpmaster cronjobs, setting up our work environment and whatever else we needed and at 10:43 UTC we got the Release Teams GO. All of what we did got logged from screen, as we intend to write a dak tool doing such releases. Anyway, I won t bore you with a detailed set of actions we had to took, way too much for now, just some few moments (All times in UTC): While writing this entry people are still doing work for the release. For example the cd building will take time, after all there are well over 500 images (and 36 live cds). Current plan seems to be that we ftpmaster push the archive mirrors around 23:00 UTC, so it has time to sync everywhere. Some while later the cd mirror will get a push, and then the official announcement will happen. Thanks go out to everyone involved in preparing this release, be it in the past by fixing bugs, uploading packages, doing whatever was needed, as well as doing the work today.

Russell Coker: Do Spammers target Secondary MX Servers

Rumour has it that some types of spammer target the secondary MX servers. The concept is that some people have less control over the secondary MX server and less ability to implement anti-spam measures. Therefore if they accept all mail from the secoondary then a spammer will have more success if they attack the secondary server. True secondary servers are becoming increasingly uncommon, the lower priority servers listed in MX records tend to have the same configuration as the primary, so the benefit for the spammer in attacking the secondary server is probably minimal. But it would be good to know whether they do this. I decided to analyse the logs from a mail server that I run to see if I can find evidence of this. I chose a server that I run for a lient which has thousands of accounts and tens of thousands of messages delivered per day, my own server doesn t get enugh traffic to give good results. I analysed the logs for a week for the primary and secondary MX servers to see if the ratio of spam to ham differed. Now this does have some inherent inaccuracy, some spam will slip past the filters and occasionally a legitimate email will be rejected. But I believe that the accuracy required in a spam filter to avoid making the users scream is vastly greater than that which is required to give a noteworthy result. I produced totals of the number of messages delivered, the number rejected by SpamAssassin (which has a number of proprietary additions), the number of message delivery attempts that were prevented due to rate limiting (most of which will be due to spammers), and the number of attempts to deliver to unknown accounts (some of which will be due to spammers having bad addresses in their lists). For each of these rejection criteria I produced a ratio of the number of rejections to the number of delivered messages for each of the servers. The rate limit count didn t seem useful. While the primary server had a ratio of 0.75 messages rejected due to rate limiting to every message accepted the secondary had a ratio of 0.08. It seems that the secondary just didn t get enough traffic to trigger the limits very often. This is an indication that the more aggressive bots might not be targetting the secondary. The ratio of messages rejected by SpamAssassin to legitimate mail was 0.76:1 on the primary server and on the secondary server it was 1.24:1. The ratio of messages addressed to unknown users to successful deliveries was 3.05:1 on the primary and 7.00:1 on the secondary! This seems like strong evidence to show that some spammers are deliberately targetting the secondary server. In this case both the primary and secondary servers are in server rooms hosted by the same major ISP in the same region. The traceroute between the two mail servers is only 7 hops, and there is only one hop between the two server rooms. So it seems unlikely that there would be some connectivity issue that prevents spammers from connecting to the primary. One other factor that may be relevant is that the secondary server has been in service for some years while the primary is only a few months old. Spammers who store the server IP address with the email address (which happens - change the DNS records to send your mail to a different server and you will see some spam go to the old server) will be sending mail to what is now the secondary server. The difference in the rejected mail volume on the secondary server and the amount that would be rejected if it had the same ratio as the primary amounts to 7% of all mail rejected by SpamAssassin and 14% of all mail addressed to unknown users. I think it s unlikely that any significant fraction of that would be due to spammers caching the server IP address for months after the DNS records were changed. So therefore it seems most likely that something between 7% and 14% of spam is specifically targetted at the secondary server. While the ratio of spam to ham seems significantly worse on the secondary it is still a relatively small portion of the overall spam sent to the service. I had been considering setting up secondary mail servers with extra-strict anti-spam measures but the small portion of the overall spam that is targetted in such a way indicates to me that it is not going to be worth the effort. Another thing that has occurred to me (which I have not yet had time to investigate) is the possibility that some spammers will send the same messages to all MX servers. If that happens then the ratio of spam to ham would increase every time the number of MX servers is increased. In that case it would make sense to minimise the number of MX servers to reduce the amount of CPU power devoted to runing SpamAssassin. Note that I have intentionally not given any numbers for the amount of mail received by the service as it is a commercial secret. Update: One thing I realised after publishing this post is that the secondary MX server is also the main server for mail sent between local users. While the number of users who send mail to other users on the service is probably a small portion of the overall traffic (it s not a really big ISP) it will make a difference to the ratios. Therefore the ratio of spam to ham would be even worse on the secondary MX (assuming for the sake of discussion that local users aren t spamming each other).

