This weekend I had the pleasure of visiting my friend Kike in Iru a, a city I really like but had not been able to visit in five years. I spent three days with him, after a really awful Bilman trip during Friday night. The first thing that happened on Friday morning was quite unexpected. I went out, crossed a pair of streets to get to Carlos III, and going past the corner I found myself surrounded by all kinds of policemen: red, blue, green and yellow. There were press reporters all over the place, with TV and photo cameras ready to record something big. What the hell? I looked around, and there it was: a huge blue sign read Populares de Navarra, and Mariano Rajoy was seconds away from getting out of the new PP headquarters in Nafarroa. With a few dozen policemen looking at me in suspicion, and realising my current hair dress wasn't the most appropriate for that scenario, I decided to disappear as quickly as possible. Populares aside, the weekend was really productive. I had a great time trying to find the places I visited 9 and 5 years ago. It was sad to see the fantastic Iru ako Gaztetxea turned into an iron building surrounded by old, traditional houses in the centre of the city. With Kike, I had enough time to learn more about the origins of Iru a and the three cities from which it originated, and visit the Ciudadela. On Saturday, Kike, Ana and I went to have some fun on a snowy day around Orreaga and had dinner in a small town around the area, maybe Lintzoain? I'm afraid I forgot due to the mix of basque names in my head. We had dinner in lo viejo, where I spotted a poster of Solidari@s con Itoiz for the Itoitz hustu arte campaign, a copy of which I unsuccessfully tried to get in several places in the city. On Sunday, Kike and I took a bus to Donosti, and I travelled across the most beautiful highway I've seen. But of course, that was from my perspective seated in a bus. I can imagine the Leitzaran highway project must have been greatly contested by the people of the tiny towns nearby. The spoiled valleys and views must have been really impressive in the past and seem now irreversibly ruined by a scar and holes through the mountains. This was my first visit to Donosti, which held its annual Marathon, and were lucky to meet our friend Rub n when he was around kilometre 25 of his race. He managed to finish under 2:50, which was a bit better than what he aimed for in his first Marathon. Well done! The weather was horrible, and our visit to La Concha, the old harbour and the Casco Viejo was short, we were freezing and getting our feet wet. While I visited Donosti for the first time, Mikel Laboa, one of the most respected singers in the basque culture, was ebbing away. Laboa's songs always give me goosebumps, even if I need to read a translation for the basque lyrics. Many will remember his music from Julio Medem's documentary, La pelota vasca, featuring Txoria txori, which has become a symbol of basque culture over the years. Youtube has quite a few videos, and I'd recommend watching Txoria txori, Gure bazterrak, Lili bat or Baga biga higa performed by the Orfe n Donostiarra to name a few. Mikel Laboa, goian bego.

Today again somebody commented on probably simplest patch I ever attempted contribute to some free software. And it memorized me the funny fact that this simple change lies for five years in bugtracker without single comment from developers. Only occasionally some random hacker founds it and ask why such simple issue has not yet been solved. Latest change in bug adds flag, that this is still broken in all recent Python versions including 3.0 :-).

I was happy to read Zack's post about adding machine-readable metadata for the Package Tracking System. Not only can one query it via SOAP, he also provides XPath recipes for how to screen-scrape data out of the web pages. He writes:

Well, on top of [SOAP] I've implemented something along the lines microformats, that just make a clever use of ingredients already available in XHTML like classes and unique identifiers.

This is awesome. In fact, as you can see when he links to the SOAP backend, the SOAP interface is implemented using that XPath screen-scraping! What I think would be even more awesome would be to present the data to a machine user of the web page as RDFa, "RDF in attributes." RDF (short for Resource Description Framework) is a standard for metadata statements. Although it is involved in early versions of RSS used for web site syndication, in general it has nothing to do with that. A sample few RDF statements might be:

• <http://www.asheesh.org> has license <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>
• <http://packages.debian.org/alpine> has maintainer <http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=asheesh@asheesh.org>

RDF generally uses URIs to represent information (though you can still literal values like numbers where appropriate). This allows different users to create namespaced terminology. That way, when Debian defines what "maintainer" means, Fedora choose if they want to use the Debian term meaning "maintainer." If they do, then Fedora people and Debian people could use the same query (on a different set of data) to answer the same question. And if they choose to use a different term, the two data sets can co-exist; the namespacing prevents any conflict. As for the term URI: URIs ("Uniform Resource Indicators") are just like URLs, except that instead of names of locations, they are just identifiers. So it's true that every URI is a URL, but you aren't necessarily intended to be able to wget every URI; they're just names. Ben Adida and Mark Birbeck wrote a fantastic RDFa primer that explains the concepts and implementation, peppering it with diagrams where they might help. The key is that using RDFa gives you the ability to automatically interoperate with the world of RDF-aware tools, including query and reasoning systems, and it is architected in a way that anyone can add RDFa data to any page without possibly stepping on the toes of other extra-metadata technologies. (Microformats don't have most of these benefits.) Ben and Michael Hausenblas at W3C also wrote a document listing some further use cases for machine-readable web pages. When I have some spare time, I'd be happy to help. But first I hope to make Zack and others aware that there is a standard for machine-readable metadata, designed with use cases like ours in mind!

