Search Results: "ana"

9 February 2010

Martin F. Krafft: Baffling Exchange

I found out yesterday that my university s Microsoft Exchange Server account stopped forwarding my mail on 8 December 2009. As a result, mail accumulated there and remained unseen. Dear examiners, paper authors, supervisors, sponsors, participants, and peers who responded to my calls and cries related to my PhD thesis. I am terribly sorry that you were subjected to this. You replied usually within a few days, but I still sent you reminder after reminder in the weeks to follow. You must have thought that I was a real dork. Please forgive me. I really appreciate your patience! I filed a ticket with my university s IT service provider, which got closed the next day with it should now work again . That wasn t going to cut it for me, so I reopened the ticket, asking for an explanation. Next, I received an apology with a bit of speculation. After a bit of research, it seems that the reason was to be found in the inconsistency of being an external staff member (i.e. an e-mail address outside of the Active Directory domain), but still having an account on the server. On 8 December 2009, the server was upgraded with a service pack. This caused Exchange to go a little manic on the housekeeping. After all, why would anyone ever want to forward their e-mail elsewhere, and still have an account? Well, I certainly don t want an account, and yet I have to have one: Microsoft has bought their ways into the university and spread their germs all across, I need credentials to be able to access shared files, print, browse the library, or search the phone book. However, considering that UL s Outlook Web Access instance does not let users of decent browsers search their mailboxes (a premium feature reserved for users of Internet Exploder), one cannot manipulate more than a page-full of e-mails at a time, bounce messages, or do many of the other operations that make dealing with large amounts of e-mail possible, and because Exchange mail if it doesn t get lost in the first place sucks in so many other ways, I certainly prefer my mail to be handled by a real mail server with a proper mail filter (writeup in progress). Maybe the Exchange service pack was simply designed to get rid of outcasts like me who don t buy into the low-Microsoft-quality vendor lock-in? We ll never know, thanks to the proprietarity of their software (and the fact that the university service provider apparently does not keep logs of changes). NP: AC/DC: Back in Black

Holger Levsen: a PR desaster

I envisioned to write a happy blog post how we managed to finally release Debian Edu 5.0.4+edu0...

Something I was really proud about and which I will probably be proud again one day.

For now I can just say, that I now have learned that proper release management needs to include release announcement release management.

Oh well. Hope you enjoy Debian Edu 5.0.4+edu0!

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - issue 20

RCBW - #20 With a couple of days of delay, here are this last week squashes, by yours truly: The delay is due to FOSDEM, it's hard to squash bugs when you are: (1) having fun (best FOSDEM ever, if you ask me), (2) connected with very poor network connectivity (let's say: FOSDEM-quality network). Also, there are just 6 squashes, but last week there were 8, so ... :-) (I know, I suck). Among the main highlights of the week, I just want to cite Mehdi Dogguy: he was with me at JFLA 2010 last week and I've managed to grab him into the "RCBW tunnel". With a handful of well-targeted NMUs, he has fixed about 10 RC bugs in the few days of the conference. He is too shy to blog about that, but since I'm evil, I'm disclosing it here :-P Welcome on board, Mehdi! (now you're doomed: you must continue doing that!)

