About a week or two ago, my sister called me that her computer didn't boot anymore. After looking at it for a short while and asking her how it had stopped working, there was only one conclusion that I could come to: the processor fan had broken down, which meant that she'd had a processor meltdown (she had a Pentium I-class system; back then, builtin thermometers weren't as common as they are now). She needed a replacement. Now I do have a bunch of spare hardware, but I didn't have anything that could compare to her 200-something Mhz system, and she was already complaining that the thing was rather slow; so I helped her find a 233Mhz Pentium mainboard (with processor) on eBay. That arrived on monday at her place, and she brought it to me to install it. That's done now, but not before I had to tell the thing it was the worst mainboard design that I have ever seen. No, really. And I've seen quite some mainboards already, since I used to work for a place where they sold hardware, a while back. The power connector, IDE connectors, serial ports, parallel port, and floppy drive connector are all positioned in the top left corner of the mainboard, above the PCI slots and right below where the power block is supposed to be. As a result, it's nearly impossible to reach them. When you do reach them, they're all placed so fucking close to eachother that it's nearly impossible to fit them all and to do so correctly. The one exception to that rule is the parallel port, which is fairly close to the rest, but still in the same area. It gets in fairly easily—unfortunately, it also gets out fairly easily if you touch them cables, which you have to do to put the topmost PCI card in its slot. Grmbl. Can't they put those cables in the center right, where they belong?!? After fighting with them cables, it was time for the RAM. That mainboard contains two DIMM slots and four 72-pin SIMM thingies. I have one RAM module for the DIMM slots, but unfortunately it didn't work with that module; I'm not sure whether it's the RAM that's broken, or whether the mainboard simply doesn't want to accept it. Fortunately, I have some 72pin RAM modules left. Unfortunately, I found that the 72pin slots were placed so close to the top of the mainboard that I had to get it out again in its entirety to be able to fit the topmost module. Grmbl. One centimeter of space is too much to ask? After that, it turned out that the machine still didn't boot. At first I thought this was one of those braindead BIOSes that doesn't boot unless you hook up a keyboard, but in the end that didn't seem to be the case. After one by one disconnecting everything, it turned out that the system would boot when I didn't connect the CD writer, but it would not boot at all when I did connect it. And when I say "not boot", I really mean it that way; it didn't even start the POST. Replacing the IDE data cable didn't help. I even tried using the one of the hard disk (which worked, because I had already done a boot from disk), or to connect the writer to as slave to the primary connector, but no luck; it simply wouldn't boot with that writer connected. Well, I'm tired of it now. Maybe I'll go to the shop with that writer again (it was a christmas present, so should still be under warranty) and ask them to have a look at it, but otherwise sis won't have a writer.

Gnarf: itentional repost to get the URLs right. Dammit :-]

2nd post :) I'm really curious where this will lead to... probably I should just write more and care less. OTOH, this will be on the net (somewhere there..) for eternity :)

my pictures from debconf.es 2 in December 2005 and debconf5 in July 2005 are finally online. Many thanks to Amaya for creating this fancy hackergotchi out of them!

debconf.es 2 videos are now being worked on.

In the end of december I went to 22C3 and had lots of fun and insights there. For the first time the congress was spawned over four days (instead of three the years before), which lead to a much more relaxed conference (no talks before noon and somewhat less crowded schedule), though in the end it was still too much information to proceed properly ;)

The CCC's conference management system, pentabarf, has been rewritten from scratch in ruby on rails - and IMO it already rocked when it was written in PHP. I guess I will have to take a closer look again..

The video team collected 400GB of data on 200 DV tapes. So now they'll have "some" work to do: only a few talks are already available online, most are not (more than 100 talks), and all need to be encoded properly. This is unfortunate for the audience (they'll have to wait) and a lot of work for the people doing it. For debconf6 we should aim to release as many videos as possible during the conference. So IMO streaming is purely optional and should only be done if a.) the video team consists of a sufficient number of people and b.) we have prepared this really well. You're welcome to help!

Oh, I almost forgot: that conference had better connectivity than Africa! That's 10 GB/s. Which really doesn't say much about the conference - your ISP might have more - but it does say a lot about the continents and its peoples situation.

