Search Results: "ema"

21 October 2008

Biella Coleman: Nerd Girls.

I am all for models and examples, and well, Nerd Girls, is such a web portal meant to celebrate “smart-girl individuality that s revolutionizing our future.” And they “want to encourage other girls to change their world through Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, while embracing their feminine power.” That message is all good and fine but the profile page is just a little too homogeneous and “made up” and actually just looks fake as fake can be (and what is UP with those dumb glasses they are all wearing?!). Sorry to say this, but all those “chics” look like they are fake nerds and are really models for Seventeen magazine or soft-porn movies. Is Nerd Girls a joke? Or is it real and just not for Ugly (or regularly looking) Nerd Girls? update
[h0mee] lol
[h0mee] actually what it really reminds me of
[h0mee] are those inspirational posters you see in high school meant to inspire students to study harder
[biella] like this one update again (sorry, the comments on my irc channel are just too good to ignore: [Atala] lol one of my friends just said the site seems like a thought experiment on what would happen if MTV bought Bitch magazine.
[rex] EXACTLY

Biella Coleman: The DMCA

Since most readers of this blog are not fans of the DMCA, I thought you all might appreciate this terse and elegant insight about why the DMCA is such a failed law.

“The existence of the DMCA is an open admission that software has failure modes sufficiently severe that regulation by software alone cannot be trusted. The effectiveness of DRM software as a regulator is therefore dependent on the legal effectiveness of the DMCA … The DMCA creates a category of per se illegal software by outlawing programs that do certain things. But in so doing the DMCA aligns itself squarely against software’s plasticity. In making it illegal to create certain kinds of software, it tries to prevent people from taking full advantage of one of software’s greatest virtues: that software can do almost anything one can imagine.??? James Grimmelmann in Regulation by Software, p. 1756

Biella Coleman: The DMCA

Since most readers of this blog are not fans of the DMCA, I thought you all might appreciate this terse and elegant insight about why the DMCA is such a failed law.

“The existence of the DMCA is an open admission that software has failure modes sufficiently severe that regulation by software alone cannot be trusted. The effectiveness of DRM software as a regulator is therefore dependent on the legal effectiveness of the DMCA … The DMCA creates a category of per se illegal software by outlawing programs that do certain things. But in so doing the DMCA aligns itself squarely against software’s plasticity. In making it illegal to create certain kinds of software, it tries to prevent people from taking full advantage of one of software’s greatest virtues: that software can do almost anything one can imagine. James Grimmelmann in Regulation by Software, p. 1756

Michal Čihař: Double check what you do

I just wanted to fix some RC bugs till I'll go home, so I looked at the list of open ones and randomly chosen two bugs about roxen fonts which looked like low hanging fruits. Both were in fact same issue, just copied to two packages. I worked on the fix, creating some intermediate version and then I finally wanted to upload the package. Unfortunately in this step I somehow managed to use the intermediate version, which did not really fix the issue. As packages were already uploaded, there was not much I could do except yet another NMU, now with full set of changes. Just as accepted emails arrived I also noticed that I messed up bug numbers in changelog - I used same bug number in both changelogs. Okay, manually closing the bug worked around this. But now I'm afraid what else did I mess up. Probably it's time to go for a dinner and stop working on computer for now :-).

Biella Coleman: Measuring a Courses Success: xkcd

So we are about 1/2 way done with my hacker class and I have to say it has been a pretty fun ride, especially since many students thought hacking was all about pimply kids engaging in malicious acts of computer violence and many had no knowledge of basic technological concepts like UNIX or source code. We had to first sweep away the cobwebs of misrepresentation and replace with a more solid foundation of facts (however messy the world of hacking still is!) But after building a foundation, you still wonder whether students are learning. Traditionally we gauge progress with exams or essays, which can be effective but let’s face it, at times a little tedious. But today a student sent me the following very short email, which made me realize I had another barometer at my disposal to gauge their progress xkcd:

http://xkcd.com/344/ I wouldn’t have gotten the joke if it wasn’t for you. Thanks.

The email not only made me smile (for it is always nice to know your students are leaning something) but it gave me the idea that in the future I might include a comic based exams composed of 5-10 comic strips (many from xkcd) and ask for an exegesis of them. Why not? Seems like fun to me. And it would be great to include the following as one of my course objectives: “By the end of this class you will be able to read xkcd and actually understand (most) of it.” If they could do that, well, they must have learned at least something

update: One of my readers, Florian, sent this nice bit, which I have not read before: “I read your blog via Planet Debian and immediately felt reminded of Jane
Goodall’s Foreword to Gary Larson’s The Far Side Gallery 5 which I’d
like to share with you:”

