Daily builds As of a month ago there are Ubuntu archives with fresh packages of Samba 4 and Openchange, built on a daily basis day from the latest upstream revision. This means that it is now possible to run a version of Samba 4 that is less than 24 hours old, without having to know how to extract source code from the version control system that upstream is using, without having to know how to build and install an application from source, but perhaps most importantly: without having to go through the tedious process of manually updating the source code and rebuilding. OpenChange is tightly coupled to Samba 4, so installing a new version of OpenChange usually involves installing a new version of Samba 4 as well. To make matters more confusing, the two projects use different version control systems (Samba 4 is in Git, while OpenChange is in Subversion) and different build systems (Samba 4 uses waf, OpenChange uses autoconf and make). I have been involved in Samba 4 and OpenChange as an upstream developer and more recently also as a packager for both Debian and Ubuntu. As an upstream developer for both these projects it is important for me that users can easily run the development versions. It makes it possible for interested users to confirm the fixes for issues they have reported and to test new features. The more users run the development version, the more confident I can be as a developer that doing a release will not cause any unexpected surprises. As a packager it is useful to know when there are upstream changes that are going to break my package with the next release.

Recipes The daily builds work using so-called recipes which describe how to build a Debian source package from a set of Bazaar branches. For example, the Samba 4 recipe looks like this:

# bzr-builder format 0.2 deb-version 4.0.0~alpha14~bzr revno ~ppa revno:packaging + revno:debian 
lp:samba
merge debian lp:~samba-team/samba/unstable
merge packaging lp:~samba-team/samba/4.0-ppa-maverick

This dictates that a source package should be built by taking the upstream Samba branch and merging the Debian packaging and some recipe-specific tweaking. The last bit on the first line indicates the version string to be used when generating a changelog entry for the daily build. Every night Launchpad (through bzr-builder) merges these branches and attempts to build the resulting source package, e-mailing me in case of build problems. Generally I fix issues that come up by committing directly to upstream VCS or to the Debian packaging branch. There is no overhead in maintaining the daily build after I've set it up. For more information on creating source package recipes, see getting started.

Toolchain The entire toolchain that does the daily package builds for Ubuntu is Free Software, and I have contributed to various bits of that toolchain over the years. It's exciting to see everything come together.

Soyuz Launchpad consists of multiple pillars - one of those pillars is Soyuz, which I hack on as part of my day job at Canonical. Soyuz is responsible for the archive management and package building. Debian source packages (a combination of upstream source code and packaging metadata) get uploaded by users and then built for various architectures on our buildfarm and published to the Ubuntu archive or to users personal package archives.

Launchpad-code Another pillar of Launchpad is Launchpad-code, which is responsible for the hosting and management of version control branches. Launchpad users can either host their branches on Launchpad directly or mirror branches (either native Bazaar branches or branches in a foreign format such as Subversion, Git or Mercurial). The mirrorring of native and foreign branches happens using standard Bazaar API's. In the case of Samba and OpenChange we import the branches of the upstream projects (Samba is in Git, OpenChange is in Subversion) and the packaging for both projects is in Bazaar. Launchad-code calls out to Bazaar to do the actual mirrorring. Over the last few years I have done a lot of work to improve Bazaars support for foreign branches, in particular on supporting Subversion, Git and Mercurial. As the code mirrorring in Launchpad is one of the biggest users of bzr-svn and bzr-git it has helped find some of the more obscure bugs in those plugins over the last few years, to the point where there are only a handful of issues with Git and Subversion imports left.

bzr-git and dulwich bzr-git provides transparent access to Git repositories from within Bazaar and is built on top of Dulwich. Dulwich is a Python library that provides access to the Git file formats and protocols that is completely independent of Bazaar. James Westby originally started it and I adopted it for bzr-git and further extended it. There are now several other projects that use it as well, including hg-git, and rabbitvcs. Apart from James and me almost two dozen other people have contributed it so far.

bzr-svn and subvertpy bzr-svn provides transparant access to Subversion repositories in Bazaar. When I grew frustrated with the existing Subversion Python bindings for various reasons, I decided to create independent Python bindings for Subversion from scratch. These bindings have since been split out into a separate project - subvertpy - and other projects have since also started using them, e.g. hgsubversion and basie.

