So I am giving a talk this Friday at the University and here is the English introduction to my talk/paper and below is the Portuguese one. It starts at 9 am in Porto Alegre, Brazil and is being streamed.

*O Departamento de P s-Gradua o da Antropologia e a Associa o Software
Livre.org convidam:
*_*
Palestra com a antrop loga Gabriella Coleman*_
professora da New York University (NYU) *Quando:* Sexta-feira, dia 13 de junho, s 9h
*Onde:* Audit rio do ILEA, Campus do Vale - UFRGS
*Entrada:* Gratuita
*Transmiss o web: *tv.softwarelivre.org *
_Revolu es Silenciosas:_*
*O Ir nico Surgimento do Software Livre e de C digo Aberto
**e a Constru o de uma Consci ncia Legal Hacker* A palestra oferece uma an lise antropol gica e hist rica do
surgimento da comunidade de software livre e de c digo aberto,
procurando mostrar como, ao longo de duas d cadas, hackers e
entusiastas do software livre garantiram para si um dom nio de
autonomia legal para a produ o de software. Em uma poca
marcada por profundas transforma es no regime de Propriedade
Intelectual, a comunidade de software e de c digo aberto se
organiza cultivando uma acentuada consci ncia das transforma es
no mbito legal. O objetivo da palestra o de demonstrar como e
quando se cruzaram as trajet rias parcialmente independentes das
transforma es nas leis de propriedade intelectual com a
consolida o do “movimento” de software livre, para se tornarem
hist rias insepar veis voltadas disputa pelo futuro das
tecnologias - especialmente o computador pessoal e a Internet.
Com este foco, ser discutida uma nova pr tica social de
produ o de tecnologia que fornece uma nova vis o de mundo
insurgente e que desafia as justificativas neoliberais que
animam a expans o das leis de propriedade intelectual. Nesta
discuss o, ao inv s de oferecer hist rico abrangente, ser o
apresentados exemplos selecionados da hist ria do movimento de
software livre e da globaliza o das leis de propriedade
intelectual, com vistas caracteriza o da pr tica de produ o,
distribui o e utiliza o de Software Livre e de C digo aberto
nos Estados Unidos.

finally I managed to book my flight to DebConf8.

2008-08-03 IB3537
7:45 / Munich, Franz Josef Strauss, Terminal 1
10:25 / Madrid, Barajas, Terminal 4



2008-08-03 IB6845
12:25 / Madrid, Barajas, Terminal 4S
19:40 / Buenos Aires, Pistarini, Terminal A



2008-08-25 IB6844
21:45 / Buenos Aires, Pistarini, Terminal A
14:30 day +1 / Madrid, Barajas, Terminal 4S



2008-08-26 IB3564
16:30 / Madrid, Barajas, Terminal 4
18:55 / Munich, Franz Josef Strauss, Terminal 1

& I'm still surprised how frequently the prices for the same flights change ...

At times, when I'm working with an HTML file - an article about programming, for instance - I need to include a snippet of code inside a <pre> tag or a <code> tag. It's very annoying to have to indent that code by hand, and since the language may be anything from Hecl, to Erlang, to Java to C, I don't want to use something like two-mode-mode for Emacs, so I threw the following elisp together:

(defun indent-region-as (other-mode)
  "Indent selected region as some other mode.  Used in order to indent source code contained within HTML."
  (interactive "aMode to use: ")
  (save-excursion
(let ((old-mode major-mode))
  (narrow-to-region (region-beginning) (region-end))
  (funcall other-mode)
  (indent-region (region-beginning) (region-end) nil)
  (funcall old-mode)))
  (widen))

To use it:

1. Put it in your .emacs file.
2. Select the region to indent according to the other mode.
3. M-x indent-region-as - which will prompt you for the other mode to use. You need to give the function for that mode, such as tcl-mode, java-mode, ruby-mode or whatever.

My elisp is a bit rusty, so I'm sure it's possible to improve the code above, but it does the job for me.

June 15th is the last day to reconfirm your attendance to DebConf8. If you are certain that you are coming, please reconfirm by setting the ‘Reconfirm Attendance’ box in your PentaBarf’s account. If you have decided not to come to DebConf8, we are truly sorry about it, but we ask you to please state this by unchecking the ‘I want to attend this conference box’. Currently, 397 people have registered for DebConf8, 340 plan to attend, but only 122 have reconfirmed (live stats).

