Away from the Yagooglive search engines, there have been some recent changes in the search space. Bing launched a while ago, but I ve only just read from Anglian LUG that Bing is badly biased, returning pretty poor results for openoffice, vista and windows searches. In the following discussion, Bev mentioned Quintura which looks like an interesting newcomer, but it s so heavily javascript-requiring that I m not going to use it every day. It made me think of a cross between Clusty and the now-dead SearchMe. The other big noise lately has been the Wolfram Alpha but most of my search requests seem too esoteric for it. As you may guess from the above, I m still using Clusty as my main search engine (when something isn t in my bookmarks or the ODP). What s your favourite non-Yagooglive search?

Trends are deceptive - but I haven't come back to this blogging in a while :)

I did my first Windows XP install for a while today for friends. Their machine had slowed to a crawl and _needed_ a disk format and reinstall. Three sets of media to find, three sets of 20 digit codes to type in. Printer software not found - so they'll have to go and download a huge program bundle from the manufacturer's site. [And it always takes an alleged 39 minutes from first reboot irrespective of the actual speed of the hardware :) ]

New hardware put in - a DVD writer to replace a CD writer which had lasted ten years and moved between at least two machines - that's spectacular in this day and age. The new drive is also 10% of the cost of the old one - 17 instead of about 200.

Total time to put on Windows XP, an AV product, get Firefox and to get part way through an Office 2007 install was about three hours. That's without setting up any accounts, shared directories (or network - the attached wireless router didn't need any changes).

I could do a Debian install onto the 40G disk in well under half that to include X windows, openoffice.org, iceweasel and a desktop environment. It would also run far better in 512M which is what this machine has.

Thankfully, they have data backups and an older laptop which has been the family workhorse - and a new netbook which attached to the network readily, has more disk than all other machines in the house combined, and cost less today than the "big machine" cost ten years ago at about 3 x the performance.

Intelligent questions were asked about Linux - I _wish_ I'd known about Ken Starks' radio advert or had it to hand at the time. See the Blog of Helios at http://linuxlock.blogspot.com for details - it's Free/Libre/Open Source under a CC Atttribute Share-alike 3.0 licence, and is available in a short version used in the radio advertisement .ogg or .mp3 or the longer version (.ogg .mp3 All in all, a balanced and a reasoned argument for switching based on nearly everybody's real life experience :(

[UPDATE] - The owner of the machine was up until 1 a.m - 11 hours total - because the machine decided to do a defrag. :(

If you ever wanted to support an open-source project but you are not a programmer, here's one (of many possible) ways to help: The Miro project (Internet TV / Video and Audio Podcast application for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X) is seeking for pledges/donations that will be used to add subtitles support in Miro. To quote from the announcement:

We re hoping to build real subtitle support into Miro in the next couple months, but we need your help! So we ve started a Kickstarter project to raise $1,000 to develop this feature for Miro on all three platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Can you pledge to help make it happen? One of the great things about the Kickstarter model is that unless we can reach $1,000, your pledge won t be charged.
[...]
(if you live in the United States, donations are tax deductible we are a 501c3 non-profit)

There are 11 days left to make a pledge.

One of my professional duties in my past ten years was monitoring systems. Even my diploma thesis was dedicated to distributed monitoring (altough my professor sucked badly). Apart from a few custom-programmed scripts to analyze special situations (e.g. proxy clusters) I used tools that fellow administrators will find familiar: Nagios and Cacti. And another less famous text-configuration-based monitoring tool called Cricket. That worked well somehow but Cricket was hard to learn for my coworkers and Cacti seems unreliable and fundamentally broken in terms of SNMP checking. Besides why do I have to set up availability checking in Nagios and set up checking of the same parameters in another software to draw graphs? Just recently I came across an open-source software I hadn t heard of before: Zabbix. And although it has a few rough edges it seems way more professional than other common tools (the commercial tools I saw are even worse than the open-source variants). I tried it and after a lot of reading and trying it looks like it has a good potential to replace Nagios and Cacti. So I thought I d sum up my personal experiences with all of these tools. Nagios. Their makers claim that it s the industry-standard in IT infrastructure monitoring . Honestly it s a great tool but considering how many years it has been existing it barely evolved. During my diploma thesis I wrote an alternative software that I called MrNetwork that dealt with flaws that Nagios hasn t even fixed today. Still Nagios is a tool I have used for many years and it is very reliable. Advantages:

• open source
• large community
• many powerful plugins (and own plugins are easy to create: just write a program that prints a one-line string and set a certain return code)
• easy-to-use web frontend
• debugging plugins is moderately simple.
  
