Michael blogs about Critical Mass.
What is Critical Mass in case you are too lazy to go to Michael's or to the Wikipedia? A cyclist-awareness movement, showing how bikers are safer (i.e. more visible) when there are more of them. The (dis)organizational nature of this movement (at least according to Wikipedia's information) seems quite fun and interesting.
However, I have to oppose what Michael says is a strong point of CM in Austria - At least, given my country's culture.
People who don't bike often say we have the least bike-aware culture, and that this city must be like hell to cyclists. It is not - Mexicans tend to believe this is the worst place possible on many accounts, and I'm happy to prove the contrary. I do feel that bringing people out to the streets, as our local government's Mu vete en bici program pushes, is completely right: It shows people how fast they can move in real streets in the city, taking away the fear of being run over by a bus, and people will gradually understand we can all excercise the right to use the streets without polluting, and gives us a better idea on how to behave with traffic (even if the traffic is made of fellow bikers) around us. I know this program works - At least, because it worked on me. Whenever possible, I go everywhere in this (not small or friendly by any measure) city by bike.
Anyway - What criticism do I have for Michael's post? That he states they:

Bicycling ludicrously slowly for a good hour, we managed to claim some fairly busy streets while many people tried to get home by car.

IMHO, what we should be doing is to demand the drivers to respect us, not to make them want to run us over. They should not be driven into hating bikers because of the chaos they generate - It is terrible to sit in a car for two hours when you usually take 30 minutes. There is simply no justification for that.
When I took part of the World Naked Bike Ride, some people wanted to take all four lanes of Reforma. Fortunately, reason prevailed, and we took only the lane we were assigned. And we should keep that in mind! Whenever possible, we should protest and make ourselves heard, but without interfering, without damaging, other people's lives!
Oh, by the way: If anybody in Mexico wants to have some nice hours of healthy fun: I am still pondering whether to join, as it is a huge effort, but I am very inclined to do so. Next week, November 9, we will go by bike from Mexico City's Z calo to Pachuca. We face 95Km and close to four hours. The road to Pachuca is basically flat, and going in a large group is a great experience. Hope to see you there!

Autotools can be nice, but they can be pretty ugly too, sometimes. Especially when you're trying to do something that the autotools weren't originally meant to do. I was trying to generate scripts using autotools, in such a way that they'd be able to use variables that I've AC_SUBST'ed. At first, that did not seem possible, unless I wouldn't mind doing what autoconf.info suggests:

edit = sed \
	-e 's,@datadir\@,$(pkgdatadir),g' \
	-e 's,@prefix\@,$(prefix),g'
autoconf: Makefile $(srcdir)/autoconf.in
	rm -f autoconf autoconf.tmp
	$(edit) $(srcdir)/autoconf.in >autoconf.tmp
	chmod +x autoconf.tmp
	mv autoconf.tmp autoconf
autoheader: Makefile $(srcdir)/autoheader.in
	rm -f autoheader autoheader.tmp
	$(edit) $(srcdir)/autoconf.in >autoheader.tmp
	chmod +x autoheader.tmp
	mv autoheader.tmp autoheader

(sic, including the "autoconf.in" in the autoheader stub. Dunno whether that's a bug or whether autotools is really that ugly) This would work, but it has one downside: it can replace instances of "@datadir@" with the likes of "$ prefix /lib/$ PACKAGE ". Or, if the user is really sadistic, "$ my_stupid_variable_specified_on_configure_command_line /lib/$ PACKAGE ". Personally, I do not like that approach. So I had to find something else. With C programs, if you want to AC_SUBST something that could end up being something like the above, you'd just make sure you'd have something like -DFOO="@FOO@" in your AM_CFLAGS (or your program_CFLAGS); this would then evaluate your AC_SUBSTed variable, making it available (the proper way) to your C program. Occasionally, this is why it can sometimes be a good idea not to have a config.h... Anyway, the solution to my little problem was to be found that way. First, I have a little sed program:

#!/bin/sh
sed -e '/@config_sh@/ 
	rconfig.sh
	d
	 '

Or: 'replace all occurrences of @config_sh@ in the input with the contents of the file config.sh'. Simple. All we need now is to generate a config.sh file:

config.sh: Makefile
	env -i FOO=@FOO@ BAR=@BAR@ > config.sh
%: %.shin config.sh
	$(srcdir)/makesh < $< > $@

The first generates our config.sh file; the second uses the sed program above to turn any '.shin' file into a processed file. And now, my shell scripts only need to say '@config_sh@' somewhere appropriate to get access to all my AC_SUBSTed variables. Whee. (Side note: I could probably run the sed inside the Makefile itself, but apparently my sed- and make-fu is not string enough -- whenever I try that, sed errors out one way or another. Oh well.)

