Search Results: "ema"

5 August 2008

Wouter Verhelst: Re: Government

One of the things of getting too much mail is that you will get swamped in it, sometimes to the level of not even managing to figure out there's been replies on your blog for the past several weeks. Oops. Apparently quite a number of people answered to my blog post about the belgian government issues, and I only found out right before leaving for Argentina. They're now all accepted from moderation, but that doesn't mean I can't follow up on them anymore. Most of them just agree with what I have to say, or posit another opinion (which is fine), but some clearly show a misunderstanding of what I was trying to say. So, since I don't want to appear as one posting gibberish, allow me to clarify:
"I could say that some other things about the past deb cle also puzzle me, such as the insistence of some people to get an unconditional split of BHV, thereby destroying all chances of even remotely reaching a compromise." You are saying that you would accept giving in to the demands of the Francophones that the Flemish give up territory. (Think about it, what century are they from? In what other country does one community demand the enlargement of its territory as an exchange for fixing a situation which the constitutional court has ruled to be illegal?)
Thanks for asking, but no, I'm not saying that. Let's be clear about this: there's a huge difference between a position that says "we need to split BHV, period" on the one hand, and "we need to give territory to the francophone community" on the other. It should be perfectly possible to, say, have the flemish community come up with some benefit to the francophone community in some respect somewhere that does not include "giving territory to the south of france"; but apparently the "negotiators" think not. To quote just one example: at some point Reinders (MR) suggested that a federal election circle be created to replace BHV, so that francophone politicians could still be elected in flanders, but also the other way around. This proposal was however killed by flemish politicians before the press as "not even negotiable" without even having discussed it. This, and other similar examples, I do not understand. After all, the fact that the constitutional court has ruled the current situation to be illegal does not change anything about the fact that this is still a request from the Flemish part of the country, and not from the Francophones; anyone telling you anything else is simply lying. There's nothing wrong with wanting something and being declared correct in court, of course; but there is something wrong with wanting that unconditionally. Unless you won a war, that is. And then still. Of course, not caring about much of the definitions of many political parties and not being a politician in any way, I ticked off someone who just happens to be a member of one of the parties I don't even like in the first place. Amedee, in case it matters: I didn't call CD&V a "Catholic" party to imply anything, but simply because I'm blissfully ignorant of the difference between Catholic and Christian. And happily so, too, given the CD&V's current behaviour. Oh, and the SP.A is not my favourite party; it's just that they seemed to be the more sensible of the lot during the last elections' campaigns. What's really my favourite party isn't something I'll tell you (or anyone), though.

Biella Coleman: Nice Website

For the most part, university websites are not the most flattering in the world, nor are academic conference websites. But this one Copyright's Counterparts is quite nice (and the theme also interesting). Makes me wonder, actually, about how copyrightable the design of a website is. Does anyone know? update: Not ...

4 August 2008

David Moreno Garza: On phone calls

I've enjoyed reading Sarah Hatter's (from 37signals) blog post about phone support. I can't say anything else that I totally agree about it, and I'd like to share my own experience.

Recently, I bought a ticket for my mom to come to visit us in New York. She finally couldn't do it for the dates we had picked so I had to cancel the airline ticket that I had already paid in Orbitz. I did this through their website, I saw how much of penalties it'd be, and it wasn't too much, so I accepted without too many other alternatives. Basically, from the total cost of the ticket, I'd have to take a small penalty fee for Orbitz and big one for the airline. The rest wouldn't be reimbursed but could be used as credit for another reservation, for the same passenger, of course. None of those tickets are transferrable, which yes, it's OK, it was just a delay of dates on the trip. Now, she is able to come again in a couple of months, so I tried to find a way to use that remaining credit to make a new reservation. I couldn't. After spending a lot of minutes (I should be an idiot, I guess) trying to find their phone number on the website, I called. A nice lady with a very weird accent for me answered, I tried to explain the issue and she was very gentle and told me that I had to do the reservation by phone. I asked if there wasn't any way that I could do the reservation online myself. She said no. I asked how come. She said that in order for me to use that credit I had to do it by phone. She started asking me the preferred days for traveling, whether at morning or at night, etc. All of this was OK, but it was very, very difficult for me to understand what she was saying sometimes, and most of the times I was embarrased to ask her to say things again and again. It was very, very difficult and frustrating to do this over phone for me. I apologized, thanked her and hung up. I couldn't do it.

