One interesting aspect of the TED conference [1] is the fact that they only run one stream. There is one lecture hall with one presentation and everyone sees the same thing. This is considerably different to what seems to be the standard practice for Linux conferences (as implemented by LCA, OLS, and Linux Kongress) where there are three or more lecture halls with talks in progress at any time. At a Linux conference you might meet someone for lunch and start a conversation by asking “did you attend the lecture on X“, as there are more than two lecture halls the answer is most likely to be “no“, which then means that you have to describe the talk in question before talking about what you might really want to discuss (such as how a point made in the lecture in question might impact the work of the people you are talking two). In the not uncommon situation where there is an interesting implication of combining the work described in two lectures it might be necessary to summarise both lectures before describing the implication of combining the work. Now there are very good reasons for running multiple lecture rooms at Linux conferences. The range of topics is quite large and probably very few delegates will be interested in the majority of the talks. Usually the conference organisers attempt to schedule things to minimise the incidence of people missing talks that interest them, one common way of doing so is to have conference “streams”. Of course when you have for example a “networking” stream, a “security” stream, and a “virtualisation” stream then you will have problems when people are interested in the intersection of some of those areas (virtual servers do change things when you are working on network security). There seem some obvious comparisons between Planet installations (as aggregates of RSS feeds) and conferences (as aggregates of lectures). On Planet Debian [2] there has traditionally been a strong shared context with many blog posts referring to the same topics - where one person’s post has inspired others to write about similar topics. After some discussion (on blogs and by email) it was determined that there would be no policy for Planet Debian and that anyone who doesn’t want to read some of the content should filter the feed. Of course this means that the number of people who read (or at least skim) the entire feed will drop and therefore we lose the shared context. Planet Linux Australia [3] currently has a discussion about the issue of what types of content to aggregate. Michael Davies has just blogged a survey about what types of content to include [4]. I think it’s unfortunate that he decided to name the post after one blogger who’s feed is aggregated on that Planet as that will encourage votes on the specific posts written by that person rather than the general issue. But I think it’s much better to tailor a Planet to the interests of the people who read it than to include everything and encourage readers to read a sub-set. When similar issues were in discussion about Planet Debian I wrote about my ideas on the topic [5]. In summary I think that the Gentoo idea of having two Planet installations (one for the content which is most relevant and one for everything that is written by members) is a really good one. It’s also a good thing to have a semi-formal document about the type of content that is expected - this would be useful both for using a limited feed for people who go significantly off-topic and as a guideline for people who want to write posts that will be appreciated by the majority of the readers. Planet Ubuntu has a guideline, but it was not very formal last time I checked. Finally in regard to short posts, they generally don’t interest me much. If I want to get a list of hot URLs then I could go to any social media site to find some. I write a list post at most once a month, and I generally don’t include a URL in the list unless I have a comment to make about it. I always try to describe each page that I link to in enough detail that if the reader can’t view it then they at least have some idea of what it is about (no “this is cool” or “this sucks” links).

• [1] http://www.ted.com/


• [2] http://planet.debian.org/


• [3] http://planet.linux.org.au/


• [4] http://www.michaeldavies.org/weblog/tech/linux-australia/mikal-blather-poll.html


• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/04/21/purpose-of-planet-debian/

Share This

About a month ago, I bought me a Samsung YP-T10 media player. I didn't want a device for which the Linux and/or Ogg Vorbis support was against the explicit wishes of the device's manufacturer, such as in the case of the iPod; because the more devices such manufacturers sell, the more they're encouraged to keep their systems closed. Definately not something I'd like to see. In that regard, the YP-T10 is pretty okayish. It supports Ogg Vorbis out of the box, and it has a reasonable set of features for a portable media player. It's not perfect, but it goes a long way. The set of features on the device is simply astonishing; apart from the obvious music playback stuff, it sports an FM radio, a text file reader, a voice recorder, a picture viewer, and a movie player. Given the size and clarity of the screen, this is actually a useful way to view a movie clip, too, although not a very comfortable one. Apart from the obvious USB cable, the device also has bluetooth connectivity which can be used to send and receive files, or to connect a bluetooth headset—especially interesting if you consider the modern stereo headphones that sound just like 'normal' headphones. Once you upgrade the firmware, the device gains the ability to play a few games, and to store vCard files. Very impressive, for such a small device. Unfortunately, not all is well. There's an RSS reader thingy on the device, which could be interesting; but it only works in companion with a Windows program, which obviously doesn't run on my (powerpc) laptop. There's only one way to charge the battery, and that's by connecting the device to a USB port. Unfortunately, that also means you cannot use the device while it's charging, since it switches to the MTP mode in which to receive files. That also goes for bluetooth, BTW -- if you're playing something, and the device receives bluetooth data, the playback is paused until receiving that data is finished. The USB cable is a nonstandard one. Given my track record of losing cables and stuff, I'm sure I'll get in trouble at some point. Hopefully Samsung will still sell those at that point. If not, well, I guess I'll see what happens then. Another point of this cable is that it's impossible to remove it from the device while the headphones are connected; you have to push a button which is physically placed in the direction of the headphone connector, about a millimeter away from it—not very interesting if I just want to connect the device to store one or two media files on there... The headphones that came with the device were not too bad, but the protective sleeves that came with it were too loose; after about a week or so, I'd lost both of them and had to buy me a new set of headphones. Luckily, that involves a simple standard headphone connector, so no problem there. All these are just minor annoyances, however. I don't really need an RSS reader, anyway. What really is a problem is the lack of tag support in Ogg files; while I can at least play them, the display will show 'Unknown' for artist, album, or title for any Ogg file—which is a real PITA. Altogether, however, I don't think the disadvantages of the device outweigh the advantages, and I've had quite some fun with it already. Having said that, given the lack of tag support in Ogg files, I don't feel I can really recommend it, at least not if you want to use it to play your Ogg Vorbis collection.

Just read on Farewell LUGRadio? [theangryangel] and Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... Lugradio is at an end [sungate] that the most famous UK Free Software podcast is ending at the end of this year. I don't know the reasons yet, but it seems a shame. I've been listening again since they proved me wrong and sorted out the dumb licensing terms so it's clearly legal to cut the shows up and only copy the bits that interest me, and Season 5 seems more interesting than previous ones. Then again, I enjoyed Red Dwarf VIII, so what do I know? (but VI and VII did drag a lot) Maybe I will go to Lugradio Live 2008 in Wolverhampton on 19-20 July now I know when it is! (Why is the date only as a large slow graphic on the event page? D'oh! (Yeah I know I should have emailed them, but I had an unfun experience with the show, so I'd rather shout this in public. Wow. I guess I'm still unhappy about them regressing to school playground name-calling.)) There are some suggested alternatives on theangryangel, but most are more Ubuntu-centric (which wasn't a good thing about LR), non-Ogg and/or non-European, so it looks like I'll give LinuxOutlaws a try. Any other recommendations?

I use the FriendFeed API (launched in March) to build the blog widget mentioned in my previous post, and I'm rather disappointed to see that the data it exports is not the same as the data FriendFeed shows on my profile page (which is collected from the various services linked to my account). The Flickr service data in particular has two problems:

• There is no obvious way to distinguish between photos I've added to my favorites and my own photos, other than looking at the URL of the photo and extracting the username. On my profile page the photos are correctly labeled, so FriendFeed does have the information.
• When I add several photos to my favorites in a row, if FriendFeed notices them in the same update batch then they're exported in the JSON feed as a single entry with multiple thumbnails. Which means that I can't add links on each image to the corresponding photo page on Flickr as per Flickr's Community Guidelines; the entry's link property points to the photo page of the first photo in the batch.