• many thought-out features like host groups or notification options that make your life easier
  
• dependencies (so that you don t get 100 alerts if a router between the Nagios server and other servers went down)
  
• nagvis plugin with a great interactive editor that draws nice management-suitable graphs (although I found the ndo2db interface hard to set up at first and a little flaky)
  

Annoyances:

• The focus is on availability checking you don t get fancy graphs on the values that are monitored (e.g how the CPU load was over time). So you ll need a second tool and set up the same checks there just to get graphs. But availability percentages are computed automatically.
• Textual configuration that has so many different settings that you need to look up the parameters often. A web-based configuration would probably be better (and is available as an add-on but I haven t tested it).
• Third-party plugins are often very badly programmed and barely documented that it appeared easier to reinvent the wheel. ( Look, ma, I can has plugins. )
• Some views on the web interface are not very obvious (e.g. clicking on the title of a host group gives a nice view of all hosts with all services).
• Many plugins don t have corresponding configuration entries so you have to find out how they work and write configuration entries yourself (and those which are preconfigured take some archeology to find out which parameters they expect). This is a huge time-waster for beginners. And in your services configuration you have to verify your checks configuration to understand the meaning of each parameter. Or do you remember what check_http 80!john!doe!10!30!body is supposed to check?
• Every set of parameters of a certain plugin requires a distinct configuration entry. The plugins have dozens of configuration switches that you may need one day. Want to set a timeout on HTTP checks? Write another check configuration. Want to check for a certain string in the HTTP response? Write another check configuration. And so on.
• Most checks are run from the Nagios server itself (the NRPE plugin to do the checks on the respective remote systems somehow refused to work properly here) which is suboptimal and puts a lot of load on the server.
• By default every alert triggers a notification. So if you can t define proper dependencies (e.g. if you want to check your web server in all 30 supported languages and there is some logical error) then you will get spammed with alerts.

Cricket. As Nagios does not support plotting graphs of the monitored values I was in need of another piece of software. Basically Cricket is a frontend to RRD (which stores data in a rotating/round-robin file that keeps data of the last X minutes/hours/days). It has a textual configuration that takes a lot of getting used to. It s main principle is inheritance of settings they call it configuration tree . Which means you have a master DEFAULTS file that contains general settings like how to query SNMP. In a subdirectory you define a certain class of devices that you want to monitor e.g. routers (the DEFAULTS are inherited to this level). Within the routers directory you can just define a list of routers you want to monitor. All settings are inherited from above (parent directories). It s more a geek tool for shell lovers. Advantages:

• very quick to monitor a large set of similar devices once the general device class is defined
• simple web interface
• very reliable
• can monitor SNMP values (it does this very well) or execute external scripts thus can be easily extended
• flexible graphing you can sum up values of two graphs into a new graph (aka mtargets multiple targets)
• different check frequencies can be configured for different subtrees through cron (by default values are collected every 5 minutes this can be set as low as one minute if needed)

Annoyances:

• the textual configuration is error-prone (leading to funny Perl errors that can be hard to debug)
• users may expect to see all parameters of a certain device instead of all devices having a certain parameters ( Give me the statistics of router42 instead of Let s see the temperature of all routers we have. )
• customizing the graphs (drawn by RRD tool) isn t trivial
• Frequency of checks is by default 5 minutes. Before RRD can draw the first value of a graph it needs three values. So you ll be waiting 15 minutes before you see any results.
• RRD rounds data by default. So the yearly graph doesn t show the peaks that the daily graphs do. (This can be fixed by not graphing the average values but the maximum values.) Long-time archiving of graphed data is not possible without throwing away the RRD files and manually customizing them. Changing the monitoring frequency (aka heartbeat ) is not possible either without throwing away the data and starting from scratch either.
• No proper built-in alerting in case certain thresholds are exceeded.

Cacti. Another frontend to RRD and a pretty sophisticated one. Nearly everything is configured through its web interface. And the result is beautiful. It s not entirely reliable though and SNMP support (at least in version 0.8.7b) is a big fail. I like Cacti for its user interface is much better than Cactis but it s less reliable and flexible. Advantages:

• Beautiful and (for most features) simple web interface. Nice features like graphs that can be zoomed using Javascript.
• Fine-grained permissions system. So a certain user may get read-only access to a certain subtree.
• The tree where graphs are placed can be configured freely so you get exactly the view you want.

