Last night, Sarah and I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I quite enjoyed it. It's been years since I've seen either the animated version (I think I've seen that at least twice, and I can't believe it was from 1979, that makes me feel so old) or the BBC TV mini-series (I think I saw that once), or read the books, so I couldn't remember the story very well at all, so it was great having a two hour long memory jog. It seemed very faithful to my memory of the original story. Acting-wise, I thought the actors that played Edmund and Lucy did a particularly good job. I was initially a bit down on the choice of making Queen Jadice/The White Witch so young, but that turned out pretty good nonetheless. The voice of Aslan was a good pick. My main beef was that the violence was too sanitised. I feel strange saying that, but up until the big battle scene, they went out of their way to make it all pretty tame and bloodless. There were also a couple of scenes that were very obviously shot in front of a blue or green screen. This movie had the potential to be Lord of the Rings material, but I think it fell down a bit, only on a few small things. The Lord of the Rings was as violent as it needed to be, without going into Day of the Dead territory, for example. Very good, but not great. I hope they do the rest of the books though. Oh, and I really think all these people who are trying to draw all these Biblical connections are really reaching.

I've still been extremely busy. Unlike my last fairly incoherent brain dump, this time I've been keeping notes on the things I wanted to write about, so hopefully I won't forget things. Here we go...

Squirrels

Squirrels are absolutely everywhere. They're very fast and very cute. They're kind of like possums, except diurnal. They run up trees with ease, and leap from tree to tree. It's quite cool to watch them. The damn things don't stand still long enough to be photographed (properly), and they don't let you get too close without scampering up a tree or running off. I'm told they're the number one carrier of rabies, so I shouldn't be trying to get too close anyway.

Sales tax

Definitely one of the more annoying aspects of consumer life is the fact that prices quoted are not inclusive of sales tax. This means you always need to part with more cash than you expect. Furthermore, there are some places (some fast-food outlets) that do quote the prices inclusive of tax, so it's really hard to know what you're in for.

Speed limits

I find speed limit signs to be either infrequent or harder to notice, or a combination of both. They're just a black text on white background sign. I'm used to them having the red circle. That said, no one seems to drive at the speed limit anyway.

Ethnicity

Canberra's a very white town compared to say Sydney, but I reckon at least the San Jose area of California blows the socks off what I've seen of Sydney for multiculturalism. You really notice it over here. I've been at the mall in Milpitas, and you can play "spot the white European" (a variation of "spot the Caucasian").

Different responses to thankyou

I think the fairly standard response to saying thanks that I'm used to is "You're welcome". Over here, you get "mm hmm" a lot, which is just strange.

Fractions vs decimal

They love their fractions. Petrol gets quoted at 221⁹/₁₀, which took me a while to realise was 221.9 cents per gallon

Alcoholic beverage labelling

Australia has the concept of a "standard drink". I remember as a kid the advertising campaign "rethink your third drink" (or for women, "rethink your second drink"). The idea being that men could drink two standard drinks in the first hour, and then one standard drink every hour after that, and be at 0.05% blood alcohol, which is the legal limit for Australia. And every bottled alcoholic drink is labelled with how many standard drinks it is. An average beer is about 1.2 standard drinks for example. No such labelling over here. You get the percentage of alcohol per volume, and that is it, which makes self-regulating very difficult. The limit is apparently 0.08%, but I don't think I want to be driving around on the wrong side of the road at that level (or any level really).

Christmas vs "Holidays"

Everyone and every piece of advertising goes on about the "Holidays". Retail people are always wishing us "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". I think this is because there's a large chunk of people who don't necessarily celebrate Christmas.

Tipping

I haven't really come across tipping in everyday life as much as I'd expected, but when I think about it a bit, I'm at work most of the time, so that's probably why. The general rule seems to be to tip "double the tax", so for a bill at a restaurant, or where you get personal service, such as a haircut, you tip. But you don't tip at McDonald's, nor Subway (where I would have expected you would).