Recently I was talking with one of the best researcher know, Tim
O’Halloran. He has been able to inspire generations of middle and high
school students to care for the natural world. Tim told me that Gary
Larson has had a major impact on his teaching. Tim uses Far Side
cartoons to introduce topics, to illustrate points, and to “reinforce
the notion that the more we investigate the universe, the richer is our
experience.” When designing exam papers Tim finds the cartoons “ease the
tension and spark the memory.” It all began when, in the fall of 1985,
he was given the task of teaching science to 162 Tulsa ninth-graders who
were convinced that it was absolutely irrelevant to their futures. Tim
put one hundred Far Side cartoons on a large bulleting board, and told
the students to study them. The consensus was that they didn’t
understand the humor - The Far Side was “too weird”. However, Tim wrote
me, “Each time we completed a unit and the students approached the
bulletin board with newly acquired wisdom, I smiled quietly and thanked
the cosmos for Gary’s perspectives as the kids roared with the confident
laughter of the enlightened.” Having taught myself for a while, I can fully and happily relate.

Later in the semester, and for my hacker course, we will be reading Understanding Comics, which will give us a bit of a meta perspective on why comics are so good at conveying a certain type of message. I can’t wait to read it as I have heard it is fantastic.

Biella Coleman: Measuring a Courses Success: xkcd

http://xkcd.com/344/ I wouldn’t have gotten the joke if it wasn’t for you. Thanks.

Recently I was talking with one of the best researcher know, Tim
O’Halloran. He has been able to inspire generations of middle and high
school students to care for the natural world. Tim told me that Gary
Larson has had a major impact on his teaching. Tim uses Far Side
cartoons to introduce topics, to illustrate points, and to “reinforce
the notion that the more we investigate the universe, the richer is our
experience.” When designing exam papers Tim finds the cartoons “ease the
tension and spark the memory.” It all began when, in the fall of 1985,
he was given the task of teaching science to 162 Tulsa ninth-graders who
were convinced that it was absolutely irrelevant to their futures. Tim
put one hundred Far Side cartoons on a large bulleting board, and told
the students to study them. The consensus was that they didn’t
understand the humor - The Far Side was “too weird”. However, Tim wrote
me, “Each time we completed a unit and the students approached the
bulletin board with newly acquired wisdom, I smiled quietly and thanked
the cosmos for Gary’s perspectives as the kids roared with the confident
laughter of the enlightened.” Having taught myself for a while, I can fully and happily relate.

MJ Ray: Monday Machine-Mangling Madness, or: Server2 on fire!

//www.flickr.com/photos/dominicspics/1901310469">dominicspics</a> (cc-by)

Bonfire Onlooker by dominicspics (cc-by) Of all the things I wanted to do yesterday, testing TTLLP’s disaster recovery plan was not one of them. I often suggest customers make disaster recovery plans, but I don’t like having to use them. One of our server farms suffered a serious hardware failure and slowly died during the day. (It didn’t catch fire - the title is a silly reference to lp0 on fire.) The current stinging electricity bills means that there’s an emphasis on power-saving now that wasn’t there 4 or so years ago, when we still built servers ourselves, before WEEE and cheap big-brand systems. Today’s servers aren’t quite as resilient, because each extra piece of hardware in use takes extra power. There are some much cleverer tactics now, but they don’t catch everything before it goes “bang” and we can’t just bring the “spare” hardware into action if it’s not installed yet. Replacement hardware will be installed as soon as possible, as well as some extra hardware that will help protect against a similar failure in future. The slow failure of the server also means that we lost some emails, voicemails and instant messages from 10am to 2pm yesterday. If one was yours, please resend. Most services have been rerouted or temporarily replaced with help from friendly associates. Three important services that haven’t yet are: 1. our financial system (which gets updated in batches anyway), 2. our task tracking (which is newer than our recovery plan and I need reminding about its backups, but at worst all the current data exists in other places) and 3. our newsletter server. I’ve copied the customer newsletter subscriptions to an older listserver, to send out news of our recovery, but the member newsletters (with GPG integration and so on) will wait for the replacement hardware. I’m hoping we can recover some things from the old server filesystem, else I’ll recreate it from the last release (that’ll teach me to hack it on the live server!). In the meantime, I’ve still most of yesterday’s work to do…

