There's only one week left for D-I translation updates. I wholeheartedly thank Otavio who agreed for such a long string freeze as it allowed me to do my best to get translations completed. And this is a huge communication effort, considering how easily the translators vanish... 46 languages are now qualified for the release, without discussion. Since my last blog entry, welcome back to Greek, Esperanto, Hungarian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Wolof. There are still uncertainties for 14 languages: Amharic, Bengali, Bosnian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Kurdish, Latvian, Macedonian, Northern Sami, Slovenian, Albanian, Tagalog, Ukrainian Again, several of these have *very few missing strings*. In short, if your language is among these 14, there are 6.5 days left (the end of the translation update round is on Saturday 20th midnight UTC). RUSH! What will happen in 6.5 days? I will examine the situation of each of those languages and discuss it with the D-I release managers. On a case by case basis, we will decide together to keep them or not. Etch has 58 supported languages (English included). Lenny currently has 47 that are sure. Will Lenny be the first Debian release ever with *less* supported languages in D-I than the former release? It would give some groung to my claim that Debian translators are currently escaping somewhere else (guess where?).

Gazpacho, one of my all-time favourite bands, are (finally) coming to Switzerland!!! On 17 October 2008, they ll play a gig at the Z7 in Pratteln/Basel. Guess who ll be there!?! It makes me very happy that they have recently signed WiV Entertainment as event/tour managers, because it means I ll probably get to see them more often in the future. To help a bit, I have agreed to be their Swiss street team (together with Tibor from Basel), which means I ll be distributing flyers and posters when I return from Ireland, in exchange for free tickets for Penny and myself. You should join us! Tickets are 22 and can be ordered from the Z7 concert page (scroll down, I can t link directly, unfortunately). According to their news page (scroll down a bit), they are also playing in Oslo on 26 September, in Verviers, Belgium on 18 October, and in Den Bosch, The Netherlands on 19 October. Don t miss them! NP: Pulp: Freaks

It seems to be a common idea by non-bloggers that the comment they enter on a blog is somehow special and should be taken seriously by the author of the blog (everyone is a legend in their own mind). In a recent discussion one anonymous commentator seemed offended that I didn’t take his comments seriously and didn’t understand why I would take little notice of an anonymous comment while taking note of a later comment on the same issue by the author of the project in question. In most forums (and I use the term in the broadest way) an anonymous comment is taken with a weight that is close to zero. That doesn’t mean that it will be ignored, it just means that the requirement for providing supporting evidence or of having a special insight and explaining it is much greater. One example of this is the comment weighting system used by Slashdot.org (AKA “/.”). The /. FAQ has a question “Why should I log in?” with the answer including “Posting in Discussions at Score:1 instead of Score:0 means twice as many people will see your comments” [1]. /. uses the term “Anonymous Coward” as the identification of users who are not logged in, this gives an idea of how they are regarded. Advogato uses a rating method for blog posts which shows you only posts from blogs that you directly rank well or which match the trust metric (based on rankings of people you rank) [2]. I believe that the automated systems developed by /. and other online forums emulate to a some extent the practices that occur off-line. For any discussion in a public place a comment from someone who does not introduce themself (or gives an introduction that gives no reason to expect quality) will be treated with much less weight than one from someone who is known. When someone makes a comment their background will be considered by people who hear it. If a comment is entirely a matter of opinion and can not be substantiated by facts and logical analysis then the acceptance of the comment is solely based on the background of the author (and little things like spelling errors can count against the author). Therefore if you want your blog comments to be considered by blog authors and readers you need to make sure that you are known. Using your full name is one way of not being as anonymous but most names are not unique on the Internet (I’ve previously described some ways of ensuring that you beat other people with the same name in Google rankings [3]). The person who owns the blog can use the email address that is associated with the comment to identify the author (if it’s a real email address and it’s known by Google). But for other readers the only option is the “Website” field. The most common practice is to use the “Website” field in the comment to store the URL of your blog (most blog comments are written by bloggers). But there is nothing stopping you from using any other URL, if you are not a blogger and want to write comments on blogs you could create a personal web page to use for the comments. If the web page you use for such purposes gives links to references as to your relevant experience then that would help. Someone who has skills in several areas could create a web page for each one and reference the appropriate page in their comment. One problem we face is that it is very easy to lie on the net. There is no technical obstacle to impersonation on the net, while I haven’t seen any evidence of people impersonating others in an attempt to add credibility to blog comments I expect it’s only a matter of time before that happens (I expect that people do it already but the evidence of them getting caught has not been published anywhere that I’ve read). People often claim university education to add weight to their comments (usually in email but sometimes in blog comments too). One problem with this is that anyone could falsely claim to have a university degree and no-one could disprove their claim without unreasonable effort, another is that a university degree actually doesn’t mean much (lots of people remain stupid after graduating). One way in which adding a URL to a comment adds weight is that for a small web site the author will check a reasonable portion of the sites that link to them, so if someone impersonates me and has a link to my web site in the comment then there’s a good chance that I will notice this. OpenID [4] has the potential to alleviate this by making it more difficult to forge an association with a web site. One thing that I am working on is enabling OpenID on all the web sites that are directly associated with me. I plan to use a hardware device to authenticate myself with the OpenID server (so I can securely enter blog comments from any location). I expect that it will become the standard practice that comments will not be accepted by most blogs if they are associated with a URL that is OpenID enabled unless the author of the comment authenticates themself via OpenID. Even when we get OpenID enabled everywhere there is still the issue of domain specific expertise. While I am well enough known for my work on SE Linux that most people will accept comments about it simply because I wrote them, the same can not be said for most topics that I write about. When writing about topics where I am not likely to be accepted as an expert I try and substantiate my main points with external web pages. Comments are likely to be regarded as spam if they have too many links so it seems best to only use one link per comment - which therefore has to be on an issue that is important to the conclusion and which might be doubted if evidence was not provided. The other thing that is needed is a reasonable chain of deduction. Simply stating your opinion means little, listing a series of logical steps that led you to the opinion and are based on provable facts will hold more weight. These issues are not only restricted to blog comments, I believe that they apply (to differing degrees) to all areas of online discussion.