Using the daily builds To use the Samba 4 and OpenChange daily builds (Ubuntu Maverick only for now), run:

$ apt-add-repository ppa:samba-team/ppa
$ apt-add-repository ppa:openchange/daily-builds

cp: Karnivool - Themata

I guess it's time again to push for another band. This time I present you Garbage. I love them, but one has to be careful in what mood one is when listening to them; it's possible that they move you in a direction you don't feel comfortable with at that time.

• Bleed Like Me: If you listen closely to the lyrics of the second verse you might get an idea why had to love that song.
• The World Is Not Enough: One might argue that a band has made it when they do a James Bond title song. This is it.
• Only Happy When It Rains: Probably the best known song from Garbage. Damn fine, great tune and groove for the message it contains.

Enjoy!

/music permanent link Comments: 0

In the process of studying for my PhD general examinations this year, I ended up writing summaries about 200 academic books and articles. AcaWiki is a wiki designed to host summaries of academic articles so it seemed like a great place to host these things. Over the last few months, I've uploaded all these summaries. Since I've finished, I've continued to add summaries of other articles as I read them. My summaries tend to be rough. I write them, run them through a spellchecker, and then post them. I don't even reread them before publishing. I hope to improve them as I reread them over time. Of course, because I've uploaded them to wiki, I hope others will add to and improve the summaries as well. AcaWiki uses Semantic Mediawiki and provides nice platform for publishing, editing, and collaboration. Although there are still ways in which the platform can be better, what is needed now is, quite simply, more contributors. I am sad to see that my summaries make up a big chunk of all summaries on the site. So if you are a student, an academic, or anyone else who writes or has written summaries of articles or books or if you might want to do so, you should consider contributing your summaries, in whatever form, to AcaWiki. I've done a little work to help integrate AcaWiki and Zotero which might make things easier. Doctoral students reading for qualifying or general examinations in particular should should consider taking notes and studying with AcaWiki. From the student's perspective, writing summaries can be one of the best way to reflect on and learn a literature. In the process, one can create a great resource for the rest of the world. If a single doctoral student from each of twenty diverse fields of study published summaries of the 200 key articles in their area, AcaWiki would have the critical core of what is most relevant in academia. Help us build it!

Given the impending deprecation of vservers, I've decided to make the switch to KVM on my laptop. Although lxc is a closer approximation to vservers, I decided to go with KVM due to it's support in Virtual Machine Manager. My first step was to confirm that my CPU would support kvm:

egrep -o "svm vmx" /proc/cpuinfo

If that command outputs either svm or vmx (depending on whether you have Intel or AMD hardware) then your CPU supports virtualization. I'm working on a host machine called chicken, which has a logical volume called vg_chicken0. All vservers on chicken operate on a root filesystem that is backed by their own logical volume. In this post, I'll describe the steps to convert the vserver hobo (which operates on a filesystem mounted on the host in /var/lib/vservers/hobo and is backed by the logical volume called vg_chicken0-hobo_root). Both chicken and hobo are running debian squeeze. vservers don't have a kernel installed or grub. KVM virtual servers need both. I was hoping I could simply enter the vserver, install both a kernal and grub and be ready to go. However, grub installation will fail miserably because grub can't figure out how to install on the underlying disk (which is hidden from the vserver). Next, I tried launching a kvm instance, passing a debirf generated ISO with the -c (cdrom) option. However, grub recognized that it was being installed onto a device that did not have a partition table (the logical volume was directly formatted with a file system). So, since I had disk space to spare, I created a new logical volume:

lvcreate --size 5GB --name hobo_root_new vg_chicken0

I then added a gpt partition table (why not prepare for the coming 2TB disks?) and created two partitions. One partition for grub2 and one for everything else:

parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new mklabel gpt
parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new unit s mkpart biosboot 2048 4095 
parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new set 1 bios_grub on 
parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new unit s mkpart primary 4096

When prompted for the end of the last partition, choose: -1 and accept the adjustment. I had to eyeball cat /proc/partitions to figure out which dm device was the second partition (dm-19). I then created a file system:

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/dm-19

Mounted it:

mount /dev/dm-19 /mnt

And rsync'ed the data:

rsync -a /var/lib/vservers/hobo/ /mnt/

With the data in place, I chroot'ed and installed the packages I needed. When prompted, I chose not to install grub to the disk, because I wanted to wait until I had an environment in which the proper disk would be available to grub as it will when the virtual server boots (see below):

chroot /mnt
mount /proc
aptitude install linux-image-2.6-amd64 grub2
umount /proc
exit