20 October 2008

Decklin Foster: And yet I swear this oath

There was a lot of political talk last week in the US about this guy "Joe the Plumber". I'm really quite mystified by the (lack of) Democratic response to this one; it seems like a perfect opportunity for the Dems to explain what their ideals actually mean, after years of complete inarticulacy. The Republican party, and conservatives in general, have somehow successfully sold their platform of, as Robert Reich brilliantly put it on the Daily Show last week, "socialism for the rich and capitalism for everyone else", to poor but socially-conservative citizens for quite some time. They've convinced people to vote against their economic self-interest, and cut taxes on the rich instead of themselves. Is voting for policies that directly benefit you less necessarily bad? I don't think so. In many cases, selflessness and altruism are better in the long run. Conservative economic policies speak to a sense of right and wrong that give people a feeling of purpose, and so an incentive to create: this is mine, I made it, you can't take it away. In a theoretical sense, leaving more wealth in the hands of the rich should "trickle down" to society in general, by providing more capital, and thus creating jobs, etc. However, I do not believe that this is why Americans, specifically, tend to support conservative economic policy. The USA has this idea of the "American Dream", pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, if you will, and striking it rich through hard work and character. It's advantageous for conservatives to sell this idea because it makes people think "tax the rich? What if I get rich?", which is a sort of enlightened self-interest, arguably. And it gets poor people to vote for them. What makes this "plumber" thing interesting to me is that is should demonstrate where this approach ought to fall down, logically and emotionally. But it does not. Here is the problem. A working stiff who earns "five figures", such as myself, generally makes that money by going to an employer every day, performing some services for them, and then drawing a paycheck. Where this money comes from is abstracted away (this is the marvelous thing we call "business"). Let's say you want to sell the "American Dream" to this person. They get their paycheck every week, and there's a chunk taken out of it by Uncle Sam. Maybe they're saving up to start a business, or go to college, etc. They sure could do it faster if taxes weren't so high. So you remind them this: when you do strike it rich (since this is America, where anyone can strike it rich), do you want those taxes to be even greater? This story contains a lie of omission, probably the greatest lie ever told in US politics, and one that has almost universally succeeded as far back as I can remember. And that is: when you do make that jump to where our hypothetical Joe is, making just over a quarter-million dollars, that it's not going to look any different. You'll get your paycheck from some abstracted source, just like before, but more will be taken out unless we stop raising taxes on those higher income brackets. There will be some node higher up in the tree for that wealth to "trickle down" from; you could say it's implied, even, that wealth is created at the root and destroyed at the leaves. What's wrong here? Simple: a self-employed plumber does not have a paycheck, except maybe to him/herself for accounting purposes. They collect their income in the form of payments from customers. They don't have an abstraction: they hire more labor and become the abstraction. If their customers have no money, the abstraction leaks, their employees have to be laid off (and then can no longer afford plumbing services themselves). The success of the plumber depends as much on how many people are able to pay them as it does on his costs (such as taxes). We want to make sure those customers can still pay. This is, in theory terms, the idea of demand-side or Keynesian economics. (Not really exactly. I took about two econ courses. But bear with me for a moment.) Now, you can argue demand-side vs. what we would call supply-side economics, which is the idea that no, first you have to stop taxing Joe so he can hire people so they have money to go buy things, for ages. People have made whole careers out of it. I am not here to do that. What I am here to wonder out loud is: why is this argument not happening, now, in our public sphere? Even if only as a small plot point in one Presidential campaign? There are very good arguments for both sides (I agree with the Keynesians, myself), and they should be what this debate is about, not digging up dirt on some guy whose real name, horrors, might not be "Joe" or protests about all those you-know-what poor people getting "government giveaways" that are disturbingly close to racism in my opinion. When I turn on talk radio I hear zombies, unable to string together any thought more complicated than "Democrat == higher taxes on everyone" (which would be depressing even if the claim were true). It begins to get unsettling when you understand your opponent's argument, and yet watch them completely unable to articulate it. When they deal with this by appealing to fear and thought-killing sound bites, it gets alarming. Obama has backpedaled whenever the whole issue has come up. In the last debate, he was saved by merely shutting up and letting out enough rope for McCain to hang himself. Not very inspiring. As a result I hear repetitions of Obama's phrase "spread the wealth around" constantly met on the airwaves with... silence. He won't touch it, and honestly, I can't blame him for not wanting to fan the flames of class warfare with only two more weeks left to stick it out. But I don't understand why, and why a single person on the left hasn't had the faith that this idea can be discussed in our society. I think that, whichever side you are rooting for (and yeah, I am for the Democrats), the Democrats should have won this point readily. Not to belabor the point, but it really amazes me that they have not. It wouldn't have taken much. Here's what you do: go to Wherever, OH with your crack PR team and find several of "Joe the Plumber"s customers. Interview them all. A few of them are, in this economy, going to be really hurting. If you're lucky: Remember that Joe owes taxes to the IRS. Very possibly, someone owes Joe money! That would be a coup. You just put them in front of the media and the whole thing sells itself. Mary needs to make these repairs... if only her tax credit were larger... etc. This would not settle the argument, by any means, especially not for political junkies. But it would begin it. We could talk about policy, whether one way of "spreading" things will result in more wealth to spread than another, instead of red-baiting. I feel a bit ripped off that we haven't even gotten that much. The theory part is pretty much irrelevant to most people; that's fine. But they deserve context. I can only assume that my ("my") party is still either terrified or stupid. I hope winning the Presidency changes that somewhat. That whole right and wrong, purpose, "noble cause" thing, right? Right, guys?

