For some time, I've had this idea brewing for how the 'net would work without DNS. Initially I was mostly thinking of how to get rid of the dark side of the registrar business, but it appears that maybe it could help with security in general too. It may not be feasible at all, or I may have forgotten extremely crucial points. I'm not a DNS guru, so bear with me and consider this as a thought experiment. This is, however, a proposal for how the Internet could be made truly decentralized, or acentric. Made so, because it currently is very centralized on at least two counts: the DNS is an inherently hierarchical structure of authority; and so is the situation with the SSL certificates used for securing websites. Let's start with DNS, if you will. Basically, the idea is to replace the current Domain Name System, which is centralised in nature (even if subdomains can be delegated) with a fully decentralised system with no central authority. The point of current DNS is to map names to IP addresses in a unique way. It currently works by registering a this name is managed by such-and-such server, ask for details at such-and-such IP address message. Of course, since there's only one namespace (or a limited number thereof, if you consider that TLDs are different namespaces), there needs to be a central authority to resolve conflicts, because some names will be more popular than others. I propose to start with a cryptographic key pair (think GPG key). Anyone can create their key pair; we assume that it's extremely unlikely for two people to generate the same keys, and that it's also very hard for two people to generate keys with the same fingerprint. By (being the only one) knowing the secret part of a key, I am the authority on what can be signed with it. I could for instance sign records that say that www points to this set of IP addresses, and smtp points to that other address. Within my area of authority, which is to say within my domain. Which is identified by the fingerprint of my key pair. What do we have so far? A mechanism that allows in a decentralised way to verify who's authoritative on the F5566852EB92BD779CF137190EA756B5144843F5 domain . In DNS terms, more probably F55...3F5.some-tld. Now let's publish the signed records on a decentralised peer-to-peer network. I'm not up to date with the latest trends in that domain, but I think something like Gnutella or Freenet would qualify, since it doesn't need central hubs but only an initial list of nodes, and it does automatic discovery of new nodes. Projects such as the FreedomBox (name likely to be changed) will probably help with that. Anyway, when looking up www.F55...3F5.some-tld, the resolver gets the signed record (and the public part of the key) from the P2P network, checks the signature, and uses the contents of the record to determine the IP address. No central or delegated registry involved at any point. Lesser risk of a single point of failure, which means better resilience against outages. Also, a better resilience against DNS-based censorship, be it promoted by non-democratic states or by greedy corporations. Of course, F5566852EB92BD779CF137190EA756B5144843F5 isn't a terribly easy name to remember or transmit. But the string of hex could be presented to the user in some other form easier to recognize for people without geek super-powers. My favourite would be the bibi-binary representation, but I'm told that the bubble-babble method works equally well. It would still be unreasonable to expect people to remember such names, and especially to type them into their web browsers or e-mail agents. A possible solution to that would be to use a short form, such as 144843F5 (or its bibi-binary equivalent), complemented by a visual representation of the full fingerprint such as the one SSH does. That pair could be displayed on business cards, email signatures, glossy brochures, advertisements and so on, and allow users to just type the strange word or flash the 2D barcode, check that the funny picture matches (in case the strange word returns several results), and get the website they want. Which they can of course bookmark under a name they can remember, probably even the same name that everyone else uses to bookmark that website. And nothing precludes convenient directories mapping names to full URLs (like search engines currently do) as long as users check that the visual representation of the site they go to matches what they've seen elsewhere. That elsewhere could, of course, take advantage of the natural web of trust that emerges in of GPG-using communities. If I'm directed at a website whose key I don't immediately recognize, then I can see who trusts that key to be legitimate (by checking the signatures), and who trusts them, and so on. Ultimately, the decision is mine to make, and mine only. In any case, once I know what URL I want to visit, I can be sure this DNS replacement will give me the right IP address (or addresses). DNS servers replying with advertisement sites instead of correct ones, and DNS-based filtering, will be things of the past. Of course, having the right IP address only solves the attacks on the DNS part. Eavesdropping can also happen by diverting traffic at the IP level. But we have a trustable way to know information related to a domain, so let's use it: the signed record can also contain the fingerprint of cryptographic keys (SSL or SSH or whatever). So we can be sure we're actually talking to the correct server, rather than to some man-in-the-middle spy. With the same guarantees of correctness as the ones for the DNS, backed by the web of trust and out-of-band validation. Again, we get rid of the hierarchy of certification authorities , some of which have been known for helping organizations get at the (supposedly secret) data people exchange over the net. To summarize: with this scheme, if I know the site I want to access is F55...3F5, then I can be certain that a) I get the right IP address for it and b) I'm actually talking to it. And nobody in-between can intercept the traffic, if the site is properly administrated and its private key is kept secure. And from the site admin's point of view, there's no need to trust DNS registrars and SSL certification authorities not to fool around with the data, or blackmail me into paying increasing fees for keeping my URL working or my SSL key certified. There's still the problem of the allocation for the IP addresses themselves, but two major parts of the centralized and hierarchical net can be gotten rid of. There are proposals attempting to fix part of the problems already, but they're incomplete. DNSSEC only solves the authentication of DNS records, not the centralisation problem. Monkeysphere aims at adding a web of trust to the SSL certificates system, but the CA chain problem seems to persist (although I must admit I'm not up to speed with the actual details). This is of course only a rough draft, full of technical considerations yet certainly not exhaustive. I've thought about it though, and I believe there are no theoretical problems with the implementation of such a scheme (apart for the handling of expiration and revocations, probably). The main obstacle to mass-adoption I can envision is the UI part, and the entrenched habit of just typing a keyword into a search engine and implicitly trusting its results, then blindly trusting the website itself; but even if mass-adoption isn't reached, I can't see anything wrong with giving those who want to be careful a more secure Internet.

