Search Results: "spa"

2 November 2008

Kurt Roeckx: DKIM: Useful?

I've been looking at DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to see if it's useful. My main interest is reducing bounced mail that I didn't send and other people receiving less spam that appears to come from me. It seems there isn't a lot of documentation about it around, and I had to go and read some of the RFCs and drafts to understand things. So I hope this is useful for someone. According to the wikipedia article it can be used to verify that the message comes from the domain that it claims to have come from. On the other hand the DKIM FAQ says it's all about the reputation of the organization the messages passed by. There is a project that creates a reputation database that then can be used in anti-spam software like spamassassin. So I at first sight this didn't look useful at all to me. It basically seems like a way to verify the Received lines in the message header. And it seems that that is what most of the software is doing. But there also seems to be an Author Domain Signing Practices (ADSP). It allows you to say that if the message isn't signed it can be dropped because it's spam. There is nothing else in DKIM other than reputation on which you can base that something might be spam or not. So I started looking in software that supported that. It seems that dkim-milter is the only software available in Debian that implements it. But it seems to be using the _asp._domainkey DNS entry from an old draft instead of the _adsp._domainkey as used in latest draft. Older drafts even used _ssp._domainkey. So it seems to me that it's not useful yet and I'll wait until the ADSP RFC is actually published and there is software available that supports it. Update:
It seems that dkim-milter from version 2.7.0 now uses _adsp._domainkey, but we currently only have 2.6.0 in Debian. But the wizard of sendmail.org still generates the _asp._domainkey. I've filed enhancement requests for spamassassin and dkimproxy / Mail::DKIM.

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.

Julien Valroff: Laptop as desktop computer replacement

I am currently studying the possibility to change my current desktop computer for a laptop. This is the first time I am looking at these powerful laptops, as I now only use cheap laptops for small office use (email, web etc.) when traveling. My aim is now to use a laptop for my daily tasks: picture editing, small development, multimedia etc.

Ideal features would be: I do not care about the weight, as it would mainly stay on my desktop. I currently have a desktop computer with 2Go RAM, an Intel 4400 Dual Core CPU (@ 2Ghz) with 200Gb hard disk - though it is enough at the moment, I would prefer the laptop to be more powerful in order to be able to run smoothly with future applications which will be released in 2 or 3 years! Ideally, it would be around 1,000 (obviously, the cheaper the better, but I want something reliable for a few years if possible). Last but not least, it needs to be 100% compatible with GNU/Linux (Debian in particular) - I do not care about compiling kernel modules, but would rather prefer they are free (as in free speech). Do you have any experiences with such laptops?
What would be your recommendations? Is my idea something totally weird (I mean, should I keep my current desktop computer)?!

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

Uwe Hermann: Google Tech Talks: coreboot (aka LinuxBIOS): The Free/Open-Source x86 Firmware

coreboot Google Tech Talk 2 Here's a nice opportunity for everyone to learn more about coreboot, a Free Software / Open Source firmware/BIOS for x86 PCs. Ron Minnich, founder of the LinuxBIOS (now called coreboot) project, Peter Stuge of Stuge Konsult, and Stefan Reinauer of coresystems GmbH have given a presentation for the Google Tech Talks series recently. The topic was (of course) coreboot, its history, goals, features and technical details, surrounding tools and libraries such as flashrom and libpayload, as well as an automated test system for running a hardware test-suite upon every checkin in the coreboot repository. coreboot Google Tech Talk 1 A video of the talk, aptly named coreboot (aka LinuxBIOS): The Free/Open-Source x86 Firmware (134 MB), is available from Youtube, get it for instance via: 
  $ apt-get install youtube-dl
  $ youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X72LgcMpM9k
The talk includes various demos of coreboot and various payloads you can use with coreboot. One nice example is the TINT payload, a Tetris-like game for Linux (apt-get install tint for the curious), which has been reworked to be usable as a coreboot payload. coreboot Google Tech Talk 3 So, yes, you can now put Tetris in your BIOS ROM chip and play it from there (no hard drive required). Other demos included some cluster nodes with coreboot, and a "normal" x86 desktop board booting coreboot + Linux in a very few seconds (much room left for optimizing there though, if you really want to get into fast booting). Check out the full talk for more infos, and if you're willing to give it a try (see the list of currently supported boards), contact us on the mailing list or join the #coreboot IRC channel on Freenode.

31 October 2008

Andrew McMillan: Graphics in OpenOffice.org: SVG, EPS and WMF

When Heather designed a logo for me for Morphoss she did it with a bitmap editor, naturally enough because that's the tool she's most familiar with using. I'd rather not use a bitmap as the source format for the logo though, because it will degrade when it gets resized, so I redrew it as a vector graphic. One of the best free, open-source tools around for vector graphics seems to be Inkscape and I've mucked around with it for many years, so I naturally used that. Once you have a logo though, you naturally want to use it in documents, and the importing of SVG graphics into OpenOffice.org documents is a long-outstanding bug (let alone embedding SVG graphics) so I needed to convert them to another format. It's actually the most requested feature in OOo, appearing twice in the top 10, and even spawning an external SVG importer project. Since both programs support encapsulated postscript I was able to save the logo from Inkscape as .eps and use it directly in OpenOffice.org. While this initially seemed satisfactory, after a few weeks of using documents with the .eps logo embedded in them I started to get annoyed with the strange pauses when my CPU was maxed out while paging up and down. I was sure that that had not happened in the past when I was using a logo in WMF format, which OOo inevitably has to support well for compatibility with other Office Suites. After some searching around for more complicated ways to convert SVG or EPS to WMF, I discovered that what I could do was simply to open the EPS in OpenOffice.org draw, and save it from there as a WMF. This seems to work well, for my purposes anyway, so now when I use my logo in my OpenOffice.org documents I don't see any annoying slowdown paging up and down within the document, and I didn't have to download the SVG importer for OpenOffice.org either. Well alright, I did download the SVG importer as well, but my logo didn't look nearly so good without it's text, and with everything displaced up and to the right at various offsets!

