My flights: ORY->MAD 2008-08-07 21:10 -> 2008-08-07 23:05 Air Europa
MAD->EZE 2008-08-08 00:55 -> 2008-08-08 09:20 Air Europa EZE->MAD 2008-08-17 12:00 -> 2008-08-18 05:10 Air Europa
MAD->ORY 2008-08-18 07:50 -> 2008-08-18 09:50 Air Europa (ORY is Paris' second airport, which has most of the flights to Spain) So, I apparently share the schedule and route with Noodles but not the airline (he's probably using Iberia). I'll probably try to gather with him to take the bus to Mar del Plata, though. In case someone flies the same day on Air Europa (should be people coming from France, UK, Hungary, Czech Rep., Poland, Italy or Israel...these are connections of Air Europa inside Europe to bring ppl in Madrid, which is their hub), get in touch with me. And, in any case, see you in Mar del Plata.

The serial port is still the way to access network components out of band. It is slow, but reliable, and remarkably well standardized. It does not have technical whiz-bangs that can fail when one needs things to just work. That makes it the natural way to access critical infrastructure and still being sure that this access vector still works when most other things are down. Every communication link has two sides, so there is a market for devices with a network link and a bigger number of serial ports to connect the actual devices to. Commercial vendors have a broad choice of serial console servers. Most of them, especially the small products with five to ten ports, are quite expensive, so I have been investigating how do build a serial console server with el cheapo hardware. USB comes to mind here, of course. The hardware side is actually quite easy: A seven-port USB hub, and seven USB-to-serial adaptors (using the widely-deployed Prolific PL2303) are easily purchased for well below a hundred Euros, and naively connected. In my test setup, connected to the hp compaq nc8000 that my blog readers should know only too well by now, the hub does not even need to have its power supply connected. The notebook can power the hub and the seven adaptors just fine. When the UMTS card is plugged in, the ttyUSBx device nodes appear in the order of plugging in the devices. When the system is booted, the order is not very predictable, so one needs - again - udev to give predictable device node names. udevinfo is an important tool to obtain the data set of an USB device which is available to match a device and to act appropriately when it is connected. udevinfo sorts the devices into a tree and shows the relationship of the devices, which device is “behind” which other device from the system’s point of view. udevinfo’s output starts at the leaf of the device tree and shows the information for each node up the tree until its root is reached. One pitfall is that one can only match against the leaf and _one_ other node more up the tree. So you cannot do matches like “the pl2303-based device connected to port 3 on hub 2-3 will be designated USBserial3”. If you try this, your rule will silently be ignored. This is a major turn-off in udev’s implementation. I didn’t try it on sid, but etch definetely shows this behavior. So one can only match like “the tty on the USB subsystem connected to port 3 on hub 2-3 will be designated USBserial3”, but that’s probably as good as it’ll get. The cause for my hub having only seven ports clearly shows itself when one looks at the udevinfo outputs of the fully equipped USB hub: The adapters are connected to ports 1, 2, 3, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4. The seven-port hub is actually two four-port hubs in a single case, with the second one connected to the first one’s port 4. This reflects itself, of course, in the udev rules necessary to address the adapters by the hub port they’re plugged in:

SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.1”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial1”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.2”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial2”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.3”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial3”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.4.1”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial4”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.4.2”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial5”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.4.3”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial6”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.4.4”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial7”

These rules will only work for a similary structured hub that is directly connected to the notebook. If there are more hubs in between the “final” hub and the host, the address matched against in the KERNELS matches are going to have a different structure. In the test setup, the first two parts of the address needed to be wildcarded since these addresses keep changing when the host is booted or the hub plugged out and in. So I guess that these udev rules are probably going to fail miserably when more hubs and/or USB-to-serial adaptors are connected. But if one does not do too many changes, things are just fine, and it is possible to put numbers on the USB hub ports and be sure that the USB-to-serial adaptor connected to port 4 is going to be /dev/USBserial4 in the host system. I tried plugging in and out the adaptors in random order, unplugged and plugged the hub itself, booted the host, and the relationship between the port and the device node was stable. In the test environment, I only tested one adapter at a time, but all these tests were successful as well. I guess that many more of these adaptors will eventually need a powered USB hub, but with seven adaptors on a single hub, the power from the USB host is sufficient to live without extra power on the hub. And, I guess, there is some hard limit for the number of USB adapters being used, and some soft limit when managing the ports and adapters is going to get harder. But, I think that a site in need of more than, say, sixteen serial ports on the console server can afford a “real” console server from one of the major vendors, which can be accessed via ethernet, UMTS, ISDN and whatever you can think of. This concludes the hardware part of my serial console server for the poor. Tomorrow, I’ll blog about the software side needed on the host to allow the serial ports to be accessed from the network while still being reasonably secure. The next article will involve ssh, /etc/passwd shells, /etc/shells, a small perl script, ser2net and telnet. And, shell escape is the cue word for grey hairs sprouting on my head.