That's about all my current observations on living over here. Tomorrow we get our townhouse in Central Park. Our air-freight was finally delivered today. (What was supposed to take about 8 days took 4 weeks). Not sure when we can expect our sea freight at this stage. We bought a couple of mountain bikes last weekend, and if the weather is okay tomorrow, we'll pick them up and ride them home. We've found a really nice off road (as in not shared with cars) bike path, which runs close to home all the way to work. I'm really keen to roller blade to work if it's feasible, and also to cycle in. I'm a bit disappointed to discover after we've been accepted for the place that we're right on top of a toxic waste dump (or something like that). If I grow a second head, you'll know why. The other piece of exciting news is that the bank sent me a debit card, when they'd previously told me they wouldn't until I had a Social Security number (still no sign if that yet). This thing (the debit card) is freaking weird. It's Mastercard branded, and in some places you use it like you'd use a debit card for EFTPOS back home. You swipe, enter your PIN and that's it. In other cases, you swipe and sign a bit of paper like a credit card transaction. In either case, money is sucked out of our checking account. The scary thing is that no one seems to check signatures in this country, and a lot of places will accept credit card payments electronically (like petrol stations where you just swipe the card at the bowser and enter the ZIP code of your billing address and that's it). Oh, and I can use this thing like a credit card for Internet purchases. What bothers me is that the level of authentication is so low, but it's sucking actual money out of our checking account, so with all the credit card fraud around, it's relatively trivial to draw actual money out of a bank account, as opposed to using someone's credit. That said, I just got the card today, and since then, it's made shopping so much easier. It's amazing how many places won't accept a foreign credit card, and I was a big user of EFTPOS back home, and this ability to use a debit card like a credit card means I can essentially continue in that habit. I wasn't looking forward to carrying lots of cash or having to use cheques.

I've been so busy, I haven't had time to blog. Rather than putting it off any longer, I'll just dump what I can remember. Last Wednesday, Sarah arrived after her holiday in Singapore, and from all accounts, had a great time. Photos as well. Sticking with the whirlwind theme, the next day, we had a "building warming" party at work for the new building we'd moved into the week before Michael and I started. The next night we had the work Christmas party, which blew the socks off any work Christmas party I'd ever been to before, and then on Saturday night we went to a party in San Francisco that we'd been invited to. On a life in general front, I'm still waiting for a Social Security number. The lack of one makes life a bit difficult for a lot of things. It also turns out that Sarah's work permit will take about 90 days to approve, so she's going to be a lady of leisure for the next few months. I've finally been issued with a work mobile phone (or "cell phone" as they call them), and so can stop roaming and paying through the nose for the privilege. We've found somewhere to live. We take possession of a 2 bedroom townhouse (split-level) in a complex in Mountain View that is 3 miles from work on the 18th. The rent is $1725 a month, which is a bit better than we were expecting. The complex we're renting in does have shared laundries, which we'd not too keen on before getting over here, but they're quite modern and secure, and there's a laundry block close to our townhouse, so hopefully it won't be too bad. The whole place had been renovated about 5 years ago, so it's all in good condition. We could have rented a 3 bedroom apartment (single level) in the same complex for about $125 a month more, but we're trying to actually make some money while we're over here... Driving on the other side of the road becomes fairly "normal" after about a week of doing it regularly. Sarah's adapted fine. Lane placement is the hardest thing, because your body's used to being in a certain spot on the road, and it's all different sitting on the other side of the car. We've managed to open a rudimentary bank account, even with my lack of Social Security number. Unfortunately I can't get paid until I have an SSN. Upside of that is that if it doesn't happen until next year, I presumably won't have to worry about income tax for this US financial year. Downside is kind of obvious... By far one of the stranger things of everyday life here is the lighting situation in the average residence. Lamps are all the rage, to the point that light switches don't exist in some rooms (notably bedrooms). Take where we're currently living for example. There's a light switch at the bottom of the stairs, there's one at the top. There's a bank of four in the living room, two of which control lights in the kitchen, and one the hallway. The last one controls a lamp in the corner of the living room, which is connected to a power socket (or power point as we'd call it). The bedroom with the attached bathroom (en suite) has two bedside lamps, and that is the sole source of light. The bathroom attached has light switches, and the walk-in robe has a light switch. It's so weird. So walking into a darkened bedroom involves walking all the way in, and fumbling around with a lamp. It's often easier to turn on the light in the wardrobe so you can see what you're doing first. I can't think of any reason for it, except tradition. It's not like they're avoiding wiring the walls or the ceiling, because it's done partially already. The bedroom has a ceiling fan, but where in Australia, there'd be a knob on the wall near the light switch to control it, it has a little chain you yank on. To add to the strangeness, there are two switches on the wall, one of which seems to allow you to turn off the ceiling fan if it's already been switched on by pulling the chain. The townhouse we're renting has a similar lamp dependency, so we're going to be making a trip to Ikea for some lamps it would seem. That's about everything I can recollect right now... Oh, I should point out that I'm really loving it over here.