Today’s the last day for the Gov.UK Consultation on Forced ISP Snooping: Please Say NO. I didn’t get to LinuxExpo, partly because of Monday Machine-Mangling Madness but I saw LinuxExpo 2008 Robert Castelo from the Drupal point-of-view. I also didn’t get to Public Sector Online (report by Andrew Lewin with links to more) and I definitely didn’t travel to Toronto, so the report on the Free Software and Open Source Symposium from Randy Metcalfe is pretty welcome. I wrote about the Social Enterprise Photography Competition and Cooperatives South-West Trade Fair last Friday - the photography competition deadline has been extended to 7 November. So you’ve still time to capture a vision of a more progressive approach to business that values people and the planet as well as profit. Last Friday was Get Online Day but TTLLP didn’t do anything for it this year - I took one look and reached similar conclusions to Graham Jones: Get online…! Oh - you are…! Related to that: on Tuesday, I got really annoyed about how many branches of government (national, regional, sub-regional and local) are obsessed about the private sector and are paying even less attention to other types of businesses, includingbuying off-the-shelf software which doesn’t conform to their stated policies about accessibility and interoperability. (Sorry if you saw evidence of that outburst… yes, local councillors are pretty powerless and get as annoyed about incompetent government services as everyone else.) It seems I’m not the only one feeling that good cooperative businesses are being overlooked. The ICA have recently sent an open letter to the Governments of the G-8 reminding them that co-operative financial institutions are an alternative secure, stable and sustainable model of business owned and controlled by people. Finally, a bit of advance notice here: “The inaugural Creativity & Business International Network (c&binet) will take place at The Grove in Hertfordshire from 26 28 October 2009” - is this something that free software and free culture supporters should get involved with? (And why did they pick a name that includes an XML special character?)

Via Kees Cook (and sorry for the reiteration for people following along Planet Debian, thanks to Caspar Clemens: Recent (>= 5.1) versions of OpenSSH (found at least in Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Intrepid), have the VisualHostKey option. What does it do?

$ ssh -o VisualHostKey=yes 172.16.10.1
Host key fingerprint is db:7a:d8:a8:2e:41:a2:e5:51:e1:7f:d0:73:bd:85:bf
+--[ RSA 2048]----+
     ..            
    ..  .   . .    
    .. . o . o .   
   + .. . o   +    
  + +  . S   . .   
 . . .  . o     .  
      .  .+.   E   
     .   o.o       
      oo...        
+-----------------+
Linux respaldos.local.iiec 2.6.26-1-vserver-amd64 #1 SMP Wed Oct 1 13:08:10 UTC 2008 x86_64

What does this mean? This ASCII-art graph represents your host's public key, which uniquely identifies (or at least, it better damn should uniquely identify!) it. This representation was added mainly because it is way easier to be able to visually record the shape of your most frequently used hosts' IDs than their fingerprint. If you connect from a foreign or untrusted machine (i.e. one that does not yet know your host's identity), make sure to run with this switch - it will protect you from somebody supplanting your server's identity.
Besides, it adds to the general kewlness factor, doesn't it? ;-)
To enable this behaviour by default, add the following to your /etc/ssh/ssh_config (or to your personal .ssh/config):

Host * 
  VisualHostKey yes

Now... What about publishing the list of the 32767 known-bad SSH keys? That'd make for a nice ASCII-art exhibit :-

“I can understand, accept and respect that there are people with different sexual trends, but that they feel proud to be gay? That they go out on parades and demonstrations?” , Said the Queen of Spain to Pilar Urbano, the author of a biography about her (”La Reina muy de cerca“). “If these people want to live together, dress up for a wedding and to marry, they might have right to do so or not, according to their country’s laws: but they shouldn’t call that marriage, because it’s not. There are many possible names: social contract, union contract.“, she added. “Puedo comprender, aceptar y respetar que haya personas con otra tendencia sexual, pero que se sientan orgullosos por ser gays? Que se suban a una carroza y salgan en manifestaciones?“, dijo la Reina de Espa a a Pilar Urbano, autora de una biograf a sobre ella (”La Reina muy de cerca“). “Si esas personas quieren vivir juntas, vestirse de novios y casarse, pueden estar en su derecho, o no, seg n las leyes de su pa s: pero que a eso no le llamen matrimonio, porque no lo es. Hay muchos nombres posibles: contrato social, contrato de uni n.“, a adi . She has also spoken against abortion and euthanasia and in favor of forcing all the children to learn religion (catholic) at school. The Royal Family is supposed not to have a public political opinion, as they should theoretically represent every Spanish person. Fortunately many of us don’t believe in blue blood, kings, queens and all that stuff, so she definitely doesn’t represent us God shave the Queen!