Then, I cleaned up:

umount /mnt
umount /var/lib/vservers/hobo
lvremove vg_chicken0/hobo_root
lvrename vg_chicken0/hobo_root_new hobo_root
dmsetup remove /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_newp1
dmsetup remove /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_newp2
kpartx -d /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root

And I removed it from /etc/fstab. Next, I created a new kvm virtual server, using the disk /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root and passing a debirf cd image with -c: virt-install --name hobo --ram 512 --disk /dev/mapper/vgchicken0-hoboroot -c /usr/local/share/debian/ISOs/debirf-rescuesqueeze2.6.32-5-vserver-amd64.iso After logging in, I installed grub2 (aptitude update; aptitude install grub2) and then I installed grub:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/
grub-install --no-floppy --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

After running grub-install, edit /mnt/boot/grub/device.map so it reads:

(hd0) /dev/sda

Then, rerun grub-install command. I tried generating the grub.cfg file, but got an error message indicating that grub-probe would not detect the device providing / (because I was running on a ram file system from debirf). I added the following to /mnt/etc/fstab:

/dev/sda2  /     ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
proc       /proc proc defaults          0 0

And then re-generate the initrd image:

chroot /mnt
mount /proc
update-initramfs -u

So, I rebooted the virtual machine by typing:

exit
reboot

This dropped me into a grub shell. I manually typed:

root (hd0,gpt2)
linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 ro
initrd /initrd.img
boot

Once booted, I logged in a completed the task with:

update-grub

I discovered another awesome monthly event. This time it was Sci-fi Burlesque. I got a couple pictures, but unfortunately, I didn't get a good picture of the storm trooper. Nothing says awesome like tribbles, storm troopers and burlesque!

The previous interesting event was Bawdy Storytelling.

(... achieve Debian world domination without endorsing Facebook) Yes Raphael, we can.
Nobody said it would have been easy, to reach Total World Domination endorsing Free Software only, but that's not a reason to stop trying. I've recently stumbled upon a very nice article by Benjamin Mako Hill, titled Free Software Needs Free Tools, which I believe it's the best possible commentary to the proposal of having an official Debian Facebook page. Of course there is nothing wrong in having non-official, or let's call them "fan" pages, about Debian on Facebook. As a matter of fact we already have one, as you point out. And I also agree that it would be better to know who is behind that page. Individuals, including Debian Developers, are obviously free to use whatever media they please to spread the cause of Debian. After all, as individuals, each of us decide upon her own personal trade-offs (for instance, a trade-off of mine is to have both identi.ca and twitter accounts and to post only to the former with forwarding to the latter). There is no way to have an official Debian Facebook page and pretend that we are not, de facto, endorsing Facebook. That's why I believe having official Debian presence on Facebook, or on any other non Free Software platform, will just weaken our cause. It will send out the message that Free Software it's something which is good for others to use, but not necessarily for Debian as a project. That does not mean that we live under a rock and that we consider social networks useless to promote the Debian cause. It just mean that we should be picky in choosing social networks that respect our Free Software principles, as we are picky in choosing licenses that are DSFG-free. For instance, I'm glad to mention here that the Debian publicity team has recently obtained access to http://identi.ca/debian and will start using it soon. Subscribe! PS This post also gives me a chance to comment on a so called "community page" of mine on Facebook. As I've briefly commented a few days ago I've nothing to do with that page. TTBOMK its content is just automatically injected from Wikipedia. The "Stefano Zacchiroli is on Facebook" claim on the upper left is true only in the sense that there are other people with my name on Facebook. IANAL, but such a claim (not the page in itself) will probably be considered an abusive advertisement in many countries around the world. update: re-word the identi.ca/debian paragraph, to better blend with surrounding text
update: mention "Debian" in heading