8 February 2010

Stefano Zacchiroli: integrating Mutt with Org-mode

remember Mutt's mail in Org-mode and jump back to them As already anticipated, I've been implementing my own Getting Things Done work flow. This post documents one of its main bricks: the integration between Mutt and Org-mode. As a geek, my main incoming stream of TODO items and information in general is email. As emails hit my INBOX, I either deal with them immediately (reply, archive, delete) or I need to store them elsewhere, possibly adding extra information such as a deadline, a personal note, the associated next action, the context in which it is actionable, etc. This need of adding extra information is what defeats the usage of my mail client (Mutt) as a list manager (in the GTD sense), and that's where I plugged Org-mode in. My main goals are:
  1. create Org-mode notes from Mutt, referencing the current email, and possibly inlining some of its metadata (e.g. subject, sender)
  2. quickly retrieve referenced emails from Org-mode notes; ideally that should happen in my usual email environment (i.e. Mutt), so that I can process the retrieved mail as usual (e.g. to inform the sender that I did something about it)
In fact, both would be straightforward to achieve if I were using some Emacs-based mail client such as Gnus, but I resist the Emacs operating system syndrome, and therefore I insist in using my beloved Mutt. Let's see how the two parts of the interaction between Mutt and Org-mode work. (1) Mutt Org-mode (there ...) The interaction from Mutt to Org-mode happens via org-protocol. Using it external applications can feed content to Org-mode note templates, which are then interactively edited (via emacsclient), and finally filed away. The Mutt glue macro from my ~/.muttrc is as follow: 
macro index \eR " ~/bin/remember-mail\n"
The remember-mail script is trivial: it parses the fed mail from STDIN (using a couple of legacy Perl modules) and then invokes org-protocol. The relevant configuration from my ~/.emacs is reported below; the comments explain the various parts: 
;; standard org <-> remember stuff, RTFM
(org-remember-insinuate)
(setq org-default-notes-file "~/org/gtd.org")
(setq org-remember-templates  ;; mail-specific note template, identified by "m"
      '(("Mail" ?m "* %?\n\n  Source: %u, %c\n  %i" nil)))
;; ensure that emacsclient will show just the note to be edited when invoked
;; from Mutt, and that it will shut down emacsclient once finished;
;; fallback to legacy behavior when not invoked via org-protocol.
(add-hook 'org-remember-mode-hook 'delete-other-windows)
(setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)
(defadvice org-remember-finalize (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
  "Delete frame at remember finalization"
  (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
     (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
(defadvice org-remember-kill (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
  "Delete frame at remember abort"
  (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
     (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
(defadvice org-protocol-remember (before set-org-protocol-flag activate)
  (setq my-org-protocol-flag t))
The result is that when you hit ESC-R in Mutt, emacsclient will be fired up in place presenting a note template that already contains relevant mail information (date, subject, from) and lets you add extra information before going away. Additionally, the email message-id will be hidden in the note as a mutt: hyperlink with anchor text "mail". (2) Org-mode Mutt (... and back again) Going back means that clicking on a "mail" hyperlink within an Org-mode note should bring up a Mutt instance showing the original message, in its context (e.g. its own mailbox). Achieving that consists of 2 separate steps:
  1. looking up a specific message by Message-ID
  2. firing up Mutt on the looked up message
For the first part I use maildir-utils (AKA mu): a Xapian-based mail indexing tool, which nicely integrates with Mutt; check out my previous blog post on the subject for a sample setup. Using mu, Message-ID lookups are as simple as: 
zack@usha:~$ mu find -f p m:E1NbJad-0007x9-B7@ries.debian.org
/home/zack/Maildir/Debian.project/cur/1264883664_0.9472.usha,U=6320,FMD5=2284e927bb93d8a2ec434f5614dc04ba:2,S
Note: I'm relying upon maildir-utils version 0.6 or greater, for all presented scripts. For the second part I use the mutt-open script which fires upon a Mutt instance on the maildir containing a specific message, and then "hits" the appropriate keys to open the message and shutdown the sidebar (if desired). It is a nicely reusable script, which I've being using elsewhere too. The needed glue on the emacs side is just a function to invoke mutt-open in a brand new terminal, and its declaration as the handler for mutt: URLs. 
(defun open-mail-in-mutt (message)
  "Open a mail message in Mutt, using an external terminal.
Message can be specified either by a path pointing inside a
Maildir, or by Message-ID."
  (interactive "MPath or Message-ID: ")
  (shell-command
   (format "gnome-terminal -e \"%s %s\""
       (substitute-in-file-name "$HOME/bin/mutt-open") message)))
;; add support for "mutt:ID" links
(org-add-link-type "mutt" 'open-mail-in-mutt)
Voil ! Download Summary of scripts and configuration snippets discussed above:

Biella Coleman: Hacker and Troller as Trickster

trickster If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:
Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.
These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts Trickster Makes this World. Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:
I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on p. 9
At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain no. The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster. I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short. For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED). But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men. But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story. For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

