I'm due a new laptop; my Portege R200 is over 4 years old now, I find it much slower than my desktop (no surprise; P-M 1.2GHz/1.2GB vs Core 2 2GHz/4GB), it's had a new battery and it has an annoying whine on the screen unless you press the side in just the right way. It's still better for long periods of use than my EEE 901, which is why I keep it. In particular I'm off to LCA2010 in January, along with some associated travel beforehand, and I'll want more than the EEE for that, but probably not a brand new laptop. Which meant that when the R200 started throwing disk errors recently I wasn't particularly happy.

Having decided it wasn't worth buying a new 1.8" drive I looked for alternatives. eBay offered plenty of options for 1.8" IDE to CF adaptors and I picked up a Kingston 32GB CF card from eBuyer. I copied across the data from the old drive using a USB adaptor, frobbed grub sufficiently that I got it installed on the CF, then swapped out the drive for the adaptor + CF. I had to do the swap a few times; the first I forgot to have a kernel with ext2 support (the HDD was ext3, but I went back to ext2 for the CF). The second I'd done my usual trick of forgetting to populate /dev with things like console and sda* (ie enough to get to the point where udev will run). And then grub needed some prodding to boot without intervention. I got there in the end and I'm currently writing this from said laptop.

I've made a few changes to the Debian install in an attempt to make things smoother; basically the same tricks people have been using on EEEs or other slow SSD devices. No swap, Iceweasel synchronous toolkit writes disabled, filesystems mounted with noatime, /tmp on tmpfs, various daemons that I don't really use disabled. It's still noticably slower than with the HDD, particularly on writes. However it's quieter and as long as it lasts for the next 3 months I'm happy (plus after that I can reuse the 32G CF card somewhere else, which I couldn't have done with a 1.8" HDD as easily).

Now, back to eying the Lenovo X200s (ugly, trackpoint but 1440x900 display, good battery life) and Toshiba R600 (slower, lower res but pretty and trackpad).as potential replacements. Maybe there'll be something even shinier in 12" by next year...

So this is in some sense a nadir for shell scripting. 2 lines that do something out of 111. Mostly cargo-culted from cowpoke by ron, but much less fancy. rsbuild foo.dsc should do the trick.

#!/bin/sh
# Start a remote sbuild process via ssh. Based on cowpoke from devscripts.
# Copyright (c) 2007-9 Ron  <ron@debian.org>
# Copyright (c) David Bremner 2009 <david@tethera.net>
#
# Distributed according to Version 2 or later of the GNU GPL.
BUILDD_HOST=sbuild-host
BUILDD_DIR=var/sbuild   #relative to home directory
BUILDD_USER=""
DEBBUILDOPTS="DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=\"parallel=3\""
BUILDD_ARCH="$(dpkg-architecture -qDEB_BUILD_ARCH 2>/dev/null)"
BUILDD_DIST="default"
usage()
 
    cat 1>&2 <<EOF
rsbuild [options] package.dsc
  Uploads a Debian source package to a remote host and builds it using sbuild.
  The following options are supported:
   --arch="arch"         Specify the Debian architecture(s) to build for.
   --dist="dist"         Specify the Debian distribution(s) to build for.
   --buildd="host"       Specify the remote host to build on.
   --buildd-user="name"  Specify the remote user to build as.
  The current default configuration is:
   BUILDD_HOST = $BUILDD_HOST
   BUILDD_USER = $BUILDD_USER
   BUILDD_ARCH = $BUILDD_ARCH
   BUILDD_DIST = $BUILDD_DIST
  The expected remote paths are:
  BUILDD_DIR  = $BUILDD_DIR
  sbuild must be configured on the build host.  You must have ssh
  access to the build host as BUILDD_USER if that is set, else as the
  user executing cowpoke or a user specified in your ssh config for
  '$BUILDD_HOST'.  That user must be able to execute sbuild.
EOF
    exit $1
 
PROGNAME="$(basename $0)"
version ()
 
    echo \
"This is $PROGNAME, version 0.0.0
This code is copyright 2007-9 by Ron <ron@debian.org>, all rights reserved.
Copyright 2009 by David Bremner <david@tethera.net>, all rights reserved.

This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are free to redistribute this code under the terms of the
GNU General Public License, version 2 or later"
    exit 0
 
for arg; do
    case "$arg" in
        --arch=*)
            BUILDD_ARCH="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --dist=*)
            BUILDD_DIST="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --buildd=*)
            BUILDD_HOST="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --buildd-user=*)
            BUILDD_USER="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --dpkg-opts=*)
            DEBBUILDOPTS="DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=\"$ arg#*= \""
            ;;
        *.dsc)
            DSC="$arg"
            ;;
        --help)
            usage 0
            ;;
        --version)
            version
            ;;
        *)
            echo "ERROR: unrecognised option '$arg'"
            usage 1
            ;;
    esac
done
dcmd rsync --verbose --checksum $DSC $BUILDD_USER$BUILDD_HOST:$BUILDD_DIR
ssh -t  $BUILDD_HOST "cd $BUILDD_DIR && $DEBBUILDOPTS sbuild --arch=$BUILDD_ARCH --dist=$BUILDD_DIST $DSC"

Once there was a project called Debian and a Ganneff.... (unfortunately in German only....)