Italian weather agencies Most Italian regions have agencies providing good regional weather forecast. However, I could not find a useful national index of all their weather forecast pages. So I made one, tweaking an image map found on wikipedia. I only filled in those regions that I was checking to organise a specific trip. With time, if I'll keep using this map I'll add more regions. Of course, if you now of a weather forecast page of a regional, public funded agency that is missing here, send me an e-mail.

(Playing Kraftwerk - The Telephone Call.) Warning: This is a long-wound complaint post. The only reason this is going to the Planet is because I have no method yet of disabling individual posts for syndication. Please skip, with my apologees for the noise, if you don’t want to listen to complaining. May contain nuts. May drive you nuts. Drove me nuts. Mmm, pistachio. When I was around 11, I got my first cellphone. I was very proud. This was back when being 11 and having a cellphone was a real novelty; pagers were still being sold, and the NMT network was still running. Like many things I appreciate, I found it in a dumpster. It was ancient, even then: a Motorola MicroTAC brick, missing its antenna. I borrowed one of my grandmother’s hairpins, and voila, working phone - as long as you didn’t leave Oslo. It had a certain cyberpunk look to it, even then: I loved it. I remember that I first bought a NetCom pay-as-you-go card; I don’t quite remember the number, but it had “283″ in it at the end, if you want to wardial. For some reason, Dad needed a SIM card so I gave him mine. So I bought myself a new one, a Telenor card, pay-as-you-go, number 91 85 95 08. I must have been around 12 at the time. And that number served me very well. Fast-forward 6 years, to late March, 2006. I had just turned 18, and one of the first things I wanted to do was get a massively cheaper, proper subscription. I’d been procrastinating it for a bit - as I am wont to - but when a nice gentleman at the subway station told me about a nice new company called SEA Norway and their wonderful prices, I accepted. Big mistake. Here begins the saga of woe… For a good while, I was very happy with their service - even though GPRS data never worked, I never used it anyway. Their name changed to Vitel somewhere along the way. I received a phone call from an enthusiastic salesman who told me how much cheaper Vitel’s power subscription is. It seemed very reasonable, so I went for it. One of the arguments he gave me was that I could collect all those utilities into one bill. I told him that I couldn’t have this: Since I’m a live-alone student, my power bill is covered entirely by the city council, so I need a proper bill to hand over every month. “Sure, that’s no problem”. I check and double-check that, and I stress it. Sure, no problem. OK, deal. Big, big mistake. They draw 2700 Kroner from my account, using the automated pay system (AvtaleGiro) that I had set up for the phone bill. 2700 Kroner (530 US Dollars) is a lot of money, especially when your monthly income, 5000 Kroner (1000 US Dollars) barely covers the necessities. So I cancel the autopay system. (I still have not received that money!) 23rd of January, my subscription is cut, since I hadn’t paid the bill. They hadn’t mailed it to me, and I’d told them I’d cut the AvtaleGiro, but I simply did not receive the bill. So I call them up in February some time and try to figure out a solution. “You didn’t pay the bill, so the subscription is closed.” -”So if I pay the bill, will you reopen it?” -”No, sorry. It is closed now.” -”So then I’ll have to transfer the number to another provider?” -”No, you can’t do that; it’s closed now.” -”You can’t refuse to transfer the number, that’s simply not legal.” -”Sure it is, the subscription’s been closed.” Urgh. So some time in the middle of March, before The Gathering, I call NetCom up: I want to transfer my number to them, please. Sure, no problem. No, this number is registered as active in our system. All is well. We’ll make the switchover on March 28th, and you will get your SIM card in the mail: It should be in your box by then. Fantastic! The 28th of March came and went with no great ceremony, not even a SIM card. No switchover occurred. I give them the benefit of the doubt for more than a fortnight. Some time in April, then, I get sufficiently annoyed to call them up and ask what had happened. “Oh, no, it seems Vitel is using the old transferral system”. -”OK?” -”Yes, you will have to send us a form with your signature by fax to carry this transfer out.” -”Sigh, alright. Where can I get this form?” -”I’ll email it to you.” Great. So I get the form. May was very busy, so I didn’t get an opportunity to fill the form out, and by now I was getting fairly tired of the whole thing anyway! The thing that finally got me, however, was a bill from Vitel - on the “closed” subscription - for not only the monthly fee, but also several kroner of SMS “content services” (Read: ring tones) and GPRS data (Which never even worked even when the subscription did!) So last Tuesday, June 3rd, I send them the damned fax. Wednesday, June 4th, I call NetCom up and ask what the status is of my subscription. “Oh, yes, this is now active with us.” -”Really?!” (I was happy in the way that only someone who’s gone 5 months without a working phone could be.) -”Sure, we’ve sent the SIM card to Bekkeveien (something).” -”…Bekkeveien? But I’ve never lived at any Bekkeveien. My last name is Bekkedal, but..” -”Alright, then that’s probably a mistake. What you can do, though, is go to a NetCom dealer and pick up a new SIM card.” -”Perfect! I’ll do that, then.” (I stress “pick up” for a reason which will later become apparent.) Goodie. I’ll get a working phone! I was very happy as I took the tram down to Aker Brygge and looked everywhere for the damned NetCom dealer. Having finally found it, I happily stride inside and ask for a SIM card for my subscription. “Sure. That’ll be 200 Kroner.” Argh! I hadn’t brought enough money! She did say pick up. Oh well. Aker Brygge is a center of business, I’m sure there are other shops. So I ask to use one of their phones to call NetCom. Sorry, no phones you can use. Sigh. Fine. Do you know of any phone booths around? They didn’t, but I found one anyway, finally. I deposit the necessary $1 for a local call (See, this is the problem with having a cellphone company run the phone booths!) and dial NetCom customer service. They take my number and - Sorry, that number isn’t yet active, it’s still registered to Vitel. ARGH! Fine. So what’s standing in the way? Well, Vitel can’t refuse it - (thanks, I know that already) - but the form that I was sent wasn’t the right form. The form I need to send is from Vitel to Vitel, authorizing the transfer.While I’m trying to hold a conversation with the customer support guy, some drunk guy is accusing me of stealing phones, and begins reading out loud the sponsor company names on the back of my DebConf T-shirt. But Vitel has already told me that I cannot transfer this number, under any circumstance! They consider it closed! “Yes, but you have to talk to Vitel.” -”I have!” -”Well, we can’t really do anything…” Alright. So I hang up and I try to call Vitel. But that doesn’t work: They closed at 3 PM!. So finally tired of Netcom failing to port my number for a while, I call Telenor. I talk to a very cheerful and helpful lady who admits to not knowing about the particulars of that situation. Fantastic! At least she isn’t going to fib it! She says that she has a vacation Thursday, but she can call me back on Friday after discussing the matter with the number transfers department. Wow! She’s actually going to confer with the relevant expertise! This is too good to be true! So she said she’d call me back Friday at 1PM with a status update. As I am writing, it is Friday at 11:01, I am anxiously awaiting the telephone call. But now I get a funny SMS message:

From: NetCom Message from NetCom: Your number has been ordered by another operator. We would like to remind you that violation of the commitment period will be billed to the order of 1500 kroner. For questions, call 05050.

My subscription with Vitel was made in 2006, more than the 12 months I and knowledgeable friends believe to be the maximum legal commitment period (I doubt I would have agreed to more anyway!). Besides, the text message keeps saying that it’s from NetCom. So my deduction is: It’s from NetCom, who I have registered an active subscription and are now complaining that I’ve moved the subscription I’ve opened with them (but which they have not successfully moved from Vitel), over to Telenor. I don’t think this is an unfair conclusion. So I call NetCom customer service - which to NetComs infinite credit is a number you always can call, almost like 112 (technically it’s accomplished completely differently, but you get my point. The number is never blocked in a blocked subscription.) And they say it’s not from NetCom, even though it says it’s from NetCom. So I’ll keep both of my readers posted on the developing situation. At least the text message indicates that something is happening with my subscription. I just want the dialtone!

For once, the the action of an otherwise stupid ISP, namely blocking port 25 outgoing, was probably the right thing to do. Yes, in comcasts case, it apparently was communicated badly, and of course you have to be able to get it unblocked easily, but I think if all big providers would either block 25 outgoing alltogether for their consumer offerings or would block it for hosts they see spamming (pattern: smtp connections to more than 20 hosts within one minute perhaps?) the world would be a better place. OTOH spammers are already reacting: the percentage of spam I'm receiving through regular MXen (as per reverse DNS), including Yahoo and Google, (but not gmx so far, interestingly) is increasing markedly these months.