A month or so ago, I published a paper with Leah Buechley that is mostly an analysis of how the LilyPad Arduino has been used. I read an earlier draft last year and loved it so, when the opportunity arose, I was honored to help out as the paper evolved. LilyPad is a microcontroller platform that Leah created a few years back and that is specifically designed to be more useful than other microcontroller platforms (like normal Arduino) in the context of crafting practices like textiles or painting. Leah's design goal with LilyPad was to create a sewable microcontroller that could be useful for making things that were qualitatively different from what most people made with microcontrollers and that, she hoped, would be of interest to women and girls. Our paper tries to measure the breadth of LilyPad's appeal and the degree to which it accomplished her goals. We used sales data from SparkFun (the largest retail source for both Arduino and LilyPad in the US) and a crowd-sourced dataset of high-visibility microcontroller projects. Our goal was to get a better sense of who it is that is using the two platforms and how these groups and their projects differ. We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino). Digging deeper, qualitative evidence suggests a reason. LilyPad users aren't just different. The projects they are making are different too. Although LilyPad and Arduino are the same chips and the same code, we suggest that LilyPad's design, and the way the platform is framed, leads to different types of projects that appeal to different types of people. For example, Arduino seems likely to find its way into an interaction design project or a fighting robot. LilyPad seems more likely to find its way into a smart and responsive textile. Very often, different types of people want to make these projects. Leah and I believe that there's a more general lesson to be learned about designing technologies for communities underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) -- and for women in particular. The dominant metaphor in the discussion on women in computer science is Margolis and Fisher's idea of "unlocking the clubhouse." The phrase provides a good description of the path that most projects aimed at broadening participation of women in computing projects seem to take. The metaphor is based around the idea that computing culture is a boys' club that is unfriendly to women. The solution is finding ways to make this club more accessible to those locked outside. It should go without saying that we share Margolis and Fisher's goal of increasing participation of women in STEM. That's LilyPad's point, after all. It it hopefully also clear that we're supportive of, and involved in, projects working to remove systematic barriers to participation by women and other groups. That work must continue. But I also think that Leah's work with LilyPad suggests another way forward based on addressing issues of self-selection that will affect even the most welcoming technological communities. Here's what we say in our paper:

Our experience suggests a different approach, one we call Building New Clubhouses. Instead of trying to fit people into existing engineering cultures, it may be more constructive to try to spark and support new cultures, to build new clubhouses. Our experiences have led us to believe that the problem is not so much that communities are prejudiced or exclusive but that they're limited in breadth--both intellectually and culturally. Some of the most revealing research in diversity in STEM found that women and other minorities don't join STEM communities not because they are intimidated or unqualified but rather because they're simply uninterested in these disciplines. One of our current research goals is thus to question traditional disciplinary boundaries and to expand disciplines to make room for more diverse interests and passions. To show, for example, that it is possible to build complex, innovative, technological artifacts that are colorful, soft, and beautiful. We want to provide alternative pathways to the rich intellectual possibilities of computation and engineering. We hope that our research shows that disciplines can grow both technically and culturally when we re-envision and re-contextualize them. When we build new clubhouses, new, surprising, and valuable things happen. As our findings on shared LilyPad projects seem to support, a new female-dominated electrical engineering/computer science community may emerge.

I have a strong belief that computing can be an empowering tool and that expanding users' control over technology is a critically important issue. Our paper argues that we should attempt to expand participation in computing by broadening the possibilities of computing, rather than only by broadening participation in extant, computing organizations, projects, and genres. Even if computing and electrical engineering communities were perfectly welcoming (which they are not) most people (both male and female, but disproportionately female) will choose not to participate. Building new clubhouses requires creativity of its proponents and risks charges of reinforcing stereotypes and existing status hierarchies. But, executed carefully and well (as I believe LilyPad has been), it suggests ways to reach the majority of people that no "unlocking" project will ever seem relevant to.

A new month has just begun, it s again time for a few suggestions of free software projects to flattr. This is Flattr FOSS in action. Enough said, let s start with my suggestions:

1. The battle for Wesnoth is a great turn-based tactical strategy game (I spent countless hours on it a few years ago). It s been a long time I have not played on my computer, but opensource games should be encouraged. Lack of good games is one of the few recurring complaints that come back from people trying out Linux for the first time. And The battle for Wesnoth is a very active project, so there s no reason to not support them.
2. Shutter is the next-generation tool to take screenshots, it s quite popular at least in Ubuntu and it can easily replace the default gnome-screenshot application. You can apply various effects on the fly, and upload the resulting pictures directly on image hosting sites (Flickr, Picasa, etc.).
3. Awesome is a highly configurable window-manager for X. I use it as a tiling window manager (windows are arranged to always fill the entire screen). Its configuration file consists of LUA code so it s for power-users mainly Julien Danjou started Awesome but he has also written many other small nifty tools, discover them in his Flattr profile.
4. Sparkleshare is a new collaboration tool that will transparently synchronize a folder between several computers/persons and inform you in real-time of changes. Under the hood, it uses public Git hosting sites (like Github or Gitorious) to store and exchange the data. In some aspects, it s like Dropbox s shared folders. You can also read Linux Weekly News review of it.
5. My last suggestion is to support Harald Welte and his projects. Click here to see his Flattr profile. He is someone in the free software world. First of all he s a famous kernel hacker, he wrote much of the firewalling code (known as netfilter). He also initiated gpl-violations.org and ensured that the GNU General Public License was respected when he found out companies that failed to meet the terms of the license. Lately he has been reverse-engineering the whole GSM stack pointing out security problems as he discovers them with the goal to provide a free implementation of everything (first results are in projects OsmocomBB and OpenBSC). Isn t that impressive?

That s it for this month. By the way, did you tell your friends how easy it is to support free software with Flattr? Share this article with them and let them join Flattr FOSS too. No comment Support my work

In my Ruby packaging in Debian and Ubuntu: Mythbusting and FAQ, I wrote The Ruby developers (or expert users) community is generally very hostile towards Debian. Many harsh words and insults are used in discussions mentioning Debian in the ruby-core@ mailing list, and there are frequent recommendations to avoid the Debian packages and install from sources, which is quite demotivating (Actually, what prompted that blog post is someone calling Debian-specific changes unforgivable). Zed A. Shaw just provided a very good example of that. Quoting the most juicy parts:

It s simply a tactic to make sure that you are stuck on Debian.

If we look at this problem from an open source perspective, Debian is at a minimum being a horrible citizen.

What is happening is control is not aligned with responsibility. Debian has taken control of the software package and recrafted it for their very narrow set of system administrator users. However, they refuse to take responsibility for the defect and quality problems they create. Instead I end up being responsible for their mistakes, which is wrong.

If Debian is in control, then Debian should be made responsible. That s the only way to get them to change it. If they don t want to be responsible, then they should let me be in control.

I m imagining a mass petition, maybe some funny ad campaigns, in-person confrontations meant to embarrass package maintainers, SEO tricks to get people off Debian, promotion of any alternative to Debian, anything to make them pay, apologize, and listen.