(How I get TV) The British Broadcasting Corporation, the largest UK public service broadcaster, is seen as a slow lumbering beast and a bit clueless about technology, as you can see from the comment when I wrote about Click: Free=beer and facebook-flaming recently. I think that's a pretty typical view. For example, the BBC has recently helped to launch Freesat which is good in some ways (free-to-air and maybe more standards-based than Sky) but still publishes half-truths like

"Installing a satellite dish is a job for professionals"

(On balance, it's no harder than installing most TV aerials, in my opinion, but remember you get no warranty on DIY.) It's pretty much the same situation online, which is why stories like The BBC and innovation [DavePress] and Good news for websites - BBC told to link out more! continue to be news, nearly 12 years after the BBC's website launched. (Source) One of the few areas where BBC triumphs is probably news-gathering, picking up stories that are unpopular with both business and government, like BBC NEWS: Towns triumph in broadband tests which follows the Experts Say Ofcom Wrong About Rural Broadband storm online. I recently helped The Doon of May team look into internet connectivity and I was surprised how bad it was in their location: a bit of attention from BBC News is most welcome. If you'd like to try receiving the BBC - or some other national broadcasters in Europe - by satellite, I'm currently taking Questions About Cycling on Satellite over on my Cycling Fans blog.

When I moved in Hungary in 2006, I started a direct marketing company. In fact, it is the local local branch of an Italian marketing company where I worked since 2003. The company is growing very slowly: we faced a lot of issues with the local market (I'll probably talk about this topic in another post) and only in the last months things started going on the right path.

I still remember the old days when I spent the whole working day alone, in the office, struggling to find the good motivation to work on something which almost everybody around me considered a failure even before starting. I always considered my company as a family, where trust and respect are the glue for the team members. I remember the old times when Aron, my first employee and now business partner, started learning the internals of the direct marketing: he trusted me, sharing with me the duties of starting up the company.  Looking back I feel proud of what we did and more conscious about what we can do in the future.

Growing also means enlarging the team. To say the truth, I didn't expect to have so many problems looking for new people to add to our team: I interviewed a lot of people for our "python programmer" position, spending a lot of time and energy. I know that living in Hungary also means dealing with a local, small, atypical environment, but we offer the possibility to learn and develop IT and non-IT skills in a young, international environment.

We finally found an interesting guy, with PHP experiences but willing to learn Python. He told us that he could leave his job by the 16th of June, and he could work with us part-time till that date. Everything worked fine for three weeks then, suddenly, he disappeared. For one week, his mobile phone rang, but nobody picked up the line. No answer to e-mails, IRC, MSN or any other communication channel. I was worried, I hoped he was fine somewhere. This morning he called Aron telling him that he was sick, he had an issue with his eye. He visited a lot of doctors. He was busy. So busy that he couldn't call us to tell us so. For one week. After he started working with us four weeks ago. What is more annoying is that he didn't appear worried about his position, about our project, about our company. If I'd have quit from my job, I'd be very very worried about my new employer who is looking for me for one whole week without being able to reach me.

We are a growing company based on a small team, without a strict organigram and a horizontal structure. I trust my workmates, I trust them so much to put in their hands my investments, my reputation, my customers. The best team members knows that errors in this phase (eg. lost customers) can influence the company future and their job position

In this case, I gave out trust, but I didn't get back respect. I'm starting to think that being friendly and building a collaborative environment, a horizontal structure is not helping but damaging the company. Maybe if I'd be a boss with strong authority, then people wouldn't behave in this way.

And yes, of course, the problem with the eye was just an excuse.

