Most of us probably get spams with subject lines like contact courier company for you package. Yesterday the courier company contacted me. The FedEx driver called me because it had been raining. He saw my name on the package he was to deliver, and remembered the last time he tried to deliver a package to us (maybe a month ago). It was raining then too. He called to say he was afraid he d get stuck, and could he please bring the package to me somewhere else? I told him where I work, and it turned out he was sitting about a mile from there anyway. So he brought me the package at work and all was fine. Last time he came to our place, he told Terah, I almost got stuck getting here on the road I took. What s the good one? That IS the good road. Followed by a look of panic. The UPS driver, on the other hand, drives a truck bigger and less maneuverable than the FedEx driver. I told him about the FedEx guy, and he laughed and said, This isn t bad! You should see the roads in Butler County! Perhaps, but I did get some laughter from my coworkers the day I called in because I was late due to being stuck in the mud, and had never left the roadway. Of course, I say that if the propane guy can make it down our roads in his giant truck which he always can then FedEx should have nothing to worry about. Ah well.

A few weeks ago I was trying to get GRUB2 for PowerPC back to work on my PowerBook G4 15", and had some problems getting OF doing the right thing. Not being an OF expert at all, I found myself making things a bit worse, ending up with an unbootable laptop and, what a classic, unable to boot my old rescue CD to get yaboot back in its place. So I googled a bit and ended up deciding that, given the boot parametres and some other stuff like the system's clock were doing strange stuff, reset-nvram would help getting things in a better shape that would at least permit CD booting. So there, reset-nvram, followed by reset-all, as found in all the OpenFirmware cheatsheets I found all over the web, and damn it, nothing changed and I was back into the OpenFirmware prompt. I used the power button to reset the laptop once again, and that was the last time I saw something functional on the PowerBook. Now, when I start the computer, all I hear is the Apple startup sound, followed by the sound of the CD drive (which has eaten an Ubuntu 5.10 CD) trying to spin up for a pair of seconds, and then nothing. There's nothing displayed on the LCD, or any other sign of life . My searches in Google indicate this is a logic board failure and you can imagine that is not cheap to get fixed by Apple support. I've tried numerous keyboard combo tricks I didn't even know about, and none seem to work. The computer doesn't seem to be responding to the builtin keyboard, an Apple USB keyboard I borrowed, or an external display. I'm annoyed because I've looked after this laptop really well and it was in a really good condition, so I'm going to see if it can be fixed for a reasonable amount. Apple care in Val ncia is not an option. They say a logic board (if this is really what is causing trouble) costs around 500 , so I'll have to explore other ways. The first one is trying to find out if these symptoms (nothing on the display, key combos don't appear to work, etc.) really point to a fried logic board or could be something else. I've tried removing the RAM and replacing it with my old one, but that didn't work either. So, if anyone reading this has some Apple PowerPC hardware experience and can share some of their knowledge and suggestions, I'd be really, really grateful. Plan B involves hiring a coworker, who I believe is the son of McGyver, to try to get it repaired for me. This would involve buying spare parts in eBay or some other place to try to get the replaced. Again, suggestions, donations and ideas are welcome in this front too. :) Jose Vicente loves fixing stuff, and right before the Summer he already showed what he can do with a screwdriver and some patience. Some weeks before, I had managed to shatter the LCD screen of my Nokia 6500s when I lost my grip while climbing down a mountain in El Cad , and the phone in my pocket hit a big rock. The phone worked, but I all I could see in the screen were some cracks in random colours. People suggested I should get a new phone, but I really don't want to generate even more polluting waste when all that was needed was replacing a cheap component.

My phone during its stay in McGyver's hideout

Here we are, still writing code, still doing 16hour days, still keeping the archive cronjobs disabled, still having fun. Yesterday we enabled the rsyncable option for all the gzip contents we are creating in our dists/ directory, which will lead to nice bandwidth savings during the mirror push. Initial tests showed a size increase of about 2 til 4 percent but the transferred amount of data going down to 1/8th for Packages files, 1/4th for Contents files. We also started implementing an ACL system in DAK which basically will allow the sane implementation of the already mentioned buildd autosigning, decrufting the code handling DMs and later on easily allowing the throw away binaries feature, while still allowing for exceptions, like bootstrapping a new architecture. The majority of it is there and already working, just a few edges still have to be smoothened. Yesterday evening we started the last major work for this meeting, in terms of coding. We will end up with a completly different way of handling the lifecycle of a package in the archive, before it enters the public viewable pool/ directory. To wrap our heads around the problem we had to write down how the archive works currently, which you can see in the first picture. And then we had to go and define how it should look in the future, for which you can look at the second picture. As all of us here love the simple clarity of this drawing we went and declared it the one and official ftpmaster documentation of our archive queues. :) As you might miss enough Milk/IceTea/Coffee/Drugs to understand what the fuck we smoked when drawing it, lets try a short explanation, starting with the old red version:

• Packages get in as usual, via our queue daemon, which copies them into unchecked/
• From there packages either go to NEW/BYHAND, get rejected, end up in a policy-queue (which is what you knew by (o-)p-u-new in the past, but more generally implemented) or get accepted and end up in accepted/. accepted/ is what you see behind incoming.debian.org.
• From NEW/BYHAND or a policy-queue packages either go to rejected, should they be unwanted for the archive, for whatever reason. Or into newstage if they are accepted. Newstage will simply end up in the accepted/ queue the next time we process files and is a neat way to avoid a class of race conditions we had in the past.
• From the accepted queue packages are usually installed into the pool/. This is the real acceptance into the archive, after this they are considered public. Very seldomly there is a problem doing this and then we end up with an automated unaccept of them, but an unaccept there is usually never done by hand.
• When a package is removed from the archive it will end up in the morgue. The same happens for files out of the reject queue.
• Every now and then we have a huge shellscript running which we refer to as dinstall, which is triggering the installation of files into the pool, is responsible for the Packages/Sources files creation, pushing the mirrors, etc.

This is how the archive worked for the last years now, and while it works it has a few drawbacks. For example, files do have to be processed multiple times before they end up in their final location, which is just unneccessary. It also opens us to a kind of race condition between the unchecked and accepted queue, leading to automated unaccepts. And it duplicates some code and also checks we have to run, wasting time and resources. Thats not all of it, but a good start. So the idea is to get rid of the extra queue and switch over to install files directly into the pool when processed from the unchecked queue. And that is what the third picture shows in green, the changed handling. As you see we completly lose the complexity around accepted by moving directly into pool. So, as usual, saying it in two sentences doesn t mean the actual implementation is easy, even if it will make future handling easier for us. Of course this hasn t been all we worked on today. We are 6 persons here, there is much more done than I can condense into those few blog posts. Especially as I want to do my own share of work (shut up mhy :) ), and not just blog around. So, to still keep you informed I included our official meeting minutes in this blog post. Picture 3 is your friend. :) (Ok ok, just joking, but it contains a good overview of our various discussion about the various projects we work on). We are currently running a script that is importing data about all known changes files the archive ever has seen (since about 2002), together with the most important data from them. While this allows only a small function for us in the archive (have we seen this file already? Reject upload) using it (prior it used to look for file existance in a subdir), it might allow other people to do creative things with it. We also added a new Release file to our mirrors. They are called InRelease and are the same as the Release file, but they are signed inline (cleartext signature). Using those files it can no longer happen that one downloads a Release file, the mirror updates and one downloads a different Release.gpg. This will help reducing problems experienced there, even if it is only the first step towards the final solution. For the final solution we have to do something about the Packages files related to the Release files to, and allow multiple versions of them to exist and then let the Release file tell for which of them they are. We probably will end up with the Packages/Sources files of the last 2 or 3 runs and the Release file mentioning them all, but that won t be done during this meeting. Oh, and as you have all be so patient with us during the last days of reduced archive service: Our current plan is to come back to a mostly normal service during Saturday, so we have the rest of Saturday and the few hours on Sunday which we are here to monitor what it is doing. Thats it for today, but you can sure expect a more detailed report send to d-d-a sometime next week.

Bok bok booooook bok bok mono bok bok bkaawk bok bok bok Chicken Little Remix 9.10 Karmic Kraienk ppe Braaaaaaaak bok boooooook bok bok bkaaawk bok bok bok bok bok:

• Bok bok LiveCD
• Wallpaper bkawk bok bok
• Cluck cluck Gnote
• Booooooook bok Solang bok bok bok

Bok bok booooook Mininova: 4577800beda226d815f98bc8d79521cd clr-9.10-desktop-amd64.iso
f97179e5b13f3aceb6c9d98d2c7e6ef5 clr-9.10-desktop-i386.iso Bkaaawk bok bok bok boooooook bok braaawk bok bok booooook bok bok bok 10.04? Bok bok boook charity, bok bok videogames, braaaawk money. Bok bok.