Ah, seems the days of posting snow pictures in Planet Debian have gone, and in any case I don’t have pictures, but I’ll blog about snow nevertheless. It never snows in Alicante, my home town. It’s by the sea in the south-east of Spain, and the winters are very mild there. I had only seen or touched snow once in my life, when I was about 7 and there was an outing in school to go and see the snow in some nearby mountain. I’m told it was crappy snow anyway. Today we returned from the QA meeting in Extremadura, arriving in Madrid really early in the morning. Knowing this, I had arranged to stay with friends Sunday and Monday, spending the night at agi@’s place. The house is in some mountain, at about 1800 meters over sea level, and there was plenty of snow. There was also a slope, and a plastic sled, so we did the obvious. It was fun, it made me happy, and I should pay Alberto another visit some other time with more appropriate clothing.

I’m getting increasingly annoyed by the state of some aspects of hardware support in Linux. My laptop (old Dell Latitude D610, Intel-based with ATI graphics) used to suspend/resume correctly with Linux 2.6.24 (ie, > 95% success rate). Later changes made the success rate drop significantly, and added a problem with kacpid taking 100% CPU because of an interrupt storm. And now, with 2.6.28-rc6, it’s completely broken. (partially documented in bug 11563, but I admit I gave up on this bug, because I’m going to change my laptop soon). My desktop used to wake-on-lan correctly with 2.6.24 (but required some hacks, because it wouldn’t wake up if the NIC was DOWNed before shutdown), but changes in the r8169 driver broke it. (documented in bug 9512). As a result, I’m forced to run old kernel versions on the two systems I have at home. I can understand that those issues aren’t considered high priority (not everybody use WoL), but the fact that in both cases, they are regressions, worries me a bit. How many things are routinely broken during each kernel release cycle? Hardware support is difficult, of course, but are we really doing everything we could to make it suck less? Some things I really would like to see:

• Distro packages for development kernel versions. For Debian, there’s this repository, but it doesn’t always contain the latest kernel versions. Maybe that’s something that should be moved to a kernel.org umbrella and generalized to all distributions, to provide beta-testers with easy-to-install packages. git bisect isn’t that user-friendly.
• Funding for driver developers to buy specific hardware. Many drivers cover a wide range of chips/cards, and developers often only have on a small subset of them, making it difficult to debug issues specific to one chip.
• Better/updated bugzilla on kernel.org. Many bug logs are totally confusing, and cover different issues. They could maybe benefit from new or specifically developed bugzilla features (and more bug triagers, of course).

In Silly translations, Gintautas Miliauskas wrote about some rather silly translations. This reminded me of a finding by a colleague a few days ago.
He had recently updated his Ubuntu installation to KDE4 (using a german locale). After this, he reassigned a hotkey (to CTRL-SPACE). However, KDE showed: STRG-Weltraum (ctrl-”outer space”) instead of STRG-Leertaste (ctrl-space key) UPDATE: Since Frederik (see comments) reminded me of the fact I already knew:
This silly translation is not the fault of the german KDE members, but a bug in the Ubuntu package, which is taking more or less random translations from Rosetta.

I recently purchased a short story from Fictionwise, which was not DRM’ed, so I could easily get it into a form where I could read it on my Sony eReader. Thanks to that short story, I was introduced to an author, and a character, which I found very engaging. When I decided to find out more about the character, I found that the author had written two additional short stories, and three additional novels many years ago, but has since stopped writing any more books involving that character. Furthermore, the novels have gone out of print, and are only available from amazon.com as used books. Unfortunately, I travel a lot. So much so, that one of the few times that I have time to read is when I’m traveling. And I really dislike having to haul dead-tree versions of my favorite novels around; they take up far too much weight and space in my carry-on luggage. Unfortunately, these out-of-print novels were published by a Neanderthal Publishing company who hasn’t made any of the books available in ebook format, DRM’ed or no. Grumpy, I searched on Internet, and found all three novels were easily available for free download — in a pirated form, of course. Should I download them and convert them into a form which would allow me to read them on my Sony eReader? Well, according to Russell Davis, former chair (and now president of the Science Fiction Writer’s Association) of the SFWA’s Copyright Committee, “electronic infringement is theft”. From a legal perspective, I suppose that is true. And given that as an Open Source programmer, I depend on Copyright Law to assure that my wishes as an author are upheld, it would be hypocritical for me assume that I should be able to ignore Copyright Law just because it is inconvenient. And yet… from a moral perspective, who has really lost anything? The argument made by Russell Davis is that infringement is bad because it is “harming authors and author estates”. Jerry Pournelle has indignantly proclaimed that e-piracy goes against a “specific (and very stern) Biblical injunction against stealing from widows and orphans”. Of course, in this case, the author is still alive (and is female, although I suppose stealing from widowers would be just as bad). Also, given that the author has publically stated she doesn’t plan to write any more books involving this character (since some of her more psychotic readers sent her death threats as a result of reading said books), the publisher is highly unlikely to re-release said novels — and if I buy used dead-tree versions of said novels, the author doesn’t receive any additional royalties. So, then, where is the moral bright line?

