Search Results: "ana"

2 November 2008

Joerg Jaspert: archive.debian.org, old bugs and list archives

sarge archived As already written a few days ago I was going to archive Sarge on archive.debian.org. That is done, you can get sarge from there now. The dists/sarge directory also already disappeared from the regular mirrors a few days ago. Im not simply deleting all source and binary packages from Sarge. Instead I am doing a removal of 1000 packages every second day, which ends up in batches of about 10000 removed files every other day. While that is a little more work on the archive side I think it pays off - many mirrors, including Debians own ones, limit the amount of files they delete in one mirror run and it is much less work than asking every mirror admin to make sure it will work on their system. Oh, just in case you mirror archive.debian.org somewhere: Make sure to use -H in your rsync call, will save about 30G of disk space.
Sarge AMD64, volatile and backports Now, while I was already working on archive.debian.org I thought it could do a little more than it did in the past. So I also went and put the Sarge AMD64 release on it, in a seperate directory. And as it would have felt lonely I put sarge-backports and sagre-volatile right beside it.
security and non-us non-us.debian.org is a service thats dead since the sarge release. Finally it also got archived on archive.debian.org (it helps that this service is, since a long time, no longer on a host in the US). security.debian.org now also appears on archive.debian.org, and the security archive will soon lose the files of old releases like slink, potato, woody and also sarge.
0.93R6, Rex and Buzz I got a few responses to my post about old releases and now we also provide 0.93R6. And to make it even better we now also have the binary packages for Rex and Buzz again. I still would like to see even older releases, including alpha and beta versions, so if you have such old things somewhere - tell me. Just make sure they somehow include the source too. I do have 0.91 for example, but it is missing any kind of source except for one package and one patchset. :(
Old list archives, old bugs On one of the CD images I thankfully got from J.H.M. Dassen I found another nice thing - old mailinglist archives from 1995 and 1996 as well as old bugs, #350 - #1626. The list- and bugpeople both got a tarball and just need to import them to make them available again. (Well, Don will kill me for that just, the bugs are html and textfile dumps, so he needs to parse them to get them in the right format for debbugs. But I’m sure he will manage. :) ). Comments: 2