Annoying. Now, I can't think of a good technical reason that would prevent FriendFeed from exporting my data properly over their API. Are they doing this for anti-competitive purposes? It's weird. I'm a big fan of data aggregation, but not if it's lossy like that!

I just uploaded belpic 2.6.0-4, with a few minor changes, and one major one. The minor changes are, first, a fix to beid-register-pkcs11.html so that it tries to install libbeidpkcs11.so.2, rather than just the .so file, into iceweasel; otherwise you have to install the -dev package (or manually install the library, or change the .html file) to be able to use beid in your browser. Second, there were some typo fixes of which a bugreport had been open embarrasingly long. Oops. The major change, however, is the fact that the debian packages now no longer have support for OpenCT as an alternative to PC/SC Lite. This isn't actually supported by the belpic upstream; and while the Debian packages did include support for such cardreaders, I do have a feeling that it was causing some problems. So why did I include it in the first place, you ask? Well, because my very own cardreader wasn't supported by PC/SC Lite. You see, when I originally packaged the eID software back in 2004, most people didn't have an eID yet, let alone a cardreader; and the fairly common ACR38U-based smartcard readers that are thrown to people's heads these days were nowhere to be found yet. So, I googled for a smartcard manufacturer, found Gemplus who claimed Linux support for (at least some of) their models, found the distributor for Belgium, and ordered a smartcardreader. It did work with Linux allright—but OpenCT, only. Only later on did I find that belpic expects PC/SC Lite. In itself, this was no problem; the first versions of belpic (up to and including 2.3.13) did have the OpenCT and other reader drivers still compiled in, anyway; only with 2.5 and later did Zetes choose to remove them. That's when I started patching, and that's when I discovered that problems began... So, anyway. No more mr nice guy OpenCT. I needed to do my tax declaration, and since it'd been a while since I last tried to do some belpic stuff (since before the move, actually), I discovered that I couldn't find my cardreader anymore. So, I bought me a proper ACR38U-based one, and did my tax declarations before doing the upload. How's that for testing? In any case, if anyone beside me was using the OpenCT bits in belpic, they're now out of luck. Go get yourself an ACR38U-based reader—they're only 15ish, anyway...

Now that Tim Connors has taken the lid off it, I feel I should opine on the matter. Microblogging is just not terribly exciting for the reader. I don't see the point in aggregating it. I don't particularly find Mikal's blatherings terribly exciting reading. I don't find Stewart's twitterings much fun either. I think Facebook's status updates are a better way to poll such things, myself, and it's where I confine my "microblogging" to. I think one of the things that used to make reading blogs more worthwhile than reading mailing lists was the high signal-to-noise ratio. Back in the day, there was a bit of a "cost" or barrier to entry for writing a blog post. For most blogs, it wasn't as easy as writing an email. I still hand-craft my blog posts in HTML, so for me to write something, I have to have enough inclination to fire up an editor and write the words. Often I run out of motivation half way through a blog post, and just end up scrapping it. I'm sitting on a few more lengthy posts that I haven't managed to summon up the energy to write at all yet. I think some of the "push-button publishing" out there is rapidly commoditising blogging, to the point where it becomes as easy or easier than writing an email. And we all know what happened to email... Blogging for me is essentially a journal. I like to use it to refer back to. To share what I'm doing with others. Occasionally it can be cathartic. Often it's a substitute for going to work and telling my co-workers about what crazy geeky thing I've done in my spare time. Mostly it's for me. The fact that I choose to share it with the world is not really a primary motivating factor for me, it just makes it more accessible for me, and sometimes helpful for others.

I've been working hard on a new project for the last couple of months, which I'm glad to be able to share with you now. For the impatient: today my company Control Yourself, Inc. is launching Identi.ca, a new microblogging service. (There's a press release on the Control Yourself site). Users can post short messages about themselves to Identi.ca, which are then broadcast to friends in their social network using instant messages (IM), RSS feeds, and the Web. The difference between Identi.ca and other services like Twitter, Jaiku, or Pownce is that it is Open Source software. I tried to meet the requirements of the Open Service Definition -- Free Software and Free Data. In the same spirit, Identi.ca supports open standards like OpenID and OpenMicroBlogging, to integrate with other Web sites and services. A little background: in March of this year, I was privileged to take part in a summit at the Free Software Foundation about open network services. The summit brought together a number of people involved in Open Source and Open Content to discuss problems with "software as a service" and how to solve them. More and more, people are depending on Web sites and other network services "in the cloud" to do much of their computing tasks. Examples: using Yahoo! Maps instead of a desktop mapping application, or using Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word. Software-as-a-service can be extremely convenient -- data on remote servers stays up-to-date, software gets updated regularly, and you can use different computers or mobile devices to get at the same data. The sacrifice, however, is user autonomy. If you decide that Google Docs doesn't work the way you want, you can't tinker with the software and fix it. If you want to share a map on your Web site, you need Yahoo!'s permission. If you want to use a new social networking site, you have to re-enter all your personal data and re-invite all your friends. The data and code belong to someone else, and they're hidden behind servers that you, the user, aren't allowed to touch. There aren't a lot of clear answers to this. But our loosely-organized summit group is moving forward to promote and support Free/Open Network Services. These are Web sites (or other services) that use Free/Open Source software (with the source available) and provide Open Content data (except for data that users mark as private). There are a lot of them popping up -- like OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. Others are close on the software side, although the data side is a little less clear -- like Wordpress.com, Reddit, or LiveJournal. After the summit, I wanted to try to see what I could do personally to further this mission. I think several of the sites I work on now -- like Vinismo and Keiki -- would qualify. But I also wanted to break some new ground and challenge people's assumptions about software services. And the services I was using, and getting invited to, the most were microblogging sites. Clearly that was the area to dig into further. To do it, I started Laconica, the software underlying Identi.ca. It's AGPL'd PHP using MySQL as a backend -- probably the most accessible platform on the planet right now. I used lots of existing libraries to make development easier, and I hired a great designer (Montreal's Marie-Claude Doyon) to give the site a professional look. Almost as important as the Open Source and Open Content is the distributed nature of Identi.ca. I designed an open protocol called OpenMicroBlogging, based on OAuth, to make it easy for users on one Laconica server to subscribe to notices by users on another server. I hope this will make the service more robust, develop a rich and diverse social network, and stimulate innovation. Because in the end, that's the Internet that we all want to be part of. As a society we rejected "walled gardens" like AOL, Compuserve, and MSN in the early 90s in favor of the distributed, open nature of the World Wide Web. And I think that the new walled gardens like Facebook and Google, need to be replaced with open protocols and standards. Will Open Network Services be the basis of "Web 3.0", the next stage of Web culture? I truly think so, but that's still an open question. People have been using Identi.ca for a few weeks now, although I've asked that folks wait until the software was more mature before posting public links. Today I'm lifting that embargo and asking friends and colleagues to join and participate in the conversation. I hope that people who are sympathetic with the ideals of Identi.ca will take the time to blog about it, invite their friends, and start using the site regularly. And of course I'd love to get feedback on bugs, requested features, and ideas for the future. Please also subscribe to me on the site -- see http://identi.ca/evan -- so I can see who's out there. There are still so many standard services on the Web that I'd like to see open sourced, open content, and distributed -- advertising, storage, image and file sharing, comments, portal pages, social news, social bookmarks, search engines. There's a real business potential for taking the lead in these areas, and I hope more people jump in.