Regular readers of this blog (ed: oxymoron alert) may recall tales of woe with our beloved (ha!) cable internet provider such as this; then there are of course minor tales like this or this or this or the other stories on on this page but I am probably forgetting others. Anyway, yesterday's highlight was initiated with a mail, seemingly sent to all customers, informing me that

ACTION REQUIRED: Comcast has determined that your computer(s) have been used to send unsolicited email ("spam"), which is generally an indicator of a virus. For your own protection and that of other Comcast customers, we have taken steps to prevent further transmission of spam from your computer(s).

and the email went on to recommend some Windows anti-spam measures, including a reference to a page I could only open with IE at work and one URL to a page that doesn't exist. Nice. Not. Needless to say, there are now Windows computers sending mail (via Comcast) here (as the lone windows box, my wife's work laptop goes straight to her university webmail). And obviously, they blocked port 25, so no more mail sending from home. So I grumpily logged a compaint having been on hold and in telephony menu hell for fifteen or twenty minutes. I was promised to hear back in 72 hours. Hasn't happened yet, naturally, but we're only half way through... Anyway, to make a long story short and this post constructive: Here is what you do on a Debian or Ubuntu system running exim as your mail transport:

• sudo editor /etc/exim4/conf.d/transport/30_exim4-config_remote_smtp_smarthost and add a line port = submission in the remote_smtp_smarthost block (assumming you have the split configuration chosen for the exim4-config package). Setting port to 'submission' switches from plain old STMP to the authenticated version running on port 587; submission is mapped to 587 in /etc/services.
• sudo editor /etc/exim4/passwd.client and add your user and password id as e.g. for comcast web-login
• sudo update-exim4.conf to update the configuration
• sudo /etc/init.d/exim4 restart to restart exim

And it may pay to check /var/log/exim4/mainlog for any irregularities. Barring those, you should now be sending mail to you smarthost using authenticated transfer over port 587. In the meantime, it looks like they unblocked port 25 at some point today...

In Debian the BIND server will by default append statistics to the file /var/cache/bind/named.stats when the command rndc stats (which seems to be undocumented) is run. The default for RHEL4 seems to be /var/named/chroot/var/named/data/named_stats.txt. The output will include the time-stamp of the log in the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (see my previous post explaining how to convert this to a regular date format [1]). By default this only logs a summary for all zones, which is not particularly useful if you have multiple zones. If you edit the BIND configuration and put zone-statistics 1; in the options section then it will log separate statistics for each zone. Unfortunately if you add this and apply the change via rndc reload I don’t know of any convenient way that you can determine when this change was made and therefore the period of time for which the per-zone statistics were kept. So after applying this to my servers I restarted the named processes so that it will be obvious from the process start time when the statistics started. The reason I became interested in this is when a member of a mailing list that I subscribe to was considering the DNSMadeEasy.com service. That company runs primary DNS servers for $US15 per annum which allows 1,000,000 queries per month, 3 zones, and 120 records (for either a primary or a secondary server). Based on three hours of statistics it seems like my zone coker.com.au is going to get about 360,000 queries a month (between both the primary and the secondary server). So the $15 a year package could accommodate 3 such zones for either primary or secondary (they each got about half the traffic). I’m not considering outsourcing my DNS, but it is interesting to consider how the various offers add up. Another possibility for people who are considering DNS outsourcing is Xname.org which provides free DNS (primary and secondary) but request contributions from business customers (or anyone else). Updated because I first published it without getting stats from my secondary server.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/05/date-1970-01-01/

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Terah, Jacob, and I went camping last weekend. Terah had asked me what I wanted for Father's Day. I thought for just a second, and said "camping!" She looked like she regretted asking. But it has been a year since our last camping trip, so off we went.

We went to Marion County Park and Lake, a nice park built by FDR's CCC program in the 1930s. It is on the National Register of Historic Places thanks to all the stone buildings, bridges, etc. that were built back then and still survive.

The reason we like it is because one side of the lake has the park office, rentable meeting houses, RV hookups, a swimming area, and really all the things you expect at a park like this (albeit on a small scale). The other side of the lake has gravel roads and fire rings. No power, no running water, but the occasional stone outhouse every half mile or so. Which means that the RV owners are not going to want to spend the night on that side of the lake. So, unlike far too many parks, it is possible to pitch a tent a good distance from the RVs. It's so annoying to go to camping and find it to be noisier than home because of all the TVs and generators running.

Jacob wasn't so sure about the first evening, but he was having a blast all day Saturday. His favorite thing was the campfire. He called it "fie" (rhymes with "buy"). He watched me gathering up brush and preparing the fire, carefully placing the small sticks first, then the big ones. So he picked up a small stick, and carefully laid it inside the fire ring, too. Then he'd watch me light the fire, or blow on some embers, and he'd blow on it, too. Fffffffffffffff! As hard as he could. At one point, I was kneeling next to the fire ring, inspecting the kindling. Terah noticed Jacob kneeling next to the fire ring on the other side, with the exact same posture and expression as I had. It was a perfect Father's Day, I think.

