Search Results: "reg"

14 December 2008

Daniel Burrows: On voting to release Lenny

Regarding the ballot currently before the Developers, Christian Perrier writes:

Moreover, the proposal is worded and was pushed in a way that all (but one) options that would allow us to release lenny will need a 3:1 majority, which is obviously very hard to achieve (and as, there are several such proposals, the vote will be spread out among all of them). So, those folks who make the release of lenny their priority are now facing an interesting tactical choice: how the ..... should we vote for this to happen? I personnally did choose to vote this way: 5462371.

I agree with Christian's goals, but in my opinion, the ballot he has cast actually makes less likely that the winning option will allow us to release lenny. In Debian, we run a two-round election using a single ballot. In the first round, any options that need a 3:1 majority must defeat the default option by a 3:1 majority. Options which fail this test are eliminated and dropped from further consideration. In the second round, a winner is chosen from the remaining options using a Condorcet method as usual. The upshot of this is that the votes for the 3:1 majority cannot be spread out, unless people habitually place only one of the 3:1 options over Further Discussion. Furthermore, voting everything below Further Discussion benefits the options that don't require a 3:1 majority over the ones that do. For a real example, let's say that we have a ballot like this:

[ ] Choice 1: Omelette [3:1]
[ ] Choice 2: Quiche [3:1]
[ ] Choice 3: Toast
[ ] Choice 4: Further Discussion

Suppose that we don't like the ballot at all, but we want an egg-based breakfast. What happens if we vote like this?

[2] Choice 1: Omelette [3:1]
[3] Choice 2: Quiche [3:1]
[4] Choice 3: Toast
[1] Choice 4: Further Discussion

This ballot can be read as: I don't think that omelettes or quiche should pass the 3:1 majority requirement. But if they do, I prefer them to toast. Unless 75% of the remaining voters vote omelette and quiche above toast, those two options will be thrown away, and the vote will be determined by whether half the voters placed toast over further discussion. If you want to make sure that toast doesn't win, you have to vote (insincerely) like this:

[1] Choice 1: Omelette [3:1]
[1] Choice 2: Quiche [3:1]
[3] Choice 3: Toast
[2] Choice 4: Further Discussion

Sadly, there is no way to vote against the vote without effectively also voting for toast!

I wonder if it was a mistake to combine the supermajority vote and the Condorcet vote on a single ballot. Maybe it would be better to write both ballots out explicitly:

Some options on this ballot must be approved by a 3:1
supermajority of the electorate.  Please enter 'Y' next to the
options that you approve of and 'N' next to those you disapprove
of.  Ballot options on which 75% of voters vote 'Y' will proceed
to the next round (below).
[ ] Choice 1: Omelette [3:1]
[ ] Choice 2: Quiche [3:1]
Rank the ballot options below:
[ ] Choice 1: Omelette [3:1]
[ ] Choice 2: Quiche [3:1]
[ ] Choice 3: Toast
[ ] Choice 4: Further Discussion

That would allow people who want to vote against the vote without privileging any of the options over the others to do so: vote Y to all 3:1 options, then vote 2221 on the rest. On the other hand, I suspect people would be confused in different ways by a voting system that was this complicated, voting Y in places where they should write a number and writing numbers where they should write Y or N. I guess all this mess is why we still use First Past the Post for votes in the real world...

13 December 2008

Gunnar Wolf: Startups here and there

David Welgon has a nice post regarding his opinions on pros and cons on running a startup in Europe (Italy) and the USA (SF/Bay area). The first of the Italy cons got my attention:

Less of a startup culture and mentality. It's more typical to get a "job for life" and hang on to it for all you're worth. Many Italians are tremendously creative, industrious, inventive people, but are going to find it more difficult to express that in some form of business.

I know I am unlike many people, specially in this field... But anyway. I live in Mexico. Many factors in The Way Things Work are pushing people towards having an enterpeneur mentality - And what you see as a point against, I see as a very big advantage.
Some people have what it takes to run a business, and that's great. However, I think it is wrong to assume most people will benefit from running their own business - And specially in a country as mine. I cannot speak much about Europe, but from what you say, it confirms it is a good model of what I'd like Mexico to morph into.
Too many people start their companies with dreams of glory, thinking they have something to differentiate from the rest of the marketplace - and they lack it. So instead of enriching an existing company with more, and better focused, technical talent, they will end up making it poorer with yet another generic company with nothing new to offer, paying famelic wages to their employees, finding a way to skip the social security payments. And there are lots of legal ways to do so in Mexico - and a growing segment of the population has neither health care nor retirement savings, as this makes their day-to-day incomes substantially more juicy... But the future will bite them hard. Well, not only them - It will bite all of us. I still think we will inevitably, sooner or later, evolve into a more caring society, a society where the strong protects the weak, where it (via the State, the government) ensures nobody has under the minimum needed to have a decent life.
And, although I am essentialy a Socialist at heart, I do recognize there is place for people getting more money than others - After all, courage and creativity should be encouraged, and true enterpeneurs should get compensed for what they give to the society - But the ridiculous, stupid differences we get to see, specially in third world countries (remember that the world's richest man, Carlos Slim, lives on the same city I do, and around ~15 years ago even lived less than five blocks away from me... But I do have close family where having food daily on the table is far from a fact) are something that should disappear for good.
Loyalty to your employer and long-term job commitment are two values I hold very dear, and hope to be able to practice. So far, I have worked for eight years for UNAM (1999-2003 and 2005-present), and I hope to continue here for many years to come. I was just talking about this with a friend - The payment itself is far less than what I could get somewhere else, but the work conditions and long-term viability are more than enough to repay for the difference. And I am sure many of my friends and acquintances would be much better off if they stopped prioritizing getting more money now in respect to leading a better, richer life - And, of course, if we all valued more giving back to the society, as we will probably all need to ask from it sooner or later.