At the last two meetings of LUV [1] I’ve given away old hardware. This month I gave away a bunch of old PCI and AGP video cards, a heap of PC power cables, and some magnets (which I received for free because they were in defective toys that could seriously injure or kill children). One new member was particularly happy that at the first meeting he attended he received some free hardware (I hope it works - most of that stuff hasn’t been tested for over a year and I expect that some would fail). Also there was another guy giving away hardware, so I might have started a trend of giving away unused hardware at meetings (he was giving away some new stuff in the original boxes, mostly USB and firewire cables). For a long time (many years) at LUV meetings there have been free text books given away. One member reviews books and then gives them away after he has read them. At the meeting Ralph Becket gave a presentation on the Mercury functional language. It was interesting to note that Mercury can give performance that is close to C (within 80%) on LZW compression (which is apparently used as a benchmark for comparing languages). Given the number of reasonably popular languages which don’t give nearly that level of performance I think that this is quite a good result. After the meeting Richard Keech demonstrated his electric car. It’s a Hyundai Getz which has had the engine replaced by an electric motor but which still uses the manual gearbox. Richard did a bit of driving around with various LUV members as passengers to demonstrate what the car can do. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to be involved in that, so I’ll have to do so next time I meet him. One thing to note is that Richard’s car was not built that way by Hyundai, it was a custom conversion job. The down-side to this of course is that it would have cost significantly more than a vehicle with the same technology that was manufactured. One design trade-off is that Richard had batteries installed in the place for a spare tire. Last year the RACV magazine published a letter I wrote suggesting that small cars should be designed without a spare tire and that owners of such cars should rely on the RACV to support them if they get a flat tire [2], my option has not changed in the last year, I still think that cars which are driven in urban areas don’t really need spare tires so I don’t think that Richard is losing anything in this regard. The motor driving Richard’s car runs on three-phase AC and a solid-state inverter is used to convert 185V DC to about the same voltage at three phase AC (I didn’t write notes so I’m running from memory). Apparently on long drives the inverter gets cooler rather than hotter - I had expected that there would be enough inefficiency in the process of converting DC to AC that it would get hot. In a previous conversation Richard told me that he can drive his car 75Km on one charge and that it takes him 8 hours to charge when using an Australian mains (240V) plug rated at 10A. When designing such a vehicle it would be trivial to make it use a 20A plug for a 4 hour charge or even a two-phase plug for even shorter charging (I’m sure that Richard could have requested these options if he wanted them). But an 8 hour charge allows the vehicle to be completely charged during a working day and the use of the most common type of plug (the type used in every home and office) means that it can be charged almost anywhere (the standard mains circuit used in Australia is rated at 15A so special wiring is needed for a 20A socket). There is such a power point mounted on the outside of my house not too far from where a visitor could park their car. I anticipate that in a few years time it will not be uncommon for people who visit me to charge their car during their visit. Richard’s ratio of an hour of charge to almost 10Km of driving means that someone who visits for dinner could get enough charge into their car to allow for 30Km of driving before they leave. 30Km is about the driving distance to go from my house to a location on the other side of the city that is just outside the main urban area, so probably at least half of Melbourne’s population lives within a 30Km driving distance from my house. Not that I expect friends to arrive at my house with their car battery almost flat, but it does make it easier to plan a journey if you know that at point A you will be able to get enough charge to get you to point B. I think it’s a good thing to have members of LUGs give things away to other people and to demonstrate technology that is of wide interest. I hope to see more of it.

• [1] http://www.luv.asn.au/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/03/02/spare-tires/

Share This

Problems with hmrc.gov.uk - the new non-PDF format of the tax return is a complete mess and very misleading. I wanted a PDF so that I could compare the generated return with an actual return from previous years, so I sent this feedback:

"The Help and FAQ claim that a colour PDF is available and I'm
assuming that the PDF will be a closer match to the paper based form
which I need to be able to compare this return against last year. The
option to obtain a PDF has disappeared. (I am able to process PDF
without needing any software from Adobe as that is the main point of a
Portable Document Format so if this is because the site is checking for
Adobe software on my computer, it should stop doing so and simply
provide a link to the PDF file.) "

The response shows that nobody actually reads the comment:

"Thank you for your online enquiry.

To print your return in PDF format you are required to have Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 or above. If you do not have this on your computer please logon http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html to download a copy. Please be aware that this download can take a long time."

i.e. Her Majesty's Government requires that you allow them to interrogate your computer to find a specific executable file or registry ID and if this is not found, certain services will be refused to you without further comment.

Instead of just generating the PDF on the server and providing a link to it.

The worst part is, the "secure gateway" used by HMRC doesn't even allow replies!

The only option is delete!!

More bias from government departments against free software. I refuse to use anything under an Adobe licence when there are perfectly capable PDF clients available under a free licence. (Let alone the discriminatory download licence). (I'm a British national but I still object to a licence that would prevent someone with dual British-Iraqi nationality, for example, obtaining a service from HMRC.) Besides which, I somehow doubt that the site would be able to correctly identify the Unix version of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

I receive notification of all my taxable income via PDF so why is the taxman different??