Systems Expo 2008 As the last years, Debian was offered a booth at last week's Systems expo here in Munich again. However, this year the Free Projects area was not organized by Rosa Riebl from C&L publishing, but by Wolfgang Drotschmann from LinuxTag e.V.. This made some things a bit more difficult, e.g. we did not know our exact booth number until a couple of days before the expo and the small conference programme was made up in an ad-hoc fashion after the expo started, but in the end most things worked out fine in some way or the other. While the booth (a demo-point, really) was as big (or rather small) as last year, there was much more space around the booth this year (something which seemed to apply to all of Systems), so things did not get too crowded even when a handful of visitors approached the booth at once. Also, the visibility was much improved as our demo point was visible by strolling visitors this year (last year, our demo point was just facing the wall). As nobody else stepped up, I had to organize the booth again. Fewer people than last year were around; only Robert Grimm, Arne Wichmann, Franziska Lichtblau, Johannes Wiedersich, Andreas Barth and I were able to commit to staffing the booth; other people were busy over the week or moved away from Munich since last year, like Robert Lemmen or Wolfgang Lonien. Luckily, we still had the computer the GNOME project donated to us last year, and I took a TFT, keyboard and mouse from the university along. This year, I decided to not show up for the booth build-up the day before Systems starts. On the one hand, I had made the experience that there is not much one can do then anyway, and would have to put the computer/TFT into the central locker room overnight anyway. On the other hand, there was as always a very low attendence in the first few hours of the expo so building up the booth in the morning turned out to be no problem. The Credativ people again provided us with merchandise (due to some miscommunication on my part the package had to arrive directly at the expo, but in the end I was glad about this as I had enough trouble carrying the computer and TFT to the expo). This year, thanks to Credativ, we were able to provide some t-shirts for the first time, something quite some visitors had requested over the years. Besides t-shirts, we had some swirl stickers and the popular Debian keychains provided by Joerg Jaspert through Credativ. In the end the booth mostly consisted of the computer (demonstrating Lenny most of the time) and some A4 sized Swirls I had printed out the day before. From Wednesday on we were able to provide Lenny Beta2 CDs as well thanks to Johannes Wiedersich who organized them. Initially, I asked ADR whether they would produce some CDs for us again as they did last year, but they did not bring the appropriate hardware this time. But thanks to Johannes we were still able to provide interested visitors with CDs through LSK. In the end, we ran out of most t-shirts at some point on Thursday and managed to sell the two remaining Lady shirts on Friday. All the other merchandise was gone by the end of the show as well so the way back was not that difficult, even more so as Andreas Barth helped me carry the computer to the subway and my car. The days I was at Systems (first and last day) the attendance was rather low, so not that many interesting discussions happened. Almost everybody who stepped by knew Debian already and the majority was using it themselves as well, at least on their servers. Those people were also really quite happy, we rarely heard much critizism, even after asking people for some. The most frequently asked question was undoubtly "when will Lenny release?", followed by "do you have that cool t-shirt in L or XL as well?". Overall it was a pretty good experience, albeit slightly stressful organizing it. In any case, this was probably the last time I had to do this as the Systems organizers announced they will rethink their concept and there will be no Systems 2009.

Nagios has the - very useful - feature of “parent hosts”. If it deems a host A being down, it first checks its parent host, B, and reports A only as down if B is up. This goes back recursively until a host with state “up” is found and only the first “down” host is actually reported. This keeps on-call people from being bombed with alerts in case of major network outages and makes sure that the alerts that are actually sent out do reasonably accurately describe the actual outage. As an individual who has some “external” servers in various data centers on the Internet, I would like to not be alerted multiple times that my servers at ISP C, D, and E are down if there is an outage at the ISP F hosting my Nagios installation or at one of the various exchange points temporarily rendering the servers unreachable (without me being able to do anything). The solution sounds easy but is surprisingly hard. How one could solve the issue For each host in the manual nagios configuration, do a traceroute and generate host stanzas for each of the hosts found:

$ sudo traceroute -I icmp -n -A 213.239.240.200
traceroute to 213.239.240.200 (213.239.240.200), 64 hops max, 28 byte packets
 1  <snip>
 2  217.243.221.150 [AS3320]  1 ms  0 ms  0 ms
 3  62.154.10.106 [AS3320]  1 ms  2 ms  2 ms
 4  217.239.40.226 [AS3320]  51 ms 217.239.40.234 [AS3320]  3 ms 217.239.40.226 [AS3320]  60 ms
 5  193.159.226.2 [AS3320]  3 ms  3 ms  3 ms
 6  213.239.240.200 [AS24940]  6 ms  7 ms (TOS=238!)  8 ms
$