Early musings, but I wonder if it's possible to sign up with Engin, and score a local Australian phone number, which pops out in the US, terminated on an Asterisk box? It's all technically feasible. The big question is, will Engin allow me to sign up? Initially googling implies that Engin will support Asterisk, which is cool in and of itself. Watch this space. I suppose I need to get Asterisk working now.

Sometimes following up on a bug takes you a lot further than you expected. Debian bug #337041 looked like it was going to be fairly straightforward once I upgraded coreutils to figure out what the new IUTF8 flag actually did, since the SSH2 protocol already supports transferring termios flags around. Unfortunately, since IUTF8 is relatively new, it doesn't have a number assigned in the draft connection protocol. Moreover, that Internet-Draft is in the last stages before becoming an RFC and can't be modified any more, and it doesn't include any facility for private-use extensions. D'oh. To add further complication, since IUTF8 is Linux-specific, it's not hard to imagine that some other OS might introduce something with the same name but subtly different semantics, and so the SSH protocols can't just defer to POSIX for the definition but instead have to spell out exactly what they mean. As a result of all of this, it looks like the best way to make progress might be for me to write an I-D myself that creates a channel extension to set or clear IUTF8, and attempt to enlist support from some upstream implementors. I didn't expect bug triage to lead me into the Internet standardisation process quite so quickly!

Hot on the heels of Joey's tale of getting rid of base-config (the second stage of the installer) in Debian, we've now pretty much got rid of it in Ubuntu Dapper too. The upshot of this is that rather than asking a bunch of questions, installing the base system, and rebooting to install everything else, we now just install everything in one go and reboot into a completed system. This does mean that, if your system doesn't boot, you don't get to find out about it for a bit longer. However, it has lots of advantages in terms of speed (the much-maligned archive-copier mostly goes away), reducing code duplication (base-config had a bunch of infrastructure of its own which was done better in the core installer anyway), comprehensibility, and killing off some annoying bugs like #13561 (duplicate mirror questions in netboot installs), #15213 (second stage hangs if you skip archive-copier in the first stage), and #19571 (kernel messages scribble over base-config's UI). To go with Joey's Debian timeline, the Ubuntu history looks a bit like this:

• 2004 (Jul): First base-config modifications for Ubuntu; we need to install the default desktop rather than dropping into tasksel.
• 2004 (Aug): Mark phones me up and asks if I can make the installer not need the CD in the second stage by copying all the packages across beforehand. Although it's a bit awkward, I can see the UI advantages in that, so I write archive-copier at the Canonical conference in Oxford.
• 2004 (Sep): Mark asks me if we can ask the timezone, user/password, and apt configuration questions before the first reboot. With less than a month to go until our first release, I have a heart-attack at how much needs to be done, and it eventually gets deferred to Hoary.
• 2005 (Jan): Matt fixes up debconf's passthrough frontend for use on the live CD, and we realise that this is an obvious way to run bits of base-config before the first reboot. It's rather messy and takes until March or so before it really works right, but we get there in the end.
• 2005 (Apr): I get "put a progress bar in front of the dpkg output in the second stage" as a goal for Breezy. Naïvely, I think it's a simple matter of programming, since I'd already done something similar for debootstrap and base-installer the previous year.
• 2005 (May): I hack progress bar support into debconf. Nothing actually uses it for anything yet, except as a convenient passthrough stub.
• 2005 (Jul/Aug): I actually try to implement the second-stage progress bar and realise that it's about an order of magnitude harder than I thought, requiring a whole load of extra infrastructure in apt. Fortunately Michael Vogt saves the day here by writing lots of working code, and the progress bar works by early August.
• 2005 (Sep-Dec): Upstream d-i development ramps back up again, with tzsetup, clock-setup, apt-setup, and user-setup all being cranked out in short order and the corresponding pieces removed from base-config. I merge these as they mature, and manage to get agreement on including the Ubuntu debconf template changes in upstream apt-setup, which helps the diff size a lot.
• 2005 (Nov/Dec): Joey and I chat one evening about the Ubuntu second-stage progress bar work, and we end up designing and writing debconf-apt-progress based on its ideas, after which Joey knocks up pkgsel in no time flat.
• 2006 (Jan): The rest of the pieces land in Ubuntu, and we drop base-config out of the installer. To my surprise, nearly everything still just works.

Although it caused some friction, I'm glad that we did the first cuts of many of these things outside Debian and got to try things out before landing version-2-quality code in Debian. The end result is much nicer than the intermediate ones ever were.