• Should I purchase a used dead-tree copy of the novel, and lug it around, inconveniencing me, causing more CO2 emissions by shipping the book to me, and in the airplane because of its added weight, as the only way I can comply with copyright law? Furthermore, should I do this to set an example to all of the younger generations that are treating copyright law much more casually, much as essentially all drivers casually ignore the law’s dictats to not drive faster than the speed limit? (Many have argued that the current state of affairs with respect to music and etexts and copyright law is bad because it encourages people to not respect the rule of law — I guess, as the argument goes, if people don’t respect the copyright law, what’s next? Torturing prisoners in Guantanomo in violation of the law? Oh, wait… too late…)
• Should I purchase a used dead-tree copy of the novel, slice the binding off, and then run pages through a scanner and an OCR program, then spend hours reformatting it into an .LRF file so I can read it on the Sony eReader? Would that be considered fair use?
• What if I purchase a used dead-tree copy of the novel, but to save the time and effort of scanning the pages and correcting the OCR errors, download the pirated e-text, and convert it into an .LRF file and enjoy it on my Sony eReader?
• What if I don’t purchase the dead-tree copy of the book, download the pirated e-text, and send a money order (so it can’t be traced) for roughly the same amount of money as the cost of the used dead-tree version of the book to the author, with a letter explaining why she was receiving this check?
• What if I just download the pirated e-text, justifying my actions that no one is actually getting hurt my downloading the text and reading it; after all, since it is long out of print and not available from any booksellers as a new book, the author isn’t going to be getting any more royalties anyway.

Somewhere along this continuum, we’ve crossed over from the light-side to the dark-side. Setting aside the observation that the Neanderthal attitudes and business practices of the publisher involved has made it impossible for me to legitimiately follow the law, enjoy the novels, and direct money to the author via royalty payments — what do you think is the morally correct course of action? And why? And if you don’t mind saying so publically, roughly what generation are you from (i.e., Baby Boomer, Gen X, Gen Y, etc.)? I’m curious how attitudes are changing based on age, and whether folks who are currently in college might differ from those who can remember a time when the Internet didn’t exist… Update: I’ve posted a follow-up to this post here.