This sounds easy and surely can be accomplished in a few hundred lines of perl. However, this makes it necessary to parse Nagios configuration if one wants to obtain the list of configured hosts directly from there. Unfortunately, the syntax of Nagios configuration is “historically grown” which makes it quite illogical and awfully hard to parse - this would easily double the size of the traceroute-based configuration generator. Additionally, the (real) traceroute given above shows three other issues that might arise from such a setup. Dynamic Routing Network paths are not as static as a traceroute suggests. On the Internet, the ISPs use BGP to connect their networks together and to ensure connectivity. In case of network reconfiguration (which may be caused by desired technical or policy changes or actual failures), the traceroute to a given network host may change. Considerable experience is needed to judge whether a change in the traceroute is only short-term while one looks at it, or long term meant to stay. Of course, only long term changes should be reflected to Nagios configuration. The possibility of changes makes it necessary to distinguish between “manually” and “automatically” generated Nagios host entries and to have a mechanism to quickly re-generate the “automatic” entries according to the current situation found on the network. Alternative Network Paths If you look at hop 4 of the traceroute given above, you see two IP addresses. This is a common “one packet left, one packet right” setup where two identical lines are sharing the load and this one sees different interfaces of the next hop router. Which IP address should one put into the parent host declaration then? Later Nagios versions supposedly are able to handle multiple parents to a host, but the docs of course don’t cover this complex configuration and I didn’t yet find the time to find out how this mechanism works and whether it can be used to represent a network layout like that in Nagios. Unpingable Routers For some network operators, ICMP echo request packets (ping) pose a significant load on their network equipment. To remedy that load, they have disabled ICMP echo reply transmission on these machines to keep the load down. This makes the router still show up in a traceroute (as this is done by sending packets with short TTL values and making them expire in transit, resulting in an ICMP TTL exceeded message being sent back), but it cannot be pinged. Hop Number 5 on the traceroute above is such a box: It shows up fine in the traceroute, but pinging it will always return “DOWN”. Currently, I simply omit such hosts from the Nagios configuration, but this may result in extra and inaccurate alerts once the unpingable host itself fails. A different possibility would be to check the host’s availabilty by sending an appropriately TTLed packet either to the host itself or to a host that is “behind” that host. The latter introduces even more complexity since one needs to find out a host “behind” the unpingable box, but this may be necessary since in the case of Hop Number 5 above, the IP address of the hop does not even seem to be in AS3320’s internal routing and tracing to the hop itself stops well before the expected place of the host regardless of from where one traces. Conclusion This is a surprisingly hard issue if one wants to do network monitoring while generating accurate alerts. Surely, it’s a topic that needs to be addressed in network monitoring, so I am quite interested in how other people tackle this. Please comment! Thanks in advance.

It was recently brought to my attention that the free newspaper "Metro" has an online version, where you can download the entire newspaper in PDF form; or use it in an online version, which consists of a series of images of each page, where if you click on an article, the usemap of that image is a link to the relevant article in HTML form. Of course my hanlin doesn't have a webbrowser (it has a somewhat limited HTML parser, but that does not understand even hyperlinks, let alone usemaps), so the PDF version is what I need. Unfortunately, the only option which "Metro" provides is a set of one-page PDF files. They are somewhat readable on my hanlin (someone with worse eyes than my own would probably have trouble reading the small letters, but for me it's not a problem); however, the fact that rather than just using the 'page turn' buttons on my hanlin I have to close the current file, open the next, and reconfigure the zoom all over, means that this multi-PDF thing isn't exactly great, and that I'd prefer just getting one PDF file instead. So I got to work, and tried out a few things. There doesn't appear to be anything to merge multiple PDF files into one. There is 'psmerge', but that only does PostScript files, not PDF ones. But that's not a problem, because PDF files can easily be converted to postscript and back, right? Well, no. The first pdf-to-postscript converter that I tried was 'pdf2ps', a wrapper script around ghostscript. Unfortunately, using that results in some ugliness: As you can see in the second image, using ps2pdf results in some quality loss. Ghostscript apparently doesn't understand the letter 'A' very well, and (more importantly) loses the anti-aliasing that is part of the pdf file. Converting this file back to PDF and storing it on the hanlin results in an unreadable text. But it gets worse. Once I had converted all those PDF files to postscript using pdf2ps and merged them with psmerge, the output was gibberish. Or Klingon, take your pick: In case you were wondering, yes, that is the exact same fragment (counting lines sucks) at the exact same zoom level. Clearly this was a dead end. I found that there was a second pdf-to-ps converter, called 'pdftops', which uses the xpdf code base to do its thing. This converter produced clearly better PDF output; I could not see any difference between the Xpdf rendering of the original file, and the gv rendering of the pdftops output. Also, the psmerge output does not garble things as badly: Sadly, it still loses anti-aliasing, and thereby the readability of the document on my ebookreader device. Moreover, the pdftops output seems to confuse psmerge, to the extent that it hangs on some pages. Another approach I tried was to import the pdftops output into scribus, and create a multi-page PDF file with that program. Unfortunately, however, scribus does not seem to like the pdftops output. Xpdf also has a 'pdftoppm' converter. With that, I was able to create a multi-page .pdf file that was not garbled, and did still contain anti-aliasing. Unfortunately, since the PPM format is a raster image format, the PDF file that is created in this way does not scale very well, resulting in artifacts and, again, an unreadable PDF file on the hanlin device. So it appears that for now I'll be stuck with storing multiple files on my device. Sigh. I wish that wouldn't be necessary... Update: So I needed pdftk.