Martin F. Krafft: Aggregating Git tips

Instead of commenting on all the recent Git on Planet Debian, I d like to point you all to the Git Wiki, and specifically the page BlogPosts. Please link your Git-related blog posts from there. Also, there is Planet RCS for you to aggregate RCS/VCS-relatd posts. NP: Anekdoten: From Within

David Welton: Startups and Work: Europe vs the US

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch comments on the US vs Europe in terms of startups: Joie De Vivre: The Europeans Are Out To Lunch It's a pretty rough and coarse-grained view of things, but there's a grain of truth there. I've written about this a little bit before. It's something that I feel qualified to talk about, having lived and worked in both the US and Europe (Italy and Austria to be precise), and in that time, generally gravitated towards startups. Here's my quick take on a list of what's good and bad about each. Please note that these are of course not true for everyone, that things are changing, but are still things I think are generally true, even when I could think of several counterexamples for some of them myself. Also, it's very important to keep in mind how diverse "Europe" is, so most of what I write is really about Italy, and to a much smaller degree, Austria. I'd be very curious to hear your own experiences in the comments. Europe Bad

Less of a startup culture and mentality. It's more typical to get a "job for life" and hang on to it for all you're worth. Many Italians are tremendously creative, industrious, inventive people, but are going to find it more difficult to express that in some form of business.
The side effects of this mean that there are fewer people to talk with, and network with, fewer potential employees willing to risk a startup, and so on. For instance, people are at times more suspicious of a new company - both clients and suppliers.
As I mentioned in my other article, it takes a lot more money to get started in many European countries - something like 10,000 Euro in Italy. Other places like the UK are cheaper, and apparently Germany is introducing some legislation to ease the burden on new companies. I really hope this changes in Europe because it's such an easy change to make: don't extract money from companies until they're making it.
More bureaucracy. I think that higher taxes, once you are profitable, might be worth paying for the social system you get in Europe, but the cost of sorting out paperwork falls inordinately on smaller, newer companies. Big, established firms can hire people to deal with all the rules and regulations, and probably have contacts in the government that can help them out in some cases. Smaller firms are the ones whose time is really going to be wasted running around to different offices trying to figure out what they have to do.
Smaller, fragmented markets. Localization is not a lot of fun in some ways, and trying to translate everything into all the languages of the European Union is a huge undertaking. In the US, you get a huge market with just English and the US Dollar. Even beyond language issues, the culture changes less in the US from place to place, meaning that you have a more homogeneous target.
Lack of acceptance of failure, both culturally and institutionally. If you go bankrupt in Italy, it's a very serious problem. Apparently (although this is second hand, I'm not 100% sure of it - maybe someone can confirm whether it's actually true?), you can even lose the right to vote. Plenty of people in the US try several times before they get it right.

Good

Even if your undertaking fails, you still have health care. Likewise, there are other bits and pieces of social support (that change from country to country) that mean you're probably not going to land quite so hard on your rear if things go wrong.
Lots of smart, educated people. I never lacked for plenty of smart people to talk shop with in Padova, and didn't miss the California bay area at all from that point of view. Open source is really big in Europe - perhaps, in part, because for many people it's a better avenue for their talents than creating a business, when doing so is difficult and less common.
Work/life balance. Sorry Mike, but the amount of people who are truly going to strike it rich is pretty small. If they want to work hard, great, but it's nice to have some other options, in terms of good, lasting friendships (rather than everything revolving around work), knowing plenty of people from outside your field, people living in and belonging to a community (how many people spend their whole lives in the bay area?). When I moved from San Francisco to Padova in 2000, I went from a world gone mad with money and the dot com craze to one where there were rich and poor, families, young people, old people, and many people who were not working for some dot com. That's not to say that people don't work quite hard in Italy - two hour lunches are a thing of the past for most anyone I know.
Smaller fragmented markets can be an advantage, too. By the time some valley-based startup finally gets around to noticing that languages other than English exist, it's possible to capture a smaller market. Ok, so you won't be the next Google that way, but there's good money to be had in doing so.
In some ways, the staid, established, don't rock the boat way of doing things in some industries may present big opportunities for outsiders to come in and pull the carpet out from under everyone. This is especially true of internet/web companies that can get started quickly and cheaply.

US Bad

If you're not careful, you can get completely sucked in to work - your life revolves around it, your friends are mostly work friends, and if something happens to your job, a lot of that goes poof. This is especially true in places like the bay area, where so many people are 'transients' - just there for a few years, without any real roots in the area. This is ok if you'll potentially make a big pile of money, but long term it's unhealthy.
Less of a sense of building for the long term. Personally, I don't want a "job for life", but I think there is some value in loyalty (the genuine sort, not the sort created by legally not being able to lose a job) between employer and employee that has been lost in the US. Being able to count on someone growing with your company, and as an employee, knowing that your company will do what it can to help you out even in tough times are things that capture some value. The US seems to be heading towards a "Coasian" world where everyone is a freelancer, and while that efficiency is hard to deny, I wonder what is lost in the process.
The competition is tough. Sure, it is in Europe too, but in Europe everyone may compete quite hard during the year, but still all take that one month vacation (although that is becoming a bit less common, especially amongst people my age), whereas in the US almost no one gets that kind of benefit - even if you wanted to take unpaid time off, people would look askance at that kind of behavior. That said, if you need to stay open in, say, August, in Italy, to compete, you are in big trouble, because for many businesses it's simply impossible because it's a chain reaction: all your suppliers and clients shut down, so you really have no choice.

