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)

I have blogged about it before, but I will blog about it again as it is that cool: SISU. According to its author, Ralph Amissah, “Susu was born of the need to find a way, with minimal effort, and for as wide a range of document types as possible, to produce high quality publishing output in a variety of document formats.” And really what it does it makes reading on the web a whole lot easier. He can only throw up Free Material and so his options are a little limited but he has recently added Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, making it easier to read than ever. We just finished reading a about 3 chapters of the book for my class (wish I had known about the SISU for my students but oh well, next time) and here is the latest entry from one of my students covering the birth and development of F/OSS and ending with some questions about Free Culture. Good stuff, if I can say so myself.

I have blogged about it before, but I will blog about it again as it is that cool: SISU. According to its author, Ralph Amissah, “Susu was born of the need to find a way, with minimal effort, and for as wide a range of document types as possible, to produce high quality publishing output in a variety of document formats.” And really what it does it makes reading on the web a whole lot easier. He can only throw up Free Material and so his options are a little limited but he has recently added Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, making it easier to read than ever. We just finished reading a about 3 chapters of the book for my class (wish I had known about the SISU for my students but oh well, next time) and here is the latest entry from one of my students covering the birth and development of F/OSS and ending with some questions about Free Culture. Good stuff, if I can say so myself.

Making sure you get valid data from users is a constant headache. E-mail addresses just happen to be a particular piece of data that causes me pain and suffering at the day job, because when people put bad e-mail addresses into web apps we host, my mail queues clog up, and that makes me a sad and slightly (more) irritated sysadmin. Since I work for a Rails hosting shop, and I like programming in Ruby, I got all industrious this weekend and put together EmailAddressValidator, a ruby class to validate an e-mail address via a regex or (optionally) DNS lookups (to make sure something might accept mail for the domain) and making (most of) a delivery attempt to an MX for the domain. It's not foolproof, but it'll stop my mailqueues from getting clogged with a fair percentage of the stuff that gives me ulcers. The fun part now is getting the customer base to (a) use the class at all, and (b) run it over their existing user address lists. As an aside, if someone wanted to setup an SMTP server configured for a catchall on gmial.com, I think he or she would have a lot of juicy stuff in very short order.

I got a voicemail message at home from UPS for a Christopher Pollock. I've previously received some mail for him as well, so I went searching, and it turns out that he lives elsewhere in my apartment complex. Not long after we moved to the US, we were picking up a pizza from Pizza Hut, and someone else was also picking up a pizza for "Pollock". It seems my last name is more common than I thought.

The design of levels for computer games is a form of programming, particularly for games with deterministic NPCs. It seems to me that for a large portion of the modern computer user-base the design of games levels will be their first experience of programming computers, the people who don’t start programming by creating games levels would be writing spread-sheets. Probably a few people start programming by writing “batch files” and shell scripts, but I expect that they form a minute portion of the user-base. I believe that learning some type of programming is becoming increasingly important, not just for it’s own sake (most people can get through their life quite well without doing any form of programming) but because of the sense of empowerment it gives. A computer is not a mysterious magic box that sometimes does things you want and sometimes doesn’t! It’s a complex machine that you can control. Knowing that you can control it gives you more options even if you don’t want to program it yourself, little things like knowing that you have an option of using a different choice of software or paying someone to write new software open significant possibilities to computer use in business environments. Games which involve strategic or tactical thought seem to have some educational benefit (which may or may not outweigh the negative aspects of games). To empower children and take full advantage of the educational possibilities I think that there are some features that are needed in games. Firstly levels that are created by the user need to be first class objects in the game. Having a game menu provide the option of playing predefined levels or user-defined levels clearly shows to the user that their work is somehow less important than that of the game designer. While the game designer’s work will tend to be of a higher quality (by objective measures), by the subjective opinion of the user their own work is usually the most important thing. So when starting a game the user should be given a choice of levels (and/or campaigns) to play with their levels being listed beside the levels of the game creator. Having the users levels displayed at the top of the list (before the levels from the game designer) is also a good thing. Games that support campaigns should allow the user to create their own campaigns. The KDE game kgoldrunner [1] is the best example I’ve seen of this being implemented correctly (there may be better examples but I don’t recall seeing them). In kgoldrunner when you start a game the game(s) that you created are at the bottom of the list. While I believe that it would be better to have my own games at the top of the list, having them in the same list is adequate. When a user is playing the game they should be able to jump immediately from playing a level to editing it. For example in kgoldrunner you can use the Edit Any Level menu option at any time while playing and it will default to allowing you to edit the level you are playing (and give you a hint that you have to save it to your own level). This is a tremendous encouragement for editing levels, any time you play a level and find it too hard, too easy, or not aesthetically pleasing you can change it with a single menu selection! When editing a level every option should have a description. There should be no guessing as to what an item does - it should not be assumed that the user has played the game enough to fully understand how each primary object works. Kgoldrunner provides hover text to describe the building blocks. Operations that seem likely to be performed reasonably often should have menu options. While it is possible to move a level by loading it and saving it, having a Move Level menu option (as kgoldrunner does) is a really good feature. Kgoldrunner’s Edit Next Level menu option is also a good feature. Finally a game should support sharing levels with friends. While kgoldrunner is great it falls down badly in this area. While it’s OK for a game to use multiple files for a campaign underneath the directory it uses for all it’s configuration, but it should be able to export a campaign to a single file for sharing. Being able to hook in to a MUA to enable sending a campaign as a file attached to an email as a single operation would also be a good feature. I have filed Debian bug #502372 [2] requesting this feature.