This could have been easily solved over an online interface or over email (they already have my freaking credit card numbers!). I've been mostly happy with Orbitz and after all they are not guilty on having me as their customer, one that cannot speak to nice ladies with very weird accents, but it'd be easier for everybody to not leave phone support as the last resource for solving an issue. I still have to call and claim my unused credit. I've been avoiding it, both because I still want to find the energy and patience and because I'm waiting for next payroll :)

Paralelly, having spent a couple of weeks with the family in Mexico City I remembered how annoying phone calls to people's houses from companies are. All of us at my family place are economically actives. Because of this, a lot of companies, credit card companies, banks, inssurance companies, etc, annoy at any time offering their products. I almost had forgotten it since my phone activity is not too active here. Those fucking companies (or the representatives rather) call, introduce themselves and start talking saying that you've won an special thing, bonus, award for your records' activities, whatever. This is so impersonal, so cold, so bitter, tacky and so stupidly impolite and annoying that I've reached the point on saying nothing at all but hanging up immediately. Some other times I interrupt saying I was busy, how they dare calling with all their bullcrap without asking me a single question on whether I can or want to receive the call. This is incredibly annoying and find it very unpleasent and impolite. What, as customer, I have to do? Avoid connections with those companies, they don't deserve my attention, they had lost it. I should only maintain a private cell phone for family and friends and try to not give that number to any kind of company.

Die phone support, die!

Russell Coker: Lenny SE Linux on the Desktop

I have been asked about the current status of Lenny SE Linux on the Desktop. The first thing to consider is the combinations of policies and configurations. I will number them if only for the purpose of this post, if the numbering is considered generally helpful it could be more widely adopted to describe configurations.

  1. Default configuration. This has the default policy and is configured with all users having the domain unconfined_t and daemons such as POP servers are allowed to access home directories of type unconfined_home_dir_t. This allows such daemons to attack privileged user accounts.

  2. Some restricted users. This is the same as above but with some users restricted. Daemons such as POP servers are only allowed to access the home directories of restricted users. This means that if a user is to have an unconfined account and receive email they must have two Unix accounts or receive their mail under /var/spool/mail. This is one setsebool command and one (or maybe a few) “semanage login -m” commands from the default configuration.

  3. All users restricted. The system administrator has the domain sysadm_t and users have domains such as user_t. This requires a few more semanage commands. It is equivalent to the old strict policy.

  4. MLS. This is anything that is based around the MLS policy.

Currently I have two Desktop machines running Lenny (a test machine and my EeePC) and one server. I have only just switched my test machine to enforcing mode so have no good data on it (apart from the fact that I can boot it up and login - which is always a good start). The server is running in permissive mode because I have not yet written the policy to allow the POP server to read from unconfined_home_dir_t. I could get it working by switching from level 1 to level 2 or 3, but I want to get level 1 server policy working for the benefit of others else first. My EeePC however is fully functional, I have been doing some work on it - that mostly means running a ssh client under GNOME but that’s OK (desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE are quite complex and demanding, getting a machine to boot and run such a desktop environment tests out many parts of the system). It’s only at level 1 for the moment because I want to get level 1 working everywhere before moving to the higher levels. I want to get things ready for real users ASAP. With the way the policy is managed now it will be possible to move from level 1 to 2 or 3 without rebooting or interrupting running services. So once users have systems running well at level 1 they can easily increase the security at a later date. The problems that I have had are due to text relocations in libraries (see my previous post about execmod permission [1]). I’ve filed bug report #493678 against libtheora0 [2] in regard to this issue and included a patch from Fedora (which disables the non-relocatable assembly code in question). It seems that upstream have some new assembler code to try and fix this issue, so hopefully we’ll have something that can make it into Lenny! I’ve filed bug report #493705 against libswscale0 for the same issue [3]. I included a patch to turn off the assembler code in question but that was not well received. If anyone has some i386 assembler skill and some spare time I would appreciate it if you could try and find a way to make the code position independent while losing little or no performance. One thing to note is that I am now using an Opteron 1212 (2.0GHz dual-core) system for compiling, I run the i386 DomU with a 64bit kernel (I expect that 32bit user-space runs faster with a 64bit kernel than a 32bit kernel), and the disks are reasonably fast. Even so it takes about 15 minutes to build libswscale0 and the other packages from the same source tree. Previously I was using a 1.0GHz Pentium-3 for my Lenny i386 development until I had the libswscale0 build process go for more than 90 minutes before running out of disk space! If your build machine is old enough to only be 32bit then you should probably plan on watching a movie or going to bed while the build is in progress. I have built packages that work around the above bugs and included them in my Lenny repository [4]. If you take the packages from that repository plus the Lenny packages then you should have a functional desktop system at level 1. I would appreciate it if people would start testing that and providing feedback. One important issue is the discovery of libraries that want shared stacks, text relocations, and executable memory. The deadline for fixing them properly is even more of a problem due to the number of people who have to be involved in a solution (as compared to the policy where I can do it on my own). One finally problem is a bug in xdm which causes it to give the wrong context for login sessions due to having an old version of the SE Linux related code [5]. Due to a combination of this and some policy bugs you can not login with xdm. This is not a hugely important issue as most people will use gdm (which has the newer patch) or kdm (which has no SE Linux patch but can use pam_selinux.so). Also another option is wdm which works with pam_selinux.so. I’ve had a response to my bug report suggesting that there’s a bug in the patch (which was taken from gdm so maybe there’s a bug in gdm code too). I haven’t responded to that yet as I’ve been concentrating on the things that will make the most impact for Lenny. At this stage I’m still unsure of when the release team will cut me off and prevent further SE Linux related fixes from going in Lenny. I need at least one more update to the policy packages before Lenny is released. I could release one right now with some useful improvements over what is currently in unstable, but am waiting until I get some other things fixed. If I get everything fully working at level 1 (both client and server) before Lenny then I will provide a similar status report for users and testers of levels 2 and 3. I don’t expect that I will even get a chance to test level 4 (MLS) properly before Lenny releases.

