A few speakers at DebConf8 used gobby during their talks to collate ideas without breaking the flow of the session.
I've just come back from the Emdebian meeting in Extremadura (of which more later) where we also used Gobby - FAI used it too. Once the network setup was working, it was simply a case of clicking Create Session in gobby on my laptop and everyone else clicking Join Session, entering the IP of my laptop (only accessible locally) and choosing a colour.
Gobby is real-time, currently plain-text only but clearly indicates how sections have been edited and has an integrated IRC box for each session. At the end of the meeting, every gobby user has a copy of every document they opened in every session they joined. updated to the moment they quit the session.
Based on using gobby in events like this, I'd strongly recommend that someone at each worksession-type meeting starts a gobby session and maintains that session for the duration of the meeting.
Gobby even does syntax highlighting - depending on how many people join and the colours they choose, this might become difficult so it can be turned off too.
There are only a few minor issues:

1. The colour bar warning box isn't particularly intuitive - you need to click on what looks like a dimmed progress bar to select a unique colour for yourself.


2. I initially thought that Gobby had no authentication - in a local meeting, anyone who can connect to the specified IP address is able to edit the document. Since then, I've noticed it does support password authentication and there is mention of fully encrypted connections so it may be possible to use it over public networks.


3. According to Wikipedia, there is a gobby server that allows non-GNU/Linux clients to run gobby and join any gobby session - I didn't explore this and the Debian package doesn't mention anything about a server option or mixed-OS support.
   
   • Update - the server is called Sobby and is in Debian.
   
   


4. The right hand side of the window is a bit wasted - maybe some kind of sidebar would be handy, especially docking the userlist into the window so that edits can be identified more quickly.

A few years ago, Terah and I got to visit the beautifully-restored Kansas City Union Station. What a sight. A train station designed to hold 200,000 people, and saw over 200 trains pass through in its heyday. So many people had stories of traveling through Union Station, of arranging to meet someone under the station's iconic giant clock. Maybe they were meeting a husband or wife back from a long trip or fighting in a war, or maybe they were meeting a relative they hadn't seen for years. Walking through Union Station one quiet evening, you can almost hear all the activity still there. Taking the train there, walking in through Amtrak's small boarding area, then stepping out into the dazzling expanse of the station is quite the experience too. It wasn't just a static relic; it was a true piece of history that we can feel.

Decades ago, one of the busiest airports in the country was in Wichita, Kansas. At its peak, the Wichita Municipal Airport saw a flight land or take off every 90 seconds. Its beautiful art deco terminal saw off many an excited traveler. From the Wichita Municipal Airport, you could see buildings owned by Boeing, could drive a minute or two and see Cessna, and other major aircraft manufacturers were also in Wichita. The airport saw many cutting-edge flights, perhaps thanks in part to this. Movie stars were known to fly through Wichita frequently. And Wichita was part of one of the first cross-country air travel routes, New York to Los Angeles, which then took "only" 48 hours. Due to lack of radios and lighted runways, people would fly during the day and ride onboard a train at night to minimize travel time.

Due to an incredible fluke of history, the Wichita Municipal Airport terminal building and control tower still stand. I've never been in an airport that still feels like the 1940s. Other great airports of the era have continued to expand, grow, and generally be replaced as demands for jet service rendered them obsolete and unusable for air service.

You can walk into the building and stand on the main floor lobby (see photos) where people once waited to catch their flight. You can walk down the single departure gate to the tarmac. Obviously we were witnessing a different era -- one in which planes carried only a few passengers each, not the hundreds that they carry today. Three to five planes would line up, and you would simply walk to yours and walk on up and into it. The control tower, a new addition in 1941, still has the high-powered red and green lights that were used to signal airplanes in the days before radio contact was common. The outside of the building has been beautifully restored, but the interior needs a lot of help (and funding) yet. You can still see some areas where the original decorative paintings and tile work survive, but all too many areas have been stripped to the concrete. Outdoors, you can find everything from one of the few surviving B-29s, to some of the earliest small airplanes, to a FedEx jet transport and other quite large planes.

Up in the control tower, they have a radio tuned to air traffic control frequencies. You can hear aircraft being routed to various Wichita airports. On the counter sit several photo albums. As you look down on the ground where historic airplanes sit, you see photos of airplanes lined up, ready to receive passengers. In this building, too, you can really feel the history.

