Aargh. Yesterday I spend hours trying to find out why SERefpolicy would not build. There was a suspicious message in the build process, about a circular dependency being removed, and it was obviously due to this dependency that the build did not work. But: I couldn't find anything like a circular dependency. The dependencies for this file were trivial, just two input files that are not being modified or generated or anything. Today I decided to downgrade make to the stable version (which unfortunately conflicts with current kernel-package...) - and now it compiles. Smells like "make bug" to me... You can grab the completely untested (last build didn't work, and my test machine is currently down) packages at http://selinux.alioth.debian.org/serefpolicy/ in case you want to try SERefpolicy yourself. I'd love to have a SELinux policy system which does not involve any such make and m4 black magic. The makefiles are a PITA to read, the whole thing is totally unmanageable IMHO.

Have you seen Shrek 2? Remember when he has to win back his beloved? "We're gonna need flour. Lots and lots of flour." Unfortunately, this joke doesn't translate into other languages - "flour" and "flower" rarely sound the same... (e.g. "Mehl" and "Blumen" in German)

I'm always fascinated by what snow does to the bamboo here. This heavy one has made the bamboo grove implode, it's bent down all over the creek and driveway and just looks totally different than normal. Nice to finally get some real winter weather. Wishing I had a digital camera right now..

Our Chair of Software Engineering at the ETH Zurich is addicted to the Eiffel programming language. Thus, a PhD student is working on an Eiffel Multimedia Framework, named EiffelMedia, and I'm doing the Debian packaging. After working the second year with Eiffel stuff now, I can say that packaging Eiffel programs (not the language itself) is a major PITA, with respect to the following two aspects: Eiffel is different

• Build tool is an Ant clone written in Eiffel, called geant (part of Gobo Eiffel).
  
  
• Paths are not hardcoded into the binaries, they are set by environment variables. You guessed it right - it's not a bug, it's a feature.
  
  
• There is no Eiffel compiler, just Eiffel-to-C wrappers which then issue the compilation to objectcode by a C compiler. Generating executables from Eiffel sources takes longer than from any other language.

Eiffel is non-free

There are not one... not two... but three incompatible Eiffel compilers arround. Oh yeah...

• EiffelStudio, developed by Betrand Meyers company Eiffel Software (formerly known as Interactive Software Engineering) reflects the reference implementation of the Eiffel language. Last summer, Eiffel was accepted as ECMA standard 367. Version 5.6 of EiffelStudio released back in fall 2005 does implement this standard.
  
  EiffelStudio is proprietary software (speaking of EiffelStudio means actually EiffelStudio Free Edition). Last year, I bitched Eiffel Softwares employees for about 3 month continuously to change the EULA for allowing non-modified redistribution. Thanks to be not ignored by Larry Miller from Eiffel Software, in the beginning of 2005 the EULA was changed and I could provide packages publicly. Theoretically, I could have moved them over to Debian non-free, but it's quite a large piece of software (190MB, source and binary packages) and the important parts (compiler and IDE) are still provided binary-only (so the archive would have to carry three arch specific version, makes 570MB in total per revision), thus no upload was considered. Additionally, EiffelStudio is available on Linux only for the i386, powerpc and amd64 architectures. All other platforms where Linux runs on are not supported.
  
  Another annoying problem with EiffelStudio is its nasty disclaimer flooding allover the buildlogs. It's built into every binary and displayed as the first 19 lines of every output of those:
  

  This program has been produced with a demo or non-commercial version
  of ISE EiffelStudio, the full lifecycle object-oriented development
  environment from Eiffel Software.
  This version is reserved for non-production use of Eiffel. Any other
  use requires purchase of a license.
  Eiffel Software offers commercial and academic licenses and
  support/maintenance contracts covering diverse needs.
  For more information please contact
  Eiffel Software at the address below or consult the Eiffel products page
  at http://www.eiffel.com/products/.
          Eiffel Software
          356 Storke Road
          Goleta CA 93117 USA 
          Telephone 805-685-1006, Fax 805-685-6869
          E-mail sales@eiffel.com
          http://www.eiffel.com
  

  This could have been "designed" a bit more discreet. However, as I do have to use wrapper scripts anyways for all binaries in the packages of any Eiffel program, I stripped that out by the occasion.
  
