Search Results: "nate"

22 September 2006

Matt Brown: Requiring client certificates for EAP-TTLS with FreeRadius

For the project that I’m dealing with at work I wanted to be able to authenticate devices in a two stage process. Stage 1 should authenticate the device to the network (via an x509 certificate) and then Stage 2 should authenticate the user who possesses the device with a username and password. Unfortunately none of the methods shipped by default with FreeRadius will support this sort of configuration. A quick skim through the FreeRadius source code revealed that it wouldn’t be too hard to add support for requiring client certificates with EAP-TTLS and EAP-PEAP. The following patch adds a new configuration option to the tls section of eap.conf which if set to true will require the client to present a certificate before authentication will succeed. Example eap.conf
eap  
                default_eap_type = ttls
                timer_expire     = 60
                ignore_unknown_eap_types = no
                cisco_accounting_username_bug = no
                md5  
                 
                tls  
                        private_key_file = $ raddbdir /certs/radius.key
                        certificate_file = $ raddbdir /certs/radius.pem
                        CA_file = $ raddbdir /certs/cacert.pem
                        dh_file = $ raddbdir /certs/dh
                        random_file = $ raddbdir /certs/random
                        # This is the new option
                        # If set to no, or missing, client certificates are
                        # not required for EAP-TTLS or EAP-PEAP
                        require_client_cert = yes
                  
                 ttls  
                        default_eap_type = md5

Erich Schubert: Why closed source drivers suck: ATI cancels support for many older Radeons

With the latest driver "update", ATI removed support for the following graphics cards: This is why closed source drivers suck. My Mobility FireGL 7800 is also not supported by the official ATI driver. Well, ATI obviously only cares about new sales, not about users. (Except that users like me will not but ATI anymore, but go for e.g. Intel) Fortunately, there are some opensource drivers for these cards. They also have 3D acceleration. Let's just hope ATI releases the documentation needed to support the newer cards (9600+, X300+) before they also discontinue support for these. (Or at least allows redistribution of the existant 2D drivers that have already been written for some of the newer ATI cards) So don't buy any newer radeon, because there is no long-term-support for them. In a few years, you won't be able to use them anymore!

21 September 2006

Russell Coker: more on vision

I had a few comments on my last so I decided to write a new post about it.

Firstly in regard to Elspeth's comment. I agree that children should wear glasses if necessary. That part of my entry was not clear, I was trying to make the point that I can understand children not wanting to wear glasses because they think it's uncool. But adults should make decisions on more important things such as what is best for their eyes. There are real reasons for needing eye surgery, if without glasses your vision is so bad that you are legally blind then an ophthalmologist may recommend surgery for that. In cases of extreme vision problems apparently a combination of surgery and glasses is required for good results. I also think it makes sense for people who need surgery for their work, for example athletes such as Tiger Woods. Looking cool is not a real reason for surgery, especially not for the small increment of coolness that some people believe is associated with not wearing glasses.

All operations involve some risk. Risk to your vision is not worth a small amount of convenience and possibly looking cool. Besides, it's widely regarded that people with glasses are more intelligent! ;)

Shintaro mentioned that there is a risk of retinal damage from being short-sighted. What I want to know is whether the risk of that can be alleviated if you wear glasses all the time? If you wear your glasses everywhere except in bed, in the shower, and in the sento, does that stop this problem? Maybe I should try and wear my glasses for more than the ~15 hours a day that I currently do.

Finally an anonymous poster noted that they didn't know anyone else who had an optical migraine. My ophthalmologist mentioned that it's rare to have a migraine that only affects the vision and nothing else. I feel fortunate to have it like that, the list of other migraine symptoms sounds very unpleasant. Of course only having had it once I can't be sure that next time it will be the same. I might get the nasty symptoms next time. :(

However one problem with what I experienced is that it came on suddenly with no warning. It would be very unpleasant to suddenly lose central vision while driving (I would have to hope that the ability to react to objects without consciously noticing them works well). Fortunately I have only been driving about 300K per month in recent years and I can probably reduce this. So the chance of it happening while driving is quite small.

20 September 2006

Stefano Zacchiroli: hello world

Hello (ikiwiki), World!\n ikiwiki succeeded where other competitors failed: convincing myself to set up a blog. This is the unavoidable "Hello, world!\n" post. Thanks Joey for this valuable piece of software, I love the subverted wiki concept and I('m starting to) like also the markdown syntax. Still, the experience in setting up the blog has not been painless, here are some rough edges I haven't yet addressed with ikiwiki (IOW dear lazyweb section from now on): Again and nonetheless, kudos to Joey for ikiwiki, it rocks!