Once the fire got going, he'd walk up towards it, say "HA!" (hot), and then run away. Educational, this camping business. He now knows what "hot" is all about.

Jacob also loved the lake. We would walk the few feet down to the beach, and he'd (holding on to one of us) walk just far enough into it to get his feet covered by the water, then pick up sand and throw it into the water to watch it splash. Or, he'd point at a boat ("bope") in the water ("wah") going past, all excited -- Bope! Bope!!! BOPE!!!

One of my favorite things while camping is sitting outside and watch the sun set. Terah and I did that while munching on banana boats we cooked in the fire (a banana and chocolate concoction that you sort of melt in tinfoil). Or we could sit in the shade on the ground and just relax and enjoy the scenery.

Terah didn't say that she enjoyed camping, but she did agree that there were good times and we could come back. Woohoo, I guess.

We're not really camping pros, and we learned a few things. One is that it would be nice to not have three meals in a day that require a fire. I'm fine with eating fruit, canned stuff, and other no-cooking-needed stuff when camping, but Terah likes more traditional food. And that's fine, and we had some great stuff to eat, but building fires is hard and hot work.

Over the first few days after we got home, Jacob came up to me and said, looking rather sad, "Fie? Fie?" I said, "Jacob, we don't have a fire here. There is no fire here." He would look so sad, and just repeat to himself for a few minutes, "No fie. No fie. No fie." So I asked him if I should build a little fire. "Yeah!" So I got a match and lit a candle. Oh, was that exciting, and almost as soon as it showed up, he tried to blow on it. By today he has learned how to blow out a candle.

A great Father's Day for sure, but we hadn't really tried to sow the seeds of a fascination with fire on the trip.

Today, I had the opportunity to try my UMTS initialization mechanism that I built this weekend with more recent hardware, a newer Option Globetrotter 3G Express Card with Vodafone branding (reporting itself to be a “Globetrotter HSDPA Modem” with Vendor ID 0xaf0 and Product ID 0x6701). To get the card connected to my test Notebook, a hp compaq nc8000, I had a “Expresscard in a PC card slot” adapter and a passive “Expresscard at a normal USB port” adapter. The USB adapter had cost about ten Euros, and I don’t imagine the PC card adapter to be much more expensive. The later Option card is recognized as three USB-connected serial ports by the Option kernel driver (CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_OPTION) as the older one is, and it works just fine. The only difference is that the udev rule needs a different value for the ATTRS modalias setting. My umts-pin script complains about an “illegal seek” after entering the PIN, but the card registers itself with the network nevertheless. Both gammu to send SMS and pppd for IP connectivity worked out of the box. Especially the “Expresscard-to-USB” adapter setup is very sexy for setups where neither an Expresscard nor a PC Card slot is available, and USB cables can be nice and long. So one could even mount the UMTS interface near the window and pull a longer USB cable to the actual system. I decided on putting the UMTS interface into a notebook, though, and mount the notebook near the window to be able to monitor the monitoring systems and send out SMS even when the whole datacenter is without power (by virtue of the notebook having a built-in UPS).

