This past weekend I did the absolutely insane and attended a wedding and an ordination in Vancouver, without taking any time off of work. I've finished two weeks at the new job (and am loving it! I'll post more when I have something more than "done a bunch of classes, learned confidential pieces of Google knowledge, ate great food") and didn't want to go to my boss and ask for time off in the first month.

So, Friday night, 9pm, caught flight from SFO to SEA, rented car. We were sitting in Heather's room at 4am chatting away, slowly passing out. Next day, up at 9, go visit Jamu, sort out suit rental, go for lunch, back to his moms to get dressed. I hope to link to a wedding album sometime in here. He got married by the paperclip behind the Planetarium in Vanier park. There were 4 weddings that I saw there, all peacefully contending for the various views and trying to stay out of one another's photos. =) Saturday evening, the DJ was great. We tried an experiment to see if we could leave Leif with Sandy, and whether the solid foods would be enough for a few hours. He made it a couple of hours, and then joined us at the dance, being happier knowing that we were around. It turns out Leif likes dancing! I was a little worried about the volume, and at various times several of us asked the DJ to turn it down when the music was creeping louder. It was also fun to see a whole pile of friend that I haven't seen in something like 10 years and see how we've all changed. Thanks to Facebook, at least we didn't have to completely rehash the last decade. =)

I think we turned in at 1 or 2. The next day, up at 10:30 so that we could pickup the van, pickup Katy, pickup our mail, go to the Naam to meet Ernie, Janet, and Anika, drop off the suit, pick up a snack, go to MEC, drop off Katy, and then head to the Vancouver Unitarian Church to see Laura's ordination and meet Jon.

Laura's ordination was the most amazing that I've been to. Her ministry is centered around the Faithful Fools, and the people that she's touched and been mentored by were woven throughout the ceremony. I was invited to play the recorder, so I did the last part of the prelude, and played along with the choir for "Rise up, oh flame". People were wearing silly hats, there were stories, and tears, and another pile of people that I haven't seen in ages from when I was a member at that church. I'm also not sure that I've been to that church since getting married in it, so it was nice to be in that space again.

The reason for the visit to MEC was that my goal has been to start biking home. I'd acquired a bike, helmet, lights, and lock, but wasn't happy with my visibility in black clothing on a black bike. I got ankle reflectors and a vest for the backpack, and I biked home yesterday. I'm surprisingly not that sore for the 10 mile ride home. We'll see how I'm doing in a few days. ;)

My personal email account was spammed by Jennifer Kirkham-Sandy (Phone 0800 6 121 151) of Total Language Solutions Limited, 3 The Courtyard, New North Road, Exeter EX4 4EP, Devon. Registered number (England and Wales) at the above address: 03933805. They seemed to be using a service called qwertywordmarketing. I've reported it to the hosting company, so we'll see what happens.

After Argentina-France on the first day, that one was planned to be one of the few big matches of first round. Of course, after the game won by South Africa (36-0), that seems pretty silly to say... The Springboks were definitely better than England, in all parts of the game. What stunned me, particularly after watching South Africa live , is their complete control on the game, which is a great improvement over their match against Samoa. South Africa scored three tries all of them great examples or organized attacks by the rear lines. Two tries for JP Pietersen, after 3 by Habana on first game: the South-African wing players rock. Despite this, the player of the game was definitely Jason Du Preez, the scrum half (hope this is the correct term in English) who organised all attacks from RSA. England was missing too many key players (several injured) to be able to be a menace for South Africa. They never were really dangerous, except maybe when the magic Jason Robinson has the ball in his hands (what a player!). I was particularly disappointed by their center back players, and even more particularly by Farrel. Ditto for Andy Gomarsall as scrum half. So, South Africa is now probably qualified with two quite easy games against USA and Tonga. England will have to fight to qualify and noone can tell if Samoa or Tonga can surprise them. Watching Samoa-Tonga on Sunday will be interesting and Samoa-England or Tonga-England are already key matches. A great rugby week-end is about to begin, again. Today, Wales-Australia is the match of the day, for sure, with wales playing home (some matches are not in France, but in Cardiff and Edinburgh). New Zealand-Portugal will be...interesting, though the only incertainty is the number of scored tries. And finally, Ireland-Georgia is of some interest for the French. Tomorrow, France could have hard times against Namibia. Of course, the challenge here is winning *and* scoring the bonus point. That match is 5 days before a key France-Ireland, so the challenge is also not wasting too much energy. Of course, tomorrow's top match for me is Samoa-Tonga while I whileprobably skip Fidji-Canada (too bad, I haven't seen those playing yet). BTW, if someone has a recording of the most intense match as of now (Japan-Fidji), I'd be delighted. Rugbystiquement v tre,

I was working on the integration of live-initramfs for grml in the last few days. As the Debian maintainers of live-initramfs switched from svn to git and I contributed several patches I had to deal with git as well. Thanks to my personal VCS hero gebi I learned some cute tricks for working with git. One very nice tip is the ‘git-server for the poor’, which is pretty simple to use and set up as soon as you know what to do. As there isn’t that much documentation regarding this issue on the net yet I’ll provide the necessary steps here: On the server side (where you are running a webserver) you just need a directory for serving via HTTP:

% mkdir -p /var/www/grml/git/live-initramfs.git

On the client side check out the original repository, create a branch, edit what you want to and finally put it on the server so upstream can grab it:

% git clone git://git.debian.org/git/users/daniel/live-initramfs.git
% cd live-initramfs
% git checkout -b cool_new_feature
Switched to a new branch "cool_new_feature"
% $EDITOR $FILE(S)_YOU_WANT_TO_CHANGE
% git commit -a
% git-update-server-info
% rsync -az .git/* server:/var/www/grml/git/live-initramfs.git/

Now upstream (or you) can work with the remote git repository in the local repository and can refer to it through a name:

% git remote add prokop http://grml.org/git/live-initramfs.git
% git remote update

Let’s checkout what we have on the remote repository available:

% git remote show prokop
* remote prokop
  URL: http://grml.org/git/live-initramfs.git
  Tracked remote branches
    cool_new_feature master
% git diff master..prokop/cool_new_feature

Finally do with it whatever you like, for example:

% git merge master prokop/cool_new_feature
... or ...
% git merge $COMMIT_ID
... or ...
% git co master
% git merge prokop/cool_new_feature
... or ...
% git checkout -b my_test_branch prokop/cool_new_feature
... or ...
% git-merge
... or ...
% git-cherry-pick
... or ...

This process might be very handy for working together with upstream (hi, panthera :-)) JFTR: I’m tracking useful ressources for working with git at my del.icio.us page.

I came across John Wang's posting titled Database Abstraction - code vs infrastructure. In it, he talks about the problems many people face when migrating applications tied to a specific RDBMS to another one. He recommends:

One solution of modern programming is to move database abstraction from the code to the infrastructure using a ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) or Data Mapper. A ORM and Data Mapper abstracts the database for you so you no longer have to do tie db abstraction to each app. Not only does it let you code once for multiple databases it lets your users migrate their data from one database to another. This blog runs Typo which is based on Ruby on Rails and ActiveRecord. I've been contemplating migrating Typo from MySQL to PostgreSQL and I've been told that it would be as simple as exporting the data with YAML, updating the database.yml file and importing the data.

Umh... Thing is, you often want to use your DB as way more than a data store - At least, when using Postgres, I do. There are many things that can be done inside the DB (such as guarding the programmer against his own mistakes by keeping sanity checks which often go beyond just referential integrity. Constraints and triggers. Oh, and of course, user-defined functions and views. Of course, most times you can go by without using several of such tools - but when they would come in handy, you can sorely miss them.
On the other hand, John mentions (right after the previous paragraph):

ActiveRecord is a data mapper and isn't as flexible as a full blown ORM but it gets the job done for the most part. For a full-blown ORM, I think of Perl's DBIx::Class which provides a full OO interface to the RDBMS allowing you to code just once for multiple DBs without limiting you when you want to use some esoteric database-specific SQL

Currently, I'm among the many that have jumped on the Rails bandwagon - And so far, I really like it. But yes, ActiveRecord -although great for some tasks- is way under what I'd like for many actions I've got used to making.
I might be seen as a backwards guy for this, but until before I started with Rails, I prefered not to use full ORMs (not that I tried too hard anyway - Probably starting a project with DBIx::Class would be all it takes for me to become a convert, from what I've read), but to do the SQL myself - Only, of course, keeping well in mind that I should separate front-end from back-end (or using other jargon to say the same, separating cleanly what should be in a Controller and what should be in a Model - Of course, no one in their right mind would put SQL on a template or a View!). It's not so hard as many people seem to think, although mixing syntaxes for two different languages (and even more if you, as I do, like to keep your code under 80 columns) is sometimes dirt-ugly. Still, on to my last bit of rant:

There are PHP frameworks out there like Symfony and Cake but do any of them have stand-alone ORMs? If so, could Drupal move to something like that and solve their maintainership problems once and for all? Drupal is part of the Go PHP5 effort so there should be no issue using PHP 5 OO. Something to think about for the Drupal folks if a PHP ORM is available

Umh... Even if there are some great ORMs in PHP... Choosing an ORM is something you do when you start a project. I doubt the Drupal people can now just decide to move over to using a ORM, as they potentially have hundreds or thousands of points where they have DB interaction. And although for most of them moving over to an ORM should even be automatizable, every ORM has some very special features which make it damn hard to craft several kinds of query.

<eddyp> anyone knows of a quick way to reformat a text to a certain with in vim?
<eddyp> width, even
<liw> !fmt -w 42
<pkern> Something along the lines of gq I think.
<pkern> Visual gq says :help gq
<eddyp> liw: ":%!fmt -w 42" should be correct
<eddyp> thanks
* eddyp notes the fmt command for future reference
<liw> fmt is a pretty handy command at times
<ricky> Wow, that is handy.
* seanius is a fan of the J and fmt combo
<pkern> (gq has the advantage that textwidth is obeyed. And fmt could be specified with formatprg.)
<eddyp> pkern: that gq is handy, too
<eddyp> "gggqG" and bam, everything is refromatted
<eddyp> does anyone mind if I post this on my blog?
<eddyp> pkern, liw, seanius, ricky ?
<liw> eddyp, nah
<pkern> eddyp: Please enlighten me why you could possibly need our approval (apart from copying the log verbatim perhaps).
<eddyp> pkern: exactly :-)
<eddyp> verbatim copy; irc is the best source of documentation :-)
<ricky> eddyp: Go ahead :)
<pkern> eddyp: Then please correct the obvious mistake of mine: ":help gq says Visual gq", hah. And I disagree on the usefulness of IRC logs as documentation. :-P
<ricky> As a side note, the -u option seems cut words at spaces properly, which I'd been looking for :)
<seanius> eddyp: if you find my armchair opinions valuable for some reason, then by all means :)

Collective Communications Campus is a very handy new blog covering news and information on NYC area communication, journalism, and media graduate departments, programs, lectures, and classes.