Josselin Mouette: A little rant on the Linux kernel development model

Sometimes, I m becoming really pestered by the number of issues, especially hardware issues, that remain prominent in the Linux system after so many years. And I m convinced that one of the root causes is the kernel development model. While far to be the only one, you understand a lot when you have a look at it. The stable API nonsense To explain the development model, the kernel documentation contains a document written by Greg Kroah-Hartman called stable_api_nonsense.txt . I think this document gets one thing very right: advertising it is complete nonsense. Many things in this document can get you a good laugh if you are used to software development, unfortunately they are not funny given how much they affect us as users and developers. Let s start with the executive summary:

You think you want a stable kernel interface, but you really do not, and you don't even know it. What you want is a stable running driver, and you get that only if your driver is in the main kernel tree. You also get lots of other good benefits if your driver is in the main kernel tree, all of which has made Linux into such a strong, stable, and mature operating system which is the reason you are using it in the first place.

What it should say instead is:

You know you want a stable kernel interface, but you don't have it, and we will never provide it. You want stable interfaces to focus on fixing bugs in your driver instead of updating it for interface changes, and to make integration of your driver in the main kernel tree easy. You would get a lot of good benefits if your driver was in the main kernel tree, but it won't make it unless you adapt to our bizarre processes, all of which have made the Linux kernel into a constantly moving target which is the reason many hardware vendors don't want to support it in the first place.

Our compiler does not have the same ABI as yours This is what happens when the only thing that interests people in charge is to code. Writing this means that these developers have no interest in making the system usable. This becomes more unbearable when such technically sharp people make up false technical arguments:

Depending on the version of the C compiler you use, different kernel data structures will contain different alignment of structures, and possibly include different functions in different ways (putting functions inline or not.)

Really, I wonder how the Microsoft developers, the GNOME guys, the glibc guys, and basically all library developers who know what they are talking about, manage to have stable ABIs despite the compiler changing all the time. One of the incredibly complicated techniques they use is to only rely on guaranteed functionality of the C specification, instead of doing many clever and funky hacks. For things more related to development itself, there are also incredibly complicated techniques like opaque structures, which save a lot of ABI breakage. Actually the only thing you need, if you design your ABI properly, is to be rigorous.

Depending on what kernel build options you select, a wide range of different things can be assumed by the kernel

This statement of a problem also contains the solution: stop making available build options no one cares about (remember, people install binary packages from their distributions) to guarantee stability instead. Instead of implementing the solution, kernel developers deliberately choose to deal with this insanity in the worst possible way: by encouraging it. Only lame developers need stable APIs But the nonsense doesn't stop to the ABI, which after all is merely a problem for distributors. To be more annoying to developers themselves, let s make up reasons to break the API all the time:

Linux kernel development is continuous and at a rapid pace, never stopping to slow down. As such, the kernel developers find bugs in current interfaces, or figure out a better way to do things.

Explained this way, it looks like a good thing. If you've done serious development or integration, you know that actually it is a problem. If you never slow down to look at what you've done, you're only going to add new bugs while you're trying to fix the others.

When they do so, function names may change, structures may grow or shrink, and function parameters may be reworked. If this happens, all of the instances of where this interface is used within the kernel are fixed up at the same time, ensuring that everything continues to work properly.

Everything is said. In the Linux kernel, changes are not done in a continuous way. Every non-minor change is going to have an impact on hundreds of different modules. The amount of work needed to accomplish these changes is absolutely insane. When a project like GNOME decides to phase-out an API, it takes several years before being actually replaced. In the kernel, it can simply happen between two minor releases, together with a rewrite of the whole ATA stack. The lolution Of course, Greg KH has a simple solution for you, in the What to do section.

So, if you have a Linux kernel driver that is not in the main kernel tree, what are you, a developer, supposed to do? Releasing a binary driver for every different kernel version for every distribution is a nightmare, and trying to keep up with an ever changing kernel interface is also a rough job.

No shit !

Simple, get your kernel driver into the main kernel tree.