Christian Perrier: The Lenny day?

Suspense..... Will we release Lenny today? :-) Whatever happens, I like the way these last two weeks were handled. The clear communication from the release team made it clear to everybody what the deadlines were. That helped a lot in cooking up good Release Notes and the great Release Annoucencement, as well as their translations. Of course, one can regret that all had to happen in the very last weeks (the RN could have been prepared earlier but nobody was in that mood except certainly Martin Borgert who is trying to shake up the tree for months...). Again, great work, everybody and I wish the best to the folks who will burn their week-end up to polish the last bits of that release.

12 February 2009

MJ Ray: The South West RDA s Business Stakeholder Conference: Shooting the Economic Rapids

I was at this event back in November and they ve just emailed me this week to point out the speeches and some recordings are now available online. The appointed Regional Development Agency is getting more powerful as our indirectly-elected South West Regional Assembly is phased out, so if you re based in SW England, you may find their current views affect a lot of your daily life over the next few years. After the meeting, I passed on a few comments about how Business Link is failing to support cooperatives and I was asked for numbers, but I don t think I have them yet. I m still following this up and will post about it again later.

11 February 2009

Jon Dowland: firehose

I use Google Reader to manage most of the sites that I regularly read. Today it occurred to me that it would be very useful to have some functionality whereby feeds in a common folder could be read in one aggregated display, a bit like how planetplanet works. I then learned that Google Reader does exactly that already: It's fairly obvious to use in the normal reader, a little bit more subtle in the mobile version (you must click the folder once to load it up in a new page, then click it again to see the aggregated contents). That prompted me to try and tidy up my subscriptions and sort them in a way that took advantage of this feature. Deciding that the Google Reader interface was too primitive to properly organise all of my subscriptions (there are about 100 or so of them), I exported my subscriptions as OPML and imported them into liferea. I then dutifully pruned the list and sorted the remainder into a heirarchy of folders. In most cases I categorised things according to their topic: e.g., "computing", "friends", etc.; with two important exceptions: feeds that I track for debugging purposes but don't actually read (such as my own weblog) I put in a folder "don't read". Feeds that I have decided I need to read every post to (and there are very few of those) I moved into a top-level folder called "essential". I note that liferea 1.4.18 at least does not support the planet-style aggregation feature for folders that Google Reader does. On re-importing to Google Reader, I discovered another facet of it's behaviour that I'd neglected to pay attention to: it does not support heirarchical folders. (How could I use this software for so long and not really understand how it works?) In fact, folders are more like tags, with feeds existing in multiple folders. To make matters even more confusing, there is an entirely separate notion of tags, which applies to items inside subscriptions. Regarding the concept of an "essential" list. If you cut down your firehose consumption to just feeds which met the "essential" criteria, would you find yourself short on information, or just short on noise? Sometimes I read a book that for one reason or another (perhaps just one: excellent writing?) I cannot put down. I utterly devour the book and finish it much more quickly than average. Wouldn't it be nice if other information could be consumed so vociforously? When trying to read things such as academic papers or bid proposals, someone unused to them may find them very hard going. Someone with more practise might managed to "read" such a document much more quickly. Perhaps there is a point to all the firehose noise: maybe we need long immersion in the culture or context to train ourselves up so we can optimally consume the good stuff?

Muammar El Khatib: Funny Political Propanga.

On February 15th, we are having an election to decide whether a constitutional amendment will be accepted or not in Venezuela. I don't want to talk about this. Instead, I'd like to talk about the funniest Political Propaganda I have seen at the moment regarding the elections.