[Attention] Personal content follows. If you got to this post expecting technical or organizational content, go ahead and skip it.
Sometimes, when you don't want something to happen... You don't even talk about it. Sometimes you try hard not even to think about it - Well, it wasn't so in this case, as it has been a long time devoted to... Thinking, thinking a lot.
The important thing is that I feel there is a fact I should have shared with the people I consider close to me. And some people do know it, of course, but it has been hardest for me to share this with who I consider my closest friends - maybe out of hope that the result will be something different?
Anyway... the fact is I have been living on my own for the last two months. Nadezhda and I decided to take a three month period to... Decide what comes next. And most of the time since this strange period began has been quite decent... But the last week or so has been... A bit different. I have been much more... introspective. Maybe it could be seen as more depressive, more introverted.
So, what does this mean? Do I have my mind clear on what to do? No. Not by far. But I am working on finding my feelings and my reality, full-time. I might be under-achieving both in my Real-Life works and in Debian - please cope with me. There is a reason for it, as you now see.
And, no, this post is not aiming at getting sympathy and hugs... It is just... Because I need to finally share this thing I am going through with. Think of it as finally stepping out of the closet, more as a step for myself than for anything else... A significant share of who I consider dear to me, even though we share no contact besides mailing lists I have mostly abandoned and two cathartic and beautiful (and, of course, technically productive!) weeks a year, lives in different timezones and countries - I do hope to have stabilized on either of the two possible realities by the time I meet my Debian fellows. As for my Mexican friends following my life by this blog... Well, just excuse me for not speaking out face to face, as this should have been done.
Comments intentionally closed. Want to say something? Just think it hard enough, it will get to its destination ;-)

Using GNOME Network Manager is a neat way to connect to wireless or virtual private networks from a laptop running Debian Lenny, Sid, Etch with Backports or any of the *buntu distributions. You can control everything from the system tray. But not all window managers have a system tray. And with some window managers it’s not obvious how to make them work with one of those lean third party trays and panels. Especially my favourite window manager for small displays as on the EeePC – ratpoison – insolently puts any panel or tray in the middle of the screen by default. It took me a moment to find out how to make ratpoison work with my favourite third party system tray trayer (which can handle transparency and is only a system tray, no taskbar). First we need to make ratpoison ignore the trayer on the one hand and and reserve space for it on the screen. Fiddling around with preconfigured frames didn’t work well and the following way is also more straight forward:

1. trayer always has “panel” as window title, so adding the following line to your .ratpoisonrc makes ratpoison ignore trayer:

   unmanage panel

2. Now all windows overlap the trayer, so we need to configure the space for it. Trayer in the default configuration shows up at the bottom and has a height of 26 pixels, so we tell ratpoison to add a padding of 26 pixels at the bottom of the screen by adding the following line to the .ratpoisonrc:

   set padding 0 0 0 26

Now we are confronted with the problem that these settings only apply to new windows, not ones which were already running when ratpoison starts. I usually start my X session using an .xinitrc or an .Xsession which calls the window manager using exec at the end. We can start the trayer later though by spawning a subshell in the background with a sleep at the beginning. Also the Network Manager applet (nm-applet) can be started that way. In my case the end of the .Xsession looks like this:

( sleep 1; \
  trayer --align right --edge bottom --distance 0 \
	 --expand true \
	 --transparent true --alpha 128 --tint 0 \
	 --SetDockType true --SetPartialStrut true & 
  nm-applet & ) &
exec ratpoison

The result could look like this: The other programs in the system tray are from right to left: nm-applet (GNOME Network Manager), Twitux (GTK Twitter Client), Audacious, Opera, Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM), Icedove (unbranded Mozilla Thunderbird). The clock on the bottom left is from the package osdclock. Oh, and although I’m fine with trayer: if anybody knows a possibility to control the GNOME Network Manager without the need for a system tray, I would be very happy if you could tell me. :-)