Today I upgraded daedalus to 2.6.14. I had to backport yaird to stable, which wasn't a big deal. It's available here if you're interested. The kernel package for 2.6.14 from unstable worked fine otherwise. I had two motivations behind upgrading - inotify and another look to see if the situation with IPMI had changed. Well inotify just works, and is the bomb. I'm going to have lots of fun with it. IPMI, on the other hand is still broken, which makes me sad. As I've previously pointed out by way of example, LAN access to the base-board management controller via IPMI is impossible after Linux shuts down the interface. It's supposed to work, but the way Linux does it seems to stop it from working. I'd read that the problem was resolved in 2.6.12, and so dutifully tested it out on daedalus to my detriment. I also tested it on 2.6.14, but again, had the same problem (I remembered to schedule a deferred reboot this time). So IPMI with a box running Linux is all good as long as the box is actually running. I suspect if the box panicked and/or hung itself, it'd also be useful for rebooting it, but if you shut the box down and remove power, IPMI won't allow you to turn it back on again.

Why is it that people use PHP?! Why do people entrust data to this nasty language? Why run mediawiki, for example? MoinMoin is much nicer. PHP is a nasty language, it's non-thread-safe, it's got awful syntax, it's OO design is awful, and debugging it is a small nightmare. I suggest to the world that python is a much nicer language.

People that claim things in blog posts because they *think* they are right, when even the *SIMPLEST* visit to the softwares website tells you otherwise... As an example to this... Sionide says that XMMS is a port of WinAmp, you can *clearly* see from the XMMS Website that this is *not* the case, the about page clearly states """It was modeled after winamp from the Windows operating system. XMMS is not a port of Winamp but was written from scratch by Mikael and Peter Alm.""" /me slaps Sionide about the face a bit. PLEASE DO AT LEAST A TINY BIT OF RESEARCH, DAMMIT. *sigh*

Rar. Beware. I've now got the M&S USB missile launcher working under Linux. I hate libusb, it's very badly documented and seems to assume you know the USB spec inside out. Anyway, usblauncher-0.0.1.tar.gz does the appropriate magic (if crudely) and includes a basic GTK2 Perl program to control it. Ian Jeffrey has also produced some code that works in much the same way, but it's only a command line example and I couldn't see a license that allowed redistribution attached to it. It looks like he went about things in much the same way as I did though.

Every now and then I set a day for myself to bring my big old desktop CPU to an internet cafe to update my Debian and Ubuntu installations, dchroots and pbuilders, because I only have a dialup connection at home (and of all things, from a softmodem.) It became such a habit that I decided to make the most of it, and use the time it takes for me to go and update to go around every internet cafe in town and see how people would react to my GNU OS Today was one such day. I went to one particular internet cafe in front of Daet Elementary School this afternoon, and with my CPU I proceeded to try to get it working on their local network and feed off its Internet connection. Unfortunately for me, however, I went there just in time for their renovation of their place, which involved moving the individual computer nodes out of place and causing some confusion, all in the name of installing some type of cafe management software (aka a Sub7-type BB tool) which ultimately caused them to use static IPs for each node on the network–waah, no DHCP! Had this been a year ago, this might have been a big problem; but now, I run the excellent pdnsd, the proxy DNS server, in conjunction with resolvconf and squid. I originally intended this amazing duo to work so that I was able to serve a nameserver 127.0.0.1 for each of my dchroots, saving me from copying my main /etc/resolv.conf to each dchroot; but now, I have surprised myself again with this, since pdnsd cached just about enough DNS entries for me to be able to just the most-frequently used parts of the Web (Google, FreeNode, etc.) It took me a while before getting down and dirty with /etc/pdnsd.conf and pasting the example “root-servers” in /usr/share/doc/pdnsd/examples/pdnsd.conf , and allowing myself full Internet access without DHCP. Now, I got my pbuilders updated, but not the dchroots; I only got a max of 7 kilobytes per second of download compared to the usual 25, Sigh… you just can’t have too much of everything…

