There are some people who’s blogs I read and often comment on or reference in my own blog posts. Some of them regularly make comments on my posts and reference my posts in their own posts. Of these people some of them I have never met or don’t seem to have conversations with when I meet them. It’s well known that there are different categories of friend including “pen pal”, “drinking buddy”, and friends in the context of sporting groups. Is “blog friend” a new friend category?

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I was watching 24 the other day and (without giving anything away) Edgar Styles had to "patch a system call" to save the world. After chiding his assistant for giving him the wrong opcode for a "load A, conditional" the following briefly appears on the screen. It's actually a pretty good piece of technobabble. The register names and use of 0x80 suggest whoever wrote this has at least some familiarlity with x86 assembley. It would have been slightly better if they called the "microshell" a "microkernel" and put the system call in eax before calling the interrupt, but if you belive Jack's amazing ability to get cell phone reception then it's only a small issue!

I was watching 24 the other day and (without giving anything away) Edgar Stiles had to "patch a system call" to save the world. After chiding his assistant for giving him the wrong opcode for a "load A, conditional" the following briefly appears on the screen. It's actually a pretty good piece of technobabble. The register names and use of 0x80 suggest whoever wrote this has at least some familiarity with x86 assembly. It would have been slightly better if they called the "microshell" a "microkernel" and put the system call in eax before calling the interrupt, but if you believe Jack's amazing ability to get cell phone reception then it's only a small issue!

Glen Turner writes about how Internet censorship could hurt science [1]. The ABC has an article about what is planned [2] which includes “Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools“. If Senator Conroy sticks to that plan then section two of Glen’s post (concerning high-speed access to research data) will not be a problem. This is no criticism of Glen for mentioning the issue as some idiot might try to change the plan to filter corporate and university access. Senator Conroy also earns a Godwin point for “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree“. There is a good discussion paper by Electronic Frontiers Australia about Labour’s plans in this regard before they won the election [3]. One issue they raise is the small number of sites identified as having child-porn. Imposing filters on an entire country to block the 3,236 web pages identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority is not a sensible solution. Another issue that EFA raises is the variety of reasons for content getting an R18+ rating (if that is to be a filtering criteria). One notable issue is “Adult themes” which includes “issues such as suicide, crime, corruption, marital problems, emotional trauma, drug and alcohol dependency, death and serious illness, racism, religious issues“. I doubt that there is much agreement between parents as to the relative significance of those “Adult themes” and which ones their children should be protected from. I also expect that a significant number of parents would like to have information about safe sex (including safe gay sex) and safe drug use available in case their children are interested in such things. I hope that the number of parents who disapprove of homosexuality and drug use so strongly that they are willing to risk their children’s lives is quite small (although the response to the cervical cancer vaccine indicates that it’s sadly larger than expected). Glen has some good points about this in the first section of his post.

• [1] http://www.gdt.id.au/~gdt/blog/strategy/2008-01-02.1024px


• [2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/12/31/2129471.htm


• [3] http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/mandatoryblocking.html