Simple, isn't it? Unfortunately this is not going to happen while you are too busy adapting it for the constantly moving interfaces. This is quite feasible if you are writing a driver for an Ethernet network adapter, but for a video card this is another story, and for a virtualization layer? Well, the Xen developers have been struggling for years to integrate their technology in the kernel, and it is still far from done. No wonder why you get good drivers only for ethernet cards and not for 3D cards or even wifi chips. This doesn t go without other, worse consequences for users and distributors. Not everyone can afford to run Ubuntu, Debian unstable or Fedora, especially if they have simple requirements like not changing the whole system every 6 months. Corporate users using Debian stable, RHEL, SLES or Ubuntu LTS need a stable kernel that doesn t move, and that doesn t break everything when upgraded. The introduction of projects like DKMS to distribute drivers in a sourceful way while keeping them easily installable is a step in the good direction, despite being a workaround for a broken situation underneath. However these efforts are ruined by the constantly changing APIs that will go on requiring changes to the sources as well as the binaries. Why it can still work In fact, with such processes, you can wonder how it is possible that the system is actually usable. The answer is simple: while being smaller than many other projects, the Linux kernel has much, much more developers. A rough estimation shows that Linux has 2000 developers, many of which are paid full-time to work on it, to work on a 15 Mloc codebase. You can compare it with X.org, which has a few dozens of developers for 3 Mloc. Or with GNOME, 400 developers for 20 Mloc. With OOo, 150 developers for 10 Mloc. Yes, you need 10 times as many people to maintain the kernel code than for another comparable project. That's of course what happens when you keep them busy with a permanent refactoring of the code. This development method, while certainly having the advantage of bringing lots of innovation and fast integration of new features, is also driving away a very large portion of the open source community to work on rewriting Firewire stacks every 6 months. And as long as they are busy with this, they are not writing correct X drivers nor fixing bugs in the applications.

19 October 2008

Peter Van Eynde: Whoos Whoos

For the last few months I've been running the latest git versions of xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd on my $WORK laptop with a Mobility Radeon X1300.

And actually I like them more then fglrx: they crash less and I actually have xrandr support so giving presentations and using the second screen no longer involves reloads of X.

A remaining problem was that they would sig11 when I enable DRI. Yesterday I went investigating and found out that the ati driver was crashing in the line:

Bool RADEONDRIGetVersion(ScrnInfoPtr pScrn) ... /* Low level DRM open */ fd = drmOpen(RADEON_DRIVER_NAME, busId);

After giving some message that it cannot open /dev/dri/card0. Some research showed that this was because I forgot to load the kernel module. /me hits table.

modprobe radeon and DRI works. Obviously it doesn't do 3D because the mesa library is too old. Installing mesa 7.2 from experimental and I see:

$ glxinfo grep direct direct rendering: Yes

And all the whoos effects... well ... whoos.

Now off to Ana's blog to find out how I can get KDE 4.1 in unstable....

Anand Kumria: How to get more developers.

Christian worries about how to grow the desktop share in the free desktop. Some recent events (Chromium, Geode) have led me to believe that … We've won … already. For example let's look at the reactions to Chromium (which I believe was released way too early):

I've just picked three links but the trend is clear. The digirati want to use Linux and Mac OS X to evaluate new technologies NOT Windows. Sure, some of them still have those boxes around for “client work”. But that is not what they use day-to-day. Now let's take a look at Mozillas' Geode. Here is the Introduction to Geode. Look at the comments:

Why is it not compatible with Linux (first one)
Ele é compativel com linux? (seventh one)
15th and 16th comments

In fact the outcry was enough for lack of Linux support that is merited a follow-up Common Geode Q&As:

Geode is meant as a temporary solution to allow websites to experiment with geolocation today. … Skyhook is built in. A side effect is that Linux isn't supported for the simple reason that Skyhook hasn't implemented Linux drivers. Although not ideal. …

A year ago this would not have happened. This amount of push-back from the digirati that the new technology they are supposed to look at and evaluate is not available on their platform would have been accepted as a matter of course. Now, though, they all expect it on their platform of choice. We've won, already. Whilst the largest user-base remains the Windows market, if you want the digirati to look at and evaluate what you have to offer it needs to work on Linux & Mac OS X. Another example, while I remember, is Adobe releasing Flash 10 for Linux on the same day as other platforms. Unheard of. So what does mean for Christian's question?

Within 12 months it will be inconcievable for software to NOT be released on Windows + Linux (and maybe Mac OS X)
Within 24 months we will have power users asking for Free Software (probably not Linux but more likely OpenOffice 3.x & Firefox) routinely
Within 36 months Linux will be 10% of the desktop market. Bigger than Mac OS X. That is a lot of people you can not afford to ignore if you are a company, it will mean that ‘web-based’ will be more and more common — integration between desktop and the web will be key.