Thanks to Grant, I discovered a couple of interesting blog posts about how to become an early riser, and about polyphasic sleep. I'm certainly interested in becoming an early riser. I'm not naturally a morning person, but for a few years I managed to force myself into it, but then I lapsed back into being a night-owl sleep-in type person. At the moment, when the weather permits, I'm trying to cycle to work with enough time to eat breakfast there and be operational at my desk by about 8:30am. It's just as fine to start at 10am, but I'd rather not get into that habit, and just treat it as a bit of a splurge from time to time. This of course means I can't stuff around in the morning, and ideally I need to leave the house by about 7:45am, with appropriate flow-on affects on when I wake up and get out of bed. It certainly takes a lot of self-discipline to get out of bed when the alarm goes off. At the moment, I tend to opt for two alarms. One to wake me up and get snoozed a lot, and one to actually get out of bed. If I was more disciplined about getting out of bed, I could just have the one alarm go off, and get extra sleep. The extra waking hours gained by polyphasic sleep are tempting also, but I think it's altogether too disruptive to try at the moment. An interesting concept nonetheless. So once we're a little bit more settled, I'll hopefully become more of a morning person again. I think the key is consistency. Sleeping in on weekends just buggers everything up, which is a shame. I quite like my weekend sleep-ins. Downside is you spend half your weekend asleep, when you could be out exploring a fabulous new foreign country, for example...

According to Mark Shuttleworth:

The DCC distro doesn't use the Debian kernel, and it modifies key pieces of the infrastructure like the linking system and core system libraries. So it's not really Debian at heart.

According to the DCC 3.0 release notes:

5 [packages] are the LSB 3.0 compatibility environment, which adds LSB 3.0 compliance in such a way that the sarge glibc and pam packages don't need to be modified

It took me a long time to figure out how to read these two statements in a way that wasn't thuroughly contradictory. The DCC dropps in ld-lsb.so linker in for LSB binaries and uses that to make them link to some modified libraries somewhere outside the normal link paths, but that's more like the distro having two hearts (one of which is used only to circulate blood through the very limited set of available LSB binaries) than not being Debian at heart.

---

Mark again:

There is now discussion of modifying many, many more packages, for example to use the Ubuntu X.org packages rather than the Sarge XFree86 packages.

DCC again:

25 [packages] are a backport of X.org from etch.

So if they're using Debian's X.org already, why would they be planning to go to Ubuntu's?

---

Mark:

The DCC distro doesn't use the Debian kernel, and it modifies key pieces of the infrastructure like the linking system and core system libraries. So it's not really Debian at heart.

Mark again:

The DCC kernel and Ubuntu kernel will be very similar if not identical in future DCC releases, and I expect that collaboration will spread to other parts of the system such as X, ACPI etc.

If you think about it, this is in a sense the strangest pairing of statements of all...

Four years ago I started translating the Mozilla suite into Galician, and from that point on I managed to keep the translation completely up-to-date, even being one of the fastest ones to create translations (when Mozilla 1.0 was released, three translations for it were released at the same time: Chinese, Asturian and Galician), and later expanding my efforts into Firefox and Thunderbird. However, after two years, things started to go wrong: support for translations was starting to fail without warning, there were some undocumented changes to the language pack format and there was a movement to integrate translations officially into the Mozilla organization that would make it extremely inconvenient for me to go on working in Mozilla, so in July 2004 I resigned from the effort and stopped updating the translations. Well, it was not exactly a thing of “oh, now it is not worth the effort", but “those SOBs are taking all my past hard work down the crapper and they were supposed to stop updating the suite so why are they releasing a fucking new version?". And also “I’m here translating this shit and nobody appreciates it so fuck it all” Much angst and stuff, and I not only stopped with Mozilla: I stopped translating pretty much anything else and almost vowed not to translate again. And I made the T-shirt and all (some of you saw it in DebConf 5). During the Christmas break I didn’t have much to do, and it had been very long since I had last programmed for pleasure, so I decided to create a set of scripts for converting Mozilla XPI language packs into a huge PO file and back (days later I was told about translation-tools, but I was in the mood to hack and it worked with a lot of small PO files, which I didn’t want). Then, I imported my old Firefox 0.8 translation, created a POT for 1.0.7 and updated the translation. I may well start making Galician Firefox translations again – but unofficially. There’s already an official Galician team, which intended to start after my resignation but is, apparently, stuck in bureaucratland. Also, some horror stories I’ve heard about make me want not to work officially with Mozilla. Plus, some of the things that made me angry back in the days are still there. For example, the documents about translating Mozilla all newbies are referred to are badly outdated. And there are no new, unified documents. But I intend to take it easy. I will not invest emotionally on this again, because I don’t want to go back to spending a couple of months playing Frozen Bubble while I think bad thoughts about Mozilla developers. Anyway, I’m moderately happy now. I’ve hacked on my own, for pleasure, for the first time in months; I achieved a goal and I’m slowly regaining my motivation to do other stuff. I hope. That was all.