  
• Visual Eiffel developed by Object Tools was a proprietary Eiffel IDE and compiler suite. In November 2004, the compiler and the standard library were made free and are licensed under GPL.
  
  Unfortunately it was never fully compatible to EiffelStudio, actually years behind. It's not suprising that the project seemed never to be alive. Because it's still stuck with an old Eiffel language specification, it's even less useful today than it ever was.
  
  
• SmartEiffel (formerly know as SmallEiffel), developed by the LORIA Laboratory is a GPL licensed Eiffel compiler.
  
  But SmartEiffel does not and will not implement the recently published Eiffel ECMA standardization (roumors has it that they fork the Eiffel language in some essential parts caused by some technical and/or personal missunderstandings between Bertrand Meyer and the leader of the development team of SmartEiffel, they know each other from earlier).

Except from some fundamental programs like Gobo Eiffel or the Eiffel Wrapper Generator (they support both all three compilers), nearly all programs are written according to the current Eiffel specifcation. So there is no real alternative to the proprietary EiffelStudio. Beeing binary-only is a major drawback too: EiffelStudio on Linux/powerpc is dynamically compiled against glibc-2.3.5, but Sarge has glibc-2.3.4. So one needs a backport of glibc, which taints the system in an unneccessary and stupid way. Please: Eiffel Software, if you are reading this, open the sources of EiffelStudio now and turn it into free software, for the greater good of us all. Make additional ports to other architectures possible and allow us, the packagers and upstreams of Eiffel programs, to drop the cumbersome support for other ancient Eiffel compilers. Let's focus us to one, single implementation and improve it.

Last Monday, Sarah and I visited the fine institution that is the California Department of Motor Vehicles, so that we could get ourselves California drivers licences. We had to do both a written test and a behind the wheel test. The written test was your standard multiple-guess exam (36 questions, maximum of 6 incorrect answers to pass). Annoyingly, all the material on the exam was not in the California Driver Handbook, which the handbook tried to make out was the case. Fortunately it was largely a case of common sense. I got two wrong. The funniest thing was that Sarah and I both got the same exam paper, and Sarah did her test just after I finished mine, and we were allowed to keep the paper, so she could see which two I got wrong. One of the more unusual things I found about the process was that they allocated me a licence number before I'd even sat the test. Last Thursday Sarah had her behind the wheel test, and today I had mine. It was pretty easy. No reverse-parking, no emergency stopping. I just had to drive around for 15 minutes. I passed without any faults. Given it took me four attempts to get my original licence in Australia, I was pretty pleased with this. (I failed my Queensland licence a number of times due to nerves). The other thing that I was amazed to discover was that I don't get the licence for another four to six weeks! They mail it out. The DMV processes over here are just mind boggling. The fact that you can't get a licence on the spot, and that it takes something like three months to get licence plates for a new car just blows me away. It's nothing like the process in Australia.

In about an hour I'll finish work and leave for Cambridge. The plan is to take a train to Berlin-Schönefeld, then fly to London Standsted and take a coach from there to Cambridge, where I'll arrive somewhen between midnight and 1am and hope to find (1) King's College and (2) someone who knows who I am and where my bed is.

I usually don't suffer from travel nerves, though this trip is so far foreshadowed by a chain of unfortunate events:
Firstly I scalded my hand with hot oil last weekend and it is now in the state of getting rid of the old burned skin, exposing the tissue underneath that is not real skin but some thin algesic replacement. Ouch!
Secondly my laptop, beloved dropkick, lost its display this week. Well, not physically, but when I booted it up on Thursday the colors where heavily distorted. I tried to fix it yesterday but at some point it just stopped working alltogether. :( Background lightening still goes on and off but nothing is displayed. I am pretty frustrated by this. Not only because I had planned to use the laptop this weekend but also because I really like it and have grown kind of attached to it. Since a professional repair would probably cost almost as much as the thing is worth and I am pretty broke at the moment I'll try to get a used display and replace it myself. (Relevant hints and advice are welcome!)
Lastly, I haven't packed yet, my belt loop is ripped and the prospect of spending long waiting periods with only a book plus pen and paper as means of distraction is not too thrilling.