After a semi-recent thread on debian-devel, I poked around and realized that I'd never actually gotten around to formally announcing the release of source code for Selectricity, a piece of web-based election software designed to allow for preferential decision-making and to provide "election machinery for the masses." Selectricity is useful for a range of decisions but it targets all those quick little decisions that we might want to decide preferentially but where running a vote would be overkill. Things were delayed through a drawn out set of negotiations with the MIT Technology Licensing Office over how to release the code under a free software license of my choosing. I was swamped when things finally came through. Over time, I managed to forget that I never did a formal announcement, never setup a mailing list, and never did all those things that I have tried to teach other people in the Free Software Project Management HOWTO. Code just sort of appeared on my website under the GNU Affero General Public License. It was until the debian-devel thread that I remembered I'd never made a formal announcement. Sorry about that! The git repository has been online and accessible through searches for more than a year now. Most folks who wanted the code seem to have been able to find it there. Indeed, a number of people have set up their own instances and a few have submitted patches to the code! But more visibility for the source means more empowered users, more visibility for free software, and more developers. So I've shipped all the code into a project in Gitorious (its like GitHub, except free), announced things on the Selectricity Blog, changed the Selectricity footer of to include a prominent link to the source. I've also created a mailing list. The Gitorious project page includes a wiki. I also want to mention this all here because the attention of the current development team seems mostly to have moved on to other projects. The current team seems able to keep the hosted version up and running, and even gets around to little improvements now and then, but there's definitely room for new life and new leadership. There are some nearly-complete and "complete minus further testing" features in the development tree that might provide low hanging fruit for folks interested in elections and decision-making who might want to get involved in Selectricity development. If you're interested and know (or want to learn) Rails, feel free to check out the code, introduce yourself on the list or contact team@selectricity.org to coordinate.

I finally finished an article I've had in one form or another for years about on the use of proprietary tools in the creation of free software. From BitKeeper to SourceForge to Google Code to GitHub, non-free tools and services have played an important role in free software development over the past decade and, I argue, continue to create a number of important, if sometimes subtle, problems for our community. The article was published in the Spring 2010 FSF Bulletin which was mailed to all FSF associate members. I've also posted the article on my website and in PDF form as well.

Due to a variety of people and places we want to see, Mika and I have regrouped around a more ambitious travel schedule in Italy for the next week or so. Our new plan is:

• August 23-27: Florence
• August 27-29: Verona
• August 29-31: Bologna
• August 31-September 1: Siena
• September 1-3: Rome

I know we'll have an organized LUG meeting in Siena. The rest of the period is a little more open. As always, if other free software, wikimedian, or like-minded folks are around and would like to meet up in any of those places, don't hesitate to get in contact. In related news, inspired by Florence and by Mika's domo-kun purse, I made a duomo-kun today.

Since I didn t actually come home from Debconf, but instead took a further week s holiday and lazed around by the beach, I haven t sat down to write anything about it yet. Most importantly, I should say thank you to Joey Hess, Steve McIntyre and Stefano Zacchiroli for arranging the Debconf Newbies programme, without which I would have been stuck at work watching the videos again (though this does have the advantage of seeing three talks at once). Every year I am astounded at the generosity of certain companies who sponsor the conference, since I ve experienced for myself the difficulty of trying to put a corporate price on free software even more so to specifically sponsor newbies, who by definition probably aren t as active in ways that interest sponsors than more established developers. Right up to the day I flew I was nervous (as in any social situation) at meeting so many new people in one go, on my own, and long way from home after all, it s not really easy to back out and go home after that But in fact, everybody I met was warm and friendly, and very supportive in all sorts of ways. I got to see and hear many talks; in the first two days alone:

• Supporting Debian machines for friends and family
• Debian at a large Dutch university
• Why is GNU/Linux Like a Player Piano?
• Bits from the DPL
• Packaging Python modules and applications
• The Unity desktop environment
• Collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu

And of course social events, like Cheese and Wine, Keysigning (handy for putting faces to names), many nights in the third hacklab, a day trip to Coney Island, a privileged viewing of the most nerdy organ in the world, and a trip up the Empire State building: The campus was ideally suited to such a conference, and apart from the mugginess we had excellent weather. I discovered that I rather enjoy watching baseball and that one should repeat the application of sunblock after paddling. But what I enjoyed most of all was being in the same area as so many eminent Debian people, and being so inspired by them to be even more involved technically and socially. I hope to see you all again soon!
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Today I bought a box of fries from The Lord of the Fries [1]. I bought it from their new stand at Flinders St station because I was going past and saw no queue. In the past I had considered buying from their store on Elizabeth St but the queues were too long. The fries were nice probably among the best fries that I ve had from local fish and chip shops. Way better than any other fries that you can find in the center of Melbourne. The range of sauces is quite good if you like that thing (I just like vinegar on mine). However it should be noted that the quantity of chips that you would get for the same price at a local fish and chip shop is usually a lot greater. Overall I was a bit disappointed, sure it s nice to have someone hand-cut fresh potatoes and to actually care about making a quality product. But when compared to the other options for relatively fast food in the CBD it didn t seem that great to me. I m never going to join a queue that has more than 20 people to buy them! But I probably will buy from them on occasion if they don t have big queues. It seems to me that the best thing that they have done is to create a strong commitment to food quality and document it on their web site. I hope that this will inspire other fast-food companies to do the same thing and result in an overall increase in the food quality. On a related note Jamie Oliver has an IDEO project running with the aim of getting kids into fresh food [2].