Biella Coleman: Hacker and Troller as Trickster

trickster If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:
Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.
These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts Trickster Makes this World. Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:
I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on p. 9
At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain no. The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster. I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short. For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED). But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men. But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story. For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

Nico Golde: Two weeks with the n900

Two weeks ago I got myself a nokia n900 phone which is running maemo 5. So far I am quite happy with it, given that my previous phone was a sony erricsson p1i which is pretty crappy.
I've taken some notes about my experiences:

Those are the things I came up with while using the phone. The calling functionality and everything which is only phone related really works fine and the sound quality while talking to someone on the phone is also really good. So far I am really happy with the phone and I can only recommend it. I hope I'll have some time to port some applications to maemo soon.

Russell Coker: Security and Hiring

The main sources of information used when hiring someone are their CV, the interview, and references. CV The CV is written by the applicant or sometimes for the applicant. Naturally it says only good things, if a CV notes no skill in a particular area then it may be used to exclude an employee from consideration. But the trend is towards including a reference to anything that you touch, so someone who lists DBA experience may merely have done a couple of CREATE TABLE operations. Interview The interview is a good test of people skills but is often of little value in assessing technical skills. The interviewer asks questions such as do you know technology X and the applicant says I know that really well . If the company is hiring another person with similar skills to current employees then they can have their current employees sit in on the interview and ask difficult technical questions, but for unknown reasons managers often don t take that option and get no advice from their technical people. Also if the company is hiring someone with specialised skills (EG they are about to implement a new application and want to hire their first employee to work on it) then it may be impossible for them to assess the technical merit of answers. Probably the best use of the interview is to match answers with the CV, if the applicant doesn t appear to know the contents of their own CV then they should be rejected. The biggest problem with interviews is when the questions are all of the form do you know X . Someone who really knows it will say yes as will someone who doesn t know enough to realise the limits of their knowledge and such ignorant people vastly outnumber the skillful people. The real problem is that the people who are moderately skillful will lose out. If someone asks me about my MySQL skills I will tell them that I m not really good at it. Sure I ve run replicated servers with tens of thousands of users running 24*7, but that doesn t mean I m really good at it probably most people who will claim to be great at MySQL without qualification would have less experience than me. References Reference checks rely on an unknown person saying good things about the applicant. For starters there is the issue of the number of references which may not be representative of their employment history EG the applicant could use as a reference the one manager who didn t sack them. The next issue is that there is little incentive for the referee to be honest, most people are aware of instances where someone once worked for a friend and can rely on good references for the rest of their career. If a reference is inaccurate then there is no realistic opportunity for redress. Finally every reference check that I am aware of (checks where I have been the referee or the applicant) has involved the applicant giving the phone number of the referee to the hiring manager! The phone could be owned by a friend or relative of the applicant, so logically a good reference that is based on trusting the applicant to supply the phone number only proves that the applicant is either good or really bad. To make a reference check prove something the recruiter would at a minimum have to phone the number listed in the white-pages for the corporation that used to employ the applicant, asks to speak to the manager of the relevant department, and then gets a reference. Calling a mobile phone number that is supplied by the applicant (which seems to be the standard practice) is essentially trusting the applicant and trust is the root cause of most security problems! Really most of this ends up as trusting the applicant to provide honest evidence that they are trustworthy and believing that the applicant s technical knowledge is good enough to be correct when they say that their technical knowledge is good. It can fail spectacularly when someone isn t trustworthy enough to provide honest evidence of their integrity or when someone doesn t have the skills needed to know that their skills are lacking. As an aside, even if the reference is given accurately and in good faith it may still be misinterpreted. The fact that telephone references are exclusively relied on exacerbates this problem. Ideally references would be in writing with some way of proving their authenticity (maybe using phone verification of the accuracy of the written document). Solutions So how can we solve this? Some people believe that career based social networking software will solve the problems, but as usual I think that software doesn t magically solve human problems. The first challenge when trying to use social networking to solve the problem is to find someone on your friends list who has relevant knowledge, this may be viable in a small industry (EG when someone from bank A applies for work as bank B in the same city). The next issue is that of false friends . I m sure that I m not the only person who has been pressured to add people as friends on social networking sites, the non-computer social interactions really don t prepare people for saying no you are not my friend (apart from high-school I guess). With professional social networking sites there are further issues, if you are working on a client site and a manager demands that they be listed as one of your friends then what are you going to do? So it seems to me that the social networking sites are at best a helper for the gossip network. If you think that a friend of a friend from a social networking site might be able to help you then you first ask your friend if the person in question is really a friend, and if so are they one of the shifty pseudo-friends you only hang out with because their company pays good money. But the problem with the gossip network is that it s mostly secret and is therefore subject to settling vendettas, I ve heard of senior managers going out of their way to spread false stories about former employees to settle scores. The best solution I can think of is for someone who has a reputation to publicly stake it on the accuracy of their references. If I m going to give a reference then I would be happy to do so via a GPG signed email or a blog post. This doesn t mean that my references will always be correct, but it would show that I try to give good references.