I was driving from my girlfriend's home to mine when suddenly I saw a guy with a banner hanged on him. When he was near to my car, I was able to read what he had written on the banner. I read:

"Vota NO a la mierda. Dale bomba".

Look at the picture:




Translated it means:

"Vote NO to the shit. Flush the toilet".

I got very surprised about the imagination used by that guy. I laughed out loud. I think it has been the funniest political propaganda that I have seen ever.. :-P

Muammar El Khatib: Funny Political Propaganda.

On February 15th, we are having an election to decide whether a constitutional amendment will be accepted or not in Venezuela. I don't want to talk about this. Instead, I'd like to talk about the funniest Political Propaganda I have seen at the moment regarding the elections.

I was driving from my girlfriend's home to mine when suddenly I saw a guy with a banner hanged on him. When he was near to my car, I was able to read what he had written on the banner. I read:

"Vota NO a la mierda. Dale bomba".

Look at the picture:




Translated it means:

"Vote NO to the shit. Flush the toilet".

I got very surprised about the imagination used by that guy. I laughed out loud. I think it has been the funniest political propaganda that I have seen ever.. :-P

Uwe Hermann: Miro 2.0

Miro 2.0 announce image It's been announced at quite a few places, so you probably already heard about it: Miro 2.0, the new major release of the cross-platform Internet RSS audio/video aggregator and player has been released. Miro is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, the new release on Linux now features a "native" GTK+ widgets UI (instead of the Mozilla-based HTML widgets of earlier versions) and supports both a xine, as well as gstreamer renderer (for audio and video). Miro 2.0 feed list I won't even attempt to list all the improvements and new features, please check the release notes and the feature list for details. Overall more than 670 issues have been fixed since the last 1.2.x series release. You can also watch this video (Ogg Theora, 10 MB) for a short introduction in Miro 2.0. Together with the software release, the getmiro.com website, as well as the online Miro Guide have been competely rewritten and are a lot more usable and better-looking than before. Finally, I have uploaded a new Miro 2.0 Debian package to unstable yesterday, by now it should be available from most mirrors. For Debian we're defaulting to xine at the moment, but please consult README.Debian if you want to switch to the gstreamer backend. Please test the new release extensively so the few remaining issues (if any) can be ironed out soon...

10 February 2009

Biella Coleman: New Media Practices in International Contexts

In the next 11 months, I will be spending a significant amount of brain power and time writing a fairly long review article on digital media and ethnography which will assess the state of the literature and various trends. Since my expertise certainly lies in the west or global questions. I will be immersing myself in the literature that looks at various international, national, and regional contexts, which is exciting. It is nice to leave the well trodden path and venture into new lands. There is a handy new site related to this topic, which some of you might be interested in: New Media Practices in International Contexts Blog Series. The entries are less blog-like and more article-like but that is was makes them great resources.

Biella Coleman: New Media Practices in International Contexts

In the next 11 months, I will be spending a significant amount of brain power and time writing a fairly long review article on digital media and ethnography which will assess the state of the literature and various trends. Since my expertise certainly lies in the west or global questions. I will be immersing myself in the literature that looks at various international, national, and regional contexts, which is exciting. It is nice to leave the well trodden path and venture into new lands. There is a handy new site related to this topic, which some of you might be interested in: New Media Practices in International Contexts Blog Series. The entries are less blog-like and more article-like but that is was makes them great resources.