• [1] http://www.lordofthefries.com.au/
• [2] http://blog.ted.com/2010/08/02/help-jamie-oliver-gets-kids-into-fresh-food-with-openideo/

I've got a pretty packed August. I just wrapped the Open and User Innovation Conference at MIT -- the academic conference on user and open innovation connected to my research. I organized the program and was MC for the 120+(!) talks and research updates on the program so it's a huge relief to see it come off successfully. On Thursday, August 5th (at 14:30 UTC) I'll be giving a talk on antifeatures at DebConf (the Annual Debian conference). It was accidentally listed as "Revealing Errors" until a few minutes ago -- sorry about that! It will be streamed live (details on the DC site) for those outside of New York City who might want to follow it. As soon as DebConf is done on August 8th, I'm going to head to Kor ula in Croatia to relax, read, and hopefully get a bit of research done, before I head off to Outlaws and Inlaws in Split on the 19th, a sort of piracy and (vs?) free software summit put on by mi2 connected to the recurring Nothing Will Happen where, from what I hear, quite a lot does. I'm going to have to leave Nothing Will Happen a little early to head to FrOSCon on the 21st where I'll be doing an antifeatures keynote again on the 22nd. I tend not to like to do the same talk too many times, or for more than a year, so this might be one of the last times I present on antifeatures in this form. After that, I'm going to head to Italy where I'll be between the 23rd and the 3rd of September. I'll fly and in and out of Rome and plan to spend some time in Rome, Tuscany, and Florence, but don't have a lot of set plans and might travel to Bologna or elsewhere. My schedule is pretty open. As always, I'm interested in meeting up for coffee or a drink with like-minded hackers, Wikipedians, researchers, activists, etc. If folks are interested in organizing talks or presentations, that sounds fun too. I'm keeping a brief description of my schedule updated alongside a bunch of ways to get in touch with me on my contact page. Don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Over the last couple years, I have begun teaching. At first just a reading group or seminar with a handful of attendees. Last term I helped teach two large lecture classes. I know that, compared to some of my colleagues, I spend an enormous amount of time assessing and evaluating students' assignments. I try very hard to give detailed, substantive, feedback on each piece of student work. At the end of the day, however -- at my school at least -- there's always a grade. For someone who went well out of his way to go to a college with no grades, there's a tragic irony to the whole situation: I think grades mean little and are often worth much less. Today I am forced to to inflict them on people who, almost universally, do not.