22:20 < cb> Das ist doch voll die Arbeit Maintainer zu werden :-). Ich geb
gew nschte Pakete immer nur weiter an einen der da sowieso schon den Kernel
betreut :-)
22:21 < Ganneff> es is nur viel arbeit wenn du keinen schimmer hast
22:22 < cb> ja ich hab nur das seepferdchen *g*
22:22 < Obilan> Knusper: ja sicher ist es das
22:22 < Knusper> kopf -> tisch
22:22 < cb> Knusper, wenn du die verwaisten pakete findest siehst du auf
der gleichen seite auch die links wie man maintainer wird
22:22 < Knusper> die hab ich gefunden
22:22 < cb> zumindest hab ich das das letzte mal dort gesehen
22:24 < Ganneff> wnpp?
22:24 < Knusper> aber man brauch dann schon leute, die einen "hoffieren"
22:26 < Ganneff> du brauchst erstmal die ahnung nen paket zu bauen.
22:26 < Ganneff> dazu siehe new maint guide
22:26 < Ganneff> dann brauchste nen sponsor. dazu gehe zur mentors liste
22:26 < Ganneff> dann machste mit dem eh weng rum (also normal so
paketuploads via dem)
22:26 < Ganneff> und hast da halt schon dein maintenance krams.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann is der sponsor angekotzt von dir und dem
laufenden arbeit generieren
22:27 < Ganneff> der tritt dich dann dass du mal DM anf ngst.
22:27 < Ganneff> das machste dann, und jemand anders tritt dir deine pakete
als dmua zurecht, nachdem du in nem keyring irgendwo steckst.
22:27 < Ganneff> und dann kannste denn krampf selbst hochladen. aber nix
andres.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann willste was andres. und willst das auch noch
ohne son doofen sponsor
22:28 < Ganneff> dann versuchste dich an DD
22:28 < Knusper> ahhhhhh
22:28 < Ganneff> dazu musste dir nen advocate suchen
22:28 < Ganneff> der is  blicherweise einer dem du vorher im prozess
laufend auf den wecker fielst
22:28 < Ganneff> und er deswegen den nm leutz sagt "oh gott, befreit mich
bloss von dem"
22:28 < Ganneff> die machen das dann, aber sie wollen dir mal etwas
schmerzen zur ckgeben
22:28 < Ganneff> desdewegen wirste viele fragen beantworten m ssen
22:29 < Ganneff> und wie beim t v das auto musste hier deine pakete nochmal
vorstellen und checken lassen
22:29 < Ganneff> und dann nochmal fragen beantworten
22:29 < Knusper> thx...
22:29 < Ganneff> irgendwann gehst du dann mit den antworten den nm leuten
so auf den geist dass die dem frontdesk sagen "meine kacke, den wolle mehr
nit mehr sehen, schickts den dochma zu den DAMs, die hamms verdient"
22:30 < Ganneff> und die machen das dann meist. ausser sie m gen dich nich.
dann darfste nochma fragen beantworten
22:30 < Ganneff> bei den dams darfste nur warten. die testen deine geduld
22:30 < Ganneff> irgendwann langweilen die sich aber
22:30 < Ganneff> und dann kriegste pl tzlich mail
22:30 < Ganneff> OH MEIN GOTT. EIN NEUER DD.
22:30 < Ganneff> ende
22:30 < Ganneff> kapitel 2:
22:30 < cb> sch ne beschreibung
22:30 < Ganneff> du machst ne zeit als dd rum
22:30 < Knusper> LOL
22:30 < Ganneff> votest durch die gegend
22:30 < Ganneff> l dst pakete umher
22:30 < Ganneff> machst bugs in stable
22:30 < Ganneff> gibts dem security team arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> sprich - du gehst allen auf den sack. denn das is was ein
dd macht. muss ja schliesslich auch spass machen.
22:31 < Ganneff> aber irgendwann, also irgendwann, da wird das langweilig
22:31 < Ganneff> und dann verschwindeste mal ne zeit.
22:31 < Ganneff> weil du weisst - da gibts noch son team. das brauch auch
arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> die suchen so leute die weggehen und sich verstecken
22:31 < Ganneff> nennt sich mia. die suchen.
22:31 < Ganneff> vielleicht finden die dich ja auch.
22:32 < Ganneff> dann kommste zur ck und machst mal wieder etwas arbeit f r
security/stable/sonstwen
22:32 < Ganneff> oder nicht, aber das is langweilig, da fliegste einfach.
22:32 < Ganneff> wennde dann gar keinen bock mehr hast und ne l ngre pause
willst
22:32 < Ganneff> dann gehste und machst eien auf emeritus
22:32 < Ganneff> das sind die rentner, die alten s cke, die sich
zur cklehnen und  ber die versuche der neuen lachen die sich grad von den
sponsoren qu len lassen
22:33 < Ganneff> ende kap. 2, ich hab keinen bock mehr. (jaja, emeritus)

Cheers to #debian.de on freenode

Eclectic paper: dh-ocaml In my day job as a researcher, I mostly publish papers along the lines of my main research interests (theorem proving, web technologies, formal methods applied to software engineering, ...). Some time though, I just come up to some eclectic idea, not strictly related to my job, that I feel like cooking up as a paper to be reviewed by some scientific venue. It happened some weeks ago with dh-ocaml, the package implementing the new dependency scheme for OCaml-related packages in Debian. It took us (as in Debian OCaml maintainers) several years to get it right and satisfactory for maintainers, users, release team, etc. The problem which dh-ocaml addresses is that, differently than C and other system-level languages, OCaml breaks ABI compatibility very often, due to the need of ensuring type safety across different libraries at link time. Other similar strongly typed languages, such as Haskell, behave similarly. This is at odds with the implicit assumption of forward-compatibility (unless otherwise "stated", e.g. with soname changes) that is relied upon by versioned dependencies in distributions like Debian. This discussion, the analysis of possible solutions, and the description of the solution we have actually implemented in dh-ocaml (called ABI approximation) turned out to be interesting for the French functional programming academic community: the paper on dh-ocaml has been accepted at forthcoming JFLA 2010. It is no rocket science , but people maintaining programs and libraries written in languages with concerns similar to OCaml's (e.g. Haskell, hello nomeata) might want to have a look.