If you write software and you re sick of Debian screwing up your gear, then shoot me ideas for how we can make this happen. I think that if enough of us band together to make Debian responsible for its actions we can actually get them to start asking us before they package our software to find out how we think it should be packaged.

On the technical part of the post: The problem that Zed is experiencing is unknown to me, and also to the Debian and Ubuntu bug trackers. To my knowledge, rubygems doesn t not require openssl or net/scp to work, and a simple grep through the sources kind-of confirms that. But of course, that blog post was written as a rant, not as a proper bug report. My best guess is that the gem that Zed is installing requires openssl and net/scp. But of course, rubygems can t just depend on all the libraries that applications or libraries installed via rubygems could possibly require. Regarding openssl, we had a problem in Ruby because of the licensing situation of Ruby (dual licensed GPLv2+ and Ruby license, linked with openssl, which might raise some eyebrows), so it was split off the main standard library package until recently (and, apparently, in the version Zed is using). For net/scp, it is not part of the standard library, and not a dependency of rubygems, so I don t see why Zed expects it to be installed. On the rest of the post: Following my last post, several people volunteered to help with Ruby on Debian (and Ubuntu). In particular, Laurent Arnoud has been doing some fantastic work fixing the pkg-ruby-extras team s RC bugs. Also, all the messages of support both in the comments of my last post were very much appreciated. But I m really wondering why the Ruby community generates so many poisonous people. All my work on Debian is done on a volunteer basis, and it s really hard to get so much shit from it.

Kevin Stone gave an interesting TED talk about the biological future of joint replacement [1]. Using stem cells and animal tissue which has been prepared to destroy the chemicals that trigger immune responses the tissues can regrow. Replacing joints with titanium and ceramic lets people walk again, regrowing them with Kevin s methods allows them to compete at the highest levels of sporting contests! Derek Sivers gave a brief and interesting TED talk advising people to keep their goals secret if they want to achieve them [2]. The Parrot AR.Drone is an interesting device [3], it s a four-propeller helicopter that is controlled by WiFi. Apparently there is little security (it binds to the first WiFi client it sees) which is a significant down-side. It returns a video feed to the controlling iPhone as it flys and can hover when it loses it s connection. It will be interesting to see when people write software for other devices (Android etc). Also I wonder whether there will be open source weapons kits for it. If you could have those devices use either a nerf gun or a lance to attack each other s turbines then you could have drone jousting. Don Marti had an interesting new idea for a crime game [4]. The main concept is to use the element of mistrust that is present in real criminal gangs. The new guy you invite to join a job might inform the police and you won t know for sure. Sometimes a heist will be discovered by the police through bad luck (or good police work) and you will wonder whether there was an informant. The aim is for a simple game design and with the complexity in email discussions between the players. The C64 isn t dead, it s even on the Internet [5], an original C64 is running a web site! Tan Li gave an interesting TED talk about a new headset to read brain-waves [6]. The device in question can be applied in minutes, requires no gel or abrasion of the scalp, connects to the computer wirelessly and is relatively cheap at $300US. The developer s kit (which I think includes a headset) is $500US. I wonder if the community can develop a cheaper version of this which is more open. Lisa Margonelli gave an interesting TED talk about the politics of oil [7]. One of her insightful points is that the subsidies for oil should be shifted from the oil industry to middle-class consumers. But she goes off track a bit by suggesting gradual oil tax increases until 2020, according to the best estimates of groups such as the CSIRO they won t need to have taxes to give a high oil price in 2020! She is aiming for a 20% reduction in petrol use by 2020, but I m not aware of any serious group of scientists who have evidence to suggest that the production capacity in 2020 will be close to 80% what it is now. Slate has a good article about The Innocence Project which uses DNA tests to overturn false convictions [8], it s scarey how badly the justice system works. Rachel Sussman gave an interesting talk about the World s Oldest Living Things [9], nothing less than 2000 years old is included. Nicholas Negroponte gave an interesting EG 2007 talk about the OLPC project [10]. While some of the content about OLPC production is a little dated the OLPC history is relevant and his personal opinions regarding the benefits that children receive from computers are insightful. Jayne Poynter gave an interesting TED talk about life in Biosphere 2 [11]. Her work on mini-biospheres is also interesting. Let s hope we get a permanent Biosphere running outside the Earth sometime soon. Sheryl WuDunn gave an informative TED talk titled Our Century s Greatest Injustice about the plight of women in most of the world [12]. Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote a good article about the use of ssh-agent [13]. You really should use it to secure your ssh keys. Mark Shuttleworth has described the development process for the Ubuntu font [14]. This is a very interesting project and IMHO one of the most significant things that Ubuntu has done. Prior to this an entirely closed development process has been used for font development. Now we are getting a major new font family developed with a free and open process and with some new legal developments for a font license! One thing to note that this project appears to have involved a lot of work from professional font designers, it sounds like Canonical spent a significant amount of money on this project.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_stone_the_bio_future_of_joint_replacement.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself.html
• [3] http://toucharcade.com/2010/09/06/parrot-ar-drone-review-the-coolest-rc-toy-ive-played-with/
• [4] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/wiki/software/better-crime-game/
• [5] http://www.c64web.com/
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_margonelli_the_political_chemistry_of_oil.html
• [8] http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/08/17/reasonable-doubt-innocence-project-co-founder-peter-neufeld-on-being-wrong.aspx
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_sussman_the_world_s_oldest_living_things.html
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/nicholas_negroponte_on_one_laptop_per_child_two_years_on.html
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2.html
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sheryl_wudunn_our_century_s_greatest_injustice.html
• [13] http://debian-administration.org/users/dkg/weblog/64
• [14] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/537