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For a while I’ve been reading the Lenovo blog Inside The Box [1], even though I plan to keep my current laptop for a while [2] (and therefore not buy another Thinkpad for a few years) I am interested in the technology for it’s own sake and read the blog. A recent post concerns a new desktop machine billed as “our greenest desktop ever” [3]. The post has some interesting information on recycling plastic etc, and the fact that the machine in question is physically small (a volume of 4.5L and no PCI expansion slots) means that less petro-chemicals are used in manufacture (and some of the resins used are recycled). However the electricity use is 47W when idle!!! On my documents blog I have a post about the power use of computers I own(ed) [4] which includes my current Thinkpad (idles at 23W) and an IBM P3 desktop system which idles at 38W. Both machines in question were manufactured before Lenovo bought Thinkpad and IBM’s desktop PC business (so they technically aren’t Lenovo machines) and they weren’t manufactured with recycled resins. But the claim that the new machine is the greenest ever is at best misguided and could be regarded as deceptive. I think that the machine is quite decent, but it’s obvious that they can do a lot better. There’s no reason that a low-power desktop machine (which uses some laptop technology) should take more than twice the power of what was a high-end laptop a few years ago. Also comparing power use with P3 machines (which are still quite useful now, my IBM P3 desktop runs 24*7 as a server) is quite relevant - and we should keep in mind that before the Pentium was released no system which an individual could afford had anything other than a simple heat-sink to cool it’s CPU. This is largely a failing of Intel and AMD to make power efficient CPUs and chipsets. It’s also unfortunate that asymmetric multi-processing has not been implemented in recent times. A system with a 64bit CPU core of P3 performance as well as some Opteron class cores that could be suspended independently would be very good for power use with correct OS support. For example when reading documents and email my system will spend most of it’s time idling (apart from when I use Firefox which is a CPU hog) and the CPU use will be minimal for scrolling - a P3 performing core would be more than adequate for that task (which comprises a significant portion of my computer use). Then when I launch a CPU intensive task (composing a blog post in Wordpress or compiling) the more powerful CPU cores could start. It would be good if Intel would release a Pentium-M CPU (32bit) with the latest technology (smaller tracks on the silicon means less power use as well as higher clock speeds). A Pentium-M running at 2GHz produced with the latest Intel fabrication technology would probably use significantly less power than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is in my Thinkpad. Put that in a desktop machine and you would have all the compute power you need for most tasks other than playing games and running vista and you could get an idle power less than 23W. The new Lenovo machine in question does sound like a nice machine, I wouldn’t mind having one for testing and running demos. But the claims made about it seem poorly justified if you know the history.

• [1] http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=99


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/10/09/a-long-laptop-lifetime/


• [3] http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=99


• [4] http://doc.coker.com.au/environment/computer-power-use/

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Well its been a while since my last post and since I’ve celebrated my 29th Birthday on December 19th, Spent a wonderfull Christmas with my family ( pictures for both here ), and getting ready to ring 2008 ! Sitting here thinking about what I want to accomplish in 2008 I only have a few easy to reach goals IMHO :

• Make it to 4 Linux confrences this year ( Penguicon, Ubuntu Developers Summit [ 1 of 2 ], SCALE, and Ubuntu Live )
• Give atleaste 1 talk at a OpenSource Confrence, and run 1 Local “Package Jam” here in Kansas City
• Quit Smoking Cigarettes
• Decide between a eeepc or Mac Book for my next “mobile” machine
• Upgrade all my systems to use FL/OSS friendly vendors like Dell,Intel,Apple etc. ( I’m not talking 100% ideal companies, but ones that atleaste show some effort )
• Keep and install of Ubuntu GNOME arround alongside my Main Kubuntu KDE ( I’m still a kde guy through and through, but its good to see the “other side” from time to time )
• Blog and Post Photos ( to flickr ) more Regularly

Also on a side note this year I’ve introduced all my imediate family members to Ubuntu and they all continue to use it ( Wife, Stepfather, Brother, and Mother ) instead of XP or Vista, My “support” phone calls have basicly dissapeared. And with that, I wish every one a safe and Happy 2008… May this be the year of the Linux Des… ahh nevermind, yall enjoy the holiday.