Good

There are certainly bureaucratic obstacles in the US, but are much more maneageable, and don't hit smaller/newer companies quite so badly.
It's cheap to get started. As per my other article, the actual state filing fee in Oregon for an LLC is $55, and that's all you really need.
The culture is definitely there, especially in the right places like the Bay Area, but even in plenty of others.
You aren't bound to employees for life, and it's easy to find freelancers. I know I'm contradicting myself, but I think it's actually a complex issue, and there are definite advantages to not having people who expect or at least want to find that job for life.
A large target market. Go online in one state, and you can, for the most part, deal with customers all over the US, in one language.
Things turn around faster. I have more of a sense that when there are problems, they get fixed. Companies (the debacle of the automakers notwithstanding) are more often allowed to fail, or at least put in Chapter 11. Sometimes this means that when things are bad, they get really bad, but also turn around and get better sooner.

Conclusions An interesting example of all this from my own experience was Linuxcare. The company was, culturally, a Bay Area startup, with the headquarters in San Francisco, founded by very startup oriented guys (one of whom, Dave Sifry, went on to do technorati, and is currently working on yet another venture). However, most of the actual open source talent was in our satellite offices, in Australia, Italy and Canada, places where, perhaps, people were not so distracted by the prospect of "make money fast!!! hurry!!!" that they had time to work, learn, and create some really great open source code. To be honest, I find myself torn. Business-wise, I prefer the US. However, outside of that, there's a lot to be said for Europe. I also think that some of what's good about business in the US is coming to Europe, albeit slowly in some cases, in Europe. People my age here can see what's going on elsewhere, and try and copy what they like. A lot of what's good about Europe, though, might be more difficult to import into the US, especially the livability of the cities. In any case, I can conclude that it's a complex, difficult topic best discussed over a glass of wine.

David Welton: Startups and Work: Europe vs the US

Less of a startup culture and mentality. It's more typical to get a "job for life" and hang on to it for all you're worth. Many Italians are tremendously creative, industrious, inventive people, but are going to find it more difficult to express that in some form of business.
The side effects of this mean that there are fewer people to talk with, and network with, fewer potential employees willing to risk a startup, and so on. For instance, people are at times more suspicious of a new company - both clients and suppliers.
As I mentioned in my other article, it takes a lot more money to get started in many European countries - something like 10,000 Euro in Italy. Other places like the UK are cheaper, and apparently Germany is introducing some legislation to ease the burden on new companies. I really hope this changes in Europe because it's such an easy change to make: don't extract money from companies until they're making it.
More bureaucracy. I think that higher taxes, once you are profitable, might be worth paying for the social system you get in Europe, but the cost of sorting out paperwork falls inordinately on smaller, newer companies. Big, established firms can hire people to deal with all the rules and regulations, and probably have contacts in the government that can help them out in some cases. Smaller firms are the ones whose time is really going to be wasted running around to different offices trying to figure out what they have to do.
Smaller, fragmented markets. Localization is not a lot of fun in some ways, and trying to translate everything into all the languages of the European Union is a huge undertaking. In the US, you get a huge market with just English and the US Dollar. Even beyond language issues, the culture changes less in the US from place to place, meaning that you have a more homogeneous target.
Lack of acceptance of failure, both culturally and institutionally. If you go bankrupt in Italy, it's a very serious problem. Apparently (although this is second hand, I'm not 100% sure of it - maybe someone can confirm whether it's actually true?), you can even lose the right to vote. Plenty of people in the US try several times before they get it right.

Good

Even if your undertaking fails, you still have health care. Likewise, there are other bits and pieces of social support (that change from country to country) that mean you're probably not going to land quite so hard on your rear if things go wrong.
Lots of smart, educated people. I never lacked for plenty of smart people to talk shop with in Padova, and didn't miss the California bay area at all from that point of view. Open source is really big in Europe - perhaps, in part, because for many people it's a better avenue for their talents than creating a business, when doing so is difficult and less common.
Work/life balance. Sorry Mike, but the amount of people who are truly going to strike it rich is pretty small. If they want to work hard, great, but it's nice to have some other options, in terms of good, lasting friendships (rather than everything revolving around work), knowing plenty of people from outside your field, people living in and belonging to a community (how many people spend their whole lives in the bay area?). When I moved from San Francisco to Padova in 2000, I went from a world gone mad with money and the dot com craze to one where there were rich and poor, families, young people, old people, and many people who were not working for some dot com. That's not to say that people don't work quite hard in Italy - two hour lunches are a thing of the past for most anyone I know.
Smaller fragmented markets can be an advantage, too. By the time some valley-based startup finally gets around to noticing that languages other than English exist, it's possible to capture a smaller market. Ok, so you won't be the next Google that way, but there's good money to be had in doing so.
In some ways, the staid, established, don't rock the boat way of doing things in some industries may present big opportunities for outsiders to come in and pull the carpet out from under everyone. This is especially true of internet/web companies that can get started quickly and cheaply.

US Bad

If you're not careful, you can get completely sucked in to work - your life revolves around it, your friends are mostly work friends, and if something happens to your job, a lot of that goes poof. This is especially true in places like the bay area, where so many people are 'transients' - just there for a few years, without any real roots in the area. This is ok if you'll potentially make a big pile of money, but long term it's unhealthy.
Less of a sense of building for the long term. Personally, I don't want a "job for life", but I think there is some value in loyalty (the genuine sort, not the sort created by legally not being able to lose a job) between employer and employee that has been lost in the US. Being able to count on someone growing with your company, and as an employee, knowing that your company will do what it can to help you out even in tough times are things that capture some value. The US seems to be heading towards a "Coasian" world where everyone is a freelancer, and while that efficiency is hard to deny, I wonder what is lost in the process.
The competition is tough. Sure, it is in Europe too, but in Europe everyone may compete quite hard during the year, but still all take that one month vacation (although that is becoming a bit less common, especially amongst people my age), whereas in the US almost no one gets that kind of benefit - even if you wanted to take unpaid time off, people would look askance at that kind of behavior. That said, if you need to stay open in, say, August, in Italy, to compete, you are in big trouble, because for many businesses it's simply impossible because it's a chain reaction: all your suppliers and clients shut down, so you really have no choice.