This is the first post of a series on componentization, starting with a brief explanation of the problem(s) we are trying to solve. I expect some familiarity with programming in general, but no specific knowledge of any particular system; the terms "DLL" and "shared library" are used interchangeably. When you are writing a DLL, you are essentially committing to support whatever interface you are exporting forever. So it better be good on the first try. DLL hell is what happens if it was not good, and you end up making an incompatible change. The obvious way an interface can be "not good" is when you need to touch the header files that define it in order to implement some new functionality. You can get away with a few things, like the addition of new functions, if you can somehow make sure that users will always have a recent enough version of your DLL around, but in general any change to the interface is going to be incompatible. The traditional Unix way of solving the issue has been renaming the library. When you link a program against a shared library on a system that uses the ELF format, the linker looks inside the library for the SONAME field, which tells it what name the library wants to be known under, and the program will then attempt to load this file at startup (which usually is a symlink to the latest compatible version). This "official" name of the library usually contains a number (sometimes more than one), and when there is an incompatible change, you simply change that number, and the new version of the library can be installed in parallel with the old. There are additional mechanisms, like symbol versioning support, that allow a single library to provide different "versions" of exported functions, and have the program specify the desired version for each symbol. To run a system like this, one generally needs to keep track of programs' dependencies; this generally happens in the package manager with more (Debian) or less (Red Hat) support from package build scripts. If you built your system from scratch, you end up doing this work yourself. That's why you had highly paid system administrators in the old days, and very short shell scripts to replace them (with various degrees of success) in the current age. In the Windows world, things have been a bit different, because except in large installations, you generally do not have a clueful, benevolent system administrator who will take care of these things; rather, you have users that expect your software to work without having an insight into the inner workings. In general, software developers have not been taking chances and simply shipped all the DLLs they needed along with the main program. When they installed these DLLs into the same directory as the program, things were fine, if they installed them into the WINDOWS directory, not so much, because when you had two conflicting versions of the same DLL, you had to decide which one to keep, and a program that would only work with the one that you threw away would simply fail in curious and interesting ways. This is the original definition of DLL hell — you cannot do it right. To make matters worse, this is not the only way an interface could change. When you define a platform, you write up an "Application Binary Interface" (ABI) document that details conventions that should be followed; for example, the ARM processor does not have a dedicated stack pointer register, so the ABI document for Linux on ARM says that R13 is to be used as a stack pointer, functions may thus expect it to point to memory that is readable and writeable, and memory with an address lower than the stack pointer is considered "free". When the function is done, it is supposed to jump to the address in R14, which happens to be the register the ARM's "Branch with Link" instruction sets to the address of the instruction following it. If the function takes arguments, the ABI says where to find them, and if it returns a value, it also tells where to place that. For everything not in the ABI document, the compiler author gets to choose. The ABI document usually attempts to be rather minimal, so it defines how C functions are to be called, and calls it a day. Anything not in the C standard is not guaranteed to work between different compilers (or even different versions of the same compiler). That includes C language extensions such as the "long double" data type, language features in C++ and Java such as namespaces, nested types and exceptions, and the data structures used by the C library's malloc() function. The latter makes life difficult even for pure C programmers, as it disallows releasing memory from a different module than the one it was allocated in, because the different modules may link to different C libraries. In essence, this means you are not supposed to export anything from a DLL that is not a C function, and even then, there are additional requirements. You could in theory export data objects, but that is discouraged, as it exposes an implementation detail. Now, we're in a bit of a dilemma here. There is lots of interesting code out there that is not necessarily written in C, we'd like to reuse it and we don't want stuff to break. The Linux approach so far has been "we simply pretend the problem does not exist", and this has been working to a large extent, simply because everyone uses gcc, and when the ABI extensions the gcc people had made changed, recompiling everything that uses these extensions makes the problem go away. This has several drawbacks. For one, it mandates that the tools used to rebuild everything and keep the installation consistent be written in C or handle the transition gracefully (for the curious who have a Debian system handy: look at libapt-pkg's SONAME), and it also requires that we have the full source code for everything not just available but buildable in an automated way. Within the context of a Linux distribution, both of these are true, so we have survived the last major ABI transitions without too many losses. So we need an extension of the ABI document that specifies how modules written by different people and compiled with different compilers can interact. These are commonly called component models, and, to quote Andrew Tanenbaum, "[t]he good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from". Next: "componentization tutorial #2: CORBA and COM"

Something I often hear from people that talk about Linux on the desktop is this: people want to be able to go to the store, buy hardware, and be confident that it will Just Work.

I would like to point out that things are rarely this simple on Windows. And, in fact, things are often simpler on Linux these days.

Here's the example that prompted this post.

I have a computer that's about 4 years old. It's my main desktop machine at home. It was still fast enough for me, but has been developing all sorts of weird behaviors. Certain USB ports stopped working altogether a few months ago. Then it started hanging during POST whenever I'd try to reboot -- but would still boot OK about 80% of the time after a power cycle. Then it started randomly losing contact with my USB mouse until a reboot. And the last straw was when the display started randomly going out. I've told everyone that my machine has cancer and is slowly dying.