Volunteers were all over. They were all eager to share about the building, the planes, everything they knew. One of the people working on the restoration of the B-29 saw us approaching, and excitedly asked, "Would you like a tour?" Of course!

Though you don't really see 1940s airports anymore, this situation was unique. In 1951, the United States Air Force announced plans to seize the airport and use it to establish an air force base in Wichita. They intended to do so within three weeks. Due to much legal wrangling, including a landmark court case in which the Air Force was forced to honor a contract it had signed with the City of Wichita, the Air Force couldn't quite kick everyone out until 1954, when a new airport in Wichita was completed.

Between 1954 and 1984, the building was an office used by the Air Force. It was abandoned between 1984 and 1991, when the City of Wichita purchased it for use as a museum.

Despite years of neglect, it still stands as a grand old airport. Standing in the airport today, you can see the sign for the Boeing Co. off in the distance, the runways in the other direction, and excited people scurrying about. In a way, it's the same scene that you would have seen 60 years ago -- though nobody was wearing a suit.

Two reasons:

1. 'foo FTBFS on m68k' is not RC. 'foo FTBFS on m68k because it segfaults during the build since it does bar and baz, which just happens to result in a segfault on m68k at startup but might randomly result in a segfault on every architecture, really' in most cases is.
2. It, well, is just fun to debug someone else's code. On m68k, it's easy to do that, too, if you know a bit of assembly language.

Today's (and last week's) bug: #497262. Xemacs21 segfaults at startup on m68k (and FTBFSes because of that), which is RC for m68k. Reason: confusion between a pointer and its value. In other words: the sanity check might succeed, or it might not, depending on your luck. In fact, the first time the code flows through this buggy path, it does not bomb. Once we do get through this bit, it's also very likely that regular error handling will catch it—the only reason why xemacs segfaults here is because we're still in initialization, and the error object in the lisp stuff hasn't been initialized yet, so we get a nice null pointer dereference... That alone isn't enough to make it RC everywhere, but it's good enough to make it important and fixable for the maintainer. Like I said, fun. Sorry for those of you who want to release Lenny ASAP, but I think I'll be making your life a bit harder :-> Next week's bug: a similar issue in emacs, or the build failure of ghc6 on m68k, depending on time and complexity.

There is a very interesting email that's been getting attention, written by a resident of Wasilla, AK, Sarah Palin's hometown. It covers the good and the bad about her, and is the first thing I've seen that gives real insight into her governing style. Among other things, it mentioned that she inherited a city with no debt and left it with over $22 million of debt. The Alaska budget has been growing at 10% a year since she took over, not shrinking. Palin also fired a lot of experienced city staff when she took over, and brought in her inexperienced cronies. And she fired the librarian after the librarian refused to ban books that Palin didn't like.

And she has a real chance of becoming president.

Scary stuff.

Oh, and Snopes verified the email as authentic.

For about eight years, I was a very happy WindowMaker user. It was very lightweight, aesthetically pleasing, and I had interiorized its behaviour and keybindings so much, I didn't feel I'd ever switch away. I periodically tried (forced myself even!) to use any of the other, more en vogue environments... Experimented using Gnome for a week, KDE for a week, XFCE for a week (so I would have enough time to learn their ways)... And always came back to my good, well-known wmaker.
In 2006, when we held DebConf6 in Mexico, I saw how other people worked with ion3. I fell immediately in love with it. Not because it is prettier, snappier or has nicer widgets than other window managers - but because it is enormously more usable. Quoting Tuomo Valkonen, the ion3 author,

Ion is not perfect and certainly not for everyone, but neither is any user interface. Usability is subjective.