I ogled with an ASUS EeePC since it was announced, but didn’t want to order one abroad. So I waited until they became available in Switzerland. Digitec is the official EeePC importer for Switzerland and seeems also to be the moving power for yet to come the Swiss localisation of the EeePC. But initially they only offered imported EeePCs with German keyboard layout, but since I really got used to the US layout, I didn’t want to buy ay new laptops or keyboards with German layout. When asking them about US layouts they told me they won’t import from the US and that their competitor Steg Computer is importing US models. But I wasn’t comfortable with Steg and EeePCs also were more expensive there, so I hesitated ordering at Steg. So it was quite unexpected for me when US models showed up on digitec’s website. (Interestingly I never received any mail from their advertised EeePC newsletter, not even when they added 2G models t their repertoire.) So at the end of March (and therefore later as most other geeks ;-) I ordered an ASUS EeePC at digitec. For me, white laptops look like Macs (and Macs are for sissies or masochists ;-) — so I had no problems to decide that I want a black EeePC with US keyboard layout. 2G was to small for my purposes (and also not that much cheaper) and 8G not available. So I went with the 4G, since Debian doesn’t need so much space if you choose the right packages (i.e. neither or at least not that much of GNOME or KDE ;-). I preferred the 4G over the 4G Surf because of the bigger battery capacity (and not because of the webcam which I consider funny but useless:-). Initially the delivery date was set the 28th of March. Then it was subsequently set to “beginning of April”, “mid of April”, “end of April” and “beginning of May”. It finally arrived on 8th of May. In the meanwhile there were reports that even the 4G has been equipped with the smaller battery of the 4G Surf because of some battery shortage after some battery plant burnt down. But fortunately the delivery problems with black 4G US models doesn’t seem to have its reason there and my 4G has a 5200 mAh battery (at least according to its label and ACPI). I also ordered a 2 GB bar of Corsair ValueSelect RAM so that I can pump up the RAM of my EeePC by factor four (for about 10% of the price of the EeePC itself) resulting in having half as much RAM as disk space. Well, I guess, I won’t do suspend to disk in that configuration… ;-) The original Xandros based Linux only noticed 1 GB of the installed 2 GB as already noted on many other places in the web. But that doesn’t really matter, since it only lasted until I found out how to restore it from DVD in case I want to sell the EeePC later (e.g. for getting the successor). It’s fine for novices, but Linuxes feel strange if you can’t even get a console or a terminal with a command line. ;-) The Debian EeePC installer worked fine except that it argued over a checksum error on our mirror which wasn’t reproducable after the installation anymore. I’ve chosen the EeePC to be my first (nearly) pure Lenny installation — compared to the three machines running Sid (i386, amd64 and kfreebsd-i386). It though has a few packages from experimental (mostly xulrunner-1.9) installed. As window managers I have installed ratpoison, FLWM and FVWM. ratpoison — best described as screen for X (although you can’t detach and reattach) since it’s my personal preferences for being productive without big screen resolutions and flwm for a low-resource window manager which can be used intuitivly by both, geeks and non-geeks (and still doesn’t look like Windows at all ;-). And FVWM is installed because it’s my default window manager on all machines with bigger or multiple screens – to be able to compare it with my usual environment. As web browser I’ve got Opera as primary browser (as everywhere else, too) and Conkeror (the EeePC is the test-case for upcoming Debian package of Conkeror) as well as links2 and lynx on the (nearly) text-only side on it, although I need them seldomly. As office programs (as I would ever need some ;-) I’ve got AbiWord and Gnumeric installed since I already use a few GNOME applications (e.g. Network Manager, Twitux, etc.) and OpenOffice.org would take up 170 MB more disk space (then including OOo Draw and OOo Impress) and Siag Office is no more in Debian since years. (Initially I had OpenOffice.org installed instead of AbiWord and Gnumeric until I noticed that I need some of the GNOME libraries anyway.) I also decided that I will need LaTeX then and when so TeX Live also got its chunk of the 4 GB of disk space. I also have a bunch of games on the EeePC. Unfortunately there are a few games which don’t work well on the EeePC due to it’s resolution being smaller than 800x600, so I deinstalled them already again, e.g. I can’t play Cuyo on the EeePC but flobopuyo. Sauerbraten segfaults, but Doom (prboom with freedoom WADs) works fine. Further non-working games unfortunately include Battle of Wesnoth and XFrisk. Still, although quite some parts of GNOME and GNOME Office, TeX Live, ScummVM with Flight of the Amazon Queen and Beneath a Steel Sky, GNU Emacs 22, Iceweasel 3 (aka Mozilla Firefox 3), Icedove (aka Mozilla Thunderbird) and the Iceowl (aka Mozilla Sunbird) are installed, only 2.3 GB of the available hard disk space are used by the installation (i.e. without my home directory). Oh, and btw: Although except the very compact and a little bit wobbly keyboard the EeePC doesn’t feel really small to me (I’ve got quite small hands), but when I sat down in front of my 14” ThinkPad T61 after a day or two with EeePC, the T61, — especially screen and keyboard — felt huge as if it would be some 17” or even bigger notebook. ;-) OTOH I still think that a 1920×1200 (which means nearly four xterms in a row) resolution on a 14” notebook would be a good idea, especially compared to the 1440×900 (which means nearly three xterms in a row) my T61 has. ;-) Personal Resumée after one month Pro EeePC