Jeff Bailey writes about the last 26 years of Microsoft [1]. He gives Microsoft credit for “saving us from the TRS 80″, however CP/M-86 was also an option for the OS on the IBM PC [2]. If MS hadn’t produced MS-DOS for a lower price then CP/M would have been used (in those days CP/M and MS-DOS had the same features and essentially the same design). He notes the use of the Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) [3] programs. As far as I recall the TSR operation was undocumented and was discovered by disassembling DOS (something that the modern MS EULAs forbid). Intel designed the 8086 and 80286 CPUs to permit code written for an 8086 to run unchanged in “protected mode” on an 80286 (as noted in the Wikipedia page about the 80286 [4]). Basically all that you needed to do to write a DOS program with the potential of being run directly in protected mode (or easily ported) was to allocate memory by requesting it from the OS (not just assuming that every address above your heap was available to write on) and by addressing memory only by the segment register returned from the OS when allocating memory (IE not assuming that incrementing a segment register is equivalent to adding 16 to the offset). There were some programs written in such a manner which could run on both DOS and text-mode OS/2 (both 1.x and 2.x), I believe that such programs were linked differently. The term Fat Binary [5] is often used to refer to an executable which has binary code for multiple CPUs (EG PPC and M68K CPUs on the Macintosh), I believe that a similar concept was used for DOS / OS/2 programs but the main code of the application was shared. Also compilers which produce object code which doesn’t do nasty things could have their object code linked to run in protected mode. Some people produced a set of libraries that allowed linking Borland Turbo Pascal code to run as OS/2 16bit text-mode applications. The fact that OS/2 (the protected-mode preemptively multi-tasking DOS) didn’t succeed in the market was largely due to MS. I never used Windows/386 (a version of Windows 2.x) but used Windows 3.0 a lot. Windows 3.0 ran in three modes, “Real Mode” (8086), “Standard Mode” (80286), and “Enhanced Mode” (80386). Real Mode was used for 8086 and 8088 CPUs, for 80286 systems if you needed to run one DOS program (there was no memory for running more than one), and for creating or adjusting the swap-file size for an 80386 system (if your 80386 system didn’t have enough swap you had to shut everything down, start Real Mode, adjust the swap file, and then start it again in Enhanced Mode). Standard Mode was the best mode for running Windows programs (apart from the badly written ones which only ran on Real Mode), but due to the bad practices implemented by almost everyone who wrote DOS programs MS didn’t even try to run DOS programs in 286 protected mode and thus Standard Mode didn’t support DOS programs. Enhanced Mode allowed multitasking DOS programs but as hardly anyone had an 80386 class system at that time it didn’t get much use. It was just before the release of Windows 3.1 that I decided to never again use Windows unless I was paid to do so. I was at a MS presentation about Windows 3.1 and after the marketing stuff they had a technical Q/A session. The questions were generally about how to work around bugs in MS software (mainly Windows 3.0) and the MS people had a very detailed list of work-arounds. Someone asked “why don’t you just fix those bugs” and we were told “it’s easier to teach you how to work around them than to fix them“. I left the presentation before it finished, went straight home and deleted Windows from my computer. I am not going to use software written by people with such a poor attitude if given a choice. After that I ran the DOS multi-tasker DesqView [6] until OS/2 2.0 was released. Desqview allowed multitasking well written DOS programs in real mode, Quarterdeck was the first company to discover that almost 64K of address space could be used above the 1MB boundary from real-mode on a 80286 (a significant benefit when you were limited to 640K of RAM), as well as multitasking less well behaved DOS programs with more memory use on an 80386 or better CPU. OS/2 [7] 2.x was described as “A Better DOS than DOS, a Better Windows than Windows”. That claim seemed accurate to me. I could run DOS VM86 sessions under OS/2 which could do things that even Desqview couldn’t manage (such as having a non-graphical DOS session with 716K of base memory in one window and a graphical DOS session in another). I could also run combinations of Windows programs that could not run under MS Windows (such as badly written windows programs that needed Real Mode as well as programs that needed the amount of memory that only Standard or Enhanced mode could provide). Back to Bill Gates, I recently read a blog post Eight Years of Wrongness [5] which described how Steve Ballmer has failed MS stockholders by his poor management. It seems that he paid more attention to fighting Linux, implementing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and generally trying to avoid compatibility with other software than to actually making money. While this could be seen as a tribute to Bill Gates (Steve Ballmer couldn’t do the job as well), I think that Bill would have made the same mistakes for the same reasons. MS has always had a history of treating it’s customers as the enemy. Jeff suggests that we should learn from MS that the freedom to tinker is important as is access to our data. These are good points but another important point is that we need to develop software that does what users want and acts primarily in the best interests of the users. Overall I think that free software is quite well written in regard to acting on behalf of the users. The issue we have is in determining who the “user” is, whether it’s a developer, sys-admin, or someone who wants to just play games and do some word-processing.

• [1] http://jbailey.livejournal.com/55585.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_Stay_Resident


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80286


• [5] http://msftextrememakeover.blogspot.com/2008/06/eight-years-of-wrongness.html


• [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desqview


• [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os/2

Share This

I'm in the process of converting all of my software repositories to Git, but to date I've only converted either Debian packaging repositories for software I don't personally maintain or repositories for software without a corresponding Debian package. But next on my list to tackle are pam-afs-session and pam-krb5, for which I'm both packager and upstream. Currently, the upstream development is in bzr and the Debian packaging is in svk. What I used to do, with Subversion, is keep the upstream development and Debian packaging in the same repository. I'd exclude debian/* when doing releases and then export it into an unpack of the release tarball to do Debian package builds. That worked great for me, but had some significant drawbacks: the Subversion repositories generally weren't public (I don't want to host upstream development on Alioth), and manual work is required to get the upstream tarball to use with the Debian package build. pristine-tar, which lets you commit a tarball to a Git repository in a space-efficient manner by basing it off of an upstream branch, is awesome. It's one of the best ideas in revision control since DVCSes. Debian package builds can be done using only the information in the repository without bloating the repository with huge binary blobs. And for upstream development, I can capture in the repository exactly what I released. However, for pristine-tar to work properly, I need to have a branch that represents the full release tarball, including the stuff that I don't want to normally track in the repository for regular development (generated files like configure that are created with make dist). I could let all that stuff be added with an xdelta, but I think that's ugly and won't be space-efficient. That means that when I combine Debian packaging and upstream development into one repository, I can't easily use the upstream development branch as the basis for the Debian packaging and pristine-tar, since it's missing all those generated files that are part of the tarball release. I could use two separate repositories, but that makes it harder to cherry-pick upstream commits and also requires that I have two separate directories for working on the same package, which I don't like. What I'm leaning towards doing at the moment is doing development on master, importing released tarballs into an upstream branch that shares no common commits with master, checking in the release tarballs under both the upstream release name and the Debian .orig.tar.gz name using pristine-tar based on the upstream branch, and branching a debian branch off of upstream instead of master. It's a little weird to have two separate lines of development that share no common ancestor but have the same files, but it's the solution that seems to work best for what I want and lets me store space-efficient tarballs and use git-buildpackage to do Debian builds without needing anything outside of the repository.

I read 7 Ways Religion is Detrimental to Science, and thought it would be an interesting read. It was, but I don't think it really made sense. Let's look at the 7 ways they highlighted:

1. Faith and the Scientific Method are Opposites

The article states:

Faith is a belief in an idea regardless of the evidence for or against it.

Actually, that's not true at all, at least for traditional Christianity. (Note that traditional Christianity is not the same as fundamentalism). Marcus J. Borg describes faith in four ways:

Fiducia -- trusting in God. Borg says, "Faith . . . [means] we trust in God as the one upon whom we rely, as our support and foundation and ground, as our safe place."

Fidelitas -- loyalty, or "the comment of the self at its deepest level, the commitment of the 'heart'. Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to statements about God. . . Fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God."

Visio -- a way of seeing -- "a way of seeing the whole, a way of seeing 'what is'. . . the ability to love and to be present to the moment. It generates a 'willingness to spend and be spent' for the sake of a vision that goes beyond ourselves."

Assensus -- perhaps the closest to what the author meant, is "faith as belief." Borg goes on to add:

The notion that Christian faith is primarily . . . about belief, about a "head" matter, is recent. . . For many, Christian faith began to mean believing questionable things to be true. . . this is the most widespread contemporary understanding of "belief".

This is very different from what faith as assensus meant. . . A deep but humble (and therefore imprecise) understanding of Christian faith as assensus, as involving affirmation of the centrality of God as known in the Bible and Jesus, is very close to faith as vision. It is a way of seeing reality.

As a Christian, I do not find the scientific method to be a problem. I find it to be enlightening in all sorts of matters, including even the history of religion in some instances. Christian faith is not about believing in certain ideas (such as the world being created in 6 literal 24-hour days), though there are those that distort it to be so. Rather, Christian faith is about living your life a certain way, about the meaning of life, about our duties to make the world a better place.