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Marcela Tiznado: When did we start attacking each other?

So, I should be at DebCamp, but I'm back home after driving 800km in one day.  
Why?   I still don't know.

The main reason for this post is the irrational and unilateral response I got 
from the DebConf Orga Team, with no right to replica of any kind, and with 
the violence and humiliation we were treated with. I've helped to make 
3 DebConf's possible, and have been involved in many ways for the past years 
in Debian, so this shocked me deeply.

The short story is that there was an extra bed in the room I was staying in, the 
person who was suppose to be in that bed is a close friend of mine, so I asked 
if someone else could use it while they weren't, since that meant I could take 
the necessary equipment that I managed to get for DebConf, and also introduce 
to Debian someone who is very active and well known in our local community 
(and also part of the umbrella foundation used for local finance issues). 
I was excited about getting there, like every year. Just to make this extra 
clear, this person had already booked the full week of DebConf, just not 
DebCamp, as he previously thought he couldn't attend. When he found out he 
could, he was thrilled to be able to go and help setup. So, I made the mistake 
of not notifying the Orga team about the switch. I did this because it truly 
was harmless action, where a bed which would otherwise be wasted would get 
used, and, I did not notify the Orga team because they've been very 
aggressive, inflexible and unhelpful throughout the planning of the 
conference. This doesn't justify it, just explains why someone who generally 
is helpful decides to take the wrong path to solve something.

Up to here, nothing very exciting. What made this special, is that when one 
of the organizers, Margarita Manterola, found out about the switch, instead 
of coming to talk to me, even though she's known me for *years*, she went 
and informed the hotel that somebody had committed a crime, and checked in 
under a different name, as if me or the person that came with me where 
some random stranger. All I can say is, WTF?

Let me stress this, the email that was sent out[1] twisted the facts, to the 
extent that some of them are a lie, like the problem arrived at check-in, 
when it actually happened while we where napping a few hours after we had 
arrived, and any effort made by the Orga team with the hotel where wasted, 
as it was one of them who had originally created the problem.

Instead of solving this among us as a group, and, again, "solve" is a 
bureaucratic thing, because no one was being harmed, Marga decided to 
actually *harm* me personally, the person who I had brought, and DebConf 
as a group. What got solved?  Nothing. I left, along with someone who 
would of otherwise been helping out build DebConf, while the Orga team 
demanded a ridiculous fee for me to stay in the hotel.
Rules are rules, I understand, but I also understand everybody listens to 
downloaded music, people in Germany install[2] nmap, and a very long list 
of rules that we tend not to follow because they're unreasonable or 
unnecessarily complicated.
Is this really what DebConf is turning into?

All I can say is I'm very sad and shocked that the people I've worked with 
for so many years decided to condemn me over such a meaningless issue, and 
especially that the local team, Martin Ferrari, Damian Viano, Maximiliano 
Curia and Margarita Manterola would do such thing to "one of there own", 
and that the international Orga team would mindlessly follow through with it.

I apologized to the hotel, I do want to apologize to the innocent people who 
had to deal with this, and, even though my intentions where good and unselfish, 
I regret what happened.

Despite all of this, I'm still deeply committed to Debian, have worked during 
the year and deserve to relax and enjoy it, so I will be there for DebConf 
as a regular attendee.

See you there!

[1] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20080802.231856.66c7d3fd.en.html
[2] http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1629259&from=rss

Adrian von Bidder: 419

Got this gem today:
This is to bring to your notice that I am delegated from the United Nations to Central bank of Nigeria to pay 100 Nigerian 419 scam victims $10 Million each, you are listed and approved for this payments as oneof the scammed victims, get back to as soon as possible for the immediate payments of your $10Million compensations funds.
Quite clever — the kind of stupidity that lets you believe this kind of email the first time will also get you a second time with this one... (Oh, yes: if you really want, you can contact mrjohnwilliamy2k1@live.com yourself.)