Nowadays it seems that most serious mail servers (IE mail servers suitable for running an ISP) use one file per message. In the old days (before about 1996) almost all Internet email was stored in Mbox format [1]. In Mbox you have a large number of messages in a single file, most users would have a single file with all their mail and the advanced users would have multiple files for storing different categories of mail. A significant problem with Mbox is that it was necessary to read the entire file to determine how many messages were stored, as determining the number of messages was the first thing that was done in a POP connection this caused significant performance problems for POP servers. Even more serious problems occurred when messages were deleted as the Mbox file needed to be compacted. Maildir is a mail storage method developed by Dan Bernstein based around the idea of one file per message [2]. It solves the performance problems of Mbox and also solves some reliability issues (file locking is not needed). It was invented in 1996 and has since become widely used in Unix messaging systems. The Cyrus IMAP server [3] uses a format similar to Maildir. The most significant difference is that the Cyrus data is regarded as being private to the Cyrus system (IE you are not supposed to mess with it) while Maildir is designed to be used by any tools that you wish (EG my Maildir-Bulletin project [4]). One down-side to such formats that many people don’t realise (except at the worst time) is the the difficulty in performing backups. As a test I used LVM volume stored on a RAID-1 array of two 20G 7200rpm IDE disks with 343M of data used (according to “df -h” and 39358 inodes in use (as there were 5000 accounts with maildir storage that means 25,000 directories for the home directories and Maildir directories). So there were 14,358 files. To create a tar file of that (written to /dev/null via dd to avoid tar’s optimisation of /dev/null) took 230.6 seconds, 105MB of data was transferred for a transfer rate of 456KB/s. It seems that tar stores the data in a more space efficient manner than the Ext3 filesystem (105MB vs 343MB). For comparison either of the two disks can deliver 40MB/s for the inner tracks. So it seems that unless the amount of used space is less than 1% of the total disk space it will be faster to transfer a filesystem image. If you have disks that are faster than your network (EG old IDE disks can sustain 40MB/s transfer rates on machines with 100baseT networking and RAID arrays can easily sustain hundreds of megabytes a second on machines with gigabit Ethernet networking) then compression has the potential to improve the speed. Of course the fastest way of transferring such data is to connect the disks to the new machine, this is usually possible when using IDE disks but the vast number of combinations of SCSI bus, disk format, and RAID controller makes it almost impossible on systems with hardware RAID. The first test I made of compression was on a 1GHz Athlon system which could compress (via gzip -1) 100M of data with four seconds of CPU time. This means that compression has the potential to reduce the overall transfer time (the machine in question has 100baseT networking and no realistic option of adding Gig-E). The next test I made was on a 3.2GHz Pentium-4 Xeon system. It compressed 1000M of data in 77 seconds (it didn’t have the same data as the Athlon system so it can’t be directly compared), as 1000M would take something like 10 or 12 seconds to transfer at Gig-E speeds that obviously isn’t a viable option. The gzip -1 compression however compressed the data to 57% of it’s original size, the fact that it compresses so well with gzip -1 suggests to me that there might be a compression method that uses less CPU time while still getting a worth-while amount of compression. If anyone can suggest such a compression method then I would be very interested to try it out. The goal would be a program that can compress 1G of data in significantly less than 10 seconds on a 3.2GHz P4. Without compression the time taken to transfer 500G of data at Gig-E speeds will probably approach two hours. Not a good amount of down-time for a service that runs 24*7. Particularly given that some time would be spent in getting the new machine to actually use the data. As for how to design a system to not have these problems, I’ll write a future post with some ideas for how to alleviate that.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox


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


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


• [4] http://doc.coker.com.au/projects/maildir-bulletin/

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(Guess I arrived early.) Dear Reader, I'd like to read any opinions on these three:- 1. when I get new information about a story I've already written about, should I make it a new blog post and/or add it to the old post or something else? For example, I've got new links about the Yahoo's good anti-spam actions which is sort-of linked to last week's spammer registrar post. 2. what should I do with links to sites where I've commented? Should I make a new feed like my bookmarks feed, silently ignore them, or something else? Last time I did a link post, mildly irritated comments followed on one of the planets. 3. Tonight is my first full Kewstoke village council meeting. Main (non-routine) topics include Sand Road Lay-by, Crookes Lane Memorial Seat, the newsletter, replacing the gazebo on the village green, coopting more councillors, completing the Crookes Lane Footpath, the 2007-08 accounts and reviewing the Sand Bay Management Plan. Any comments on any of those?

OK, so I've spent my last money on the One Mini A110 subnotebook recently. Yep, yet another ASUS Eee PC clone, but this one has the great benefit of costing only 199.- Euros and has similar specs as the Eee PC 2G Surf (700), I think. This is really a great little machine as far as I can tell. It's a VIA C7-M ULV 1GHz with 512MB DDR2 RAM and a 2 GB Solid-State-Disk (SSD), 7" screen at supposedly 800x480, VGA out, card reader slot for SD/MMC/MS, 2x USB, wireless, modem, audio. No webcam, no bluetooth. Yesterday I created a wiki at a110wiki.de (for the A110, but also the A120 from the same vendor, which has a 4 GB SSD), where A110 users can collect information, HOWTOs, photos, etc. There's already quite some content there, especially some early tutorials and photos on the inner workings of the A110. Today I've installed a stock Debian unstable distro on the SSD with 2.6.25 kernel, and I'm currently checking which parts of the hardware work out of the box, and which need further fixing. There's a a bunch of source code tarballs and patches on the vendor website, but most of it seems to be meant for 2.6.22, we'll see if and/or how much work it'll take to merge all this upstream (if it's not already done)... My Debian Installation HOWTO is also available from the wiki, of course; I'll add more info and photos during the day. Now for all interested parties: The vendor of the A110 has (again) announced a special weekend offer (valid until Sunday, June 1, 2008, i.e. tomorrow) where they'll sell the A110 for 199,- Euros again, the regular price will be 229,- Euros after that. So if you're thinking about buying one, now is probably the right time. Check the wiki for issues which are important to you, some quirks remain at this point (but will probably mostly be figured out sooner or later), e.g. the wifi seems to have issues (the vendor said they'll send a driver update to all affected customers), the RAM is builtin and can't be upgraded, and some other, more or less important issues, depending on what you expect from the laptop. For real-time communication there's also the #a110 IRC channel on Freenode.