Disadvantages:

• Doesn t hide the RRD magic very well. The user is easily confused by templates, data sources and the like.
• Graphing sometimes just stops working for no reason or values are missing although the server isn t overloaded and other software doesn t show such outages. According to a quick search on the lazyweb I m not the only one with such effects.
• Setting up many systems means a lot of clicking in the web interface. Setting up new kinds of checks (aka templates ) means even more clicking and is very error-prone.
• The quality of some third-party templates I tested was pretty bad. Creating new templates is tedious, error-prone, frustrating and close to black magic. Nothing for the casual user at least.
• Doesn t handle SNMP correctly (this is the biggest fail in my opinion and makes it unusable here). Although it knows how to query indexes (e.g. ifDescr to get the names of your network interfaces) it just seems to stored fixed OIDs. So once the SNMP tables change the order or number of items (which isn t unusual) then suddenly other parameters get graphed.
• Frequency of checks is by default 5 minutes. Increasing the frequency leads to missing data and wrong results.
• As it uses RRD and needs 3 valid values you won t see that your monitoring fails until you wait 3 5=15 minutes. Not suitable for impatient non-smokers like me.
• Debugging failed checks is close to impossible. If a check fails then I find myself clicking around randomly trying to find typos because the alternative is digging around in database entries.
• The web interface is sometimes confusing. A refresh of SNMP tables is done by clicking a unmeaning green circle icon. Adding new items to a list is done by clicking an inconspicious Add link that doesn t even look like a link.
• Another UI confusion: graphs are created from the devices view. But they are deleted from the graph management view.
• No alerting in case certain thresholds are exceeded. Another tool like Nagios would still be needed to notify you.
• Can t sum up multiple targets so monitoring failover clusters doesn t work well.
• RRD averages data when putting daily values into weekly values, weekly into monthly and monthly into yearly. So the yearly graph doesn t show the peaks that the daily graphs do. (This can be fixed by not graphing the average values but the maximum values.) Long-time archiving of detailed graphed data is not possible (RRD). Changing the monitoring frequency (aka heartbeat ) is not possible either without throwing away the data and startin from scratch.

Zenoss. People pointed me to Zenoss which is supposed to offer the same functionality as other monitoring systems but is much more integrated. So this short list is more a quick one-day-experimental expression than a thorough analysis. But in the end much of the fuss is just marketing. Advantages:

• Beautiful web interface
• Nice gimmicks like google maps integration to show you where your servers are down worldwide. Only makes sense when monitoring networks with several/many remote locations.
• Can partly discover parameters of systems automatically. That works for static routes (although I wonder why the heck I want to monitor static routes), file systems and network interfaces. On the other hand processes can t be discovered automatically and have to be set up manually.
• Does not come with a specific agent but plays rather well with plain old SNMP.
• Can monitor Windows through native WMI.
• Large fanbase.

Annoyances:

• Web interface feels slow (Zope is bloated)
• Opaque operation. It does not tell what s actually going on. You can add monitoring and check back later if anything worked they way you want.
• Questionable reliability. In a test here I was monitoring a running process. The process was said to be down and suddenly went to up after a while although nothing had changed on the system.
• Just one dashboard. Several dashboards similar to Zabbix screens would be nice.
• Configuration and data is spread across MySQL, the internal Zope database storage and RRD files on disk.
• The dependency graph is a nice Flash-based applet displaying how the systems are connected. But it does not show any details about the systems aside from whether they are up or down. And clicking on a host does not take you anywhere but center on the system. Beautiful but it could do so much more than just look beautiful.
• I dislike the way that things are configured. The context menu with the down arrow needs to be used. I d prefer simple add or delete actions instead of navigating the menu all the time. Looks like Javascript is used wrongly here.
• Limited open-source version. Full version needs to be paid for.

Zabbix. This is the tool I have been evaluating for the past two weeks and currently I m moving all checks away from Nagios and Cacti and put it into Zabbix. So the following list is more a first impression instead of a year-long experience. (I m using Zabbix 1.6.5 here. Debian Lenny s 1.4 version lacked some interesting features like proper SNMP handling so I backported the newer version to Lenny.) Zabbix seems very close to the perfect monitoring system I had always dreamt of. I would have designed it differently in some aspects though. Advantages:

• Availability Monitoring (like Nagios) and graphing (like Cacti) is combined into one tool.
• Highly configurable. User John may just get an SMS for problems of high severity during the weekend and on weekdays get a Jabber message. Even automatic actions like restarting services can be set up.
• The notifications actually help the person who gets the message. Low disk space on /var on web5 with an additional comment is pretty helpful even when sent via SMS.
• Very performant. The remote agent gathers the information on each system.
• Fast web interface.
• Sophisticated monitoring of web sites. Zabbix can follow a path of simulated mouse clicks on a web site and check for functionality and response time.
• Real-time graphs. Values are by default collected every 30 seconds. You quickly see where you are going.
• Permissions system. Certain users can be limited to certain views.
• Gathered data is stored in a database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite) instead of an RRD file. Storage periods (aka history ) can be configured freely. Backup up the database is all there is to be done.
• Agent for remote checks simply works (and is available on Debian Lenny) and can even call scripts or shell one-liners to gather information. The agent can gather a lot of information locally and send it to the Zabbix master server. Works on several operating systems and even on Windows (just set up monitoring of Windows services and processes successfully).
• Templates (that can even link to further templates) save time in setting up many checks.
• Graphs (plots of values over time) can be customized like which items are plotted and in what way. Even pie charts are possible.
• Even the parameters that don t get an explicit graph can be graphed at any time. E.g. the agent has tracked the CPU load on a system that you never cared about then you can graph that with one mouse-click.
• Screens and slide shows can be used for high-level views (aka dashboards ) or to be displayed on a big geeky display. They can combine textual display of the status as well as clocks, ad-hoc graphs or predefined graphs.
• Very flexible trigger expressions. For example you can tell a trigger to fire if the average system load over the last 15 minutes is above a certain value. As all measured parameters are stored in a backend database you can use all kinds of mathemical expressions. Like firing a trigger if the average number of running processes during the last half hour is above 50. All other software I tested just has access to the last value gathered.
• Customized alerting is simple through shell-based alert scripts.
• Remote monitoring made easy by using a Zabbix proxy.
• Paid support and paid custom programming available. But the software is completely open-sourced.
• 320 page PDF manual with screenshots and nice references. (Although I d personally prefer an online help. Currently the ? link within the web interface just points to the PDF that you can download.)

Annoyances:

• A lot of mouse moving and clicking is required to set up things. For example setting up an alert if the free space on a disk on a certain server is getting too low then you need to set up hosts, items, triggers and actions. Some of the clicking seems redundant. E.g. I didn t find a way to create triggers automtically for a set of checks. If I monitor how full the /home partition is then I d like to set a threshold in the same configuration step.
• Takes a little patience understanding the concepts although they make sense after half a day.
• The web interface is crammed full of features. For casual users it s confusing to navigate.
• The map editor is close to unusable. You can put icons and connections into the graph but have to define the X and Y coordinated manually. This feature is nice but desperately needs a good interactive map editor like nagvis uses.
• Does not detect the available assets in a monitored server automatically. Imagine that you want to monitor the space on all disk partitions on a system. You will have to copy over or create the check items manually or define all possible checks in a template and disable those you don t need. Cacti handles that better by offering you a list of partitions to monitor. Zenoss can do that partly. The zabbix agent should be able to handle such a service discover automatically. (The built-in Discovery feature rather seems to detect new servers in a given network range automatically. But that s something different.)

See also: Ben Rockwood s blog Further similar software I didn test thoroughly: Hyperic and Opsview (I ll surely update this blog post while I learn more about Zabbix.) All of the above tools are great. I m not meaning to say that Zenoss is total crap for example. The differences are subtle. And whether a piece of software suits your needs really depends on your expectations. I love that all this software is available as open-source. And a totally unscientific but fun analysis of the community is counting the number of active people in the respective channels on the Freenode IRC network:

• #nagios: 133 users
• #cacti: 58 users
• #cricket: 2 users
• #zenoss: 54 users
• #zabbix: 61 users

Either Nagios has the largest fanbase or perhaps that means that the majority of people needs help with it.

RCBW - week #3 And this week we have a new player, welcome on board David! This week summary of mine follows
(As usual, dates are not strictly the day in which a bug has been dealt with, but rather the day of the week I assigned a bug to).

• 14/09/2009 bug #526579 - elisa - change CDBS hook to which register cleanup actions (FTBFS)
• 15/09/2009 bug #535299 - gambc - fix debian/control line continuations (patch from KiBi)
• 16/09/2009 bug #527789 - apertium-es-pt - fix build w apertium 3.1 (it's incredible how slightly different the various apertium thingies are ...)
• 17/09/2009 bug #518745 - cbmplugs - use pkg-config in place of b0rken sed magic (patch from Tzafrir Cohen)
• 18/09/2009 bug #529872 - kaffe - generalize build-dep on gcj: gcj-4.2 is gone
• 19/09/2009 bug #533959, bug #527514 - turbotinymce - obsolete with TG2, trigger RM/RoM
• 20/09/2009 bug #534024 - apertium-tolk - fix build w apertium 3.1 (build-deps and configure.in)

Comments / ponderings of this week:

• Sometimes, a NMU for a package which is otherwise rotten can help also in the sense that it can force the maintainer to realize that the package should be removed and file a RM/RoM request. It happened wtih turbotinymce this week (not listed above)
• David, you sure about ann? Did you try the resulting package? I give it a try last week, but the trivial patch attached to the bug log, while it fixes the build problem, gave a non-working package to me. I ran out of investigation time before being able to post any useful feedback to the buglog.