I had planned long for this Debconf and with the experience from the previous times I did all I could to reach one goal minimise stress. I think I got it right this time. First of all I got my company (Accenture) pay for the whole thing, so I did not have to worry about sponsorship queue (but instead I must gather and deliver them back some knowledge gained from the conference should be easy). I also managed to get a direct flight there is a weekly flight Tashkent-Riga-New York on Sundays and I got a ticket for that both ways. This took many hours off the travel time and reduced the stress a ton. Then I also did all the prudent travelling things: mostly reading the New York page on Wikitravel. This told me (among other things) what metro line to take to get the best view of the city. And for luggage I took a backpack (for the laptop and walking around) and a roller (for the clothes). I learned a lot from the Up in the air movie, it really teaches one how to take stress out of travel. This went very well in the beginning I took a bus to the airport early, checked in, breezed trough security and then waited and waited. The boarding only started half an hour after we were scheduled to depart. But I can not complain, because the flight attendant called my name (among a few others) just before boarding and changed my ticket I was bumped up to business class . It has been many years since I ve flown a regular (non-budget) airline and now first time ever in the business class! We got regular class meals, but at least we got to sit in the big chairs with lots of leg room. It was great! I bought a paper book (from Charles Stross) to read during the flight, because that is the only thing you can do during take-off and landing and I had some stuff to listen to in my iPhone. I tried sleeping and I think I managed to kill a couple hours that way too. It sure helped combat jet lag later on. When I arrived, I had my immigration and customs forms filled out. Latvia is on the USA Visa Waiver program, so I just had to fill out a form online prior to the trip to get a permission to enter USA. I only had one printout of the Waiver confirmation page and my airline took that before giving me a boarding pass, so I had no paper copy to give to the guy at the USA border, but he did not even ask for it he only took the two forms I filled out, scanned my passport, took my fingerprints (all fingers) and a photo. Then he gave me back the customs for (stamped) and I could go get my luggage. After that it was just a matter of walking trough customs and giving the customs official the pre-filled and stamped customs form. I was not stopped further. The AirTrain was a bit confusing you just get on the AirTrain and go where you need to go, you actually pay at the place where AirTrain connects to metro, so when you are coming from the airport you are actually paying ($5) when you are exiting the AirTrain system. There are plenty of AirTrain people that will give you an AirTrain ticked for $5 cash right there or you can use a machine to get it (where you can also pay with a card). The machines also take AmEx, but you must know the PIN code, if your don t know the PIN of you AmEx card (like I don t know the PIN of my corporate AmEx) you can only buy MetroCards at news stands, but there you will not find the unlimited ride tickets only 5 or 10 ride tickets are available. Next I screwed up a bit and thus got a bit lost in the New York metro system. The Wikitravel recommends to take the AirTrain to Jamaica station and from there take J or Z line into the city for the best views. I went to Jamaica and got into the first metro train that came on to the platform. Unfortunately, that was the E line train and it does not cross with J or Z lines after that, so I was stuck. To complicate the situation E line is under repair, so after a few stops the trains diverted to the F line and I had to scramble to figure out where to get out to get to the 1 line where Columbia University is. I ended up spending more than an hour in the metro, but I got there in the end. So I emerge from the 116th street metro station directly in front of the campus entrance gate and it starts raining. A thunderstorm swept across New York as soon as I stepped outside the metro station, so I took shelter a the side of the building. It kept raining. After a few minutes decided that I don t want to wait any more, so I put all my electronics into my backpack and went towards the dorm where my room was. The rain was warm, people around me were playing and running around in the wet grass, it was fun. The guard showed me where to go to check in. It was really simple sign here, here is you magnetic stripe key, have fun. And the room was just as spartan bed, desk, chair, closet, bathroom and a large fan under the window. The first night I did not know that I could actually turn that fan down, so I slept to the sound of full fan blasting, much like on the airplane. The dorm looks ancient it looks like it was build in the 60s and never changed since then. I mean, I ve lived in worse places, but people would at least change wall sockets or faucets or ceiling paint every other decade or so. The newest things here were the magnetic locks on the doors and a TV and a mini fridge in the hallway. After dropping my things I went off to the Mudd building across the campus to check in with people in the hacklab. It was just starting to take shape, but many great and familiar people were already there. It was like walking into a family home same warm welcome smiles and that great feel of belonging to the group. After I quick chat I went off downtown. The plan was that I left my old Canon 400D camera back at home and that I would buy a new Canon 550D here in New York on arrival. Unfortunately I underestimated the travel time on subway and by the time I got back downtown most shops where already closed. I got to checking out a Best Buy and was told there that they don t have 550D in stock. Next morning I went for a full scale search B&H Photo Video store, J&R Express, another BestBuy none of them had the Canon 550D (aka T2i) in stock in a body-only configuration. BestBuy had a few sets with the kit lens, but I did not want paying 100$ extra for something I already have. The last option was Adorama and I got lucky I nabbed the last 550D they had and it was body-only. Now I was back, with a camera in my hands and the Debconf10 could really begin!