John Goerzen: Review: Video Editing Software

We recently bought a Canon Vixia HG20 camcorder. The HG20 records in AVCHD format (MPEG-4 h.264) at up to 1920 1080. To get from the camcorder to a DVD (or something we can upload to the web), I need some sort of video editing software. This lets me trim out the boring bits, encode the video for DVD, etc. Background In addition to DVD creation and web uploading, I want the ability to burn high-definition video discs. 1920 1080 is significantly higher resolution than you get from a DVD. There are two main ways to go: a blu-ray format disc, or an AVCHD disc. A blu-ray disc has to be burned onto BD-R media, which costs about $5 each, using a blu-ray burner, which costs about $200. AVCHD discs use the same h.264 encoding that the camcorder does, meaning they have better compression and can be burned onto regular DVD+R media, fitting about 30 minutes onto a DVD. Moreover, it is possible to move AVCHD files directly from a camcorder to an AVCHD disc without re-encoding, resulting in higher quality and lower playing time. The nicer blu-ray players, such as the PS3, can play AVCHD discs. AVCHD seems pretty clearly the direction the industry is moving. Compared to the tape-based HDV, ACVHD has higher quality with lower bitrates, better resolution, and much greater convenience. Hard disk or SD-based AVCHD camcorders are pretty competitive in terms of price by now too, often cheaper than tape-based ones. The downside of AVCHD is that it takes more CPU power to process. Though as video tasks are often done in batch, that wouldn t have to be a huge downside. The bigger problem is that, though all the major video editing software claims to support AVCHD, nobody really supports it well yet. The Contenders Back when I got my first camcorder in about 2001 the one that I m replacing now you pretty much had to have a Mac to do any sort of reasonable consumer or prosumer-level video editing. We bought our first iMac back then to work with that, and it did work well with the MiniDV camera. Today, there s a lot more competition out there. The Mac software stack has not really maintained its lead some would even say that it s regressed and the extremely high cost of buying a Mac capable of working with AVCHD, plus Final Cut Express, makes that option completely out of the question for me. It would be roughly $2500. Nobody really supports AVCHD well yet, even on the Mac. Although most programs advertise support of smart rendering a technique that lets the software merely copy unchanged footage when outputting to the same format as the input none of them have smart rendering that actually works with AVCHD source material. Though this fact is never documented, though discussed on forums. Another annoyance, having used Final Cut Express in the past, is that with these programs you can t just go to the timeline and say delete everything between 1:35 and 3:52 ; you have to go in and split up clips, then select and delete them. They seem to be way too concerned about dealing with individual clips. I briefly used Cinelerra on Linux to do some video editing. It s a very powerful program, but geared at people that are far more immersed in video editing than I. For my needs, it didn t have enough automation and crashed too much and that was with MiniDV footage. It apparently does support AVCHD, but I haven t tried it. I ve tried three programs and considered trying a fourth. Here are my experiences: Ulead/Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 Commonly referenced as the go to program for video editing on Windows, I started with downloading the Free Trial of it from Corel. Corel claims that the free trial is full-featured all over on their website, but I could tell almost instantly that it wasn t. I wound up buying the full version, which came to about $65 after various discounts. I wanted to like this program. Its output options include AVCHD disc, Blu-ray disc, DVD+R, and the like. Its input options include MiniDV, AVCHD, ripping from DVD, ripping from Bluray, and just about every other format you can think of. And it heavily advertised proxy editing , designed to let you edit a scaled-down version of AVCHD video with a low-CPU machine, but refer back to the original high-quality footage for the output. It didn t pan out that way. The biggest problem was the constant crashing. I really do mean constant. It probably crashed on me two dozen times in an hour. If you are thinking that means that it crashes pretty much as soon as I can get it re-opened, you d be correct. Click the Play button and it hangs. Click a clip and it hangs. Do anything and it hangs. It did seem to work better with the parts of the source that had been converted to a low-res version with Smart Proxy, though it didn t eliminate the hangs, just reduced them. And every time I d have to End Task, it would forget what it had already converted via Smart Proxy even if I had recently saved the project and have to start over from scratch. I spent some time trying to figure out why it always thought my project was 720 480 even when it was 1920 1080, and why the project properties box didn t even have an option for 1920 1080. After some forum searching, it turns out that the project properties box is totally irrelevant to the program. Yay for good design, anyone? VideoStudio Pro X2 does have good output options, allowing combination of multiple source files onto a single DVD or AVCHD disc as separate titles. Unfortunately, its DVD/AVCHD rendering process also yes hangs more often than not. The documentation for VideoStudio Pro X2 is of the useless variety. It s the sort of thing that feels like it s saying The trim tool is for trimming your clips without telling you what trimming your clips means, or making it obvious how to remove material from the middle of a clip. The proxy editing feature isn t what it should be either. Instead of being something that just automatically happens and Works in the background, you have to manage its queue in the foreground and it forgets what it was doing whenever the program hangs. On the rare occasion when pressing Play did not cause a hang, the AVCHD footage played back at about 0.5fps far, far worse than PowerDirector manages on the same machine. Bits that had been rendered for proxy editing did appear to play at full framerate. I have applied for a refund for this purchase from Corel under their 30-day return policy, and have already uninstalled it from my disk. What a waste. CyberLink PowerDirector 7 Ultra This was the second program I tried, and the one I eventually bought. Its feature set is not quite as nice as Corel s, especially when it comes to versatility of output options. On the other hand, it feels done. It only crashed two or three times on me apparently that s GOOD on Windows? Things just worked. It appears to have proxy editing support, but it is completely transparent and plays back with a decent framerate even without it. It can output to AVCHD, Bluray, and DVD, though smart rendering doesn t work with AVCHD source material. Its weakness compared to the Corel package is that it doesn t have as many options for formatting these discs. You can have only one title on a disc, though you can have many chapters. You have some, but not much, control over compression parameters. The same goes for exporting files for upload to the web or saving on your disk. The documentation is polished and useful for the basics, though not extensive. Overall, this package works, supports all the basics I wanted from it, so I m using it for now. Adobe Premiere Elements 7 I downloaded the trial of this one too. I opened it up, and up popped a dialog box asking what resolution my project would be, interlacing settings, etc. I thought YES now that s the kind of program I want. As I tried out the interface, I kept thinking the same. This was a program not just for newbies, but for people that wanted a bit more control. Until it came to the question of output. Premiere Elements 7 was the only package I looked at that had no option to burn an AVCHD disc. DVD or Blu-ray only. That s a deal-breaker for me. There s no excuse for a program in this price range to not support the only affordable HD disc option out there. So I didn t investigate very much farther. Another annoying thing is that Adobe seems to treat all of their software as a commercial. I m a user, not an audience, dammit. I do not want to buy some photoshop.net subscription when I buy a video editing program. I do not want to see ads for stuff when I m reading PDFs. LEAVE ME ALONE, ADOBE. I just felt sleazy even giving them my email address, let alone installing the program on my system. I think I will feel like a better person once I reboot into Windows and wipe it off my system. Pinnacle Studio 12 Another program that comes highly rated. But I never installed it because its minimum system requirements state that it needs an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz or higher for 1920 1080 AVCHD editing. And I have only a Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz half the computing horsepower that it wants. And since they offer no free trial, I didn t bother even trying it, especially since PowerDirector got by fine with my CPU. Conclusions This seems to be a field where we can say all video editing software sucks; some just suck a little less. I m using PowerDirector for now, but all of the above programs should have new versions coming out this year, and I will be keeping a close eye to see if any of them stop being so bad.