I am very saddened by the state of the IT industry. It seems like nearly everyone who works in or around IT is, to put it bluntly, a cowboy. There appears to be very little desire for actually helping people; instead all I see is a very large number of people circling around looking for the next person they can make a quick buck off. In short, most of the IT industry is composed of people who are little better than shysters and conmen. As a case in point, I recently had contact with someone who is trying to get an online store running. They've been trying, unsuccessfully so far, for several months. They've been screwed over by basically every IT-related person they've had contact with so far. Now, after all of their suffering, they've finally gotten in contact with me. Most of their money is gone, and they're deeply behind schedule. So I'm left trying to pull a miracle job in little time and with little money. Yes, I could shoo them away, because they're asking for more than they can afford, but there's a little spark of helpfulness left in me, and I'll try to get them going as best they can with what they've got. If they'd found someone competent right at the beginning, they'd have been fine. They started with sufficient cash and time to produce a good end result. But chancing upon someone decent doesn't have good odds in IT; it's a bit like winning the lottery. This story isn't unique in my personal experience, by any stretch. There seems to be a near-endless procession of non-technical people who come out of their encounters with the IT industry battered and bruised, whether it be on the web, in their business infrastructure, or their personal computing needs. While it's easy to blame the customer for not managing themselves and their computing properly, I don't think it's fair to lay the blame on them -- to me, that's like blaming the patient for dying on the operating table, when the responsibility must lie, prima facie, with the surgeon. It's the surgeon, after all, who is the (presumably) trained and experienced professional in the relationship, and it is his responsibility, primarily, to ensure that everything goes smoothly[1]. Depressingly, I don't see much of a way around this problem. The few IT people who did care could try and group together, build some sort of a rating or "membership implies quality" system, educate the consumer, and try and drive the cowboys out, but guilds and trade associations are frowned upon these days, smacking (as they do) of restraint of trade and collusion. Government regulation never seems to produce anywhere near the desired result, while hoping that the consumer will either rise up and demand quality, or will gain sufficient knowledge to be able to pick a cowboy is a complete non-starter, for the same reason as teaching everyone basic surgical techniques isn't going to improve the quality of hospitals.

---

There's an ad that used to be on Australian TV for a certain bank, where a guy is at a party and he's asked by another of the partygoers what he does for a living. As he replies, "I work in banking", the entire party goes silent and stares at him in horror. It's only when he says, "It's OK, I'm with $BANK_BEING_ADVERTISED" that everyone looks happy again and continues on with their party. Although I've never had that particular experience, I'm almost getting to the point where I'm not happy telling people what I do for a living. This is because in any non-trivial collection of people, there's almost certainly going to be at least one person who has had such a poor experience with the IT industry that they're either going to take it out on me, ask me interminable questions about computers, or will just hate me on principle. It's unfortunate that brothels don't have pianos any more; if I were to say "I play piano in a whorehouse" I'm pretty sure the response would be "lawyer or sysadmin?". As Edsger Dijkstra said back in 2001, "The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed." Are you?

---

1. That isn't to say that the patient (or client) has no responsibility in ensuring a positive outcome -- if you go bungee jumping the day after open heart surgery, or never send your web developer any content, you're very unlikely to have a positive outcome. However, it seems to me as though the only customer consultation done by most IT "professionals" on taking on a project is a Homeresque "I only have two questions. 'How much?' and 'give it to me'".

I just uploaded the Debian packages versioned 1:2.9.9-2 (almost immediately followed by 1:2.9.9-3, because I forgot to test part of it, and obviously that part turns out to be broken), containing some updates:

• Added a switch in the configuration file which will cause the initscript to not kill all nbd-client instances, which it does currently.
• Added initramfs scripts.

The two combined should allow for running a root filesystem on an NBD device. Note that the initramfs scripts haven't received any testing beyond my system yet; it's not impossible that they're broken in some regard. Treat them with some caution. Having said that, testing would be welcome... Next, I've also started work on partman-nbd. This is in an even more experimental and unfinished state, but the eventual goal is to support installing to an NBD device. Wouldn't that be nice.

Following my post about SSH jumphost I have another SSH feature to share with you, which IMO isn’t known or used enough. Imagine you have some data on one host which gets regenerated every now and then and you also need this data on other hosts too. There are multiple ways to sync the data to other machines. You can

• make them available via http/ftp and cron a wget run
• use some rsync or ftp daemon on the target host(s) and write data to them (brrrrr)
• simply use limited SSH keys to signal the target host(s) when there is something new to fetch