In a comment on my post about Slicehost, Linode, and scaling up servers [1] it was suggested that there is no real difference between a physical server and a set of slices of a virtual server that takes up all the resources of the machine. The commentator notes that it’s easier to manage a virtual machine. When you have a physical machine running at an ISP server room there are many things that need to be monitored, this includes the temperature at various points inside the case and the operation of various parts (fans and hard disks being two obvious ones). When you run the physical server you have to keep such software running (you maintain the base OS). If the ISP owns the server (which is what you need if the server is in another country) then the ISP staff are the main people to review the output. Having to maintain software that provides data for other people is a standard part of a sys-admin’s job, but when that data determines whether the server will die it is easier if one person manages it all. If you have a Xen DomU that uses all the resources of the machine (well all but the small portion used by the Dom0 and the hypervisor) then a failing hard disk could simply be replaced by the ISP staff who would notify you of the expected duration of the RAID rebuild (which would degrade performance). For more serious failures the data could be migrated to another machine, in the case of predicted failures (such as unexpected temperature increases or the failure of a cooling fan) it is possible to migrate a running Xen DomU to another server. If the server migration is handled well then this can be a significant benefit of virtualisation for an ISP customer. Also Xen apparently supports having RAM for a DomU balloon out to a larger size than was used on boot, I haven’t tested this feature and don’t know how well it works. If it supports ballooning to something larger than the physical size in the original server then it would be possible to migrate a running instance to a machine with more RAM to upgrade it. The question is whether it’s worth the cost. Applications which need exactly the resources of one physical server seem pretty rare to me. Applications which need resources that are considerably smaller than a single modern server are very common, and applications which have to be distributed among multiple servers are not that common (although many of us hope that our projects will become so successful ;). So the question of whether it’s worth the cost is often really whether the overhead of virtualisation will make a single large machine image take more resources than a single server can provide (moving from a single server to multiple servers costs a lot of developer time, and moving to a larger single server exponentially increases the price). There is also an issue of latency, all IO operations can be expected to take slightly longer so even if the CPU is at 10% load and there is a lot of free RAM some client operations will still take longer, but I hope that it wouldn’t be enough to compete with the latency of the Internet - even a hard drive seek is faster than the round trip times I expect for IP packets from most customer machines. VMware has published an interesting benchmark of VMware vs Xen vs native hardware [2]. It appears to have been written in February 2007 and while it’s intent is to show VMware as being better than Xen, in most cases it seems to show them both as being good enough. The tests involved virtualising 32bit Windows systems, this doesn’t seem an unreasonable test as many ISPs are offering 32bit virtual machines as 32bit code tends to use less RAM. One unfortunate thing is that they make no explanation of why “Intger Math” might run at just over 80% native performance on VMware and just under 60% native performance on Xen. The other test results seem to show that for a virtualised Windows OS either VMware or Xen will deliver enough performance (apart from the ones where VMware claims that Xen provides only a tiny fraction of native performance - that’s a misconfiguration that is best ignored). Here is an analysis of the VMware benchmark and the XenSource response (which has disappeared from the net) [3]. The Cambridge Xen people have results showing a single Xen DomU delivering more than 90% native performance on a variety of well known benchmarks [4]. As it seems that in every case we can expect more than 90% native performance from a single DomU and as the case of needing more than 90% native performance is rare it seems that there is no real difference that we should care about when running servers and that the ease of management outweighs the small performance benefit from using native hardware. Now it appears that Slicehost [5] caters to people who desire this type of management. Their virtual server plans have RAM going in all powers of two from 256M to 8G, and then they have 15.5G - which seems to imply that they are using physical servers with 16G of RAM and that 15.5G is all that is left after the Xen hypervisor and the Dom0 have taken some. One possible disadvantage of this is that if you want all the CPU power of a server but not so much RAM (or the other way around) then the Slicehost 15.5G plan might involve more hardware being assigned to you than you really need. But given the economies of scale involved in purchasing and managing the large number of servers that Slicehost is running it might cost them more to run a machine with 8G of RAM as a special order than to buy their standard 16G machine. Other virtual hosting companies such as Gandi and Linode clearly describe that they don’t support a single instance taking all the resources of the machine (1/4 and 1/5 of a machine respectively are the maximums). I wonder if they are limiting the size of virtual machines to avoid the possibility of needing to shuffle virtual machines when migrating a running virtual machine. One significant benefit of having a physical machine over renting a collection of DomUs is the ability to run virtual machines as you desire. I prefer to have a set of DomUs on the same physical server so that if one DomU is running slowly then I have the option to optimise other DomUs to free up some capacity. I can change the amounts of RAM and the number of virtual CPUs allocated to each DomU as needed. I am not aware of anyone giving me the option to rent all the capacity of a single server in the form of managed DomUs and then assign the amounts of RAM, disk, and CPU capacity to them as I wish. If Slicehost offered such a deal then one of my clients would probably rent a Slicehost server for this purpose as soon as their current contract runs out. It seems that there is a lot of potential to provide significant new features for virtual hosting. I expect that someone will start offering these things in the near future. I will advise my clients to try and avoid signing any long-term contracts (where long means one year in the context of hosting) so that they keep their options open for future offers.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/11/27/slicehost-vs-linode/


• [2] http://www.vmware.com/pdf/hypervisor_performance.pdf


• [3] http://www.cmg.org/measureit/issues/mit41/m_41_1.html


• [4] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/xen/performance.html


• [5] http://www.slicehost.com/

Since I do some work on software translation, I have seen my fair share of silly translations (in my case from English to Lithuanian). Here's my latest find: in Gmail there is a choice of chat list for every person in the address book, and there are four options: Auto, Always, Never, and Block. The Lithuanian translation of the option "Auto" is ... "Automobiliai" which means "Cars". Took me a while to figure out what happened the first time I saw it. This ranks right next to the already classic wizzard button translation "Kitas", "Kitas", "Suomi " for "Next", "Next", "Finish" (translated back to English that would be "Next", "Next", "Finnish" as the language of Finns) and my personal favourite: Finnish translated as "Finikie i " (Phoenician). FWIW I tried to apply for access to Gmail translations (there are many more inconsistencies, mistakes and screwups in there), but it seems that Google is not interested. I wonder if they have any translation quality control at all.