9 February 2009

Steve Kemp: It is an army bred for a single purpose

It is funny the way things work out when you're looking for help. Recently I was working on a Ruby + FUSE based filesystem and as part of the development I added simple diagnostic output via trivial code such as this: 
@debug && puts "called foo(# param );"
That was adequate for minimal interactive use, but not so good for real live use. In real live use I started outputing messages to a dedicated logfile, but in practise became overwhelmed by thousands of lines of output describing everything ever applied to the filesystem. I figured the natural solution was to have a ring-buffer. (Everybody knows what a ringbuffer is, right?) It could keep the last 500 messages and newer debug information would just replace older entreis. That'd be just enough to be useful if I had a problem, but not so overwhelming it would get ignored. In Perl I found a nice ringbuffer library, but for Ruby nothing. Locking a region of shared memory via shmget, shmset and keeping an array of a few hunded strings would be simple, but it seems odd I have to code this myself. I started searching around and I accidentally stumbled upon the unrelated IPC::DirQueue perl module. Not useful for my ringbuffer logging problem, but beautifully useful. There is no package for Debian but that was easily created: 
dh-make-perl --build --cpan IPC::DirQueue
Already I have a million and one uses for it - not least to solve my problem of maintaining a centralised quarantine for all the spam mail rejected by N MX machines. (Which currently uses a combination of rsync and lockfiles.) This is the reason why sites like Perl Advent Calendar are useful - they introduce a useful module every day or two, and introduce you to thinks that you can use in the future. Of course keeping a sustainable site like that up and running is hard which is why sites like debaday struggle to attract contributors, for example. Anyway random happyness. ObFilm: Lord of the rings: Two Towers