Using a keyboard-oriented, tiling window manager represented -for the first time in 20 years (I had my first contact with a Macintosh in 1986)- a radical user interface change. For my way of working, I just don't need a desktop, I don't need having a background space or overlapping windows. What I need is a way to functionally organize the windows I have open at any given time, quickly switch between them (and not depending on the mouse, please!), maximizing screen space and all that. ion3 was godsent.
Now, in 2007 there was (yet another) huge flamefest. Valkonen basically does not want distributors distributing any version of ion3 that's not the latest, and introducing changes not approved by him - He basically demands ion to be non-free. So, it was moved to the non-free section of Debian where only Womble decided to keep giving it support. And, of course, by September 2007 Julien Danjou announced he had written another window manager: Awesome.
My main motivation for switching away from ion3 is that... I don't want to use non-free software. But I was very comfortable with ion3. It was only after I saw many other people using Awesome at DebConf8 I decided to bite the bullet and switch. It looked at least as comfortable as ion3.
But... Well, I cannot come up with better phrasing than what Joey said when he switched to Awesome, almost exactly a month ago. When changing between the mainstream window managers, the differences are mostly cosmetic. But with these really different window managers... I cannot but reproduce Joey's words:

I wish I had a good analogy to explain to my nontechnical readers what changing to a new window manager is about.
One way to think about it is that it's like driving a car down the road, and suddenly swapping the steering wheel and brakes out for a tiller and gear shifter. And having to downshift for braking until you learn that the brakes moved to the turn indicator lever. By trial and error.
But that's really only part of it. Another way to look at it is adopting a new philosophy. Or, in some cases a cult. (In some cases, with crazy cult leaders.) Whether they use Windows or a Mac, or Linux, most computer users are members of a big established religion, with some implicit assumptions, like "thy windows shall be overlapping, like papers on the desktop, and thou shalt move them with thy mouse".
So, changing to a new window manager is a process of being dumped into a different environment, where nothing works like you've come to expect, and trying to construct a mental model that you can use to make sense of it. But it's also a process of modifying that environment to behave the way you like.
And when done whole-heartedly, this doesn't just mean trying to make it like the environment you were used to before. It means trying to absorb the underlying philosopy of the window manager, and think up new ways of doing things, inspired by that philosopy, and modify the environment to allow doing those things.
So ideally, "I switched to a new window manager" doesn't mean "my screen has some different widgets on it now". It means "I'm looking at the screen with new eyes."

So, what's so different?
Besides learning some new keybindings (expected, of course), Awesome has several suggested layouts to help you organize your workflow, usually (although not always) consisting of a main area and a side area, tiled side by side (or one above the other, or several stranger ways). This sounds rigid, but it is incredibly comfortable - and I've only been an Awesome user for three days!
But what sets Awesome apart from basically anything else is the concept of tags. Whey you see an Awesome session, you recognize something similar to the very well known workspaces concept we have had in any Unix-like environment for many years, right? Well, but they are not workspaces. They are tags. What is the difference?
When I work with workspace, each of my windows can be in a different workspace. So in one, I'll have my mail-related stuff. In another one, I might be browsing. In another one, I have my development things, and I might be following some logfiles in yet another one.
Awesome allows you to use tags for categorization in much a more flexible way.
For example: I am mostly a web-oriented developer. I usually need four things when developing a system: A browser, Emacs, the log for my development server, and a console where I can peek and poke at my objects and interactions. Of course, cramming them all into the same screen makes no sense - It would be better to follow the good ol' desktop metaphore, and just switch the focus and raise the window, right?
In Awesome, I can have them all set to the maximum screen size - _and_ use the most common combinations as well. Each of the windows can be tagged to more than one workspace (and yes, this is immensely more flexible than the always visible hint on traditional WMs).
To begin with, I'll give each major process a tag to itself, to work full-screen. Emacs is on tag 1, my browser on tag 2. The log and the console share a terminal (i.e. via screen or terminator).
This console by itself is not too useful, so I'll set it to tag 4, and we will go back to it later.
So if I'm building a view or following online documentation, I will add tag 3 to both Emacs and the browser.
I'm also setting tag 4 to the browser - That allows me to use it next to my terminal, following the results of my website-clicking.
And, of course, tag 5 will be set to Emacs and to the console, so I can quickly check any quick API-related question that does not need the documentation or look at a newly written method.
By the way, have you noticed CapsLock is the most stupid key invented, ever? Ok, I gave a good use to it: It's called Mod4. Imagine it is just an extra Ctrl, Alt or Meta key.
So, Mod4-1 gives me Emacs. Mod4-2 gives me the browser. Mod4-3 gives Emacs+browser, Mod4-4 gives browser+console, and Mod4-5 gives Emacs+console. And, of course, the handy Mod4-0 gives me all of my open windows tiled side by side.
Even this is a pattern of being a newbie, I know - I could keep 4 and 5 free, and just tag several simultaneous tags to be active. How? Switch to tag 1 exclusively (Mod4-1), and activate tag2 as well (Ctrl-Mod4-2). There, I have Emacs and browser side by side. Want to get the console instead of the browser? Simple. Ctrl-Mod4-2 (toggle off tag 2), Ctrl-Mod4-3 (toggle on tag 3).
Anyway - As you can see, I am excited at finding a very new and nice tool to help me work better. Today I was playing a bit with the Awesome widgets, but that's something to be talked about later.
In Debian, we are at a crossing point: Awesome is just reaching ion3's popularity. And I'm adding my two main machines' votes to Awesome.
This is Awesome. Quoting (yes, one last quote) the official Awesome site, This gonna be LEGEN... wait for it... DARY!.