The case is a pretty nice full tower -- solid and sturdy. I have an 160GB IDE drive in it. So I figured I will upgrade the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and add a 500GB SATA drive since they're so cheap these days and I'm running out of space. I'd also have to buy a new video card since my old one was AGP and the new motherboard only has PCI Express for video. So about $700 later from Newegg (I got a Core 2 Duo E6750), the parts arrived.

I spent some time installing it all. The motherboard had only one IDE channel, and I didn't have any IDE cable long enough to connect both the IDE hard disk and the optical drive, so I popped in an old Maxtor/Promise PCI Ultra133 controller I had sitting around to use with the DVD burner.

Now, to recap, the hardware that the OS would see as new/different is: CPU, RAM, IDE controller, SATA controller, Promise IDE controller, integrated NIC, sound, video.

Then the magic smoke test.

I turned on the machine. Grub appeared. Linux started booting.

Even though I had switched from the default Debian "supports everything" kernel to a K7 kernel, it still booted.

And every single piece of hardware was supported immediately. There was no "add new hardware" wizard that popped up, no "I've found new hardware" boxes. It just worked, silently, with no need to tell me anything or have me click on anything.

Only one piece required configuration: the NIC, thanks to some udev design flaws (it got renamed from eth0 to eth1 by udev). That took 20 seconds. Debian saw the IDE HDD, the SATA drive, the Promise controller, the DVD burner, the video card, the sound, and it all worked automatically. And Debian is not even a distro that occurs to a lot of people when they think of great hardware support.

Now let's turn to Windows.

The Windows Nightmare

I have a legal copy of Windows XP Home that was preinstalled on the machine when I got it. I resized its partition down to about 20GB so that I could use 140GB for Linux. I use it rarely, primarily for gaming, and I've bought about 3 games in the last 4 years. I usually disconnect the network when I boot to Windows, though I do keep it current with updates.

I did some research on what Windows was going to do when I replace the hardware. The general consensus from people on the 'net is that you can't just replace a motherboard and expect everything to be happy. There were generally three different approaches suggested: 1) don't even try, just reinstall; 2) do a rescue install after you move over; and 3) use sysprep. The rescue install has to be done by booting from an XP install CD, then picking a rescue install option somewhere. It will overwrite your installed Windows with the version from the CD. That means that I'd have to re-apply SP2, though bits of it that didn't get overwritten would still be on the hard disk, and who knows what would happen to the registry.

Option #3 was to download sysprep (must have the Genuine Disadvantage ActiveX to get the free download from MS). Sysprep is designed to be used just prior to taking an image with ghost for replication. It removes the hardware-specific config (but not the drivers), as well as the product key, from the machine, but otherwise leaves it untouched. On the next boot, you get the "Welcome to XP" wizard.

One other strike against #2 is that Compaq "helpfully" didn't ship any install CDs with the machine. Under Windows, they did have a "create rescue CD" tool, which burned 7 CDs for me. But they are full Compaq-specific CDs, not one of them an XP CD, *AND* they check on boot to see if you're using the same Compaq motherboard, and exit if not. Highly useless.

So I went with sysprep. Before my new hardware even arrived, I downloaded the Windows drivers for all of it. I burned them to a CD, and installed as many as I could on the system in advance. About half of them refused to install since the new hardware wasn't there yet. I then took a raw image of the partition with dd, just in case. Finally, right before I swapped the hardware, I ran sysprep and let it shut down the machine.

So after the new hardware was installed came the adventure.

Windows booted to the "welcome to XP" thingy. The video, keyboard, mouse, and IDE HDD worked. That's about it.

I went through the "welcome to XP wizard". But the network didn't work yet, so I couldn't activate it. So I popped my handy driver CD in the drive. But what's this? Windows doesn't recognize the DVD drive because it doesn't have drivers for this Promise controller that came out in, what, 2001? Sigh. Downloaded the drivers with the imac, copy them to a CF card, plug the USB CF reader into Windows.

While I was doing that, about 6 "found new hardware" dialogs got queued up. Not one of them could actually find a driver for my hardware, but that didn't prevent Windows from making me click through them all.

So, install Promise driver from CF card, reboot. Click through new hardware dialogs again. Install network driver, reboot, click through dialogs. Install sound driver. Install Intel "chipset" driver, click through dialogs. Reboot. Install SATA driver. Reboot.

So the hardware appears to all be working by this point, though I have a Creative volume control (from the old hardware) and a Realtek one in the tray. Minor annoyance to deal with later.

Now I have to re-activate XP. I dutifully key in the magic string from the sticker on my case. Surprise surprise, the Internet-based activation fails because my hardware is different. So I have to call the 800 number. I have to read in 7 blocks of 6 digits, one block at a time. Then I answer some questions: have I activated Windows before, have I changed hardware, was the old hardware defective (yes, yes, and yes). Then I get 7 blocks of 6 digits read to me. Finally Windows is activated. PHEW! Why they couldn't ask those questions with the online tool is beyond me.

Anyhow. Linux took me 20 seconds to get working. Windows, about 2 hours, plus another 2 hours for prep and research.

I did zero prep for Linux. I made one config change (GUI users could have just configured their machine to use eth1).