• [1] http://games.kde.org/game.php?game=kgoldrunner


• [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=502372

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The monthly IRC board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place later today, as announced by SPI’s secretary last week. While the announcement is back on time (yay!), the agenda isn’t (aww!). I’d be quite interested to learn how SPI is going to try to reduce the risk to its reserves, given the current slow decline of its primary bank which is not one of the first US banks getting bailed out. I think the best way for not-for-profits to avoid risking donations at the moment is to avoid having them in their bank accounts, in line with the Better Business Bureau standard that

“the charity’s unrestricted net assets available for use should not be more than three times the size of the past year’s expenses or three times the size of the current year’s budget, whichever is higher.”

Back in June 2005, SPI’s board of the time (Ian Jackson, John Goerzen, Jimmy Kaplowitz, David Graham, Bruce Perens, Benj. Mako Hill, Branden Robinson) decided to “remain noncompliant” with that standard and I fear that chicken could be coming home to roost now. I hope we don’t lose anything, but AIUI we’ve got nearly $150,000 in play. Update: Unlike its UK analogue, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation covers corporation accounts up to $250,000, so SPI is only risking temporary unavailability, not yet a risk of loss. Thanks to bd_ for pointing me to that.

As some of you know, the first weekend in October was a big deal for me, because it was NCR's Oktoberfest launch event. My son and I spent the weekend camped out on the prairie with Keith Packard and many of our other friends. Keith successfully went from nothing to a "level 2" high power certification, which was pretty cool. I wasn't quite so lucky. On Saturday morning, I flew my custom-designed rocket YikStik for a "level 3" certification attempt. The name comes from the word my wife uses to describe lipstick. The rocket was built from a mixture of custom and Giant Leap parts, including 98mm Dyna Wind airframe, a 98-75mm tail cone retainer, and a Pinnacle nose cone. All the centering rings were cut on my 3-axis CNC milling machine, and the fins were custom 7-layer composite layups using plywood, carbon fiber, fiberglass, and epoxy... all vacuum bagged using a kitchen food saver appliance. Painted red, gold, and black, with a custom 8 foot main parachute sewn by my wife Karen from the Team Vatsaas design in red and black rip-stop nylon. The motor selected was an Aerotech M1297W reload. This is a 75mm diameter motor 66.5cm in length with 2722 grams of propellant yielding 5417 Newton-seconds of total impulse. It was also on sale earlier this year for cert attempts. My simulations said YikStik should have flown to about 14,800 feet above ground level at the NCR north site on this motor. The launch went perfectly, and the rocket was stunningly beautiful under boost. It disappeared into some high clouds, but we continued to have strong signals from the two tracking transmitters installed in the payload bay behind the nose cone. About the anticipated time after launch, we saw a rocket descending under chute in the distance, and headed in that direction. A few minutes later, we abruptly lost both tracking signals, and that's when things took a turn for the weird. In hindsight, I think we suffered an apogee deployment of the main chute, and the rocket we saw descending was someone else's. YikStik was designed to deploy a streamer at apogee, then descend fairly quickly to about 1500 feet above ground where a second set of ejection charges would fire to separate the nose cone on a 3 foot drogue parachute that would pull a deployment bag containing the main chute out of the airframe and then pull the bag off the chute. The nose cone, payload bay with the tracking transmitters, and deployment bag would then descend under the drogue chute and the remainder of the rocket would descend under the big chute. In the world of deployment bags, this is called a 'free bag' configuration. With deployment at 1500 feet, the two bits should have landed within sight of each other. But that didn't happen. It wasn't until late Sunday afternoon, after we had to leave to get Keith to the airport, that some friends finally located the nose cone assembly about 3.5 miles down range from the launch site, over a couple rises and past an area of rough terrain. By then it was cold, windy, and rainy, and so I really appreciated the effort they put in locating the nose, and wasn't too surprised that they didn't immediately see the rest. Since the bulk of the rocket under the main should have had a slightly higher descent rate than the nose cone, I expected to find the rest of the rocket somewhere near a line between the launch rail and where the nose cone was discovered. So last Wednesday I spent about 5.5 hours walking around the area searching... but no luck. Since then, several other people have been out looking for my rocket, including two friends who flew over the area today in a light plane looking down into all the washes. Still nothing. I posted some signs in the area with a photo of the rocket and my contact info, I hope someone calls eventually. In the meantime, the bulk of YikStik remains missing, and of course I did not achieve a successful level 3 certification. Lessons learned for next time are that tethering the deployment bag to the main chute instead of flying in a "free bag" configuration might have been a better choice, and it's kind of silly having two tracking transmitters in one of the two pieces of your rocket and none in the other... Ray LaPanse took some stunning photos of the launch. He will likely post better versions with color correction and so forth at some point, but in the meantime, I've put a few up on my Garbee Rockets web site. She sure was a beauty!