Can you believe it? I still talk to people who don t know how to play blackjack. There must be something in the mechanics or tableau of blackjack that people find intimidating; for some reason, people can be a little cautious about taking the first move.
Photo courtesy of Winquerque on Net via Flickr. Clearly, there s no cause to hesitate. Players find quite quickly that it is actually not hard to figure out, and the strategies aren t even terribly complicated. For sure, if you re used to playing online slots, you are probably going to need to work a little harder to master the nuts and bolts. But it s still nothing like getting to grips with Texas Hold em from the beginning, for example!. Quite frankly, you very likely already know a fair portion of what most players have to know. I am able to give you the essentials in one simple little paragraph: If the card has aparticular number, that s the amount it will be worth. If it doesn t, it s worth 10. The only exception to this rule are Aces, which are worth either 1 or 11 (more about that later). Say hit when you have to get closer to 21, and/or stand when you don t. If you are closest to 21, you win. If you bust (get more than 21), you lose. Getting dealt blackjack (a natural 21 from the first two cards), makes you an instant winner (well, you and the dealer can also tie, or push ). Got it? OK, so it is not completely all you need to know. To begin with, most professional blackjack fans understand all too well that your goal has less to do with trying to get to 21, and just about everything to do with defeating an opponent. The dealer will not have the luxury of actually playing , precisely. Whether you re playing at a land-based casino or online (speaking of which, for additional info on USA casino players, all you have to do is click the link!), the house rules specify each individual play they can make. Mainly, she or he needs to take another card until their cards add up to the house rule limit (generally 17 and over). Of course, one of you will get an ill-fated draw and find themselves busted , but this decides a fewer number of games than you might expect. The tricky aspect of blackjack is the decision that you have to make if the cards add up somewhere around 12 and 16 (approximately, subject to other details). If you only had your own cards to consider, it would just be nothing but chance. Don t get me wrong, dumb luck has quite a lot to do with it. It is a card game, of course, and all card games are based on luck to some extent. But the serious gamer recognizes that luck is essentially a code word for statistics ; if you know what you have, and you possess a clue about the dealer s cards, you may make a knowledgeable judgment about which cards you re more inclined to end up with if you decide to hit another time. The most useful clue that you require to evaluate whether to play risky or conservative (sorry, I meant loose or tight ) is the dealer s upcard. Well, that s all for now, but for more information, you can always take a look at our friends at USA online casinos accepting Webmoney , who will get you up to speed. A bit later, we re going to get down to the serious nitty-gritty: doubling down, splitting, and much much more. Until then !

Many Unix daemons use a technique known as pre-forking . This means that to save the amount of time taken to fork a child process they will keep a pool of processes waiting for work to come in. When a job arrives then one of the existing processes is used and the overhead of the fork() system call is saved. I decided to write a little benchmark to see how much overhead a fork() really has. I wrote the below program (which is released under the GPL 3.0 license) to test this. It gives the performance of a fork() operation followed by a waitpid() operation in fork()s per second and also the performance of running a trivial program via system which uses /bin/sh to execute the given command. On my Thinkpad T61 with a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz I could get 2429.85 forks per second when running Linux 2.6.32 in 64bit mode. On a Thinkpad T20 with a 500MHz P3 CPU I could get 341.74 forks per second. In both cases is seems that the number of forks per second is significantly greater than the number of real-world requests. If each request on average took one disk seek then neither system would have the fork performance as any sort of bottleneck. Also if each request took more than a couple of milliseconds of CPU time on the T7500 or 10ms of CPU time on the 500MHz P3 then the benefits of pre-forking would be very small. Finally it s worth noting that the overhead of fork() + waitpid() in a loop will not be the same as the overhead of just fork()ing off processes and calling waitpid() when there s nothing else to do. I had a brief look at some of my servers to see how many operations they perform. One busy front-end mail server has about 3,000,000 log entries in mail.log per day, that is about 35 per second. These log entries include calling SpamAssassin and Clamav, which are fairly heavy operations. The system in question averages one Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5420 @ 2.50GHz core being used 24*7, I can t do a good benchmark run on that system as it s always busy but I think it s reasonable to assume for the sake of discussion that it s about the same speed as the T7500 (it may be 5* faster, but that won t change things much). At 2429 forks per second (or 0.4ms per fork/wait) if that time is entirely reduced to zero that won t make any noticeable difference to a system that has an average operation taking 1000/35= 28ms! Now if a daemon was to use fork() + system() to launch a child process (which is a really slow way of doing it) then the T7500 gets 248.51 fork()+system() operations per second with bash and 305.63 per second with dash. The P3-500 gets 24.48 with bash and 33.06 with dash. So it seems that if every log entry on my busy mail server involved using a fork()+system() operation and it was replaced to use pre-forked daemons then it might be possible to save almost 10% of the CPU time on that system in question. Now it is theoretically possible that the setup of a daemon process can take more CPU time than fork()+system(). EG a daemon could have some really complex data structures to initialise. If the structures in question were initialised in the same way for each request then a viable design would be to have the master process initialise all the data which would then be inherited by the children. The only way I can imagine for a daemon child process to take any significant amount of time on modern hardware is for it to generate a session encryption key, and there s really nothing stopping a single master process from generating several such keys in advance and then passing them to child processes as needed. In conclusion I think that the meme about pre-forking is based on hardware that was used at a time when a 500MHz 32bit system (like my ancient Thinkpad T20) was unimaginably fast and when operating systems were less efficient than a modern Linux kernel. The only corner case might be daemons which do relatively simple CPU bound operations such as serving static files from a web server where the data all fits into the system cache, but even then I expect that the benefit is a lot smaller than most people think and the number of pre-forked processes is probably best kept very low. One final thing to note is that if you compare fork()+exec() with an operation to instruct a running daemon (via Unix domain sockets perhaps) to provide access to a new child (which may be pre-forked or may be forked on demand) then you have the potential to save a moderate amount of CPU time. The initialisation of a new process has some overhead that is greater than calling fork(), and when you fork() a new process there are usually lots of data structures which are not written after that time which means that on Linux they remain as shared memory and thus reduce the system memory use (and improve cache efficiency when they are read). #include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <stdlib.h> #define NUM_FORKS 10000
#define NUM_SHELLS 1000 int main()

struct timeval start, end;
if(gettimeofday(&start, NULL) == -1)

fprintf(stderr, "Can't get time of day\n");
return 1;
int i = 0;
while(i < NUM_FORKS)

pid_t pid = fork();
if(pid == 0)
return 0;
if(pid > 0)

int status;
pid_t rc = waitpid(-1, &status, 0);
if(rc != pid)

fprintf(stderr, "waidpid() failed\n");
return 1;


else

fprintf(stderr, "fork() failed\n");
return 1;

i++;
if(gettimeofday(&end, NULL) == -1)

fprintf(stderr, "Can't get time of day\n");
return 1;
printf("%.2f fork()s per second\n", double(NUM_FORKS)/(double(end.tv_sec start.tv_sec) + double(end.tv_usec start.tv_usec) / 1000000.0) ); if(gettimeofday(&start, NULL) == -1)

fprintf(stderr, "Can't get time of day\n");
return 1;
i = 0;
while(i < NUM_SHELLS)

pid_t pid = fork();
if(pid == 0)

if(system("id > /dev/null") == -1)
fprintf(stderr, "system() failed\n");
return 0;

if(pid > 0)

int status;
pid_t rc = waitpid(-1, &status, 0);
if(rc != pid)

fprintf(stderr, "waidpid() failed\n");
return 1;


else

fprintf(stderr, "fork() failed\n");
return 1;

i++;
if(gettimeofday(&end, NULL) == -1)

fprintf(stderr, "Can't get time of day\n");
return 1;
printf("%.2f fork() and system() calls per second\n", double(NUM_SHELLS)/(double(end.tv_sec start.tv_sec) + double(end.tv_usec start.tv_usec) / 1000000.0) );
return 0;