Anyway, still looking forward to the weekend! (<phlox>Optimism!</phlox>) I'll let you know how it went (and what further mishaps struck me) when I return. :)

Simple answer: because RSS and Atom are XML formats. So please generate valid output. Adhere to the standards! The RSS feeds of Planet Gnome and Planet Ubuntu, for example, are currently broken. (Planet Gnome due to a bug in Planetplanet AFAICT, Planet Ubuntu due to a broken RSS feed from Wordpress... Yes, you must escape single < characters in XML...) Templating systems such as the default templating of the Django Framework, or the popular Clearsilver templating engine are unfortunately not suited for XML output. Oh, and please never ever write XML using 'print' commands either. Use a proper XML writer, which can handle charset issues and escaping properly. Good examples for XML-enabled templating engines include TAL and METAL used by Zope (but available for a variety of languages), and KID (again python, used by the Turbogears Framework). Closely related is the "HTML fragments" issue, which basically is why I want XML to be used internally, too (you could also store StructuredText only, and convert it to XML just for transformation to the output): HTML fragments in my blog should be valid slices of an XHTML file, to avoid issues when generating both the web pages as well as when integrating the feed into other pages. With RSS, the HTML code is AFAICT escaped in one big data chunk, so it doesn't matter there. It probably does for Atom. So what a good blog tool (including a rewrite of planetplanet which has way too many bugs) needs to do is to parse it's input data (plain text, HTML provided by a web browsers WYSIWYG edit component, mail, structured text, XML, ...) and either reject broken entries or try to guess whats intended, but guarantee that the output is valid XML. Then generate proper feeds and output from that. Thanks to all those who already replied to my previous posting. One thing I was pointed at, and I'll probably look into is Apache Forrest. Although I likely will use KID instead, if I happen to write my own tool after or despite my upcoming final exams.

1. IDE ribbon cables
2. IDE jumpers
3. Slave/master issues
4. BIOSes that can’t boot to large partitions (I would be happy not to see this in the afterlife, either)
5. Long, uninterruptible POST
6. dma_timer_expiry
7. Cilantro

Actually, I don’t really dislike cilantro, I just wouldn’t miss it if I never saw it for the rest of my life. The other stuff, though, is definitely getting in the way of me dying happily. This is not a list that would resonate with most people, but I expect most of my readers are not representative of the general population.

Recently there was a discussion on whether BitTorrent should get some encryption (or obfuscation, more likely) added. Right now, you can filter out BitTorrent traffic with the following iptables command (note: this needs iptables 1.3.4 and a recent kernel):

iptables -I OUTPUT -j DROP -m string --string "BitTorrent protocol" --algo bm --from 0 --to 100

(Note: match is not optimized, the range of 0 to 100 and algo bm is arbitrary) The nice thing is, that this match is very unlikely to match non-Bittorrent traffic. Linux users can use it to filter out all BitTorrent traffic or mark it for speed restrictions. Network operators are very interested in filtering this traffic: it slows down more important traffic (and if you are e.g. using stochastic fair queing, the large number of connections for P2P filesharing will make it get a larger share than other apps!) and can cause costs. If you have mobile users, who e.g. connect their laptop to your network, they will occasionally use BitTorrent at home, and forget to disable it when they connect to your network. That's really bad, it happens and it's not like this is intentional "malbehaviour" or "sabotage"! So back to the original topic - obfuscating BitTorrent traffic. Let me explain what network operators might do when BitTorrent can't be slowed or filtered any more (Note that this already applies to some services such as Skype or Kazaa as far as I know): First of all, they might decide to filter all connections to non-standard ports. This effectively eliminates (most of) filesharing - but also e.g. Skype and some IM and chat services. Basically any non-standard service. (Note that "professional" VoIP services using SIP may still be whitelisted). Secondly, they could decide to slow down all connections to non-standard ports. This would make filesharing, Skype, IM etc. still possible, but for example file transfers via IM will be really slow. No video via Skype, probably, depending on the limits set in traffic shaping. Thirdly, they could disable all outgoing connections and require you to use proxies for that. Then you need to enable/disable your proxy all the time when switching networks, and you'll only be able to use a limited set of services. Again, Telephony via SIP is still technically possible, using a SIP proxy or by whitelisteing major SIP providers. Skype is no longer possible. IM needs whitelisting, and will likely be blocked, too. None of these options are very favourable for the users. So please do not support "obfuscated" Protocols such as Kazaa or Skype, or an obfuscated variant of BitTorrent. Stick with stuff administrators can set up policies for - and be nice to your admins. Tunneling via non-standard ports, hiding services will only get you into trouble, and probably even make innocent other users suffer. After all, filesharing - especially illegal downloading movies and music - is not THAT important, is it? So please make the important services not suffer from it. Thank you. Oh, and please use SIP, not Skype. Because your admin can whitelist your SIP provider if you tell him you need it for work or setup a proxy for that - and with Skype, he might be afraid that you become a supernode and cause high traffic costs. And then there is a much larger software choice for SIP, including many OpenSource solutions, including PBX software such as Asterisk.