flymake and read-only directories. I have (add-hook 'find-file-hook 'flymake-find-file-hook) in my .emacs, but that makes flymake enabled for every file it can support. That is annoying when it tries to start flymake and write to a read-only directory, and fail every time. I added a (not buffer-read-only) check to flymake-find-file-hook, and I feel more comfortable now. Sent to BTS.

ObRandom:

Any blog post, comment thread, question, or email which starts "Hi guys" is bad, wrong, and probably not worth reading.

ObTitle: Dawn of the dead - the original and best version - 1978

Procmail This will be the last time I talk about this, but here's my anti-rubbish procmail filter. It correctly copes with:

• Foreign character sets that I can't read.
• Bounces from joe-jobs.
• Malformed emails.

Obviously edit to suit your tastes. Especially with regard to character sets - it is a wide brush which is tarring a group unfairly. That said in practise it works for me. If you want real antispam filtering then you should probably be looking at externalising it, or having a layered approach.

• Procmail snippets

ObQuote: Citizen Kane

mutt has excellent OpenPGP and GPG support. However different clients send GnuPG encrypted/signed data in different ways. Lots of people seem to be using FireGPG these days so that they can use GnuPG within the GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo! web clients.

Here's the procmail rule I used to convert almost all incoming emails to the OpenPGP/MIME format:

:0
* !^Content-Type: multipart/
* !^Content-Type: application/pgp
 
 :0 fBw
 * ^-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
 * ^-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
   formail \
     -i "Content-Type: application/pgp; format=text; x-action=encrypt"

 :0 fBw
 * ^-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
 * ^-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
 * ^-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
   formail \
     -i "Content-Type: application/pgp; format=text; x-action=sign"
 

However, this didn't actually work with FireGPG and the way that it puts encrypted messages inline. I eventually found out that putting this in my ~/.muttrc would fix it:

set pgp_auto_decode=yes

Trying to get prepared for lenny, the new iceweasel annoys me more and more.

• Problem 1: How do I globally set a program to use for mailto: links?
  The old solution no longer works, and the only workaround I found is placing a mimeTypes.rdf with the right contents to /etc/iceweasel/profile, but that of course only works for new accounts, not when upgrading accounts...
• Problem 2: Is there a way to get the Xprint interface of iceweasel back?
  It still suggests xprint, but I see no way to not get those gtk printing dialog boxes. Those of course only show "Print to file" because I am using lprng and someone decides to disable the lpr backend gtk by default. (Those printing backends modules in gtk seem like a nice thing at first, I could easily write one to show the printers in /etc/printcap and have controls for all the options of the printer's PPD file in there, but it only helps to get the dialog better). But the postscript it creates is just broken beyond description. No need to speak about doing color all the time (looks like there is no way to tell cairo to make a surface grayscale), or embedding all the fonts, but it tries to do the distance of characters on its own and miserably fails so. The fonts it embedds also have some strangenesses, or the pswrite method of the new ghostscript has problems, too.
  Another problem with the gtk print dialog in iceweasel is in the print setup dialog box. It always defaults to letter, and I found no way to globally change this. Here most likely the fault is somewhere in the glue code, giving that a first glance looks really like someone only knowing letter and executive wrote it...
• I'm sure there were others, but those I forget over the more urgent ones...

Yesterday I attended a lecture by professor D.J. Bernstein, best known for his products like qmail, owner of one of the coolest domain names in the world and for his often controversial but always interesting visions. His talk focused on why the majority of internet traffic still is not encrypted. We protect our email passwords but the 95% of other things we do is completely unprotected from a sniffer. He then narrowed it down to DNS. The problems with DNSSEC are evident and it's still a question of whether it will ever be implemented (after 15 years the design is still in flux, let alone that it's properly implemented or actually used). On a more constructive side he presented his own solution: DNSCurve: using elliptic curve cryptography to not only sign but also encrypt DNS traffic, and do so on the fly rather than the cumbersome precomputation approach of DNSSEC. Bernstein shows that the extra cost of on the fly cryptography is, even for root servers, very minor compared to the costs of the entire system, but it does significantly reduce the administrative burden compared to DNSSEC. As usual he has made an interesting case, a worthwhile read.