The Debian Lenny release has still quite a big list of Release Critical bugs, and as Debian developer I feel that I should do my share, and at least look at the list of bugs and see if there's any I could do something for.

Almost always though, I find that I won't touch the remaining bugs in the list.because of one or more of these reasons:

1. a package I really don't care about
2. hugely complex package or might also use something obscure like cddb
3. it seems like people are already looking into it
4. it requires a political solution, not a technical one
   

As part of the effort to get Lenny released, Joss Mouette started the Debian Bug Sprint.
This is really a cool concept, and it is a shame not more people participated.

The reason for me it is cool is that it forced me to break the rules I mentioned above, because I got a bug which fitted 1 and 4 of my list above!

Turned out this bug is really a border case in interpretation of Debian policy.

The package is perfectly usable without any extern dependencies, hence it is currently in the main section of Debian. However it doesn't end there. The package also has a download script that can fetch firmware images for certain printers. It appears for people with these printers the package is NOT usable without external files.

Aparantly though, the current, as one person involved in the bug calls it, "spirit" of Debian is to tolerate this, as it is good enough that it is usable without external dependencies for SOME persons.

However the bug submitter doesn't agree, and thinks this is a case that needs addressing withing the Debian project.

I suggested splitting up the package and moving the download script to contrib, but this was mostly dismissed as idea.

The end result is that the maintainer decided to escalate the problem to the Debian CTTE.
This means it probable won't be solved by today, soo I will have to bake cookies for someone :)

I can't stand the taste of coffee - neither American, nor Italian - it all tastes like dirt to me. However, I too occasionally need a kick to keep me going even when I'm tired, and I've found just the thing here in Austria. Red Bull is the most famous Austrian "caffeine/energy drink", but they also have a variety of similar products, which sell at lower prices. Recently, I noticed that you can even get the stuff in 1.5 liter bottles, rather than the more expensive 1/4 liter cans. Be careful though: I had a bit too much the other day, and my wife had to detach me from the ceiling. If I had a good head for business, I'd find a way to make money exporting the stuff. At a bit more than a Euro per liter, it's way cheaper than expensive cans of Red Bull.

As I wrote previously, I started looking around for a new hosting provider, as Layered Tech is jacking up their prices too much. This isn't something I consider 'fun', as it will involve a lot of time swapping things over, with the potential for problems, but the amount of money disappearing every month is too much to ignore at this point. After some dithering, I finally went ahead and spent some money for a minimal slice at Slicehost. Linode seems pretty competitive too, but I more or less flipped a mental coin. I was actually ready to go ahead the other day, but I stopped to think some more after seeing that Slicehost has been acquired by Rackspace. In terms of seeing hard working people rewarded for their efforts, I am of course happy for the guys at Slicehost, but it also leaves a few questions:

• Sometimes, perhaps not immediately, but after a while, there is less incentive to bust your butt if you cashed in in a big way.
• Rackspace is not my kind of hosting outfit: they don't even list their prices where people can see them, like Slicehost, Layered Tech, and most everyone else does. I've heard they're good, but quite expensive. I don't need 'managed' servers - I can do that myself.
• The FAQ says that Slicehost will continue as a going concern in its own right, but there's always the chance that they were acquired for their tech, and that the FAQ just says that they will continue to operate to keep their current clients from bolting.