8 February 2009

Russell Coker: Normalising Wages

John Robb writes about the normalisation of salaries that is driven by the use of the Internet and global corporations [1]. He cites an example of IBM forcing many of it s employees to work in developing countries for lower wages. It seems to me that IBM is leading the field in this regard and many other companies will do the same. The computer industry which has been very well paid for the last 20 years seems likely to have some significant reductions in wages. Some computer jobs can t be immediately outsourced to other companies such as network cabling, hardware repair, and training. But they will experience a pay reduction due to competition from software engineers and other people who s primary work is easily outsourced. For a job hunter it seems that the best thing to do is to look for work that requires site visits and customer contact. One of my long-term clients has a large business in installing wireless devices. For a long time they have had an open offer for me to climb up towers and install wireless devices. If the rates for system administration and software engineering in Australia (and the outsourced work from the US that I sometimes do) drops to Indian pay standards then I might do some of that wireless work. When recommending that my clients hire people to do software engineering or programming work I am considering seeking out people in low-wages countries that I know through the free software community. I believe that through an organisation like Debian I can find people who are as good as the people I have been finding through my local LUG but who can feel happy earning a much lower rate. My clients seem to periodically need PHP work, so if you live in a low wages country, have good PHP skills, and are well known in the free software community to a degree that I can feel happy in skipping personal meetings then you can email me your CV. Don Marti has written about the Linux vs Windows situation on Netbooks [2]. He suggests that neither Intel nor Microsoft is set up for a Netbook world. If both Intel and Microsoft were to pay the majority of their employees rates that are only slightly greater than typical wages in India then things might look a little better for them. During the dot-com boom I was working in Europe (firstly in London and then later in Amsterdam). It was a lot of fun in many ways with large amounts of money, easy work, and parties. The down-side was that I had to work with druggies and other people who were not suitable employees as the companies I worked for felt that they had no choice. Since the dot-com crash the quality of the people I have worked with has increased significantly which was a good compensation for the lower pay. Also I believe that the lack of silly money was one factor that helped Linux and other free software increase market share after the crash. I expect that the economic depression that we are now entering will have a similar effect. I will earn less money, have fewer parties, and work harder. But generally the quality of the staff in the IT industry will improve and the usage of free software will increase. As an aside, Don suggests that people who create web sites etc will want more expensive machines. I regularly use my EeePC for running servers in several data centers, I do all types of system administration and system programming on it. The screen resolution is not that great, but it shouldn t be difficult to design a Netbook that can drive a 1920*1200 external display (as is being commonly deployed in new hotel rooms - it seems that all new large-screen TVs have VGA and DVI input). A netbook which can drive a 1920*1200 display and a full-size USB keyboard could allow me to do some very effective work in a hotel room while also allowing me to work when traveling in public transport. Now all I need is for the hotel booking sites such as www.wotif.com to allow me to search for rooms that have such a display. A business hotel could even provide a USB keyboard in the room to allow guests to travel light. Of course it would be possible to design a slightly larger laptop at a Netbook price point, the extra plastic and metal needed to make a larger frame and keyboard costs almost nothing and given the low prices of large desktop TFT displays I find it difficult to believe that the factor of two difference in price between the cheaper and more expensive Netbooks is due to the display. My main machine is a Thinkpad T41p, I really don t need a high-end machine on my desktop. I am considering the practice of avoiding purchasing expensive machines as a matter of principle. Maybe if we try and avoid buying expensive machines we can help drive the market towards Netbooks where Linux has an advantage.

Daniel Burrows: Dear Lazyweb, does anyone understand job control?