Remember the one rc bug a days activities from Steinar and Zack? Well, maybe I won't make to one rc bug per day, but at least I could blog about some of my recent activities. Maybe it motivates some others? #553248 libnel-dev: missing-dependency-on-libc needed...
Trivial bug solved by adapting the depends-lines; uploaded.
#589344 missing symbols in library
Missing build depends; sponsored NMU by Davi Leal to delayed.
#582309 Links against libclamav
"solved" by disabling clamav support; uploaded to delayed 15.
#589819 Unmet Recommends on extremetuxracer-racer
Fixed typo in recommends (introduced by yours truly); uploaded.
#565805 FTBFS on kfreebsd-*: need to define type GLUTesselatorFunction
Applied patch by Felix Geyer; (doesn't help the release, package is experimental).
#568990 planetpenguin-racer-extras: Outdated; needs restructured and updated to be usefull
Upload fixed package prepared by Bertrand Marc.
#548084 aegir-provision: /etc/aegir/drushrc.php PHP error,
#548085 aegir-provision: /etc/aegir and /etc/aegir/drushrc.php file permissions
and unreported piuparts problem Uploaded to delayed.
#569177 kernel-patch-nfs-ngroups: doesn't apply anymore
Added an updated version of the patch; uploaded.
#580120 mediatomb allows anyone to browse and export the whole filesystem
Disabled user interface in configuration file; uploaded to delayed.
#588554 jamin: Ships files in /usr/lib64/
Patched configure-script to install to the correct place; with maintainers permission uploaded without delay.
#576901 init.d script fails under Squeeze with insserv due to lack of run level definitions
Updated LSB header of init script same was as upstream did in recent version; uploaded to delayed (got thanks from the maintainer for that).
#574624 dibbler-client: after removing package with dselect impossible to purge it.
Verified fix by Edward Welbourne and uploaded to delayed.
#586057 havp 0.91-1.1~volatile1 still haven't show up in lenny-volatile yet.
Seems to have been an infrastructure hick up, which got solved in the meantime. Closed without upload.
#518227 hplip: text missing at the bottom of a page on HP DJ 5550
Discussed with release team, severity got lowered.
As you can see, finding fixable rc bugs is certainly possible. So please step in :) BTW: If you don't have upload rights yourself, but prepared an NMU / patch, feel free to ping me and I'll take a look and try to sponsor your NMU. Just ask!

We've got a fairly layered set of software that runs beneath our file systems: RAID1 followed by cryptsetup, followed by lvm. It works remarkably well. However, when it's time to do something like enlarge a partition or disk, it gets complicated. We have a server (hubert) that was running two 1 TB disks in a RAID1. We typically create two partitions: one small boot partition and one large partition the uses the rest of the available disk (with 2 TB disks we've added a third partition for grub). Last month I replaced one of the disks with a 2 TB disk, partitioned the new disk with similar a partition scheme (except that the "rest of the disk" partition was twice the size as the original one), and then added the new partitions to the RAID (mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sda1; mdadm /dev/md1 --add /dev/sda2). Yesterday, I replaced the 2nd 2 TB disks, and again added the new partitions. The result was a fairly painless transition from 1 to 2 TB disks with minimal downtime. The problem - though - is that we're not using all the disk space available, since md1, the RAID array that uses the "rest of the disk" partition, is only about 1 TB when it should be just under 2 TB. That problem was easy enough to solve by growing the RAID device with:

mdadm -G /dev/md1 -z max

It took a while, but eventually, running:

cat /proc/mdstat

And

cat /proc/partitions

Reported the right sizes for md1. After RAID, comes cryptsetup (/dev/md1 is the source device for md1_crypt). So, the next command was:

cryptsetup resize md1_crypt

In the output of:

cat /proc/partitions

I saw the change reflected in the dm-0 device. Since md1_crypt is used as the physical volume for a volume group, the next step was to resize the physical volume:

pvresize /dev/dm-0

This change was reflected with:

pvs

Now, the command:

vgs

Displayed a full 931 GB available that wasn't there before. Next up: resizing the logical volume:

lvresize --size 1700GB vg_hubert0/blanco_members

And, last but not least, was the file system:

 resize2fs /dev/mapper/vg_hubert0-blanco_members

See also dkg's article on resizing crypt partitions.

Today I started to tell a friend about something from dinner the night before. Except that she was at the dinner. And sitting at the same table! Even when prompted, I couldn't really remember! This does not warrant a blog post. Anybody who knows me well knows that my memory for these kinds of more mundane details is pretty porous. This kind of thing happens all the time. I'm writing this so that when I'm much older, and still forgetting things all the time, folks can use this as a reference point before concluding that senility is setting in. I'm afraid that everyone else will forget my forgetfulness!

I have a lot of papers lying around. I now try to keep them organized, but I haven't got through the back log of when I didn't organize them. Sometimes I come across stuff that I'm happy I had in the pile. The following was my attempt at a valedictorian speech for the 2005 Math class at the University of Waterloo. I was not the valedictorian, but I tried, and thus have a speech.

Ladies, Gentlemen, Doctors and children of all ages. Thank you for spending our last day at Waterloo, here with us. I am one of those people who won't be staying here after day, but somehow I was still chosen to be the valedictorian. So, when I was asked to be the valedictorian by some friends of mine, I was thrilled. I also though I could do a good job, heck, I got my degree in CS, therefore, I can do anything. So, I accepted the nomination. I looked at the nomination form and didn't find any hints on what to talk about. At this point I realized that this speech may be a little underspecified. In fact, there was no specification at all.