For those who haven t heard: OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation

The community of volunteers developing and promoting OpenOffice.org sets up an independent Foundation to drive the further growth of the project The Internet, September 28, 2010 The community of volunteers who develop and promote OpenOffice.org, the leading free office software, announce a major change in the project s structure. After ten years successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principle sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called The Document Foundation , to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original charter. The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organisations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive innovation in the office suite market. From now on, the OpenOffice.org community will be known as The Document Foundation . Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand LibreOffice has been chosen for the software going forward. The Document Foundation is the result of a collective effort by leading independent members of the OpenOffice.org community, including several project leads and key members of the Community Council. It will be led initially by a Steering Committee of developers and national language projects managers. The Foundation aims to lower the barrier of adoption for both users and developers, to make LibreOffice the most accessible office suite ever. The Foundation will coordinate and oversee the development of LibreOffice, which is available in beta version at the placeholder site: http://www.libreoffice.org. Developers are invited to join the project and contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to shape the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors who translate, test, document, support, and promote the software. Speaking for the group of volunteers, Sophie Gautier a veteran of the community and the former maintainer of the French speaking language project has declared: We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company. Free software advocates around the world have the extraordinary opportunity of joining the group of founding members today, to write a completely new chapter in the history of FLOSS . [...]

So welcome The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. I already can see how does the community benefits from this due to the merge with go-oo:

Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.

(from http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/) So, will Oracle contribute the OpenOffice.org trademark to the community ? Time will tell
Filed under: LibreOffice, Openoffice.org, Proud to use free software

One of the nice things that I've been involved with since starting to work at ARM in Cambridge is setting up newer, faster machines to help with the armel port. We have six machines hosted in the machine room here now:

• abel is a porter box
• arnold, alain, alwyn and antheil are running buildd software
• arne is a hot spare (currently on my desk, but ready to go back in the rack any minute now)

All of these machines are Marvell DB-78x00-BP development boards, each configured with a 1GHz Feroceon processor (ARM v5t), 1.5GB of RAM and a 250GB drive attached via SATA. They're nice machines, reasonably powerful yet (as with many ARM-based machines) they draw very very little electrical power even when working hard. These very boards were used for a while by the folks at Canonical to help build the Ubuntu armel port, but now we've got them. In terms of configuration, these machines are not quite fully supported in Debian yet, though. The kernels we're using are locally-built, based on the Debian linux-source-2.6.32 package but with a .config (marvell.config) that's tweaked slightly to add the support for these boards. There aren't any source changes needed, so I'm hoping to get support added directly in Debian, either as a new kernel flavour or (preferred) as a patch to an existing flavour. I've had conflicting advice about whether the latter is possible, so I'm going to have to experiment and find out for myself. UPDATE 2010-09-28: I've tested, and it seems that the boards will need a new flavour after all, as the config is incompatible with the closest other config (kirkwood). Ah well... I had no end of trouble trying to get make-kpkg do the right thing, so on advice from Ben I built the kernel using "make deb-pkg", a standard target in the Linux kernel's build system: fakeroot make -j2 deb-pkg DEBEMAIL=93sam@debian.org DEBFULLNAME="Steve McIntyre" KDEB_PKGVERSION=buildd23 Annoyingly, that wouldn't work when cross-compiling either so I had to build the kernel natively. To make the resulting kernel image package install properly (and, just as importantly, allow for future easy upgrades for the DSA folks), I also needed the following tweaks to the Debian system:

• depmod:
  • Need to make sure that depmod is run so the new kernel can find and load modules at boot. Added trivial script in /etc/kernel/postinst.d/depmod to do this.
• initramfs-tools:
  • Needed to copy the file /etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools into place from my amd64 machine; I'm guessing this would be there automatically on a new-enough version of initramfs-tools on the armel machines, but we're still using Lenny as a base system for now even if I'm using a Squeeze-based kernel.
• flash-kernel:
  • #594878: support for these boards. Hector did most of the work, and I've worked on it a little more.
  • #550584: kernel postinst hook script (/etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-flash-kernel) to create uImage and uInitrd files from the kernel zImage and the initramfs.

Finally, I've tweaked the uboot config on the machines to use the uImage and uInitrd files that are generated:

Marvell>> setenv IDE ide reset
Marvell>> setenv loadkernel ext2load ide 0:1 0x2000000 /uImage
Marvell>> setenv loadinitramfs ext2load ide 0:1 0x3000000 /uInitrd
Marvell>> setenv bootboth bootm 0x2000000 0x3000000
Marvell>> setenv bootcmd setenv bootargs \$\(bootargs\)\;$(IDE)\;$(loadkernel)\;$(loadinitramfs)\;$(bootboth)
Marvell>> saveenv

And that's it, as far as I can see. I'll now wait for people to tell me what I've got wrong above... :-)

After the famous Facebook outage a few days ago, Facebook Engineering made a to be fair, reasonably detailed statement on what went wrong and how it affected the service. One particular comment attached to it drew my attention:

It s great to hear and see that big companies like Facebook are so open with what they do. That s rare, very rare. Thanks!

Huh? Did I miss some announcement of openness and freedom?
<script type="text/javascript"> var flattr_wp_ver = '0.9.16'; var flattr_uid = '32970'; var flattr_url = 'http://www.jwiltshire.org.uk/content'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_tag = 'blog,wordpress,rss,feed'; var flattr_btn = 'large'; var flattr_tle = 'jwiltshire.org.uk'; var flattr_dsc = 'The public face of jwiltshire'; </script> <script src="https://api.flattr.com/js/0.5.0/load.js?mode=auto" type="text/javascript"></script>

I recently started using btrfs, in both raid0 and raid1 setups, and migrated some data there. Once all the data was copied, I wanted to check how much overhead moving to btrfs meant, space-wise.