Andrew Pollock: [life] Reno air races and air show

I asked Marc-who-shall-not-be-linked-to if he could take Sarah and I for a plane ride some time, not expecting it to be for a while, and he turned around and offered to take us out on Saturday, to Reno to see the air show. It was only after we got there that I discovered it was predominately air races, with a bit of a show tacked on. That was okay, it was a good day out. The flight, in a little single-prop, four-seater Trinidad, took about 90 minutes each way, give or take, and was fun. I'd already been in a little plane once before, so it didn't have quite the same novelty value for me as it did for Sarah, who was really excited. This was our first visit to Nevada, if you call flying into Reno International, with a 20 minute cab ride to Reno Stead Field, "seeing Nevada". Nevada's cabs were interesting, with rooftop advertising ranging from the local adult venues featuring pole and cage dancers, to the region's abstinence advocacy group. The airshow itself was an interesting display of patriotism and propaganda. I've never been to an airshow in Australia either, and I don't really know a lot about aeroplanes, but it's fun watching cool military aircraft whizzing around. We've been a bit spoiled living near the Moffet Federal Airfield, but even then, you only get to see stuff flying straight in or out. This was cool to see stuff flying around for the express purpose of being ogled. As for the patriotism and propaganda, I think it was the display of the F-15 Eagle. They had some dude from the Air Force on the public address system talking about whilst it did its tricks, and he was constantly going on about (your) US Air Force's military superiority and how the F-15 could do anything and blah blah blah, all with "God Bless the USA" being played in the background. In fact various versions of this song got played throughout the day, with the crowd often singing along. It was the lines
I'm proud to be an American
where at least I know I'm free,
that particularly make me smirk. It's like America's the only country in the world that's free or something. That, and God only blesses the USA. Gimme a break. Oh, and we all had to stand up for the national anthem. It's funny. Australia just seems so unpatriotic by comparison. Not that I've been to an air show in Australia, so I don't know what sort of a military slant they have. There was a bit of an exhibition also attached to the show, where all manner of government types were doing recruiting, from the state troopers to the military. I ran into the Australian family of a guy from the RAAF on exchange with the USAF, and a lady from Darwin running a stall that sold Australian products. Overall it was a good day out, with some more exposure to good old American culture. Photos from the outing are here

19 September 2006

Edd Dumbill: EuroFoo reflections

I got an enormous amount out of the just-finished European FooCamp, with lots of thoughts sparking off and interesting things to consider. Jon Mountjoy proposed a theory to me that Web 2.0 and the enterprise weren't in fact as far apart as a naive observe might imagine. He reckons that mashups, tagging and the like do happen within the enterprise, and in fact are often solving harder problems than found in the wilds of the web. There is a lot in common between Web 2.0 and SOA (even aside from buzzword compliance factors). This is a theme I'd like to follow through. Who are the hackers on the inside of companies, and what stories do they have to tell? Gavin Starks from Global Cool really opened our eyes again to the problem of the environment, and introduced the interesting position that Global Cool are taking. If you want to do anything real right now to avoid catastrophic consequences, it's too late to wait for government initiatives to bear fruit. Private citizens must act too. And that's the aim of Global Cool: educating and lobbying the individual, not the government. I was struck, as were others, by the unfortunate irony that conferences have a big environmental cost in the travel involved, as we sat there among people from many countries. I want to now investigate how XTech could be better in this regard, through carbon offsetting and similar schemes. I guess being in Paris is already a good start, as trains are apparently only 25% as polluting as planes, though this still seems like a lot! Claus Dahl led an interesting and wide-ranging discussion about Second Life as a prototyping space for real life invention. Too many themes there to summarise neatly, but we did have an entertaining side discussion about Second Life's potential environmental impact due to CPU consumption and data centers. One suggestion was that objects and activities could be annotated in-world with their environmental cost. Simon Willison energetically explained OpenID, a decentralized identity system proposed by SixApart and already live in systems such as LiveJournal. It attempts to solve the problem of a username and password pair for every site you visit, without the controversy of centralisation suffered by projects such as Microsoft's passport. Simon demonstrated a proof of concept that I think will be a very neat answer to site providers who ask "why should I support OpenID?" (Sneak preview: because if you don't, it's going to be astonishingly easy for a middleman to provide it, and you wouldn't want that.) I also took time to learn about something I'd been interested in but not known much about, 3D printing and "fabbing". Simon Wardley led a great overview of current systems for 3D printing and their various attributes, and indicated where the current trends were going. It doesn't seem so unrealistic that there'll soon be affordable 3D printing bureaux similar to walk-in reprographic facilities like Kinkos. Plenty more went on that I've not got time to transcribe, but I think will flavour my thinking over the months to come. I was fortunate to be among some incredibly intelligent and welcoming people. My thanks to O'Reilly for putting this on, and to everyone else who went for being inspiring companions. Oh, one more thing. Belgians are excellent at confectionery.