Decklin Foster: Tap that class

And now, something entirely impractical. I picked up Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper the other day to look for some teaching material. Flipping through, I came across a basic feature that had heretofore escaped my notice: the Struct class. If you want to use a class for nothing more than bundling together a few values, you can create a Struct instead of writing out initialize and attr_accessor yourself. The idiom is like this: 
class Server < Struct.new(:host, :port, :password)
  def to_s
    port == 6600 ? host : "# host :# port "
  end
end
That particular one's from Njiiri (which may clue you in that it took me several months to get around to writing this post). For educational purposes, it's nice: you can point out how we give a name to a class (I've also tried to explain assignment as "naming" rather than "storing"), that there's an unnamed class (classes are also objects!), and overriding a method (which uses the dynamically defined stuff), without any boilerplate to get in the way. So it's tempting to use this in a lesson. Unfortunately, Ruby is a little bit weird here, and you run into those distracting "practical" issues about the particular language you're working in. Your classes can't subclass Class, and thus you can't say Foo.new like you can Struct.new. Struct is actually implemented in C (or Java, or whatever's native). So you have to do some handwaving. This is because the "metaclasses" we have in Ruby are implemented, so to speak, as singleton classes of objects (including class objects). I do not mean this as a criticism of Matz at all, but they seem like more of a serendipitous thing than an intentional design -- "hey, if we implement classes in this particular way, we get this sort of metaclassing automatically [1]." (The clearest explanation of why this is that I've found is in the first chapter of Advanced Rails by Brad Ediger.) I wanted to be able to just subclass Class, rather than have all that fun power that we normally get to abuse in Ruby, only because I think this is the clearest way to explain the abstraction. Even I still have trouble describing singletons in plain English. Struct is intuitively a class of classes, and factors out similar/boring stuff -- a good practice. It could be an example of how to refactor some simple classes, if only we could follow it. I decided to give up on the idea for my tutorial, but it kept me up at night. Ruby metaclasses clearly can do anything that the sort of Struct-like metaclasses I have in my mind -- "parametric" classes, if you will -- can do, and I can dynamically define just about anything; why not make it happen? We can instantiate Class itself, but the tool we have to shape that class is singleton methods. This can certainly be abstracted away. So, I whipped something up. Before getting to it, though, let's visit a new construct in Ruby 1.9 and 1.8.7: Object#tap. Apart from the obvious debugging use described in its documentation, it makes it quite easy to factor out this pattern: 
def gimme_a_thing
  thing = Thing.new
  thing.do_stuff_to_it
  thing
end
Into something closer to the style of functional or declarative programming: 
def gimme_a_thing
  Thing.new.tap  thing 
    thing.do_stuff_to_it
  end
end
(Well, "do stuff" is obviously still procedural, but A for effort.) Which one is "better" could probably be the subject of much debate, but: I really prefer the second one; even though it has exactly the same effect, it looks like "what" rather than "how" (something else I try to beat into impressionable young heads. :-)), which is I think easier to write tests for. I'm going to use it here, because it's shorter. Now, Object#tap passes the object as an argument to the block; in our case, we are going to define a metaclass, so we want to work with self, instead. So we define a new version, class_tap -- by analogy with class_def, I suppose --- which class_evals the block rather than simply evaluating it: 
class Class
  def class_tap(&blk)
    tap  _self  _self.class_eval &blk  
  end
end
And to do the following trickery, we make use of MetAid, written by why the lucky stiff -- it's very small, so we could always just incorporate the bits we want into the code here, but this short file provides a common vocabulary for talking about metaclass stuff which is quite valuable. Now, we can write a method to create our new classes on the fly. Here's what I came up with: 
require 'metaid'
class << Class
  def meta(_super=Object, &blk)
    new.class_tap do                     # 1
      meta_def :new do  *args            # 2
        Class.new(_super).class_tap do   # 3
          class_exec *args, &blk         # 4
        end
      end
    end
  end
end
(Note the "class << Class", opening the singleton, rather than "class Class", opening Class itself. Also, the distinction between new and Class.new -- they are the same method, but from inside the meta_def we're no longer in the Class class.) The lines of meta itself mean:
  1. The value of this thing is a generated class, which we will describe thusly:
  2. Its singleton class has a new method, which gives you a value that is:
  3. Another generated class, which is defined by:
  4. the original block, which now gets run with new's arguments.
Nary an assignment in sight! The (embarrassing) caveat is that methods in the block that defines the new class instance cannot use def to create methods as normal. A def is evaluated in a totally fresh scope (I don't think I get the opinion behind this decision, to be honest), so we need to use class_def instead. This is, I must admit, rather hideous. Perhaps someday the language will change. But, first things first: now we can implement Struct in pure Ruby. 
class MyStruct < Class.meta \
  do  *args 
    attr_accessor *args
    class_def :initialize do  *instance_args 
      args.zip(instance_args).each do  attr, val 
        instance_variable_set :"@# attr ", val
      end
    end
  end
end
The real Struct class does a few other nice things for you, but this is the heart of it; I can go back to that Njiiri example and just swap in MyStruct for Struct (Providing an instant performance gain of -200%... :-)). Here's a "shapes" example from my abandoned OO lesson: 
class Polygon < Struct.new(:sides)
  def perimeter
    @sides.inject(&:+)
  end
end
class RegularPolygonClass < Class.meta(Polygon) \
  do  n_sides 
    class_def :initialize do  side_length 
      @sides = [side_length] * n_sides
    end
    class_def :area do
      @sides.size * @sides.first**2 / Math.tan(Math::PI / @sides.size) / 4
    end
  end
end
class Square < RegularPolygonClass.new(4); end
class Pentagon < RegularPolygonClass.new(5); end
(Note that area has no free variables and thus could actually be defined with def. It would just look funny.) You only have to change one number here to make new polygon classes, rather than accumulating parameter lint or explicitly subclassing and redefining something implicit just for the derived class [2]. In a way it the exact analogue of the imperative vs. tap style described above. There is quite a bit of aesthetics involved; one way is not "right". Apart from the syntactical wart, I like being able to do things this way. Ruby is, as they say, optimized for programmer happiness and the principle of least surprise. Still, I'm sure it is quite slow, and I don't particularly need it for any real-world application right now. For an intro to OO it's way too much complexity to have lurking unexplained beneath the surface and still requires getting bogged down in the language you happen to be using. But hey! It's neat.
[1]I basically try to do this whenever possible, anyway. Design decisions are like sex: they're better when they're free.
[2]Of course, if Ruby class variables were not leaked across the entire inheritance hierarchy, something as trivial as this one-variable example would be... trivial. At least, few people would actually miss metaprogramming features. Blub blub blub.