2. People Vote Base on Religious Ideas

The author says that "Stem Cells weren t the first time a body of research didn t get proper funding because some religious wack-jobs." Well, I agree that that was a problem. Non-religious people can vote in odd ways too. I argue that the rejection of stem-cell research goes against Christian teaching; after all, we are to help the least among us, and do not people with Alzheimer's qualify?

I think the author's point should have been "exremists have odd views." Extremists can be atheist, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or other religions. Religion does not have a monopoly on them.

3. Religion Removes the Need For Science

The author says:

When people are content to believe in something that explains why they are here, even if it is wrong, they become less interested in other ideas. Religion often leads people to believe that they have all the answers. Science is self-correcting in that nobody assumes they are absolutely correct.

That is incorrect on several levels. First, science cannot explain why we are here. It can explain some of the mechanics. As an example, let us take for granted that modern scientific thought on the origin of humanity is correct: that there was a Big Bang, that single-celled creatures evolved on earth, and that human life eventually evolved through a complex process of evolution and natural selection. Fine; this does not contradict religion in any way. Science and religion answer different questions. Science answers "how". Religion answers "why". Science cannot answer the question "Why was there a big bang?" or "Did the evolution of humanity serve a larger purpose?"

Moreover, religion should not assume that they have all the answers, either. The canonical Christian Bible was mostly fixed within a few centuries AD. Life in 200AD was a lot different from life today. Part of the reason there are many different groups of Christians is the complexity of applying the stories in the Bible to modern life. The ideas in any given denomination evolve over time, too. I think it would be the height of hubris for anyone, religious or not, to claim that he or she had all the answers. Again, I know that some religious people act that way, but then so do some atheists or agnostics.

4. People Lean on Religion, When They Could Benefit From Science

The author of "7 Ways" cites the quite rare case where a child dies of a curable disease while his/her parents pray, refusing medical care. This is an extreme position that is not shared by the vast majority of religious people. Most religious people are perfectly content to use the latest medical care.

Meditation or prayer does not replace medical care; it supplements it. Scientific studies have even demonstrated its effectiveness.

5. The Church Takes Up Natural Resources

The original author states that "The land that churches take up around the world could be used to build schools, homes, recreational buildings and commercial operations." This is perhaps the most frivolous of arguments. Putting aside the fact that many churches operate schools, churches are often one of the few ways that modern city dwellers have to form a sense of community. They are not just places to engage in religion. They are places to meditate, to get away from it all, to meet your neighbors, to vote.

6. The Church Takes Up Monetary Resources

The original author says "if people donated to scientific advancement like they did to the church, imagine where we would be today." It's not a pleasant picture. Religion, and institutions supported primarily because of the teaching of religion, are the people that feed the hungry after natural disasters, that operate food pantries (our church operates the only one in our community, and it's open to anyone without any questions or talk about religion), that operate schools in disadvantaged areas, that have spread the whole idea of fair trade for third-world artisans, etc.

It is true that acts of evil have been committed in the name of the church, too. It is also unquestionably true that some church groups spend money more carefully than others. As with any donation, people should be careful where they give. Government-operated research studies are not necessarily a good use of money, either.

7. Religion is A Strong Meme

The author of the original story seems to be responding to a particular brand of Christianity: what Borg calls "literal-factual" religion. There are quite a few people that take that stand. They are sometimes inaccurately referred to as "evangelicals" or the "religious right"; while there is some overlap between the groups, they are not one and the same. The people with the literal-factual view are not representative of the whole.

More interestingly, Borg points out that the literal-factual view was actually a response to the development of the scientific method during the Enlightenment. As the modern idea of truth moved to literal, factual, provable truth, some Christians grew defensive about their faith, and started to look for "scientific" ways to prove that the world was created in 6 days, etc. in an attempt to show the world that Christianity fit their new notion of truth.

That makes a compelling argument that the scientific method is the stronger meme in today's Western world -- so strong that the author of the rant against religion has apparently forgotten the more prevalant -- both throughout history and today -- view of Christianity that is "more than" Science, not at odds with science.

I've just changed the behaviour of oldsys-preseed in the case when a static IP address is set in the configuration of the device that is the default setting from the vendor. In the past, oldsys-preseed would try to be smart in this case and do DHCP in the assumption that the users never configured the static IP address themselves and might not want to have that setting. However, Mike (mwester) convinced me that doing DHCP when the configuration clearly says to use a static IP is a bad idea. Apparently quite a few users got confused by the old behaviour of oldsys-preseed. The new behaviour exists as of version 2.0 of oldsys-preseed which will be in rc1 of debian-installer for lenny. This change affects the Linksys NSLU2 and Thecus N2100.

I put the Nokia E51, which I had previously acquired, onto Ebay last night, and it sold within minutes. Even though I made a 50 loss on the whole affair, this made me very happy! The phone is crap in so many ways that it made me quite angry. I now consider those 50 the investment I had to make to bring you this post: First of all, the reason why I bought the phone was because it sports wireless LAN as well as Voice-over-IP. Since I ve recently gotten into VoIP, I was looking for reasonable VoIP phones and even though the Siemens C450IP DECT phone works very well, it only does so at home, or where I find a switch port for it. So my theory was to get this Wifi+VoIP phone and be able to use my VoIP infrastructure from anywhere around the world. Penny has the Nokia E65 and loves it, so I went for the E51, a newer model that promised to address some of the issues she had with hers. All of the following is based on the E51 with the 100.34.20 firmware dated 29 September 2007, which runs the (crippled) Symbian S60r3 operating system.

Good things Let s start with the few good things up front: the E51 comes with a regular USB jack, allowing you to plug it into any computer and use it as mass storage device without the need for any Nokia-specific cables. I also liked the remote lock functionality: in the event of a stolen phone, you could send it a pre-defined passphrase that would cause the phone to lock itself. Also, the phone could be configured to lock itself (like a screensaver) after a given amount of idle time. Other than that, I could not find anything outstanding, so let s turn to the downsides, of which there are many more:

VoIP/SIP shortcomings I had previously dismissed the E series phones for good reasons, but both the E65 and the E51 improved their SIP clients a fair bit, and with the SIP VoIP settings utility, it was even possible to configure STUN. But unfortunately, the SIP client, while a nice toy, ended up being unusable in production. Here are some of the reasons: I got VoIP working at home and in some other places, but definitely not everywhere. It may be that some of those networks blocked the SIP port (5060/udp), or that the phone didn t feel well on the day, but in the majority of cases, I could not get the SIP client to connect. And there was no way to find out what was going on, as the client would just claim that registration failed without any additional information. It was also hard to retry, often requiring the phone to be restarted. Whenever if failed, the client would helpfully tell me that it could not establish a connection to the connection network . To get the phone to log on to the SIP server automatically, I had to define a home network for the SIP profile. Changing the access point for that network required a phone reboot to get SIP working again. It was possible to define multiple SIP profiles with different access points and add them all to the one, global VoIP profile, and theoretically get auto-login to work across multiple Wifi networks; unfortunately, I cannot say that this worked, there were always some problems requiring me to change defaults and shift things around. Also, after I had defined a few of those profiles and needed to make a change to the SIP settings (move the SIP port to 53/udp), I had to modify all profiles in turn; it was not possible to share settings. On the other hand, NAT traversal settings and timeouts, which can only be configured with the aforementioned SIP VoIP settings utility, applied to a VoIP profile and thus to all SIP profiles, without exception. I found it mildly annoying that I couldn t use # and * as part of the number/SIP address to call, nor was it possible to dial single-digit extensions the phone will ask you to associate a quick dial number with the key, even if quick dial has been explicitly disabled). I could also not dial a SIP address ad-hoc if I wanted to call sip:someone@sip.somewhere.org, I had to define a contact and add the Internet phone address. One can define Internet calls to be the default call type, thus routing all calls via VoIP if available. Unfortunately, once I dialed a number, the event was hardwired to the call type: I could not redial a number used previously for a VoIP call when all I had available was GSM coverage.