• It’s geeky. If you show up with it, people want to lift it to see how much it weights and try the tiny keyboard. They’re surprised that 800x480 aren’t that small and that the performance isn’t that bad.
• Very compact and robust. With the T61 I always fear that its edges are too close to the the outside of my backpack and could be damaged that way.
• The price of course: CHF 499 at digitec (plus CHF 54 for the 2 GB RAM)
• Runs Linux ex factory. So yu don’t have to expect that many driver hassles.
• RAM upgrades are very straight forward and do not void the warranty. (BTW: The sticker over one of the screws which probably should prove the integrity can be removed and placed again easily… :-)
• The weight. 0.92 kg can be easily held wit one hand, also because of less leverage effect as with full-size laptops.
• The SSD despite it’s size. Being such lightweight you accelerate the EeePC unmindfully even when it runs. But it doesn’t matter, at least not to the hard disk. And it boots very fast, especially after the usage of insserv.
• Intergrated Ethernet network interface. (Hey, the MacBook Air hasn’t a builtin one, not even an external shipped with it! ;-)
• Three USB sockets (the MacBook Air has only one which is usually taken for the Ethernet network adaptor — Ok, with the EeePC usually one is taken for the Bluetooth dongle, but then are still two sockets left… ;-)
• Great contrast on the builtin screen.
• External VGA output. You have to configure X.org to make the virtual screen big enough (e.g. 2048×2048 instead of the default 800×800).
• Despite its size quite a lot of space for modifications inside the case. Especially a bluetooth case mode should be no big deal.

Contra EeePC

• The keyboard: keys smaller than usually (ok, wouldn’t work otherwise ;-), very wobbly, no precise contact depth (pressing Shift and Fn with one finger often doesn’t press Fn right), not all keys on the same plane, unusual offsets between the key rows (the number row has about half a key width offset to the left) or position of keys (I often hit Ins when I want Home, Del when I want Backspace or Fn when I want Ctrl, the ~ key is between Esc and F1, Up is between Slash and Right Shift, etc.)
• The position of the power button: It’s exactly where I want to put thumb when holding the EeePC solely with the right hand. And yes, I already accidentially switch it off several times because of that. For luck the button doesn’t work at all when the lid is closed, because you still can reach it easily while it’s closed.
• The mouse button(s): It only has two buttons which are one part you can press more to the left and more to the right side. And if you press it in the middle you randomly get either a left or a right click. You have to press it very hard to get both clicks at the same time. (e.g. to emulate a third middle button). Three separated mouse buttons would have been way better.
• It has (only) a touchpad. I definitely prefer thumbsticks as the ThinkPads have, but got used to it, though. I have seen worse touchpads, too.
• The noisy and not very precisely beared fan, which seems to strife its environment when the EeePC is being accelerated. Whih happens quite often because of its size and weight and because the SSD doesn’t mind acceleration. The fan does mind – and you hear it. :-(
• Some programs need minimum 800x600 resolution to work well.

Pro ThinkPad (in direct comparision)

• Thumbstick.
• One of the best laptop keyboards around.
• Three easy to distinguish mouse buttons.
• Even ressource-hungry programs like Liferea work fine.
• Quite big screen resolution (1440×900).
• Bigger battery, space for additional batteries.
• Could be a workstation replacement.

Pro Lenny on the EeePC

• The installer image of the Debian EeePC Project works out of the box. All necessary drivers are available, if you include the non-free repositories and the eeepc.debian.net repositories.
• Stable enough for daily use. (IMHO Debian Testing – and even Debian Unstable – is more stable as many other distribution’s stable releases, e.g. those from SuSE.)