30 October 2008

Gunnar Wolf: SSH visual host keys

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 :-

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.

Wouter Verhelst: Reading the "Metro" on my Hanlin V3

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: original PDF source, as rendered by Xpdf output of pdf2ps, as rendered by gv 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: psmerge output, as rendered by gv 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: better psmerge output, as rendered by gv 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.

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: 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.

MJ Ray: Why Are You Distributing Leaflets?

Like all visitors to the Listening to the Social Entrepreneur conference, my pack included a leaflet from a university research centre. Today it popped up on the top of my in-tray while I was making a concerted effort to clear it. The leaflet is a description of the research centre, but it included a web address, so I visited that website. It contained essentially the same information and nothing else. What was the point of that? I already had their contact details in the attendee list. How much did these leaflets cost? In general, it’s a little disappointing when you get a “null pointer” from a private company, but it’s particularly annoying from a university. University mistakes like “technology transfer programmes” (that stop software becoming free software available to social enterprises) are justified by a need to get more money - but clearly this particular university has money to waste. How about others? If there was a way to subscribe to email or blog news of their research publications, I probably would have subscribed. Instead, I’ve just ranted here (without rewarding them with a link) and now I’m going to recycle the flier. I’ll probably have forgotten the three-letter acronym by next week. It’s simply bad marketing. It’s paper spam. Please, if you are putting things into conference handout packs, ask yourself why? What are you hoping to get out of it? How are you going to measure its success?

28 October 2008

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Google Summer of Code 2008 Mentors Summit

Spent last weekend in Mountain View where Google had invited a number of mentors for the Summer of Code project that Google once again graciously sponsored. A rather impressive list of projects sent up to two people each, giving a probably unparalled sample of major Open Source projects. I had a blast. Chris, Leslie and the rest of the Google's Open Source Programs Office facilitated a really nice unconference that spawned a few really nice sessions, and they took very good care of us. And just about everybody met a number of folks in person that were previously known only via email or irc. As the saying goes: nothing like the bandwidth of a face-to-face meeting... Last but not least I should issue a health warning. Sharing a room with the fearless Debian DPL is not for the faint of heart: His snooring is truly world-class.

Chris Lawrence: Say it ain't so: Joe target of database snoops

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.

Russell Coker: The Latest Dick Smith Catalogue

I was just reading the latest catalogue from Dick Smith Electronics (a chain of computer stores in Australia). The first interesting thing that I noticed is that laptops are cheaper than desktops in all categories. For any combination of CPU power and RAM in a desktop system I can see a laptop advertised with similar specs at a lower price. Of course you won’t get such a big display in a laptop, but big displays don’t always work well. I just read an interesting review of LCD display technology [1] which states (among other things) that TN panels (which provide poor colors and a limited viewing angle) are used in all current 22 inch monitors! They state that the Dell 2007WFP (which I own) comes in two versions, I was fortunate to get the one that doesn’t suck. Based on that review I think I’ll refrain from all further monitor purchases until the technology gets sorted out and it becomes possible to reliably buy the better monitors at a decent price. The most expensive desktop system that Dick Smith advertised in their catalogue has a 22 inch monitor. It seems that with desktop systems being more expensive an increasing number of home users will use laptops instead, which will of course change the economics of manufacture. Maybe the desktop computer is about to die out and be replaced by laptops, PDAs, and mobile phone type devices (blackberries etc). Another interesting thing is an advert for a LASER pointer (it seems that they haven’t been banned as “terrorist weapons” yet). Being on special for a mere $27 is not the interesting thing, what is interesting is that the advert claims “projects up to 500m indoors“. I’m sure it will be handy if I ever have to give a presentation at the Airbus factory. But otherwise it seems quite unlikely that I will ever get an opportunity for a 500m indoor space. The prices on digital cameras have been dropping consistently for some time. Now they are selling a Samsung S860 (8.1MP with 3* optical zoom) for $98. This is (according to the specs at least) a very powerful camera for a price that most people won’t think twice about. I expect that an increasing number of people will buy new digital cameras every year the way white-box enthusiasts buy new motherboards! Hopefully people will use services such as Freecycle [2] to dispose of all their old cameras, to both avoid pollution and get cameras into the hands of more people. Very few monitors are being sold with resolutions greater than 2MP (1680*1050 is the highest you can get for a reasonable price). So an 8MP camera allows significant scope for cropping and resizing an image before publishing it on the web. Even the 4MP cameras that were on sale a few years ago (and which are probably being discarded now) are more than adequate for such use.

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