7 February 2010

Marco d'Itri: Advances in networking for virtual machines

So far the networking of virtual machines has usually been managed by configuring a Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) in the host, i.e. the good old implementation of 802.1D in the Linux Kernel:
A Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) is a capability within a physical end station that supports local bridging between multiple virtual end stations and (optionally) the external bridging environment.
While this works well and in some cases is the best solution, in other setups performances or policy needs dictate that the traffic between virtual machines is forwarded to an external bridge (the Ethernet switch connected to the host) and back without having in the host a real bridge learning MAC addresses from its ports and implementing the STP. Enters the VEPA:
A Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA) is a capability within a physical end station that collaborates with an adjacent, external bridge to provide bridging support between multiple virtual end stations and external networks. The VEPA collaborates by forwarding all station-originated frames to the adjacent bridge for frame processing and frame relay (including "hairpin" forwarding) and by steering and replicating frames received from the VEPA uplink to the appropriate destinations.
Support for VEPAs has been added to Linux 2.6.33 with a simple change to the macvlan driver. The next step will be to use the macvtap driver (available in 2.6.34), which exposes a tap character device usable by kvm-qemu and "connected" to a macvlan-like interface.

6 February 2010

Cyril Brulebois: G-I, part 4

A picture is worth a thousand words: A slightly longer story follows, resuming from the previous episode, where Gtk seemed to be working. Making sure Gtk actually works Since the udebs are quite fat already, I decided to put the contents of the gtk2.0-examples package into a new revision of the new libgtk-x11-udeb package. gtk-demo was running fine (if one forgets that this demo application is really easier to deal with if one uses a window manager), although image handling was broken. Julien and I spent quite some time double-checking that the libpixbufloader-png.so plugin was present; that both previous DirectFB-based udeb and new x11-based udeb were very similar; that configuration was generated properly; we went so far as to include strace in the netboot image, and to check the configuration file was open() d, but the plugin was never to be even looked for. All this resulting in a Unrecognized file format message every time. Josselin, our Messiah, enlightened us: although Gtk was previously using some configuration files to determine which pixbufloader plugin to use, it still continues to access those files but relies on a MIME database in the end. Installing the host s /usr/share/mime/mime.cache database did the trick (we have a proper fix pending), and all of a sudden, we got image support (which is needed for the logo_installer.png displayed on top of every screen, as well as for some icons during the installation, like the final one). Tweaking d-i itself Julien took care of rootskel-gtk. It was mostly about: Another easy step was cdebconf. Mostly: search and destroy on the few bits using DirectFB. An interesting issue we had was that even though a proper cursor theme was installed and made the default, we only had a black cross as X pointer. That s where we learnt it s needed to manually set a cursor for the root window, which can be done this way: 
GdkCursor *cursor = gdk_cursor_new(GDK_LEFT_PTR);
gdk_window_set_cursor(gdk_get_default_root_window(), cursor);
gdk_cursor_unref(cursor);
Tweaking gtk2-engines was trivial, just a matter of building against the x11 flavour of Gtk instead of the directfb one. Some substitutions in debian/control and debian/rules, and that was done. Julien also took care of tweaking console-setup so that keyboard-configuration s and console-setup-udeb s postinst scripts call setxkbmap when $DISPLAY is set. Meaning we were able to replace kbd-chooser with console-setup-udeb, leading to a correct setting within X right after having selected the layout! Reverting d-i s r61645 (which disabled Gtk-based d-i images) was trivial (although while looking back, it was probably unnecessary), and after having messed around with the packages lists (there s a lot of local udebs at this point), especially to add some fonts, we managed to get an image which seems to work fine (at least in my VirtualBox environment). I tried Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and French installations, and all of them seem to work fine (installed systems were bootable after an installation in the selected language) while issues were limited to some rendering or translation glitches, which didn t seem critical at all. Next steps Since there were some iterations, and since the trial-and-error approach was chosen, the first goal is to generate clean patches against all modified packages, and make sure a single walk through all packages in a clean chroot is sufficient to generate a working d-i image again. Once that done, which should probably considered (at least, I hope!) quite a good base already, the idea is to look into the various udebs to see whether there are some parts that could be disabled (maybe introducing a trimmed-down flavour especially for the udeb in some non-flavoured-yet libraries), so as to reduce the size of the resulting image. In the meanwhile, one can fetch the current hand-built netboot image by browsing http://people.debian.org/~kibi/di-x11/. It s only available for amd64, and weights 23MB. There s a sha256sum as well as a detached GPG signature in the same directory.