Con Lenny on the EeePC

• My favourite feed reader Liferea has changed its cache format since the version in Debian Etch, so I can’t sync Liferea caches between my Debian Etch running T61 and the Testing running EeePC. Well, fortunately the version of Liferea in Debian Etch still works on Debian Lenny, so I just downgraded the package to the version from Etch and set it on hold. I don’t use it on the EeePC though since it needs way too long to start (about 10 to 15 minutes compared to 1 to 3 minutes on the T61)

Summary I’m very happy with the EeePC and I didn’t expect that it would replace my 14” ThinkPad in so many (but still not all) situations. :-)

Recently I’ve been having some problems with hardware dying. Having one item mysteriously fail is something that happens periodically, but having multiple items fail in a small amount of time is a concern. One problem I’ve had is with CD-ROM drives. I keep a pile of known good CD-ROM drives because as they have moving parts they periodically break and I often buy second-hand PCs with broken drives. On each of the last two occasions when I needed a CD-ROM drive I had to try several drives before I found one that worked. It appears that over the course of about a year of sitting on a shelf I have had four CD-ROM drives spontaneously die. I expect drives to die if they are used a lot from mechanical wear, I also expect them to die over time as the system cooling fans suck air through them and dust gets caught. I don’t expect them to stop working when stored in a nice dry room. I wonder whether I would find more dead drives if I tested all my CD and DVD drives or whether my practice of using the oldest drives for machines that I’m going to give away caused me to select the drives that were most likely to die. Today I had a problem with hard drives. I needed to test a Xen configuration for a client so I took two 20G disks from my pile of spare disks (which were only added to the pile after being tested). Normally I wouldn’t use a RAID-1 configuration for a test machine unless I was actually testing the RAID functionality, it was only the possibility that the client might want to borrow the machine that made me do it. But it was fortunate as one of the disks died a couple of hours later (just long enough to load all the data on the machine). Yay! RAID saved me losing my work! Then I made a mistake that I wouldn’t make on a real server (I only got lazy because it was a test machine and I didn’t have much risk). I had decided to instead make it a RAID-1 of 30G disks and to save some inconvenience I transfered the LVM from the degraded RAID on the old drive to a degraded RAID on a new disk. I was using a desktop machine and it wasn’t designed for three hard disks so it was easier to transfer the data in a way that doesn’t need to have more than two disks in the machine at any time. Then the new disk died as soon as I had finished moving the LVM data. I could have probably recovered that from the LVM backup data and even if that hadn’t worked I had only created a few LVs and they were contiguous so I could have worked out where the data was. Instead however I decided to cut my losses and reinstall it all. The ironic thing is that I had planned to make a backup of the data in question (so I would have copies of it on two disks in the RAID-1 and another separate disk), but I had a disk die before I got a chance to make a backup. Having two disks out of the four I selected die today is quite a bad result. I’m sure that some people would suggest simply buying newer parts. But I’m not convinced that a disk manufactured in 2007 would survive being kept on a shelf for a year any better than a disk manufactured in 2001. In fact there is some evidence that the failure rates are highest when a disk is new. Apart from stiction I wouldn’t expect drives to cease working from not being used, I would expect drives to last longer if not used. But my rate of losing disks in running machines is minute. Does anyone know of any research into disks dying while on the shelf?

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A few months ago, Stephen Milborrow started releasing a patched version of R that performs just-in-time compilation -- see his Ra page for some details and further pointers. In a nutshell, Ra provides a modified R engine so that code preceded by all jit(1) function call, using his jit package from the CRAN archive, will run faster due to just-in-time compilation of loops and arithmetic expressions. Ra offers to pick the low-hanging fruit for users as loops can be a bottleneck. Of course, as shown in Stephen's case study, using appropriate vectorised expression will often be faster still. That said, for a certain class of problems, Ra should offer a decent speed boost. Debian users can now just say

    sudo apt-get install r-base-core-ra r-cran-jit

as the Ra and jit packages in Debian's unstable distribution (and in the case of jit, even in testing). Lastly, version 1.1.0 of Ra was released by Stephen yesterday and is now also in Debian unstable.