I tried the installation of KDE 4.1 beta 1 on Debian, as described here. I ended up undoing this about an hour later. The environment isn't really usable yet, so my advice to the public is: don't do it, on a system you plan to actually use.

Here is a random assortment of problems I encountered:

• You can't configure size and appearance of the panel. This is a long-standing problem, but I thought it was fixed.
• In general, there don't appear to be all that many configuration options available to replicate various behaviors that I have become accustomed to.
• Rendering problems in the system tray; icons appear on top of each other.
• Various kicker widgets don't appear to be available for KDE 4 (yet?).
• Most applications don't copy their old settings, but it appears that some do?
• KMail doesn't interact well with encrypted IMAP accounts. I didn't try much beyond that, because I have no accounts that are not affected by that.
  
• Clicking on an RSS link in Konqueror doesn't link to Akregator anymore. Probably, various MIME type associations are missing.
• I couldn't get the environment to remember to open terminal windows maximized. Very annoying.
  
• I couldn't add any application icons to the panel. I'm not sure where on is supposed to store one's favorites now.
  

So it was quite obvious that that various pieces don't really fit together all that well yet. On the upside, I noticed many really good ideas that I would look forward to using if the overall environment worked.

The good news is that the packaging appears to be really robust (I found one packaging bug with a file conflict) and the upgrade and downgrade works well (you have to use aptitude, as described in Ana's post; apt craps out completely).
So when KDE 4 is actually usable, Debian will be ready. But not for lenny; that would be suicide in my opinion.

I don’t know if Peter tries KDE 4.1 beta1 (4.0.80) but I tend to disagree with some comments.

• you can’t configure size and appearance of the panel. This is a long-standing problem, but I thought it was fixed.

False. See the plasma icon on panel ? click on it and you’ll have what you want:

• In general, there don’t appear to be all that many configuration options available to replicate various behaviors that I have become accustomed to.

Could be nice to be more verbose.

• Rendering problems in the system tray; icons appear on top of each other.

True, but it’s better with each release and not really a showstopper.

• Various kicker widgets don’t appear to be available for KDE 4

Which one do you want ?

• Most applications don’t copy their old settings, but it appears that some do?

Indeed. KDE3 uses .kde as home directory and KDE4 uses .kde4. It is intended to not break your KDE3 until we test upgrade path.

• KMail doesn’t interact well with encrypted IMAP accounts. I didn’t try much beyond that, because I have no accounts that are not affected by that.
• Clicking on an RSS link in Konqueror doesn’t link to Akregator anymore. Probably, various MIME type associations are missing.

I don’t know I continue to use Kontact from KDE3. Modestas and Sune have switched to kde4pim and they found it better than expected.

• I couldn’t get the environment to remember to open terminal windows maximized. Very annoying.

Hmm It works for me. Konsole saves maximized/normal state.

• I couldn’t add any application icons to the panel. I’m not sure where on is supposed to store one’s favorites now.

Make sure you unlock widgets with plasma icon on the top-right corner. Drag and drop from K-Menu to panel. Sebas made a nice rough guide to plasma. Take a look !!!

• So when KDE 4 is actually usable, Debian will be ready. But not for lenny; that would be suicide in my opinion.