5 February 2010

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R / Finance 2010 Open for Registration

The annoucement below went out to R-SIG-Finance earlier today. For information is as usual the the R / Finance 2010 page:
Now open for registrations: R / Finance 2010: Applied Finance with R
April 16 and 17, 2010
Chicago, IL, USA
The second annual R / Finance conference for applied finance using R, the premier free software system for statistical computation and graphics, will be held this spring in Chicago, IL, USA on Friday April 16 and Saturday April 17. Building on the success of the inaugural R / Finance 2009 event, this two-day conference will cover topics as diverse as portfolio theory, time-series analysis, as well as advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management and trading. Invited keynote presentations by Bernhard Pfaff, Ralph Vince, Mark Wildi and Achim Zeileis are complemented by over twenty talks (both full-length and 'lightning') selected from the submissions. Four optional tutorials are also offered on Friday April 16. R / Finance 2010 is organized by a local group of R package authors and community contributors, and hosted by the International Center for Futures and Derivatives (ICFD) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Conference registration is now open. Special advanced registration pricing is available, as well as discounted pricing for academic and student registrations. More details and registration information can be found at the website at
http://www.RinFinance.com
For the program committee:
Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, John Miller,
Brian Peterson, Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan
See you in Chicago in April!

Clint Adams: Who needs free firmware?

http://bugzilla.intellinuxwireless.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1585