Russell Coker: siteminder - what you expect from CA

Recently I've been unfortunate enough to be the sys-admin of some systems running CA software, the specific horror in this case is Siteminder.

The latest excitement was when an important machine stopped working abruptly and gave the error "ff ff ff ff" in the Apache error log. I have been familiar with the error message "ff ff ff" which means that the Siteminder policy server can not be contacted. But it took me a while to discover a message in the policy server logs indicating that a client was connecting to it with an invalid shared secret. It seems that the policy server had suddenly changed it's shared secret for no reason I could determine.

A google search for this issue turned up a single blog entry about it, which reports the "ff ff ff ff" error message as appearing in the case where the "ff ff ff" error occurs on the machines I run. Maybe I'm running a newer version, or maybe drax0r wrote the wrong error message by mistake. My colleagues have seen the error message "ff ff", we are still unsure of what that means.

For people who haven't used Siteminder I'll briefly describe how it works. There is a 2MB Apache module (larger than httpd and all the modules shipped in the RHEL package) that implements the access control and content management (compiled with -g, presumably because it will SEGV if compiled with -O2). This module spawns a daemon from Apache. Unfortunately the daemon code drops the root UID but does not drop the root GID (fun for security), I wrote a patch to the runuser program that can be used to address this by changing GID before running Apache. Then all communication between Apache and the policy server goes via the daemon process via sys-v IPC. Of course if the daemon crashes then the IPC resources are not freed and then it won't restart unless the system is rebooted or the semaphores are manually removed.

18 September 2006

Evan Prodromou: F te du G nie CCXIV

Today's the "day of Genius" in the French Revolutionary Calendar -- a festival to celebrate human reason, innovation, and inspiration. Something that deserves our respect and attention. My big genius accolades today are for the people who put on the Piknic Electronik Summer Sundays in Montreal. We stopped by the last one for 2006 yesterday, and it was a great time. Our friend John Usher (in town to defend his Ph.D. thesis) came along with us, but we also met friends Jeff and Anne-Marie, Lou and Candace and little Olive, Patti and Meg and Lucinda and Damian and Douglas and... lots of folks. Piknic remains one of my favorite parties in Quebec. An afternoon dance party under a giant Calder stabile on a beautiful island park in the St. Laurence River? Truly genius! I hope Piknic 2007 keeps growing and going with the mellow, friendly atmosphere that it's had in the past. tags:

Web 2.0 Conference So, I'm sad to see that the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in November is sold out. Maj and I made plans to visit SF during this time just to get to the conference, but I guess it's all filled up. Now I'm trying to track down a spare ticket or two. Anybody got a miracle? tags:

R RS There's now a draft version of the Revised Report on the algorithmic language Scheme (R RS). It's not much news for folks who read the recent status report on R RS, but it's still pretty interesting. Most of the good ideas seem to have gotten into the spec, and the icky idea of doing immutable pairs seems to be gone now. Check out http://www.r6rs.org/ for a copy of the draft spec and a signup form for the discussion list. tags:

SxSW Panels and Wiki I'm pretty excited to see that the new 2007 South-by-Southwest Interactive panel voting interface is up today. I proposed a panel called Commercialization of Wikis: Open Community that Pays the Bills, to discuss different ways that private companies are creating wikis and investing in Wiki technology. I was surprised to hear that, for SxSW Interactive 2007, it's the only proposed Wiki panel! If you're thinking about SxSW 2007, or if you just feel like voting on things, please drop by and give the wiki panel your support. tags:

Ms. P. I'm really proud of my cousin, Lisa Prodromo, who's a teacher in Chicago. Lisa's from the poor branch of the family that can't afford a "u" at the end of their name, but she's overcome that hardship and is now a really great English teacher. She's got a blog at http://www.msprodromo.com/ for her students, but I'm waiting for her to bust out with one for grownups, too. Anyways, she was just nominated for the prestigious Golden Apple award, a Chicago-area teachers award. I'm sure she's going to win. tags: : What's the protocal for commenting here in your bliki? Edit now and ask questions later has always worked for me, so I'll try that. When am I got to get an introduction to the illustrious Chicago Ms. P? We're doing some scheming here in Chicago and would love to include her. --TedErnst

Uwe Hermann: Manipulating PDFs from the command line - joining, merging, rotating [Update]

One of the single most useful packages when it comes to PDFs in Linux is pdfjam. From the website: The installation is easy as always: apt-get install pdfjam PDF is not exactly the most easily editable format out there, but these tools can save you lots of time and trouble. Just recently I needed to merge two PDFs into one (and I didn't have any source format of the files). A simple pdfjoin foo1.pdf foo2.pdf --outfile bar.pdf does the job in a few seconds. Equally useful when you need to print huge documents is pdfnup --nup 2x2 foo.pdf, which sticks four PDF pages into one (thus drastically reducing the amount of pages you have to print)... Update 2006-09-20: As was noted by several people, pdftk is very cool, too. It can do some other things such as split PDFs, encrypt/decrypt them, manipulate metadata and more...