3 August 2008

Russell Coker: Used Car Prices

There is an interesting article in The Age about the effect of petrol prices on the poorer people in Melbourne [1]. The article claims that people are unable to sell large old cars and buy smaller cars. To investigate that claim I did a price search on Ford Falcons and Holden Commodores on the web site www.drive.com.au . The Ford Falcon and Holden Commodore were for a long time the two leading marques of cars sold in Australia - both of them large cars. It seems that if I wanted to buy a Falcon that is less than 20 years old with an engine of 4.0L (or bigger) then I would have many choices available with list prices under $2500, including some cars in that price range which are as little as 10 years old (the average age of a car that’s registered for use in Australia). For Commodores there seems to be less choice, there are a few of them with 4L engines that are just over 10 years old being advertised for just under $5000 and a significant number being advertised in the $5,000 to $7,500 range. I don’t know whether the increased asking price for Commodores is due to greater optimism by the owners or a greater demand. One thing that we have to keep in mind is that due to the low price of advertising on the web site and the duration of the advert (which permits changing the price at any time) the sensible strategy is to start the advert with an optimistic price, and then gradually drop the price if there is little interest by the buyers. There are also some Falcons on auction on Ebay that are going fairly cheaply, one example is less than $6000 for a 2000 Falcon with only a few minutes to go. The HSV (Holden Special Vehicles) cars are listed on Drive as a different make on Drive (it’s just Holden’s range of faster vehicles), and surprisingly their prices are quite strong. There is only one vehicle on offer for less than $5000, and only a few for less than $10,000. Now when it comes to buying a small car, on ebay there are a number of Toyota Corollas on sale, two 1997 models are on sale for just under $9,000 and just under $10,000. It seems that you could sell a 2000 model Ford Falcon on ebay and not receive enough money to buy a 1997 Toyota Corolla! For the Corollas advertised on Drive the majority of them seem to be advertised for around $15,000, but the volume on sale is great enough that there is a significant minority advertised for lower prices. There are 173 Corollas advertised for between $2,500 and $5,000 it might be possible to find one of those that has no significant problems. So it seems that ebay is not the place to buy a Corolla! So it seems that the main premise of the article (that you can’t sell a second-hand large car and buy a small car) is correct. If you were to sell a 1990’s Falcon or Commodore and buy a Corolla (which cost about half as much as a high-end Falcon or Commodore when new) of the same age then you would be lucky to get more than half the Corolla purchase price. Then of course there’s a 4% “stamp duty” tax to pay and the risk that a second-hand car you buy might have some hidden problem (the cheaper cars are unlikely to have been well serviced).

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Biella Coleman: New Foundations

Over the years there have been a pretty steady number of foundations that represent the world of Free Software and Open Source. Now there are new foundations that are distinct and with different goals but related such as autonomo.us and now Open Web Foundation. John Eckman has penned some ...

2 August 2008

Russell Coker: On Talking to Police

The lecture by Professor James Duane about why you should not talk to the police (in the US at least) is doing the rounds at the moment. The Google video site doesn’t work for me, so I downloaded it from youtube with the following references:
part 1 [rVq6N0xAEEM]
part 2 [-Z0bpj3EEHI]
part 3 [44-GSZofXIE]
part 4 [zSvxiaO-TG8]
part 5 [gzYHnWrqfWg]
part 6 [BErNzdOnWGY] The first thing that struck me about this is that it’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone clearly state the problem with the excessive number and complexity of the laws. It’s impossible to know whether you are breaking the law. This is obviously wrong and it should be a legislative priority to reduce the number of laws and the complexity of the laws. If for every law they sought evidence regarding whether it helped people or helped preserve the state then that would be a good start. The excessive number of laws is not just a problem due to the risk of accidentally breaking a law, but also due to the fact that a malicious cop could arrest anyone that they wished - it would merely be a matter of following them for long enough. In the second half of the lecture Officer George Bruch from the Virginia Beach Police Department gives his side of the story. At one point he cites an example of the road laws where he can follow a car and find a legitimate reason for booking the driver if he wishes. Virginian law allows the police to destroy primary evidence. If they tape an interview then they can transcribe it to a written record and then destroy the original tape. If the transcription removes some of the content that has meaning then the defendant is probably going to suffer for it. It’s often stated that on the net you have to make extra effort to make your meaning clear as jokes can’t be recognised by the tone of voice. It seems that the same effort would need to be made in a police interview (but without the possibility of going back and saying “sorry I was misunderstood” that you have in email). It’s also legal for police to lie to suspects. While I can imagine some situations where this could be reasonable, it seems that at a minimum there should be some protection for child suspects against being lied to by police (there have been some travesties of justice stemming from children trusting police in an interview room). It seems that if someone doesn’t get a good lawyer and refuse to talk to the police then they will be likely to be convicted regardless of whether they are guilty or innocent. Officer Bruch says that he tries to avoid interviewing innocent people. So I guess whether someone ends up in jail or not will depend to some extent on the opinion of a cop who may or may not interview them. While I guess a high rate of success at securing convictions is in most cases a good thing, the fact that convicting an innocent person is the absolute best way of letting a criminal escape justice seems to be forgotten. Another issue is the fact that a witness may have reason to believe that they could be a suspect. The advice that a suspect should never talk to a police officer seems to logically imply that intelligent people will be hesitant about providing witness statements in situations where they may be a suspect. I wonder how the legal system in Australia compares to the US in regard to these issues. I know that we have far too many laws and too many complex laws which can not be understood and obeyed by a reasonable person.