• [1] http://slashdot.org/faq/accounts.shtml


• [2] http://www.advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=224


• [3] http://doc.coker.com.au/internet/personal-seo/


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openid

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It's been a year or so since I last reported what I was up to in my "day job." The last year has been a productive, if sometimes schizophrenic, period. I've had a good time working with Eric von Hippel (innovation and free and open source software research guru) and have decided I'd like to do a bit more of that. So I'm taking classes again -- mostly sociological methods courses -- to try to learn a bit about becoming a social scientist. To do so, I've enrolled in the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship PhD program at the MIT Sloan School of Management and am working on putting together an interdisciplinary -- probably even interdepartmental -- research program. My basic research questions remain the ones that have motivated all my work: How can I get a better understanding of communities producing free stuff? How can I help those communities do so more effectively? MIT has a large number of people who share these goals and interests. Who knows, if I can put together enough of them and an academically rigorous research proposal that will provide a real benefit to the free software and free culture communities I care about, I might even manage to get a degree out of it! I'll also be staying on as a fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media where I'll continue to maintain and expand Selectricity, work on Revealing Errors, and more.

Yay. A Meme. And I have a bad enough headache to write something… My own machine set uses something from the Babylon5 series, so I have delenn (laptop), vorlon (desktop) (Yes, contrary to common believe it is not named after that prior Release Manager of Debian :)), sheridan/vir/kosh/lyta/morden (various servers). More interesting is the naming scheme i took for DebConf hosts: Characters from the Simpsons, but the names have to make some kind of sense with the function of the machine. And names from members of the Simpsons family are forbidden and to be used for machines directly at a DebConf venue only. Some of the names we use are cmburns, smithers, apu, skinner, quimby, wiggum, herb, krabappel, horatio, cletus, kent, krusty. Look for the TXT records to know who it is, all of them have one. Finding out why the hosts carry those names is left as an excercise to the reader, except for two to demonstrate the twisted brain you need to get it :)

• krusty - Krusty the Clown. Was the master video relay for DC8 (and will be for some others) and as such presenting/managing/getting a/the show to the people watching from outside.
• horatio - The Sea Captain. Is used as the shell machine for DebConf people that do not have an own shell box, but which we want to have in IRC for basically 24/7. So shell <-> sea.

At work it is extremely boring, descriptive names for the function. Like mail1, mail2, etc.

---

Oh, and also, lets shoot madduck. Comments: 1

What we are having here is a quite non-typical ARM based motherboard. It features a pre-production version of Marvell 78x00 series ARM SoC, clocked at 1GHz. It features multiple on-board sata and gigE connectors, as well as pci-e slots and DDR2 ram slots. Fairly "meh" in x86 world, but on the ARM world most systems are designed mainly for low power consumption, tiny size and low cost. Which, while creating allows creating many exciting devices, makes finding meaty buildd's tricky. When we intruduced armel port, the security people rose the concern that arm buildd's are too slow. Especially from the security Point of view, where getting security fixes out fast is important - every second of waiting for security builds to finish someone could be exploited!

Luckily, some people from Marvell had heard about our need and arranged to donate a developer board for us!

So far, the build speed improvement, compared to our current (Thecus N2100) buildd's is very promising. When looking at build times of some slow-building packages which likely will see security uploads:

Package     Thecus   MV78100   HPPA    MIPS
linux-2.6   39h      11h       6h      17h
webkit      17h      5h        3h      4h
qt4-x11     59h      17h       7h      13h
xulrunner   14h      4h        1.5h    3h

We see that with a Marvell board we are more in the line with other architectures. And the production hardware is going to be even faster! There is a dual-core version as well, but it's not SMP. Both cores are independent, and would basically both run their own Linux image. If manage to find a easy way to implement and manage that, we could run two theoretically run two independent buildd instances on the same board.

See the Linux Devices article for more details about the MV78x00 in general.