Gack, what a mess my blog feed has been in. It's still not 100% okay, but at least Firefox now parses it without complaint. Maybe someone with more XML-fu than me will read this and tell me how to fix the rest... I've always gone to a fair bit of trouble to ensure that my blog's HTML is syntactically correct, at least in terms of HTML, and everything is spelt correctly. To achieve this I use a fairly involved script to perform a bunch of sanity checks when I make a new post. Unfortunately, I've been neglecting the state of my blog's feed, and as I've recently discovered, it's been in quite a bad way for quite some time. Given that more people probably read by blog via the feed than the HTML, I've probably been focussing my attention disproportionately. It seems that whilst the native HTML I'm writing may be valid 4.01 Transitional, the XML that Blosxom generates from it isn't valid XML, mainly in terms of tag closure. So I guess this is going to mean that I need to go for a stricter and/or newer standard. I might need to move to XHTML or something. I've also found that a lot of the HTML generated by the various blog meme generators is utter crap.

We again had a great event and a great Debian booth at Solutions Linux 2006. Thanks to Julien Blache who coordinated the whole stuff and all the Debian people who animated the booth this year again. The Babelbox demo installed Debian 148 times in 3 days, with 64 desktop installs the first two days and a sprint of 84 base system installs the last day, in less than 8 hours. I have put my pictures online. Most comments are in French but you'll enjoy them anyway. And, for my D-W friends, sorry for this and that.

I'm such a funster. It's Friday night and I've spent it fighting with consumer routers in an attempt to get my home setup sorted out a bit. And I've made some progress, but it's taken a while. My old setup was an Asus WL-500g with a USB Speedtouch attached. This was running a hacked up version of Oleg's firmware, with kernel 2.4.20 (ewwwww) and the userland Speedtouch pppoa3 driver. It's been up 253 days as I type, which is quite impressive IMO. The plan was to get something else doing the same job so that I could try and get more up to date firmware on the Asus (probably OpenWRT) and give it to my parents as a wireless access point / print server. First try was my Netgear DG834G. Unfortunately the ADSL interface on it doesn't want to sync to the line for any length of time. I don't really want to faff with it at present, so I gave up on that. I do want to try and get this sorted, as it has a native ADSL interface, but the AR7Port appears to have stagnated a bit. Next was the Netgear WGT634U. I'd built an OpenWRT image for this and tried to flash it earlier in the week, but messed it up and bricked the router. So opened it up, hooked a serial console up and managed to restore it easily enough. A little bit of frobbing and I had it recognising the Speedtouch. Result. This has a 2.6.15.1 kernel, which means in kernel driver goodness and nice and up to date. Plus OpenWRT makes it easy to add various nicities like radvd and dnsmasq. I'm currently using this solution and will keep an eye on it over the weekend before reinstalling the Asus. Of course my home network has become simplified a bit by the fact I no longer factor the NTL connection into it. That's always just been a backup thing since getting ADSL from Black Cat (mmmm, IPv6 goodness) and I've decided to finally ditch it soon. However I might want to add a modem to the WGT634U at some point - probably using a USB serial dongle I guess, as I don't think the internal ports do hardware flow control. That's a battle for another day though. I also managed to get rid of a whole load of computer junk that was working but unused, thanks to Norfolk FreeCycle. Kathy will be pleased when she comes back from London tomorrow. :)

Cliff has a nice post about our visit to Nebraska, including a picture of Terah and Marilyn! Unfortunately, I suspect our chocolate budget is going to take quite a hit this month, since Cliff has reminded Terah of all the chocolate treats they had for us.