Yay, long time since the last ftpmaster blog post. Time to write a new one. It’s not that I haven’t done anything since my last post, it just wasn’t only ftpmaster related. Right now I’m somewhere in Extremadura, Spain, at the Ftpmaster / I18N / QA Meeting. This meeting is near to the location of DebConf9, so yesterday we visited that venue. Still have to upload the pictures I took. It’s pretty nice, but I fear we might have a problem with wheelchairs. While the venue is very well prepared for wheelchair users, like having ramps or electric elevator platforms for every little staircase, I see one big problem in the size of the elevator going from the ground floor up to the first level. We don’t have exact measurements currently, just our rough guess from looking at it, but this is something we definitely have to look in. Something similar applies to the sleeping place. They do have a room for disabled people, but we couldn’t look into it when we where there, as it was in use (And it is pretty unpolite to just move into an occupied room). So we need to get an exact floor plan and hopefully also pictures for it later on. Luckily, the sleeping place is a much smaller issue, if it doesn’t fit we could think about placing disabled people in a Hotel. More ftpmaster related we had a lot of discussions about one of our main agenda points for this meeting, tdebs. The more we discuss it, the more we all hate it. Its a topic that touches nearly everything in Debian and will redefine quite a lot of places/actions/behaviours, so it needs a lot of thought. Which is what we start here. We wont be able to get anything substantly implemented here, but I think we can get to a common understanding of a specification and a Todo. After all the schedule currently has “lenny + 2” for this, its not a light weight step. But thats not all, would be boring if we would have only one topic. Us ftpteam also intends to/does work on other issues, like a redesign of dak and the database below it. And today we issued a statement about the AGPL. Not ftpmaster related, but also a nice work done here in Extremadura, is the setup for mirrors of packages.debian.org. This enables us to mirror the part of packages.debian.org to other .debian.org hosts thats responsible for the web view, and as such allows us to have redundancy in case of errors, load balancing and all those nice things. Comments: 2

What started with a little host naming theme riddle, and spread as a meme across various planets, has come full circle today, as I installed a new machine, khyber.madduck.net in the racks hosted at the LayerOne colocation site in Z rich. Init Seven, my favourite Swiss ISP, are sponsoring the rack space and connectivity: a routed /28 IPv4 subnet and a /64 IPv6 subnet. The machine is a Transtec Calleo 331 1U server with two quad-core AMD Opteron 2354 processors, 16Gb of RAM, and 4Tb of disk space, configured into a 2Tb RAID1 with LVM on top. It will be used to host a couple of KVM instances for a number of projects I currently operate off my main, personal server, pulse.madduck.net. Unfortunately, Transtec (as well as most other vendors I checked out) uses nVidia s MCP55Pro chipset, which had me sceptical long before I sent the order. nVidia is known to suck at thinking open-source, and the Linux kernel driver for their network chips, forcedeth, had to be reverse-engineered, because nVidia failed to cooperate. Apart from that, nVidia s chips are also often simply crap. Many of their motherboards come with broken APICs and the network chips often wreak havoc on subnets. I find it curious that a search for MCP55 or MCP55Pro on the nVidia website yields no results. Given these expectations, I insisted on a try-and-buy contract, which are not default in Switzerland (as opposed to the EU). My fears proved right, it wasn t long until I encountered the first problems with nVidia s crap: the network chip is unable to deal with segmentation offloading for larger packets, e.g. those with IPv6 payload in a bridging context, and generic segmentation offloading has to be turned off on the interface:

ethtool -K eth0 gso off

This fixes the issue, and so I stuffed it into /etc/network/interfaces and decided to keep the machine, especially after having invested the time into the server to figure out how to work the watchdog and the IPMI card. The folks behind Transtec s support hotline are helpful, but it took me a bit of time to get the information I wanted out of them. At least they deemed it perfectly natural that I wanted to run Debian, and never questioned that. Let s document some of the more internal specs here for posterity: The BIOS gives the impression of two separate watchdogs, one on the IPMI card (a SIMSO+) and one on the mainboard itself (a SuperMicro H8DMU+). Transtec told me that SuperMicro disabled the IPMI watchdog (called BMC watchdog in the BIOS) with firmware 1.29, leaving only the one on the motherboard. It took a bit of time to find out that this was a W83627THF and supported by the w83627hf_wdt driver, which I configured with module options timeout=120 nowayout=1. I left the BIOS setting at disabled since that would otherwise interfere with booting e.g. the awesome grml live system by rebooting the machine after the set amount of time. It also took a bit of time to get SOL working with the IPMI card. In the end, I found it to work best by configuring the console redirection in the BIOS to use COM2 with 38400/n/8, using hardware flow control, redirection-after-POST always, and vt100 emulation ANSI and vt-utf8 emulation were horrific. I instructed the bootloader to pass console=tty0 console=ttyS1,38400n8 to the kernel (order matters), and configured agetty in /etc/inittab like this:

T0:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty -8hL ttyS1 38400n8 vt100

To guard against the worst, I also left a grml CD in the drive, to be able to boot a rescue system via SOL in case everything else was broken. The following kernel boot parameters enable me to use the rescue system via IPMI:

vga=normal noeject noprompt console=tty0 console=ttyS1,38400n8 forensic

Michael Prokop of the grml project tried to create a customised ISO image with these options for me, but I kept getting medium errors trying to read it, independent of the burner, CD-writing-software, operating system used to burn, medium, and drive used to read, so it s possible that the ISO image is faulty. Michael used the following command line to create it (supporting files are here):

grml-live -t ~/templates-madduck -c GRMLBASE,GRML_MEDIUM,AMD64 -o \
  /grml-live/grml64-medium_2008.11-madduck -a amd64 -s sid -v \
  2008.11-madduck -g grml64-medium -r Schluchtenscheisser -V -b