15 September 2006

Joey Hess: bookmarks and stuff

This is kinda a mix between my list of bookmarks and some things I've been thinking about and following lately. astronomy I've been reading a lot of astronomy stuff lately, a lot more than my usual low-level interest in it. I'm kind of feeling the need for a refresher course, so I can get a better handle on stuff that's happened since I studied this stuff in school. It's hard to get my head around things like dark matter and really grok the evidence. While black holes and relativity and such seem so obviously a natural part of this universe. Does this mean I'm getting old? The chance to bounce questions and ideas off someone would probably help in getting a real grip on this stuff. So would a lot more physics than I know.. (Hurrah for Eris BTW. The name almost makes all that sillyness over a mere definition worthwhile.) Favorite sites: Universe Today and Wikipedia.
weather I've been following this hurricane season, to make up for having paid so little attention to last year's disastrous one. I knew about the "New Orleans bowl" scenario well before Katrina, and the night before it hit I actually spent several hours tuning in far-away AM stations from down there and listening to the city not react in time. But despite all that I feel that I missed out on really seeing it happen, so I've been learning about tropical waves, and wind shear and ULL's, and dropsondes, and the satelite data that can be used to follow hurricanes. The nice thing is that instead of the old stereotype of someone watching the weather channel 24/7 with a map and thumbtacks, these days there's a nice mix of pre-processed info and analysis and raw data, easily followed in small amounts of time on Wunderground's blogs.
spaceflight Half love and half hate. The recent shuttle mission has been a riot for a shuttle-hater and SF lover. It has all the elements of one of those SF novels where they go down to the cape, dig up an Apollo stack, and use it to save the world / travel to Mars / fight the alien invaders. Except here they're pulling an unused orbitor out of mothbolls. And putting it up on the launchpad with a hurricane bearing down, getting it struck by lightning, pulling it off the pad, changing their mind with the giant crawler half-way through that milti-day maneuver when the hurricane fizzles, putting it back, filling and refilling the tank as sensors fail and they rewrite their safty regs on the fly, barely making the launch window, and proceeding to triumphantly lose nuts and break wrenches .. In Space! Space opera, indeed. Then there's the genuinely interesting stuff. Intentional crashing of a French probe into the moon, probes firing projectiles at asteroids and trying (with great difficulty and many glitches) to return a sample. A mission on its way to Pluto. The rovers still going strong on Mars after all this time. Bigelow launching an inflatable prototype of his planned space hotel. A whole load of microsats tragically blowing up on launch. All the private aereospace stuff, which seems to close to turning into something real. Happily followed at Spaceflight Now.
TV Over the past while and a half I've been very happy to discover The Wire and Deadwood, have been working my way through the Sopranos and Lost, been creepily fascinated by Big Love, got a kick out of the Canadian antics of Corner Gas, vegged out to Greys Anatomy, and have been very sad to reach the end of Six Feet Under. BSG, Doctor Who, House, and some other shows haven't held up as well past the first seasons for me. Happily, there's NetFlix, which makes it plausable that I did this legally despite not having HBO or even owning a TV.
literature I've been reading Charles Stross, David Drake, John Twelve Hawks, Kelly Armstrong, Naomi Novik, Robert Charles Wilson, VC Andrews, and, loath though I am to admit it, John Ringo. I'm in the middle of books by Steph Swainston, Geoff Ryman, and Dave Duncan. I finally found a defintion of Science Fiction I like, but I lost the link. (It's the subjective "her world exploded" one.) Anyway, I'm afraid that I may have reached the point where to get much more out of reading SF, I'd have to start going to cons. Which I don't want to do. But I seem to be at a low ebb for it being interesting to me, or just need to finally tackle some other branch of literature. Actually, the most engaging reading I've been doing lately is in the achives (all of them!) of the Idle Words blog. It makes obscure details about Poland and China, and even interpretation of Russian classics seem pretty darn interesting, and has much better rants about the space shuttle. And it proves that blog entries should properly be good and long.