The problem of the first option is that you need to make the data available via http/ftp, which needs an extra daemon to run. And then you need to cron a script fetching it, which wastes resources if the data is updated infrequently. The problem of the second option is that you need some daemon available which allows you to write to the host. Depending on what you chose that might be with passwords transferred unencrypted. Or you aren’t able to set it up yourself, as you are not the admin of the machine. So, lets take the third solution. Its safe to assume that SSH is available on the hosts you login to (don’t tell me you still use telnet/rlogin on remote machines), so lets use SSH features. I assume that usage of basic SSH public key authentication is known, if not you first want to google for it and learn about that. Using SSH keys to trigger actions on remote hosts is basically the same as a login to the machine and manually running a command - except you don’t need to do it yourself, a script is doing it. Which leads to one big difference for a “trigger” key compared to a “login” key: You do not set a passphrase for that SSH key! As a consequence of that you use such a key only for exactly one purpose, nothing else. Generate a new key for another trigger. Never, ever, use such a passphrase-less SSH key for normal logins to other machines… Having generated a passphrase-less key on host a (let it have IP 1.2.3.4) we copy the .pub file over to the target host b and put it into the authorized_keys file (usually in ~/.ssh/). The difference to normal login keys is the large line of options we put in front of it:

command="rsync --server -vlHogDtprz --delete --delete-after --ignore-errors . /org/backup/something",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,from="1.2.3.4" ssh-key-here

or

command="/var/mirror/ftpsync &",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty,from="1.2.3.4" ssh-key-here

Both commands allow to use the SSH key from host a with its IP 1.2.3.4 and will run the command thats defined here. No matter what command or options are are specified on the commandline on host a, host b will only do the above. There wont be any port, X11 or agent forwarding and due to the forced command there also wont ever open a shell. With the first command we trigger the remote hosts rsync to write the data we send into that path, using the given options. Of course that means we send data using rsync from our host. The SSH connection stays available for the whole time the command runs. The second command instead runs the given binary, a shell script in this case, in background. As we also forbid tty allocation the SSH connection is closed right after the script is started. To avoid DOSing the remote machine such a script should have some kind of lockfile check and abort if a second copy is already running. SSH also allows to use such limited SSH keys for the root user, while disallowing normal root logins: Change PermitRootLogin in sshd_config from no to forced-commands-only and you wont be able to login to the remote host as root but you can trigger actions that should be run as root. If you want to know what else you can do using options specified in the authorized_keys file then read its man-page, it has some details how you can use it to limit port forward requests, use more than just one IP in the from= parameter, … Some users of the above way of automating tasks on remote machines are

• The Debian mirror network. About all tier-1/2 mirrors are pushed using the described technique, making updates to Debian available as soon as possible.
• da-backup, the Debian Admin Backup tool, used by Debian and DebConf to backup their hosts to central backup servers.
• packages.debian.org updates his data way faster than in the past, thanks to this.
• Possibly many many more, its a useful feature.

Using a bluetooth headset for giving presentations While looking for ways of flipping slides while not near the computer, I stumbled on this idea this idea, bought a cheap headset for like 10euros and started playing. Getting the headset to work with alsa It's supposed to just work, but bluez-utils in Debian has audio support disabled. I've rebuild the package with the patch found in the bug report, copied the extra configuration files as I mentioned in a followup to the bug report, and brought my Debian up to speed. Once the patched bluez-utils is in place, this is how to get the headset to work:

1. put the headset into pairing mode
2. hcitool scan (to get the address of the headset)
3. put this in ~/.asoundrc (using the address you got with hcitool scan):

   pcm.bluetooth_hw  
      type bluetooth
      device 00:11:22:33:44:55
    
   ctl.bluetooth  
      type bluetooth
      device 00:11:22:33:44:55
    
   # No idea why this is needed, but it makes aplay complain a bit
   # less, and also it makes aoss work
   pcm.bluetooth  
       type plug
       slave.pcm "bluetooth_hw"
    
   

Now, forget hcitool cc: in order to pair with the headset, the command is:

mplayer -ao alsa:device=bluetooth moo.wav

This will trigger a funky chain of events that will eventually cause the bluetooth applet to ask you for the pin (0000 for the headsets), get things paired and activate super cow powers. Now you have an alsa sound card called 'bluetooth' that works only with some, but not all, alsa applications. mplayer works. aoss works, but not always. aplay seems to work. twinkle won't work; apparently, it's because it tries to open the device multiple times. Feeding synthesised speech to the headset Synthesised speech is done by festival. Festival works with oss. The headset works with alsa. aoss works, but not always. This is the script I'd like to run:

#!/bin/sh
warn()  
    echo -n "Attenzione: "
    if [ $1 == 1 ]
    then
        echo -n "manca un minuto"
    else
        echo -n "mancano $1 minuti"
    fi
    echo " alla fine."
 