I've been banging my head against this all day and it doesn't make any more sense than it did when I started. I have a need to write some code that can manage job control on a terminal. More specifically, I need to run a single process and stuff it into the background at will, so that it gets suspended when it tries to read from the terminal. So, there's a controller process and a subprocess process. 
 controller  ----------> subprocess
               manages
The man-pages and glibc info documentation make this look simple: disable TOSTOP if it's enabled via tcsetattr() so that the subprocess can write to the terminal, then start the subprocess in a new process group (by fork()ing and calling setpgid()). Once it's going, you can put it in the foreground or background by calling tcsetpgrp() to set the terminal's foreground process group to the subprocess (to put it in the foreground), or to the controller process (to put the subprocess in the background). Whenever the subprocess is in the background, it will be sent SIGTTIN if it tries to read from the terminal. I have everything working -- except for the very last sentence of that last paragraph. I can see my processes being put into the right process group, and I can see them going into the foreground and the background. For instance, here the first line is the controller process and the rest of the lines are the process group of the subprocess (this one started a few other processes). 
STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss+  ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26989 26980 26989
S    ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26989 26989 26989
S    /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26989 26991 26989
S    /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26989 27027 26989
Z    [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26989 27028 26989
S    /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26989 27028 26989
S    whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26989 27028 26989
If I try to move the background process into the foreground, it is marked as the foreground process in this session: 
STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss   ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26991 26980 26989
S+   ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26991 26989 26989
S+   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26991 26991 26989
S+   /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26991 27027 26989
Z+   [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26991 27028 26989
S+   /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26991 27028 26989
S+   whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26991 27028 26989
Note that the background process is not suspended, even though it's busy reading from the tty. If I manually suspend the process group with kill -TTIN -26991, it stops as expected: 
STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss   ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26991 26980 26989
T+   ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26991 26989 26989
T+   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26991 26991 26989
T+   /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26991 27027 26989
Z+   [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26991 27028 26989
T+   /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26991 27028 26989
T+   whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26991 27028 26989
So the signal isn't being blocked or ignored. I can also run programs in a normal shell, outside my harness (e.g., links &) and watch them auto-suspend, but the same thing doesn't happen when I start them directly under my controller process. It's not even that they're starting as foreground processes: I start them in the background, and they never see a SIGTTIN. Does anyone have a clue what's going on? Hopefully it's as simple as a flag I have to set somewhere... Oh, and for extra fun, this is all happening inside a VTE terminal widget. That shouldn't make a difference (after all, it's what gnome-terminal uses, and SIGTTIN behaved as expected when I tested it there), but who knows, it might be relevant. [UPDATE] I did a little more testing: I was bringing the subprocess into the foreground whenever the terminal was active, so I couldn't try typing into the terminal while the subprocess was in the background. If I do that, it does get SIGTTIN and it suspends. So it looks like select() doesn't count as a read for the purposes of job control. I doubt there's much I can do to get around that. :-(