Good

There are certainly bureaucratic obstacles in the US, but are much more maneageable, and don't hit smaller/newer companies quite so badly.
It's cheap to get started. As per my other article, the actual state filing fee in Oregon for an LLC is $55, and that's all you really need.
The culture is definitely there, especially in the right places like the Bay Area, but even in plenty of others.
You aren't bound to employees for life, and it's easy to find freelancers. I know I'm contradicting myself, but I think it's actually a complex issue, and there are definite advantages to not having people who expect or at least want to find that job for life.
A large target market. Go online in one state, and you can, for the most part, deal with customers all over the US, in one language.
Things turn around faster. I have more of a sense that when there are problems, they get fixed. Companies (the debacle of the automakers notwithstanding) are more often allowed to fail, or at least put in Chapter 11. Sometimes this means that when things are bad, they get really bad, but also turn around and get better sooner.

12 December 2008

Russell Coker: Christmas Toys for Children

It’s almost Christmas and time to buy scientific toys for children. Here are some random ideas, of course it’s probably too late for the online stores to deliver - but there’s always next year. The MikroKopter is a kit helicopter based on four propellors (two rotating in each direction) and is capable of semi-autonomous flight while carrying a decent payload (such as a digital camera) [1]. The parts cost over E700 and the skill involved in assembling it is significant, but it would be an excellent present for anyone who is 14+. Of course the type of helicopter described in my previous post [2] is a much more affordable present and can be used by a young child. The scitoys.com site has a good range of scientific toys for sale [3], they are assembled into kits. The United Nuclear site has a huge range of chemical supplies and related things [4] that can be used for making some great science experiments and toys. They also have really detailed information about the potential hazards of the things that they sell (not that I was planning to buy Cesium or Uranium anyway). If buying exotic alloys elsewhere it’s probably a good idea to check the United Nuclear site for the hazard information (not all sites provide as much information as they should). Professor Bunsen is an Australian site selling similar produces to SciToys [5]. The range is slightly different, and if you are in Australia then it’s safer to buy locally - there is a significant amount of stuff on the United Nuclear site that would be unlikely to pass Australian customs. The Spirograph is a good way to introduce mathematical concepts to children [6], it would probably be a good present for children who’s parents are not interested in maths and science. Lego [7] is always good, but there are also other similar products to consider. Meccano is good for older children, but the ranges for younger children have some deficiencies (the 2+ stuff requires the finger strength of an adult to assemble all parts). The Italian company Quercetti has some great products [9]. Unfortunately their web site is only in Italian and they have no links to sites in other countries/languages (they do have the names of some distributors who may have web sites). Their products includes a gears set (suitable for teaching children as young as 1yo) and a model car with an engine that has pistons moving inside a clear plastic case, a two-speed gearbox, and a fully functional differential (designed for 2yo+). For more hands-on tasks that require supervision (not something that can go under a tree) one good option for ages 3+ is to disassemble a variety of computers and computer parts. CD-ROM drives are good because you can connect a 9V battery to the head assembly motor or the tray eject motor to make it work. Hard disks have insanely strong magnets inside them - don’t give two such magnets to a child. A multi-meter is a great educational toy that can be used for many great experiements (as well as for practical tasks such as determining which battery of a set is flat) [10]. The parts from a hard disk can be used to demonstrate how a generator works (the mechanism to move the heads provides you with strong magnets and a coil that fits them). Note that an analogue meter is needed for such experiments as the amount of electricity generated is small and AC - a digital meter will average it out to zero (at least for the more affordable meters that I have used). It’s probably best to own both a digital meter and an analogue one, the minimum age for owning such a meter is probably about 10, the minimum age for using one with supervision is about 3. An oscilloscope is a great educational toy [11], unfortunately they are quite expensive (Ebay seems to have nothing below about $450). They can be used for all sort of fun tasks such as measuring the speed of sound. The wikipedia page notes that you can get PC based Oscilloscopes (PCO) which are cheaper. I wonder if they have Linux support for such things… The OLPC is a great computer for kids in developing countries [12]. They are now available in Australia [13]. For most children in first-world countries a second-hand laptop of a more traditional design is probably a better option. There are a significant number of old laptops gathering dust which can easily have Linux installed with a variety of educational software. Buying an OLPC on the “give one get one” deal costs $400US plus tax and shipping, while a second-hand laptop can be purchased for significantly less than that. While giving an OLPC to some random needy child is a good thing, as the person who gives a laptop locally is probably going to provide support for it there are some benefits to giving a regular laptop. Conferences often have bags of random junk to give out to delegates, and trade shows always have lots of little toys with company logos on them. Such things are usually of little use - but children like them. Also the trinkets that computer companies give away are often educational. If you have a cupboard filled with such things then unloading them on some children is a good idea - of course you have to make sure that anything you give to young children can’t be swallowed and has no sharp points.

[1] http://www.mikrokopter.de/ucwiki/en/MikroKopter

[2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/12/11/toy-helicopter/

[3] http://scitoys.com/

[4] http://unitednuclear.com/

[5] http://www.profbunsen.com.au/

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph

[7] http://www.lego.com/

[8] http://www.meccano.com/

[9] http://www.quercetti.com/

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimeter

[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscilloscope

[12] http://laptop.org/

[13] http://www.olpc.org.au/

Matthew Palmer: ETOOMUCHMAGIC

I'm a fairly big fan of the Rails web development framework; it uses a programming language I quite enjoy using, and deals with the "bureaucratic" overhead of writing a web application with minimal fuss, leaving me to think about the things that matter -- my application's functionality. To achieve this wonderous feat[1], Rails has a healthy injection of magic in the codebase, to do all sorts of interesting things, like autoload missing constants, and make intelligent guesses about what I want to happen in various situations. The problem comes when you want to reuse this magical code for something else. I'm working on a project at the moment where a bunch of the utility functions that are in the ActiveSupport ~~gem~~library would come in real handy. Well, that's OK, it's a separate ~~gem~~library from the rest of Rails, I'll just load it into my app, and I'm away. Or... not. The problem is that it would appear that a lot of the magic in the library is mandatory. Regardless of whether I want your constant autoloading magic, I've got it. I also can't just easily pick-and-mix the parts of the ActiveSupport library that I want, because there's all sorts of dependencies between the different chunks of the code that aren't expressed the "right way" -- everything gets loaded in the top-level active_support.rb, rather than being depended on by the files that need the classes. This is arguably a bug in ActiveSupport, but it's not something that's likely to be real high on anyone's annoyance list (since in practice ActiveSupport is a part of Rails, and when you use it in Rails it works Just Fine). So, to all programmers: magic is great, but be careful about excessive magic. In particular, don't make magic happen in places that the user didn't ask for, and allow people to turn off your magic when it's counter-productive to their purposes.