Matthew Garrett: Ultamatix

First, let me make one thing clear. This isn't constructive criticism. This is just criticism. It's directed at software that's so wrong-headed that there's no way to make it significantly better, and everyone involved would be much better spending their time doing something else instead of trying to fix any of what I'm about to describe. It's not worth it. Sit in a park or something instead. Meet new and interesting people. Take up a hobby that doesn't involve writing shell scripts for Linux. You'll be happier. I'll be happier. Everyone wins.

Anyway. I wrote about Automatix some time ago. It died and the world became a better place. More recently it's been resurrected as something called Ultamatix. In summary, don't bother. It's crap. And dangerous. But mostly crap. Again, I'm going to utterly ignore the UI code and just concentrate on what it runs.
There's almost certainly more. I got bored. The worrying thing about this is that the Ultamatix author read my criticisms of Automatix and appears to have attempted to fix all of them. The problem with this is that there's clearly a complete lack of understanding of the fundamental problem in several cases. For example, one of my criticisms of Automatix:

sudo sed -i "s/^vboxusers\(.*\):$/vboxusers\1:$AXUSER/" /etc/group

- assumes that the system isn't using some sort of user directory service.

and the Ultamatix response:

Fixed...Got rid of Virtualbox

Except exactly the same problem is present at other points in Ultamatix, as noted above. Taking a bug list and slavishly fixing or deleting all the bugs isn't helpful if you then proceed to add the same bug back in 24 other places. In that respect, it's even worse than Automatix - the author's managed to produce a huge steaming pile of shite despite having been told how to avoid doing so beforehand. He may be no newbie to programming, but if not it's a perfect example of how experience doesn't imply competence.

Don't install this package. Don't let anyone else install this package. If you see anyone advocating the installation of this package, call them a fool. There's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for the existence of this kind of crap.

Minor update:
The above was looking at 1.8.0-4. It turns out that there's a 1.8.0-5 that's not linked off the website. There's no substantive difference, but some of the numbers may be slightly different.