Over on Planet Ubuntu there is a VRMS meme winding down. Usually I tend to think web log aggregator memes are an abomination, however, this one is a little more interesting, especially if Debian folk pick it up. It seems like many Planet Ubuntu posters require some non-free stuff, examples include; graphics and other drivers/firmware, Flash (Gnash/Swfdec aren't there yet), Sun Java (despite OpenJDK), RAR 3.0 archives, LHZ archives (despite jlha), Microsoft fonts (despite ttf-liberation), icon themes, ICC profiles, mind mapping, support for codec DLLs from Windows, VirtualBox drivers for Windows, the Opera web browser, games and other things. For Debian users, the popcon information pretty much confirms the above issues. Some other stuff Debian users use that isn't in Debian include; patented codecs, skype, acroread, the non-free version of VirtualBox and more. Next, lets get in on the getting your meme on part. On my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop I have following Debian non-free/contrib stuff installed; firmware-iwlwifi, gcc-doc, gcc-doc-base, gcc-4.3-doc, autoconf-doc, gdb-doc, make-doc. On my OpenMoko FreeRunner phone I have nothing installed from Debian non-free/contrib. My wireless router and ADSL modem don't run Debian. The wireless router is a MIPS-based Netgear WGR614L (that is marketed as supporting DD-WRT, OpenWRT and Tomato) so I could conceivably install OpenWRT etc or Debian on it, but I haven't gotten around to that yet. The ADSL modem is a MIPS-based Siemens SpeedStream 4200, but it looks like that would require a significant amount of effort to get running FLOSS. Lets ponder my laptop freeness a bit more. The docs are all FSF-free, but not DFSG-free. It appears they are not DFSG-free because the FSF will not allow 28 words of FSF/GNU advertising to be removed (I'm not sure if Debian or the FSF is more pedantic). I'm not aware of any DFSG-free alternatives to them and I don't particularly care about the restrictions. My wireless card is an Intel 3945ABG mini PCI card that requires the kernel to upload the iwlwifi firmware before it works. Intel refuse to release firmware source code under a free license, citing FCC requirements. I'm not aware of any free firmware (or firmware reverse engineering efforts) for this device so the only alternative is to use wired Ethernet or buy another wireless card. Ethernet wires everywhere would be very inconvenient, so I've been thinking about trying to replace the card or laptop as soon as I am able. Since Atheros has released GPLv2 firmware for its AR9170 802.11n USB chipset I'll probably get something released by Atheros. I wonder why the FCC didn't prevent Atheros from releasing modifiable firmware, perhaps Intel will change their position too. So, what other software is on my laptop apart from Debian? Lets see, nothing on the HD apart from GRUB 2, /boot containing a Linux image/initrd from Debian and the LUKS partition containing swap and the Debian ext3 rootfs. Coreboot laptop support seems to be in the very early stages so I have no alternative to the supplied Dell BIOS at the moment. There is also the CPU microcode and other firmware installed in the various devices on the system, at least the HD, Ethernet, Bluetooth, GPU, DVD drive etc. have some kind of firmware in them. Some of this firmware is updatable using software from the Dell Linux repositories. Lets ponder my phone freeness a bit more. On it I have two copies of the u-boot bootloader (one in the protected NOR flash), u-boot is free. The NAND flash has an old Qt Extended Improved (QTEI) install that I need to copy stuff off and wipe. I also have a 4GB microSD card containing QTEI, Debian, FDOM and SHR. Now that QtMoko has brought QTEI to Debian packages I can probably ditch the QTEI install. I read that OM2009 is being merged into SHR so I can get rid of FDOM. That leaves SHR and Debian/QtMoko (nothing non-free). IIRC SHR does contain some firmware for devices that the OpenMoko FreeRunner doesn't contain, but that will get removed as Linux upstream moves more and more of that into linux-firmware.git. Nothing more on the main flash or microSD storage, so what else? The OpenMoko contains lots of hardware, but the main problematic devices here are the AR6000 Wi-Fi chip and the TI Calypso GSM device. The AR6000 is an issue because the firmware embedded in the chip is non-free and FullMAC so it is hard to add new features like AP mode or improve the connection quality/etc. In addition the firmware currently on the device is a development version of a 2.0 version (1.x was apparently broken) and further development does not seem to be happening yet. Since Atheros GPLed the AR9170 firmware I idly wonder if they could be convinced to release the source and GPL the AR6000 firmware. Perhaps a life-size gold statue of RMS would help there. The GSM device is problematic because of various bugs in the firmware. It apparently is an ARM chip with Nucleos, so perhaps uCLinux or something could be ported to it or written for it. There has been at least one discussion about hacking the GSM firmware (thar be dragons). Searching for some keywords extracted from the end of the first mail in that thread lead to some interesting results indeed. Lets ponder my network freeness a bit more. I should allocate some time to investigate putting Debian on my wireless router and ADSL modem. These generally just work except the ADSL modem reboots itself a lot during the summer. The just-works status of these devices means that messing with them is problematic in case I brick them (luckily I have a spare for the ADSL modem though). I presume OpenWRT and similar have replacements for all the software on my wireless router, drivers may be an issue though. I use gmail for reading email lists, mainly because of intertia, cheapness and because the interface has no GUI FLOSS peers yet (sup-mail exists for console use). TangoGPS, OpenStreetMap and other tools are slowly replacing my use of Google Maps, although I imagine routing will remain an issue for many years yet. One of the tech groups I'm involved in uses Plesk as a hosting control panel, mainly out of intertia, I'm not familiar with any FLOSS replacement though. Some of the upstream FLOSS projects I'm involved with use sourceforge as a hosting platform. There is a certain level of lock-in with SF.net, most of the data is easily exportable though. Lets ponder my software freeness in comparison to Planet Ubuntu posters. I have no freeness issues with drivers at the moment, however firmware seems likely to have freeness issues for a long time to come. I've avoided the need for the Adobe Flash Player by using swfdec and clive for downloading videos for some sites. swfdec works OK for some sites, some that I care about where it doesn't work and clive cannot download video include Vimeo, abc.net.au and sbs.com.au. For Vimeo you can download raw video if you have a login, but I do not, bugmenot is unreliable and Vimeo doesn't seem to be accepting new registrations. SBS I watch on television and ABC I get no reception so I just don't watch it. Java isn't an issue now that OpenJDK exists. I sometimes need to extract RAR 3.0 archives, which I do by copying the files to a friend's Windows machine or using a RAR extractor website. There is no free implementation of a RAR 3.0 extractor yet. I seem to remember that there is source code for a non-free extractor so presumably a clean-room documentation and reimplementation effort could fix this. I don't encounter LHZ files, but jlha-utils is available for if I do. I feel no need to install Microsoft fonts since the Liberation fonts and DejaVu meet my general font needs and Debian contains fonts covering all the scripts of Unicode (except for about half the huge amount of Han characters). In my music collection, only the Voxware audio codec and DigiTrakker MDL files are not supported by Rhythmbox, but I don't really miss those few tracks. I rarely have audio/video codec issues with video from the Internet. I don't have a use for Opera. Thanks in part to the efforts of the Debian games team, games from Debian main (such as warzone2100) satisfy my gaming needs. I just don't use Skype. Overall, I'm generally happy with my level of software freedom. My main strategy for preventing regressions in my software freedom is to just avoid doing things that require non-free software. The most problematic FLOSS issues for me are Flash support (adoption of the HTML5 video tag will resolve this for me), RAR 3.0 support and firmware. Please feel free to contact me with any comments or questions. Happy Software Freedom Day everyone!