12 September 2006

David Welton: Rails pagination with N results

For a site I'm building with Rails, I wanted to paginate the results of a database query with the build in pagination utilities. However, out of the box, paginate doesn't take a :limit option, because that's used to get a certain number of results per page. This is the workaround I put together. Perhaps there are better ways, but this was quick and efficient. In the controller: 
class StoreController < ApplicationController
   # This is for Pagination.
   DEFAULT_OPTIONS[:first_n] = nil
This lets you use a new option to paginate, :first_n (which isn't the best name, but was the first thing that popped into my head). Now, you override this method: 
  def count_collection_for_pagination(model, options)
    unless options[:first_n].nil?
      return options[:first_n]
    else
      return model.count(:conditions => options[:conditions],
                         :joins => options[:join]   options[:joins],
                         :include => options[:include],
                         :select => options[:count])
    end
  end
So, if you only want N results, you then do: 
@prod_pages, @products = paginate(:products, :condition => condition, :first_n => 100)
Seems to be pretty quick and simple, so it works for me, although I'm sure a Ruby expert could make it look even nicer.

Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber: What is REQUEST_URI supposed to be?

While evaluating Gallery, I noticed that my test web server generates wrong links inside the web application. After getting some help on the Gallery Forum, I was told that this was because my setup was miscreating REQUEST_URI to contain the entire URI, consisting of scheme, host name and path, while Gallery expects that variable to be only the path portion of the URI. Since REQUEST_URI is fine when I ask the web server running the application directly from the host in question, while accessing it from my local machine through an ssh tunnel (since the application web server is not going to be publicly visible on the Internet) yields the full URI in REQUEST_URI Unfortunately, neither is the PHP Documentation especially verbose (it just says that REQUEST_URI is “The URI which was given in order to access this page; for instance, ‘/index.html’.”) nor is the apache documentation formally defining REQUEST_URI (the closest to a definition being the documentation for mod_setenvif, which says that REQUEST_URI is “generally the portion of the URL following the scheme and host portion without the query string”). Did I miss a more formal documentation of apache/PHP’s behavior? Pointers appreciated. While I was writing this blog entry, which was a lot more angry in its first version, the Gallery guys finally acknowledged that apache and PHP are not sufficiently specifying REQUEST_URI and that I have delivered a valid example where there is a host part in REQUEST_URI. They’re going to work around this. Good news, thanks!
The promised fix is in gallery2 svn, I have applied the patch to my local version, and the application is fine now. Thanks!

11 September 2006

Joachim Breitner: BIOS vs Linux created Partition Table

While trying to introduce Linux at the SOS Hermann Gmeiner International College in Tema, Ghana, I encounted a very strange problem. Here are the results, I spare you the list of things I tried to find out:The BIOS on the Gateway PCs they use here, with the id bf86510A.15A.0066.P13, will freeze when it encounters a disk with a linux created partition table. It will do so before even deciding what to boot, so you can't boot from CD then. It does not matter if the orignal MBR is on it, or the one created by Window's fixmbr, or lilo -M, or install-mbr, or grub. Changing the partition table using Windows XP (diskpart in the recovery console) will make the BIOS boot nicely. This only happens with the hard model drive that came with the PCs, after replacing it with a different model any partition table is ok.The only way to keep working with the hard drive is to power the computer without the hard drive attached, wait until it is done detecting it (for example wait until the BIOS complais about the lack of harddrives), then plug it in while the computer is running. Of course, the hardware is not meant to be used this way, and it might destroy everything, so don't try this at home (unless you have to). For me it was the only way, since when I know boot from a CD (Windows Installation Disk, Knoppix, FAI-Installation CD, anything that does not rely on BIOS information regarding the hard disks), the hard drive can be used just fine...So how did I get Linux on it in the end? One can say I tricked the BIOS: I made the automatic Linux installation add another, unused and small partition at the end. After the installation is done and I can't boot regulary any more, I use the mentioned power trick to boot the Recovery Console of a Windows XP installation CD, to delete the unused partition with diskpart. This makes Windows write the table, and thus make the BIOS happy. Unfortunately, this kills grub, so I have to boot any Linux boot CD, chroot into my installed system and run grub-install...If anyone has encountered similar problems before and maybe found a nicer solution, which maybe could bring me back the "A" in "Fully Automatic Installation", or at least frees me from the need to make IDE hot-pluggable, I'd be grateful.