Sometimes you're just flat out wrong. While I can understand your position of 'all fear-mongerers and religious fanatics should just commit suicide', I do not agree with it. However, this time, the girl you refer to didn't actually commit suicide because she fell in any of those categories. Had you actually read that BBC story you link to in some detail, you'd have found that:

• The girl was sixteen years old. While old enough to understand danger, it usually isn't old enough to understand the intricacies of science.
• She took her own life after watching a sensationalist TV channel that was spreading the lie that the LHC would cause the earth to crack up

Now I agree that ignorance to science is something that should be advocated against; but if the facts of science are misrepresented through a TV channel that is only interested in its own profits, are those who do believe their only source of information then to be blamed? If the only data you get are outright lies, is the world then indeed a better place because it got rid of one "mis"believer? I think not.

Some people think that you can recognise a good restaurant by the presence of obscure dishes on the menu or having high prices. The reality is that there are two ways of quickly identifying a good restaurant, one is the Michelin Guide [1] (or a comparable guide - if such a thing exists), the other is how quiet the restaurant is. By a quiet restaurant I certainly don’t mean a restaurant with no customers (which may become very noisy once customers arrive). I mean a restaurant which when full will still be reasonably quiet. Making a restaurant quiet is not in itself a sufficient criteria to be a good restaurant - but it’s something that is usually done after the other criteria (such as hiring good staff and preparing a good menu) are met. The first thing to do to make a room quiet is to have good carpet. Floor boards are easy to clean and the ratio of investment to lifetime is very good (particularly for hard wood), but they reflect sound and the movement of chairs and feet makes noise. A thick carpet with a good underlay is necessary to absorb sound. Booths are also good for containing sound if the walls extend above head height. Decorations on the walls such as curtains and thick wallpaper also absorb sound. A quiet environment allows people to talk at a normal volume which improves the dining experience. It seems to me that the same benefits apply to server rooms and offices, with the benefit being more efficient work. I found it exciting when I first had my desk in a server room (surrounded by tens of millions of pounds worth of computer gear). But as I got older I found it less interesting to work in that type of environment just as I found it less interesting to have dinner in a noisy bar - and for the same reasons. For a server room there is no escaping the fact that it will be noisy. But if the noise can be minimised then it will allow better communication between the people who are there and less distraction which should result in higher quality of work - which matters if you want good uptime! One thing I have observed is that physically larger servers tend to make less noise per volume and per compute power. For example a 2RU server with four CPUs seems to always make less noise than two 1RU servers that each have two CPUs. I believe that this is because a fan with a larger diameter can operate at a lower rotational speed which results in less bearing noise and the larger fans also give less turbulence. While it’s obvious that using fewer servers via virtualisation has the potential to avoid noise (both directly through fans and disks and indirectly through the cooling system for the server room [2]). A less obvious way of reducing noise is to swap two 1RU servers for one 2RU server - although my experience is that for machines in a similar price band, a 2RU server often has comparable compute power (in terms of RAM and disk capacity) to three or four 1RU servers. To reduce noise both directly and indirectly it is a requirement to increase disk IO capacity (in terms of the number of random IOs per second) without increasing the number of spindles (disks). I just read an interesting Sun blog covering some concepts related to using Solid State Disks (SSDs) on ZFS for best performance [3]. It seems that using such techniques is one way of significantly increasing the IO capacity per server (and thus allowing more virtual servers on one physical machine) - it’s a pity that we currently don’t have access to ZFS or a similar filesystem for Linux servers (ZFS has license issues and the GPL alternatives are all in a beta state AFAIK). Another possibility that seems to have some potential is the use of NetApp Filers [4] for the main storage of virtual machines. A NetApp Filer gives a better ratio of IO requests per second to the number of spindles used than most storage array products due to the way they use NVRAM caching and their advanced filesystem features (which also incidentally gives some good options for backups and for detecting and correcting errors). So a set of 2RU servers that have the maximum amount of RAM installed and which use a NetApp Filer (or two if you want redundancy) for the storage with the greatest performance requirements should give the greatest density of virtual machines. Blade servers also have potential to reduce noise in the server room. The most significant way that they do this is by reducing the number of power supplies, instead of having one PSU per server (or two if you want redundancy) you might have three or five PSUs for a blade enclosure that has 8 or more blades. HP blade enclosures support shutting down some PSUs when the blades are idling and don’t need much power (I don’t know whether blade enclosures from other vendors do this - I expect that some do). A bigger problem however is the noise in offices where people work. It seems that the major responsible for this is the cheap cubicles that are used in most offices (and almost all computer companies). More expensive cubicles that are at almost head-height (for someone who is standing) and which have a cloth surface absorb sound better significantly improve the office environment, and separate offices are better still. One thing I would like to see is more use of shared desktop computers, it’s not difficult to set up a desktop machine with multiple video cards, so with appropriate software support (which is really difficult) you could have one desktop machine for two, or even four users which would save electricity and reduce noise. Better quality carpet on the floors would also be a good thing. While office carpet wears out fast adding some underlay would not increase the long-term cost (it can remain as the top layer gets replaced). Better windows in offices are necessary to provide a quiet working environment. The use of double-glazed windows with reflective plastic film significantly decreases the amount of heating and cooling that is required in the office. This would permit a lower speed of air flow for heating and cooling which means less noise. Also an office in a central city area will have a noise problem outside the building, again double (or even triple) glazed windows help a lot. Some people seem to believe that an operations room should have no obstacles (one ops room where I once worked had all desks facing a set of large screens that displayed network statistics and the desks were like school desks with no dividers), I think that even for an ops room there should be some effort made to reduce the ambient noise. If the room is generally reasonably quiet then it should be easy to shout the news of an outage so that everyone can hear it. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that a quieter working environment can increase productivity by 5% (I think this is a conservative assumption). For an office full of skilled people who are doing computer work the average salary may be about $70,000, and it’s widely regarded that to factor in the management costs etc you should double the salary - so the average cost of an employee would be about $140,000. If there are 50 people in the office then the work of those employees has a cost of $7,000,000 per annum. A 5% increase in that would be worth $350,000 per annum - you could buy a lot of windows for that!