I gathered what I could from the form, i.e. a speech had to be written by, and performed on the 18th of June 2005. Skip forward a few weeks, I'd accomplished nothing more than vague thoughts on what to talk about, then I got an email. All potential speeches had to be presented on the 6th of April 2005 (the deadline had moved up, and still no specification). However, a performance objective was given in that email -- each speech must be completed in 5 minutes. Given that I don't have a spec, I can only hope no one else has one.

What follows is my implementation of this unknown specification.

Another cycle in our lives is over. We are finished our latest round of education. This time from the University of Waterloo, in some Math program. Many of us have changed significantly while we've been here, but we are still the same people. We know we are older, we can guess that we are wiser, and we are certainly more educated. So, here is a quick tour of my cycle through Waterloo.

When I got here back in September 2000, I was amazed at how many smart people could be put together in one small place. I am actually still amazed by all the smart people here. I simply happen to know a bit more about some of these people and the amazing things they have done. With all these smart people here, I even had to do homework to keep up.

Skip forward to second year. Second year is when the university decided there is no more room for me in residence. In fact, they do that to almost all second year students. So, I found a sleezy place to live off-campus and started discovering what life is like outside the university bubble. For example, there are stores not in the plaza. There are a couple malls, a bus station, and a train station.

By third year Waterloo had become home despite working in two other cities and growing up on the other side of Toronto. I no longer had to fear being kicked out of CS since I had enough courses with good marks racked up that my cumulative average wouldn't drop too low unless I started failing, which would have been a bad thing to do.

In fourth year, I could see the end in sight. Grad school applications needed to be done pronto and some interesting job prospects lured me away from yet more years of school. Co-op didn't help keep me in school, I enjoyed the working world. I know there are others that used co-op to find that the working world wasn't for them. I expect those people to be in some school for a good long time.

Now we are at the end, and the cycle is complete. I've been across the country, lived over in sunny California, and biked through Scotland, but no where has compared to Waterloo, or the great people that make it such a wonderful place to be. I'm sad to go, as I'm sure many of you are, but I hope you are excited about the next step at the same time.

That was my 5 years, in a non-chronologically accurate order. But it's been even better to help and see people do amazing things. Small things, like getting a group of friends together to go get pints of Bubbletea. To large things like running frosh week for thousands of first year students.

Now that we have looked at the past, what about the future? One of the things I didn't wan to say during this speech is that "We are the future". What does that even mean? Are we useless now? I don't know what it means, it could even be partially true, but we are not useless. In fact our time is now! Among this graduating class are those who are doing cutting edge research. There are those we are already running their own companies. There are those who are already half-way through there plan to rule the world. There are even those of us who are simply going to help others do those things. So, we are not "the future", we are "the now".

Being "the now", (don't I sound like Dubya?) is one thing, but we should always be "the now". We can always make now be our time. We should do this because if we aren't the ones living happily and making the world a better place, in our own ways, then who is going to do it?

If nothing else, I really hope everyone lives happily. For me, I found if I can keep my hat then I can be happy. Well, I can be happy promoting "No Pants Day"!

DOWN WITH PANTS!!

At the end, I finally figured out the specification for this speech. It's simple: Remind people of the awesome things they have done here, the amazing people they shouldn't forget. Lastly, to convince people to keep doing the awesome things despite what might happen or what obstacles appear.

Thank you, I enjoyed being your VD today.

Many Open Source projects have and IRC # for developers. The NetSurf project is no different. During a discussion someone jokingly suggested that one contributor should be asked to take the FizzBuzz test. Can you guess what happened next?

First up was Rob Kendrick with the classic solution in C (his day job is as a support team lead which seems to make those programmers who cannot do this seem even more scary bad.)<iframe src="http://pastebin.com/embed_iframe.php?i=EaQ2414U" style="border:none;width:100%;height:200px;"></iframe><iframe src="http://pastebin.com/embed_iframe.php?i=cYY0YDYM" style="border:none;width:100%;height:220px;"></iframe>

It s pretty off topic for my blog since I usually only blog about technical stuff. But this is just great. Real life people having a real look at concerts of prominent and not-so-prominent musicians. And it s all in German which is a nice thing since most of such stuff I have to find on English web sites (except the obvious German big press influence). Made me notice I missed the concert of Jamie Cullum of course. But the article is quite nice and I definitely enjoy reading more of those. Have a look if you re as keen on music as I am, or not. :)