[1] This feat becomes more and more wonderous to me every time I look at the other available web development frameworks out there, especially ones in other languages. Despite having Rails to ~~rip off~~take inspiration from, they still seem to require a lot of boilerplate to achieve their goals. While there's a limited amount of boilerplate stripping you could do for a C program, Python people keep telling me that their language is just as powerful as Ruby -- and yet all the Python web framework usage I see is chock full of unnecessary cruft.

MJ Ray: Global 300 and chances to invest in a fuel co-op or meet Cooperatives-SW

The new Global 300 list has been released this week:-

the 300 top co-operatives are responsible for an aggregate turnover of 1.1 trillion USD which makes it the size of the 10th economy of the world nearly the size of the Spanish economy. The list also shows that co-operatives are growing in terms of turnover 14%

Also, the Good Fuel Co-operative (a consortium established early in 2008 by five UK biodiesel cooperatives: Goldenfuels, Sundance Renewables, Magpie Recycling, Bolton Alternative Fuels Co-operative and Biofuels.org.uk) has launched a share issue to raise 420,000 to fuel the growth of the biodiesel market. Finally, Cooperatives-SW board will meet in Exeter in January and the AGM will be in Plymouth in April - so if you d like me to let you know the dates when they re announced (for meeting up or otherwise), please leave a comment on this post and tick the Notify me of followup comments box. Thanks!

11 December 2008

Russell Coker: Please Turn off Your Spam Protection

Hi, I’d like to send an email from a small domain that you’ve never heard of or from a big ISP that’s known for being slack about spam (*), I can’t send the mail to you because of your anti-spam measures. I think that this is unfair, it’s discrimination, and you are cutting off your nose to spite your face in rejecting my mail. So please reconfigure your mail server now and accept more spam in your inbox, my message is important enough to justify the extra time you will spend manually deleting mail and the risk of accidentally deleting legitimate mail while deleting heaps of spam (I am in fact more important than you). By not accepting my mail you are being an asshole. I only receive a dozen spam messages a day and I don’t mind it, without even knowing you or having bothered to do a web search to see how well your email address is known I’m sure that you don’t receive any more spam than me and therefore you too can turn off most anti-spam measures and manually sort through the spam. You don’t really have a problem with spam, you are just paranoid, I’m sure that you installed your anti-spam measures before receiving any spam and then never bothered to check the hit rates. My sys-admin knows that one of the DNSBLs has an old entry from when his server was broken, but he won’t request that it be removed - so you can change your server because my sys-admin doesn’t want to click on a URL that you sent him. The RFC-ignorant.org service is used and run by ignorant people - I know this without even reading their web site to discover how it works. The above is a summary of a number of complaints that I have received about my anti-spam measures. I’ve para-phrased them so that they make sense, I have not actually had someone directly say “I’m more important than you so you should just accept more spam”, but the implication is quite clear. Now there are some legitimate reasons for requesting that anti-spam measures be reduced. In the distant past almost everyone had working reverse DNS entries which matched the forward entries and it was common to reject mail from systems that didn’t have valid DNS. Nowadays there are many big ISPs that delegate IP address space without permitting reverse DNS entries, and there are companies that have one department in charge of IP addresses (who don’t have a clue about reverse DNS) and another department running mail servers (who are cluefull). So the environment has changed to make reverse DNS checks a non-viable anti-spam measure. Requesting that people remove such checks is reasonable. Anti-spam measures that attack innocent third parties are bad. Sending “warnings” about viruses has made no sense for many years as all modern viruses fake the sender address, an employee of one company once admitted to me that they were sending out anti-virus “warning” messages as a way of sending unsolicited advertising to random people (I reported them as a spam source). Some time ago on a routine upgrade of ClamAV I accidentally copied in a default configuration file that made it send such warnings - I was grateful when someone informed me of my mistake so that I could fix it. Challenge-response is another technology that causes harm to others. I think it makes a lot of sense for mailing lists (every modern list server will confirm subscription requests), while it does result in sending unwanted mail to innocent third parties (every time a new virus becomes prevalent I receive a number of confirmation messages from list servers), but it’s not something that I will use on a regular email account (but I am prepared to do paid work implementing CR for other people). Requesting that manually implemented blocks be removed is quite reasonable. Occasionally I find that mail from one of my servers is blocked because a previous owner of the IP address space did bad things. In such a situation it is quite reasonable to provide an assurance that the new owner takes abuse issues seriously and to request that the block be removed. Requesting that I make any change to my system without making a minimal effort to get your broken mail server fixed is totally unreasonable. If the system administrator is not prepared to click on a URL to get their system removed from a black-list or if the user is unwilling to report the problem to the sysadmin then I will probably be unwilling to make any change to my system. The only exceptions to this rule are for clients, colleagues, and for people who use mail services that are large and unresponsive to users (IE the users don’t directly pay). I recently made a white-list entry for a large European ISP that is used by a Debian Developer for their work, as the ISP is known to be unresponsive to requests and mail related to Debian work is important to me I added a white-list entry. One thing I am planning to do is to document my anti-spam measures and then allow people the opportunity of suggesting new anti-spam measures that I haven’t tried yet if they want me to turn off any of my current protections. (*) I’m not aware of any big ISP that takes strong measures against spamming customers and customers whose computers are trojaned. I am aware of one having done it in the past, but I suspect that they may have ceased doing so after their brush with bankruptcy. I suspect that many ISPs simply rate-limit their customers connections to the outbound mail relays and hope that they don’t get enough infected customers at any time to get themselves listed as a spam source.