... and so on. Today's example: For each File. Yes, you know what it does already. But that would make for a very short blog post, and that is so not my thing, so I'll quote the short description of the project:

For each File lets you run an arbitrary set of GNU BASH commands upon an arbitrary set of objects. It can be used to perform repetitive tasks such as renaming, extracting, moving, and manipulating a large number of files.

Yes, dear friends, someone has sat down and written a program (and associated manual) to implement a bash for loop (and possibly a bit of find as well). Since it's all written in bash, it's not as though the author of the program was incapable of working out how to write for i in /path/*; do [...]; done, either. I'm not quite sure which part amused me the most. Was it the ever-optimistic -devel and -user mailing lists, completely devoid of archived material? How about the user manual -- 40% of which was the licence text? Perhaps it was the fact that this not just a bash for loop -- it's a fully internationalizationable bash for loop. I know one thing, though -- with all of the energy put into this program (and it's been going for several years now, apparently) the author could have created the ultimate, never to be surpassed manual for the bash for keyword, which would have been significantly more flexible, and certainly less interesting to poke fun at. Addendum: the whole site that FeF is hosted on is accessable only via SSL with a self-signed certificate -- except for the download page, which is HTTP only. So you "know" that the non-existent list archives are really what they say they are (at least as long as you trust "Gna!" as a certificate authority, as I'm sure we all do), but the actual source code is hosted who-knows-where, with no useful assurances as to provenance whatsoever.

Now here’s the thing I’m supposed to write It took me quite some time since I was too busy sleeping Looking back at 2005:

• January :

• I started this blog (on the 22nd)
• Submitted my UPOU application

February :

• I got into using planner-el
• Tried my hand at managing GtkLP for Debian in Subversion
• Got to know more about BitTorrent as well
• Got a Gmail account
• Successfully set up Linux-2.6 on St. John’s Debian Woody box malinao
• Got to know Clair via this very blog

March :

• I met Ubuntu Warty, Clair, and Mario too after my UPOU admission exam
• Moved to Emacs 22
• Delved into Lisp while coding an MP3 playback script on Warty
• more PlannerWiki goodness

April :

• More Lisp programming
• Video card replacement
• Attending my first PLUG Technical Seminar

May :

• The usual summer routine: teach swimming and maths

June :

• Back to school
• Tried blogging under Emacs PlannerMode, in which I have inadvertently spammed Planet Debian and Pinoy Tech Scene, earning the ire of Mako
• Attended the first meeting for Software Freedom Day with Sacha, Clair, and Rick. Also met Jerome for the first time

July :

• Sacha (left for Toronto on the 15th)
• Went back to WordPress

August :

• ITA on ecb
• Preparing the LinuxWorld conference
• Trying out Arch
• Released a new GtkLP for Debian

September :

• New ecb package (which to this day hasn’t been uploaded yet, looking for sponsors

• Software Freedom Day on the 10th!!! Met Donnie too
• LinuxWorld at Dusit!!!
• MidTerms!!!
• Started contributing to Ubuntu

October :

• Finals!!! (yeah, just after midterms
• NatSci finals in Naga City, looking for Linux users too
• Became a Ubuntu Member

November :

• Became a MOTU

December :

• Glimmer of hope
• Another GtkLP release
• Lost cellphone
• Meeting Ealden for the first time at the Ubuntu-PH EyeBall
• Thankful for $DEITY letting me live another year

Things to I want to do this 2006:

• More Debian and Ubuntu work
• Learn some more programming languages
• Try other VCSs/RCSs
• Really finish school
• Catch up with my RL

Things to look out for:

• Ubuntu AsiaBusinessTour/Philippines
• PLUG’s very own hacker conference/camp
• Bicol Open Source Forum (and perhaps Bicol’s very own LUG

Rock on, 2006!