Above is the picture of the RFID device in my new UK passport. The outer wire loop is 72mm * 42mm which is by far the largest RFID device I ve seen. It appears that they want the passport to be RFID readable from distances that are significantly greater than those which are typically used for store security RFID devices. I couldn t properly capture the text on the page which says THIS PAGE IS RESERVED FOR OFFICIAL OBSERVATIONS, IF ANY . The plastic layer that protects the RFID device leaves a 3mm margin that could potentially be used for official observations. Assuming that they don t write in really small letters I guess this means that either they don t make official observations on the passports nowadays or that any such observations are stored electronically where the subject has no good way of discovering them and objecting. Above is a picture of the front cover of my passport which shows the RFID logo. Both images have links to the full resolution pictures. On Sunday I leave for a two week business trip to San Francisco, this will be my first trip with my new passport. I m thinking of taking some aluminium foil to wrap around my passport when it s not being used. I don t expect to really gain any benefit from doing so, it s a matter of principle.

Earlier this summer, I wrote a blog post on taking a principled position on software freedom where I argued that advocates of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) should take a principled position because the pragmatic benefits associated with open source --- "better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost" in OSI's words --- are simply not always present. More often than not, FLOSS projects fail. When they survive, they are often not as good as their proprietary competitors. Over the last year, I've been back at MIT taking classes, reading extensively, and otherwise learning how to act like a social scientist. My research goals, which I'm now beginning to focus on, are to help build a stronger understanding of the social dynamics in free software and free culture communities. With a slightly skeptical view toward my involvement with groups like the FSF and my work in the FLOSS community, at least one academic tried to suggest that taking a principled position in favor of software freedom might compromise the positivist social science research program in which I am engaged. "An advocate is too biased," they said. After many months of thinking seriously about this warning, I believe that this criticism can be addressed. After all, a principled position in favor of software freedom is a statement of how things should be, not a description of how they are. OSI will argue that open source leads to inherently better software. This statement, of course, is one that can be empirically tested and, in fact, there seems to be plenty of evidence that it is often wrong. On the other hand, the FSF's position that software should be free is ethical in nature. One can disagree with it, just like one can disagree with any other ethical position, but it can not be proved either right or wrong --- only convincing or unconvincing, logical or illogical in the context a certain set of other values that others might or might not share. Research has shown that the vast majority of FLOSS projects fizzle. A advocate who argues that FLOSS is inherently better is left trying to explain this fact and make excuses. As a result, OSI-style beliefs can certainly be a source of problematic bias in a social scientist. However, a person who believes that software should be free is welcome to recognize that it both fails and succeeds and to ask why. A principled idealist can argue in favor of behaviors that may be disruptive, difficult, or inefficient. Indeed, Stallman has never suggested that free software will be easier or better. Indeed, he routinely asks people to sacrifice their convenience for freedom. My goal, as a social scientist, is to understand why some FLOSS and free culture projects succeed and why many fail. I never take FLOSS's success for granted and, in fact, believe that proprietary software may often leads to better software in OSI's terms. Unlike an advocate who tows the OSI line, embracing evidence of the effectiveness of proprietary software is no way in conflict with my belief that software should be free. In fact, my desire to see software freedom grow becomes the driving force between trying to understand FLOSS's shortcomings! I am no more biased --- which is not to say completely unbiased --- than the person who both thinks that crime is wrong and who wants to study criminal behavior. In an analogous sense, starting out with the belief that all people are naturally law-abiding may be a problem in a way that beginning with the belief that people should be law-abiding is not. Starting from the fomer assumption, one has to explain away evidence to the contrary. Starting from the latter assumption, one can build an understanding of what drives people to obey or violate laws which, in turn, can help build a stronger society. To me, the question is not why FLOSS will succeed. Indeed, I believe its success is an empirical matter that remains very much up in the air. For me, the question is how it might. Embracing a principled position lets us face the facts and puts advocates and practitioners in a position to devise laws, social structures, and technologies to insure that it does.

RCBW - week #12 Here is this week squashes, by yours truly:

• 23/11/2009 bug #553122 - libtcl-chiark-1 - add missing ldconfig invocation, for *.so in linker locations
• 24/11/2009 bug #528152 - tulip - replace ttf-bistream-vera w/ dejavusans (patch from James Westby)
• 25/11/2009 bug #533993 - solfege - remove net need for xmllint (patch from Ubuntu by Alessio Treglia)
• 26/11/2009 bug #531220 - nut - fix ntp.conf postinst processing to avoid overwriting user settings
• 27/11/2009 bug #523912 - mit-scheme - add missing build-dep + tricky build due to bootstrap
• 28/11/2009 bug #521964 - libapache2-mod-lisp - fix APR version detection, patch by Antonio Radici
• 29/11/2009 bug #553257 - pidgin-hotkeys - remove unappropriate e-Xclusion in dh_shlibdebs

The funniest part of this RCBW issue is probably that Luk has started handing over RC bugs to me: from time to time I just get a /query from him with bug numbers In fact, this is more useful than one can imagine, because a considerable amount of time in periodic RC squashing is taken by triaging the RC bug list to choose your targets. Of course there is no guarantee that I'll be willing/able to fix handed-over bugs but, as a RM, Luk has evidently well-trained feelings about how hard would be to fix a given bug. All in all, for this week it worked well: 4 of the above 7 came from SchindlerLuk's list. ... and of course, let's welcome Simon on board! He is definitely doing a better job at spotting packages that should be removed from the archive rather than resurrected (potential negative effect that a NMU can indeed have on a package, de facto "saving" it from testing/release exclusion). In fact, the dilemma of "NMU vs Request Removal" raises various tricky questions. For instance, while we currently have pretty clear guidelines on how and, more importantly, when doing NMUs, we are more stringent on "Non-Maintainer Removals". Quoting from the Package Removal Requests wiki page:

    In all cases, if there is a maintainer and it's not you, mention the
    maintainer's opinion or, if you don't know it, mention how and when you
    tried to contact him.