Martin F. Krafft: Init7 and Transtec please me

Init Seven has once again established themselves high on my ranking of awesome service providers. After battling and not resolving the problems with crap nVidia hardware, I was ready to return the server to Transtec, despite having invested a full day of work into it. Having a machine in a rack across town, with the looming danger of simple network traffic taking out the network card along with the bridged IPMI remote console (thus requiring me to head out to the colocation centre each time there was a problem) was just not going to justify the expense for the server. Init Seven connected a second switch port to my VLAN, which now allows me to hook the IPMI card directly to the LAN. This does not solve the problem with the sub-zero-quality crap manufactured by nVidia, but at least it makes it possible to resurrect the machine remotely, until the problem with the hardware has been addressed and dealt with by the forcedeth driver. And if that is not possible (due to nVidia pile of shit), then the last option is a separate network card attached to the riser card slot. In related news: Transtec was quick to proxy to the Supermicro s support (the motherboard manufacturer), and within a few hours, I had a newer forcedeth.c file. I compiled the driver, which seemed to handle larger packets just fine at first. Unfortunately, just as my hopes were up, the problems came back even with the driver from Supermicro. Back to start, do not collect any money. Regardless, I ve been impressed by Transtec s support level so far. Yes, I did purchase a five year express warranty extension, but it wasn t very expensive, definitely nowhere near the price for a real SLA. And yet, my requests to date have each been answered within a day at most, including such extravagant things as them providing doanloadable floppy images of the BIOS update, which Supermicro only distributes as Windows .exe file. Now if only they (and everyone else) would stop shipping nVidia hardware NP: AC/DC: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Martin F. Krafft: Healthy home-order food in Zurich

If you re looking to set up a business in Zurich but lack an idea, here s one almost guaranteed to be successful or well, at least it fills a niche: Healthy home-order food. I d be your first customer, and quite a regular one too, if you delivered to my door freshly cooked, (ethnically) diverse meals with lots of vegetables, at reasonable prices, of course. I m happy to cook fancy dishes for guests, but cooking for the purpose of having something enjoyable to eat alone is just not my thing at all. I sometimes wish it were And before you wonder about my quest for healthy foods: yes, I wouldn t mind losing a bit of weight, but I am certainly not crazy about it. It s more that I ve simply developed a strong liking for vegetables, and quite like not suffering from a heavy stomach after a meal. NP: AC/DC: Ballbreaker

Ross Burton: SSH Tip Of The Day

Do you regularly ssh into machines which have dynamic IP addresses, and get really annoyed with OpenSSH warning that the IP's key doesn't match the host key? I certainly do, with machines announce their names using mDNS and a DHCP server in my router. Today I finally checked the documentation and found out how to skip this check. The magic option is CheckHostIP, which you can set in .ssh/config on a per-host level. I've got this in my config:

Host *.local
  CheckHostIP no

Now all machines I ssh into using a .local domain won't have their IP's key checked against the host key, because the IP is dynamic. Sorted! NP: Music Like Amon Tobin, Last.fm

10 December 2008

Gunnar Wolf: githubredir.debian.net - Delivering .tar.gz from Github tags

There is quite a bit of software whose upstream authors decide that, as they are already using Git for development, the main distribution channel should be GitHub - This allows, yes, for quite a bit of flexibility, which many authors have taken advantage of. So, I just registered and set up http://githubredir.debian.net/ to make it easier for packagers to take advantage of it. Specifically, what does this redirector make? Given that GitHub allows for downloading as a .zip or as a .tar.gz any given commit, it suddenly becomes enough to git tag with a version number, and GitHub magically makes that version available for download. Which is sweet! Sometimes it is a bit problematic, though, to follow their format. Github gives a listing of the tags for each particular prooject, and each of those tags has a download page, with both archiving formats. I won't go into too much detail here - Thing is, going over several pages becomes painful for Debian's uscan, widely used for various of our QA processes. There are other implemented redirectors, such as the one used for SourceForge. This redirector is mainly meant to be consumed by Debian's uscan. Anybody who finds this system useful can freely use it, although you might be better served by the rich, official GitHub.com interface. Anyway - Enough repeating what I said on the http://githubredir.debian.net/ base page. Find it useful? Go ahead and use it!

Erich Schubert: Four months in job review

I've been at my new job for almost four months now. After I had completed my degree, my advisors at the university quickly offered me a position. When I heard back e.g. from Google where I had submitted an application, I had already started my new job.
So from my current point of view it was the best thing to do:

Challenge. It's a total brain job, which makes it lots of fun. I'm not fixing peoples computers or broken PHP hacks, but I'm bending my mind on new algorithms pushing the limits of science. Before I started I was like "actually I'd like to make new things work for everybody, get them out into to wild". But I can be just as happy with getting things work in a lab context, actually.
Learning. I keep on learning. Not only on the science level, but writing articles, advising people for their thesis, teaching, ... they all contribute to personality.
People. The colleagues and my "boss" are fantastic. No infighting, competitions for certain positions or so.
Little stress. University work is quite regulated, but that also means it basically is a 9-to-6 job. In internet startups, consulting, IT administration, etc. you often have irregular working hours, 24h standby and such things. Here I can reliably plan my evenings (dancing!) and I'm not taking my work home, but when I'm home all I have to do is relax for the next day. Of course there is the occasional exception when a conference deadline is coming up.
Reasonable deadlines. Conference deadlines are different than product deadlines. They're just there, but not pushed in a way to make them unachievable without overtime.
Payment. It's regulated, so it's not as much as the high tech companies would pay or I could probably earn freelance, but it's reliable and definitely enough for me to live on (I don't spend much anyway, I don't have expensive hobbys. So I end up saving a large share of it.)
Degree. In three years, I should end up with a PhD degree.
Office. The university offices are good, and centrally located. We can get some good food nearby, have a nice huge park, a Biergarten, ...