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1 August 2008

Russell Coker: Upgrading SE Linux Policy

When I first packaged the SE Linux policy for Debian the only way to adjust the policy was to edit the source files and recompile. Often changes that you might desire involved changing macros so while it would have been theoretically possible to just tack a few type definitions and allow rules at the end, you often wanted to change a macro to have a change apply all through the policy. To deal with that I had the policy source installed on all machines and the package update policy would compile it into a binary form and load it into the kernel. Now there was the issue of merging user changes with changes from a new policy package. For most configuration files on a Unix system you can just leave any files that are modified by the user, not taking the new default configuration might cause the user to miss out on some new features - but presumably they were happy with the way it worked in the past. However due to inter-dependencies this wasn’t possible for SE Linux, if one file was not ungraded due to user changes and other files related to it were then the result could be a compile failure. Another issue was the fact that a newer version of the policy might permit operations that the sys-admin did not desire and therefore not meet their security goals, or it might not permit operations that are essential to the operation of the system and interrupt service. To solve this I wrote a script that prompted for upgrades to policy source files and allowed the sys-admin to choose which files to upgrade. This worked reasonably well in the early days when the number of files was small. But as the policy increased in size it became increasingly painful to upgrade the policy with as many as 100 questions being asked. The solution to this (as implemented in Fedora Core 5, Debian/Etch, and newer distributions) was to have binary policy modules that maintain their dependencies. Now there are binary policy modules which can be loaded at will (the default install for Debian only installs modules that match the installed programs) and the modules can have optional sections with dependencies. So if you remove a module that defines a domain and there are other modules which have rules to allow communication with that domain then the optional sections of policy in the other modules is disabled when the domain becomes undefined. This solves the technical issues related to module inter-dependencies but the issue of intent and interaction with the rest of the system remains. With Red Hat distributions the solution has been to upgrade the running policy every time the policy package is upgraded and be cautious when changing policy. They do a good job of the upgrade process (including relabeling files when the file contexts change) and in terms of policy changes I have not heard complaints from users about that. Users who don’t want a newer version of the policy can always put the package on hold. For the Debian distribution after Lenny I plan to have a policy upgrade process that relabels files and a debconf question as to whether package upgrades should upgrade the policy. But for Lenny the freeze is already in progress so it seems to late to make such changes. Instead I’m going to upload a new version of the selinux-basics package with a program named selinux-policy-upgrade that will upgrade all the policy modules that are in use. This is not the ideal solution, but I think it will keep Lenny users reasonably happy.

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John Goerzen: The Eee 901: Awesome

An Eee 901 showed up here recently, and I've had a (little) time to play with it.

What an awesome little machine that thing is. The keyboard is better than I expected, and so is the screen.

I got annoyed at the lack of things like Emacs on the default Xandros install, so decided to zap it and install Debian. But first, I wanted to take a backup of it.

I was thinking to myself that this is a Linux environment, but I can't just boot up a Linux rescue thingy to get stuff off it because it's not a regular PC.

Oh wait. It IS a regular PC. It is so small that I wasn't even thinking about it in the right terms. So a little dd, gzip, and nc later I have my backup image.

Debian went on smoothly -- booted from a 16MB image on a USB drive. X, suspend/resume, etc. all worked out of the box. Compiled the wifi driver and it works.

This is, I think, the perfect laptop size. Also the price is good, it's solid... what's not to love?