Busy times, despite being on holiday. Mostly this has been doing "business" work, and fiddling with self-promotion. But despite this I managed to find time to write some extremely useful new Lisp:

• Sensible (new) window placement for GNU Emacs

Anyway very little time over the coming week will be spent online. All being well. Still enjoying playing with my (loaned) Nokia 770 - maybe I'll get another one of my own eventually. ObQuote: 30 Days Of Night

Several stories on NPR today have featured interviews with Democratic voters in Florida and Michigan. Many of them were mad about the situation, but mad at their state democratic parties. Many of them did not vote because they were told their vote would not count, so now they are upset at these efforts to count the vote from these states.

Meanwhile, there is a very interesting post about how Hillary may want these delegates to remain unavailable to her, as a way to continue pressing her case all the way to the convention. Sigh.

The way .ssh/authorized_keys is typically used is not secure. Because using it securely is hard, and dumping in passwordless ssh keys is easy. I spent about 5 hours today locking down my authorized_keys. rsync The only easy case is a rsync of a single directory. Follow these good instructions. If you need to rsync multiple separate directories, it's easy to find several documents involving a validate-rsync.sh. Do not use, it is insecure -- it allows rsync to be run with any parameters. Including parameters that allow the remote system to rsync in a new ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Oops. (You can probably also trick validate-rsync.sh into running other arbitrary commands.) To be secure, you have to check the rsync parameters against some form of whitelist. git Locking down git should be easy. Use git-shell. Unless you also want to be able to log in to an interactive shell on the same account. To do that, you'll need to generate a separate ssh key for git. Both git servers I use are named git.*, so I set it up like this in ~/.ssh/config on the client:

Host git.*
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa.git

Then on the server, I added the key to authorized_keys, prefixed with this:

command="perl -e 'exec qw(git-shell -c), $ENV SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND '"

(I also tried the simpler command="git-shell -c $SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND"; but it didn't work with alioth's old version of openssh, and I didn't want to worry about exposing SSHORIGINALCOMMAND to the shell.) Before arriving at that, I took a detour to using gitosis. It can make it impressively easy to manage locked down git over ssh, but you have to fit how it does things. Including repository layout, and a dedicated account. So I spent several hours changing my git repo layout. In the end, I decided gitosis was too complicated and limiting for what I needed, but I do recommend checking it out. svn Like git, this is fairly easy, since svn provides svnserve. The svnbook documents how to use it in .authroized_keys. Basically, just use

command="svnserve -t"

A similar approach as used for git can be used here if you want to have a dedicated ssh key that causes svnserve to be run. d-i daily builds d-i has a d-i-unpack-helper that can be put in authorized_keys. unison Can probably be locked down similarly to rsync, but I haven't tried yet. duplicity The only way seems to not use duplicity over ssh at all, and instead use a different transport. too hard What if you want to allow locked down git, and a rsync, and maybe unison too, all to the same account? You'll end up with some nasty mismash of all of the above, and there are plenty more things using ssh as a transport that need other techniques to lock them down. Until this becomes easier, a majority will just dump passwordless ssh keys in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, creating exploitable trust paths that don't need to exist.

I’m so going to Debconf 8… Here are my travel details to and from Buenos Aires, in case someone wants to fly with me:

• Dublin - Madrid, 7th August, 18:25-21:50, IB3183
• Madrid - Buenos Aires, 8th August, 01:25-08:40, IB 6843
• Buenos Aires - Madrid, 21st August, 21:45-14:30, IB 6844
• Madrid - Dublin, 22nd August, 16:10-17:35, IB 3184

All for 783 euros, bought 1 week ago. I’m arriving 1 day early and 4 days late, but I’ll take the chance to help the organization after my arrival and visit Buenos Aires after Debconf :) And I’d also like to apologize in advance to anyone I ask to fetch me something, because, being Spanish, it is possible I’ll say something obscene instead ;)

Buch of quickies:

• First, I'm moving from livejournal to blogger. Mainly because blogger allows me to email pictures/videos from my cellphone and automatically converts them to blog entries. To avoid spamming planet with unnecessary entries, only postings tagged with "Debian" be syndicated to p.d.o.
  
• Was invited to UDS and Prague. Quite different from conferences where I've been before (debconf, FOSDEM). Less time spent with one person presenting and rest of room listen, more time people discussing the topic of session. Atleast this was the case in the Mobile track I mostly followed.
  