Russell Coker: Integrity and Mailing Lists

One significant dividing factor between mailing lists is the difference between summary lists (where the person who asks a question receives replies off-list and then sends a summary to the list) and the majority of mailing lists which are discussion lists (where every reply goes to the list by default). I have seen an argument put forward that trusting the answers on a mailing list that operates under the summary list model is inherently risky and that peer review is required. It could be argued that the process of sending a summary to the list is the peer review. I’m sure that if someone posts a summary which includes some outrageously bad idea then there will be some commentary in response. Of course the down-side to this is that it takes a few days for responses to the question to arrive and as it’s common that computer problems need to be solved in hours not days the problem will be solved (one way or another) before the summary message is written. But the idea of peer review in mailing lists seems to fall down in many other ways. The first problem with the idea of peer review is that the usual aim of mailing lists is that most people will first ask google and only ask the list if a reasonable google search fails (probably most mailing lists would fall apart under the load of repeated questions otherwise). Therefore I expect that the majority of such problems to be solved by reading a web page (with no peer review that is easily accessible). Some of those web pages contain bad advice and part of the skill involved in solving any problem relates to recognising which advice to follow. Also it’s not uncommon for a question on a discussion list to result in a discussion with two or more radically different points of view being strongly supported. I think that as a general rule there is little benefit in asking for advice if you lack any ability to determine whether the advice is any good, and which of the possible pieces of good advice actually apply to your situation. Sometimes you can recognise good advice by the people who offer it, in a small community such as a mailing list it’s easy to recognise the people who have a history of offering reasonable advice. It seems that the main disadvantage of asking google when compared to asking a mailing list is that the google results will in most cases contain links to web sites written by people who you don’t know. Sometimes the advice is easy to assess, for example if someone recommends a little-known and badly documented command-line option for a utility it’s easy to read the man page and not overly difficult to read the source to discover whether it is a useful solution. Even testing a suggested solution is usually a viable option. Also it’s often the case that doing a google search on a recommended solution will be very informative (sometimes you see web pages saying “here’s something I tried which failed”). Recommendations based on personal experience are less reliable due to statistical issues (consider the the regular disagreements about the reliability of hard disks where some people claim that RAID is not necessary due to not having seen failures while others claim that RAID-5 is inadequate because it has failed them). There are also issues of different requirements, trivial issues such as the amount of money that can be spent will often determine which (if any) of the pieces of good advice can be adopted. The fact that a large number of people (possibly the majority of Internet users) regularly forward as fact rumors that are debunked by Snopes.com (the main site for debunking urban legends) seems to indicate that it is always going to be impossible to increase the quality of advice beyond a certain level. A significant portion of the people on the net are either unwilling to spend a small amount of effort in determining the accuracy of information that they send around or are so gullible that they believe such things beyond the possibility of doubt. Consider that the next time you ask for advice on a technical issue, you may receive a response from someone who forwarded a rumor that was debunked by Snopes. Sometimes technical advice is just inherently dangerous because it is impossible to verify the integrity of some code that is being shared, or because it may be based on different versions of software. In a previous blog post I analyse some issues related to security of the Amazon EC2 service [1]. While the EC2 service is great in many ways (and implements a good well-documented set of security features on the servers) the unsigned code for managing it and the old versions of the images that they offer to customers raise some serious issues that provide avenues for attack. Getting the EC2 management tools to work correctly on Debian is not trivial, I have released patches but will not release packages for legal reasons. It seems most likely to me that someone will release packages based on my patches (either because they don’t care about the legal issues or they have legal advice suggesting that such things are OK - maybe due to residing in a different jurisdiction). Then people who download such packages will have to determine whether they trust the person who built them. They may also have the issue of Amazon offering a newer version of the software than that which is packaged for Debian (for all I know Amazon released a new version yesterday). The term integrity when applied to computers refers to either accidental or malicious damage to data [2]. In the context of mailing list discussions this means both poorly considered advice and acts of malice (which when you consider spam and undisclosed conflicts of interest are actually quite common). If you ask for advice in any forum (and I use the term in it’s broadest sense to cover web “forums”, IRC, twitter, etc) then getting a useful result will depend on having the majority of members of the forum possessing sufficient integrity and skill, being able to recognise the people whose advice should be followed, or being able to recognise good advice on it’s own. I can think of few examples of forums of which I have been involved where the level of skill was sufficient to provide quality answers (and refutations for bad answers) for all areas of discussion that were on topic. People whose advice should generally be followed will often offer advice on areas where their skills are less well developed, someone whose advice can be blindly followed in regard to topic A may not be a reliable source for advice on topic B - which can cause confusion if the topics in question are closely related. Finally a fundamental difference between “peer review” (as applied to conferences and academic journals) is that review for conferences and journals is conducted before the presentation. Not only does the work have to be good enough to pass the review, but the people doing it will never be sure what the threshold is (and will generally want to do more than a minimal effort) so the quality will be quite high. While peer review in mailing lists is mostly based around the presence or absence of flames. A message which doesn’t attract flames will either have some minimal quality or be related to a topic that is not well known (so no-one regards it as being obviously wrong). Update: The “peer review” process of publishing a post on my blog revealed that I had incorrectly used who’s instead of whose.