# df -h /mnt/share
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb3 932G 682G 250G 74% /mnt/share # btrfs-show /dev/sdb3
Label: none uuid: e06484de-fb18-4564-b6e6-adbaed8bebec
Total devices 2 FS bytes used 681.61GB
devid 2 size 465.66GB used 427.13GB path /dev/sdb3
devid 1 size 465.66GB used 427.15GB path /dev/sda3


The filesystem was freshly created, in a raid0 fashion, so both 465GB partitions are used to form (roughly) a 930GB volume.
So, I had filled it with 682GB of data, and df was telling me 250GB were left, which is not unexpected. What I didn t expect, though, is btrfs-show telling me 427GB were used on each partition. Again, the filesystem was freshly created and the data had just been copied over, so I wasn t expecting these numbers to be off. Which meant 854GB were being allocated on disk for 681GB of data, 25% overhead ! Curious to know how much left that really meant, I just tried a stupid thing: filling as much as btrfs permits:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/share/zero bs=1M
dd: writing /mnt/share/zero': No space left on device
253359+0 records in
253358+0 records out
265665118208 bytes (266 GB) copied, 1144.41 s, 232 MB/s
# du -sh /mnt/share/zero
248G /mnt/share/zero


It turns out I actually could write for the amount of free space df was claiming was free (modulo GiB-GB conversions).

# df -h /mnt/share
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb3 932G 930G 2.0G 100% /mnt/share # btrfs-show /dev/sdb3
Label: none uuid: e06484de-fb18-4564-b6e6-adbaed8bebec
Total devices 2 FS bytes used 929.36GB
devid 2 size 465.66GB used 465.13GB path /dev/sdb3
devid 1 size 465.66GB used 465.15GB path /dev/sda3


So, this time df is slightly off, and btrfs-show somehow agrees the filesystem is full. But surprises don t stop there:

# rm /mnt/share/zero # df -h /mnt/share
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb3 932G 682G 250G 74% /mnt/share # btrfs-show /dev/sda3
Label: none uuid: e06484de-fb18-4564-b6e6-adbaed8bebec
Total devices 2 FS bytes used 929.36GB
devid 2 size 465.66GB used 465.13GB path /dev/sdb3
devid 1 size 465.66GB used 465.15GB path /dev/sda3


That s right, even after the file removal, for btrfs-show, everything is still in use. Even after several sync or several hours later. All in all, just don t trust what btrfs-show says. NB: one also needs to know that df reports wrong sizes for raid1 setups, but that s another story.

This last couple of days I've been dedicated making Gnus fresher. I've decided to give a whirl on Gravatar support. I already tried the gravatar.el lying on the Interweb, but well, it was crap: it used wget to fetch pictures, therefore was totally synchronous. Reading each mail was slower. The cache did not even have TTL, as far as I recall. So, I've now wrote gravatar.el implementing the Gravatar API. Asynchronously of course. With cache, TTL, etc. Perfect. :-) Then I've composed gnus-gravatar.el, implementing a washing function adding Gravatar for From field and/or Cc/To fields, like done for picons. As I was expecting, the patch was badly received by the GNU guys, which start talking about thinks like external resources, privacy, non-free software, etc. Boring. Fortunately, Lars allowed me to push the patch in git so everybody can give it a try. I'm now waiting for feedbacks in order to know if I will have to maintain this patch outside Gnus, or not. Here's the mandatory screen-shot.

Brian announced it on r-help and r-sig-finance and I have since updated the R/Finance website and Call for Papers page. And as David Smith already outblogged me about it, without further ado our Call for Paper for next spring's R/Finance conference:

Call for Papers: R/Finance 2011: Applied Finance with R
April 29 and 30, 2011
Chicago, IL, USA
The third annual R/Finance conference for applied finance using R will be held this spring in Chicago, IL, USA on April 29 and 30, 2011. The two-day conference will cover topics including portfolio management, time series analysis, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, market microstructure and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management, portfolio construction, and trading. One-page abstracts or complete papers (in txt or pdf format) are invited to be submitted for consideration. Academic and practitioner proposals related to R are encouraged. We welcome submissions for full talks, abbreviated "lightning talks", and for a limited number of pre-conference (longer) seminar sessions. Presenters are strongly encouraged to provide working R code to accompany the presentation/paper. Data sets should also be made public for the purposes of reproducibility (though we realize this may be limited due to contracts with data vendors). Preference may be given to presenters who have released R packages. Please send submissions to: committee at RinFinance.com. The submission deadline is February 15th, 2011. Early submissions may receive early acceptance and scheduling. Submissions will be evaluated and submitters notified via email on a rolling basis. Determination of whether a presentation will be a long presentation or a lightning talk will be made once the full list of presenters is known. R/Finance 2009 and 2010 included attendees from around the world and featured keynote presentations from prominent academics and practitioners. 2009-2010 presenters names and presentations are online at the conference website. We anticipate another exciting line-up for 2011 including keynote presentations from John Bollinger, Mebane Faber, Stefano Iacus, and Louis Kates. Additional details will be announced via the conference website as they become available. For the program committee:

Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Brian Peterson,
Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan, Joshua Ulrich

So see you in Chicago in April!

As this year's admin, I wrote up the following summary which has now been posted at the R site in the appropriate slot. My thanks to this year's students, fellow mentors and everybody else who helped to make it happen.

Projects 2010 As in 2008 and 2009, the R Project has again participated in the Google Summer of Code during 2010. Based on ideas collected and disussed on the R Wiki, the projects and students listed below (and sorted alphabetically by student) were selected for participation and have been sponsored by Google during the summer 2010. The finished projects are available via the R / GSoC 2010 repository at Google Code, and in several cases also via their individual repos (see below). Informal updates and final summaries on the work was also provided via the GSoC 2010 R group blog.

---

rdx - Automatic Differentiation in R Chidambaram Annamalai, mentored by John Nash. Proposal: radx is a package to compute derivatives (of any order) of native R code for multivariate functions with vector outputs, f:R^m -> R^n, through Automatic Differentiation (AD). Numerical evaluation of derivatives has widespread uses in many fields. rdx will implement two modes for the computation of derivatives, the Forward and Reverse modes of AD, combining which we can efficiently compute Jacobians and Hessians. Higher order derivatives will be evaluated through Univariate Taylor Propagation. Delivered: Two packages radx: forward automatic differentiation in R and tada: templated automatic differentiation in C++ were created; see this blog post for details.