• [1] http://www.michelinguide.com/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/09/10/efficiency-of-cooling-servers/


• [3] http://blogs.sun.com/studler/entry/why_you_should_avoid_placing


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netapp

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I wonder what would have happened if Obama had put lipstick on a pitbull would there be any less of this circus put up by the Republican monkeys? Are we back in Kindergarten? Mom! Mom! He hit me! . Is the next thing we ll see tears on stage? Or some sort of fake emotional outbreak? Anything goes in America, I say Both, Obama and McCain have used the lipstick analogy in the past (see previously linked article, and this AP writeup), so why are the Republican monkeys trying to nail him on sexism? They are (trying to) play the gender card (thanks to Erinn Clark for the link). Sexism surely is a word to grab attention, especially in the Excited States of America. By shifting attention to sexism, the Republican monkeys are not only stealing Obama s show and dragging the short-attention-span media (and populace) away from any Palin-related scandals, they are also covering up that they don t have anything else to say. Finally, sexism is an emotional topic, unlike the other political and policy crap the entertainment-hungry television crowd has to put up with, so hooray for excitement! I am disgusted by this American election circus. And I wish we d get about as much coverage of American news in these times as international news gets airtime on American TV. Even though I hope Obama wins for no other reason than that he s not in the same political camp as George W. International Terrorist and War Criminal Bush, I couldn t really care less and don t have any reason to believe that things will improve when the Democrats move back into the White House. And neither do lobbyists care who s sitting at the top. Idiots exist on every level and all over the globe. The rich will still pull the strings. The capitalist avalanche (euphemistically called the strive for democracy ) doesn t slow down. Other countries political monkeys have tasted totalitarianism and lost their senses, and no US government will get them back on track. And the media, who controls it all anyway, is just cashing in on the whole spectacle, which is why I have to continue to be subjected to it. Which brings us back to the rich I wouldn t be surprised to find the likes of Haliburton in the financial support list of the Republican monkeys. PS: I know and respect many American citizens, and I know most of them think like me. Nevertheless, I feel it necessary to point out that none of the above is an attack on those of you with a clue. I feel sympathy at the same time as I feel the rage expressed in the above, but this rage is solely with the political monkeys, the media, and merciless capitalists. None of those are US-specific, it just happens that you seem to have the most pronounced combinations. NP: Mogwai: Come On Die Young