My vet has written two books on cats, is nominated for Intervet's Vet of the year and is also a very interesting person to talk with: Santiago G. Caraballo.

Ugly pics of scars and post-surgery cats to be uploaded later.

As usual something sorrowful has to happen at the beginning of the year, when I'm hopeful that's going to be better year than previous. Today my dog has been knocked down and that f*cking driver didn't even stop to see what he made.
Radar was only four year old and now unfortunately he's six feet under :(
I miss you Radar.

I just came back from the vet. I left Vi and Emacs there and will pick them up after work, as today they will be spayed and neutered (450 EUR total). I am all shaky inside.
My little cats! (Well, not so little, as Emacs started acting like if she was in heat only a few hours before I had to take a plane for my Holidays, so I guess she is not so little anymore, nor is Vi, who seemed completely fascinated by her new behavior. Anyway, my vet knew this would happen one month in advance, when we were arranging an appointment for the surgery that will be performed today).

Good luck, my babies!

The Hogmanay celebration in Edinburgh started on December 29. This was coincidentally on the same day as my meeting with Steve Kemp, a fellow Debian developer. We had a nice chat and a huge and tasteful hot chocolate in a coffee shop on Nicolson Street. After our meet we ran into the Torchlight procession, Edinburgh’s Hogmanay first event. There seemed to be no end to the procession. I was cold, my feet were hurting, so I caught a bus home and missed out on the fireworks. New Year’s Eve On New Year’s Eve I took the last bus to the city centre (around 21:00). It was still raining a bit, but fortunately it had completely cleared up once I got out of the bus. There, I witnessed the start of the Royal Bank Street Party (consisting of concerts, a carnival, attractions, etc.), which meant thousands, ten thousands of people gathering to enter the party. This party was held in a closed down perimeter covering Princes Street and other adjacent streets. Since I had no ticket I made a walk around the perimeter to get a glimpse of the party itself but also to see what else was going on in the centre. It turned out that there were lots of ticket-less people who were partying in pubs or just singing and dancing on the streets. At 23:30, lots of people (including me) gathered on the North Bridge to wait for the 0:00 moment. At midnight loud yelling rose from the centre evolving into a load roar as if legions of men were sent to war and the Seven Hills Fireworks were set of. Everyone was cheering, jumping in the arms of strangers and wishing everyone a good and happy new year. It was an amazing thing to experience and be part of :), I hope that I can come back for it once more. A happy and good new year everyone!

Seeing the reports of kernels logging the addition of leap seconds and, along with others not seeing such messages on my system, I decided to read up. To my surprise I learned that POSIX systems do not represent Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), but only a variant of UTC without leap seconds. One consequence of this is that arithmetic done in POSIX time does not correspond to arithmetic done in UTC if one crosses a point where leap seconds were added. Another consequence is that if someone wants his POSIX system clock to display a time corresponding to UTC then the clock needs to be adjusted whenever UTC counts leap seconds. The log messages are the result of ntpd telling the kernel to skip one increment of the system seconds counter. So much for the smug comments about those broken OSes that don't handle time properly.