Marco T&uacute;lio Gontijo e Silva: Using sup-mail


Some time ago I wanted some features that evolution wouldn t give to me, such as a good user experience without using the mouse, and the possibility to use an external editor for writing e-mails. I always liked gmail web interface, but I don t like using software that I can t change or see the code, so I wanted threaded view, but I was not with a very high expectative of finding it, since I ve never seen it anywhere else. I tried icedove, sylpheed, claws and mutt, but none of them was good enough for me. I couldn t use very well icedove, sylpheed and claws only with the keyboard, and mutt wouldn t show me a list of folders with how many unread messages there was in each of them. mutt-patched tries to do this, but the number of messages aren t updated automatically. So I kept with evolution. At that time, I even tried evolution from experimental, which contained a plugin to use an external editor. The result was that I got even more crashes, and the external editor was not very nice. I gave up about it when I had to remove totem because of broken dependencies with the evolution from experimental. Some days ago Rafael (Pre ) Cunha de Almeida told me that he heard of this sup, and tried using it, but didn t like very much, because it was not good for accessing the mail from two different machines. As I use only my notebook most of the time, I decided to try it out. And i m liking it: it s mostly like gmail, but with a very good feature I don t remember seeing in gmail: you can kill a thread, and even if more mail arrives from that thread, it ll not be shown in your inbox. Other thing I liked about it is that it s highly customizable in Ruby, which made me feel a little bit like in XMonad. The first problem I found on it was the handling of UTF-8. I found this bug about it, and installed the recommended package, so it worked. I hope this correction, or the better one suggested here, get to Debian. I took a look at the Hooks page on the sup wiki, and used the fetchmail suggestion. I noticed that the code that was there in the time didn t worked here (maybe a bashism?):
fetchmail >& /dev/null
 So I replaced it in the wiki with:
fetchmail 2>&1 > /dev/null
 which worked here. I wanted to create a new binding, to kill the thread, kill the buffer, and move to the next message in thread-view-mode, so I tried some possibilities without success, until I got to this, with the help of hyperbolis@#sup@irc.freenode.net:
class Redwood::ThreadViewMode
@@keymaps[self].add :kill_and_next,
"Kill this thread, kill buffer, and view next", '&'
def kill_and_next; kill_and_then :next end
def kill_and_then op
dispatch op do
multi_kill [@thread]
end
end # From lib/modes/thread-index-mode.rb
## m-m-m-m-MULTI-KILL
def multi_kill threads
UndoManager.register killing # threads.size.pluralize thread do
threads.each do t
t.remove_label :killed
add_or_unhide t.first
Index.save_thread t
end
regen_text
end threads.each do t
t.apply_label :killed
# hide_thread t
end regen_text
BufferManager.flash # threads.size.pluralize thread killed.
threads.each t Index.save_thread t
end
end This is the content of the file ~/.sup/hooks/startup.rb. I copied a function from the source code of sup, commenting one line that was relative to that context.

4 February 2010

Brandon Holtsclaw: More Women in Management, the More Profitable the Company

According to an article in theWashington Post, Weekly Edition, 9 by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, companies that employ more women in upper level management are more profitable than those that rely heavily on male talent to run their businesses.

This exciting (but not surprising) news is not limited to the United States, but is true throughout the world.

And it s not only one study, but at least half a dozen, from a broad spectrum of organizations such as Columbia University, McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs and Pepperdine University, that document a clear relationship between women in senior management and corporate financial success. By all measures, more women in your company means better performance.

One of the points made in the Washington Post article was that men may naturally be more prone to risk taking and competition (thanks to the hormone testosterone), but women are better collaborators and better at achieving long-term results.

So men, if you want your businesses to flourish, hire and promote more qualified women. The results are in, the statistics speak for themselves. Men are the hares and women are the tortoises, who will win the race steady and slow. <script class="owbutton" src="http://onlywire.com/button" title="More Women in Management, the More Profitable the Company" type="text/javascript" url="http://www.imbrandon.com/2010/02/04/more-women-in-management-the-more-profitable-the-company/"></script>