(
    for x in 5 4 3 2 1
    do
        warn $x
        sleep 1
    done
)   festival --tts --language italian

By tweaking the sleep times and numbers a bit, it's a useful prototype that sends updates on how much time is left for the presentation. This, under aoss, does not work reliably. An alternative is to replace the festival invocation with this:

echo string   text2wave tmpfile.wav
mplayer -ao alsa:device=bluetooth tmpfile.wav

However, I found no way to tell text2wave to use Italian instead of English. I did manage, however, to get some link between festival and the headphones. At a further stage, I can write a program for the countdown that keeps the audio device open and every once in a while gets a waveform out of text2wave and feeds it to the audio device. Keeping the audio device open seems a good idea, to avoid losing the beginning of the message while the connection is established (happens with my cheap headset) and to avoid the headset to go idle and switch off. Reacting to the buttons on the headset It's supposed to be possible, but I didn't manage to find out how to do this using the normal alsa driver, now that btsco is apparently deprecated. Once I find out how to be notified of button presses, I'll try to see how to send a Page Down keystroke to OpenOffice Impress or xpdf. Voice commands sphinx2-bin seems promising, but since everyone around me is now asleep, playing with voice commands has to be postponed. Further ideas

• IRC link: send me a message on a public IRC channel, and I could head it on the headphone: nice for giving talks that people is watching remotely via streaming.
• Giving the percentage of time passed, instead (or additionally to) the time remaining.
• Linking with the presentation software and also say the number of slides remaining.
• Get the status update being spoken not just at regular intervals, but also when changing slide.
• Get the headset to read slide notes, or only the slide notes marked with a special leading keyword.

I’ve just read an interesting article in the New Yorker titled “Twilight of the Books” [1]. It started with some depressing statistics about literacy. One comment that I couldn’t figure out concerned “the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed“. The decline in literacy concerns me because I want to live in a society where everyone can contribute as equals and where all voters have the possibility of becoming well informed about the issues that affect their vote. If literacy declines far enough then fascism seems to be the inevitable result. I’m not sure whether that makes me a humanist according to the author. Below in the second part of this post (not included in the feed) I include my dictionary definition of the word, #4 is the definition most commonly used today (which is a reasonable match for my beliefs). There is some interesting information regarding basic research on the mental abilities of literate and illiterate people which suggests that people who an read are better at handling abstract concepts and hypothetical situations. The article notes that spending time on the net increases academic scores for children. It also makes the interesting claim that visiting pr0n sites increases grades, I find that difficult to believe. I wonder whether there is a difference between readers and writers in this regard. Does the typical serious net user who averages writing more than 3650 messages a year for fun (in addition to whatever email may need to be written for work) plus some blog posts and writing other web pages have different mental abilities to someone who just reads what others write? Does blogging (and other writing on your choice of topic) change your brain? What about programmers, does spending 8 hours a day writing formal rules for hypothetical mathematical situations (which is essentially what programming is about) change your brain? Are programmers going to have greater abilities for managing abstract concepts and hypothetical situations than people who have not had such experience? NB It will be difficult to determine this as people who have such skills will find programming easier and more fun so therefore a career in programming computers is self-selecting for people with such abilities. Another interesting fact is the results of research into the comprehension of a PowerPoint presentation. People who read it without an audio-visual accompanying it learned more and rated it as more interesting. Based on this my plan is that in future when attending conferences I will try and read papers which are presented BEFORE attending the lectures. Unfortunately most conferences which have papers presented seem based on the idea that you give a lecture about a topic as a teaser for your paper and assume that the audience knows nothing about it (conferences which don’t have papers outnumber the ones that do). Most Linux conferences seem based on the idea that almost no-one reads papers at all, they attend lectures and visit web sites and IRC channels afterwards. NB this comment is based on talking to people who attend conferences and my observations on attending conferences - it is not a criticism of any conferences merely an observation on cultural attitudes. Based on this information it seems reasonable to provide copies of lecture notes to the audience before the lecture. For example for a typical talk that I give to a LUG I could blog the lecture notes before the meeting and email the LUG mailing-list with the URL, people who really want to learn would hear me talk AFTER reading the notes and hopefully get the best of both forms of learning. I had been considering producing some YouTube [2] videos with instructions on how to use SE Linux. But it seems that might not be such a good idea (at least not a good enough idea to justify the amount of effort I would have to spend). The author seems to misunderstand YouTube, it is NOT about making the Internet resemble TV (where millions of mindless drones watch content created for the lowest common denominator in the audience). The AtGoogleTalks on YouTube [3] and www.ted.com are examples of high-quality free content (comparable to the best TV documentaries - the type of content which is cited as increasing the academic results of children) and the culture of creation and discussion must be a good thing. Most TV is bad because it’s one-way communication and the quality of the content is low. YouTube videos are widely discussed in email, blogs, and other written forums. The creation of the best (and often most viewed) videos would surely involve some writing. I wonder whether the benefits attributed to reading can be obtained without reading fiction. The nature of work is changing to require an increasing amount of reading and writing. The most menial work requires reading instruction manuals. Most of the best paid jobs involve a lot of reading and writing. If reading fiction isn’t required then it seems that there is little risk in the immediate future.