31 July 2008

Jacobo Tarrío Barreiro: Translating debconf templates

You can approach debconf translation work in two ways: you can be active and seek out packages to translate and update, or you can be reactive and translate and update packages when someone requests it to be done. Usually, nobody takes a purely active or reactive stance; for example, lately I used to react to calls for translation updates, but when I had some spare time I would go translate a couple of new packages. When you work actively, the web page whose URL you need to know is http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/. There you have links to all languages for which there are translations. Click on yours, and you’ll see a page listing the state of every source package’s debconf template translations for your language. First, you see the partially-translated packages, then the fully translated packages, and finally a list of packages which are not translated to your language. For each package in the first two sections you can download the .POT and .PO files; the names of the packages in the last section just link to a big webpage from which you can download every package’s .POT file. In the top part of the page you have links to other useful pages. An interesting one is the ranking page, which lists all the languages in order of completeness. For working reactively, you need to subscribe to the debian-i18n mailing list, because when there is a call for updates or for translations it is always sent to that mailing list. Also, if there already is a translation for your language, another email will be sent to the translation group’s mailing list, as well as to the file’s latest translator. Calls for translations include information on the deadline and the package maintainer’s preferred methods for submitting the translation. There may also be some notes from the package maintainer. Finally, the .POT file is attached to the call for translations sent to debian-i18n, while the old .PO file is attached to the call for translations sent to the group and the latest translator. Calls for translations can be sent by the package maintainer when the debconf templates have been modified and the translations need to be updated, but they can also be sent by other people for many other reasons. For example, for the last months there’s been a campaign to upload packages for which there were newer translations that hadn’t been uploaded yet, so NMUs for these packages (non-maintainer uploads) were announced, including a call for translations. Also, there was a campaign to review all packages’ debconf templates, make them more consistent, improve their grammar, etc., and a call for translations was issued for every package after the review.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Making it official

I just wrote this in my user page in the English wikipedia:
Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho is no longer actively working on Wikipedia. While I approve, in principle, all the new and stricted editor policies, it is emotionally very demanding to be challenged under new policies for edits that were made in good faith under older policies. There just aren’t enough positive aspects to doing Wikipedia to offset that very big negative aspect.
Some of the challenges toward my edits have happened in the English Wikipedia, and some in the Finnish Wikipedia. I have felt like this for about a year now – it’s probably time to make it official. I may make minor edits, or write in talk pages occasionally, but any substantial edits I won’t bother with any more.

Russell Coker: Mental Benchmarking

One thing that seems overlooked by most people who discuss productive work habits is the varying mental capacity for performing different types of work. While it’s well known that alcohol and other substances decrease mental ability and it’s slightly less well known that sleep deprivation has a similar affect to being drunk [1], the reference cites the case of medical residents - the effects of sleep deprivation can affect people with medical training who presumably are better qualified to recognise and mitigate such problems than most people. Previously I wrote about increasing efficiency through less work [2], which was mainly based on the total number of hours worked in a week - with some mention of extreme fatigue. However it seems obvious that things aren’t that simple. The ability to perform work can be reduced due to temporary issues, poor sleep the previous night (not the same as sleep deprivation but enough to decrease performance), general health (I find that having a cold really reduces the quality and quantity of my work), and physical state (skipping a meal due to being busy can lead to lower quality work). For the work I do (system programming and system/network administration) there are a range of tasks that I need to perform, which require different levels of skill. Now when I have several tasks that need to be done it makes sense to do the most demanding task that I can do well. The problem is in assessing my own ability to perform such tasks, while I can have a general idea of how alert I feel, it seems likely that self assessment by subjective criteria will decrease in accuracy at least as fast as my ability to perform the work in question. So having an ability to assess my mental capacity at any time seems useful in determining when to work on the hard tasks, when to work on easy tasks, and when to just give up and go to bed! ;) Fortunately I have found a benchmark that seems to give reasonable results. I have found that I can reliably solve the game Codebreaker (based on the board game Mastermind [3]) on the Familiar distribution of Linux running on my iPaQ in under 30 seconds when I’m fully alert. So far my tests have indicated that when I seem less alert (due to finding tasks difficult which should be easy or making mistakes) the amount of time taken to complete the game increases (my worst day was when I couldn’t complete it in under a minute). It seems likely that someone who is doing intellectual work could take one day off work a week without a great decrease in productivity if it was their least productive day. If there was a factor of three difference in productivity between the best and worst days then skipping the worst day might decrease productivity by 10% if the 8 hours in question were used doing something as demanding as working. If what might have been the least productive day had been spent relaxing followed by going to sleep earlier than usual then it doesn’t seem impossible for productivity to be increased enough on the next day to provide a net benefit. One thing I plan to do from now on is to use Codebreaker to help me determine when I should cease work in the evening. If I take more than a minute to complete it (or have difficulty in solving it) then it’s probably best to finish work for the day.

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30 July 2008

Matthew Garrett

The Linux Plumbers Call for Papers is open for another day or so. It's looking like we'll have an excellent spread of interesting power management topics, but if you've got anything interesting to say then throw it forward. We're looking for kernel issues that have an impact on userspace, userspace issues that need kernel support and anything else that involves the interesting interactions between the two.


Hats for everyone and cab it to the Gold Club

San Francisco has been somewhat hectic, but yesterday included a quick trip to the office to discuss community involvement in improving power management. Look forward to developments there. Independently, I now join Brian the guy who had been clean too long to get onto the drugs rehab program (hurrah voicemail) in being an ex-owner of my US phone number. Probably best to delete it if you have it.