First of all, thank you DebConf5 organizers! You guys did a fantastic job in providing the opportunity for both DDs and non-DDs alike to meet face-to-face with each other. Debian definitely is alive and kicking! So it is with great disappointment to see articles like this (”No Way For Linux To Replace Proprietary Software”) when I came back to Hong Kong. It’s an op-ed piece in a local newspaper by Charles Peter Mok, and begins by attacking last week’s Evans Data report for lacking objective data, therefore the conclusion reached (OSS adoption is speeding up) is too far-fetched. This is followed by (translation to English mine):

In fact, due to their love of open source systems (sic), open source supporters often are shallow when it comes to analysis and reaching conclusions, and confirming their subjective wants become their priority; of course, open source critics, like the Microsoft Windows camp and Sun Micro’s Unix camp, sometimes do the same thing.

Maybe he takes the /. crowd too seriously? Anyway, he then essentially translates the month-old SG Cowen report as an example of an objective argument… actually the translation is rather dubious. For example, the report only said “Linux seems to be hitting a limit” (via BusinessWeek); he translated that as “Linux’s development has reached the stage where it’s facing piling limitations”. What a nice and objective extrapolation! Moving on, he uses the report to reach the conclusion that (again translations mine):

… whether Linux will still enjoy considerable growth, or the red light has been lit, is at the moment too early to say. Enterprise and personal users who use proprietary software such as Windows are still the majority.

Thanks for stating the obvious, Charles. So where’s the objective argument that supports the title of the article?

During the last two months, I taught an elective course on introductory functional programming. The nominal target group was third-year information technology undergrads, but in practice the student body consisted of everything from second-years to almost-done masters students. All had taken at least a year’s worth of general programming courses (taught in Java most recently, earlier in C++), a full semester’s worth of data structures, a half-semester of automata and grammar theory and some mathematics. I have enough teaching experience (been teaching two courses a year since 2002) to know my faults. My biggest fault is that I routinely underestimate the difficulty and laboriousness of tasks I set for my students. My second biggest fault is that if I am not careful, I can easily revert to reciting reference material, that is theoretical definitions, instead of giving a tutorial. I am better at avoiding the latter fault than the former, although when I have little time to prepare, the latter fault will, too, manifest itself. Knowing these faults, I tried to plan this course so that there would not be such trouble. Reading Baen books, I have learned a military saying: Battle plans never survive contact with the enemy. I found myself in a similar situation: my course plan did not survive contact with the actual teaching situation. The broad outlines of what I was going to teach held mostly. Other than that, it ended up being a very different course than I had originally envisioned. I started by giving a crash course on Haskell IO: how to write simple text-line-based interaction in Haskell. The idea was to introduce early the part of Haskell that many people think is hard but is actually quite easy, by explicitly drawing on the students’ imperative programming background. After IO, I ended up trying to give the students a broad, working knowledge of pure functional programming in Haskell, starting with first-order list processing and further discussing topics like parsing, persistent data structures, higher-order list processing, et cetera. I found that it was hard to give any of the topics proper room time-wise, as the basic concepts of functional programming are somewhat circularly related. At this time, the students complained that the course is hard, and many dropped out. They shouldn’t have; we had covered the main topics of the course in half the time. I could then use the rest of the time to go over the topics again from a different point of view, and give them time and tools to integrate it all to their own internal know-how databases. In the latter part of the course, on the surface we discussed Haskell metacircularly, but that was mainly a tool to reinforce the stuff done earlier in the course. Of course, my exercises were a little on the harder side. I ended up lowering official expectations about how much of the exercises the students were expected to solve, and that seems to have helped. Of the 20 people who took the first exam, 18 passed. The advanced course starts in a week or two.