It's the X Development Summit in Edinburgh this week, so I've been hanging out with the graphics crowd. There hasn't been a huge amount of work done in the field of power management in graphics so far - Intel have framebuffer compression and there's the lvds reclocking patch I wrote (I've cleaned this up somewhat since then, but it probably wants some refactoring to avoid increasing CPU usage based on its use of damage for update notifications). That still leaves us with some fun things to look at, though.

The most obvious issue is the gpu clock. Intel's chipset implements clock gating, where unused sections of chip automatically unclock themselves. This is pleasingly transparent to the OS, and we get power savings without any complexity we have to care about. However, there's no way to control the core clock of the GPU - it's part of the northbridge and fiddling with the clocking of that would be likely to upset things. Nvidia and Radeon hardware is more interesting in this respect, since we can control the gpu clock independently of anything else. The problem is trying to do so in a reasonable way.

In an ideal universe, we can change these clock frequencies quickly and without any visual artifacts. That way it's possible to leave it in the lowest state and clock it up as load develops. There's a couple of problems with this - non ideal hardware, and the software in the first place. Jerome's been testing a little on Radeon and discovered that changing the memory clock through Atom results in visual corruption. It's conceivable that this is due to some memory transaction cycles getting corrupted as the clock gets changed. If we could ensure that the reclock happens during the vertical blank interval, that's something that could potentially be avoided (of course, then we have the entertainment of working out when the vertical blank interval actually is when you have a dual head output...). The other problem is that 3D software tends to consume as many resources as are available. Games will produce as many frames per second as possible. Demand-based clocking will simply ramp the gpu to full speed in that situation, which isn't necessarily what you want in the battery case (as the number of frames per second goes up, so does the cpu usage - even more power draw) but is probably pretty reasonable in the powered case.

Handwavy testing suggests that this can save a pretty significant amount of power, so it's something that I'm planning on working on. Further optimisations include things like making sure that we're not running any PLLs that aren't being used at the time (oscillators chew power), not powering up output ports when you're not outputting to them and enabling any hardware-level features that we're currently ignoring. And, ideally, doing all of this without causing the machine to hang on a regular basis.

While some people think that Googles new open source webbrowser Chrome is a great example of code reuse I think the opposite is true. He found at least 25 open source libraries used by the browser. So far this is not a problem but what is a problem is that it embeds all of them in the upstream source tarball instead of depending on the system-wide copies. I know that it might be problematic if people have to install 25 libraries on their own (they could provide static builds though) but for distributors this is just a nightmare if security issues pop-up in one of the used libraries (famous libraries who had issues in the past: webkit, libpng, libjpeg, libxml, ...).

In this case the distributors can't just fix the security issue in the shared library and all applications using it are fixed, no they also have to fix all the copies in software like Chrome. Same if you installed Chrome from source, if a security issue pops out in one of the embedded libs you have to go and install a new Chrome version. Google also needs to additionally maintain upstream and security fixes in their embedded code copies but I guess they have enough manpower to do so.

I didn't yet look at the Chrome source code but I hope it has at least a way to link against the system-wide copies without patching the makefiles.