• [1] http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain?currentPage=all


• [2] http://www.youtube.com


• [3] http://au.youtube.com/profile?user=AtGoogleTalks

(more…)

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Tomorrow, all being well, I should receive a new desktop computer. I ordered it upon Boxing Day so the turnaround is pretty good. Right now I have two desktop machines:

yours.my.flat

This machine is occaisionally used by my partner, but primarily exists to remotely backup my various servers. It runs rsnapshot to do a full rsync of four machines every six hours.

vain.my.flat

This is my day-to-day desktop machine. It is going to be replaced, and this will be rotated into the backup machine. The machine yours will sit in a closet for a couple of months then be donated to somebody local.

As with all the machines I've bought recently the new one is coming from Novatech - (Another company whos website has a suprising hostname.) The interesting parts of the spec are :

• AMD X2 4200 processor
• 2 x 500Gb SATA drives
• 4Gb memory

The biggest difference to me will be the significantly increased disk space which means that I'll be able to remove the external 120Gb USB hard drive I currently house my MP3 collection upon. By retiring vain and moving my current desktop machine to be the "random guest machine" and backup host I'll also have a lot more space for storing backups upon. (Full database backups every six hours; I'm paranoid...) Having 4Gb of memory will also mean that I can run more than 2 or 3 Xen guests at the same time. My plan is to setup at least the following guests:

• sarge.security-build.xen
• etch32.security-build.xen
• etch64.security-build.xen
• etch32.desktop.xen
• etch64.desktop.xen

The desktop machines will run GDM / X11 and will be available for logins via xdmcp - so that I can have a fully seperate working environment which is pristine and easily regenerated. Giving 5 xen instances 256Mb of memory each will leave me with close to 3Gb of disk for the host and that is three times what I hav enow! All in all I'm looking forward to the new machine enormously a bargain at ~ £290.

Trolltech has released Qt4.4.0 technical preview (tp1). This release introduces new features like phonon (multimedia framework) with the gstreamer plugin, webkit (web browser engine), xmlpatterns (XQuery and XPath engine), help system with QtClucene (Qt wrapper around clucene), etc … and some enhancements to current modules. It comes with new demos (browser using webkit, mediaplayer using phonon and embeddeddialogs) and new examples (help, ipc, phonon, qtconcurrent and xmlpatterns). It’s worth to take a look closer from a packager point of view:

• phonon can be found in KDE svn and webkit can be found on WebKit svn.

=> It means different release schedule and sources not always synced. It seems we need to choose which branch we want to package (TT/KDE and TT/WebKit).

• xmlpatterns module depends on exceptions support.

=> So far, we build Qt without exceptions support. If you want the xmlpatterns module, you need to enable exceptions support

• a change on Qt4.4.0 breaks ABI on mips architecture.