Abridged to remove irrelevant conversation…

< Czesiu> Btw, udev recommends at least 2.6.12 kernel, which is not shipped
in Debian.
< Md> so far the upgrade procedure is “upgrade your kernel, reboot,
upgrade udev”
< Md> Czesiu: yeah, nobody had told me this yet, you know?
< dilinger> you can either go the lvm route, and make up some kernel APIs to
match again, or you can go the ndiswrapper route and make some incredibly
strict dependencies so that people are sure to upgrade kernels and udev
in parallel.  both solutions suck.
< Czesiu> Md: you sound quite sarcastic :)
< wildfire> why not just have a udev-compat; which conflicts which newer
kernels; and make udev conflict with older ones
< Md> dilinger: a future udev version will refuse to install on anything
older than 2.6.12, so this will reduce the potential for brokeness
< Md> the /dev/input/mice problem has been unexpected, if it cannot be fixed
I will make the next package require 2.6.12
< dilinger> the best solution, imo, is to have udev 0.5x and 0.62 allowed
to be installed in parallel, and have a wrapper script that determines which
to use when it’s run
< wildfire> hmm, dilinger, that does sound pretty clean
< Md> dilinger: the configuration syntax is subtly different too. this is
not really possible
< Md> wildfire: yes, until you start looking at how to implement it 
< dilinger> Md: sure it is; /etc/udev05x for the old version or something
< dilinger> /etc/udev for the new version
< wildfire> md, but that’s someone else problem ;-)
< Md> dilinger: keeping them in sync is hell
< dilinger> no kidding, but that’s what maintaining stuff like this requires
< Md> so far, it appears to be too much complex to be justified
< Md> if upgrades will happen to be more complex than we currently know then
I will reconsider this
< dilinger> are you kidding?  i think the number of people whose systems
are breaking is pretty good justification
< Md> dilinger: only because the package currently is not refusing to run
on older kernels
< idnar> Md: but if the package fails to run, isn’t that likely to cause
breakage too, since your /dev won’t look like it normally does?
< Md> idnar: it will refuse to be installed or upgraded, like it’s currently
happening if you are using a kernel < 2.6.8
< dilinger> Md: what about doing something insane w/ devfs/
< dilinger> and devfsd
< Md> dilinger: ?
< idnar> Md: ah
< dilinger> depend upon devfsd, if the kernel is older than 2.6.12, have it
mount devfs over /dev and run devfsd instead of runing udev
< Md> different configuration syntax, different semantics, no HAL/hotplug
support. basically, I can’t see why you could think about this
< dilinger> because it would allow things to *work*
< dilinger> even if it doesn’t have the same config syntax
< dilinger> it could spit out a big warning upon startup
< idnar> suddenly switching the user to devfs would likely cause all sorts
of unknown breakage
< Md> if the kernel is older than 2.6.12 people will not be able to install
a newer udev, so this is not relevant
< Md> please try to look at the whole picture
< dilinger> people are going to want to reboot into older kernels and have
their /dev in a sane state
< dilinger> the running kernel isn’t the only one they may be using
< Clint> yeah, i’m not using the running kernel
< Md> dilinger: then udev will automatically disable itself. the current
experience shows that users are not bothered by this
< dilinger> Clint: quiet over there :P
< dilinger> Md: the user experiences around here don’t seem to match what
you’re saying, otherwise i wouldn’t even be mentioning it
< Md> again, this is not how future versions will work
< dilinger> let me put it another way
< dilinger> it would be a very good idea to future proof udev against such
incompatabilities now
< Md> tell greg k-h, now me :-)
< dilinger> because i’m sure things will break again
< Md> anyway, you persuaded me. I will upload right now an updated package
which refuses to be installed with old kernels
< Md>   * Kernels older than 2.6.12 are not supported anymore.
< Md>     If detected, the package will refuse to be installed.
< Md>     If the running kernel is downgraded after the package has been
< Md>     installed udev will disable itself at boot time.
< Sesse> Md: whoa
< joshk> that’s ridiculously stupid if you as me
< Md> this is what was going to happen in a few releases anyway
< Clint> joshk: coredump immediately
< Md> BTW, I suggest that concerned people read this before continuing
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=12236847
< joshk> breaking support for anything but the very latest kernel (which
isn’t even in debian yet!) is dumb. you break everyone’s desktop because
hal stops working
< joshk> (one particular example)
< Md> joshk: people can keep the old udev until the upgrade, nothing breaks
< Sesse> Md: *g*
< joshk> don’t grin at Md, it makes him think we’re in agreement