One thing I had wondered was why home air-conditioning systems are more efficient than air-conditioning systems for server rooms. I received some advice on this matter from the manager of a small server room (which houses about 30 racks of very powerful and power hungry servers). The first issue is terminology, the efficiency of a “chiller” is regarded as the number of Watts of heat energy removed divided by the number of Watts of electricity consumed by the chiller. For example when using a 200% efficient air cooling plant, a 100W light bulb is rated as being a 150W heat source. 100W to Heat it, 50W from the cooling plant to cool it. For domestic cooling I believe that 300% is fairly common for modern “split systems” (it’s the specifications for the air-conditioning on my house and the other air-conditioners on display had similar ratings). For high-density server rooms with free air cooling I have been told that a typical efficiency range is between 80% and 110%! So it’s possible to use MORE electricity on cooling than on running the servers! One difficulty in cooling a server room is that the air often can’t flow freely (unlike a big open space such as the lounge room of your house). Another is the range of temperatures and the density of heat production in some parts (a 2RU server can dissipate 1000W of heat in a small space). These factors can be minimised by extracting hot air at the top and/or rear of racks and forcing cold air in the bottom and/or the front and by being very careful when planning where to place equipment. HP offers some services related to designing a server room to increase cooling efficiency, one of the services is using computational fluid dynamics to simulate the air-flow in the server-room [1]! CFD is difficult and expensive (the complete package from HP for a small server room costs more than some new cars), I believe that the fact that it is necessary for correct operation of some server rooms is an indication of the difficulty of the problem. The most effective ways of cooling servers involve tight coupling of chillers and servers. This often means using chilled water or another liquid to extract the heat. Chilled water refrigeration systems largely remove the problem of being unable to extract the heat from the right places, but instead you have some inefficiency in pumping the water and the servers are fixed in place. I have not seen or heard of chilled water being used for 2RU servers (I’m not saying that it doesn’t get used or that it wouldn’t make sense - merely that I haven’t seen it). When installing smaller servers (2RU and below) there is often a desire to move them and attaching a chilled-water cooling system would make such a move more difficult and expensive. When a server weighs a ton or more then you aren’t going to move it in a hurry (big servers have to be mostly disassembled before the shell can be moved, and the shell might require the efforts of four men to move it). Another issue related to water cooling is the weight. Managing a moderate amount of water involves a lot of heavy pipes (a leak would be really bad) and the water itself can weigh a lot. A server room that is based around 20Kg servers might have some issues with the extra weight of water cooling (particularly the older rooms), but a server room designed for a single rack that weighs a ton can probably cope. I have been told that the cooling systems for low density server rooms are typically as efficient as those used for houses, and may even be more efficient. I expect that when designing an air-conditioner the engineering trade-offs when designing for home use favor low purchase price. But someone who approves the purchase of an industrial cooling system will be more concerned about the overall cost of operations and will be prepared to spend some extra money up-front and recover it over the course of a few years. The fact that server rooms run 24*7 also gives more opportunity to recover the money spent on the purchase (my home A-C system runs for about 3 months a year for considerably less than 24 hours a day). So it seems that the way to cool servers efficiently is to have low density server rooms (to the largest extent possible). One step towards this goal would be to have servers nearer the end users. For example having workgroup servers near the workgroup (instead of in the server room). Of course physical security of those servers would be more challenging - but if all the users have regular desktop PCs that can be easily 0wned then having the server for them in the same room probably doesn’t make things any worse. Modern tower servers are more powerful than rack mounted servers that were available a few years ago while also being very quiet. A typical rack-mounted server is not something you would want near your desk, but one of the quiet tower servers works quite well.

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

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As some might know, I've been working at the university for a few weeks now. I'm very happy how it all worked out, because of the people there and the subjects to work on. It's just great to think through some mind-bending index structure to improve reverse-k-nearest-neighbor queries. And the professor (who is very well known for his work on R*-Trees, the X-Tree, and the DBSCAN and OPTICS algorithms) really manages to aggregate excellent people.(rkNN is the problem of finding those points for which a Nearest Neighbor Search [Wikipedia] would return the given point. There are many use cases for example in location based services.)A lot of my work involves a framework which has been published recently on the SSDBM 2008 conference: ELKI - Environment for DeveLoping KDD-Applications Supported by Index-StructuresThe goal of ELKI is to become what WEKA is for machine learning. And it's well on it's way for that.ELKI aims at the data mining researcher, it's not designed to squeeze out the last bit of performance. Instead it allows you to compare different algorithms, try different index structures (including various spatial and metrical trees) and offers all kinds of functionality you can reuse. If you are planning to do some real world applications, it likely is still useful for prototyping.In the last weeks I've already put quite some effort in ELKI, so expect the next version to be released with significant changes and new functionality. In fact some working functionality was just left out of the release because we hadn't cleaned up the code yet.Currently, getting started with ELKI can be a bit tricky. It's not hard to use, but you just need to find out where to start. The next release will therefore include a "dummy algorithm" that mostly serves as being a template for implementing custom algorithms (it can also be used for benchmarking an index structure, though).

AVSForum user DigaDo describes a high-tech new antenna technology for digital television. This advanced device, however, is not recommended for use outdoors or in damp environments.

Today I received two kittens. They rock. Somebody else who rocks? Martin F. Krafft. Martin rocks because of this gem I came across today managing ~/.ssh/known_hosts via git. The idea is that instead of having a single file known_hosts you have a known_hosts.d/ directory containing multiple entries that are concatenated together. So neat. So obvious. So nice. Rock award. ObFilm: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

In an hour the online part of this combined embedded+fai meeting in Badajoz in Extremadura, Spain, will sadly be over, but the sadness will hopefully be compensated by good food (yes, the food at the last dinner was great) and more fun! To me it were three intensive days (plus some two half days of intense travelling) which were really productive. This post is a summary of what I did here, to document how useful these meetings are. I'm only one person out of 18, who did some Debian work here, much more stuff was done, most of it I probably didnt even notice, as 14 people where working on embedded stuff, which I mostly ignored... ;-) That said, I think it was still very nice to have this meeting together, a.) because I'm quite interested in embedded stuff and b.) because the embedded crowd is a fun one to hang around with!

Right now I'm quite tired so that I dont fully remember what I have done on the first day :) It included uploading the DebConf7 mpeg videos which will now be used by Miguel Gea to create DVDs from those, so that he gets familar with the toolchain, so that he then can do the DebConf8 DVDs once those videos are (fully) ready. That will still take some time though, but hopefully not too long.