So Tuesday was another very productive day seeing lots of things done. And actually today also started (and will end) like this. I am now of the opinion that we need such a kind of meeting of our team every 6 months, if only we could manage to get the time off from our real lifes. Sitting together, discussing, working on the same thing, being able to just call over the table and get a different opinion just gains so much that we are missing otherwise As you already read, Monday was our day to change the database layer while Tuesday left us with adding the v3 source formats. Which was declared finished today, somewhere around noon. The first picture in this blogpost shows our still to fix up/todo list from Monday evening. Besides the v3 format we also worked on other things, like the already mentioned lintian autorejects. This patchset is also fully committed and tested working since today, so we could start on other issues. We had lots of general enhancements of our code committed, from improving our logging to fixing some issues with expiring old files from the pool all the way up to reducing code duplicates all over the place. I must confess that we did not start right away working on dak today. . We had to start by using hightech to fix a broken shoe first. (Some glue and a heavy laptop. NOT MINE). :) Back to reality - we are currently 6 persons all working on various parts of the dak code. We still have the archive mostly disabled (basically one large dinstall run in the evening always) and are happy with this, as this allows us immediate testing without the risk of accidently destroying someones package upload. And we do test a lot, haven t seen that many python backtraces before in one place :) The third picture shows our todo list status from today. We still have a good number of points open, but as we have 6 persons working it does seem manageable to at least get a very good start on each of them. What we currently work on is ACLs in the archive, which will soon allow us to fix another issue the old DM code has but even more important will allow automated signing of packages built by buildds soon. We basically are able to limit such keys to only be able to upload for the one architecture they are allowed to, as well as forbid them to upload any kind of source. (Together with various other considerations around the setup of the buildds (like, for example, only buildds administrated by DSA can have that, but other points too), the handling of the keys, etc, this will lead to much faster uploads of the build binary packages). And will take a tedious work away from buildd admins (who will still have enough to do to deal with the general administration of it, the build failures, such things). Another thing we work on is the handling of arch all packages, in a source that produces arch all as well as arch any binaries. Currently, as soon as a new source is uploaded for one architecture, every architecture will see the new arch all deb. Which can lead to uninstallability of other packages. Not very nice. And another one of us is also working on our contents generation. Something started long ago, but not yet finished. Recently we did take big steps in this, getting our SQL queries for it down from about 10 minutes to something around 10 seconds. That is for one suite, one architecture, the full contents file contents. While this is SQL only and we still need to write it out to disk, it is a nice improvement. And to my right we have someone working on getting the Packges/Sources files data stored within projectb too, so we can also use our own python scripts to write those files. This will finally enable us to completly ditch apt-ftparchive. And finally, to my left site sits someone who is working on a dak policy wrapper, with which we can allow other groups then ftpmaster to control suites. The initial usage will be to restore the (oldstable-)proposed-updates handling with their own queues in front, as that is no longer part of our NEW handling script. In the future it will also allow easy handling of other situations, like suites for volatile or backports.org. Basically everything where the people running the archive software are different to those people actually setting the policy for the suite. Another nice detail is the ability to throw away uploaded binaries and only ever take buildd built binaries into the archive. We will not go to source-only uploads, as that will only lead to lots of untested uploads (sorry people, we are all humans, it WILL happen), but we can have them uploaded, do regular checks (including the lintian ones), then take the files from the buildds. (Of course there is a way to get things bootstrapped, the system behind this is flexible to allow for a bootstrap mode for a new architecture). (I have multiple pictures, will probably put some more up when I am back home).