Gripes with the IMAP client The IMAP client, while an interesting addition to my day, turned out to be pretty unusable. The first mistake I made was to tell it to synchronise all messages in some of my larger mailboxes, which caused the phone to take tens of seconds until it switched a folder, and a few seconds just to scroll to the next screen in any given folder. I found that once any mailbox accumulates more than 100 messages, the client turns useless (Nokia s default is to synchronise 30 messages). I could tell the client to synchronise every hour, but only if I locked it to an access point, the home network . If I roamed to a different Wifi network, I could no longer connect to the IMAP server, as this access point would not be found. The phone would not let me use a different access point unless I changed the home access point, but changing that turned off the automatic mail sycnhronisation. If I say mail synchronisation, I mean header synchronisation. Even though there is an option for Headers only , it only applies to POP3; it is impossible to have the phone download message bodies automatically, only manually and then only per-message or per-folder, not for all folders at once. The IMAP client could delete messages, but it could not move a message to a different folder, nor create or delete folders. And even though I could turn off the message tone the phone would play when it received new email, it insisted on vibrating nevertheless. The only other IMAP client I found for Symbian phones is ProfiMail, which looked interesting and much more powerful, but which would randomly crash on me while browsing or operating on larger mailboxes.

Connection hickups While the an application was running that was using the network, the Wifi connection stayed open, but I could not make it stay open between sessions. The phone would obtains an IP, do what I asked it to, and then immediately close the connection. From a power management perspective, this makes sense, but not from the usability angle. I could not make the phone connect to a Wifi network that advertised both, WPA and WPA2 and had to disable WPA at home to let it connect. At times, it was not possible to reuse an existing connection. I haven t been able to figure out the details, but it seemed to me that whenever an application like the IMAP client was locked to an access point, it would be unable to make a connection to the IMAP server, even if e.g. the VoIP client was connected to the server by way of exactly the same access point. The phone would just say that a connection was already active and that I should close it and try again . I had a really hard time working with SSL-enabled websites and IMAP servers, because even though the phone presented me with the server certificate and offered the choice of accepting it permanently, it didn t and would ask the question again and again (which made the phone pretty unusable if the IMAP client was running in the background). Only after I had found out how to import the CACert root certificates, did this problem become irrelevant.

Other pet-peeves The phone came with a lot of smaller issues that made me ask the question of whether its designed ever had to use it too often. Possibly the most annoying aspect of the phone was its speed. It s a lot faster than the E61, but it still takes on the order of seconds to update screens or display simple text messages. Speaking of text messages, I am a little spoiled by the Sony Ericsson K610i (to which I now return), which would offer the contacts with whom I d recently interacted instead of presenting me with the full list, like the E51 does. I could filter the full list, but only by typing the start of the name substring matching was not implemented. It was impossible to receive text files via bluetooth and have them put onto the filesystem. On receipt, the phone just said text file saved , and it took me a while to figure out that it had stored them into the notepad, from where it could not be exported. To get my SSH identity onto the filesystem for PuTTY to use required me to access the phone via USB. The phone could receive vCards with new contacts, but it only offered to import the first contact, even though the standard allows for an arbitrary number of contacts per file. What s even worse though is that the phone silently failed to import contacts with non-ASCII characters in their name, such as or they just didn t show up even though the phone gave every indication of a successful import; creating such contacts on the phone worked, on the other hand. Each time I started the phone, the Nokia greeting screen would show up, accompanied with the Nokia tune, which could not be disabled. Enough said. The last problem I feel worth mentioning is hardly a Nokia or Symbian problem: battery life. With Wifi turned on, the phone would last about 24 hours on standby, which makes it pretty unusable for roaming Wifi or even VoIP usage.

Summing up I am happy to have sold the phone and look forward to returning to my Sony Ericsson K610i. After checking out the E61/E71 a bit, playing with the E65, and trying the E51 out for several weeks, I can conclude that Nokia has a long way to go before they can offer a usable smartphone with Wifi/VoIP capability. It would be a good step forward if they would open-source the Symbian operating system, but until that s done, I am going to look at the OpenMoko FreeRunner next. The E51 once again made it perfectly clear for me that proprietary software is no alternative for my use case. NP: Fat Freddy s Drop: Live at the Matterhorn

The Age has an interesting article about proposed DNS changes [1]. Apparently ICANN is going to sell top level DNS names and a prediction has been made that they will cost more than $100,000 each. A suggestion for a potential use of this would be to have cities as top level names (a .paris TLD was given as an example). The problem with this is that they are not unique. Countries that were colonised in recent times (such as the US and Australia) have many names copied from Europe. It will be interesting to see how they plan to determine which of the cities registers names, for the .paris example I’m sure that the council of Paris Illinois [2] would love to register it. Does the oldest city win an international trademark dispute over a TLD? The current situation is that French law unambiguously determines who gets to register paris.fr and someone who sees the URL will have no confusion as to what it means (providing that they know that fr is the ISO country code for France). As well as city names there are region names which are used for products. Australian vineyards produce a lot of sparkling wine that they like to call Champagne and a lot of fortified wine that they like to call Port. There are ongoing battles about how these names can be used and it seems likely to me that the Australian wine industry will change to other terms. But in the mean-time it would be interesting if .champagne and .port were registered by Australian companies. The fuss that would surely cause would probably give enough free publicity to the Australian wine industry to justify an investment of $200,000 on TLDs. The concern that is cited by business people (including the client who forwarded me the URL and requested my comments) is that of the expense of protecting a brand. Currently if you have a company named “Example” you can register example.com, example.net, and example.org if you are feeling enthusiastic. Then if you have a significant presence in any country you could register your name in the DNS hierarchy for that country (large companies try to register their name in every country - for a multinational registering ~200 domains is not really difficult or expensive). But if anyone can create a new TLD (and therefore if new ones are liable to be created at any time) it becomes much more difficult. For example if a new TLD was created every day then a multi-national corporation would need to assign an employee to work full-time on investigating the new TLDs and deciding which ones to use. A small company that has an international presence (IE an Internet company) would just lose a significant amount of control over their name. I don’t believe that this is as much of a concern as some people (such as my client) do. Currently I could register a phone line with a listed name indicating that it belongs to the Melbourne branch of a multi-national corporation. I don’t expect that Telstra would stop me, but the benefit from doing this would be minimal (probably someone who attempted fraud using such means would not gain much and would get shut down quickly). I don’t think that a DNS name registered under a .melbourne TLD would cause much more harm than a phone number listed in the Melbourne phone book. Incidentally for readers from the US, I’m thinking of Melbourne in Australia not a city of the same name in the US - yet another example of a name conflict. Now I believe that it would be better if small companies didn’t use .com domains. The use of country specific names relevant to where they work are more appropriate and technically easier to implement. I don’t regret registering coker.com.au instead of some name in another country or in the .com hierarchy. Things would probably be working better right now if a .com domain name had always cost $100,000 and there were only a few dozen companies that had registered them. But we have to go with the flow sometimes, so I have registered RussellCoker.com. Now when considering the merit of an idea we should consider who benefits and who (if anyone) loses. Ideally we would choose options that provide benefits for many people and losses for few (or none). In this case it seems that the suggested changes would be a loss for corporations that want to protect their brand, a loss for end-users who just want to find something without confusion, and provide more benefits for domain-squatters than anyone else. Maybe I should register icann.port and icann.champagne if those TLDs are registered in Australia and impersonate ICANN. ;)