Following zack's suggestions, I've been looking at RC bugs in my sparetime. In two days (well, two evenings really), I've been able to cope with a good number of bugs:

• #543063 - ann: FTBFS: /bin/sh: aclocal-1.10: not found (DELAYED/7 RFS!)
• #527823 - elisa-plugins-bad: FTBFS: rm: cannot remove
  /build/user-elisa-plugins-bad_0.3.5-1-amd64-0hSRfJ/elisa-plugins-ba
  d-0.3.5/debian/elisa-plugins-bad//usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/*.
  pth': No such file or directory (DELAYED/2 RFS!)
• #536924 - gai: FTBFS: gai-private.h:66:35: error: libgnomeui/libgnomeui.h: No such file or directory (DELAYED/10)
• #537019 - gimp-dcraw: FTBFS: Unrecognized switch --build-strip (DELAYED/2)
• #536945 - hdate-applet: FTBFS: hdate_applet.c:21:35: error: libgnomeui/libgnomeui.h: No such file or directory (DELAYED/7)
• #519056 - im-sdk: FTBFS with glibc 2.8 (DELAYED/2 RFS!)
• #536964 - im-sdk: FTBFS: Package libglade-2.0 was not found (RFS! - see above)
• #543083 - libcsoap: FTBFS: aclocal-1.10: not found (DELAYED/7)
• #543036 - honeyd: FTBFS: configure: error: dumbnet-config not found (closed, unreproducible)
• #543045 - farpd: FTBFS: configure: error: libdumbnet not found (closed, unreproducible)
• #536967 - glunarclock: FTBFS: configure: error: Library requirements (libglade-2.0 >= 2.0.0 ) not met (0-day)
• #521942 - jabsorb: FTBFS: Missing Build-Depends on servlet-api and commons-httpclient (0-day)

I must admit that some of them (didn't count them, might also be the greatest part of them) already had patches, and I just prepared the NMU. For others, there were other FTBFS's other than the ones filed, and those were fixed too. It would be extra cool if some DD uploaded the remaining 3 NMUs! I also had time to release and package syslog-summary 1.14, but, not being DMUA yet, I'd need a sponsor for that too (but I'll probably ask my AM, since this upload sets DMUA). Happy RC-bug-squashing! Your friendly neighborhood hanska