It is of course reasonable to be more stringent on a measure that is way more invasive than a "simple" NMU. But if we start to rely on NMU-time as an important trigger for removal requests, then we could probably use a more aggressive and more distributed process for removals.

After all the U-turns by politicians, I got confused about how Three Strikes is developing. I think the current status is Mandelson trying to sneak it through as a Statutory Instrument and protect some of the most protectionist foreign interests ever seen. I ve written to my MP to express my disagreement. Andrew Heaney of TalkTalk has submitted a petition to abolish the proposed law that will see alleged illegal filesharers disconnected from their broadband connections, without a fair trial . It s not worded brilliantly, but it covers the vital point without a fair trial so I think it s still worth signing here. Thanks to Glyn Wintle for the updates on fsfe-uk. Meanwhile, unaccountable copyright collections agent PPL have picked the ideal moment to start harassing local community events. Please give generously: EMI only earned 298,000,000 last year. If you ve a bit more time, you could send a Message To Mandelson at ORG. I might not agree with ORG s structure, but they do make some cool protest sites. (Javascript required to view, as far as I can tell.) Even more flamboyantly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling on people to phone up and Stop the Pirate-Finder General!

This is it. We know the faces of people who will count in Europe during the 2009-2014 period. And we can count on them to make the EU weigh even less than it did until now. Jos Manuel Dur o Barroso, president of the European Commission. For 5 years, this ultra-liberal brought in his fanatic views of the free market, leading to unprecedented removals of regulations and legislations that could prevent large corporations to extort money from citizens. He holds a non-negligible responsibility on the (still unsolved) bank crisis of 2007. Yet, citizens voted en masse earlier this year for the EPP all across Europe, leading to his renewal. You get the commission you deserve. Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council. This is no secret that this transparent non-leader was the choice of Sarkozy after Tony Blair turned out to be an unsustainable choice. Yet, none of the 26 other members of the Council dared to raise a single finger against this choice. Sarkozy has completely lost his credit in France, but that doesn t prevent this council of cowards from trusting him, apparently. It s not as if there weren t good candidates, like Jean-Claude Juncker or Vaira V e-Freiberga. But having a competent, Europe-friendly president who actually knows his files and speaks many languages would have cast shadows on those who don t (see below). Catherine Ashton, foreign ministry of the EU. If there was any worse possible choice, I don t know which. This was the only position supposed to be affected to a socialist. And since the Labour party is still member of the PASD, despite their insane liberal economic policy and their full-scale paranoia leading to unprecedented freedom hunting in the UK, the position was given to someone from this party. And among them, they chose a person with a reputation of sloppiness and incompetence, who doesn t speak correctly a single foreign language. It is probable that, just like Van Rompuy s going to be Sarkozy s puppet, she s going to be the UK Foreign Office s servant. And we continentals all love the Foreign Office s policy, which is often in complete opposition to what the rest of Europe feels like. Jerzy Buzek, president of the European Parliament. You don t know him? Neither do I. A weak parliament goes with a weak parliament president. This way, the European Council has its hands free for behind-the-curtains arrangements, rather than letting the citizens representatives take action. Martin Schultz, president of the PASD group at the European Parliament. In order to ensure his place as president of the Parliament for the second half of the period, he betrayed his own people, and accepted any rotten compromise the EPP would propose for the key positions. Socialists have never been so weak in Brussels, and the total absence of leadership has something to do with it. Makes you proud to be European, heh? And of course you already know the real faces of Europe for the next years. Sarkozy, Merkel, Berlusconi, Brown. The main leaders from Western Europe, with their rotten governments who swore to slay any of the remaining personal freedoms in each of their countries. What a great image for EU in the world. What a great example to set. But again, you get the leaders you deserve. That s the whole point of democracy.

I wonder if it's possible to identify link spammers (you know, these bots that mass-submit a link into as many blogs/etc they can find in order to boost their page rank) by the simple measure of how many of the links to their site are marked 'nofollow'.Say, a regular page should have less than 5% (and less than 20) nofollow links; a site that goes significantly above this value probably employs some spam bot.The only really hard thing is how to avoid attacks on a site using this ... say, I write a bot that spams links to Microsoft on as many sites as it can find that DO use 'nofollow', in order to get that site above the limit, and have google penalize it.So in general I don't think Google would automatically penalize such things, still it could be used to e.g. have a human check the destination site for useful content, and then only blacklist when it doesn't seem to be useful.P.S. Which BTW is a reason why some of the SEO "do nots" are bullshit: it would be too easy to deliberately use these to blacken a competitor. So a 'link farm' will at most do nothing to raise your ranking; but Google must not allow you to actually lower a competitors ranking by setting up a link farm to him!)P.P.S. On another side note: Who guarantees that Google actually ignores "nofollow" links? They could also just be assigned a lower weight or a penalty, so that a "nofollow" link from a strong site such as Wikipedia would still be worth a lot, while the average blog comments page link goes down to 0. Say a "nofollow" link from a PR 6 site is as much worth as a regular link from a PR 4 site, and PR 2 becomes PR 0. Would already do much of the trick in discouraging the use of blog spam bots. Because after all, ignoring the links on Wikipedia for page rank would be quite stupid. In German Wikipedia, the page contents are even "sighted" (aka: peer reviewed); this is a rather trustworthy source, especially when you take time effects into account. A link being constantly in Wikipedia on a popular page for more than a month very likely is good.