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1 November 2008

Christian Perrier: John Goerzen is my hero...

...for maintaining bacula and maintaining it well. I adopted Bacula as backup solution for my local machines, at home, after I went very close to a complete disaster on my home server, last summer. As of now, my home server and my laptop are now backed up with it. The backup is done on a dedicated disk of the server (until I setup a dedicated server, probably in the house's ceiling). And things are just...working. Of course, Bacula is a fairly compilcated beast but, well, as I managed to make it work, I consider that anybody can do it. This morning, I finally setup the bacula graphical console on my laptop. As the laptop is running unstable, with Bacula 2 packages, I indeed had to upgrade bacula packages on the server (which runs Etch, where Bacula version is 1.*). I just went to backports.org, found backported packages there, kindly prepared by John (and Rhonda, apparently). One "apt-get install -t etch-backports" after, I'm just running Bacula 2. John, you deserve a full tank of beers... I'll think about it next time I happen to come in the middle of Kansas..:-)

31 October 2008

Gunnar Wolf: How (and how not) to create cyclist awareness

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!

Michael Schutte: Soundcycle vs. car horns

Wikipedia says:
Critical Mass is a bicycling event typically held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities around the world.
My home town of Innsbruck has been one of these cities since 29th August. I joined the movement for the third protest ride (de_AT) today to avoid the Hallowe en fuss, to have some fun, to get to know people, and out of personal conviction. Bicycling ludicrously slowly for a good hour, we managed to claim some fairly busy streets while many people tried to get home by car. A few of them attempted to get us out of their way by honking, but they gave up when they realized that our constant ringing and the music coming from the Soundcycle was louder than them. The hardest part was to get attention by pedestrians and drivers without interfering with buses and trams, but it worked most of the time. What s so great about Critical Mass is that it makes the participants experience just what they want to deliver: When there are more cyclists on the streets, every single one feels much safer, and motorists drive more carefully. I would usually avoid S dring at 5 p. m., but with an estimated fifty people around me, it is an entirely different matter. I also basically like the overall non-organisation of the trips: Whoever is at the top of the convoy can decide where it goes. Sadly, this spontaneity has its drawbacks: It briefly got us into the absurd situation of unlawfully using the street even though a cycle lane was available, which made our protest pointless for a few minutes. But a little room for improvement won t prevent me from taking part once more before the winter break.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: The NaNoWriMo site TOS is onerous

From the NaNoWriMo TOS:
The Office of Letters and Light reserves the right to change the terms and conditions hereof without prior notice at any time and any such change shall be effective immediately upon posting the changed Agreement on NaNoWriMo.org. The effective date indicated at the top of this page will be updated to indicate that changes have been made. You should, as a condition of continuing to access NaNoWriMo.org and use its features, periodically review the terms of this Agreement and such continued access and/or use shall be deemed to be conclusive evidence of your agreement to be bound by any such changed Agreement.
No, I will not write the Office of Letter and Light a blank check.

30 October 2008

Jeff Bailey: Sickness, birthday, and planning for the next year.

I just managed to chat with the nurse at the doctors office. The chest x-rays confirm Pneumonia, and I'm now on antibiotics. They've also done two throat swabs. The first came back negative for Strep Throat, but I apparently clearly have a throat infection of some sort. They also did blood work to check for mono. The rest of the lab work will come back in 48-72 hours. The antibiotics will almost certainly cover everything already, though. I should apparently be non-contagious by Wednesday and back to work then.

I'd planned to mention this a little closer to New Years, but may as well post it now: We're not the only ones who've had a crappy year. Two of the couple I know who've been together longer than Angie and I have been broke up this year. Other people have had problems with their kids, or been fighting, or been fucked by the stock market.