Mike Hommey: xulrunner 1.9.1.6-2 diff stats

As part of preparing xulrunner 1.9.2 (which would lead to Iceweasel 3.6), I have gone through all the patches currently applied to the latest xulrunner release, to keep track of what should be upstreamed, what needed feedback, what patches I needed to update in upstream bugzilla, etc. As I have talked about our differences with upstream on a few occasions already, and as I was doing this grunt work anyway, I thought it would be nice to make the results public. First, a few reference numbers (excluding changes to generated configure files): A few observations on the above data: The latter used to be true, but is not anymore: xulrunner 1.9.1.6-2 added a lot of changes and is now up to: 98 files changed, 1107 insertions(+), 517 deletions(-). What happened ? will you ask me. A lot happened: the test suite, attempts at correctly installing C++ headers and IDL files, bug fixes. Work has also been done such that make clean/distclean doesn t leave stuff around and that xulrunner can be properly built twice in a row. Differences between 1.9.1.6-1 and 1.9.1.6-2 look like this: 31 files changed, 341 insertions(+), 167 deletions(-). Some were stolen from bugzilla (13 files changed, 162 insertions(+), 70 deletions(-)): Many others were sent: A few others were filed without a patch, as I felt a proper upstreamable patch needed discussion (3 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)): A few changes are related to the way we build and how we run the test suite (5 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)): Finally, a few were related to the Debian changes history (2 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-)): Going through the rest of the changes between upstream and the latest Debian release, we can split in 5 categories of changes:
Those that were picked from upstream, or sent and eventually applied in 1.9.2 or trunk (12 files changed, 68 insertions(+), 41 deletions(-)): Those that were picked from bugzilla or sent there, but are not applied upstream for various reasons (29 files changed, 138 insertions(+), 209 deletions(-)): Those that were reported but for which I wanted feedback for a proper fix, yet a patch was applied in Debian because this was necessary (6 files changed, 22 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)): Those that are yet to be sent to bugzilla (15 files changed, 111 insertions(+), 54 deletions(-)): And finally, the changes that are either Debian specific or not deemed upstreamable (30 files changed, 460 insertions(+), 77 deletions(-) ; this can sound huge, but see the details below): Note, the numbers in the various diff stats obviously don t add up, since some changes overlap. All that information doesn t account the few additional components added in debian/filemonitor and debian/extra-stuff, that account for nearly 600 lines (excluding licensing boilerplate), but I ll talk about these in another post. This analysis also helped spotting another harmless merge error (the first one was spotted a few weeks ago and just left the enable-system-lcms around, without any effect): a variable replacement in a Makefile that doesn t have any effect, since the 2 variables have the same value. Only a pointless 1 line change.

Andrew Pollock: [geek] On trying to buy a 19 inch rack

The first time we looked at this condo that we ended up buying, I looked at the cupboard under the stairs, and could visualise a small 19 inch rack in the lower part of it, with all of my computer gear in it. When we got structured cabling installed, I had the CAT-6 cabling terminated onto a basic 19 inch patch panel, with the intent of mounting this in a rack. Then it became a case of trying to find a rack. My favourite junk shop, Weird Stuff, didn't have anything that wasn't full height, so I started looking around online. There's certainly a lot of variance in price. I settled on a 26U Intellinet rack from New Tech, because based on the dimensions on the website, it would fit in the space I had in mind. When we assembled it, it became obvious that the dimensions quoted were the inside dimensions and not the outside dimensions, and it was about 4 centimetres too tall. In hindsight, I should have figured that out. 26 x 1.75 is 45.5. This is where I must give a shout out to New Tech. Sarah called them up, explained the situation, and they agreed to take the rack back, and sent us some shipping labels to ship it back. We managed to find a more simple rack, a 20U Middle Atlantic, which arrived today, and was significantly easier to put together. The only downside: no rear mounting holes. I don't think it'll be a huge problem, though. All I'm planning on mounting in the immediate future are the patch panel, some sort of cable management, a Catalyst switch, and a power strip. At some point in the future, once we stop spending money hand over fist, I'll look at getting a rack mountable server to replace the hodge podge of computers I'm currently running. What I wish we'd discovered about two days ago, was the Lack Rack. This would have been perfect (and so much cheaper).

3 February 2010

Steve Kemp: Revenge is not good. Once you're done. Believe me.

I was interested to see Adnan Hodzic discuss life without evolution in the GNOME environment recently. I too use GNOME as my desktop environment (I sometimes toy with various tiling window managers before getting annoyed at something or other). My solution to the GNOME problem is to purge the gnome-desktop-environment package and instead my own local package gnome-desktop-minimal. This package is a meta-package which includes a smaller selection of GNOME packages, notably ignoring several that the gnome-core package would pull in such as eog - why install that when I prefer qiv or feh? If I believed we could agree on precisely which packages to include I would submit a bug to the gnome team "Please provide gnome-desktop-minimal" or similar. Still I suspect individual biases/preferences will make such a suggestion contentious at best and impossible to satisfy at worst. ObTitle: L on

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl: Dear lazyweb, I have problem understanding ACLs, maybe you can help me?