These days, something happened to one of my external USB drives that I so far only knew from ReiserFS (which I since called ReisswolFS, German word play on "shredder" ...). But, it's not ext3 which I blame.Short story what happened:

• Resumed the system from 'suspend'.
• I copied some files onto the first file system.
• I copied the same files to a second external disk (dual backup...)
• I copied some files from the first disk, which caused an access-beyond-end-of-disk, mounting the filesystem read only
• Unmounted the filesystem, started e2fsck
• Started copying the files from the secondary filesystem
• Got the same error on the second disk.
• Cancelled e2fsck doing more damage to the first disk.
• Shutdown and reboot
• Memcheck, three iterations. Nothing.
• Checked second disk, no errors in filesystem (!), copied the files I had issues accessing just fine.
• Filesystem on disk #1 seriously trashed.
• Had ext2fsck try to recover filesystem on disk #1
• Pretty much all data on disk #1 is now in lost+found, it seems as if all major folders were corrupted. Lots of corrupted file entries (character devices with random permissions and numbers) there, too.

What I will do now:

• Reformat disk #1, and restore it from the other backup (Extra backup for teh win! I also have a 3rd copy of about 2 months ago off-site)

As you can see, something was wrong with the system, not with the file system.I have a strong suspect to have caused this. In case you wondered why I included "resumed from suspend" above: I've been having system stability issues with resume ever since upgrading to the Intel driver 2.9.0 and KMS (Debian unstable+testing) with kernels up to 2.6.31. In about 1 out of 5 resumes, I get a Xorg or system lockup after anything from 1 to 60 minutes. Sometimes I also experience video corruption after a few minutes, trashing some terminal emulation until the next redraw. Just before writing this email I had a typical lockup: when scrolling the terminal emulator. This has been a typical trigger for lockups. On contrast I havn't seen any such crashes (or screen corruption) on a fresh boot.Freedesktop bug reporting the same issue closed as "not our bug, blame it on the kernel".Note that 2.6.32 release candidate Changelog contain many changes for the intel DRI kernel driver. So the bug might already be fixed in the RC kernels.Same report in Kernel Bugzilla is still 'NEW' though.Related bug report in Debian, blaming it on KMS.

I ve just read an interesting post at Making Light about seat-belts [1]. In Australia seat-belt use is mandatory, you can be fined for failing to wear one and the police (who help clean up the mess when someone dies on the road) are apparently quite aggressive about enforcement. Even aside from the legal requirement the use of seat-belts is fairly ingrained in Australian culture, people tend to use them even when they won t get caught. One of the things I like to do in my spare time is to take unused computer gear from IT companies (which they regard as rubbish) and give it to home users for recreational and educational use. Due to that and my work for some smaller IT companies I ve helped many people load computer gear into their private cars and observed that most people will not take adequate care unless I coerce them. A CRT monitor tends to be large and heavy, you wouldn t want to get hit in the back of the head with one at 60Km/h. With some combinations of monitor and car you can fit a monitor in the front passenger foot-well, but usually the only place a monitor will fit is the back seat. The correct thing to do is to use the seat-belt to strap the monitor in place. It s most likely that the monitor stand (the only part that allows a seat-belt to be attached) would snap off in the event of a serious crash but this would at least slow the monitor down. Also don t put the monitor directly behind your seat if you can avoid it, put it behind the passenger seat. In a collision monitor might be able to push through your seat and cause you a back injury. Between 1992 and 2006 there were 78,000 acute computer-related injuries treated in US hospital emergency rooms [2]. The number of injuries caused by monitors peaked at 37% of the total in 2003 this was largely due to monitors falling on people. Even without the speed of a car a monitor can be a dangerous projectile. Hard drives have a lot of potential to cause damage, they are dense, hard, and the corners often aren t rounded. Storing them above the back seat behind the driver s head (as a friend once tried to do) is a really bad idea. Mythbusters showed that a box of tissues isn t going to kill you in a crash, but a hard drive is much more dangerous. The typical car glove box can store a few drives. If you need to transport a box full then the front passenger foot well is a reasonable place. If your car rolls then that would suck, but it seems that people usually die when they roll their car anyway so just try not to do that. A serious server (EG 2RU or bigger rack-mount) typically weighs 30Kg or more and is solidly constructed. The size and mass of such a machine makes it extremely difficult to safely store inside a car. The ideal place is the boot, but if that isn t an option then behind the passenger seat is the next best option. One final issue that I ve been wondering about is the safest option for laptops that are in use in a moving car. A 3Kg Thinkpad would have to hurt if it hit you in the back of the head at 60Km/h. The child-seat attachments are solid anchor points that can be used for other things. I wonder if a laptop security cable could be attached to one of the child seat points. According to an exhibit at a science museum I can throw a tennis ball at 115Km/h, so I presume that laptop security cables are designed not to break when someone swings the laptop at that speed. Therefore if a car was driving at a legal speed in Australia before crashing then a laptop security cable should be able to stop the laptop. Preventing the cable from injuring the passenger on the way would be the difficult part.