Other cool Linux HW features

Say you buy a new printer and want to get it set up. On Windows, you insert the CD, let it install 200MB of print drivers plus ads plus crap plus add something to your taskbar plus who knows what else. Probably reboot. Then the printer might actually print.

On Debian, you plug in the printer to the USB port. You type printconf. 5 seconds later, your printer works.

I have been unpleasantly surprised lately by just how difficult hardware support in Windows really is, especially since everyone keeps saying how good it is. It's not good. Debian's is better, in my opinion.

Michael Hirschorn in this month’s Atlantic reduces my generation’s entire cultural zeitgeist to a single word: quirk.

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It s easy for David Cross s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the 90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn t mean you should.

Hirschorn makes a fair point which, I think, can be restated that much of the content I enjoy is really just candy. The Atlantic seems to have recently figured out its readership (or at least figured out me). Hard to Swallow (by B.R. Myers, who more typically writes about Korean issues) is a pointed moral critique of modern food lovers (chowhounds?) and food writing (including Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, much read by my contemporaries). If I weren’t already a vegetarian, I might take umbrage. “Insider baseball” pieces on Karl Rove and Michael Gerson are also excellent, and in the case of the former quite timely. To wrap up this encomium, props to the magazine for its clean new website design, which I believe premiered today, and for including an embedded Youtube video in the online version of the quirk article.

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The gloom from my last entry has more or less lifted. To refresh, my desktop died shortly after a lightning storm; no definite cause and effect relationship, but a strong correlation. I shut it down, and after the next reboot I got scary errors all over the place, starting with this disclaimer:

HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor

Now, that may be true, or it may not be. Certainly the disclaimer is sensible, since machine checks are usually caused by failing components. And it persisted for most of a day every time I tried to boot the machine, but there was quickly a new addition: different scary errors on ata1. And it got rapidly worse. On Friday morning, having let the machine cool and relax overnight, I brought it up on a rescue CD and could get at /boot (a separate partition), but not at /etc (from inside my RAID/LVM setup). I went out and bought a new SATA drive and attempted to recover /boot onto it, but I had waited too long; at this point I could still get at the partition table, but not the contents of /boot. Some things to note here.

• As far as I know, you still need a separate /boot if your root uses RAID + LVM.
• Therefore your /boot is obviously not backed up by your carefully constructed RAID.
• But that’s fine because all that really mattered was your kernels, and you have them still lying around on your mirrored disk. Right?
• Of course, right. But dynamically generated initrds, while technically awesome, are awkward to recreate from a rescue CD. Especially a 32-bit rescue CD when your root filesystem is all 64-bit.
• It can’t be hard to find a rescue CD with a 64-bit kernel, right? No, not right either. I did eventually find a 50MB Gentoo install CD that worked serviceably well.
• Your laptop has a convenient CD burner, right? No, not right, turns out it doesn’t write CDs after all. Oh well, Windows file sharing plus the wireless plus the Mac Mini in the other room… there you go.
• You didn’t need anything else from /boot, right? Like your carefully constructed voodoo incantation to boot Windows… whoops… hopefully you remember how that worked…

So, after some futzing around I was able to boot the Gentoo rescue CD, partition the new hard drive, mount the remaining disk in degraded mode, reinstall the handy Debian packages of my kernels, have it magically recreate ramdisks, and then reinstall grub. By the way, --no-floppy obviously means something different to grub than it does to me, as most of the reinstalling grub process was still spent waiting for my non-existant fd0 to time out. Then I added the new disk to the array, let it reconstruct for two hours, and rebooted. Lo and behold… no more machine checks! I am a happy camper. Despite the tribulations above I came out remarkably well, since I seem to have lost nothing but my grub menu.lst file. And now I have rdiff-backup configured to back up /boot onto the array in case I ever need to do this again.

One thing that I don’t like is blogs that provide no method of feedback. When I want to read something with little or no possibility of feedback I’ll read one of the many newspapers that are available. Craige McWhirter’s blog is one of them. The CAPTCHA system doesn’t work (I must have tried at least 20 times with both Konqueror and Iceweasel) and he doesn’t provide an email address. He does provide a mobile phone number which is handy for people in the same country. AKISMET works fairly well on my blog and makes the spam quite managable. As the number of legit comments are not that great I manually approve them thus avoiding having a spam ever appear on my blog - showing a spam encourages more of the same. The comment I wanted to make on his post was to reference my previous blog post on this topic and suggest that one thing that can be done is to improve public transport which will increase the area of land available to people who work in central city areas. This means that the land prices can decrease and housing prices will follow. Another issue is that he suggests assisting people in paying rent. While this may sound like a good thing the current system of Negative Gearing is designed to decrease rent, but instead merely increases the price of owning a house.

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I work in an open-plan office. Normally I like to listen to some of my iPod's music, or NPR or something, at some point during the day. It helps me tune out distractions when I'm coding or concentrating on something. My iPod, and my nice Etymotic headphones, get transported to and from work each day in my laptop bag. Today I forgot the laptop bag at home.

What to do? I could just work without headphones. I'd be fine, but you know, I've got standards here. My job involves working with computers, so I ought to be able to come up with a workaround, right?

So lesse... what do I have? One binaural (mono sound, but speakers for each hear) telephone headset. One Polycom SIP phone, connected to our corporate Asterisk system. One workstation with sound capabilities. One installation of Asterisk on this workstation for testing purposes. And, a pre-existing path from the corporate system to the workstation system for testing Asterisk. (Very handy that, and used a lot when we were doing active Asterisk work.)