Until we figure out the problem with this, the grml64 0.2 CD in the drive will do. The machine is now operational, but the IPv6 prefix I have still arrives at vera.madduck.net, a Xen-Instance hosted by Init Seven, which I will no longer need, once I find the time to migrate all the services it hosts. NP: This Will Destroy You: Young Mountain

Cooperatives-SW is working in partnership with the Regional Infrastructure for Social Enterprise (RISE) to hold a Trade Fair with support from CDA (BRAVE Ltd.), Social Enterprise Works, Co-opportunity and Watershed Media Centre. It will be held on Monday 1 December at the Watershed in Bristol. TTLLP will be there and I should post lots of news about it on Tuesday. I’ll try to microblog the event, but that depends how busy it is. Thanks to the VAT rate cut on the same day, I’ll be the only one there, leaving workers in the office just in case any of our customers have problems with their OSCommerce or Drupal online shops. (It seems there shouldn’t be any, but we hope for the best and prepare for the worst.) If you’d like to meet up on Monday, send me a comment however you prefer. Update: If you want to attend the event, registration details are on this page - it looks like registration is required, but I’ll be disappointed if they turn people away from the exhibition space between 1 and 2pm if there’s room.

Of course everybody in our crowd noticed the huge "Wifi zone powered by Debian" sticker with a Deban swirl at the restaurant door where we had dinner :-) And the Debian wallpaper among the other images on the screensaver on the restaurants computer was probably also noticed by many. What really freaked me out though (in a very positive sense) was that the owner/someone (? I have no idea, I talked with him, but not about restaurant ownership...) wrote the billing programm himself. When shown the features it looked to me like a good one, with a simple and nice looking interface and appearantly feature complete to manage the restaurant (including creditcard interface etc.). The cashier computer was running Debian and the app is written in gambas2, which is a BASIC interpreter with build-in database abstraction layers and supporting gtk and QT. And he plans to release this as free software. Yay. Yay Yay Yay!

Me looks forward to this to happen and also to get the .svg of the sticker

"Wasted" time on the parts of both developers and users. On the other hand, isn't the whole point about computers that they waste the time they could have saved in any case? LILO boot screen with breakout game. Thanks to Florian Rehnisch for making me stumble upon this. (The description references SuSE Linux 7.2, so I'm probably the last person on earth who hasn't seen this before. Oh, welll...)

It's interesting to be here in Casar de Caceres for the joined i18n+QA+FTPmasters Extremadura meeting. Today, I've been sitting all day long in the biblioteca, which is used as hacklab, and just watched all great people around playing around with the concept of "tdebs". That weird beast can be described in two words as a concept of deb packages that would be able to distribute translation data in a more independent way then "regular" deb packages. Don't smash me as the concept is currently being twisted around in all directions by the nice folks here, to bring it to a great concept well suited for "side" material of our packages. To get an idea, you can read the original concept that popped up during the 2006 i18n Extremadura meeting, but got transformed drastically by ideas exchanged at Debconf 8 All this is made possible because the concept is now a very important issue for Emdebian and is strongly pushed by Neil Williams, whose nickname shall now be "MisterT", by general agreement of the folks here. What's really interesting right now is to see live discussions happening all the way round and see the concept slowly emerging from this. Something we could probably never do in regular mailing lists discussions or on IRC. We should really grant tons of rewards to the Extremadura region, and particularly out tireless C sar who again organised that meeting. It's still hard to say what will emerge from this and we willprobably need some more such live meetings to have real implementations of these tdeb beasts, but this is really how I like to see free software development going on. And now people begin to think about coding stuff and prepare patches, which is a good sign, in general.

The other day I was looking at the statistics collected from my web server logs, and saw that easily more than 80% of people who find my website are looking for my Latin vocab learning tools. They’re pretty basic, but I found them to be somewhat helpful when I was learning Latin. I’m seriously considering expanding it a bit, adding conjugation/declension drills, making it a little prettier, etc. Anyway, tonight, I got a nice email from a woman who uses the vocab tools, and noticed that there was a problem with fourth principal part of the Latin verb ‘cado’, and it sent me on a somewhat fruitless search for what the right word is. (A quick primer for those not familiar with Latin verbs: most verbs have four principal parts, which can be used for conjugation. The fourth principal part is the perfect passive participle, e.g. “to have been heard”.) So then, what is the perfect passive participle of ‘cado’, which means “to fall”? Before I get into that, consider for a moment what the translation to English would be. “To fall” is usually used as an intransitive verb (the transitive form is mostly obsolete), so “to have been fallen” doesn’t really sound natural. But the translation can be approximated to something like “to have been dropped” or “to have been struck down”. But what is the actual word that is used? On this there appears to be some disagreement. Wheelock’s Latin says that it’s ‘casurum‘, as does Wiktionary. However, Tyro’s Dictionary says that it’s ‘casum‘, as does All Verbs. Meanwhile, Whitaker’s Words says that ‘casurum‘ is “very rare”, from “later” Latin, and used in the Vulgate Bible, and says it should actually be ‘casusus‘. I still don’t know which one is correct, and suspect that all three are correct depending on the text that’s used. I can somewhat see how ‘casum‘ might have been correct at some point, but changed as it overlaps with the noun ‘casus‘, which is the noun “fall”, as in “that was a nasty fall”. Or vice versa. I tried to go searching through prose to see which was most commonly used, but most of what I found was from the Vulgate Bible and used ‘casurum‘. So, I’m still not sure which is actually the “best” word. I’ve changed the site so that it uses ‘casurum‘ to be consistent with Wheelock’s. So, does anyone definitively know, which is actually best, and what the etymology is?