• [1] http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008845.html


• [2] http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/42768/135/

My Debian QA page shows what I consider to be a huge amount of packages I am currently uploader for 207 packages. Why so many? There are many factors The main one is group maintenance (I'm directly responsible only for 19; of course, this should not mean I disregard the rest of them), the second one is regularity. By far, most of my source packages (177) match lib.*perl, followed by lib.*ruby with 20. Anyway A strong factor that allows the pkg-perl group to be successful in maintaining 1411 packages is the regularity of the task: Packaging Perl modules is usually as easy as running dh-make-perl on them (of course, not taking away the merit of packaging the few strange corner cases In Ruby-land, the landscape is quite different. The developer community is quite anchored in agile worldviews, which go beyond coding practices and all the way over to confronting the way most Free Software projects distribute their work. I have previously ranted presented informed and opinionated blog posts on this topic Ruby culture dictates the distribution via Ruby Gems, which are for many reasons not Debian friendly. Besides Gems, most projects have adopted Git for development tracking and are hosted under Github That's why I came up with Githubredir, which basically presents an uscan-friendly listing of tags for a given project. But if you develop in Git, you might want to split a project in its constituent parts for easier organization, without meaning that each subproject should be an independent project by itself, right? After all, that's what Git submodules are for. That's what happened with a great PDF generating library for Ruby, Prawn. Thing is, the three parts of the main project are required for the project to be built. Anyway, that was a great reason to move the package over to the new dpkg 3.0 (quilt) source format. And, yes, it is a straightforward move! If you have not yet done so, take a look at Raphael Hertzog' explanation+FAQ wiki page. It just works, and makes many things way easier. There are still some wrinkles in my packaging, like where I'm getting the orig tarballs from As the submodules are not presently tagged in any way, I was only able to download a snapshot of their respective current master branches. This is suboptimal, I know, but I have talked to the upstream author, and he confirms that for the next major version (which should not be long in coming) the tags will be synchronized, and things will be even cleaner. PS- I love Hpricot. To get the numbers for my QA page, I just had to get three dirty but useful arrays:

And work from the three very simple lists there i.e. tot.select pkg pkg =~ /lib.*perl/ .size gives me 177.

Over the years far too many years I have occasionally chronicled the slow death of my mother, a death of mind, personality, really person that comes with Alzheimers. She has officially had the illness for 7 years now but had symptoms prior to this time, in the form of perceptual disturbances that are the defining feature of the rare type of Alzheimers she has, Benson s syndrome. As her illness progressed and we saw her doctors they would always ask: what other illnesses or health problems does Vera have? And I would answer none. Without fail and almost immediately, the inquiring doctor would respond back none? often with a slightly raised eyebrow, the one word uttered not to challenge the veracity of my answer, but used instead to convey another meaning, often bathed in some mixture of compassion and pity. It was an acknowledgement of the future that awaited us, basically stating with no other illness, this is going to be on heck of long and difficult haul of a life experience, which has indeed been the case. However, after nearly two years of being bed bound in a nursing home, physical health problems are now creeping in and my mother is descending into different type of hell, especially since she can no longer communicate the physical pain she might be in. The words she knows are few: no and a few other words (she likes to tell people they are loco and indeed I can only imagine how true this accusation of crazy is given that we are keeping her alive against her wishes). Her consistent and persistent wailing, agitation and crying do of course communicate the depth of suffering this being the hardest thing to bear witness to. She does have periods of calm, coaxed in part by the drugs she is given but these are not enough to override the pain she and we feel. About two months ago, her body started to give, the first problem being a fracture that led to significant internal bleeding and required a blood transfusion and a brace she is still wearing. A few weeks ago when I was visiting her, she basically developed these black and red welts on the bottom of her feet in a manner of two days, so instead of boarding a plane to NYC, I took her to the emergency room and stayed a full week while she was pumped with intravenous antibiotics. At first, doctors thought it might be gangrene, which was mortifying mostly because of all the associations that come with it. The doctors determined that it was not in fact gangrene but that she has a bone infection technically called osteomyelitis a tricky condition to treat that requires at minimum 45 days of IV antibiotics. The hospital/doctors who had originally determined she would stay there for her treatment, changed their mind unexpectedly and announced their intention to ship her to a long-term care facility, which in theory we were not opposed to, except for the fact that it is very far from where my sister lives, and also it is a facility we had not verified for ourselves. On top of it, we knew she had a legal right stay in the hospital (though some doctors informed us otherwise). We preferred the hospital because it is so close to our house, we would be able to hire someone to visit her when my sister is at work, and we suspect that she will have additional complications from 45 days of IV abx so why not stick around and receive treatment and care from the same internist who had been nothing but a great doctor. The story took a turn toward the surreal when the infectious disease doctor decided to release her to her nursing home with a treatment of oral antibiotics, even though every single doctor we saw from the emergency room doctor to the weekend internist who subs for her regular doctor, repeatedly informed us the only treatment is IV antibiotics for at least 45 days, possibly more (which is the normal treatment protocol).
Since so many people don t know how to maneuver complaints and take action in hospitals, doctors and other staff can exploit this to make medically dogdy decisions (which happened in fact when a feeding tube was put into my mom, but that is another long story I don t think I ever wrote about here). I am sure also that some doctor s are less willing to take questionable action with certain patients depending on the class and background of their family members but I bet the first impression I give off to doctors, to invoke Erving Goffman s work on self-presentation, is not someone willing to take swift action. In the hospital, I have the sense that most doctors don t take me all that seriously, probably thinking that I am 5 foot slacker/artistic type that I admittedly do look like as I dress in jeans, a hoodie and a winter cap because the hospitals are so effing, ridiculously cold in PR (and I can t help my height nor the fact that I look 24 or so). So it usually comes as a surprise when I bring out my mind ninja tactics developed over years of being and thinking like an academic, whose craft is research, whose passion is arguing, and for some of us who are politically inclined, who love the challenge of righting wrongs. So when this happened I contacted lawyer-friends, talked to the social worker and promptly complained to the head of client services/ombudsperson and made a stink but of a very particular sort: it was packaged in massive tact. I was very deferential (especially since those folks have nothing to do with the mess, they are there to help and are your allies), repeatedly pointed out how the doctor s decision amounts to medical negligence, and made it clear that I was willing to take action, leave my work if need be and get my ass down there, and casually mention how in the 5 hours between their decision and my phone calls, I have already taken action (how I have contacted lawyers on the island, etc). Needless to say, the hospital decided that my mom is staying put in the hospital and I am relieved. But this solace is only of the tiniest sort. I am still reeling from the absurdity of her condition and her suffering. She is only alive because of a feeding tube that I am opposed to, her state of being a modern day zombie that in reality, or at least from my perspective perpetuates her suffering. For this reason, truth be told and at one level relieved that her body is finally failing, that there is a chance, a light at the end of this lonely, now horrific tunnel that her life will end sooner than later. This, however, makes it no easier emotionally nor ethically as it is my mother who must journey alone through significant pain and suffering as her body now goes elsewhere a journey we can watch in person yet are powerless in its face.