Update:
Thanks to Sven Joachim and Andrew Pollock for informing me about /etc/init.d/mountoverflowtmp which exists to mount a tmpfs named overflow if /tmp is full at boot time. It appears that the system was not compromised. But regular reinstalls are always a good thing. On the 24th of August this year I noticed the following on my SE Linux Play Machine [1]:
root@play:/root# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda 1032088 938648 41012 96% /
tmpfs 51296 0 51296 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10240 24 10216 1% /dev
tmpfs 51296 4 51292 1% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb 516040 17128 472700 4% /root
/dev/hdc 1024 8 1016 1% /tmp
overflow 1024 8 1016 1% /tmp The kernel message log had the following:
[210511.546152] su[769]: segfault at 0 ip b7e324e3 sp bfa4b064
error 4 in libc-2.7.so[b7dbb000+158000]
[210561.527839] su[778]: segfault at 0 ip b7eb14e3 sp bfec84d4 error 4 in
libc-2.7.so[b7e3a000+158000]
[210585.270372] su[784]: segfault at 0 ip b7e044e3 sp bff1b534 error 4 in
libc-2.7.so[b7d8d000+158000]
[210595.855278] su[789]: segfault at 0 ip b7e014e3 sp bfd18324 error 4 in
libc-2.7.so[b7d8a000+158000]
[210639.496847] su[796]: segfault at 0 ip b7e874e3 sp bf99e7b4 error 4 in
libc-2.7.so[b7e10000+158000] Naturally this doesn t look good, the filesystem known as overflow indicates a real problem. It appears that the machine was compromised. So I ve made archival copies of all the data and reinstalled it. As the weather here is becoming warmer I ve used new hardware for my new Play Machine. The old system was a 1.8GHz Celeron with 1280M of RAM and two IDE disks in a RAID-1 array. The new system is a P3-800 with 256M of RAM and a single IDE disk. It s a Compaq Evo which runs from a laptop PSU and is particularly energy efficient and quiet. The down-side is that there is no space for a second disk and only one RAM socket so I m limited to 256M that s just enough to run a Xen server with a single DomU. I put the new play machine online on Friday the 23rd of October after almost two months of down-time.

• [1] http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/play.html

On Thursday I will be helping to kick start a debate about some of the possible differences (or not) between free and open source software at Eyebeam, which will be hosted by Upgrade. If you are interested but are not in NYC, there will be a live stream and chat.

On Thursday I will be helping to kick start a debate about some of the possible differences (or not) between free and open source software at Eyebeam, which will be hosted by Upgrade. If you are interested but are not in NYC, there will be a live stream and chat.

I just released Cupt 1.2.0 to Debian experimental.

It now has the ability to create and load Cupt system snapshots (in a sense of installed packages) and the algorithm to try handle changes which require X MiB to download when you have only Y MiB of free disk space available, and X > Y.

For first, see new 'snapshot' subcommand, for second, set new 'cupt::worker::archives-space-limit' option.

Now the 'I-wish-a-feature-in-Cupt' list is again empty. Test, enjoy, report bugs, submit new wishes.

I am at the Debian FTPMaster meeting in the LinuxHotel Essen currently. We arrived Sunday evening and will stay until 1st November, giving us a nice week of time to work on outstanding archive issues. Currently we are 4 persons, Mark and me as FTPMasters and Frank and Chris as FTPTeam members. 2 more FTPTeam members join us Wednesday evening, so we only miss 2 members of our team in the end. Monday started out very well, with us merging a 7000 (plus something) lines patch, completly changing our database handling code. While we do have the archive disabled since we started working on it (and haven t reenabled it yet), we had a surprisingly small amount of errors to fix up. Though we do still have to test various codepaths, so it will still be a bit before normal service is back. But yay, we are now with a database layer that actually understands types (and has various other advantages). Today started with us getting to the next intrusive patch set waiting for our attention, the source v3 format. At the time of writing this blog post the patchset is merged (with changes to the way it originally looked) and we are now cleaning up and fixing the introduced bugs. Though I just heard live the first rejection of a sample v3 format package, so that looks pretty good too. And while that bugfixing is going on we are also working on the lintian autorejects and still have many other points on our agenda. I try to keep you updated, and we sure will send a report after the meeting, but I think it can already be said that every single cent spent here is worth it.

I had to struggle a bit with the mobile stick I just got from Vodafone and thought it might be useful to write it down somewhere. The Huawei K3520 (recognized automatically by Linux 2.6.31 as a E620 USB Modem ) seems to work without many problems, the only hardware related issue being that sometimes, seemingly at random, the memory stick part will be loaded and sometimes just the USB modem part. The Vodafone Germany specific configuration, on the other hand, wasn t so easy to find online. The working config I currently have with NetworkManager 0.7.1 is:

Number: *99# (this is the default, but it warrants an explicit mention since I ve found other examples online with *99***1# , and that didn t work)
Username: vodafone
Password: vodafone
APN: web.vodafone.de (this seems to vary wildly from country to country) The rest is either default or empty.