Wouter Verhelst: Ska &amp; Newwave

I have three machines located under my desk at home: A few months ago, the last two had died with various problems that had seemed to be disk-related; both gave an error in the firmware—with ska's error obviously being more... detailed... than the 'unhappy mac' error icon that newwave gave me. Today, I powered both on again. newwave didn't even give me a hiccup; it booted right away, even if it needed to do a rather extensive fsck run. ska did take a little more work, unfortunately; it seems to boot, but it does give me SCSI errors, too. At least it's managed to make it to a login prompt, however, so I can have a chance at fixing it. Interestingly, just as I finished the above paragraph, and less than half a minute after it made it to said login prompt, it breaks down rather horribly: 
scsi0 channel 0 : resetting for second half of retries.
SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel 0.
scsi0 : DCMD DBC=0x98080000, DNAD=0x2cec6c (virt 0x002cec6c)
         DSA=0x3ad300 (virt 0x003ad300)
         DSPS=0x2060000, TEMP=0x3ad154 (virt 0x003ad154), DMODE=0xe0
         SXFER=0x58, SCNTL3=0x0
         phase=MSGIN, 0 bytes in SCSI FIFO
         SCRATCH=0x3ad300, saved2_dsa=0x3ad300
scsi0 : DSP 0x2cec64 (virt 0x002cec64) ->
0x2cec64 (+1a1) : 0x98080000 0x02060000
0x2cec6c (+1a3) : 0xc0000004 0x002ce5c4 0xfff47010
0x2cec78 (+1a6) : 0x80080000 0x002cfb80
0x2cec80 (+1a8) : 0x98080000 0x00030000
0x2cec88 (+1aa) : 0x50000000 0x002cede0
0x2cec90 (+1ac) : 0x60000200 0x00000000
scsi0 : issue queue
scsi0 : dsa at phys 0x3ab188 (virt 0x003ab188)
        + 64 : dsa_msgout length = 2282225664, data = 0x2ce7d8 (virt 0x002ce7d8)
        + 60 : select_indirect = 0xfff47010
        + 56 : dsa_cmnd = 0x2ce5c4                result = 0x8888, target = 27147, lun = 0, cmd = VENDOR SPECIFIC(0xe5) c4 ff f4 70 10 88 08 00 00
        + 48 : dsa_next = 0x0
scsi0 target 27147 : sxfer_sanity = 0x0, scntl3_sanity = 0x0
                   script : 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 0000004a
Oops: 00000000
PC: [<000bfae2>]
SR: 2700  SP: 01ad9cd8  a2: 01ad8000
d0: 00000001    d1: 00002622    d2: 0000000a    d3: 00000008
d4: 002d2704    d5: 002d14e0    a0: 00000000    a1: 0015aefc
Process ntp_time_as_com (pid: 775, stackpage=01ad9000)
Frame format=7 eff addr=01ad9d5c ssw=0505 faddr=0000004a
wb 1 stat/addr/data: 0005 003ab188 01ad9d60
wb 2 stat/addr/data: 0005 0016f8b5 0000abd6
wb 3 stat/addr/data: 0005 01ad9d40 0000000a
push data: 01ad9d60 0000adec 0015aee0 00000001
Stack from 01ad9d40:
        0000000a 00000008 002d2704 002d14e0 002ce5c4 002ce140 003ab188 0000ac4a
        000bfe68 002ce5c4 0013e781 00000000 00000018 002d2704 00000000 00000000
        0000ac4a 003ab188 002d14e0 002ce000 000bfefc 002d14e0 003ab188 0013e576
        00000000 0000ac4a 002d14e0 003ad300 98080000 000bf586 fff47000 002cec98
        002ce000 000c02d4 002d14e0 003a5200 00000000 000b2704 00000018 00000020
        00000000 00000000 002d14e0 002ce000 000bf912 002d14e0 002d14e0 00000001
Call Trace:
        [<0000ac4a>] [<000bfe68>] [<0013e781>] [<0000ac4a>]
        [<000bfefc>] [<0013e576>] [<0000ac4a>] [<000bf586>]
        [<000c02d4>] [<000b2704>] [<000bf912>] [<000b6c4c>]
        [<000b5f24>] [<000b6a04>] [<000b6c4c>] [<000b6c4c>]
        [<000b65b6>] [<0013d5fe>] [<00002404>] [<000beb82>]
        [<000bd206>] [<000bf022>] [<000bf4d6>] [<000bed46>]
        [<000833fe>] [<00004e52>] [<00003b86>] [<0000c00c>]
Code: 2c68 004a 4878 0180 2f0c 47fa 0c8a 4e93 508f 2a0b
Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler!
In interrupt handler - not syncing
aw. Oh well, at least I've got one more working machine now. Only need to update it from unstable as it was 41 days ago to today's unstable. Going to take a while, I fear.