jhead is a very nice and very powerful command line utility to mess with JPEG headers (esp. EXIF fields).

  $ apt-get install jhead

It can display/extract a great amount of metadata fields from JPEG files and also extract the thumbnails stored in JPEG files (if any). The following will list all known metadata fields from a sample photo:

  $ wget http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3173/3061542361_60acb0904b_o.jpg
  $ jhead *.jpg
  File name    : 3061542361_60acb0904b_o.jpg
  File size    : 1074172 bytes
  File date    : 2008:11:26 23:38:04
  Camera make  : Panasonic
  Camera model : DMC-FZ18
  Date/Time    : 2008:03:05 15:45:52
  Resolution   : 3264 x 2448
  Flash used   : No
  Focal length : 4.6mm  (35mm equivalent: 28mm)
  Exposure time: 0.0100 s  (1/100)
  Aperture     : f/3.6
  ISO equiv.   : 100
  Whitebalance : Auto
  Metering Mode: matrix
  Exposure     : program (auto)
  GPS Latitude : N %:.7fd %;.8fm %;.8fs
  GPS Longitude: E %;.8fd %:.7fm %;.8fs
  GPS Altitude : 174.00m
  Comment      : Aufgenommen auf dem <a href="http://www.froutes.de/TT00000014_Ars_Natura">Kunstweg Ars Natura</a>.
  ======= IPTC data: =======
  Record vers.  : 4
  Headline      : Felsburg auf dem Felsberg
  (C)Notice     : www.froutes.de
  Caption       : Aufgenommen auf dem <a href="http://www.froutes.de/TT00000014_Ars_Natura">Kunstweg Ars Natura</a>.

As you can see there's a huge amount of potentially privacy-sensitive metadata in your typical JPEG as generated by your camera (including camera type, settings, date/time, maybe even GPS coordinates of your location, etc). You can extract the thumbnail stored in all JPEGs in the current directory with:

  $ jhead -st "&i_t.jpg" *.jpg
  Created: '3061542361_60acb0904b_o.jpg_t.jpg'

Note that the JPEG thumbnail does not necessarily show the same picture as the JPEG itself. Depending on the image manipulation software that was used to create the edited/fixed/cropped JPEG, the thumbnail may still reflect the original JPEG contents (see sample image on the right-hand side). This is a huge potential privacy issue. There have been a number of articles about this some years ago, in case you missed them:

• disLEXia: Hidden data in Document Formats
• disLEXia: EXIF Thumbnail in JPEG images (many sample JPEGs and their differing thumbnails)
• Kevin Cohen: Digital Still Camera Forensics (PDF)

Thus, an important jhead command line to know is the following, which removes all metadata (including any thumbnails) from all JPEG images in the current directory:

  $ jhead -purejpg *.jpg
  Modified: 3061542361_60acb0904b_o.jpg

As you can see the result is that only very basic information can be gathered from the file afterwards:

  $ jhead *.jpg
  File name    : 3061542361_60acb0904b_o.jpg
  File size    : 1052506 bytes
  File date    : 2008:11:26 23:38:04
  Resolution   : 3264 x 2448
  $ jhead -st "&i_t.jpg" *.jpg
  Image contains no thumbnail

I recommend doing this for most photos you make publically available on sites like flickr etc. (unless you have a good reason not to). Finally, see the jhead(1) manpage for lots more options that the tool supports.

I love it when a lack-of-humor and lack-of-appropriateness-originated flamewar causes somebody to point me towards a very nice display of intelligent humor. Specially when it is so close to me, to my roots, to my family and my personal history. FWIW, for several years, while I was a BBS user, I used WereWolf as my nickname. Great thanks to Frank K ster - and, of course, to Christian Morgenstern.

The Werewolf - English translation by Alexander Gross A Werewolf, troubled by his name,
Left wife and brood one night and came
To a hidden graveyard to enlist
The aid of a long-dead philologist. "Oh sage, wake up, please don't berate me,"
He howled sadly, "Just conjugate me."
The seer arose a bit unsteady
Yawned twice, wheezed once, and then was ready. "Well, 'Werewolf' is your plural past,
While 'Waswolf' is singularly cast:
There's 'Amwolf' too, the present tense,
And 'Iswolf,' 'Arewolf' in this same sense." "I know that--I'm no mental cripple--
The future form and participle
Are what I crave," the beast replied.
The scholar paused--again he tried: "A 'Will-be-wolf?' It's just too long:
'Shall-be-wolf?' 'Has-been-wolf?' Utterly wrong!
Such words are wounds beyond all suture--
I'm sorry, but you have no future." The Werewolf knew better--his sons still slept
At home, and homewards now he crept,
Happy, humble, without apology
For such folly of philology.