As a beta tester for the new email application from Nokia, you will have to give your mail account password:



and agree that they will get your data, too [1].




Really unimpressive, Nokia.


[1] I haven't checked the "Nokia privacy policy", but is enough for me to say no, thanks, and start to wonder if they do anything behind my back with the phones they sell.

A quick note: I'm going to be in Oslo from the 20th to the 22nd of October. I probably won't have time to meet anyone, unfortunately, but if you are up for it, send me an email with a cell phone number and we'll see what can be arranged. Also, I'm trying out Dopplr. I'm not a frequent traveller, but I really like to meet people when I do go someplace new: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/davidnwelton

In a recent blog post, Kai complained about various existing tools for marking up email in HTML. He also asked for pointers to other tools. Since he didn't specify good tools :-), I took the opportunity to promote my work in progress plugin for ikiwiki to do that very thing. When asked about demo sites, I realized that my blog doesn't actually use threaded comments, yet, so made a poor demo. Follow the link and you will find one of the mailboxes from the distribution, mostly a few posts from one of the debian lists. The basic idea is to use the Email::Thread perl module to get a forest of thread trees, and then walk those generating output. I think it would be fairly easy to make a some kind of mutt-like index using the essentially same tree walking code. Not that I'm volunteering immediately mind you, I have to replys to comments on my blog working (which is the main place I use this plugin right now).

Anand Kumria wrote:

If IBM were to go bankrupt, would the government step in? Unlikely. Investors would lose (money), staff — another word for investors — would lose (jobs), but customers would win (their computers would keep working). Some customers would win more than others (especially those who had the equipment on lease); if no one is collecting, why pay?

I’m wondering here where Anand got the idea that once a company went bankrupt, that you don’t need to pay to that company anymore. When a company goes bankrupt, at least in Germany the following happens: A trustee/liquidator is selected. This liquidator is then collecting the information who owes money to the company and who still needs to get (how much) money from it. The liquidator also has to check the option of selling company assets (which might include the contracts of customers that still have to pay) to fulfill the debts of the bankrupt company. After he turned all assets into money, the money is distributed among those who still have to get money from the bankrupt company. Anyway, regarding his main argument that the (average) customer of a company (bank in this case) should never have to pay for the failed speculations of that company, I somehow have to agree with him. Someone putting money into a regular bank account or papers with fixed interest rate should never lose his money. But there are also customers buying bank shares with a chance of higher revenue than with fixed interest rate papers. These should suffer from failure of the bank management, as they more or less explicitly wanted to be tied to the success (or failure) of the bank. However, this is mostly irrelevant, since the failure of so many “investment banks” has side affects that might cost the average inhabitant of the affected countries even more than the discussed rescue plans. One of these effects is that the banks are now much more conservative regarding lease and mortgage plans, effectively leaving many home owners with no option to fulfill previous obligations (remaining debt after a previous mortgage expired can’t be refinanced by a new mortgage), causing them to have to sell their homes to pay the first mortgage. This is in some way stupid because this causes people who were perfectly paying their mortgage rates to loose their house, while the bank which would be giving them a new mortgage could get a new and good customer, improving their income. On the other hand, if the other side effects of the current crisis cause those “good” mortgage customers to loose their jobs, they might turn into bad customers who are unable to pay their rates. All in all, this is a spiral that could cause the whole economy to break down (a small example: The bank is not giving out mortgages, so no one will build new houses so the builders loose their jobs so they don’t pay their mortgage rates anymore,…. - over simplified, but still shows what I mean). Unless the spiral is terminated in time, before too drastic things happen. All in all, I do understand why the politicians try to rescue those banks (or at least the customers of those banks), though I think that in an economy with slightly higher regulation, there wouldn’t be the need for such a rescue plan. I know there are some german banks affected by the crisis as well (among them Hypo Real Estate and others), but the average private customer of such banks shouldn’t loose money due to the regulations we have in place. In general, there should be some security fund which makes sure that private customers never loose money put into regular bank accounts or fixed interest papers, vice-versa, banks should calculate mortgages so that they can be pretty sure their customers are actually able to pay off their rates - it doesn’t make sense if someone starts off having to pay 500$/month for their mortgage and has to pay over 1000$ a few years (as in 2-3 years) later, because the bank raised the interest that much. I have no problem with people loosing money from shares of banks or other companies directly or indirectly through investment funds.