And lastly, taken from this LP bug, I had to change to in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf, to avoid the Looks like pppd didn t initialize our dbus module error. After all this the connection still needs a push to work (it rarely if ever works on the first try and I haven t dug deep enough to decide if this is a Vodafone, a driver or a NetworkManager problem), but after connecting everything is shinny.

If you ever wondered if you are a good programmer (not), you might think about the following points:

1. Repeat yourself. How else would you keep yourself busy, if your customer has new requirements?

2. Re-Using code is for people who take the other side of the street if a big dog walks along. No risk, no fun. How else would you find out that the common idiom you use is really the way the job has to be done?

3. If you have a coding convention (e.g. how code has to be indented): Just ignore it. Its a good thing to have editors go crazy, when trying to automatically detect the indenting of a source file. By always confusing the editor you keep up the fun of the people, who try to change your code. It would be too boring for them, to simply edit the file, without the quiz which quoting applies to your code. Extra points for those who additionaly (to mixing tabs, spaces, 4 and 8 space, expandtab and no expandtab) write a vim modeline into their file that - by guarantee - does not match the indenting of the file.

4. If you can complicate things: Do it. Numeric indices in arrays can be exchanged by arbitrary strings, this makes your code more interesting. Especially if you have to move elements in that array. And complicated codes makes people, who don't know it, think that you are a good programmer. One step nearer to your goal, isn't it?

5. When working with different classes invent a system that auto-loads the classes you need. Don't document it, that would be a risk for your job. Its not neccessary anyway, because good programmers like the riddle and finding out what gets called, where and why, is a simple but entertaining riddle. After all documenting is a bad idea as well. Especially if you make your system open source, because with a good documentation, it might be to easy for competitors to use your code to make money.

6. If you find ways to do extra function calls: Do it. It gives you the chance to refactor your code, if the customer notices that it is too slow. Great opportunity, hu?

(But, seriously: Don't hear on me. Its just a cynical way to express my feelings.)

When the Intel Atom was revealed to the public I didn't came around to say: "Wow!", because that piece of hardware promises to be a generic-x86 1.6 GHZ CPU with a total power consumption of 2 Watt, which is amazing considering that x86 hardware generally wasn't an option if you wanted to build a low-power system. But then the first chipsets were presented to the public and the Atom became a farce, because you don't want to have a chipset that eats over 25W for a CPU which consumes 2W. That was basically laughable.

Recently I managed to find out that there is a new chipset out there, the Intel i945GSE, which runs at about 11W TDP, including the soldered-on-board N270 atom cpu. And I convinced myself that this could get my new homeserver. So together with a 2.5" drive I could get a system which runs with about 15W maximum power consumption, which is amazing, given that the Arcor Easybox my provider gave to me seems to have similar maximum power consumptions. And it isn't able to provide me with the great flexibility, the new Atom system is.

So I bought the following components:

• Intel Essential Series D945GSEJT
• A Mini-ITX M350 case, which is amazing, because its about the size of a Linksys router and should still provide a good thermal environment.
• 2GB Kingston HyperX DDR2 533 MHZ S0 DIMM
• a Western Digital Scorpio 320 GB hard-drive

It took a while to get those components together, especially because I previously decided for an Antec case which I ordered from K&M Elektronik, but as they didn't keep their delivery promise I came to the M350. What a luck.

Running Debian on this machine is the easy part, you would think. This is true, for some exceptions. First: Lenny runs fine. I've installed the notebook hd in my desktop and then put it in the atom, when I got the first hardware and it worked right away. Except of a grub message, which is disturbing and which I didn't manage to fix right now (grub says "Error: No such disk" just to get the menu a seconds later anyway and boot the system flawless).

What didn' t work exactly reliable was the included network chip. Its quiet a shame to say that, but if you buy an Intel board, wouldn't you expect that it would run Intel components? Unfortunately this is not true for the atom board. It has a Realtek RTL8111 network chip, which isn't properly supported by the 2.6.26 kernel (that means the kernel think it is and loads a rtl8169 module, which isn't able to properly detect a link).
The workaround for this is to use a 8168 module from Realtek and compile it for your kernel, but as I equipped this system with an Atheros 2424 PCIe chipset for playing WLAN AP, too, I had to upgrade to 2.6.31 anyway and there the chip is fully supported by 8169.