Unlike DebConf8 I also brought my fancy new fonera2 with me, in the hope to give it to someone to work on emdebian support for it. This is quite a longer road, as currently uclibc is not part of Debian, but thats only one step in this puzzle. Much to my joy Per Andersson took the opportunity to play with it and now took it home with him to document how to run Debian on it. I'm looking forward to see progress on this in the future ;-) Update: uclibc support is only needed for running Debian from the 4mb flash it has. But since it also has an usbport one can attach some storage there and run a full Debian system, just like on the nslug, which also has 32mb of RAM.

Unfortunatly I basically forgot about the FSG-3 I also took with me (which was for good reasons, one the second and third day I mostly did FAI work), but then I remembered 90min before the end, which was really too late. Narf. But Riku had a short look at it and told me one thing I didn't knew before: (at least) arm(el) kernels need to have the cpu id set in the kernel and the debian kernels don't have that, as they are build for more than one cpu type, so one has to prepend an arm assembler code instruction before running the kernel... I'm curious to do this soon :-)

But I have more hardware news to tell: C sar G mez Mart n (thanks for organizing this meeting, too!!!1) gave me back my OLPC laptop which I borrowed to him quite some time ago, so he could use it for a talk he gave at a university in Extremadura, so now I finally could give Andres Salomon new debian image for the XO a try. It was really nice to finally see a nice Debian gnome desktop on the device :-)

Today the FAI group, that was Sebastian, Michael, Thomas and me, also took a break to visit the Alcazaba de Badajoz (built around 1100, so roughly 900 years ago) which is an amazing building (thats why I linked to the spanish wikipedia entry as it has nicer pictures), from where you can see most of the city. I've been to Badajoz at least three times now and I'm really glad I finally did that, it's only 5min away from the office where the meeting was held and I highly recommend it to anyone going here.

Oh, and last and definitly not least I did a lot of work on FAI too. Besides discussing stuff which will hit planet after I posted this (hah! Michael already posted it, though without proper credit, so I will do a repost) I mostly reviewed changes and patches and discussed bugs, I didn't develop many patches myself (well, except one for the changelog..) but I've read every change at least twice, once as a commit msg and once in a full review. Plus many patches I read more often... all in all I think FAI is now in an great shape for lenny (which was the only thing we worked on during the weekend, we discussed some future plans, but work was only done for lenny), except that we want to another upload (with only documentation changes) after the upcoming one (which has quite some documentation changes already, but also some RC+important and some trivial bugfixes).

As you might have guessed, I started this entry on saturday and am finishing it now. According to the topic of the #extremadura2008 channel, which we created to coordinate between the groups, we also fixed 7 RC bugs (or 8? one should really document the bug numbers and not the number of bugs..) affecting lenny and 3 more which are only relevant to sid. Which is not as many as I would have liked to be fixed, but then, it wasn't a ("traditional") bug squashing party either. Which makes me wonder, are there any planned in the coming weeks?

So all in all I think this meeting was really very productive. Plus, I also enjoyed a special half an hour of real holidays: on saturday we had to leave lunch without having a chance to have a coffee afterwards, so I stumbled into a random cafe on the way to the venue. Turned out it was a very nice one, where due to its nice interiour I managed to reflect on life, 42 and all the rest almost immediatly. A totally unexpected but needed break. I wont say more here, because the thoughts and memories are really mostly relevant for me, but I'm really happy I found that space. DebConf8 and this meeting both were really fun, but I really didnt have a minute to reflect things. 30 minutes to do that is definitly not enough, but it was a good start. Now I just need to find another opportunity to continue with it. I hope this will happen before the next Extremadura meeting ;-)

When finishing series of articles about Debian packaging and writing about dbconfig-common, I just had to ask myself, why it is not used in phpMyAdmin package. I did not find any reason and as Thijs did not have any objections, I hacked it together this evening. So what you will get? All fancy features where phpMyAdmin requires it's database to manage some additional features. For example you can create PDF pages with structure of your database, add additional comments to databases, notice relations between MyISAM tables, etc. Simply see wiki for more details. Besides this, phpMyAdmin is now automatically configured to use database you choose using dbconfig-common, so you can also connect to remote MySQL server without manually configuring anything. The only thing which scares me a bit is that we now increased a lot number of debconf questions user has to reply by this...

There are some things you just wouldn't want to do without living in the country in Kansas.

A lot of rock on your driveway.

A good view of the sunset.

Neighbors with tractors.

Some way to get rid of trash and recycling.

Some friendly outdoor cats.

That last item is there because there are a few things you would really love to do without:

Mice.

Rats.

Pack rats.

Other assorted rodents.

Now, although we were adopted by a stray cat not too long ago, he is really the skittish, wondering hobo type of cat. Sometimes he's around, sometimes he's not. We'd really like more of a 24/7 rodent patrol. Plus we can't ever get close enough to Sneaky to play with him.

So on Labor Day, I brought home two cats from my parents place: Hudson and Nash. Both are yellow. Neither of them were really accustomed to a car carrier, and though the trip is less than 15 minutes, were quite scared by the end of it.