=> nobody is perfect… If you want to play with this release, you can find packages for Debian (sources and amd64 build at the moment) on: http://people.debian.org/~fabo/debian/qt4-x11_4.4.0~tp1-1/ the regular snaphot of the QWebView (done in 3s): As far as i can see, Qt4.4.0 will rock !

my blog has moved to: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog BIG FAT WARNING: my blog has moved to a new location, namely: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog (following my homepage which is now located at http://upsilon.cc/~zack). Redirects are in place to avoid suddenly un-subscribing people feed readers, by they will be removed sooner or later, so please update your feed readers. Here is a quick link to the new RSS feed URL: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/index.rss. If you prefer, now there is even an Atom feed URL: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/index.atom. A functional improvement over the previous location is that discussion pages work again, so you can now leave comments to my posts in wiki-style using them (though you will need to register or have an openid account).

I have now gotten into baking bread at home and I like the result greatly. The inspiration came from an anime Yakitate!! Japan! - a very funny anime about bread bakers with lots of parody on other anime and lots of over-the-top reactions to bread. It also has a lot of tips on baking your own bread which helps people get started. I have heard that ‘Yakitate!! Japan’ caused a bread baking mania in Japan on par with the Go mania from ‘Hikaru No Go’ (Off-side note: I wonder if making an anime about developing free software would turn people in Japan and all over the world to do it more?) I watched the anime a couple years back and promptly forgot about it, but now when I was thinking about what anime to show to my girlfriend it came back to me. After that we both decided that we need an oven to bake bread in, unfortunately the flat we are in has no oven, so we had to buy a free-standing one. After much research and deliberation and some good advice from my friends, I got us a Samsung CE1071AR microwave oven with grill and a convection oven function. It has been the best decision - cooking with this thing is easy and painless. It is large enough for one large loaf of bread or a bunch of cookies in two levels. It has a steam-based self-clean function and an automatic preheat function. It can do all the things that a microwave oven can do and also combine regular oven with microwaves. And best of all it also has a 40 degree setting in the convectional oven mode - that is perfect for raising bread right in the oven. I am starting with the simplest bread recipes from The Fresh Loaf site tutorial section and in short order was able to produce some of the best tasting bread I ever had. You can see the result above. Now when my girlfriend and her sister decided to cook all kinds of stuff for Christmas I was not bored, but rather the opposite happened - I participated and had fun. Even more so - we are now watching the ‘Yakitate!! Japan’ anime, together with my girlfriend, looking for new tips for the cooking. I just might try to make a croissant next

finally I found the time to write down the configuration we use on our server to blacklist hosts that try to send emails to pre-defined nonexistent mail addresses. it uses only exim & postgresql & is (except for adding the "triggering" recipient email address patterns to the respective table) rather self-contained.

the documentation can be found in the article dynamic blacklisting with exim & postgresql. feel free to use/improve/comment/... the ideas!

Last night we celebrated Christmas with some friends by doing a lot of cooking - baking mostly. In the end we had some regular sweetbread dough and some gingerbread dough left over. On a whim I suggested to put them together - we rolled out both doughs very thin (3-4 mm), put them on top of each other (with some vanilla powder in between) then rolled that into a big roll and cut it into 1 cm pieces. After glazing that with beaten egg and cooking for 15 minutes in 200 degrees C oven we got what can be seen in the photo above. The taste is phenomenal - it has the hard and crispy layers of gingerbread and soft layers of the regular sweetbread and sweet all through. In some cookies the innermost core was made of a chunk of soft gingerbread - that tasted the best. I also got myself an oven and have started to bake home-made bread, but that’s for another post :). Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

Spamassassin supposedly can precompile rules to allow faster operation. It compiles an optimized matching automaton that will process all the regular expressions in parallel.Anyway, in order to use it, you need to manuall install some dependencies. They probably can't be introduced as real dependencies to not enforce them upon people who don't want to use this feature. So far, I've identified

aptitude install re2c gcc libc6-dev make

I'm aware that many people will have the libc6-dev and gcc stuff already installed, and the re2c dependency is well-documented. But I actually had removed the C compiler from my mail server.