So in less then five minutes I had music going via my telephone headset. Lo-fi, and not noise-dampening like the Etymotics, but I enjoyed it for the simple fact that it was being played *over the phone* at no cost to anyone. My desk phone supports multiple "lines", so I still could place and receive calls just fine.

Should anyone care to look, they'd find a 5-hour call from me to myself deep in the Asterisk logs. My own workstation logs will show that I put myself on hold for 5 hours (since I used Asterik's music-on-hold feature to play my own selections).

IP telephony is fun. So is Asterisk.

A common pattern in blog communication is referred to as a Meme. Here is one example of the commonly used definition of the term as applied to blogs. One common factor that doesn’t seem to get directly mentioned much when people define the term (but which always seems to be mentioned in passing) is the idea of tagging people. So the definition of a meme as applied to blogs seems to be a silly question that you answer in a blog post and then request that some other bloggers (usually 5) answer as well. At the end of this post I have included the dictionary definition of the term (here is the Wikipedia definition). I believe that it is incorrect to call a question such as “which superhero do you most identify with” a meme. Instead I think that there is a Memeplex associated with such posts. One meme is that when someone “tags” you (requests that you answer a question) it should be considered an honour (someone in the blog-sphere likes you enough to ask you random questions in a public forum). Another meme is that such discussion is a good thing (although an increasing number of people in the more serious part of the blog-sphere oppose this). A final one that is apparent to me (I’m sure that there are others) is that so-called memes and lazyweb posts are the same thing (I believe this to be wrong). I believe that lazyweb posts if written about interesting topics can contribute significantly to the community knowledge base. I also believe that chain lazyweb posts (here is a link to the only such post I’ve made so far) can also contribute if created in a sensible manner. Chain posts that don’t require any thought or input from the person re-posting them (EG “please post this message to all your friends so that they can know of the terrible war/famine/earthquake/whatever in some foreign part of the world”) are of course quite useless (you can make a post of links once a month if you want to spread the news about such things). Now I agree that some amount of conversation among bloggers in a community that is personal and not directly related to the main topics of discussion is good for building the community. From Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) [jargon]: meme
/meem/, n. [coined by analogy with gene’, by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as a replicator , esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase meme complex denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the hacker subculture’ meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, meme is often misused to mean meme complex. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons. PS This evening I had planned to go to a LUV meeting and see my friend Andy Fitzsimon (blog) give a talk about Inkscape (for which he is famous). I also had a day off work, so it was going to be a day of non-stop fun. But instead I got some sort of cold/flu, stayed in bed for much of the day, missed the meeting, and was late in my blog post. This sucks.

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So it seems that Squid changed its redirector API with 2.6. This pissed me off no end once I got to the bottom of a problem related to it at work last week. Squid's had redirector functionality since, oh, last century, and it's a really handy feature, if you want to intercept URLs that Squid's handling, and change them to something else. I've used it in a past life at an ISP to force people to use a local mirror for various things, regardless of where they think they want to go. So for the longest time, the API has been documented that an external program, which Squid will attach to the stdin and stdout of, will receive on stdin four words on a line, pertaining to the URL being requested: the IP address/FQDN of the client requesting it, the username of the user, if they've authenticated to the cache, and the HTTP method being used. All good. So we had an in-house redirector script, which used a regex (^(\S+) \S+ \S+ \S+)$) to determine if it should apply any logic to the URL at all, or just output a newline, meaning no redirection should occur. So along comes Squid 2.6, which changes that API. It now passes in five things on stdin. The changelog has an innocuous "Added to the redirectors interface the support for SSL client certificate" entry, so I presume on a good day, that's what is passed in as the fifth word instead of a hyphen. Anyway, our redirector script started not rewriting anything at all, which made some other stuff break spectacularly. It was most fun in one location, where we had four proxy servers behind a load balancer, and two were running Squid 2.5 and two were running Squid 2.6. Yay for non-deterministic behaviour. So once I'd tracked down the problem, I swore a lot, and changed the regex to be ^(\S+) \S+ \S+ \S+( \S+)?$ and proceeded to rant at anyone and everyone within earshot on how messed up this whole situation was. The thing that is irritating me the most is that this seems to have been a fairly poorly communicated change, as best I can determine. It happened between Squid.2.6.STABLE1 and Squid.2.6.STABLE2 (hmm, stable?). I mean, the FAQ hasn't even been updated. This clearly caught out other projects like jesred that provide generic extensible Squid redirectors, looking at #381984. I wonder if SquidGuard in Debian Etch is busted? So, whilst Squid 2.6 (the release that changed this behaviour anyway) is just over 12 months old, if you haven't upgraded yet, and you have custom redirectors, consider this rant a head's up.