Over the years far too many years I have occasionally chronicled the slow death of my mother, a death of mind, personality, really person that comes with Alzheimers. She has officially had the illness for 7 years now but had symptoms prior to this time, in the form of perceptual disturbances that are the defining feature of the rare type of Alzheimers she has, Benson s syndrome. As her illness progressed and we saw her doctors they would always ask: what other illnesses or health problems does Vera have? And I would answer none. Without fail and almost immediately, the inquiring doctor would respond back none? often with a slightly raised eyebrow, the one word uttered not to challenge the veracity of my answer, but used instead to convey another meaning, often bathed in some mixture of compassion and pity. It was an acknowledgement of the future that awaited us, basically stating with no other illness, this is going to be on heck of long and difficult haul of a life experience, which has indeed been the case. However, after nearly two years of being bed bound in a nursing home, physical health problems are now creeping in and my mother is descending into different type of hell, especially since she can no longer communicate the physical pain she might be in. The words she knows are few: no and a few other words (she likes to tell people they are loco and indeed I can only imagine how true this accusation of crazy is given that we are keeping her alive against her wishes). Her consistent and persistent wailing, agitation and crying do of course communicate the depth of suffering this being the hardest thing to bear witness to. She does have periods of calm, coaxed in part by the drugs she is given but these are not enough to override the pain she and we feel. About two months ago, her body started to give, the first problem being a fracture that led to significant internal bleeding and required a blood transfusion and a brace she is still wearing. A few weeks ago when I was visiting her, she basically developed these black and red welts on the bottom of her feet in a manner of two days, so instead of boarding a plane to NYC, I took her to the emergency room and stayed a full week while she was pumped with intravenous antibiotics. At first, doctors thought it might be gangrene, which was mortifying mostly because of all the associations that come with it. The doctors determined that it was not in fact gangrene but that she has a bone infection technically called osteomyelitis a tricky condition to treat that requires at minimum 45 days of IV antibiotics. The hospital/doctors who had originally determined she would stay there for her treatment, changed their mind unexpectedly and announced their intention to ship her to a long-term care facility, which in theory we were not opposed to, except for the fact that it is very far from where my sister lives, and also it is a facility we had not verified for ourselves. On top of it, we knew she had a legal right stay in the hospital (though some doctors informed us otherwise). We preferred the hospital because it is so close to our house, we would be able to hire someone to visit her when my sister is at work, and we suspect that she will have additional complications from 45 days of IV abx so why not stick around and receive treatment and care from the same internist who had been nothing but a great doctor. The story took a turn toward the surreal when the infectious disease doctor decided to release her to her nursing home with a treatment of oral antibiotics, even though every single doctor we saw from the emergency room doctor to the weekend internist who subs for her regular doctor, repeatedly informed us the only treatment is IV antibiotics for at least 45 days, possibly more (which is the normal treatment protocol).
Since so many people don t know how to maneuver complaints and take action in hospitals, doctors and other staff can exploit this to make medically dogdy decisions (which happened in fact when a feeding tube was put into my mom, but that is another long story I don t think I ever wrote about here). I am sure also that some doctor s are less willing to take questionable action with certain patients depending on the class and background of their family members but I bet the first impression I give off to doctors, to invoke Erving Goffman s work on self-presentation, is not someone willing to take swift action. In the hospital, I have the sense that most doctors don t take me all that seriously, probably thinking that I am 5 foot slacker/artistic type that I admittedly do look like as I dress in jeans, a hoodie and a winter cap because the hospitals are so effing, ridiculously cold in PR (and I can t help my height nor the fact that I look 24 or so). So it usually comes as a surprise when I bring out my mind ninja tactics developed over years of being and thinking like an academic, whose craft is research, whose passion is arguing, and for some of us who are politically inclined, who love the challenge of righting wrongs. So when this happened I contacted lawyer-friends, talked to the social worker and promptly complained to the head of client services/ombudsperson and made a stink but of a very particular sort: it was packaged in massive tact. I was very deferential (especially since those folks have nothing to do with the mess, they are there to help and are your allies), repeatedly pointed out how the doctor s decision amounts to medical negligence, and made it clear that I was willing to take action, leave my work if need be and get my ass down there, and casually mention how in the 5 hours between their decision and my phone calls, I have already taken action (how I have contacted lawyers on the island, etc). Needless to say, the hospital decided that my mom is staying put in the hospital and I am relieved. But this solace is only of the tiniest sort. I am still reeling from the absurdity of her condition and her suffering. She is only alive because of a feeding tube that I am opposed to, her state of being a modern day zombie that in reality, or at least from my perspective perpetuates her suffering. For this reason, truth be told and at one level relieved that her body is finally failing, that there is a chance, a light at the end of this lonely, now horrific tunnel that her life will end sooner than later. This, however, makes it no easier emotionally nor ethically as it is my mother who must journey alone through significant pain and suffering as her body now goes elsewhere a journey we can watch in person yet are powerless in its face.