In the comments on my post about the Dell PowerEdge T105 server [1] there is some discussion of the internal USB port (which allows the use of a USB flash device for booting which is connected inside the case). This is a really nice feature of the Dell server and something that would be useful if it was in more machines. However I believe that it would be better to have flash storage with a SATA interface on the motherboard. The cost of medium size flash storage (eg 4G) in the USB format is not overly great, if soldered to the motherboard or connected to a daughter-board the incremental price for the server would be very small. Dell servers shipped with a minimum of an 80G SATA disk last time I checked, it seems quite likely to me that Dell could reduce the prices of their servers by providing flash storage on the motherboard and having no hard disk. It seems likely to me that there is a significant number of people who don’t want the default hard drive that ships with a Dell server. The 80G disk that came with my PowerEdge is currently gathering dust on a shelf, it was far to small to be of any use in that machine and Dell’s prices for bigger disks were outrageous so I replaced the default disk with a pair of big disks as soon as the server had passed some basic burn-in tests. Most servers that I run fall into one of two categories, machines which primarily do computation tasks and need little storage space or IO capacity (in which case 4G of flash would do nicely) and machines which have databases, backups, virtual machine images, and other big things (in which case anything less than 160G is silly and less than 500G makes no economic sense in today’s market). Note that for a machine with small storage requirements I would rather have a 4G flash device than an 80G disk, I am inclined to trust flash to not die but not trust a single disk, two 80G disks means more noise, heat dissipation, and expense. According to comments on my previous post VMWare ESX requires a USB boot device, so if VMWare could be booted with a motherboard based flash device then that would be an ideal configuration for VMWare. In some mailing list discussions I’ve seen concern raised about the reliability of permanently connected USB devices, while I’ve only encountered USB problems related to buggy hardware and drivers other people have had problems with the electrical connection. So it seems that motherboard based flash could be expected to increase the reliability of VMWare servers. The down-side to having flash permanently attached to the motherboard is of course the impossibility of moving the boot device to different hardware. In terms of recovering from failure restoring a few gig of flash storage from backup is easy enough. The common debugging option of connecting a hard drive to another machine to fix boot problems would be missed, but I think that the positive aspects of this idea outweigh the negative - and it would of course be an option to not boot from flash. If anyone knows of a tower server that is reasonably quiet, has ECC RAM and a usable amount of flash storage on the motherboard (2G would be a bare minimum, 4G or 8G would be preferred) then please let me know.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/26/dell-poweredge-t105/

So today, I happen to be looking at wikis for two small to mid-sized public proojects (MoinMoin and DokuWiki look like frontrunners right now — any suggestions?) Recently, I’ve also looked at blog and CMS software, and a host of other web apps. It’s as if these people have learned nothing about good software practices over the last 20 years. Warning: Rant Ahead So how many of you have been here before? You download WebApp X. It tells you to cd to your DocumentRoot and unzip/untar it there. At this point, most of them will tell you to chmod -R 777 the install directory. Some of the better ones, such as WordPress, will tell you to chmod it 777, or if that makes you nervous, to instead chown it to the user that your webserver runs as. It is at this point that you realize that the Java-based programs ship with their own webserver that takes 2 minutes to load and uses 2GB of RAM, while the PHP-based programs want you to give them 32MB RAM per process, and probably modify your global PHP settings in a way that breaks some other PHP web app you’re already using. As if that isn’t enough to scare you off, generally speaking, config files — including passwords to databases — are stored in the same directory, along with .htaccess files. Many of these programs are also downloading and updating plugins over the Internet, usually without any kind of cryptographic authentication, and overwriting their own program files in the process. Oh, and this is a class of app that is notorious for security problems to start with, and makes your server known to billions of people via search engines. Absolutely no opportunity for trouble here, of course! That sentence was dripping with sarcasm, in case you didn’t get it. It also makes it almost impossible for people such as Debian maintainers to package up some webapps (such as just about every single one that uses Ruby on Rails) because there is just no sane way to make it behave with respect to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. I’d love to see web app developers do a few simple things:

1. Separate code from data
2. Separate code from configuration
3. Separate all of the above from the DocumentRoot to the greatest extent possible

I realize that some of this is purportedly to make things easier to install when you have FTP access only. But to me it seems just really poor design. I’ve written webapps, and it’s not that hard to do this part right. Plus, doing the above right means that I no longer have to do something like use git on my WordPress installations because it’s too much of a hassle to apply security and plugin updates on all three separate ones otherwise.