Many people think that white-box machines (IE the cheapest no-nam PCs you can buy) are suitable for use as servers. There are several factors that make white-box machines totally unsuitable for use as a server (and IMHO unsuitable for any other task). Firstly white-box machines are not designed. A set of parts are designed, some combinations of parts are tested, but most aren’t. For example a motherboard manufacturer will test their latest motherboard design with the current video cards and a video card manufacturer will test their new cardss with current motherboards. If you have a new video card and a new motherboard then there has probably been little testing of the combination. This compares to a name-brand machine where the entire unit has been tested and found to work together. White-box assemblers (they aren’t “designed” or “manufactured”) will often use different combinations of parts for each machine that they assemble. If a video card manufacturer sells two cards with the same part number that have different chips then they may be installed in two machines with the same description. So taking an image of one white-box machine and installing it on another that was described as being identical might not work. For these reasons I have ceased using white-box machines as desktop machines or as low-end servers (EG internet gateway machines). I use second-hand name-brand machines for low end servers and for desktop machines. When comparing servers the case for name-brand systems is even stronger. Real servers have ECC RAM as a standard feature, it is possible to get white-box servers with ECC RAM - I have seen such a machine on one occasion. But the vast majority of white-box machines lack such features. See my previous posts about getting ECC RAM in a cheap machine and desktop machines with ECC RAM about some of the issues in this regard. Another feature of servers is better storage options. There are white-box server machines with hot-swap hard drives, but they are significantly more expensive than regular white-box machines - if you are going to spend that much money then it’s better to get a refurbished HP server machine at auction (HP seems to be selling a lot of almost-new server gear at auction at quite reasonable prices with warrantee). A cheap machine (typical white-box or a very low end server from a company such as HP) will have hard drives that don’t support hot-swap. Lack of hot-swap means that a hard drive failure requires that the machine be disassembled to swap the dead disk - it also means that there is sometimes difficulty in identifying which disk has the problem (the error light on a hot-swap drive is quite handy). Then the process of swapping the disk will take at least 10 minutes of hardware work before the machine can be booted up again. With hot-swap disks you can identify the failed disk via a flashing light, remove it while the server is still running, and then initiate a RAID rebuild after installing the new disk. Hot-swap disks cost more and the mounting brackets etc are also expensive, but it’s a good option to have - especially considering that disks are more likely to fail at busy times which is when down-time is least acceptable. These features make disk expansion particularly expensive for servers, people often miss the benefits of servers and say “I just bought a 3000G disk for my home PC for $2, why can’t you just do the same for the server” (I am exaggerating slightly). Another advantage of name-brand servers is remote access. There have been a variety of remote access cards that you could install in a white-box PC and also a variety of devices to digitise a VGA signal for remote KVM access, but they are all rather expensive and remove the price advantage of white-box hardware. A final benefit of name-brand hardware is that you will be running the same hardware as other people. If I was to experience a problem running Linux on a HP DL380 G4 server then I can enter that text in to Google and get many hits. If I was to experience a similar problem with a white-box machine then I would need to perform searches on each of the parts that might have a problem - which would be particularly inconvenient if I couldn’t determine some of the part numbers through software and needed to disassemble the machine first!

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Today I’ve implemented a feature which was long overdue: making the table sortable by the available table headers. The second feature I’ve added is that every bug report now has it’s “Last Action” date. While both features are useful for themselves, combining both result in a very handy bug triaging tool. A few months ago when I was trying to help the KDE team on their bug triage, I’ve missed the feature to sort bugs by their date of the last action in our BTS since I’ve noticed that many of the very old bugs (last action-, not bug number wise) where already fixed or could be closed for other obvious reasons. The problem was just to find all those “stale bugs”. I was able to close dozens of old bug reports but it took much more time to find them, than to decide whether they’re still active or not. And since I hadn’t the tools available to find the “easy targets” on a quick way, I gave up after a few days. Today it’s just as easy as firing up rng and let it search for all bug reports belonging to the qt-kde team: rng debian-qt-kde@lists.debian.org and sorting the resulting list by last action… sweet! The package was just uploaded and should be available tomorrow. Update: Don pointed out that you can get the ordering in the web interface too by appending ordering=age to the URL. Neat.

It's been a few days since I posted on my blog -- since I left Montreal for Taipei and Wikimania 2007. My time has been upside-down and backwards as I've traveled around to the other side of the clock and a day into the future, and I've just been insanely busy with other work. My flight to Taipei was dreamy. I travelled enough last year to get Air Canada's "silver" frequent-flier level, which earned me a couple of system-wide upgrade certificates. They came in handy, since I bumped up to business class on the leg between Montreal and Vancouver, and then to the "Premier Laurel" class on the EVA Air codeshare between Vancouver and Taipei. That was first class across the Pacific Ocean, and man, it's the only way to fly. Jimmy Wales was on the same plane (but back in business class...), so we got to chat a bit and we shared a taxi to the conference site. Jimmy's really fun to talk to -- it's always nice talking to another entrepreneur who's passionately dedicated to Free and Open Content. (We were in line for customs together, too, and I tried to peek at his passport to find out his date of birth, over which there is some confusion. But he had his thumb over the day (intentionally...?), and all I got was "Aug 1966", which everyone agrees on anyways. Dang! My personal theory is that Jimmy was born on 6 June 1966 and uses 8 Aug 1966 instead to avoid the demonic stigma.) The conference centre we're in is great -- a really big, clean, modern place. It's nice when we're inside, but Taipei in August is muggy and hot like a laundromat in rural Mississippi. I find myself rushing between buildings. tags: wiki wikimania2007 taipei evaair jimmywales travel