10 September 2006

Joachim Breitner: Afraid of the German Police

Recently, a few hosted servers in Germany were taken by the police, some of which were running the TOR anonymizer (see heise.de, golem.de, both German). As I'm running one on my server, this worries me, as I am quite dependent on this server, especially now that I am in Ghana, my server in Munich and my backups behind a DSL line with anachaic little upstream bandwidth.I feel I should stand bold and keep running my TOR server, but in this case I'm a coward, so I disabled it. Sorry.For the uninitiated: TOR is a network of servers you can freely use to conceal the origin of your internet activities. This is invaluable for people with oppressive governments (more oppressive than the German one in this case); think China. Unfortunately, as with all technology, this can be used for bad things. The original reason for the police to seize the servers was, according to the news, child pornography. But they should know that a TOR server never knows both origin and target of a connection, and thus is useless for them!

Steve Kemp: And in my last hour I m a slave

Over the weekend there was the Edinburgh debconf meetup, which went pretty well. Due to unfortunate timing I wasn’t around as much as I should have been, so I’ll not actually mention anything which was discussed; mostly because I don’t want to hear that I was wrong and that dicussions moved ahead to contrary decisions after I left! I had to leave early on Friday evening due to my girlfriend coming back from a camping trip and falling asleep on the sofa of the pub. (Shes been away for three months, with only a week visit in the middle; so it was a long absense.) I also left early on the Saturday because we had booked a meal at a posh restaurant a month or two previously - to celebrate an anniversary - and that couldn’t be avoided. Still it was lovely to see the people who came, and I’m looking forward to meeting them and others again in the future. If you’re ever Leith Fishers Restaurant is beautifully located and full of amazing food. Ironically it is a fish restaurant and because I don’t eat that at all I ordered the only two non-fish based dishes, but both were utterly divine.

Erich Schubert: Microsoft considered harmful for the internet

One our mailservers was heavily loaded these days. Some (braindead, but actually it's not their fault) user sent a huge mail to a huge list of recipients, with many incorrect addresses. Unfortunately, some of the receipients are users of Microsoft (apparently "Win 2003 Server SBS mit Exchange 2003"). Which somehow bounces back the mail to all original receipients. Some of which, well, do the same. My current count is somewhere at 1700 mails. Most were rejected by my mailserver, since I've quickly added a filter. Search for "IMB Recipient" to find out why you better do not use Microsoft Small Business Server. Unless you want to become really unpopular with your people for flooding their mailboxes. Microsoft Knowledge-Base description of the problem - now if that isn't a gross understatement for "your mailserver can be abused to mailbomb others". Todays culprit: Engpass Marketing- und Services GmbH apparently can't configure their Microsoft mailserver properly.

Andree Leidenfrost: SAP on Debian

SAP has supported Linux for many years. Debian, though, is not one of the supported distributions which I find unfortunate because I am an SAP consultant and a Debian developer. ;-)

I have manually installed an SAP Testdrive system on Debian from RPM packages years ago which was very painful. Gregor Wolf's instructions on SDN make things look much less daunting for a regular install. Hopefully, I'll have a chance to try this in the next couple of months...

Andree Leidenfrost: Vista rocks, AIGLX/Compiz is so, so

Nothing like the above to get a bit of an audience, I guess... ;-)

I tried the freely available (i.e. no Passport account or other crap required) pre-RC1 build of Windows Vista sometime last week. Whilst I didn't delve all that deeply into new stuff that's under the bonnet, I played around with the new Aero GUI a bit. And I must say that I'm somewhat impressed. I thought the Luna style of XP was totally, utterly and completely ridiculous when I first saw it. Compared to that, Aero is quite neat and subtle. I rather like the frosted glass effect of the window title bar, the way windows are stacked at an angle for easy selection, the glowing window buttons and a few other bits and pieces.

I've since wiped that disk and installed Fedora Core 6 Test 2 to have a look at AIGLX/Compiz. I thought I use Fedora since this is where AIGLX originates. I'm not at all excited about XGL because it appears to pretty much require proprietary drivers - not good. (I've actually got a Radeon 9600 which has experimental but AFAICS working 3D acceleration in Xorg from version 7.0). So far, so good. I got the cube thing working, wobbly windows, window and menu shadows, minimise/restore window effects, the 'film' desktop chooser, transparency on move and likely more that I can't recall right now. It's all working and not crashing. The only issue is that it doesn't feel "natural" (for lack of a better word). Maybe it's because there is a bit of a lag when doing something for the first time or after a while, i.e. moving a new and large window or spinning the desktop cube. I certainly think that my Radeon 9600 card should be up to it - after all it spins the cube at break-neck speeds. When doing similar things on OSX or even Vista it feels like this is just what you do; with AIGLX/Compiz it more feels like "Look what I can do!" without that certain matter-of-course-ness. Or, to reveal my age ;-), it feels a bit like early eighties pop music that had just discovered the possibilities of digital synthesizers. (Also, and this can probably be considered a real bug, scrolling in Firefox is dead slow with AIGLX/Compiz.)