So I've been in the US for just over six weeks now, and I thought I'd reflect on the trials and tribulations of bootstrapping oneself in a foreign country. The Social Security Number is the primary key from hell I already had a fair idea of the importance of obtaining a Social Security Number (SSN). So much so, that after dumping our luggage at our temporary accommodation, the Social Security Administration office was the first place Michael and I went to, so we could lodge applications. We subsequently learned from another Australian who was about two weeks ahead of us, that you're apparently supposed to wait ten working days before lodging the application, to allow your immigration records to percolate through the bureaucracy that is the US Government. Our applications were duly accepted without any mention of waiting a bit, but we were sent away with a letter and a tracking number, saying that the SSA had to verify our existence with Immigration (this is despite the fact that we're standing in front of them with a passport with an I-94 stapled in it) and that it would take up to four weeks. So it's been six weeks, and still no sign of an SSN. Enquiries with the office are met with the same response - waiting on information back from Immigration. Apparently it can take up to three months. It's a real shame you can't start the application process when your visa is granted or something, as in order to apply, you need to quote your "alien registration number" (I still chuckle at how the US Government refers to me as an "alien" in all their paperwork), which is the number on your I-94, which you only get when you enter the country. So, whilst the SSN application remains pending, I cannot be paid, I cannot have my health insurance paperwork lodged by my employer, and whilst I'll be covered for health insurance retrospectively, I'm not technically covered right now, if I were to require medical treatment. Going back to how the SSN is the primary key of All Things... Next step is to open a bank account. We chose Citibank, because I've been told it's slightly easier to import money back into Australia with them. Fortunately we were able to open an account sans SSN, but it's called an "NRA account" (NRA standing for Non-resident Alien). We were told that we were only eligible for an ATM card until I had an SSN, yet they mailed me out a debit card about a week after we opened the account, and happily ordered one for Sarah, and a cheque book when we asked after opening the account. About the only thing it seems we can't do at the moment is transfer money back to Australia. No big deal, it's all coming the other way until I can get paid... Driver's licence requires an SSN ideally, so that's out of the question for the time being... Electricity, telephone and cable were all able to be provisioned with an SSN, although I think for credit-rating purposes, again, it is the primary key. We had to pay a deposit for the electricity, which is fair enough. The lady I spoke to on the phone when I got it connected said that they just treated us aliens like teenagers straight out of home with no credit history. I don't have a problem with that. It's just a shame that you can't import your credit history. Getting a cell phone account appears to be nigh on impossible with an SSN though. It was a battle just to get a prepaid SIM card for Sarah's phone, and this makes a great story of how much hoop-jumping is required. We walked up to a Cingular stand in a shopping mall to see what we could and couldn't do. I explained our situation (lack of SSN, lack of credit history, etc etc) to the sales droid, and he assured us it wasn't a problem to get a prepaid SIM card. He proceeded to take about 30 minutes to organise the SIM card. I watched as he entered a dummy SSN into the computer, and used his own driver's licence number. He was clearly battling the computer system to be able to do it. When we got home, and Sarah called up to try and put some credit on the phone with our Australian Visa card, she was told they only accepted credit cards with a US billing address. (So much for Visa being accepted worldwide). So we headed off again to Safeway to purchase a prepaid Mastercard. Funnily enough, when Sarah called up to activate that, she was initially asked for an SSN, so we almost had a dependency loop that we couldn't break, just to get a US cell phone. Fortunately they could cope with no SSN, so she successfully ended up with a prepaid Mastercard, with a US billing address, so she could put credit on her prepaid SIM. From what I can work out, a lot of the places that do request the SSN seem to using the last four digits as an authenticator, much like everyone just uses name and date of birth back in Australia, so I'm guessing for these organisations, I could probably just quote any old number that fit the pattern and they'd be happy. Just so long as they don't go trying to run a credit check against it... Foreign credit cards As I said earlier, a credit card with a non-US billing address is fine for most face-to-face purchases, but an amazing array of mostly telephone transactions will not accept them. Most notable was trying to add credit to a calling card for making international telephone calls. Couldn't be done. So it meant I had to forego any discounts or bonuses for topping up, and buy a whole new calling card. Car insurance and registration I'm not sure how this is going to go yet. Our Prius is supposed to be available around the 18th of January. I'm hoping I'll have my SSN by then, otherwise we'll have to import a heap of money to pay for it. I'm sure you can get insurance and own a car without an SSN, because you hear of people who do driving holidays across the US, buying a car on one coast, driving it cross-country, and then selling it. It might be more expensive, and I again, you can't import your driving/insurance history, so you have to start off at the bottom of the ladder again... In summary, I think you need to have relatively deep pockets to bootstrap yourself over here. You need to be able to function without getting paid for up to two or three months, and you need to understand that credit-wise and insurance-wise, you're going to be back at square-one again, irrespective of how good you might have been in your home country. The sooner you come to terms with these, and appreciate that you are moving to a foreign country, the sooner you can get on with enjoying the experience.

I finally got around to using itunes today. I compiled sharpmusique. I had to hack around the build system in the old snapshot of vlc shipped in the 1.0 tarball. Then once I had that working, it was time to figure out why the files were saved with as " - - - .m4a", which looks wrong. Fortunately, there was a comment in saying what is probably wrong when saving the files, so I rigged up a patch.