17 October 2008

Martín Ferrari: A season in Plan 9 land

I mostly stayed under a rock during the last weeks: exams season, some assingments plus one week of much needed [VAC]; ironically in the DebConf 8 secondary hotel. I'm in a very interesting course on operating systems' programming, it's a new optative course, and has generated a lot of expectatives: most of the systems-oriented undergrads in the computer science career are attending. The downside is that it's *intensive*: we're expected to build from scratch a minimal operating system, starting from the bootloader. So far my group has already done a bootloader that understands FAT, and the entry point for the OS, in which the basic stuff is setup: gate A20, interruptions, protected mode, GDT, etc. Plan 9 mascot: Glenda

Also, each group is required to do a presentation of some systems research topic, and we choose Plan 9 from Bell Labs, that mostly unknown OS that was meant to be a better UNIX, but never gained popularity. So I spent many days playing with it, trying to grok quickly what it was about, and creating a small network of virtual hosts (in Qemu) that could show how it all fit togheter. Plan 9 has all the credentials: created in the same lab as UNIX, designed by the same people, which already learned from past mistakes. It was started in the late eighties, and it really feels like what the future was meant to be. Sadly, we're just starting to see a few of it's revolutionary ideas being applied to other systems: UTF-8, /proc, unionfs, fuse, clone(2), separate namespaces; all of these follow concepts first created in Plan 9, UTF-8 was designed by Ken Thompson "in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992", in Rob Pike's words. Not happy enough with reworking all the core concepts, they also recreated the visual environment. I have to admit, the user-facing ideas are so foreign that I still don't feel very comfortable using it. Surprisingly, the desktop is very mice-centric, it cannot be used at all without the mouse, and it's bothersome with less than three buttons. Anyway, the underlying workings are so attractive, that I cannot stop from wondering if a hybrid system could be built (Debian/kPlan9 anyone?). To illustrate, I'll reproduce here the same example that I showed yesterday and left some jaws hanging. I had booted a CPU server and a diskless terminal, called cpu-0 and term-0 respectively. This is a screenshot taken in the terminal, which is basically a telnet to my Debian box:
Plan 9 screenshot: first telnet

Nothing spectacular here, except for the weird syntax, it was seen like this in the Debian box:

martin@abraxas:~$ netstat -nt   grep :22
tcp        0      0 10.0.2.1:22             10.0.2.30:39879         ESTABLISHED

But here comes the fun, I ran an import command, which is more or less a remote filesystem mount, with which I mount the remote machine's /net in the local namespace. It has to be noted that the /net path is by convention the entry point to anything network related, including all the networking API.
Plan 9 screenshot: second telnet

And the wornderful thing is that this works as it should (note the remote address):

martin@abraxas:~$ netstat -nt   grep :22
tcp        0      0 10.0.2.1:22             10.0.2.10:38158         ESTABLISHED

So, what happened? telnet wanted to create a TCP connection, and that is accomplished opening /net/tcp/clone, but then it found the imported filesystem. The open(2) request was then transferred to the remote machine, and there the networking code did the actual TCP/IP dance. Things like this make you realise that maybe the BSD sockets API is not that nice an abstraction; in Plan 9 there are no BSD sockets, it's only implemented in the POSIX compatibility libraries, which aren't used by any of the core tools. Neither there exists any threads support, you just call rfork(2) setting the appropiate flags, exactly what glibc does under the covers nowadays. They also decided to live without select(2) or poll(2), there are no non-blocking calls. If you want non-blocking, you rfork(). The only syncronisation primitive is rendezvous(2), and everything else is built on that. At this point, it should not surprise you that to kill a process you can type echo kill > /proc/$pid/ctl; and that there's no need for an equivalent to Xnest, as rio (the graphical interface) provides a modified /dev, you just type rio inside a window and there you go. Yes, I'm hooked. If you're interested, I compiled many links here (some Spanish there, but all the content is in English), as one of the weakest points in Plan 9 is the unorganised and missing documentation. Tags: Plan9, Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian, Facu

Russell Coker: The Next Miserable Failure?