Making the system an access point has been surprisinly easy as well. The greatest pain was to find a Mini PCIe WLAN card, because after all this isn't very common. However I found one based on an Atheros 2424 chipset and bought it. I additionaly bought an SMA-antenna connector that I could mount into the case (the M350 has a preparation hole for it) and an SMA antenna.
Setting this up, has been fairly easy. You need to know, that running master mode with newer mac-subsystem-drivers in Linux doesn't allow setting master mode directly. Instead you need to use an application to manage everything, which is capable of running cards over netlink. Thats hostapd. The unfortune is, that the lenny version is too old and so I built myself a (hacky) backport of the sid version, which isn't that hard anyway, because rebuilding against Lenny is enough. Additional you need a kernel 2.6.30 with compat-wireless extensions, or an 2.6.31, because previously the ath5k driver didn't support the master mode. After that getting hostapd up is a matter of a 4 - 15 lines configuration file. For me its now running in 802.11g with WPA and a short rekeying interval with 14 lines of configuration.

After all I'm satisfied with the system. Without any fan the CPU constantly runs at 55 C, which is okay, given that it must operate within 0 and 90 C according to the tech specs. The system and the disk are somewhat lower (47 and 39 C). The power of this system is more then enough. Its booting quick and working with it works without latencies, even when the system is doing something. What I haven't yet tested is weither the power consumption actually fulfills the expactations. I will do so, once I got a wattmeter.

For software, the question whether some software can be considered free is relatively easy to decide: Check the license of the code against the list of free licenses of your trust (the OSI list, the FSF list or the judgement applied by debian-legal) and that s (mostly) it. When it comes to web services in the broader sense, including hosters, communication providers, social networks etc., this are not so clear. In this blog entry, I ll try to list the various requirements that a service should fulfill and which I usually consider before deciding to use a service.The RequirementsA) Availability of source codeComing from the Free Software movement, this is the first requirement that comes to mind. If a web service claims to be free, then I want to be able to inspect how it is working, suggest and implement improvements and set up my own instance. For example, Canonical s software housing setup Launchpad was itself not Free Software until very recently. Having access to the source code is also the reason why I prefer gitorious over github for git hosting.B) Access to my dataDepending on the kind of service, it might hold data from me or about me that are important, such as my emails on a webmail service. If I won t have a way to easily retrieve my data to back it up or to move to a competitor, I ll think twice before trusting my data to this service.C) Free data formatsIf there is accessible data, it should be in a format that I can easily get and use with a choice of (Free) software. Not sure if such a service exists, but an online office suite only supporting its own proprietary file format (possibly with its own proprietary offline office suit) would be no option for me.D) An APIFor an extensively used service, I will want to have the possibility to optimize my user experience by automation. This requires that I can use the service not only in person, but also from tools I write. A very good example for this is Twitter: Besides registration, there is no need to use their web site at all and still use all the features, using the tools I find most fit for a task.E) Choice of providersCompetition is good. If a service is only provided by a single company, and I become dependent on the service, I become dependent on the company. A few years ago, SourceForge was mostly the only provider of gratis, comprehensive software project hosting. By now, there are a few alternatives, such as alioth, savannah or google code, which is appreciated. Note that when it comes to the proprietary instant messaging services (ICQ, yahoo messenger, MSN messenger), there is no choice of providers: To talk to my buddies on a certain network, I am bound to that provider. The same applies to social networks (Facebook, StudiVZ, XING), and is one of the reasons why I shun these yet. F) Federation between providersIf there is a choice of providers, and the service in question provides some kind of communication, it is very desirable if I can interact with users of the service on other providers. A very good example for this is e-mail: People @gmx.net can send mails to people @aol.com, and I can have @joachim-breitner.de and still communicate with everyone. This was not always the matter of course: Before Internet e-mail was common, people on AOL could not get in touch with people at CompuServe. These days, the problem persists with instant messaging (Jabber a.k.a. XMPP being the notable exception) and social networks. Also sites like gitorious or github could support federation if they would allow to create branches of repositories that are hosted elsewhere, allowing their users to use the familiar interface with all repositories they work with.Analysis of a few servicesSo far the theory. Let s see how various services fare.e-mailBeing from the old times of the Internet, when everything was better, it does not surprise that this passes all requirements: There is a large amount of Free e-mail servers and clients to choose from, my data is easily moved via well-known protocols such as POP or IMAP and save in standardized format. There is an abundance of service providers, and they all talk to each other. One could argue that the openness of email causes problems like spam, but I d say that this might be a design issue, but not inherent to the above criteria.Pretty much the same analysis applies to Jabber/XMPP.ICQI joined when I was young and unwise. Now I am stuck to AOL to keep in touch with a relevent part of my online correspondence. To use it on the operating system of my choice, other people had to reverse engineer the protocol and any time, AOL could change how its servers work and I ll be locked out. I can not get in touch with people on other networks, my buddy roster is not easily backed up and restored, and no, we can not see the source of the ICQ servers. I d wish I could switch over to Jabber completely, but there are always a few important people who do not use that yet.Github/GitoriousAlthough gitorious is slightly older, github managed to become more famous. These web sites allow developers to publish their source code and other contributors to easily branch, work on their changes, and propose them for merging in the main code. They are based on git, so I can get my data. There is a choice of providers. I am not sure how well I can access their functionality (merge requests etc.) programmatically. As said before, they do not interact well, and only gitorious has published its code.Facebook/StudiVZVery disappointing. I have heard that Facebook offers you a rich API, but otherwise, they fail every category. This is one of the reasons why I am not to be found on these networks yet.Twitter/identi.caTwitter, similar to Facebook, excels in the category API , but fails in the others. A better alternative is identi.ca: The software behind it is free, I can download contact data etc. It even supports federation via OpenMicroBlogging, although that did not break through yet it, it seems.OpenIDAnother very good example for what I want is OpenID, a service that allows websites to accept a user s credentials from another site. This saves the user from having to create accounts everywhere. There are free implementations, multiple providers, I can easily switch between them. A great feature of OpenID that goes a bit beyond federation is delegation: On the start page of my homepage http://www.joachim-breitner.de/, I saved who my OpenID provider is. Now I can use http://www.joachim-breitner.de/ as my OpenID, and even if I change my provider, this stays valid! This is a feature that not even XMPP easily provides.ConclusionWhether a web service is really free is a complicated question and has a graded answer. One has to balance the benefits of using a web service against the freedoms it is missing. I hope that in the long run, services fulfilling most or all of these requirements will prevail, so that I ll be networking socially and blogging microly with a good conscience.