News reports have described the use of forced child labour for cotton harvesting in Uzbekistan, which is then used in t-shirts and so on, including those sold by some major shops in England like Asda/Wal-Mart, as I mentioned on the debian-project email list last autumn. When you buy badly-produced T-shirts to support free software projects, you may be helping provide freedom for more software users in your country, but you may also be helping to enslave vulnerable workers in other countries. If you buy Debian T-shirts from the UK, you’re probably OK. This is something that the Debian UK Society seems to do right. Their buyer (and current Debian Project Leader) Steve McIntyre wrote:

“[Fruit of the Loom premium Ts, Kustom Kit Augusta/405 polo shirts ...] both FotL and KK have ethics statements that describe their standards. The KK one is linked off the front page of their website; the FotL details I have in .doc format that I’ll pass on if people would like to see them.” (original)

I also asked my local perl mongers group to do similar but there’s been no response to that yet (or any t-shirts AFAIK). I’ve been told that all of the FSF Europe gear is Fair Trade but it doesn’t say that on their web shop. How about other free software projects? Have you asked about your T-shirts? Is there a central site for this sort of information?

It may come as no surprise to some of you that I actually enjoy -- yes, enjoy -- watching political conventions. I've spent some time watching them over the past two weeks.

McCain has yet to speak tonight as I write this, but I've got to get out a few comments.

First of all, both parties of course were attacking the presidential candidate of the other. But did you notice a key difference? The Democrats attacked McCain on policy, while the McCain people attacked Obama on biography. VP nominee Palin even went so far as to mock Obama's work 20 years ago as a community organizer. I think that is incredibly telling. It seems to me to indicate that the Republicans know that their policies aren't working, and are grasping at straws to find something else. There is plenty in McCain's biography that the Democrats could go after -- his involvement in one of the worst scandals in the Senate, for instance -- but they aren't.

What about the other difference? Hope vs. fear. Obama's speech last week was truly inspiring. I don't think I've ever been inspired by a politician before. Make no mistake about it, he set the bar for himself incredibly high. I don't think anybody since Kennedy has done that. Obama realizes that there are things we must do as a country, and he also emphasized that the "ask not what your country can do for you" theme. Watching Giulianni and Palin was an exercise in fear-mongering. It's a constant stream of "9/11 MUSLIM OIL SHORTAGE TERRORISM NUCLEAR BIN LADEN IRAN GAS PRICES RED ALERT PANIC PANIC PANIC MEXICANS 9/11 9/11 9/11 SCARY WAR WAR WAR." It's as if they have discovered M-x spook RET in Emacs.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are talking about reducing health care costs, making sure everyone is covered, ending war, making the economy better for working-class people. It's an interesting disconnect that Obama highlighted well: McCain has said that the American economy has done well over the past 8 years. And indeed, by some "traditional" measures, such as productivity or GDP, it has. But the vast majority of Americans are not better off today than they were 8 years ago. Obama argues that the way McCain measures economic success is way off; our economy is not doing well if the vast majority of regular Americans are not doing well.

Also telling was how both candidates promised to reach across party lines (Bush promised that too). One actually is working to do it. Take abortion, for example. Obama said that he doesn't agree with the pro-lifers, but surely everyone can agree that providing better funding and support for alternatives to abortion such that it becomes incredibly rare is a good thing. Where's McCain looking for common ground? And then, of course, we have Palin wanting her family to be off limits -- but only when it's convenient to her.

I've voted in the past, but usually as a vote against someone rather than a vote for someone. This year, I'll make a single vote and do both.

I don't know what it says about Debian but while the political content of my last post was ignored, I have received a steady stream of email today saying Michael Palin was in fact the lumberjack in "And Now For Something Completely Different" Obviously I am unfit to be a heartbeat away from the DPL. obTheOtherPalin: Today is Ganesh Chaturthi so I have been to busy praying to watch it. I presume it will be on youtube or something by tomorrow. In any case as long as she didn't embarass herself, my view that she will be a plus for the McCain campaign still stands.

I finally got around to releasing eweouz 0.2 tonight. It is still a bridge between emacs and Evolution Data Server, now with both gnus and wanderlust support. Changes include:

• Actually works now, sans stupid typo
• A bit more documentation
• Now handles non-ASCII names, thanks to setlocale.
• Be a bit more paranoid and fail if opening addressbooks and such fails.

eweouz now also has a mailing list and a git and gitweb repositories.

gksu-polkit gets pipe support One of the features I really wanted to get into gksu-policykit early was working correctly with pipes. With the current gksu you cannot do something such as echo blah gksu tr a-z A-Z. It is actually very hard to work correctly with input/output with su and sudo bellow. I do think it also has something to do with me not being too clever in UNIX file descriptors at the time I originally planned how gksu works. I did get an email from someone at Sun offering to write support for that who never mailed me again, but anyway… gksu-policykit is currently able to get all the input and output forwarded to/from the process by using an interface similar to glib’s g_spawn_async_with_pipes. Here’s what we are able to do already:

$ echo test string   ./gksu/gksu-polkit /usr/bin/tr a-z A-Z
TEST STRING
$

It’s impressive to me that all the input and output goes over DBus quite nicely.