What kind of sick joke is this? The German government seems to want to sell the personal information of 80 million German citizens to interested companies. They wanted to introduce a new digital identity card with biometric data and possibly also an RFID chip on it for quite a while now (you know, all those evil terrorists out there, blah blah blah). And now they dream about selling the data records stored on that card for 40-50 cents per record to interested companies? WTF? I don't think I have to elaborate on the abuse-potential this can have, and on what this means for the privacy of all 80 million citizens affected... The above article and also another article are a bit fuzzy on the exact details so we'll have to wait until more info is published/leaked, but this is definately an alarming trend/discussion... (via Anarchaia, Fefe, netzpolitik.org)

Bill Gates wrote his famous letter thirty years ago, tomorrow: http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html In the meantime, people are still missappropriating software, the "hobbyists" have returned with a vengeance and have built software that rivals or bests Mr. Gates', and the economics of the industry still aren't entirely clear. What economist would have ever predicted the success of Open Source? They're certainly fascinated by it now that it's here.

If anybody working at Novell / SUSE is reading this and wishes to donate a free license key/username + password for SuSE Enterprise Server 9 that would be great! This would make up for :

• Failing to respond to a web-based feedback system for three days.
• Failing to answer the telephone in the Edinburgh office for three days.
  • No answering machine either
• Failing to respond to a message left on the answering machine of the Bracknell office for two days.
• Failing to answer the UK-based email address, for two days.
• Being told when contacting the USA office that we should contact the UK office.

I suspect that we’ll be moving to RedHat in the future… Other free stuff is always welcome too

After seeing everyone shill for their favorite scm lately, with most of the predictable ones getting the attention, I thought I'd throw my choice out there, just to see it represented.

I primarily use svn with my work on X in Debian, and it's a wonderful system. Fortunately though, I don't have to maintain the repos, and when something goes wrong I can cry to our beloved DPL to get his admin on, and he fixes things up. This works out fairly well for me as a basic user, but I don't want to be dealing with these sorts of hassles for smaller projects. The distributed scm thing appealed to me in this sense, so when arch started to become a serious buzzword in the Debian crowd I had a look.

Well, more than a look. I fought for over a month with tla and baz and found that they were both so unuseable and poorly documented that I couldn't do more than scream and cry. bzr looked cool, but it wasn't ready (I sorta tried to manage one of the X.Org releases in Debian with it and failed miserably). Darcs was slow and in a minority language, which was a major turnoff for me. And I don't have a ton of diskspace, so git was out. Svk struck me as a hack (it still does) so I didn't want to go with that. Monotone was ok, but not good enough, so I sighed, gave up, and went back to svn thinking that this was as good as it could get. Indeed, we added a quilt-based patch system to the Xorg packages, so now I have a mini-scm (quilt) inside an scm (svn) and it works amazingly well.

But one of my friends just got hired by the people who make Xen, and he mentioned that they used mercurial, and asked if I had tried it yet. I scoffed and said no, and that all scm's suck harder than anything has ever sucked before, but I had a lot of time to kill while I was waiting on an X build, so I gave it a look.

Mama, I'm home. I was stunned that I was able to pick up mercurial in about half an hour after tearing my hair out for over a month with arch.

The UI is apparently very darcs-like (by accident, according to the mercurial author) which is known to be fantastic. Branching, merging, etc is simple as can be so far, although upstream is still working out better methods to deal with merging.

It's very fast, built for large trees (i.e. the kernel) so it will be suitable for managing X with (although I haven't tried this yet, but I plan to). For X, I'll need something fast to keep my sanity. This rules out darcs and baz (which has somehow managed to get amazingly slow in addition to being difficult as of late).

Unlike git, it keeps changesets in xdelta format rather than storing whole files, so it doesn't eat my hard drive.

It's written in python, so it's something I could hack on if I want to.

It supports an easy server setup with apache, and you can push your repos and serve them via static http if you don't have a server, like me.

Like monotone, it exposes hashes to the user, but unlike monotone it also provides a local revision number to make sure you don't spend all your time copying and pasting hashes, which is what put me off from monotone.