So, anyone watching the show was actually pretty much told (although indirectly) how it was done. (Potential spoilers see full post for my take) Ok, the image with the flashing and the stuff, pretty noticable. From what I know of the subject, it was meant to be. What noone seems to have mentioned was the fact that as it flashed, there was a brief tone. I believe that the image wasn t meant to actually be subliminal as he mentioned, subliminal images are invisible . It was meant to be noticed, but only to assosciate the tone with the image. I also feel that the video did play a part. From what I can tell, an image (or text) was over/underlayed over the image of the rotating (fuzzy) lines, but had a very high transparency. This meant, that like the UV pen, you couldn t pick up the image conciously, but you could unconciously. (UV pens leave a small residue behind that makes visible light reflect slightly differently. Try it, get a UV pen and write on a shiny surface. (like the back of a playing card). Looking head on at it, you don t notice, but if you tilt the card, you can see the writing at some angles the mind subconciously picks this up). Tie this in with things like the wording used before the video, the trailers, and hidden wording/images throughout the show, and you have your whole thing. No sublimilal messages were used, but there were many uses of whatever that term that he used was (SVP?)

For some reasons, you may need to clone/backup NTFS based systems. Lets say your NTFS system is located at /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 is a spare partition where you can store your image. At first you need to boot a live system to take an image:

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
dd bs=512 count=1 if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.mbr
ntfsclone -s -o /dev/sda1 bzip2 -9 -c > \
/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.img.bz2 To restore the image you just need:

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
dd count=1 bs=446 if=/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.mbr of=/dev/sda
cat /mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.img.bz2 bunzip2 -c \
ntfsclone -r -O /dev/sda1 - P.S. If you are elective in germany, have a look at this!

mach package page. IM SOOOOO SORRY TO LUCAS AND HIS FANS AND HIS MOM.

(aside: I have a number of blog posts in draft don't worry they won't spam the various planets but this was timely so I pushed it out first) The most recent version of Firefox 3.x will also prompt you to update your Flash plugin if it is out of date. According to Ken Kovash, the response has been phenomenal. Almost 10,000,000 click through. That is 10,000,000 failures. Like a lot of people, I provide technical support for my Windows using family (and some friends). So I get to see how badly Windows is in the 'update' space. It is pretty common to have: Windows, Anti-virus, Java and one / two other applications (e.g. Google apps, Skype, Yahoo IM, etc.) prompt you with little annoying notification bubbles. Most of them have trained themselves to not look in the bottom right of the screen and to ignore requests to update. Which means that whenever I see a big, important update, like the Firefox one I end up having to remotely take over their machine and do it on their behalf. The user experience was:

1. Update Firefox.So far, so good.
2. It prompts and say Flash is out of date.Excellent. Click on link.
3. Adobe site says "click to upgrade".Great. It also includes, checked by default, a download of McCafe's anti-virus tool something or other.
4. Realise that pointless download of McCafe is about to happen. Cancel. Uncheck. Download again.Why is Adobe offering me more than just an upgrade of the product I am after? Apparently this is very common in the Windows world (think Safari included with iTunes, etc.)
5. Adobe figures out I am using Firefox and sends, instead of Flash, a 'Download manager' plugin.It includes instructions on how to enable things so that this plugin is updated by Adobe all the time. I, rather pointlessly, ponder why Flash does not do this itself.
6. Once installed, you need to restart Firefox. I do so.
7. This time the "Your Flash is out of date page" does not appear.At this point a normal person would think that they are now secure. Nothing could be further from the truth. Adobe has stupidly decided that first you need to have their update plugin. Then you need to actually do the update. FAIL.
8. I manually go the the '3.5.3' release note page, where it detects, again, that Flash is out of date.I click through to Adobe's site (again), this time, it figures out that it needs to update Flash. It autoinvokes the autoupdate plugin and does the update.
9. Prompted to restart Firefox, again. I do so.
10. Everything is now perfectly fine.

That was a total user experience failure. Not Mozilla's fault but Adobe's. But Mozilla can make a difference in this area. And work around the stupidity of Adobe.

1. All plugins MUST register a https URL where their version can be checked.
2. Periodically Firefox does the version checky thing (like with Add-Ons) and ensures they are up to date

That implies that there is a, separate "Your plugins are out of date page" distinct from "You've installed an upgraded version of Firefox"

I'm off to Boston in under 16 hours, and I'll be getting into Portland around lunchtime on Monday. I'll be talking at Linuxcon about how we're broadening power management on Linux to be applicable from phones through netbooks up to supercomputers - that's 10:15 on Tuesday. At 10AM on Friday I'll be presenting at the Linux Plumbers conference on how userspace can express its requirements to the kernel more clearly, thereby allowing the kernel to be smarter about powering down hardware. And after a short hop down to SF for the weekend, I'll be back in Portland at the X developers conference talking about the role of X in providing relevant information to the kernel and using that to facilitate more aggressive power management.