Until very recently I thought that it would be almost impossible to get someone worse than George W Bush as the leader of any significant country. Unfortunately it seems that I was wrong and John McCain and Sarah Palin promise more of the economic, regulatory, and military disasters that are the trademarks of the US Republican party (or at least the dominant Neo-Con branch). Here are some links about John McCain: Here’s a good summary of the racial issues in the current US presidential campaign (This is Your Nation on White Privilege) [1]. The Obama campaign is highlighting the connection between John McCain and Charles Keating [2]. McCain was one of the senators helping Keating while his bank (the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association) was going under. In the end 20,000 people lost their savings and the US taxpayers ended up losing $120,000,000,000. Frank Rich has written an article for the New York Times about the racist attacks on Barack Obama [5]. The current actions of the McCain campaign only barely stop short of calling for an assassination. The South Florida Times has an interesting article about the McCain family’s history of slave ownership [7]. Now John McCain is not responsible for the actions of his great-great-grandfather in owning slaves, and there’s nothing wrong with having black relatives who are the descendants of some of those slaves (even though there is doubt about whether the female slaves were legally adults or even consented to the sex acts in question). But he should be honest about it. Denying having non-white relatives in the face of the facts seems to be strong evidence of racism. It is however understandable that John doesn’t want to discuss the fact that some of his relatives have announced plans to vote against him. Rolling Stone magazine published an interesting article about John McCain’s history as a spoiled brat in the navy [10]. It seems that if your father is an admiral you can ignore orders, crash planes, and basically do whatever you like. It also reveals that John was broken by the Viet Cong torturers and provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid. I’m not going to criticise John for breaking under torture - I think that the assessment of wing commander John Dramesi (who was tortured by the same Viet Cong torturers but didn’t break) should be accepted. John Dramesi says that McCain “wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” while in captivity. However McCain’s use of his former POW status in propaganda is quite dishonest. John McCain is also documented as having described his wife as a “cunt” and a “trollop“. Here are some links about Sarah Palin: Former US Army Brigadier General (retired) Janis L. Karpinski writes about Sarah Palin [3], it’s interesting to hear what an intelligent female soldier has to say about her. One thing that I found noteworthy was the repeated references to “murdering” wild animals, shooting at a defenseless animal is of course quite different from shooting at a person who can shoot back (and different again from commanding an army). Janis also makes reference to Sarah setting the feminist cause back decades - I think that is what Sarah desires though. Also Janis points out the emotional problems for which pit bull terriers are known. There are many claims that Sarah is a “Maverick” and has a record of opposing corruption. This article in the Village Voice documents some of her corrupt activities - including having her home built for free in exchange for assigning the contract to build the Wasilia ice-hocky rink [4]. Thomas L. Friedman has written an article about Palin’s Kind of Patriotism [6]. According to Sarah it’s not patriotic to pay taxes, it seems to me that encouraging citizens to disobey the law should disqualify her from being elected without all the other issues. Thomas notes that Sarah is promoting the interests of Saudi Arabia by prolonging the US dependence on oil imports. The Huffington Post has an interesting article about Sarah Palin’s church [8]. It’s strange how little notice has been taken of Sarah’s former pastor who stated that people who didn’t vote for Bush were likely to go to hell. The Times has an article about “Troopergate”, some of Sarah Palin’s other corrupt practices, and the role of her husband as a shadow governor [9]. Update: Corrected URL [6].

[1] http://www.opednews.com/articles/This-is-Your-Nation-on-Whi-by-Tim-Wise-080916-307.html

[2] http://www.keatingeconomics.com/

[3] http://www.truthout.org/article/palin-can-launch-us-back-time

[4] http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-10-08/news/the-book-of-sarah/

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?ex=1239681600&en=b38b2d4387d4e3c4&ei=5087&excamp=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1015-L1&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1015-L1

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/opinion/08friedman.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=palin%20patriotism&st=cse&oref=slogin

[7] http://www.sfltimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2024&Itemid=1

[8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html

[9] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4692408.ece

[10] http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print

Biella Coleman: Obama Roasts McCain at Al Smith Dinner

I have been mostly silent about the campaign here but this video is too good to remain so (and makes me wonder if Colbert and Stewart wrote the speech for Obama)

Biella Coleman: Obama Roasts McCain at Al Smith Dinner

I have been mostly silent about the campaign here but this video is too good to remain so (and makes me wonder if Colbert and Stewart wrote the speech for Obama)

Michal Čihař: Gammu news

I finally catched up with Gammu backlog from holidays and now it is time to move it a bit further. Automatic testing During this week I set up CDash instance for acquiring results of automatic nightly checks of Gammu. Each night Gammu is build on several hosts (currently Debian x86_64, Debian x86, SUSE x86_64 and crosscompilation for Windows on Debian) and results are posted to the dashboard. If you have some other architecture which could participate in testing, you are welcome to contribute! It is simple - just checkout svn, create build directory and configure there Gammu using cmake. You can enable coverage tests (-DCOVERAGE=ON). Then just run every night make Nightly for regular testing or make NightlyMemoryCheck to do dynamic allocation analysis. There is more detailed documentation in sources (INSTALL file). Thanks to this, I can hopefully sooner spot regressions and possible problems on different architectures. Roadmap With upgrade of Mantis, new feature called roadmaps arrived. I started to use it for planning features in future Gammu releases, so you can see what bugs should be fixed in future releases in Gammu roadmap. Currently there are not much things planned, because till now I had to focus only on bug fixing, but I think with 1.21.0 we have reached much better quality than in past releases and now is time to do some important changes in the core. Nokia phone required As you can already see in roadmap, I plan some bigger changes to Gammu core. I currently have on Sony-Ericsson phone and I would not be able to properly test how these changes will affect Nokia drivers. So for start I will need at least Nokia Series 40 3rd edition phone. Nokia 6233 (or 6234) currently looks as a reasonable choice, but if you have any hints for cheaper one with similar features, just drop me an email. Perfect would be if somebody would have half broken phone (I do not intend to use it for anything else than Gammu development, so broken camera, speaker, microphone or display does not really matter) and will be willing to donate it to me. If this will not work out, I'll have to buy used one and I will try to collect funds for this. If you want to contribute, check my donations page for possibilities.