• [1] http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/rule-changes-to-spark-domain-name-goldrush/2008/06/27/1214472719636.html


• [2] http://parisillinois.org/

Share This

Okay, following my irritated post I received (sigh) complaints about me being too harsh. So to these people here is what I say, because I'm tired answering the same thing over and over. For starters, the SSL dialog in firefox is badly designed:

1. My mom doesn't grok it, so it totally fails the "corridor testing" (see JoelOnSoftware if you don't know what it is), stop pretending otherwise;
2. since it fails with the "average not very computer literate user", I, as an advanced user, believe to be representative of this kind of person, say and affirm that this UI is completely broken and horrible, not to mention counter-intuitive.

That said, I have other things to say on the form. Yeah I've been harsh, and I will continue to be about this issue: this has not been designed with the simplicity in mind, but by geeks (FSVO geek) that believe that it's important to educate people about how nice HTTPS is and that everyone should talk in S3kr3t because its 733t. And I'm sure they tried very hard to make it very painful for users to have to deal with HTTPS and not believe in it to be trusted for bad reasons. Why ?

• because geeks want to use https when possible ;
• but they care about it to be secure (FSVO secure);
• and that they want the whole world to do like them because they know the TRUTH.

HELLLOOOO PEOPLE this is the wrong way to do it. People are already aware that it is https, because they did typed https in the URL. And again, my mom doesn't know what the s in https stands for and she doesn't care. What she cares about is to see the small lock when she logs on her bank website, not even when she goes on her webmail. You REALLY want to make a simple UI ? Well, please try to explain and justify (with real arguments) Why on earth is https with an untrusted certificate less secure than http ?. Okay I'll let you 3 seconds to think. 1
2
3 What is your answer ? OH see ? it isn't. So now second 1 question, why does it need to be more painful to use https with an untrusted certificate than plain http ?. Well, I don't have 3 seconds to give anymore, so let's jump to the answer: there is absolutely no reason. See, I'm far from an UI expert, and what I use every day for UIs would revulse 99% of the planet: vim as an editor, awesome as a tiling window manager, vimperator for a browser, and I live most of the time in a terminal. But it takes me like 10 minutes to design what I believe to be an excellent UI for https with untrusted certificate: just don't mind the certificate and show it like plain HTTP. YES I'M ANNOYED That brings me to the last point. I see in my comments, and have received the same by mail, that I should not be harsh with people writing such a brilliant piece of software. Well, the fact that firefox is or is not a good piece of software is totally irrelevant. When you claim no less than trying to reinvent the web, well, if you fuck up this big, you deserve it. No matter if it's a free piece of software or not. (or a piece of free software or not). When you request your users to click on FIVE completely counter-intuitive buttons/urls to finally be able to see a webpage they want to see (and my mom doesn't care about the webmail being insecurely hosted, really), with the first screen being almost the same than what you get when a serer timeouts or 404, well, you're just out of your mind. There is absolutely nothing that can excuse such a bad design, and the SSL thing is a failure. I mean everyone is laughing at the vista way of asking you if you really meant to go pee, well I see no difference here, it's as dumb and inefficient. No matter how much firefox did improved (and it did memory wise, believe me, I feel it, and I'm really glad about that), https is part of my everyday's life. Those five clicks are a real PAIN. When I'm reading documentation, browsing some sources, and so on, I go through this dialog about 3 to 10 times in a row. I'm totally unimpressed, and just because a couple of geeks believed that it was GOOD to educate me about how dangerous untrusted certificates are, I have to break my workflow to grab my mouse in the middle of my work. No sorry, I don't really want to be calm. In fact, what annoys me the most, is that I'm a programmer. And as a programmer, the worst thing to me, is regression. Regression is what happens when you're sloppy, and don't test your program enough. It's what happen when you aren't good enough to keep your concentration, and don't see the big picture, and constantly break your program invariants. So when I see a regression that people did on purpose, well, it shocks me beyond what I can explain with words, that's the worst thing you can do to a piece of software. I won't really mind a new feature that only partially works, I won't mind if a feature that is complicated to write isn't there after 5 years dreaming of it, but this ? I do mind. There is no way to consider that ruining a piece of software like that to the name of A Greater Good is excusable. Oh and last words: wanting to educate people this way is a way worst offense that what I will ever say on the subject. Such a condescending approach to what they think of their users reminds me of various journalists that I met, and that when I tried to rephrase some things so that they can write about it to their readers, answered to me oh you know, they're too dumb, they'll never understand. And as a result, articles or interview are always distorted, can't interest the readers that don't care about the subject a lot, because there's nothing captivating in the article, and is totally inexact and uninteresting to people interested in the matter, because it's void from its substance. Well, the SSL dialog gives me the very same impression: it's annoying to me who knows what a SSL certificate is, and my mom won't know a single bit more what an SSL certificate is and why she should care^[1].

For best system security you want to apply kernel security patches ASAP. For an attacker gaining root access to a machine is often a two step process, the first step is to exploit a weakness in a non-root daemon or take over a user account, the second step is to compromise the kernel to gain root access. So even if a machine is not used for providing public shell access or any other task which involves giving user access to potential hostile people, having the kernel be secure is an important part of system security. One thing that gets little consideration is the overall effect of applying security updates on overall uptime. Over the last year there have been 14 security related updates (I count a silent data loss along with security issues) to the main Debian Etch kernel package. Of those 14, it seems that if you don’t use DCCP, NAT for CIFS or SNMP, IA64, the dialout group, then you will only need to patch for issues 2, 3 (for SMP machines), 4, 5, 7 (sound drivers get loaded on all machines by default), 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. This means 11 reboots a year for SMP machines and 10 a year for uni-processor machines. If a reboot takes three minutes (which is an optimistic assumption) then that would be 30 or 33 minutes of downtime a year due to kernel upgrades. In terms of uptime we talk about the number of “nines”, where the ideal is generally regarded as “five nines” or 99.999% uptime. 33 minutes of downtime a year for kernel upgrades means that you get 99.993% uptime (which is “four nines”). If a reboot takes six minutes (which is not uncommon for servers) then it’s 99.987% uptime (”thee nines”). While it doesn’t seem likely to affect the number of “nines” you get, not using SMP has the potential to avoid future security issues. So it seems that when using a Xen (or other virtualisation technology) assigning only one CPU to the DomUs that don’t need any more could improve uptime for them. For Xen Dom0’s which don’t have local users or daemons, don’t use DCCP, NAT for CIFS or SNMP, wireless, CIFS, JFFS2, PPPoE, bluetooth, H.323 or SCTP connection tracking, then only issue 11 applies. However for “five nines” you need to have 5 minutes of downtime a year or less. It seems unlikely that a busy Xen server can be rebooted in 5 minutes as all the DomUs need to have their memory saved to disk (writing out the data to disk and reading it back in after a reboot will probably take at least a couple of minutes) or they need to be shutdown and booted again after the Dom0 is rebooted (which is a good procedure if the security fix affects both Dom0 and DomU use), and such shutdowns and reboots of DomU’s will take a lot of time. Based on the past year, it seems that a system running as a basic server might get “four nines” if configured for a fast boot (it’s surprising that no-one seems to be talking about recent improvements to the speed of booting as high-availability features) and if the boot is slower then you are looking at “three nines”. For a Xen server unless you have some sort of cluster it seems that “five nines” is unattainable due to reboot times if there is one issue a year, but “four nines” should be easy to get. Now while the 14 issues over the last year for the kernel seems likely to be a pattern that will continue, the one issue which affects Xen may not be representative (small numbers are not statistically significant). I feel confident in predicting a need for between 5 and 20 kernel updates next year due to kernel security issues, but I would not be prepared to bet on whether the number of issues affecting Xen will be 0, 1, or 4 (it seems unlikely that there would be 5 or more). I will write a future post about some strategies for mitigating these issues. Here is my summary of the Debian kernel linux-image-2.6.18-6-686 (Etch kernel) security updates according to it’s changelog, they are not in chronological order, it’s the order of the changelog file:

1. 05 Jun 2008: CVE-2008-2358 for DCCP and CVE-2008-1673 for ASN.1 (NAT for CIFS and SNMP).


2. 23 May 2008: CVE-2008-2136 memory leak in IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels, CVE-2007-6712 timer related bugs, CVE-2008-1615 ptrace on AMD64 architecture, and CVE-2008-2137 “Validate address ranges regardless of MAP_FIXED”.


3. 07 May 2008: CVE-2008-1669 SMP race


4. 11 Apr 2008: CVE-2007-6694 PPC only, CVE-2008-0007 Add VM_DONTEXPAND to vm_flags in drivers that register a fault handler but do not bounds check the offset argument, CVE-2008-1294 prevent user escape from RLIMIT_CPU, and CVE-2008-1375 fix dnotify race.


5. 10 Feb 2008: CVE-2008-0010 and CVE-2008-0600 Fix missing access check in vmsplice.


6. 25 Jan 2008: Not a security issue, but silent data loss on IA64.


7. 22 Jan 2008: CVE-2007-6151 ISDN memory overrun, CVE-2008-0001 something related to checking the access to a directory, CVE-2007-2878 FAT filesystem related, CVE-2007-4571 ALSA bug that allows user to read kernel memory.


8. 17 Sep 2007: Fix minor DOS attack for slightly privileged users (EG members of dialout group).


9. 18 Dec 2007: CVE-2007-6063 overflows in ISDN subsystem, CVE-2007-6206 core dumping over an existing file can get the wrong ownership (should be possible to use kernel.core_pattern to work around this [1]), CVE-2007-5966 timer issue, CVE-2006-6058 Minix fs DOS attack via corrupted fs, and CVE-2007-6417 tmpfs memory leak.


10. 29 Nov 2007: CVE-2007-3104 local kernel DOS attack (Oops), CVE-2007-4997 malicious frame on wireless interface crashes system, CVE-2007-5500 potential system hang, and CVE-2007-5904 CIFS overflows from server sending corrupt data.


11. 02 Oct 2007: CVE-2007-4573 Xen 64bit with 32bit DomU, CVE-2006-5755 Xen, CVE-2007-4133 memory management DOS, and CVE-2007-5093 DOS when unplugging a webcam that is in use.


12. 25 Sep 2007: CVE-2007-3731 ptrace causing Oops, CVE-2007-3739 memory management Oops, CVE-2007-3740 CIFS not honoring umask, CVE-2007-4573 ptrace of 32bit process on AMD64 bug, and CVE-2007-4849 JFFS2 (flash media) filesystem bug.


13. 27 Aug 2007: CVE-2007-2172 IPv4 memory related issue (local DOS or compromise?), CVE-2007-2875 local user can read kernel memory if cpuset filesystem is mounted, CVE-2007-3105 buffer overflow in random number generator, CVE-2007-3843 CIFS, and CVE-2007-4308 AAC RAID.


14. 11 Aug 2007: CVE-2007-1353 bluetooth, CVE-2007-3513 usblcd, CVE-2007-2525 PPPoE, CVE-2007-3642 H.323 connection tracking, CVE-2007-2172 IPv4 local exploit, CVE-2007-2453 slightly less random numbers, CVE-2007-2876 SCTP connection tracking, CVE-2007-3851 i965 batch buffer usage, and CVE-2007-3848 potential privilege escalation.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/01/05/core-files/

Share This

It seems this is an infrequently asked question, so if you ever need to extract files from a Windows self-extracting installer executable that's been created with the Nullsoft Installer (NSIS): p7zip can do it, and it's apparently the only readily available tool for the job. The command to use is 7zr (shipped in the regular p7zip package) or 7z (shipped in p7zip-full):

$ 7zr X Firefox\ Setup\ 3.0.exe
7-Zip (A)  4.58 beta  Copyright (c) 1999-2008 Igor Pavlov  2008-05-05
p7zip Version 4.58 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,2 CPUs)

Processing archive: Firefox Setup 3.0.exe

Extracting  localized
Extracting  localized/chrome
Extracting  localized/defaults
[...]
Extracting  localized/searchplugins/google.xml
Extracting  localized/searchplugins/wikipedia.xml
Extracting  localized/searchplugins/yahoo.xml
Extracting  nonlocalized/components/browser.xpt

Everything is Ok

Folders: 26
Files: 185
Size:       24930294
Compressed: 7496920

In just under a month, the tenth O'Reilly Open Source Convention will get underway in Portland. Over ten years OSCON has developed—along with the world of open source—into an intense, exciting, informative, diverse and exhausting event. This year I've the privilege of being co-chair, along with Alison Randall. We've packed so much into the show, it's a difficult job even being able to comprehend it as a whole! Fortunately, there's a way to start making sense of things before you arrive there, thanks to the personal scheduler. Just mark the sessions you want to go to with a star, and you'll be able to plan out your time in advance. I wanted to list a few sessions from my own personal schedule that particularly piqued my interest. Then at the bottom of this post I'll share a discount code which can give readers of this blog 15% off OSCON registration. There's bribery for you. Practical Erlang Programming Largely thanks to XMPP enthusiasts and ejabberd, I've been hearing increasing amounts about Erlang, and I'd like to know enough about it to be dangerous. This three hour tutorial looks just the ticket. Open Source Virtualization Hacks This is one of several sessions we have on virtualization, something I'm particularly pleased about. Virtualization may be "done" at the kernel level, but I think we're only just starting out on its application. This session is by my friend and sometime co-author, Niel Bornstein, who works for Novell on just this sort of thing. Using Puppet: Real World Configuration Management Puppet is the piece of open source software that is most exciting to me at the moment. As a developer, it enables me to manage my machines like I'd manage my code libraries. A must-see if you've not used Puppet yet. These are just 3 out of the 300 or so confirmed sessions. Don't forget there's a large number of events and parties happening around OSCON too. And finally, the discount code. Use the code os08pgm when you're registering, and you'll get 15% off the ticket price. See you in Portland!Join the conversation about this post