Of course, good things could come out of the deal too, so I decided to put my paranoia aside and test the waters. There are a lot of things to like about a system like Slicehost's: it's relatively quick and easy to set up new slices, fiddle with the resources that each slice has, and so on, compared with a physical server. Furthermore, they have a reputation for not 'overbooking' their servers, which is why I wanted to get away from a VPS in the first place, many years ago. Setting up a slice was very quick and easy, but unfortunately got off to a rough start: their "fraud detection" system had a problem with me being in a different place than my billing address. Luckily, they were very fast at correcting the problem. As an aside, I think that fraud detection is probably best left to the credit card companies, although of course I don't really know their business, so maybe that particular check has saved them some money/frustration in the past. Upgrading the Slicehost Ubuntu to Intrepid In any case, once I got it up and running, I wanted to test out the upgrade to Intrepid, as that's going to be out in less than a week, and I might as well upgrade while I have 'fresh' servers to play with, and prior to installing a bunch of stuff. It went very well. I did a do-release-upgrade -d, hit 'yes' to everything, rebooted, and everything was fine! Admittedly, I don't have anything running on the server yet, so that kept things short and sweet, and didn't require the upgrade of various systems which might have had troubles, but so far so good If you'd like to sign up for Slicehost, it looks like they give you a referral code. Mine can be utilized by going here.

I finally got around to getting myself a new mobile phone, as it looks like the Android phones may take a while to arrive here in Europe, unlocked, and my old phone was fading. I ended up selecting a Nokia 6120 in order to get something that runs Symbian, which has a decent amount of apps above and beyond the Java ME stuff. So far, I'm fairly happy with the phone. Here are some notes:

• It's small and light. Nice!
• It runs Java ME (J2ME) applications surprisingly slowly. I'm non-plussed by this. And no, it's not just Hecl, even ShopList, which is quite simple and small (~ 6K), takes several seconds to start up. This is not appreciably faster than on my cheap phone from several years ago.
• My old, cruddy phone was able to recharge (slowly) via USB. This one doesn't, as far as I can tell.
• I bought it from Amazon.de, and the bozos who were the 'real' sellers sold me a phone intended for the polish market, meaning the dictionary languages installed are all eastern European - no Italian, which I need. Not the phone's fault though, and I guess it's probably possible to replace that stuff.
• The camera has some weird issues where it leaves streaks. I realize that it's only a phone camera, but it ought to be able to do better. Here's an image from my recent trip to Oslo, by way of example:

• Creating videos wors pretty well though.
• Playing video is just a bit jerky - it mostly keeps up, but not 100% of the time, when you lose a few frames.
• Nokia ought to do a better job making sure that it's integrated with Linux (Ubuntu in my case). That said, things work quite well, by and large, and I was able to get things done with relatively little fiddling.
• The amount of progress over a few years is very impressive. This phone completely blows my old phone out of the water. Sure, it's a bit pricier, but it's way more capable.

All in all, I'm happy with it, but I think that my next phone will be some kind of Android-based device, as that system is way more hackable than Java ME, and the people developing it seem to 'get it' a bit more. That said, I'm glad I got it - I needed something modern to play with Hecl on, and hopefully I will be able to work on using some of the fancier bits of the phone from Hecl. Oh, and by the way, I'm always on the lookout for phones to try Hecl with - even if they're old and worn out, the only thing that matters is that they are able to run Java ME applications. Contact me for shipping information:-)

The following list is merely a small selection of scholarly articles listed in the ISI Web of Knowledge with "invisible hand" in their title:

• Beyond the Reach of the Invisible Hand
• The Real Invisible Hand: Presidential Appointees in the Administration of George W. Bush
• The Invisible Hand of God, Visible in the History of Chemotherapy
• Does the Latex Glove Fit the Invisible Hand? Application of Market Ideology to the Doctor/Patient Relationship.
• One-Armed Economists and the Invisible Hand.
• Subjective Image of Invisible Hand Coded By Monkey Intraparietal Neurons
• Exploitation - The Invisible Hand Guided By a Blind Eye: Confronting a Flaw in Economic Theory
• The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel
• The 'Invisible Man' and the Invisible Hand - H.G. Wells's Critique of Capitalism
• The Dilemmas of Laissez-Faire Population Policy in Capitalist Society: When the Invisible Hand Controls Reproduction.
• Hong Kong Government Policy and Information Technology Innovation: The Invisible Hand, the Helping Hand, and the Hand-Over to China
• Helping Russian Students See the Invisible Hand.
• Hailing with an Invisible Hand: A 'Cosy' Political Dispute Amid the Rise of Neoliberal Politics in Modern Ireland
• Adam Smith's Invisible Hand Is Unstable: Physics and Dynamics Reasoning Applied to Economic Theorizing
• Offering an Invisible Hand: the Rise of the Personal Choice Model for Rationing Public Benefits
• From the Invisible Handshake to the Invisible Hand? How Import Competition Changes the Employment Relationship
• Invisible Hand Effect in an Evolutionary Minority Game Model
• Did the Invisible Hand Rock the Cradle?
• Internet: The Invisible Hand of Deliberation
• The Invisible Hand Has Already Wreaked Much Havoc - About Adam Smith
• Gaussen's Invisible Hand: The University Mechanics and Machine Inspector Moritz Meyerstein: An Instrument Maker in the 19th Century.
• "The Invisible Hand" of the Market or "The Ever-Present Hand" of Management (On New Discussions and Methods in the Field of Economic History)
• Statin Utilisation - Recognising the Role of the Invisible Hand
• The Universe's Invisible Hand.
• How Did the Invisible Hand Handle Industrial Waste? By-Product Development Before the Modern Environmental Era
• When Iron Fist, Visible Hand, and Invisible Hand Meet: Firm-Level Effects of Varying Institutional Environments in China
• Behavioural Genetics: Evolutionary Fingerprint of the 'Invisible Hand'
• The Hunting of Forbidden Books. Censored Books, Persecuted Books, the Story Written By the Invisible Hand
• Identification of Pareto-Improving Policies: Information as the Real Invisible Hand
• The Conspiracy of the Invisible Hand: Anonymous Market Mechanisms and Dark Powers
• The Other Invisible Hand, Delivering Public Services Through Choice
• Reviving the Invisible Hand: the Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century
• Plant Science - The "Invisible Hand" of Floral Chemistry
• Suppressive Effect of Multimodal Surface Representation on Ocular Smooth Pursuit of Invisible Hand
• The Visible Versus the Invisible Hand - A Tension Inherent in Modern Economies
• The Invisible Hand and the Grabbing Hand
• A Close Eye on the Invisible Hand
• The Contracts of Credit in a Long Term Relationship From the Invisible Hand to the Handshake
• Chile's New Entrepreneurs and the "Economic Miracle": The Invisible Hand or a Hand From the State?
• The Invisible Hand or Hands Across the Water, American Consultants and Irish Economic-Policy
• How Would the Invisible Hand Handle Money
• A Helping Hand for the Invisible Hand
• Measuring the Speed of the Invisible Hand - The Macroeconomic Costs of Price Rigidity
• The Invisible Hand Turns Green - Using Economic Instruments to Conserve the Environment
• The Invisible Hand Made Visible, the 'Birth-Mark'
• Trembling Invisible Hand Equilibrium
• Guiding the Invisible Hand - Economic Liberalism and the State in Latin-American History
• The 'Invisible Hand Meets the Dead Hand High Above Washington D.C.'
• From the Invisible Hand to the Gladhand - Understanding a Careerist Orientation to Work
• Public-Sector Reform - Not So Invisible Hand
• Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand
• Economics as Ideology - On Making the Invisible Hand Invisible
• The Invisible Hand - Poetics and Narration of Verga, the Novelist
• Invisible Hand, Invisible Death
• The Invisible Hand Strikes Back - Motor Insurance and the Erosion of Organized Competition in General Insurance, 1920-38
• The Creeping Invisible Hand - Entrepreneurial Librarianship
• The Speed of the Invisible Hand
• From the Invisible Hand to Visible Feet - Anthropological Studies of Migration and Development
• Invisible Hand, the Marijuana Business
• The Invisible Hand in San Francisco.
• The Invisible Hand That Feeds the Cults - Messianic Capitalism
• Can an Invisible Hand Palpate the Carotid Pulse
• Invisible Hand or Fatherly Hand - Problems of Paternalism in the New Perspective on Health
• Palm-Reading the Invisible Hand - A Critical-Examination of Pro-Competitive Reform Proposals
• The Market as Messiah: The Invisible Hand Strikes Again.
• Federal Legislation and Investment Policy - Far-From-Invisible Hand of Congress and Treasury
• Shaking Hands with Invisible Hand - Transitional Strategies for Global Social-Change - Questions and Issues
• Invisible Hand and Clenched Fist - Is There a Safe Way to Picket Under First Amendment
• Institutional Change and Quasi-Invisible Hand

And, finally:

• What's Wrong with Invisible-Hand Explanations?