Lucas Nussbaum: Debian on a Dell E4300

I received a new laptop, a Dell Latitude E4300. I was a bit anxious with its level of support on Linux, because it only recently started being shipping, and it s full of recent Intel hardware. Also, with lenny being frozen for 5 months, we are currently a bit behind regarding hardware support. I installed lenny on it, as I usually run testing+APT pinning. What I m describing here is what is unsupported in lenny out of the box. Wireless:
Needs a 2.6.27 kernel (iwlagn driver), Lenny only has 2.6.26. Downloaded from the kernel team s unofficial repo. Firmware isn t packaged in Debian (firmware-iwlwifi needs an update). Needed to download it from Intel. Graphics:
Intel device, unsupported with lenny s driver (but vesa works surprisingly well, oI only noticed that I was using vesa when I tried to play a video and found out I had no xv support).
Works with experimental s Xorg and the experimental intel driver, but that Xorg needs some polishing. The evdev driver now handles all inputs, so the keymap has to be configured differently (as usual, #debian-x people were very helpful). Suspend/Resume:
Works out of the box using pm-utils. No need for quirks. All in all, it was easier than I expected, and support will probably be perfect for lenny+1/2 ;)

Julien Danjou: telak in awesome

Some years ago I wrote a little tool called telak in order to display remote images on my wallpaper and have them updated regularly. Yesterday, as a challenge, I rewrote this as an awesome module, in Lua using wget. I simply used a wibox and a widget from awesome API to display the images. It's called telak, as the original, and is in the awesome next git branch, which will be the 3.2 version of my favorite window manager.

David Welton: Slicehost vs Linode

Since hosting is the major expense for DedaSys LLC, and obviously a critical part of much of what I do, getting the right one is very important. Naturally, "the right one" for me may not be the right one for everyone. I am a fair sysadmin for small numbers of machines, so I don't mind doing that myself - I don't need, nor want to pay for hand holding.

Since this post has become fairly popular, I am going to link to my Linode affiliate URL if you'd like to sign up with Linode - thanks! Other than running my sites there, I have no other affiliation with Linode. And, if you're more a fan of Slicehost, here is my referral page on Slicehost.

I recently moved everything over to Slicehost on the recommendations of friends, and am so far fairly happy with the experience. It's cheaper, simpler, and more flexible than Layered Tech was. To boot, I also like the fact that Slicehost is run out of St. Louis, Missouri, rather than some really expensive tech center like San Francisco or Boston. Hosting is basically a commodity, and much like you wouldn't want to put a factory in San Francisco, you don't want your hosting their either. However, I discovered something annoying about Slicehost: they use x86_64 servers, which, per se, doesn't really matter to me - I use open source code that can run on any number of architectures. The problem is that this particular architecture uses more memory than plain old x86. Significantly more. My Layered Tech server with 1 gig of memory was hitting the swap space a bit, but the same code on a slice was swapping quite heavily, despite the fact that I'd moved PostgreSQL off to its own slice. Since I pretty much exclusively run Rails, I decided to look into Phusion's "Ruby Enterprise Edition", which is basically just some nice hacking on Ruby's garbage collection mechanism. What they've done is nice, and I may end up using it, but ultimately it's buying me space that I would also gain from simply moving back to x86. With that in mind, I decided to take another look at what appears to be emerging as one of Slicehost's main competitors, Linode, who *do* use x86 servers. Here are my results, which are admittedly not all that scientific, but what the heck - you're getting them for free, and they were pretty quick to whip up. Service, Support, Setup But before we begin with the numbers, I want to add a few words of caution. One of the big things about hosting, to me at least, is how they deal with unexpected random negative events. Connections going down, disk breakage, DoS attacks, and so on. It's really hard to get an idea of just what sort of people you're dealing with until you've "ridden the river together". I don't really know what sort of response times, uptime, and all that either Slicehost or Linode have, so there are potentially some big intangibles there that are not quite as easy to draw pretty charts for. In terms of the console/setup/management tools, I liked Slicehost's simplicity more - Linode gives you more options, but they're a bit fiddly and cluttered feeling at times. For instance, Linode lets you pick how much swap space to give your disk image, but doesn't include a bit of javascript to balance out the swap and regular partitions, so that if you type in a larger swap number, you have to do the math and subtract that from the other number. Annoying, but not a big deal. Linode lets you pick various data centers in the US (no Europe, yet). Slicehost gives you the option to do backups of your disk images, which is nice, and something that Linode lacks. Comparing plans Since I'm interested in comparing hardware and machines I actually have access to, here are the plans I am currently signed up with, and the salient numbers:

	Slicehost 1024	Slicehost 512	Linode 720
Memory	1024	512	720
Bandwidth	400	200	400
Disk	40	20	24
Cost	70	38	39.95

Memory / Dollar:

Bandwidth / Dollar:

Disk / Dollar:

Linode mostly comes out ahead, but not by that much, except for bandwidth. However, let's take a crude look at x86_64 vs x86 memory usage. First, ./script/console (a Rails console) for the same code base on two different machines, showing the virtual memory size (VSZ) and resident set size (RSS):

And just to look at something else that's a bit smaller, I ran the following script:

puts File.open("/proc/self/status", "r").read

And got the following data:

Being charitable with those numbers, we get x86 taking up 77% the memory that x86_64 does. So let's add that to our comparison of how much memory you're getting per dollar on Slicehost and Linode:

Wow! That's a fairly significant difference. Performance That's most of what we can glean from published numbers, and running a few simple experiments. However, there's another factor that's important: performance. "Virtual Private Server" systems, or simply VPS's, got a bad name in the past because they were "overbooked" - too many virtual servers competing for the same CPU resources on one machine. Slicehost and Linode both look like they want to avoid that kind of bad reputation, and so far all the systems I have used have felt snappy and responsive. Now here's where we get really unscientific... I decided to try and do something, even if it wasn't much, to get some kind of objective measurement of what kind of CPU I was getting on the machines. This is really unscientific, because the machines do have other duties (I don't have the cash, time or inclination to set up random servers just for testing), and of course, who knows what else is sharing the computer with my systems: if you get a relatively unused computer, you can apparently pick up extra cycles for yourself, over and above your guaranteed minimum. But c'est la vie, and so I decided to do some numbers anyway. I picked a C implementation of mandelbrot from the language shootout more or less "for the hell of it" (I'm going to keep repeating "unscientific" and invite someone to do better tests than I have). I ran this code every 20 minutes for a couple days, and then averaged out the run times:

As expected, the higher power Slicehost 1024 machine wins out in terms of raw speed (less time is better), but not by that much over the Linode system. Indeed, when we factor in the relative prices, Linode comes out ahead, again:

So it looks like we're not paying a CPU penalty for having more memory, bandwidth, disk, etc... Notes

Nothing in these statistics is indicative of future directions that both Linode and Slicehost might take. Slicehost was recently acquired by Rackspace, and that could have effects on the service they provide. Maybe one or both will come under financial pressure and start "overbooking" their servers.
The spreadsheet I used is available via Google docs, for the curious. I did most of the work in OpenOffice, and then uploaded it though, because working with the web spreadsheet was kind of painful. Unfortunately, you can't select non-contiguous data ranges in the Google spreadsheet, so the labels are interspersed with the data. Yuck. Also, Google docs doesn't handle 'time' values nicely, which is what the performance data was originally. The spreadsheet is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pVDeZF6ire2YwATBYb4mBKQ
The standard deviation on the processing times is higher for both slices than the linode system. Not quite sure what that means in terms of what's going on under the hood, but I thought it was interesting.

MJ Ray: Environmental Policies and Computing

I’ve not written about this for a while, but I’ve just started seeing Apple’s Greenwash adverts, so I went and found the latest Greenpeace electronics report which says:

“Apple’s score increases slightly to 4.3 points, but the company drops to 14th position. Apple scores well for putting products on the market whose key components are free of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and PVC vinyl plastic [...] All Apple products should be free of these substances by the end of 2008, which will challenge other PC makers to follow their lead. [...] Apple scores poorly on most e-waste criteria, except for reporting a recycling rate in 2006 of 18% as a percentage of sales 7 years ago. It does slightly better on energy criteria for disclosing the carbon footprint of every model of product although not exactly what is being evaluated in the criterion.”

I feel that it’s hard to push the large electronics companies by direct action and purchasing decisions (although I will continue to try). Regulations must be introduced too and now the EC has issued a Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy Efficiency [TreeHugger report]. TTLLP has been slowly getting out of data centres for the last few years - between the toxic e-waste in servers and rising energy costs, with most of our competitors ignoring both of them, it was too hard to do the right thing and be profitable. I think the market is ready for a step-change to green data centres and we can’t do that alone. Expect a new TTLLP-branded venture early next year… Finally, tomorrow, on 11 December, our governments will decide Europe’s response to climate change for the next 12 years. Take 2 minutes to tell them to keep global warming below 2 C.

9 December 2008

Bastian Venthur: Lenny s release date III

Two months since my last status update of my initial guess for Lenny s release date, time for an update: My guess for Lenny's release III

I don t know what the current official release target for Lenny is, but I still think we re heading towards Spring/Summer 2009. The last related mail on -devel-announce is from October 2008 from Alexander who hopes that we ll release Lenny at least by the end of 2008. I ve read an article with an interview with Steve McIntyre somewhere on The Register where he said:

Bastian s being a little bit pessimistic based on the data he s looking at, but as far as I know, he hasn t spoken to any of the release team. As far as Lenny goes, we re almost there, he told The Register.

That interview was in the beginning of October. It doesn t bother me too much, that we release late. What bothers me is that we don t correct our estimated release dates even when it s obvious that there is no way we will release in time. It s really sad that we keep our users in the dark about the fact that we can t release in time until it s already too late. I believe many users would appreciate if we d honestly say: We don t know when we release, but currently we have x RC bugs open and looking at the last releases we think it will take roughly n months to fix them and release, instead of the good old We release when it s ready . Another important point: Unstable is frozen for almost five months now. If you buy a current laptop, chances are hight that it might not fully work with Debian bleeding edge unstable, since it s horrible outdated. Some of the newer stuff can be obtained from experimental if you re brave enough, but if you re not, unstable is getting more and more unattractive compared to other distribution s current versions. This is really something we should try to fix after we released Lenny.

8 December 2008

David Welton: OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError (hostname was not match with the server certificate)

I got this error in one of my Rails apps that I migrated to 2.2. It occurs when you try and send mail with ActionMailer, which makes it especially annoying because the exception notifications I normally receive when there is a problem weren't being sent! I wasn't able to track down the root cause of the problem - apparently something about an SSL certificate not being there or not being right, but here's the change that causes ActionMailer to fool around with SSL mail: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/732c724df61bc8b780dc42817625b25a321908e4 I was able to "correct" the problem (or at least get things working again) by commenting out this line of code:

smtp.enable_starttls_auto if smtp.respond_to?(:enable_starttls_auto)

Perhaps it should be a configuration option, or there should be better error detection with regards to the certificate. If anyone comes up with a nicer answer, leave a comment, but in the meantime, I thought I'd post my quick and dirty fix.

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