A few days ago, I blogged about booting/running the Quantian iso via VMware Player, a 'free as in beer' virtualization tool. Over the last few days, I have experimented a little more, perused the VMware Player Forum and googled a bit. It turns out that you can employ the 'free as in speech' virtualization tool qemu (using version 0.7.2 from Debian unstable is fine, looks like a newer 0.8.0 it out upstream) to create a virtual disk image in vmdk format suitable for VMware. For example, the command

qemu-img create -f vmdk Quantian.vmdk 512M

creates a 512mb file of the given name in the in required vmdb format. By the way, qemu is smart and creates a much smaller file -- an 'empty' 512mb partition occupies only 12mb. It is then only a matter of updating the previously posted Quantian.vmx file to add the 'new disk'. I.e. instead of defining just one ide device, we now use two as per

# CDROM Info
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.fileName = "quantian_0.7.9.1.iso"
ide0:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

# edd 31 Dec 2005 adding a virtual disk file
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.filename = "Quantian.vmdk"
ide1:0.redo = ""
ide1:0.deviceType = "ata-hardDisk"

On the next reboot, Quantian will display a disk symbol for hdc. It it then a matter of starting a root shell in Quantian, running cfdisk or fdisk to partition the new "empty" disk drive and to add a /dev/hdc1 partition (or more), running mke2fs -j dev/hdc1 to add a filesystem --- and on a subsequent reboot, the disk is ready for use. It should thus be possible to create a suitable disk file of, say, ten or so gigabytes (given that Quantian expands to around seven gigs), create a filesystem and then run knx2hd to install Quantian onto the new virtual disk, make the disk bootable and, presto!, have a virtual instance of Quantian on stateful read/write media. While my tests have been limited to using a Linux host, this procedure should work just the same way in Windows. Oh, and as it's still early afternoon here: Best wishes for 2006 to everyone!

I've implemented the real ksh for hackers.It's a shell that interprets C code line-by-line, and runs each line of code in kernel mode(by building modules with that line on the fly and doing an insmod/rmmod).It's pretty slow, and doesn't feel too interactive, but here it goes.I'm sure most people hacking on the kernel have this kind of setup already.Here is the full text (binfmtc-style).An example transcript follows:

The following is a repost from my old blog, originally written one year ago. As I start to write this, it’s the last minute of my country’s 87th birthday (the Finnish Independence Day). It got me thinking about nation-states and independence and whatnot. And I came to a threefold conclusion: First, there is some value in independence. Getting rid of the status of a Grand Duchy in personal union with Russia was certainly a good step for Finland, in light of the rough road the Russians themselves have since travelled. For the same reason, the two wars Finland fought against the USSR were quite worthwhile. Similarly, if Finland were to be threatened by a neighbour again, armed defense would certainly be justifiable. Second, there is no intrinsic value in independence. If a humanly life (including freedom and local government) can be guaranteed even if there is no Finnish state in itself, I see no reason to hold on to the old-fashioned concept of a nation state. Third, I am in favour, as a long-term goal, of a world government. Of course, a single government becomes a single point of failure in case of a coup, for example, but if the global state is arranged properly, the danger of a successful coup is minimal. On the other hand, a world government is in far better position to institute necessary policies to combat the global problems of poverty, climate change and other such issues than the current system of competing and cooperating nation-states. In the current system, the big issues are easily put aside in name of local opportunism. Finland is by no means immune to that problem. The great crises of the 20th Century were its devastating wars. Fortunately, we have overcome them to a sufficient degree. The great crisis of the 21st Century is not terrorism – though it is a symptom. The great crisis is caused by the limits of growth, and we are already feeling quite concretely the nearness of those limits. If something is not done, our current civilization will crash spectacularly. The human race will probably survive – but do we really want to live through another Dark Age? Long Live the Earth!