Three talks in under 10 days. I'll even do my best to ensure that there's new jokes for each of them.

Now there is yet another package with a weird name in Debian - douf00 - a lightweight, slim and straight forward presentation tool. Written by some guys from a hacking and security team, which is mainly based in Vienna - guess that explains the l33t name (if you're scared now, yes, I've reviewed the code...). At the FrOSCon one of the authors asked me if I'd be willing to package it for Debian.I'm sure you'll love it if you're giving presentations and don't like to mess with Openoffice.org and friends. Below I've cited some parts of the README - make sure you read the linked file if you want to know more, or just install the package and give it a try. Douf00 is a lightweight, slim and straight forward Presentation Tool. It assists novice as well as experienced speakers when giving lectures and business meetings. With its simple presenters Screen that includes current slide - next slide (preview) as well as timers it is designed to assist those of us, that are willing to step up their lectures to the next level. The main reason why we created douf00 is because we (nice name crew) travel to conferences very often. As a matter of fact i always carried my macbook pro to every event. I always loved keynote and how the presenters screen works. Not having to worry about your beamer configuration and presenters screen is really comforting. However since i love to pack small and play big (on it stuff) i really felt we had to do something about it. Given the current situation presenters using linux have to deal with, we decided to simplify it. Of corse as a geek i would love to travel just with my netback saving valuable space in my backpack. In reality i was always caring my heavy macbook pro 15" everywhere just to lecture. Not only is it bad to give a presentation standing behind your machine because your presenters remote doesn't work. It is also highly annoying to always have to fumble around with your graphics card. Given the large verity of tools for creating your slides. (i.e.: powerpoint, open office impress, apple's keynote, latech-beamer,....) We felt there was no room for yet another slide creation tool. Nonetheless i noticed my desire to jump onstage, give a really good presentation without the usual worries. To be honest i use Keynote from apple on my home computer as i find it the most comforting tool to create slides. But now that we have created doufoo i save up on baggage space, and i finally managed to get rid of all the worries beforehand. But what is doufoo? - The perfect choice for every presenter that has more important stuff todo than care about beamer configuration more than once. Its fast, simple and lightweight. We think that caring less about your gear and focusing on the presentation itself is the best way to keep your audience enthusiastic and entertained.

[So much for at-least-one-post-a-week : I'm now back online, courtesy of a new router]. In the this week is another announcement from the CoRoT group: CoRoT-7 is the first star (outside our own) known to host two Super-Earths. Two planets of 1.6 and (max.) 21 times Earths' mass, and the smaller one at least is rocky (the outer planet has not been seen in transit, so we can't tell yet). Its not the first Earth-sized planets to be discovered: as my supervisor points out, <http:>PSR 1257+12 holds that record, as well as the one for the first exoplanet to be found. As usual, Exoplanet.eu gives the details: CoRoT-7b has a flurry of papers to its credit already. CoRoT-7b transits its star and is the first Super-Earth with a clear radius measurement. Together with a mass calculated from a radial-velocity measurement by the HARPS spectrometer, they calculate a density of 5.5 g/cm3, and so its shown to be a rocky world. CsoRoT is a hot A-class star, and CoRoT-7b orbits only 2.5 million km from it. Because of this, it is unlikely that it has retained an atmosphere (it'll be way too hot), and is expected to be tidally locked: with one face permanently pointing at the star, one in permanent darkness, the two sides will be both too hot and too cold for life. (Is there a Goldilocks, twilight zone? unlikely: the tidal forces will be too high, and with no atmosphere to moderate matters, there can be little hope for life). Still, while it may not support life, it could help answer important questions, such as how many terrestrial planets are there out there. Most of the planets discovered to date have been gas giants, which are easier to discover. But are there lots of rocky planets hiding between the giants ? One way of answering this might involve the disks from which the planets evolved. One trend we've seen is that (gas giant) planets are more likely to be found around stars with high metallicity (astronomers are strange in calling all elements heavier than helium a metal). But our Sun is strange in being comparatively depleted in 'refractory' elements such as iron or silicon. Is this important for the story of terrestrial planets? Melenendez et al. have a paper on arxiv.org on this topic. They find that most stars similar to our sun found not to have giant planets have elemental abundances similar to our Sun: perhaps they have undiscovered rocky planets instead ? Tags astronomy, exoplanets, planet-of-the-week