The fall semester is right around the corner and I have spent the last week obsessively tweaking my hacker course. I think I finally crafted a syllabus I can live with for the rest of the semester. I say “live with” because of what I excluded, which I simply did not want to (notably there is no material on DeCSS/DMCA, hacking the I-Phone, and I wanted to do more on encryption). But the good thing is I will be teaching this again in the future and will learn how to rotate in and out some of this material. Now I am off to enjoy a final free day before teaching responsibilities really begin.

Three replies to things I saw today on Planet Debian on blogs of people that don’t have fully-working web comment systems:-

1. Professional Slide Installer (usual buggy blogger.com CAPTCHA) - yes, they exist. My village’s council sometimes hires them. I think they’re carpenters who have specialised. There are also professional slide inspectors (well, childrens’ play area safety inspectors, but professional slide inspector sounds cooler).
2. Internet Speed Hype (usual buggy wordpress kind-a captcha) - ThePhone.Coop (UK) doesn’t cap, but charges extra if you go over your subscription amount. We have a monitoring system that lets you check your usage fairly easily and set up email alerts when your prepaid amount is almost used up. (I work for agent AG_471 of ThePhone.Coop but I think I’d like them anyway.)
3. home of the madduck/ blog/ Recovering a lost default route (site under construction - see bottom of page) - I was told by a very wise man to always start a delayed reboot (shutdown -r +5) before messing with anything to do with the networking on a remote machine.

Among other things, my webmaster cooperative is an agent for the Phone Co-op. Particularly with Free Software, cost-efficient ways of downloading data is a good companion service to have and the Phone Co-op has given a good ADSL and calls service to my own home and office for a few years now. When there are problems, they’ve worked pretty well to fix them. Just last week, I had a phone call to tell me when routing problems in LINX were fixed… which was a great help. I don’t remember an ISP doing that for me for years. I think the last one was my university’s dial-up service, 10 or more years ago. Another unusual thing for a UK ISP is the excellent public position on the Phorm ad-snooper that I mentioned previously: We strongly oppose these practices, especially the loss of privacy [...] Phorm is not operating on our users’ lines and we have required and received assurances from our suppliers that this will remain the case. Our Chief Executive Vivian Woodell gave an interview to the FT (accept the first two cookies, then block the rest, else you only get two paragraphs) which has a pretty good explanation of how the business side of the cooperative works. We’re recruiting for Line Rental (PSTN and ISDN) until the end of the year, including special offers like residential Unlimited Anytime Calls for 7.95 a month (normally 9.99) at the moment, as well as the great climate-neutral and ethical policies - if your landline contract renewal comes up, give it a look. The Phone Co-op was ten years old in June, but there are still big challenges: I’d love to see a cooperative pay-as-you-go mobile phone service and the mobile contract offers still look a bit expensive to me (no bundled data on phones, 25 per month for a 3G data card). I’d also love to see support for some daring innovative solutions like customers owning their own tails (tails are the last link to their house, where most of the UK has a choice of one provider: BT), using that as a way to upgrade small towns and villages to fibre-optic, or offer resident-owned wifi. Update: As if by magic, Ofcom has started a social web consultation about mobile phone services. Go comment.

One of my favorite things to watch are the “making of [movie, documentary etc] segments that are now routinely included in any DVD. It is nice to look behind the curtain and see exactly what choices are made, what is excluded, and why they are made. I wish that more books, especially academic ones, had a “making of” section, giving a window into these choices. We are not exactly encouraged to include this commentary in the book itself but one can find this type of insight in author interview. I recently read one such interview with the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. The interview is on his site and the original is here. There are a couple of things that I found particularly interesting, such as how to treat iconic figures such as RMS and ESR [not as researchers, for example ] and the importance of letting your research and thinking brew over a fairly long period of time, despite the pressure of publishing fast, quick and dirty, which is especially strong with anything “digital.” The book is hefty and long, but as is emphasized in the interview, it is also pragmatic and readable. If folks on Planet have not yet checked it out and are not ready to commit to a long book, I would checkout Chapter 6 on the creation of the copyleft. It is sure to please academics and geeks alike.