---

A GUI for Graphics using ggplot and Deducer by Ian Fellows, mentored by Hadley Wickham. Proposal: R puts the latest statistical techniques at one's fingertips through thousands of add-on packages available on the CRAN download servers. The price for all of this power is complexity. Deducer is a cross-platform cross-console graphical user interface built on top of R designed to reduce this complexity. This project proposes to extend the scope of Deducer by creating an innovative yet intuitive system for generating statistical graphics based on the ggplot2 package. Delivered: All of the major features have been implemented, and are outlined in the video links in this blog post.

---

rgeos - an R wrapper for GEOS by Colin Rundel, mentored by Roger Bivand. Proposal: At present there does not exist a robust geometry engine available to R, the tools that are available tend to be limited in scope and do not easily integrate with existing spatial analysis tools. GEOS is a powerful open source geometry engine written in C++ that implements spatial functions and operators from the OpenGIS Simple Features for SQL specification. rgeos will make these tools available within R and will integrate with existing spatial data tools through the sp package. Delivered: The rgeos project on R-Forge; see the final update blog post.

---

Social Relations Analyses in R by Felix Schoenbrodt, mentored by Stefan Schmukle. Proposal: Social Relations Analyses (SRAs; Kenny, 1994) are a hot topic both in personality and in social psychology. While more and more research groups adopt the methodology, software solutions are lacking far behind - the main software for calculating SRAs are two DOS programs from 1995, which have a lot of restrictions. My GSOC project will extend the functionality of these existing programs and bring the power of SRAs into the R Environment for Statistical Computing as a state-of-the-art package. Delivered: The TripleR package is now on CRAN and hosted on RForge.Net; see this blog post for updates.

---

NoSQL Interface for R by Yasuhisa Yoshida, mentored by Dirk Eddelbuettel. Proposal: So-called NoSQL databases are becoming increasingly popular. They generally provide very efficient lookup of key/value pairs. I'll provide several implementation of NoSQL interface for R. Beyond a sample interface package, I'll try to support generic interface similar to what the DBI package does for SQL backends Status: An initial prototype is available via RTokyoCabinet on Github. No updates were made since June; no communication occurred with anybody related to the GSoC project since June and the project earned a fail.

---

Last modified: Wed Sep 22 19:39:43 CDT 2010

I work from home, this is a good thing. I benefit from a 20 metre commute, comfortable working environment and generally low carbon lifestyle.

Apparently, live.com thinks that any browser coming from a ppc architecture is a mobile device. This sucks for the users of the hundreds of thousands of powerpc desktops still in service. I don't use hotmail myself, but i do support people who use it. I set one of my clients up with debian squeeze on their PPC machine because all the proprietary vendors have basically given up on that architecture -- debian represents the best way to get modern tools on these machines (and other machines too, but that's a different argument). However, this client couldn't get to their hotmail account, despite using the latest version of iceweasel (3.5.12). They were directed to a crippled interface that didn't include the ability to attach files, and was a gross waste of the desktop screen space. It appears to be the "mobile" version of live.com's services. However, the same version of iceweasel on an i686 test machine could access the standard version of hotmail with no trouble. My friend jeremyb helpfully suggested fiddling with the User Agent string exported by the browser. Some experimentation shows that the presence of the string "ppc" within any parenthetical expression in the UA makes live.com show the crappy interface. You can try it yourself (if you have a hotmail account) on your x86 or amd64 machine by adding (ppc) to the default valule of general.useragent.extra.firefoxComment in about:config. Stupid stupid stupid. I'd like to have fixed this by overriding the browser's reported architecture (or simply by removing it -- why does a web server need to know the hardware architecture of my client?). But there doesn't appear to be a way to do that with the way that mozilla constructs the UA. Instead, i needed to add a new string key named general.useragent.override which is not exposed by default in about:config. This raises some questions:

• Why are we publishing our hardware architectures from our browsers anyway? This seems like unncessary leakage, and not all browsers do it. For example, Arora doesn't leak this info (despite a poorly-argued request to do so). Browsers are already too identifiable by servers. This information should not be leaked by default.
• Why does live.com insist on sending ppc users to the crappy "mobile" version? Are they trying to encourage the treadmill of hardware upgrades that proprietary vendors benefit from? Is there some less insidious explanation? Are there actually more powerpc-based mobile devices than desktops?
• why is there no simple way to tell Firefox/Iceweasel to override or suppress the architecture information? Having to override the useragent string entirely means that when iceweasel does eventually get upgraded, it's going to report the wrong version unless i can remember to update the override myself (i can't reasonably expect a non-techie client who never heard of user agents before today to remember how to do this correctly).

Any ideas?Tags: browser, hotmail, powerpc, ppc, useragent, wtf

The Debian policy dictates that package upgrades must take care of preserving user changes to configuration files. This article will explain you how most packages ensure this. This is important knowledge for anyone who has to manage upgrades: knowing how it works lets you easily automate most of it and deal correctly with the fallout. How dpkg manages configuration files Most packages rely on dpkg to properly install configuration files. Dpkg keeps a checksum of the last installed version of configuration file. When it must install a new version, it calculates the checksum of the currently installed file and if it doesn t match anymore, it knows that the user has edited the file. In that case, instead of overwriting the configuration file, it asks the user what to do. You probably already have seen those questions, they look like this:

Configuration file  /etc/bash.bashrc'
 ==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation.
 ==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
   What would you like to do about it ?  Your options are:
    Y or I  : install the package maintainer's version
    N or O  : keep your currently-installed version
      D     : show the differences between the versions
      Z     : start a shell to examine the situation
 The default action is to keep your current version.
*** bash.bashrc (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ?

In this specific example, if you answer Y or I (for yes or install ), dpkg will install the new version of /etc/bash.bashrc but it will also backup the current version in /etc/bash.bashrc.dpkg-old. If you answer N or O (for no or old ), dpkg will install the new version in /etc/bash.bashrc.dpkg-dist and /etc/bash.bashrc is left untouched. The two other answers allow you to examine the differences before taking a decision. Note that if you choose to start a shell, the new version is currently available as /etc/bash.bashrc.dpkg-new (and since Squeeze there are convenient environment variables $DPKG_CONFFILE_OLD and $DPKG_CONFFILE_NEW in case you want to create a custom review script). All configurations files managed by dpkg are called conffiles because that s the name of the field where they are recorded in the dpkg database. You can display the list of conffiles for any package:

$ dpkg --status bash
[...]
Conffiles:
 /etc/skel/.profile ecb6d3479ac3823f1da7f314d871989b
 /etc/skel/.bashrc 2afdd6c53990f2387a7ef9989af0bc07
 /etc/skel/.bash_logout 22bfb8c1dd94b5f3813a2b25da67463f
 /etc/bash.bashrc 5b3c3bc73d236e4e1b6f9b6c1ed5964e
[...]