I ve just been disappointed to read about the DNI (Defence in the National Interest) web site closing down [1]. The final blog post says In the meantime, I ll leave everything up unless we start having more security problems , but unfortunately they have had a number of security problems in the past. I doubt the ability of a Wordpress installation to remain unscathed on the Internet if it s not upgraded regularly. So I think it s only a matter of time before a new bad Wordpress bug is discovered and DNI goes offline for good. In the past I did idly consider volunteering to help them run their site, but apart from a lack of spare time there is the issue that a number of their policy positions are things that I strongly disagree with. I can agree with paleo-cons on a number of issues, but there are also significant areas of disagreement. So it seems that the combination of a lack of skilled system administrators and a lack of good security in their software is reducing their ability to spread their message. While the site content is going to be mirrored on other sites the URLs will break and Google will give it a lower rank. In many ways losing Google ranking is a way of being silenced. I wonder whether the apparent lack of moderate-right political expression on the Internet is partly due to that demographic having less IT skills than the groups who have centrist to left-wing political views and those who have extreme-right views. Naturally anyone can pay to have someone run their web site, but having to pay raises the barrier to entry and eliminates some of the potential contributors. I think it s a bad thing for democracy if the only people who get their voices heard are those who have significant amounts of money or technical skill. One of my hopes for the SE Linux project was that it would increase the longevity of servers while also decreasing the amount of money required to run them. But of course if you have buggy PHP code then there s not much SE Linux can do to help you.

• [1] http://www.d-n-i.net/dni/2009/11/23/dni-to-close-update/

I've been slacking on the RC bugs front. :) Let's see, my last blog post was on Monday 16th, so I'm late...

• 2009-11-17: #527838 in 'smart' - investigated, closed as fixed. (Blatant cheating.)
• 2009-11-18: #516338 in 'pornview' - debugged a segmentation fault on amd64
• 2009-11-19: #551251 in 'libjavascript-perl' - patch written, but need to finish off and release.
• On Friday I looked at postgresql-pllua and postgresql-plproxy, but they need a bit more work than I originally thought, so I joined the pkg-postgresql team. I'm amazed I wasn't a member before, in fact. :) Now just need to actually update the packages.
• Then I took the weekend off! Went out, had fun...
• Yesterday I followed up on bug #516338 above with a delayed NMU, but I believe we're close to a maintainer upload now.
• 2009-11-24: #553230 in 'libapache2-mod-macro' - NMU diff written. I think it's borderline removal material, since there's only been one maintainer upload ever, but it does have a few popcon votes.

The DELAYED queue is a wonderful mechanism for reducing the amount of busy waiting that needs to happen for NMUs; you don't have to remember to come back and upload several days later. For non-DDs, it takes a bit more co-ordination between you and your sponsor, unfortunately - do you send the NMUdiff to the bug before you get sponsorship, and risk having to change it? And then revisit the bug to give notice again once it does get sponsored? Or leave it until after upload, which might reduce the amount of notice you're actually giving the maintainer (if, say, your mentor is in a different timezone)? I've been opting for the first approach, but it doesn't have the same fire-and-forget quality of the real thing.

I recently had the misfortune to be compelled to install Proftpd on SCO Unix. There s nothing wrong with Proftpd of course, but everything is wrong with SCO. LDFLAGS=-L/usr/ucblib ./configure libdir=/usr/ucblib --enable-builtin-getnameinfo To get it to compile the above ./configure line is needed. It uses /usr/ucblib because having the basic BSD sockets API residing in a non-default directory makes things more exciting. The --enable-builtin-getnameinfo option is needed because the getnameinfo library call in SCO Unix doesn t work properly. On a real OS I would have downloaded the source to libc to figure out where the problem might be, but on SCO I had no option other than to disable that functionality. Then once I got it working I had to put UseIPv6 off in the configuration file, otherwise I got the error No Route to Host (from memory) when I tried to start proftpd. Finally the process was dying from an unhandled SIGALRM every 10 seconds. According to truss (a vastly inferior equivalent to strace) the sigaction() system call was being entered four times to handle SIGALRM (as was reported for every time the application code called sigaction() but the default action of terminating the application remained in place. I ended up running proftpd from inetd which removed the need for the alarm handling code. Then it all worked. SCO sucks. Last month Darl McBride was terminated from his position with the SCO group [1]. It s unfortunate that Darl wasn t terminated a lot earlier, if so then maybe SCO could have focussed on improving the quality of their products and delivering value for stock holders. Hopefully Darl will be sued by some of the people who lost money when SCO went bankrupt. It would be good if Darl could also be sued by companies that lost money due to the poor quality of SCO Unix that means every company that runs SCO servers or that writes software for it. The truly awful nature of SCO Unix is in large part due to the fact that all of SCO s money was spent on litigation that was well known to be baseless.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darl_mcbride

Este post tambi n est escrito en espa ol aqu . Privacy at Facebook is heavy-duty. As a big fan of the Worlds Collide Theory I hate be tagged compulsively. I would like to select in which photos appear in my profile and feed. Since I couldn t find that option in the setting menu, I looked for the answer in my favorite scripting language: Python. This 60-lines-long script removes your tag from the latests photos where you has been labeled. You can download it from here. You may run it hourly (or every 15 minutes, or every 5 minutes, depends how paranoid you are) via cron or whatever. Any improvement is welcome. It probably runs on Windows too. If you managed to do it, leave a comment for the others.