In other news, Foxconn are sending me a board with the "controversial" AMI BIOS in order to figure out what's going on. Progress by this time next week, with luck.

29 July 2008

Holger Levsen: Update on debian-community.org

Since at least two months I wanted to write this blog post, as I have realised that I can't give debian-community.org the love it needs. But I have even been to busy to write this Request For Help... :-(

Since September 2007 three community planets (english, italian and german) exists and are used and (since a bit longer) there is a wiki, a mailinglist and an IRC channel (#debian-community on OFTC) and a server running this.

And then it got stalled, yet two out of three DPL candidates mentioned debian-community.org during the DPL IRC debate, believing it was alive and kicking. (Or at least not stalled as it was at that time.) The planets are alive, but that's it. Or rather that was it, there has been some activity recently! :-)

Last week, Andreas Putzo approached me and told me he wanted to spend some of his holidays to work on the long proposed email and jabber services. And by now he already did so! Yay.

Still, please consider this request for help (or invitation ;) still to be valid. For example, mail+jabber work now, but there is no documentation on our wiki...

There are many ways you can help, the best is to take initiative. If you want to, please join the IRC channel or send a mail to the list. I'll still hang around, but probably not much more. I certainly don't plan to stand in the way, rather the opposite. And of course, should you attend DebConf8, I'd also love to talk to you :-)

So much for now, now I'll continue with other pre-Argentina todo entries :-)

Hah. Forgot one link: if you haven't seen it yet, please take a 30 sec. look at join.fedoraproject.org. Very well done. I'd like to see debian-community.org to become a bit like that :-)

Adrian von Bidder: KDE 4.1

A while ago I decided that my desktop computer would be a test platform for a few things. So at the moment it's KDE 4.1 and OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta, both from Debian's experimental distribution. Which, on a system which originally was an installation of Debian etch, means that by now not much is left over from that etch system. Long live Debian's dependency handling, which so far has never really let me down! Conclusion: thankfully I have a laptop for actually doing stuff...
  • Digikam (the KDE 4 version as packaged in experimental) is completely b0rked, which is the most annoying thing because the machine is my main photo storage. (I don't do anything beyond archiving the photos, so just blowing away the digikam database is no issue, as is just putting the files into the filesystem. OTOH once Digikam's new removable-media support is tested and works, I plan to start annotating the pictures.)
  • Kmail, absolutely wants to display emails in a proportional font. And I'm not going to configure a typewriter font as the default “proportional” system font... Also, but I suspect that might be an issue with the IMAP server, it still forgets the “ignored” state of mailing list threads. making any moderatly high traffic list impossible to read.
  • OpenOffice.org runs for about 30 seconds before crashing. Ok, it's beta, but so far my experience with packaged stuff, even in experimental, was better. Still, I'm not complaining, I'll just wait for the next version.
  • KDE 4 can't cope with multiple screens (at least if they don't have the same size.) KDE 3 was just nice on this system. I'll start filing bugs when KDE has stabilised enough. If I still have that graphics subsystem then — I've been considering upgrading to a bigger screen for a while now, which probably would mean that I'd throw away the second display, getting more desk space instead.
I should probably add that this is not a rant. I'm running software that's explicitly labelled as experimental. So people should probably view this as a response to whoever (can't find it anymore, wasn't it on Planet?) recently stated that he'd switch to the Hurd since Debian has become boring. Or as a Thank You posting for those making Debian from a “you know it's been the stable version for the last year when it's entered Debian” type of distribution into a “get it on the day of release” distribution.