KDE4 is more than usable. It contains some glitches but we are far from sucide

Today a client asked me to advise him on how to dramatically reduce the number of servers for his business. He needs to go from 18 active servers to 4. Some of the machines in the network are redundant servers. By reducing some of the redundancy I can remove four servers, so now it’s a need to go from 14 to 4. To determine the hardware requirements I analyzed the sar output from all machines. The last 10 days of data were available, so I took the highest daily average numbers from each machine for user and system CPU load and added them up, the result was 221%. So for the average daily CPU use three servers would have enough power to run the entire network. Then I looked at the highest 5 minute averages for user and system CPU load from each machine which add up to 582%. So if all machines were to have their peak usage times simultaneously (which doesn’t happen) then the CPU power of six machines would be needed. I conclude that the CPU power requirements are somewhere between 3 and 6 machines, so 4 machines may do an OK job. The next issue is IO capacity. The current network has 2G of RAM in each machine and I plan to run it all on 4G Xen servers, so it’s a total of 16G of RAM instead of 36G. While some machines currently have unused memory I expect that the end result of this decrease in total RAM will be more cache misses and more swapping so the total IO capacity use will increase slightly. Now four of the servers (which will eventually become Xen Dom0’s) have significant IO capacity (large RAIDs - they appear to have 10*72G disks in a RAID-5) and the rest have a smaller IO capacity (they appear to have 4*72G disks in a RAID-10). The other 14 machines have the highest daily averages for iowait adding up to 9% and the highest 5 minute averages adding up to 105%. I hope that spreading that 105% of the IO capacity of a 4 DISK RAID-10 across four sets of 10 disk RAID-5’s won’t give overly bad performance. I am concerned that there may be some flaw in the methodology that I am using to estimate capacity. One issue is that I’m very doubtful about the utility of measuring iowait, one issue is that iowait is the amount of IDLE CPU time when there are processes blocked on IO. So if for example you have 100% CPU time being used then iowait will be zero regardless of how much disk IO is in progress! One check that I performed was to add the maximum CPU time used, the maximum iowait, and the minimum IDLE time. Most machines gave totals that were very close to 100% when those columns were added, so it seems that if the maximum iowait for a 5 minute period plus the maximum CPU use plus the minimum idle time add up to 100% and the minimum idle time was not very low then it seems unlikely that there was any significant overlap between disk IO and CPU use to hide iowait. One machine had a total of 147% for those fields in the 5 minute average which suggests that the IO load may be higher than the 66% iowait number may indicate. But if I put that in a DomU on the machine with the most unused IO capacity then it should be OK. I will be interested to read any suggestions for how to proceed with this. But unfortunately it will probably be impossible to consider any suggestion which involves extra hardware or abandoning the plan due to excessive risk… I will write about the results.

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I used to help staff more exhibition stands than I do now. Part of the reason I stopped was that few free software people seem to appreciate the basics of running a good exhibition stand and I got bored of arguing that we should give people space, avoid putting a counter across the stand, keep notes of contacts made and basic stuff like that. So, it was good to read Connecting People: Making an exhibition of yourself - the exhibitor and the linked Business Startup Coach shares Exhibition & Trade show secrets which repeat many points I've made before. Don't want to listen to me? Listen to the marketing experts. Some time after noticing WDPRS, I tried reporting as much spam as possible for a while, to hosters and registrars based on WHOIS details. Some hosts and registrars were good at dealing with spam (Yahoo and walla.net.il were exceptionally good) many were bad (bresnan.net, registrationtek.com, publicdomainregistry.com (PDR), ait.com, omantel.co.om, ttnet.net.tr) and some were ugly (Tucows/OpenSRS wrote back to say they don't do anything about domains they register, while ENom and Moniker never sent human answers). So it's no surprise to see ENom, Moniker, PDR and AIT on the list of

"Top Ten Worst Spam Registrars Notified By ICANN"

ultimately taken from this report.

I decided to purchase a three-year on-site warranty extension with next-business-day response time for one of the Lenovo systems I administer. I get this kind of extension for most systems that aren t critical, but whose downtime would be inconvenient. My understanding of the contract has always been that, assuming the problem requires on-site service, a technician gets in touch with you by the end of the next business day to agree on a time for the on-site visit. The contract does not guarantee that there will be a technician on-site on the next business day, but for two or three hundred Euros, that would be too much to ask. However, it turns out that I assumed too much. First of all, Lenovo sells you a next-business-day response time objective , meaning that they aim to respond by the end of the next business day, but (obviously) can t be held liable if they fail to do so. Apparently, they don t even have to provide a reason for missing the objective. What s even more curious, however, is their interpretation of response : the term stems from the time when operators would log calls and technicians then processed the queue. Nowadays, Lenovo prides itself with skilled technicians resolving more than 30% of all problems already on the phone , so the technicians log the calls and then immediately respond to them. According to Lenovo, it is thus completely acceptable and within the bounds of the contract if the phone technician logs a call on Thursday (and thus responds to it righ away), an the on-site technician calls to arrange for a visit on the following Tuesday, and the first available slot would be Friday 6 business days after the call was logged. I could not find any relevant information about this on their website, nor can you retrieve the agreement which you had to accept as part of the warranty registration later. Of course, I am not surprised by any of this. The world out there seems to be full of asymmetric arrangements. I just wonder why we put up with them. I certainly don t, and that s why Lenovo is getting an angry letter from me with a reference to this blog post. PS: in fairness, I should point out that I have been please by their support before, but have also questioned it in the past. NP: Contriva: Tell Me When