It has a fairly small command set, with 39 commands in the current tip (i.e. HEAD) as opposed to the > 150 in baz which made me weep.

It feels like using bzr, except it's here now and ready for production. Indeed, it's already used in production in making Xen.

There's a bunch more that I won't talk about, mainly because these are the things that have grabbed me. A note of caution is that I've only been hacking on local projects by myself (mainly configure-debian) with it, so I don't have the tons of real world experience with multiple trees that the thing is built for yet. I'm thinking about putting up a parallel mercurial tree to the XSF tree just for fun (the svn repo would remain the canonical one) if people are interested and I can find a server. I hope though, that all the people out there who, like me, were bouncing around trying out scm after scm and never being quite happy with any of them at least give mercurial a fair chance. I'm still amazed at how much I like it, and I think some others might feel the same.

Yesterday, the right-wing PAN candidate for the presidency of Mexico, Felipe Calder n, made a declaration that shadows the current president, Vicente Fox (from his same political party) almost look like a genuine statesman. (some links, La Jornada, El Universal) - And that's no easy feat, given that Mr. Fox is -so far- the nation's most prolific president... When it comes to stupid sayings.
How come Calder n rose so quickly to become a statesman? Let me first go through a bit of history. Not much, promise. Well, I'll do my best.
Twelve years and one month ago, Mexicans woke up with the frightening news we had a violent guerrilla group in Chiapas, one of Mexico's richest states, but one with the highest percentages of poor people - and, not coincidentally, of indigenous population as well. This uprising was very soon known all over the world - And its leaders quickly learned how to ensure they would not be prosecuted and exterminated: Simultaneously with the fighting, they made as large a media coverage as they could, strongly supported in the Internet democratization of the information that had just begun. Thousands of people all over the world understood their ideas -at least what they said at that time- and spread the word. I had my first trip in Europe with my (now) wife in 1996, and we saw many grafittis stating Viva Chiapas, Viva EZLN... It was amazing.
EZLN was (is) specially hard for the government to kill. As they don't do military sabotages, terrorism or so on, it is very hard to justify military action. After 12 days of fighting, a truce was decreed. The truce was broken once, in the early years of the Zedillo government, but officially there is a cease-fire, observed by both sides. The Zapatistas have took the ideas and further promoted them, with action. My Chiapas-born friend Alex Ju rez often tells me about the tremendous cultural difference between the Zapatista territories and the paramilitary ones - In the Zapatista areas, you see indians reading books, working their land, organizing themselves in the Fair Government councils, and strongly opposing alcohol and drugs. Just the opposite from the other areas.
EZLN shifted their strategy some months ago, going beyond stating their wishes for a fair regime and waiting for the government to look at them. I still don't really understand where they are heading, but the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Rainforest turns them into a political movement, clearly separated from the existing regime. They do not seek to be elected, they oppose every party and candidate. They define themselves as an anticapitalist movement, located down and to the left - Lets see where this goes to.
Well, back on track... One of the president's most famous stupid quotes is that, during his campaign, he promised to solve the Chiapas conflict in fifteen minutes. Well, it's been either fifteen very long minutes, or he just hasn't had any time to devote to those dirty indians. Mexicans are very frustrated by the lack of importance this man gave to one of our country's longest and most desperate needs.
Of course, Felipe Calder n must do something in this regard. Fox's shadow is a big one, and this little man must try to escape from Fox's biggest mistakes. So he just came with a formula that I don't know why no statesman thought of before: Instead of negotiating, instead of working to solve a very difficult problem, he declared he will unilaterally declare peace with EZLN.
I wonder if this year's Nobel prize will go to such an abnegated, smart and selfless person. Man, we could take this same solution to Darfur, to Israel/Palestine, to Congo, to Chechnya... If rulers all over the world start declaring peace unilaterally, all of the world's problems will be solved! What comes next, he will declare (maybe as Salinas did) that we are a first world country? Poor people are only sad reflections in the sand but don't exist in his reality?
Please, Mexicans: The man is clearly schizoid. Are you happy with Foxilandia? It seems that alternate realities are part of the PAN's action program. If you are not satisfied with Fox's results (who is?), don't vote for this guy. We will all regret it.