We normally pen up outside cats for the first few days so that they can identify with a new home, then let them roam free. So we decided to take them in to the grain elevator and let them roam in there for a little while. This is a big old wood structure about 80 years old. It has two stories, and a series of wooden grain bins built into the first floor.

We took the cats, in their carriers, into one of those bins, closed the door, and then let them out. Both were scared, but one of them calmed down quickly, and was soon happily playing with shoelaces, purring loudly, and generally wanting to be held.

The other made a run for it. He couldn't get out the door, but, well, he managed to climb up the wall. Up and out of the grain bin, and another jump or two and he was in the second story of the building -- no doubt finding a lovely cat-sized place to hide.

We eventually closed up the elevator as best we could, and left for the evening.

Tuesday morning, we saw only the smaller cat around. By the afternoon, Terah saw the older cat prowling around in the yard. That's one thing about 80-year-old farm buildings: they can't keep cats in or out. A cat will find a way in, or a way out, if it wants.

By now, they're playing outside and love it. They still like to go inside, and Hudson -- the older cat -- will let me get within about 5 feet of him. Nash tries to not let me get more than 5 feet away, and has climbed most of the way up my jeans using his claws by now.

When we're not outside, we can see them prowling about outside. Sometimes they'll see something -- maybe a cricket or a mouse -- and they'll crouch down, tail moving excitedly, ready to pounce. They don't really play with each other, but they stay close by.

All of this is great, but it comes with a price: I no longer have an excuse to avoid cleaning the rat droppings out of the elevator, because they won't just reappear within a month anymore.

It’s silly season again in America: a Presidential election year. If you don’t know that, you must really be living under a rock. As I did four years ago, I’ll post my thoughts about how I vote online for all the elections I can participate in: national, Congressional, Indiana-wide, and local. That way, you can do more than curse the ignorant Americans for their choices; you can possibly influence at least one. Local races look to be more boring than usual this year, because neither of Indiana’s Senators is running this year. Fishers trends strongly Republican, too, which makes a lot of the other local races uncompetitive. But that’s not why I said the Republicans win. I figured I’d be able to watch the speeches from the conventions at my own convenience online, so just now I tried both sites. Here’s what the Democratic convention site told me:

We re sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn t compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following:

Compatible operating systems:
Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5).
Compatible browsers:
Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works.

That’s because the Democrats chose Microsoft as their official technology provider, and Microsoft chose to deliver all video using their Silverlight technology, which doesn’t work on Linux (yet). And what are the Republicans using? Good ol’ YouTube. Yes, I’ll probably be able to find the important Democrat speeches on YouTube. But how easy will that be? And how many of the obscure Democrat speeches will I be drawn into watching just out of curiosity? I’ve already listened to portions of Fred Thompson’s and Joe Lieberman’s speeches–because it was so easy. Advantage: Republicans.

For about eight years, I was a very happy WindowMaker user. It was very lightweight, aesthetically pleasing, and I had interiorized its behaviour and keybindings so much, I didn't feel I'd ever switch away. I periodically tried (forced myself even!) to use any of the other, more en vogue environments... Experimented using Gnome for a week, KDE for a week, XFCE for a week (so I would have enough time to learn their ways)... And always came back to my good, well-known wmaker.
In 2006, when we held DebConf6 in Mexico, I saw how other people worked with ion3. I fell immediately in love with it. Not because it is prettier, snappier or has nicer widgets than other window managers - but because it is enormously more usable. Quoting Tuomo Valkonen, the ion3 author,

Ion is not perfect and certainly not for everyone, but neither is any user interface. Usability is subjective.

Using a keyboard-oriented, tiling window manager represented -for the first time in 20 years (I had my first contact with a Macintosh in 1986)- a radical user interface change. For my way of working, I just don't need a desktop, I don't need having a background space or overlapping windows. What I need is a way to functionally organize the windows I have open at any given time, quickly switch between them (and not depending on the mouse, please!), maximizing screen space and all that. ion3 was godsent.
Now, in 2007 there was (yet another) huge flamefest. Valkonen basically does not want distributors distributing any version of ion3 that's not the latest, and introducing changes not approved by him - He basically demands ion to be non-free. So, it was moved to the non-free section of Debian where only Womble decided to keep giving it support. And, of course, by September 2007 Julien Danjou announced he had written another window manager: Awesome.
My main motivation for switching away from ion3 is that... I don't want to use non-free software. But I was very comfortable with ion3. It was only after I saw many other people using Awesome at DebConf8 I decided to bite the bullet and switch. It looked at least as comfortable as ion3.
But... Well, I cannot come up with better phrasing than what Joey said when he switched to Awesome, almost exactly a month ago. When changing between the mainstream window managers, the differences are mostly cosmetic. But with these really different window managers... I cannot but reproduce Joey's words:

I wish I had a good analogy to explain to my nontechnical readers what changing to a new window manager is about.
One way to think about it is that it's like driving a car down the road, and suddenly swapping the steering wheel and brakes out for a tiller and gear shifter. And having to downshift for braking until you learn that the brakes moved to the turn indicator lever. By trial and error.
But that's really only part of it. Another way to look at it is adopting a new philosophy. Or, in some cases a cult. (In some cases, with crazy cult leaders.) Whether they use Windows or a Mac, or Linux, most computer users are members of a big established religion, with some implicit assumptions, like "thy windows shall be overlapping, like papers on the desktop, and thou shalt move them with thy mouse".
So, changing to a new window manager is a process of being dumped into a different environment, where nothing works like you've come to expect, and trying to construct a mental model that you can use to make sense of it. But it's also a process of modifying that environment to behave the way you like.
And when done whole-heartedly, this doesn't just mean trying to make it like the environment you were used to before. It means trying to absorb the underlying philosopy of the window manager, and think up new ways of doing things, inspired by that philosopy, and modify the environment to allow doing those things.
So ideally, "I switched to a new window manager" doesn't mean "my screen has some different widgets on it now". It means "I'm looking at the screen with new eyes."

So, what's so different?
Besides learning some new keybindings (expected, of course), Awesome has several suggested layouts to help you organize your workflow, usually (although not always) consisting of a main area and a side area, tiled side by side (or one above the other, or several stranger ways). This sounds rigid, but it is incredibly comfortable - and I've only been an Awesome user for three days!
But what sets Awesome apart from basically anything else is the concept of tags. Whey you see an Awesome session, you recognize something similar to the very well known workspaces concept we have had in any Unix-like environment for many years, right? Well, but they are not workspaces. They are tags. What is the difference?
When I work with workspace, each of my windows can be in a different workspace. So in one, I'll have my mail-related stuff. In another one, I might be browsing. In another one, I have my development things, and I might be following some logfiles in yet another one.
Awesome allows you to use tags for categorization in much a more flexible way.
For example: I am mostly a web-oriented developer. I usually need four things when developing a system: A browser, Emacs, the log for my development server, and a console where I can peek and poke at my objects and interactions. Of course, cramming them all into the same screen makes no sense - It would be better to follow the good ol' desktop metaphore, and just switch the focus and raise the window, right?
In Awesome, I can have them all set to the maximum screen size - _and_ use the most common combinations as well. Each of the windows can be tagged to more than one workspace (and yes, this is immensely more flexible than the always visible hint on traditional WMs).
To begin with, I'll give each major process a tag to itself, to work full-screen. Emacs is on tag 1, my browser on tag 2. The log and the console share a terminal (i.e. via screen or terminator).
This console by itself is not too useful, so I'll set it to tag 4, and we will go back to it later.
So if I'm building a view or following online documentation, I will add tag 3 to both Emacs and the browser.
I'm also setting tag 4 to the browser - That allows me to use it next to my terminal, following the results of my website-clicking.
And, of course, tag 5 will be set to Emacs and to the console, so I can quickly check any quick API-related question that does not need the documentation or look at a newly written method.
By the way, have you noticed CapsLock is the most stupid key invented, ever? Ok, I gave a good use to it: It's called Mod4. Imagine it is just an extra Ctrl, Alt or Meta key.
So, Mod4-1 gives me Emacs. Mod4-2 gives me the browser. Mod4-3 gives Emacs+browser, Mod4-4 gives browser+console, and Mod4-5 gives Emacs+console. And, of course, the handy Mod4-0 gives me all of my open windows tiled side by side.
Even this is a pattern of being a newbie, I know - I could keep 4 and 5 free, and just tag several simultaneous tags to be active. How? Switch to tag 1 exclusively (Mod4-1), and activate tag2 as well (Ctrl-Mod4-2). There, I have Emacs and browser side by side. Want to get the console instead of the browser? Simple. Ctrl-Mod4-2 (toggle off tag 2), Ctrl-Mod4-3 (toggle on tag 3).
Anyway - As you can see, I am excited at finding a very new and nice tool to help me work better. Today I was playing a bit with the Awesome widgets, but that's something to be talked about later.
In Debian, we are at a crossing point: Awesome is just reaching ion3's popularity. And I'm adding my two main machines' votes to Awesome.
This is Awesome. Quoting (yes, one last quote) the official Awesome site, This gonna be LEGEN... wait for it... DARY!.

Xen-Hosting

Two years ago I started running the xen-hosting.org setup, offering Xen hosting for 7 people for a reasonable price. (Basically to subsidise my own desire to have a big guest and not pay too much for it) At that time I was charging £11.50 for a Xen guest with 256Mb of memory and 10Gb of disk space. Each year since then we've managed to increase the spec. For the same price. Two years on this means I'm now hosting 7 Xen guests with 1Gb of memory, and 40Gb of disk space, for that same price of £11.50 a month. Nice to see how things can improve as time goes on :) In other news - It is just past our two year anniversary.

DNS Blacklist

Thanks to the people who said nice things about the DNS blacklist I setup the other day. I suffered a couple of DNS-problems earlier in the day, but things should be back up and running for good now. I hope. The ultimate cause was using ":" not "&" records with tinydns. Sigh.

ObFilm: Teenwolf