So I'm proposing a "Global Fuck You". At 00h15 GMT (So that folks in Brittan can celebrate New Years and then participate), I'm proposing that anyone who feels like they could've done without some piece of 2008 go out and burn something. If you feel so inclined, write the list on a sheet of paper of the items, and torch it over a candle (In the parking lot! Don't start 2009 homeless!) If you choose to burn something more creative, I probably don't want to hear about it (I'm looking at you, students in France!). =) I don't know if it'll do any good, but it will certainly feel good.

I'll post again in mid-December about this. In the meantime, tell your friends! Start a Facebook group. Or something. Next year's gotta be better.

Hugs and love, friends. Thanks for the b-day wishes. Congrats to those doing the Ubuntu release! =)

Update: On the other hand, I'm *really* glad we're not moving tomorrow anymore! =)

Tks,
Jeff Bailey

David Welton: Slicehost Migration

Phew... that was a lot of work. I have a bunch of small sites that I migrated to slicehost, and at the same time upgraded to Rails 2.1. Here are my notes:
  • x86_64 sucks up memory in a bad way. On a 32-bit x86 system davidw 20089 0.0 0.1 3320 1428 pts/1 S+ 11:41 0:00 ruby and on x86-64: davidw 24197 0.0 0.1 16756 1968 pts/0 S+ 18:33 0:00 ruby Ouch! That means that you'll need more memory, and thus to spend more money, to run code that might have fit decently in a similar amount of memory on an x86 machine. For instance, my old server had a gig, and was running low on memory, so on slicehost, I set up one 512 meg slice to handle PostgreSQL, and a gig slice to handle Apache and Rails. The database slice is performing ok, but the 'web' one is kind of iffy in terms of memory. Part of the problem here, I will admit, is that Rails is a memory hog, but still, I had hoped to come out ahead by moving from a machine with 1 gig to two machines with 1.5 gigs between them, and instead I'm more or less where I was before.
  • I got caught up in a bit of a mess with Rails and the Ubuntu Intrepid update. I prefer to manage the Ruby stuff with gems, rather than traditional .deb package management, as I've had better luck with that in the past. I do use some of the system packages though, such as libpgsql-ruby1.8. However, the maintainers did something kind of ugly with the package: they swapped out the actual code from one code base to another - "Switched upstream source from ruby-postgres to ruby-pg". Which changes the way you load it, and perhaps a few other things as well. I think I would have been happier seeing the package renamed or something, as all of a sudden, programs stopped working.
  • I really like the ability to resize slices. I started both my slices at the 256 size, and then made them bigger when I was ready to put them into production. The process is not instantaneous, but it's pretty handy if you need more capacity in a hurry. Adding new slices is also fast.
So, all in all, I'm happy with the move, although the memory issue is irritating.

David Welton: Slicehost Migration

Phew... that was a lot of work. I have a bunch of small sites that I migrated to slicehost, and at the same time upgraded to Rails 2.1. Here are my notes: So, all in all, I'm happy with the move, although the memory issue is irritating.

Miriam Ruiz: Homophobic words of the Queen of Spain?

“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!

Michael Banck: 30 Oct 2008

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.

Decklin Foster: A long-overdue explanation

Regarding that last post. I received the list via email from Alan Sondheim earlier in the week, and felt like putting up a link to it. No particular reason; it seemed appropriate for one of those sui-generis enigmatic tumblelog things. I was disappointed to find that none of the mailing lists where I might have been able to find it had public archives. (One way of dealing with people who complain about spammers harvesting their address, I suppose...) So, I said to myself, I've got 8+ years of this guy's email work, I'd like to share it with the world, and I have Mnemosyne, which I had always thought, in the back of my mind, would be a neat way to archive email written as email rather than written as a "blog". So, a little hacking later... The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive (Warning: some parts are NSFW). It has already given me some ideas for improving the example templates; I'll release 0.12 soon with the changes I had to make to get this running. (Final tally: 4500 messages, 75 seconds from a clean htdocs, 12 to no-op. On whatever the cheapest Linode [1] [2] is. Eh. I can do better.)
[1]Incidentally: Linode has been great. Highly recommended.
[2]Also: yeah, I know my footnotes are broken. Working on it.