When volume becomes high enough you start to observe patterns in SPAM pretty easily. I think that this is primarily because people like to see patterns, whether they are present or not. The trick is determining whether they are real patterns or not, and then to a lesser extent whether they are useful patterns. For example I host mail for a business domain. That means that incoming messages come primarily from existing customers, and very rarely from potential new ones. In practise that means that email is expected to arrive from 9am til 6pm (+/-2hours) Email received at 2AM? Either it is somebody working remotely, a foreign contact, or much more likely it is SPAM. Now clearly you cannot dump all messages received at unusual times of the day, but it is a surprisingly robust SPAM indicator for that particular domain. All heuristics are fallable, but some are useful regardless.. I'd love to know what people can learn from their SPAM. This week I'm handling approximately 80,000 messages a day, per MX, which isn't huge (ie. 2-3 million a month). ObQuote: Highlander

If all goes according to plan, Helen, Ilenia and I will be in Vienna, Austria sometime in the next week or two, to register our daughter as a US citizen. As always, we're interested in meeting anyone local for alcohol/food/coffee/whatever, within the limits of our time there. Send email with a mobile number if you're interested in meeting up at some point. I'm not exactly a frequent traveler, but Ilenia and I both really enjoy meeting people when we go places, so I signed up for this to see if it helps put me in contact with people, either in places I go, or people visiting Innsbruck: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/davidnwelton

Sorry, ever since Debconf I've been busy, ill and otherwise distracted. I'm still catching up... Stuff that's happened: Dude, you're married! For the second year running, I had to leave Debconf a day early to attend a wedding party. My good friend Matthew married Oxana last Monday. I've just put my photos of the happy event online today. After a successful Debconf where I managed to evade the normal plague, it hit hard on the Tuesday morning and I've been struggling with it ever since. Just about over it now, but I've been feeling crap for over a week. On the way to Buenos Aires to catch my flight back to England, I received a text message telling me the sad news that my uncle, John Bolton had passed away. This means that the eldest two of my mum's three brothers have died this year, in the space of just a few months, and it's been a very hard time for the family. The funeral happened earlier this week, so I was away and mostly off-line for a couple of days travelling there and back. I'm trying to get back up to speed on a whole host of different things at the moment; if you're waiting on a response from me about Debian-related stuff, please feel free to prod me via email or IRC.

Currently, I'm together with Marc Brockschmidt evaluating which virtualization to use on our new server. We want that our virtual systems feel like real systems, and we want an open source solution. So, vserver and the like is out of the game, as well as VMware. The two remaining solutions we looked at are Xen and kvm. Xen has of course the advantage of the matured. Also, we have experience with running xen servers - and with the issues that can happen, like the chances to disconnect dom0 from xend, and then reboot the server the hard way. However, the most serious disadvantage is that development has practically stalled with the 2.6.18-kernel. Of course, even of today one could install a new server based on Etch, but that doesn't really feel right. There is some development ongoing to run domUs with newer kernels (like in Lenny), but there isn't currently any new kernel available for dom0. kvm is a more recent addition to the virtualization camp, and is basically "qemu on steroids". All looks rather promising, development happens with the recent kernels. However, kvm lacks a few features of e.g. Xen. This includes the ability to reboot dom0 (and the hardware) and just let the domUs survive. Or to have a nice management script where one could just say "xm shutdown $domU", and have basically the power button be pressed on the virtual machine. Or to just attach and detach to the virtual console whenever one wants. Nothing of that is impossible with kvm, one could attach the command-terminal to some pipe, and the linux console to some other, and attach and distach via own scripts. But - all of that should be expected to be available from some solution that calls itself enterprise ready. (And - writing own scripts has always the possibility to make own mistakes.) However, among all the worst possible issue is that kvm is underdocumented (or rather: There are lots of different places where some parts of the documentation is hidden - including the great remark in the man page "The other options are similar to those of qemu."). So, what to do? Invest more time into a solution that seems like a dead end. Or put up with the incompletness of another solution?