It's no wonder people hate dealing with certificates. I'm one of those people who really hate handling certificates. For some reason Linux lacks simple tools to manage certificates. Debian has one set of tools and I bet quite a few other distributions have their own set of tools. So nothing generic. In my opinion the problem lies in OpenSSL, which is an overly complicated piece of software. Sure it's able to encrypt your fries at the local fast food place, but most people never use anything more than the x509 module. And even that is complicated. I'm not saying that it should be point and click operation, but what I want is a tool that allows me to create, renew and verify SSL certificates. Which is pretty much the most common thing you do with OpenSSL. Now, lets assume you have a certificate and a key that you want to check if they match. Can you say from the top of your head how to do that? If so, you are either dealing with this stuff daily or you looked it up from a manual. The correct "magical mumbo jumbo" is:

server:/tmp# openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in /etc/ssl/private/some.key   openssl md5
94c5fa8b0fe1baa6e8dfcdec75444620
server:/tmp# openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in signed.crt   openssl md5
94c5fa8b0fe1baa6e8dfcdec75444620

Now, how easy was that. It only took me 10 minutes to construct that line. Most of the time went to searching Zimbra scripts for the correct magical line. The reason why I went through the scripts instead of the manual is that I had already seen the scripts do a appropriate check. And there is no way I could have constructed that in that kind of a time frame just by using the manual. Usually I think that people complain too much when they can't figure out how to make ls or something work like they want. A certain degree of manual reading is good for you, but in this case it's too much. In any case, I'm posting this rant as a reminder for myself so that the next time I can just look it up from here.

Via my Facebook updates feed, the Columbus Dispatch reports that records of “Joe the Plumber” have been looked up in various Ohio databases, potentially in violation of various privacy laws. As I noted over at OTB during the Obama/Clinton/McCain passport snooping controversy, the snooping in this case was almost certainly the result of what was called “imprudent curiosity” in those incidents rather than a concerted effort to dig up dirt on everyone’s favorite small-business owner. That isn’t to excuse the snooping, mind you. Update: Michelle identifies a broader issue at work here.

Cookies, bugs, and releases Christian knows how to be very inspiring and provocative with his blog posts, the APT case is a very good example of how useful that can be. I believe today's post is yet another example of that, many thanks Bubulle! Still, I stopped believing in the incompatibilities among having discussions (possibly heavy, possibly flamish) and releasing. Fact is:

• I've been participating in the -project discussion about Debian membership. The reason why I did that is that I firmly believe we need to open up Debian to non-technical (or at least non-packager) contributors. We have been wishing that for years, no matter if/how flawed was the initial proposal, keeping the ball rolling on that aspect is very important for our project, possibly more than releasing ...
• ... nevertheless, this did not inhibit me from taking part in the wonderful idea of the BugSprint game. In fact, I also think that I deserve some cookies, but I'm waiting to see how Joss will determine the first 5 winners
• (and no, I did not gave up my job either :), I've been following the discussion on -project like 1 hour per night for a couple of random nights last week, and playing the BugSprint some hours during the past week-end)

The BugSprint has been anticipated well before the inflamatory membership reform proposal, and repeatedly advertised by Joss in various ways (kudos). Still the participation has been way too low. That has nothing to do with other "distractions".

Recently I've been hacking around on GNU screen. I've fixed a few bugs and added a few new features. One of the earliest features I added was the ability to source every file in a directory. One of the later additions was to add simple conditionals to the dotfile, via the new if primitive. Today I had an epiphany moment. Rather than adding either of these two features I should have altered the behaviour in the far simpler manner.

If we allow ~/.tscreenrc to be an executable we immediately gain lots of things for free.

Consider this ~/.tscreenrc file:

#!/bin/sh
for i in ~/.tscreen/*; do
    if [ -e $i ];
       echo "source $i"
    fi
done

That gives us the effect of a "source directory/" primitive. Similarly I can do complex tests without the need for an if primitive if I were to write this:

#!/bin/sh
# common config
cat ~/.tscreenrc.common
# per host config?
file=~/.tscreenrc.$(hostname --fqdn)
if [ -e "$file" ]; then
   cat $file
fi
# if we have lynx define an alias for it + map it to a key
if [ -x /usr/bin/lynx ]; then
   cat <<EOF
# Surf the web with <Ctrl-a f>
alias web screen -F -t web /usr/bin/lynx
bind w web
EOF
fi

So as of v0.4.7 tscreen allows you to have your configuration file be:

A normal file:

In which case it is parsed as you'd expect.

An executable file:

In which case it is executed and the output is parsed.

The code change is trivial, just an extra stat call and the use of popen vs. fopen, but the payoff is significant. ObFilm: L on