Clint Adams: Eight days of Mraz makes a harmed man fumble

  • Day One
The South American maid confesses that she doesn't clean much, because the Spaniards don't notice.
  • Day Two
People keep playing the same Jason Mraz song over and over again. It is awful. Does Jason Mraz have more than one song? If so, does he have any good songs? This makes Coldplay seem like good music.
  • Day Three
While dumpster-diving in Fulda, a large man wearing an archer's cap and peculiar shoes appeared, carrying one of the largest baskets I have ever seen. He showed me that it was full of bread, and attempted to sell me some. When I showed no interest in his wares, he recited the following gibberish: 
 Ich glaab ich bin aus Staa
 unn hab' mehr Bauch wie Baa-
 unn doch bin ich en arme Tropp-
 denn ach, ich hab'e Loch im Kopp!
  • Day Four
More Jason Mraz. Ugh. Jos complains about people who will walk together without talking constantly. He repeats himself about fifty times without accidentally saying anything interesting. I am afraid that he will injure his voice and then his brain will have to start working. Luckily this does not occur.
  • Day Five
In Neu-Isenburg for a standoff with the Sky Chefs. Every time I enter Neu-Isenburg I get paranoid and start looking for UutiSaruman. It's creepy.
  • Day Six
A Hessian woman tells me I lead a sad life. I can tell that she's Hessian because she looks like a slender Austrian with teeth. I don't tell her this.
  • Day Seven
Razula asks if I remember what le k means in Slavic. I don't know why he thinks I knew in the first place. His friend starts spouting off a lecture on why Hungarians are superior to Germans because Hungarians lie, cheat, and steal, and Germans obey laws. I wonder if le k can help this situation. Probably not.
  • Day Eight
Now the South American maid is complaining that Spanish men are gay and don't realize it. Then she goes on at great length about the Great Flying Circus of North Korea. I think about asking her where it's from. I decide against it.

29 October 2008

David Welton: Slicehost + Ubuntu Intrepid Upgrade

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.

David Welton: Android is out!

As most people probably know by now, the Android source code is available, as promised: http://source.android.com/ The next part is the interesting part, though, in my opinion. Source code is wonderful, and a huge gift from Google, but the real "secret sauce" for the most successful open source projects is the community. It will be interesting to see how Google manages this aspect of their project. It could be a situation where they create, and the public consumes, and it's fairly one way, with the odd patch here and there going back. Or it could be that they'll really let people get involved. Running a community for something this big, with this much code, and this much interest to the world at large is a daunting task, but Google certainly has the open source expertise to figure it out, so what we end up seeing will depend on exactly how Google wants to manage things. All in all though, a big step for open source - congratulations to all the people at Google who made it happen!

David Welton: Slicehost + Ubuntu Intrepid Upgrade

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: 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.

David Welton: Android is out!

As most people probably know by now, the Android source code is available, as promised: http://source.android.com/ The next part is the interesting part, though, in my opinion. Source code is wonderful, and a huge gift from Google, but the real "secret sauce" for the most successful open source projects is the community. It will be interesting to see how Google manages this aspect of their project. It could be a situation where they create, and the public consumes, and it's fairly one way, with the odd patch here and there going back. Or it could be that they'll really let people get involved. Running a community for something this big, with this much code, and this much interest to the world at large is a daunting task, but Google certainly has the open source expertise to figure it out, so what we end up seeing will depend on exactly how Google wants to manage things. All in all though, a big step for open source - congratulations to all the people at Google who made it happen!

Benjamin Mako Hill: An Invisible Handful of Stretched Metaphors

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

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