So I've got this cool Intel Atom-Board Intel Essential Series D945GSEJT, which is the first Atom-ITX-board that doesn't feature a 25W chipset for a 2W CPU. Its pretty cool, but one thing made me laugh.
Today I saw that there came a "Intel atom inside" sticker with the board. I thought: Well, nice, now I could - if I wanted - put this on my Mini-ITX-system. But then I saw whats been written next to this: "Use of the enclosed Intel Atom logo label is unauthorized and constitutes infringement of Intel's exclusive trademark rights unless you have signed the Intel Atom logo trademark license".

Isn't it nice of Intel to supply me with a sticker which would make me a criminal if I'd use it?

(No apologies to the original.) I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old boyfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. He's had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, teeth whitening, and a radical nosejob to make him look as much like your current boyfriend as medical science will allow. He's handsome, of course, almost too handsome. He still uses far too much product in his hair and carries that desperate look in his eyes. The fragrant haze around him is the cologne he overuses to mask the scent of failure. But standing there in that form-fitting t-shirt, you'd almost forget for a moment what a psycho he was- how he used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how he was only happy when you were paying attention to him. You'd almost forget about carrying around his legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, he would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong he'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out. You complained about him for years before finally deciding to get rid of him, and here he is again. Though, somehow, he seems like a completely different person now. "I'm up here," he says when he catches you staring at his package. Tempted though you may be, you know that over time he'll get bored and slow down on you just like he always does. And then you'll be right back where you started: trapped. He keeps you by convincing you that you don't have a choice. You're just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other. "But I'm different now," he says, batting his eyes innocently. "I've changed." Indeed he has. Apparently, he's really into Kabbalah now or something like that. It's helped him discover loads of untapped potential in himself. But it also means that you'll have to buy all new furniture to fit with his understanding of feng shui. That's not the only change he has in store for you. The minute you let him move in, he'll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night. He doesn't love you, but he doesn't hate you, either. The truth is that he couldn't care less one way or the other. He's here because he doesn't want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, he wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, he needs a place to stay. But all in all, he's OK. He's a seven. He'll do, I guess. UPDATE: There was a Hacker News thread about the Slashdot link that got killed before I could reply to someone who left a negative comment. I'll reproduce it here for the sake of anyone still scratching their head.