Just went back from today’s roundtable discussion on “IPR Issues and Open Source” hosted by the National 863 Project. It was well attended, with major software companies as well as experts from MII, MOST and the academia. In particular I found the talk by Peking University’s Dr. Zhang most enlightening — they have done extensive research on almost all open source licenses (including CDDL), as well as the impact of software patents on open source. Unfortunately I’ve learned today that China has already granted software patents. Even more sadly is the fact that most participants viewed software patents as ‘inevitable’, as a thing that Chinese companies need to deal with as they join the global community. I told them about the various software patent backlashes around the world, especially in Europe; and also asked them to ponder the question of whether software patents, as currently implemented by the US, is a sensible and logical thing for China to move towards. Hopefully this will get them thinking…

1. What is Preventa?

Preventa is a port of the Debian and GNU userland to the Minix 3 kernel and libc. Hence an alternate name is Debian GNU/Minix (but I won't use that unless it becomes an official Debian port. See below.) 2a. Why is it called Preventa?

It's a riff on the last attempt at porting Debian to a non-Linux kernel which was called Nexenta. 2b. Why is it called Preventa?

Because if it becomes an official Debian port, it is probable that the sheer number of release critical bugs caused will prevent Debian from ever releasing again. 3. Is this an official Debian port?

Currently Preventa has no official connection to the Debian project. In the future? Perhaps if there is some interest. I'm not persuing that angle right now. 4. Does Preventa suffer from licensing problems like Nexenta?

No, the Minix kernel and libc are BSD licensed. 5. So why are you doing this?

Like many people, I used Minix when I studied operating systems in college. I am interested in trying the new version but I am more comfortable with a GNUish environment rather than the BSDish one that Minix provides. This led me to wonder how hard it would be to port Debian and in general, how much work goes into a new Debian port. Maybe I might be able to write some articles about the experience. Other than that there is no practical reason really. 6. How can I help?

At the moment I am just doing this for my own edification so I'm not looking for help. This will undoubtedly change if I get stuck. 7. What does the port entail?

I will attempt to port dpkg, apt, and the Debian base system plus a few other odds and ends I feel I need. I will use the Minix kernel and libc (unless GNU libc turn out to be easy to port which I suspect it won't.) Basically Preventa will have the same kind of features as the official Minix3 distribution. If I have to patch anything I will offer it back to the Minix and/or Debian maintainers if they want it. 8. Where can I keep abreast of your progress?

I will blog about it. As soon as it is somewhat usable, I will release the results (including source of course) to the public for people to use as they wish. 9. what does ast and the Minix community think about this?

I haven't told them yet. I should do that soonish. 10a. Hi, I'm from OSNews and I don't like Preventas' green on black theme. And the file manager is totally unintuitive.
Uh, that's the command line. Minix doesn't support the X window system yet. 10b. Then I dub thee "not ready for the desktop."

Aieeee!

dad: (while joining us, who're watching the Vienna New Year's concert on TV) Nice flowers?
mom: No. It's a peasant's fair.
dad: That can be nice too, no? A nice peasant's fair? ... Hmm. This might require a bit of explanation. My mother has been teaching floral design for almost 20 years. She's also managed the flower decorations in the local church for ages. This obviously isn't because she knows nothing about flowers or floral decoration; she obviously does and is, in fact, quite passionate about it. A result of this is that she can be quite upset when you went to church on christmas eve after she's done quite some work arranging the flowers, and you didn't even notice them (because they are, after all, things meant to be decorations in the background—and you gave your attention to the mass itself). Or that when there's something going on on TV or in real life involving a concert, the church, or something else, she'll first look at the flowers, and only then at whatever else is going on. As I do, dad also knows this. So his question was really after her expert opinion on whether the flowers were nice. In that light, the final remark is rather... silly.

Maybe Intel should donate their new slogan to Linux instead: This is a small farm of Linux servers, each reporting that it has added the leap second, and logcheck on each of the machines (not running remote syslog yet) reports this line as "unknown or important log message", sending an email each to my off-site account. Guess I'll have to file a bug against logcheck to add a statement for this line, so I won't see it next year. or in 2600, if they maybe add a leap hour instead. On the other hand, this is a nice new years mail from your servers: Nothing interesting happened, so I had to add a leap second. ;-)

Ok, so I’m supposed to write about some things in retrospect with 2005, like the many folks who did so already. Unfortunately, I’m out of time here (’tis around 30 minutes before midnight, yet my folks are nagging me to join them at my tita’s house, so I’ll just save the retrospecting for later. Well, later… HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! PS: Sorry for spamming Planet Debian as I just upgraded to WP 2.0, and my feed b0rked