IM IN TAIPEI HACKING UR DAYS I came in a couple of days early to participate in the Hacking Days event. This is a pre-conference meetup for MediaWiki developers and those who love them. The meetup was really unstructured and fun because of it, although there were a few points of uncomfortable silence when people stopped talking and we all realized we had 14 more hours of meetings and not much left to say. There's also a real tension between the conference organizers, who've encouraged non-developers to come to Hacking Days, and the core developers who really want to just be left alone and get some work done. This year the 2-day event was split into "Hacking Days" and "Hacking Days Extra", with the first being invite-only and the second being open to all. I think it's a tension that needs to be resolved -- if outsiders aren't invited to Hacking Days, we just need to say that and live with it. We shouldn't let people think they're going to participate and then cut them out. That's a bait-and-switch tactic and it's unfair. I think that there's a need for an open-attendance MediaWiki conference; I also think that MW is a big enough piece of software that third-party conference organizers would be eager to make an MWCon work. And core developers could get hefty fees for coming to talk! tags: wiki mediawiki hackingdays wikimania2007

Announcements I've been having problems sleeping here. I've been falling asleep at the wrong times and waking up at the very wrong time. Last night, I missed the Wikitravel Eat-together because I fell asleep at dinner time and didn't get up for the event. Make mental note: don't miss your favorite wiki's user get-together! Fortunately Jani covered for me and apparently the event was a lot of fun. Speaking of Jani: this morning he announced a new venture that Maj and I have been helping him with. Wikitravel Press is an independent company that will be publishing a line of printed travel guidebooks (yes, paper books! That you can hold in your hand!) based on Wikitravel content. I think it's a great project and I'm really glad we're going to finally be fulfilling this important goal of the Wikitravel project. I also think it's going to be a great way to attract a new round of contributors -- people who are more reliant on their paper guidebooks than to a search engine for learning about their destinations. I think that the idea that they can change and improve the books they have will be a really important incentive for these folks. And like it or not, there are still a lot of people who don't consider digital information "real" in the same way as analog-stored info. So putting Wikitravel guides on paper is like Pinocchio becoming a Real Boy. Thank you, Blue Fairy! More info at the project's announcement and the on-site discussion (Wikitravel:3 August 2007). tags: wikitravel wikitravelpress guidebooks travel announcements

Called out This morning's keynote address by the Wikimedia Foundation chairwoman Florence Devouard was informative and interesting. She even talked about ways to bring money into the Foundation... including selling books based on the site content. I was giggling about this with Jani as she moved on to talking about the attention economy, to hear, "For example, Evan is not paying attention right now and talking to his neighbour." D'oh! Lesson learned: don't mess with User:Anthere! tags: anthere keynote books wikimediafoundation

The key to productivity is avoiding other work. The weekend has just started, and I've successfully hooked up a JTAG probe to a Linux box and implemented half of debian/xcontrol stuff. xcontrol is a preprocessor for control files that accepts an extended syntax and compiles that into a policy compliant debian/control file, losing bits of information on the way (but whoever cares can just look into the xcontrol file). For now, I am planning to support the following extensions:

Build-Depends-Tool:

An additional build dependency line useful in cross compiling packages. The normal “Build-Depends” is reinterpreted as packages required for the target architecture, while this line specifies packages required on the host during the build.

Build-Depends[release]:

This overrides the build dependencies for a certain release, and comes in handy when backporting. Of course, this is orthogonal, so -Indep and -Tool fields exist too.

Optional: yes

This package is not normally built; if you need it, you have to invoke the “build-package” and “binary-package” targets.

per-package Build-Depends*:

This allows specifying the build dependencies for “Optional: yes” packages without adding them to the main list.

The syntax is still debateable at this point. The non-orthogonality of Build-Depends-Tool is intended, by the way. :-) The transformations done to make this policy compliant should be obvious: Build-Depends-Tool is folded into Build-Depends, the release-specific Build-Depends are omitted (or selected if xcontrol is told to target a specific release), Optional is stripped out and the per-package build dependencies for all non-Optional packages are accumulated. I don't know whether I'm going to do templates yet, this will probably wait until the second release. More on the JTAG adapter when I have the gdb stub working. Now I'm going to go back to what I should really be doing.

So this is it, I've actually finished at Canonical! For most of the past week, I've been in Portland, OR at Ubuntu Live. I gave two talks (Ubuntu Technical Demonstration and Bringing your software to Ubuntu users) and one tutorial (packaging for Ubuntu and Debian derived distributions). I had a great time, and was glad to get a chance to see my former coworkers one last time. I'm happy to be leaving on great terms with my former employers, and hope to be at UbuntuLive again next year.

This conference was a whirlwind of meeting people. JP, Teri, Jim, Andy and MaryBeth are people I'm really looking forward to seeing in the bay area when I get there; I got to see Steve and Patty in the Debian booth; I managed to go for dinner with Chris and Leslie; A going away party that included many of the above plus Matt, Steve, Etienne and Torsten; I had lunch with Katie, whom I haven't seen since my wedding; I had another lunch with Mermaid, whom I thought had fallen off the face of the earth; my final lunch at Veganopolous included MaryBeth again and Rob. I did miss seeing Kamaya, which is sad, though. I got *almost* everyone I wanted to see.

It's a crazy list. Some of these people will be random business contacts. Some of these are folks that I feel like remeeting them after several years was like only missing a day. Some of these are people I miss already.

Sabrina and I are making the trek up north to Kit and Hannah's wedding. We're staying at Miriam's and had lovely Ethiopian food.

Time to sleep. 7am is going to come too early.