Thank you for replying instead of simply downvoting. There are assumptions in the structure of the original text that I don't think most of the people discussing it (here, or over there) appreciate. To wit: the narrative of technology belongs to men. Women are objects. The dumbest, easiest way to make that stick out (I did it over breakfast, ffs) is to swap the genders. It sounds "wrong". The emotional-abuse stuff is more creepy. The physical descriptions are more awkward because men aren't leered at in the same way. It's not about evening things out, it's about subverting what the text doesn't say outright by making it obvious. I am, I'm sure, as aware as you that "deconstruction" is not (anymore) a word you say to sound smart, rather a word you avoid saying to avoid sounding like you're trying to be pseudo-smart, but sometimes you just gotta call a spade a spade. You're free to disagree with that (I assume you still will), but I think "not even wrong" is a little over the top.

I ve just been setting up new virtual servers at Linode [1] and Slicehost [2]. I have previously written a review of both those services [3], based on that review (and some other discussions) one of my clients now has a policy of setting up pairs of virtual servers for various projects, one server at Linode and one at Slicehost. Now both virtual hosting providers work very well and I m generally happy with both of them. But Linode seems to be a better offering. Linode has graphs of various types of usage, I can look at graphs of disk IO, CPU use, and network IO for the last 24 hours, 30 days, or for previous months. The three graphs have the same scale of the X axis so I can correlate them. The stats on Slicehost just allow you to get the current raw numbers, which doesn t help if I want to know what happened last night when performance sucked. When I build a Linode instance I can have multiple filesystems configured (Slicehost can t do any of this). I can use less disk space than is available to reserve space for other filesystems. Separating filesystems makes it easier to track IO performance and also allows some bounds to be set on the amount of disk space used for various tasks. Nowadays the use of multiple partitions is not as popular as it once was, but it s still a real benefit. Of course one of the benefits of this is that I can have two partitions on Linode that are suitable for running as the root filesystem. If an upgrade fails then it would be an option to boot with the other filesystem (I haven t actually done this but it s good to have the option). I believe that this feature of Linode could do with some improvements. Firstly when creating or resizing filesystem it should be possible to specify the number of Inodes when using Ext3. The fsck time for a large Ext3 filesystem that has the default number of Inodes is quite unreasonable. It would also be good if other filesystems such as XFS were supported, for some use cases XFS can significantly outperform Ext3 and choice is always good. When BTRFS becomes stable I expect that every hosting provider will be compelled to support it (any provider that wants my continued business will do so). Now Linode and Slicehost both allow sharing bandwidth allowances between virtual servers. So if you run one server that uses little bandwidth you can run a second server that needs a lot of bandwidth and reduce the potential for excess bandwidth use problems. The next logical extension to this is to allow sharing disk allocation between servers on the same physical system. So for example I might want to run a web server for the purpose of sending out large files, 360M of RAM as provided by the Linode 360 offering would be plenty. But the 128G of storage and 1600GB per month of bandwidth usage that is provided with the Linode 2880 plan would be really useful. At the same time a system that does computationally expensive tasks (such as a build and test server) might require a large amount of RAM such as 2880MB while requiring little disk space or bandwidth. Currently Linode allows sharing bandwidth arbitrarily between the various servers but not disk space or RAM. I don t think that this would be a really difficult feature to implement. Finally Linode has a Pending Jobs Queue that shows the last few requests to the management system and their status. It s not really necessary, but it is handy to see what has been done and it gives the sysadmin a feeling of control over the process. These management features provide enough value to me that if I was going to use a single virtual hosting provider then I would choose Linode. For certain reliability requirements it simply wouldn t be a responsible decision to trust any single hosting company. In that case I m happy to recommend both Linode and Slicehost as providers.

• [1] http://www.linode.com/
• [2] http://www.slicehost.com/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/11/27/slicehost-vs-linode/