MJ Ray: How to Install Koha 3.0.0 on MacOS X 10.5

This is a pretty technical note, which I’m posting here for review and hopefully to help other people. The reinstall I mentioned last week was a MacOS X 10.5 server, so this time I installed Koha more simply and took more notes. I don’t want to put this in the distribution as INSTALL.osx, for reasons mentioned below. Also, I’d be very happy if people replaced all osx servers with debian ones, or at least some sort of tidy GNU/Linux. The sysadmin installed XCode and fink for me and I ran
fink install apache2 apache2-dev mysql mysql15-dev
without any great event. I also re-used an old, imperfect, local finkinfo/idzebra.info to
fink install idzebra idzebra-shlibs
Next, I used the extremely horrible command
fink list $(sed -n -e “/PREREQ_PM =/,/ / ;s/^[ ']*//;s/::/-/g;s/’.*\$/-pm588/;/-.*-pm588/p; ” Makefile.PL tr A-Z a-z)
inside an unpacked koha-3.00.00.094 folder to find out which modules fink had packaged already. Something similar can be done for debian and ubuntu, using apt-search or dpkg instead of fink and a libperl- prefix instead of a -pm588 suffix. (I think all systems should do something like that. Then we could merge the INSTALL.*s into the main INSTALL because they lag behind.) Three of those, I copied to /sw/fink/10.5/local/main/finkinfo and edited slightly (usually to increase the version: dbd-mysql-pm, html-template-pm, xml-libxml-common-pm, xml-libxml-pm.info and xml-simple-pm.info… also in my fink-10.5 folder) and then ran
fink install dbd-mysql-pm588 text-iconv-pm588 xml-simple-pm588 data-dumper-pm588 digest-md5-pm588 file-temp-pm588 getopt-long-pm588 html-scrubber-pm588 list-util-pm588 list-moreutils-pm588 mime-base64-pm588 net-ldap-pm588 test-harness-pm588 text-wrap-pm588 time-hires-pm588 unicode-normalize-pm588 xml-dumper-pm588 xml-libxslt-pm588 xml-rss-pm588 yaml-syck-pm588
to install those modules. For the remaining modules from CPAN, I set PERL5LIB to my new Koha folder (export PERL5LIB=/Library/WebServer/Koha/lib:/Library/WebServer/Koha/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/:/Library/WebServer/Koha/lib/perl5/site_perl/:$PERL5LIB) and ran perl -MCPAN -e shell, telling the configuration screens to use PREFIX=/Library/WebServer/Koha (so install into the Koha folder instead of splattering across /System/Library). Then the command
install Bundle::KohaSupport
just worked, thanks to excellent work by Mike Mylonas and others. Finally, all that was left was to run the normal installation in the koha-3.00.00.094 folder, picking the “single” configuration and ignoring “make test” failure (because it’s a work in progress and this is RC1), edit the /Library/WebServer/Koha/etc/zebra/*cfg to point at /sw instead of /usr, symlink koha-httpd.conf into /sw/etc/apache2/sites-available and run the a2ensite commands, copy the service plist files into /Library/LaunchDaemons and load them into launchctl, browse koha and start testing it. Simple(!) It only took me a full day of work to figure that out and do the reinstall… compared to under 2 hours from scratch on debian at the moment. Maybe it’s faster if you know the OS better and/or aren’t trying so hard not to splatter stuff across the base system. Did I do anything wrong above?

28 July 2008

Jacobo Tarrío Barreiro: Translating the Debian installer

As some of you know, I’ll stop working on Galician translations (of everything) after Lenny is released (or after the end of October, if Lenny is not released before). Before that, I’m going to start documenting several aspects of my work on it in several blog posts. I’m not going to follow any particular order; when everything’s written, I’ll collate the documents and make them available together in a single coherent document. Although it is written for the future Galician team, this work (even the final document) will be written in English. If it is a problem for anyone, I don’t want them as translators. And, also, this will make this document potentially useful for other teams.
The Debian installer system (d-i, for short) is made up of several components. Some of these components were written especially for the Debian installer; others, however, are standalone applications which are used during the installation of Debian. The translations of many of these components are managed separately; however, an effort is being made to keep track of them, providing a single dashboard where a translator can see the status of the d-i translations, get files to translate, instructions for submitting the translations, etc. This dashboard resides at http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/l10n-stats/. There is a translation guide for d-i, explaining what components are in each level, how to retrieve the files to translate or update, and how to submit the translated files. I’m giving here a short summary in this post. For translation purposes, d-i is divided in five levels. Level 1 contains the strings everyone sees when installing Debian — the following levels contain components whose translation is less user-visible. Therefore, when translating d-i you should prioritize level 1 translations, then level 2 translations and so on. However, this doesn’t mean that they are any less important; you should try to always keep them up to date! You can see the status of every language in each level by going to the l10n-stats page. If you click on a language you can see a text file with a more detailed report on the translations for that level and language. You can also opt in to receive emails every morning when the status in a level for your language changes — you’ll have to ask Christian Perrier to subscribe you to the websec-txt notifications for your language. Level 1 translations are maintained on Alioth, so you should get an Alioth account and request to be added to the d-i project as translator. Then, you’ll be able to download and upload the translations using Subversion. There are lots of programs and packages that comprise level 1; however, to make translation easier and more efficient, the translations are consolidated in only 5 files (called sublevels). In this way, if the same string appears several times in several programs, you only need to translate it once. It’s 5 files instead of a single one so that it’s easier to distribute work, assign priorities, etc. The other levels consist of translations of individual programs, which are maintained in many different ways. The particular methods you have to use for each package are detailed in the translation guide. For most of them, it involves downloading the .POT or .PO file from a read-only version control repository, and uploading the translation using the Debian BTS.

27 July 2008

Matthew Garrett

FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST T-MOBILE WHY ARE YOU TRIGGERING VOICEMAIL NOTIFICATIONS AT THE RATE OF ONE EVERY FIVE MINUTES WHEN I AM UNABLE TO EVEN ACCESS MY VOICEMAIL I AM GOING TO BURN YOU TO THE GROUND

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