6 February 2009

John Goerzen: Microsoft Windows: A Culture of Mediocrity

This is a giant rant with a small point at the end. So be warned. Earlier this week, I booted up Windows for the first time in a few months. About 2 minutes after it came up, just after I had started up an app, it informed me that it desperately needed to restart because it had applied some updates, and unless I clicked cancel, it would. So I restarted. The Saga Begins Then I opened up the program for my negative scanner. This device has an infrared dust-detection system that is not well supported in SANE. I can insert a 6-frame negative, it will load it in, identify where the 6 frames are, and scan it at 4000 DPI. So anyhow, I opened it up and started scanning. Surprisingly, it was REALLY SLOW. Normally it takes about 3 minutes per frame, and I could tell it wasn t going to do that. It sounded as if the computer couldn t keep up with the scanner. I tried to get Windows to tell me if it was talking to the scanner at USB 2.0 speeds, but this information was nowhere to be found. So I went down under my desk and moved some USB devices to different ports. Got back up from under the desk, and: BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH was there. Reboot. Scanner now works at normal speed. So I started it scanning, then went off to watch the Purdue game with Terah. Came back a little while later, expecting it to be ready for the next negative, only to manage to catch it in the nick of time before it helpfully rebooted my machine again due to yes more updates. So I saved, rebooted, and finally scanning worked after that. Also I disabled automatic installation of updates. A Turn For The Worse A few days later, I was getting expecting a new camcorder, and I was planning to use Windows for video editing. Originally, my hard disk had Windows, a Windows emergency recovery partition, and Linux on it. When I upgraded my motherboard and added a SATA HDD, I moved almost all of Linux to it. So there was now a lot of free space on that original drive, and the recovery partition is useless with the new motherboard anyhow. So I figure: delete that recovery partition, and expand the NTFS partition to take up the whole of the disk. Easy enough, right? So I do this, and much to my annoyance, Windows now refused to boot. It would just hang. No boot menu, no splash screen. Just hang. Linux saw and could access the NTFS partition just fine. So I went hunting for my XP install CD. Finally found it. Boot off the thing. It spends 5 minutes loading drivers for all sorts of things I don t have off the CD, then promptly crashes, saying inaccessible boot device. A hunch or two later and I m twiddling bits in the BIOS to try to get it to see my SATA DVD burner properly. No luck. I finally download the drivers for my chipset from Gigabyte, have to use Wine to extract them, then scrounge up a working floppy to put them on. Reboot. Blue screen again but a different one. Twiddle some more bits in the BIOS. Reboot. Success! Recovery console is mine! I run chkdsk, and fixboot, which everybody in the forums says will fix this. Neither made any difference at all, but the recovery console could see the NTFS partition just fine. Grumble. More googling, and I try testdisk for Linux. It twiddled some bits on the NTFS boot sector and my partition table. Reboot. And UGH. Now Linux won t even boot and Grub won t start. Download Debian live CD. Boot from it. Inspect disk with fdisk. Turns out testdisk just renumbered my partitions. Restore the previous numbering: Windows on partition 2, Linux /boot on partition 5. Save, reboot. Grub is back. Linux boots. Try Windows. And . Still hangs, but this time only after saying that HAL.DLL is missing or corrupt. Reboot into Linux. HAL.DLL is right there where it should be, and at the size it should be. Ponder this for a bit. I then tried looking at boot.ini. On a lark, I wondered if deleting the recovery partition meant that boot.ini no longer considers Windows to be partition 2, even though that s what the partition table says. Change it to partition 1, save. Reboot. SUCCESS IS MINE! WINDOWS BOOTS! Only 4 hours after expanding its partition. I told some friends about this trouble booting. What on earth did you do, John? I expanded the NTFS partition. And the response: Ahh. That ll do it. Expanding a partition is something we do routinely on Linux. Even on running production servers. Even WHILE THEY RE RUNNING. And I never have a problem like this. And even if I did, I wouldn t have to use some tool written FOR A DIFFERENT OS to fix it. Argh. The Problems Multiply A few days later, I got a new Canon Vixia HG20 camcorder. It shoots in AVCHD format 1920 1280@60i, h.264, which is a standard format for hard disk or SD card HD camcorders. I needed some basic video editing software that would let me do simple edits and burn a BDMV or AVCHD disc onto DVD+R formats that Blu-ray players can play, yet are cheap to make. After poking around, I decided to download the free trial of Ulead/Corel VideoStudio Pro X2. The free trial supposedly was the full version of the program, though it quite obviously wasn t after installing it. So I bought the full version and was greeted by about an 800MB download instead of the 120MB full version free trial download. Now here s the thing about VideoStudio Pro X2. IT S CRAP. It has crashed on me at least two dozen times, usually when I click the Play button. Its interface is really clunky. There s no way to mark a start and an end point, and say just delete everything between there, regardless of what clips they re in. The AVCHD disc creator wants to re-encode the entire project, even though it s ALREADY IN AVCHD. Though you can work around that by exporting the entire project to an AVCHD *FILE* which is smart enough not to re-encode it then making a disc from that. The project properties likes to say I m editing 720 480 even when I m editing 1920 1080, and doesn t even have a box for 1920 1080. Though after some Googling, it turns out that the project properties settings are irrelevant anyway. Yay for good design? So after all this crashing, I went out and did some more Googling. I found this lovely quote:
In short, every application I and our Labs tester tried iMovie, Pinnacle Studio, Ulead Video Studio, Sony Vegas and Avid Liquid at best could open but barely play some clips, and more often simply hung or crashed.
So what we have here is a whole culture of mediocrity. Everybody advertises that they work with AVCHD, yet nobody actually WORKS with AVCHD. And this is the format that the industry is rapidly moving to for HD HDV s days are quite numbered.

Biella Coleman: Viral Power

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a :-)

Biella Coleman: Viral Power

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a :-)

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