The command dpkg-query --showformat='$ Conffiles \n' --show bash can give you the same information if you need to retrieve only that field. The 32 characters after the filename are the MD5 checksum of the original configuration file provided by the package. Avoiding the conffile prompt Every time that dpkg must install a new conffile that you have modified (and a removed file is only a particular case of a modified file in dpkg s eyes), it will stop the upgrade and wait your answer. This can be particularly annoying for major upgrades. That s why you can give predefined answers to dpkg with the help of multiple --force-conf* options:

• --force-confold: do not modify the current configuration file, the new version is installed with a .dpkg-dist suffix. With this option alone, even configuration files that you have not modified are left untouched. You need to combine it with --force-confdef to let dpkg overwrite configuration files that you have not modified.
• --force-confnew: always install the new version of the configuration file, the current version is kept in a file with the .dpkg-old suffix.
• --force-confdef: ask dpkg to decide alone when it can and prompt otherwise. This is the default behavior of dpkg and this option is mainly useful in combination with --force-confold.
• --force-confmiss: ask dpkg to install the configuration file if it s currently missing (for example because you have removed the file by mistake).

If you use Apt, you can pass options to dpkg with a command-line like this:

$ apt-get -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confdef" -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confold" dist-upgrade

You can also make those options permanent by creating /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/local:

Dpkg::Options  
   "--force-confdef";
   "--force-confold";
 

Bringing up the conffile prompt at any time The conffile prompt is only displayed when dpkg detects that the package provides an new version of the conffile. Thus reinstalling the same package will not bring up the prompt. But you can instruct dpkg to ask nevertheless with the --force-confask option. This is a new feature in Debian Squeeze. It will only ask for files that are locally modified.

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I've just released a new Blog::Spam module to CPAN. The Blog::Spam module is 99% of the code behind the blog & forum spam detection service. On the whole I'm pleased with the way that development has gone, and although I'm going to keep tinkering it is essentially "complete". Now I need to go back and fix bugs in chronicle, asql, and rinse. ObSubject: "You are just an ordinary man in a cape!" - Batman Begins.

Richard Darst has been writing about DebConf organisation and wrote about DebCamp. Thought I'd give my story about where the idea for DebCamp came from, for some context. DebConf2 in Toronto was my first DebConf. I had sadly missed DebConf1 due to EPASSPORT despite having sponsored tickets; something I still kick myself about. Things were not as well organised back then. Anyway, since Ottowa Linux Symposium was the week before DebConf, some of us were in Canada early for that, and needed to find something to do in the time between conferences. My thought was, find someplace to camp. It'd be a cheap way to see more of Canada and decompress. I posted this plan to debian-private and Andreas Schuldei and I spent several days canoing around Algonquin park. Of course, we'd never met before. I'd met probably less than five European debian developers before that point. We experienced big scary lakes that challenged our limited canoe skills, portaged and camped, and even saw a moose. Later during DebConf2, I distinctly remember mentioning our camping trip and saying "we could have a DebCamp before the next DebConf". And sure enough, before DebConf3 there was a DebCamp[1]. In the days we hacked on d-i and stuff. We camped out in the gym of a primary school in Oslo, and hung out through the long evenings out front. Some people even brought tents. Since then, DebCamp has developed into the integral warmup for DebConf that Richard describes. I'd rather see it more ad-hoc and scruffy, but you can't argue with the purpose it serves. So, are there any good places to camp near Banja Luka? [1] Even then the DebConf orga team made it seem that easy.

The week before DebConf has been traditionally been DebCamp. This has been advertised as a time for core teams to come early to work on their projects together, and this post will talk more about what that means.At DebCamp, there is not much infrastructure set up yet. We have (unfurnished) hacklabs, accommodations, and usually food from the very beginning. We'll have Internet access, but the network and power distribution isn't set up yet. People find what they can and make their own space to work. The DebConf team works on setting up hacklabs starting on day 0 or 1, and the DebCampers serve as the test subjects to make sure that everything works.There intentionally aren't many scheduled activities during DebCamp. The organizers have too much else to do, and events aren't the main purpose of DebCamp. If some people wanted a place to meet, they could probably find a place, though. Some years, there have been one or two workshop type events on the DebCamp schedule.DebCamp has frequently been explained by "Development teams like debian-installer and debian-edu also have the possibility of meeting beforehand for undisturbed collaborative work. ... Interested teams should contact the organizers upfront to make special arrangements." (From the DC10 website) Also included in DebCamp are the DebConf organizers - we desperately need that time to pull organizers from over the world together to get us on the same page locally. Furthermore, anyone without a workplan can attend DebCamp by paying their actual costs.However, saying that DebCamp is limited to these groups of people doesn't reflect reality: Anyone can attend. Thus the DebCamp description doesn't necessarily reflect the actual limits for attending. This has the appearance of resulting in (and some people believe it has) a DebCamp which is biased towards those who well-connected with organizers, since they know that basically anyone can go and get a free extended holiday with Debian people. In fact, getting anyone to review the submitted workplans has met resistance in the last few years.For DebConf10, we did manage to reach agreement to filter out possible tourist-like people, but it was a similar (or only slightly more strict) criteria than DebConf itself. This was done very late, too late to be fair to force adjustments in travel plans of too many people. The difference between the DebCamp listed criteria and who has gotten sponsored for DebCamp in the past caused contention among some new organizers this year. Why didn't they know that they would have qualified for DebCamp past years? The moral of the story is that we need to be more clear on the purpose of DebCamp and make the actual qualifications for attending concrete and well-known so that it remains fair.Of course, it's also true that non-core developers and other interested people to attending DebCamp is a good thing, since it is a strong motivator to get more involved in Debian. Local people are encouraged to attend and learn/hack/volunteer. DebCamp isn't meant to be exclusive, just to reflect the realities of a limited budget.
DebCamp is a very important part of DebConf, both for Debian development purposes and for DebConf set-up purposes. However, since it is a week of limited attendance with mostly the same people attending year after year, we need to ensure that it remains transparent to the rest of Debian.Tags: debconf