Jaldhar Vyas: Plumbing the Depths

Wow this Joe the Plumber phenomenon really seems to have Democrats spooked as they are now scrambling to find any possible dirt on the guy who dared to question Dear Leader. One might think people with a solid 6-10% lead wouldn't need to be so desperate but Adam is probably well aware of the Democratic partys penchant of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. A lot of these progressive types are still nursing resentment for the "swiftboating" of John Kerry and wary that it will happen again so todays strategy is pre-emptive douchebaggery before Karl Roves evil minions can sully the pristine reputation of their fair candidate. What they don't realize is that calling Kerry an America hating traitor worked because there was reasonable evidence that he threw his medals away, and made speeches denouncing his country which are typical of acts people associate in their minds with America hating traitors. The 527s exaggerated but the exaggeration would not have worked if there was not an element of truth behind it. Now no one is disputing that Obama actually did make the "share the wealth" remark. Whether the person he said it to is a republican plant or some other sort of nogoodnik is immaterial. Obama is a redistributionist and that is precisely the reason why liberals want to him to be president. And how pathetic is the "dirt"? He owes backtaxes? Gee I wonder why someone who already owes money would be apprehensive about having to pay more? A lot of people owe money at one time or another and even have liens placed as a result. Perhaps it is relevant to mention that for someone in public office (like oh, say, Charles Rangel who I'm sure Adam will discuss in his next post.) but for a private citizen? Isn't that one of the "chilling effects on free speech" we were going to be subjected to in Bush's America? The other one one was how is not a real plumber. Apparently he is not licensed but, sit down for this one, it is actually possible to do work without a piece of paper from the government. Really! I've seen it happen. Is it always a good idea to ignore licensing regulations? Well they often serve to protect the public from malpractice but then again they often prop up cartels. Here in the NY/NJ area plenty of people of all political persuasions seem to be willing to take the risk of hiring unlicensed plumbers and other tradesmen because at the end of the day, it's the, you know plumbing, that makes you a plumber nothing else. And none of this has any bearing on Obamas policies or what they mean for America. So if you like socialism and think its what America needs, feel free to make the case to the voters and perhaps they will agree with you or perhaps not. But stop with with the ad hominems against people who point that out.

16 October 2008

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Joe the Plumber isn t a plumber?

I haven’t been blogging this election at all recently — there are enough folks out there saying just about everything that should be said (and lots that shouldn’t), but I couldn’t let this little tidbit slip by without mention.Via the TaxProf blog:

Politico and Bloomberg report that the State of Ohio has a $1,182.92 tax lien against Joe the Plumber for back income taxes.
The Associated Press reports that Joe the Plumber lacks a plumbing license.

Also, the Trademark Blog notes the flurry of related domain name registrations. Technorati Tags: Joe the Plumber, Obama, McCain, Politics, Election

Steve Kemp: Dirty. Dangerous. Your kind of people.

Screen Fork?

There are times when I think of forking. Mostly sanity returns very quickly, though Still GNU Screen is one program that I use almost constantly, and it seems to work at a glacial pace. The Debian package has a lot of open bugs against it. Some trivial, some annoying, and some with patches. Making the program GNU/Linux only would simplify a lot of things. But then again would that be a legitimate reason to fork it? Me? I'd just like to see some additional primitives.

More QPSMTPD

I've come up with a nice simple qpsmtpd plugin to do spamgourmet-like setup. This means I can have email addresses:

steve.3.count@steve.org.uk

Allows only three mails to this address.

steve.date.20-10-2008@steve.org.uk

Allows only mail to be sent here prior to Oct 20th.

Plugin code will be in the usual place in the next day or two..

ObFilm: xXx

Biella Coleman: Geeks and the Other Sex, again

I know this is on Planet already BUT I need to keep it for my own records on hacker humor (I have a chapter on this in my book) and well, it is good enough to have it show up 2x:

I occasionally send quotes that make me smile to Joey, but this time I can’t resist circulating it more widely… >
> Marek Vasut (1):
> i2c/tps65010: Vibrator hookup to gpiolib Guys, I know we geeks aren’t known for our sex-life, but do we have to
make it so obvious? (Linus Torvalds)

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