Having said all that, I'm surely and truly excited about the possibilities of a vectorised desktop and think it's got oodles of potential. And I'm equally surely and truly appreciating the work people have put into this. I've merely come to realise that the blurred videos on youtube may not necessarily convey the current state of affairs with total accuracy.

8 September 2006

Evan Prodromou: 22 Fructidor CCXIV

One of the interesting topics that came up during this last summer at various conferences -- dare I call it the Summer of Wiki? -- was the idea that experienced wiki community members need to share our cultural values and community-building experience with new wiki sites and developers. Christoph Sauer coined a term for this effort: Wiki Ohana, based on the Hawaiian concept of wp:ohana, or extended family. I was glad to see that the tireless Mark Dilley has started a new wiki at http://wikiohana.net/ to organize the Ohana effort. I plan on taking some time to work on this site; I think it's going to be crucial for riding the publicity wave that wiki is on right now. tags:

Wikitorial triumphant Last summer, the Los Angeles Times tried an extremely interesting experiment in creating a wikitorial, or wiki-based editorial. The experiment was a notorious disaster: due to excessive abuse and fighting, the Times cancelled the experiment before publishing the results. The entire experience stained wiki's reputation for an entire year. Fast forward to 2006: oh, how times have changed. Ryan Singel of W I R E D magazine put up a 1000-word article about wikis on a wiki at SocialText. He invited the general public to edit the article. The result, which is a reasonably cohesive article on wikis, was published in wired under the title Veni, Vidi, Wiki. It's not the best article in the entire world on wiki, but it's not half bad. Some people have been down on the project -- mostly wiki businesses who felt they didn't get prominent enough coverage -- but I think that the bar was set so low by the LA Times that it's hard not to call getting to publication a success. Looking back, what were the possible factors that made the WIRED article work when the LA Times one didn't?
  • Point of view. The LA Times article was an editorial, while the WIRED article was ostensibly a news story. Editorials are intrinsically opinion-oriented. Wiki can work for expressing personal opinions, but it's not easy, and the result usually isn't a very good read. It's much better as a means for expressing agreed-upon consensus information.
  • Topic. The LA Times decided to use the extremely divisive issue of the war in Iraq as the subject of its editorial. How they expected to have a collaborative editing success with this topic is hard to understand. By concentrating on the wiki method itself, on the other hand, the WIRED article covered a much cooler topic that lent itself better to dispassionate discussion and consensus.
  • Shared goals. The Times tried to reach out to a mass-market audience that was extremely passionate and divided on the topic at hand. The discussion of the Iraq war had already largely degenerated to name-calling and demonization at that point; the people who were participating had more to gain from keeping the other side from getting a say than from getting their own opinion across. For the WIRED article, the audience was experienced wiki community members -- people who know and understand the technology and culture. They had a shared goal with WIRED and with each other -- to spread the word about wiki in a way that's easy to understand. Although Angela Beesley's point and Mike Cannon-Brookes's article correctly note that the increasing commercial interest in wikis did bring some baggage along, I think there was some common ground that participants could reach.
  • Organizational commitment. This, I think, was the key success factor. The LA Times posted their wikitorial as an experiment -- they dipped their toe in the water and pulled back as soon as the going got tough. As far as I know, they had no community management or leadership, and no seasoned wiki community members participating. On the other hand, Ryan Singel's article was hosted on SocialText, and SocialText has made a good business out of teaching companies and organizations the Wiki Way. They've got some of the best wiki minds around on their payroll, and it shows in their ability to manage a wiki project.
Although I think that these experiments are interesting, I don't think they make a very good measurement of whether wiki can work. Obviously, we have thousands of examples that wiki works (see WikiIndex if you need more convincing). I think that people's engagement with a wiki is proportional to their belief in the importance of their own work. If wikis are relegated to a tiny part of a Web site or publication, participants pick up on this de-emphasis and don't put much effort into the project; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think that to be healthy, a wiki needs to be a major part of its parent project, if not the whole thing. That's why, I guess, WikiNews is going to continue to be more relevant and important than one-off wiki article stunts. tags:

Hyperscope I'm psyched to see that Hyperscope has achieved its 1.0 milestone. Hyperscope is the extension of wp:Doug Engelbart's ideas about hypertext and human intelligence augmentation into the technologies of today's World Wide Web. Eugene Eric Kim has been working hard on the project and gave a great demo of the tool at Wikisym in August. Congratulations to EEK and the entire Hyperscope team! tags:

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