It was easy to understand how to activate and set ACLs and I also understood the mask, which defines the maximum rights a user might get through ACLs. However, what I don't understand is, why this mask is dynamically calculated and set with every chmod (or equivalent) access... Perhaps I should describe my problem a bit more: For our (web-) developers Linux workstations I need to grant them some additional rights to the configuration files. As they always get no tasks and need to install new software (solved via sudo) and change the configuration, I so far thought the easiest would be to grant them write privileges on /etc (safe some special files like /etc/shadow of course). So I thought I could use ACLs to grant them rwx-privileges. Using default-ACLs (which are inherited when creating new files) it would be easy, if they e.g. install an own Apache web server, as the new directory and the new files inherit the default ACL. However, due to the mask being set to r-x, our developers still don't get write permission on /etc/apache2/foo. I tried to set a default mask, too, which seems to be inherited. But as soon as the package management does the equivalent of chmod 740 the mask gets recalculated and my ACLs don't work any more. Appearently, ACLs are not the solution to my problem :( But how do I solve my problem? And why is the mask always recalculated?

Barry Hawkins: The Agile Business Analyst

Agile Business Analysts? I have recently been fleshing out my thoughts on the role of business analysts in an Agile team. This is something I have historically addressed on a case-by-case basis with clients, but when thinking about it last week at a client site, I realized that I do have a general take on how the role and responsibilities of a business analyst change when a group moves to using an Agile process. Per the usual, I ll be using Scrum as the example process where needed. The Classical Roles Historically the business analyst has had two primary roles. In a process where cross-functional communication and collaboration are minimized, these roles are essential. What little communication that takes place between the business and the software development teams purporting to serve them passes almost exclusively through one or more business analysts. I view the business analyst in a phased development approach as having two roles; Translator and Gatekeeper. The Translator The business analyst is primarily tasked with taking the needs of the business and translating them into a written document that is then handed to the software developers and testers. This role s necessity is based upon some fundamental assumptions. First, programmers and testers are on the whole, too socially retarded to actually talk to the business persons and find out what they want. Second, the business is primarily viewed as being unable to focus its thought long enough to tell the programmers and testers what they need. Since a key value of an Agile approach to software development is to have individuals and their interactions be the driving force rather than processes an tools (see The Agile Manifesto), the obliteration of this role is a primary objective. The Gatekeeper Business analysts are also viewed the gatekeepers for requirements in classical, phased software process approaches. This is a somewhat unfair role, since they rarely have the authority to prevent business or technology changes, like a meter maid trying to stop an armed terrorist. It s even more unnatural since change always happens, so it s like the meter maid being assigned to an anti-terrorist unit with no additional training, authority, or weapons. The Agile Roles Some of the more extreme practitioners of Agile methodologies say that business analysts have no role in an Agile team. I disagree, provided the role of the business analyst is allowed to evolve. The roles I ve seen them take on as valuable members of an Agile team are Facilitator, Historian, and Journalist. The Facilitator A high degree of collaboration and interaction take place between business and technology in Agile Software Development. The business analyst can serve a critical need in these interactions, facilitating communication between business and technology and making sure that critical areas are being covered in an interaction. This can be a more fulfilling experience for an analyst, since they often talk to one side, then go to other to pass on the information, all the while thinking, Man, this would be simpler if you were both in the room with me at the same time. The Historian The business analyst s documentation skill is excellent for capturing significant information that often gets lost in a team of purely technical people. I have seen some great uses of business analysts in this area. One is to document the system that the team actually builds (not the big, up-front imagined system that is covered in a phased design stage). Another is capturing key technological and architectural decisions and the context in which they were made, so that when a group revisits certain items asking, Why in the world did we decide to do that? , they have the means to be reminded or informed why a particular path was chosen. The Journalist The business analyst can also be the team s journalist, making sure the latest information makes it out to all interested parties. One creative approach I ve seen at a client site is a business analyst who has a project blog. He posts entries after each meeting between the business and technology, documenting what new user stories were created (even scans in the story cards!), a summary of the discussions held, and documents any key decisions that might have been made. Oh, and he provides an excellent executive summary at the top that s suitable for anyone s review, right up to the CEO. Tell me you wouldn t love to have that guy in your Agile team.

1 February 2010

Debian News: Brief updates: noteworthy updates, X.org, KDE and mini-Debconf in Panama

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