• Testing scripts now consider Armel a Release architecture. \o/. The armel debian-installer should also be part of debian-installer beta2 really soon(tm) . Only getting testing-security running properly is tricky at the moment...
• fuck I'm old now.
  

strftime's time format does not support fractional seconds, but a lot of people want to do that, based on a google search. It's been implemented as an extension to several programs. Each implementation I found uses a different conversion specification, and in each case the character chosen was already used by something else in the standard strftime. The only unused letters are: %f, %i %J %K %L %q %Q %w (and perhaps some punctuation). Of these, "%f" has a good mnemonic for fractional seconds. But I hestiate to poach from such a small space. Looking at glibc's extensions to the strftime format suggested a different approach. I suggest using "%.S" for fractional seconds. There's a good mnemoic and this seems unlikely to be used for anything else. This could be extended to include an optional precision ("%.4S"). It would also be nice to have a standard way of showing microseconds, nanoseconds, and milliseconds too. "%uS", "%nS", and "%mS" would be nice to use; unfortunatly, "%u", "%n", and "%m" are already used in strftime (so are "%U, "%N", and "%M"). I don't have a solution for these, but they're probably generally less useful than fractional seconds anyway.

---

Update: I neglected to mention the possibility of using the O modifier. Dirk Eddelbuettel points out that R uses "%OS" for fractional seconds. As compromises go, R has chosen a pretty good one. But SuSv3 actually defines the O modifier as causing the locale's alternative numeric symbols to be used, with an example of Roman Numerals. So fractional seconds is probably not quite what "%OS" is intended to do, unless you're in the locale for very fast living people. :-) In current versions of glibc, the alt_digits field used by the O modifier is only present for a few locales: fa_IR, ja_JP, and or_IN. Still, there are plenty of other numeral systems out there, so I still favor making up a new modifier like "%.S", rather than trading off localisation for precision.

During the last 4 days, I didn't read Planet. So I started an interesting exercise and wanted to comment very briefly on a few entries I just read quickly to catch up. My Planet premium, so to say..

• (not Planet related...I read that on NASA mailing lists...some of which I'm subscribed since 1988) NASA's Phoenix lander successfully landed on Mars. This is actually the first successful soft landing on Mars since 1976 (recent landings were hard ones, with airbags....or failures). This stunning picture shows the spacecraft with its parachute during its descent on Mars. It was taken by the HiRISE camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The very first time a spacecraft photographs another one while it's landing. Amazing, right?
• Marga and the Spanish keymap: I can't disagree with your comments, Marga. Still, that's a though issue: changing the behaviour of a keymap that's used by millions of users is not a trivial change. OTOH, you're right and that tilde should be dead, indeed. I think there is barely no other option than a fork, here: have both keymaps, one with asciitilde and another one with dead_tilde on the same key combination and let users choose. That keymap should be named "es-standard" to avoid changing the existing "es".
• John Goerzen biking to work: John is among the people I never met but who I know I share ideas and vision of life with. So, seeing him comment on alternative ways to commute to/back work is a pleasure for me (alternative transportation systems with the goal of abandoning the heresy of individual cars is part of my hobbies....while I still don't always apply these principles myself). And, well, seeing someone writing that this is still possible in the flat MidWest of the country that contributes the most to climate change is a relief for me: change can happen.
• Joey reads USENET again. Long time since I last read news... In the past I used to have my own feed, through UUCP. I still receive a lot of my mails by UUCP, though (bubulle@kheops.frmug.org comes this way)
• Pollocks were in Europe. Andrew is another of these people I feel like having connections with while we never met. Next time, plan a stop in Bubulle Hotel and visit Paris, Andrew.
• Dirk mentioned Bike the Drive, which I assume to be a bike-related event in Chicago... Yet another occasion to see there's still some hope for alternatives to cars in the US of A...
• Kartik is back home in Mumbai after some months working in Bangalore (and not enjoying it). I'm happy for him that he can be again with his family.
• Ganneff also bikes. Of course, he does it the geek way. Would you have guessed? Joerg, are you ready for the DebConf daily running tour which I plan to do in Mar del Plata?
• Manoj is the last Emacs user, along with /me
• Jaldhar who I have much respect for in the project, still supports the US republican party, the most conservative party in the so-called western world. It is still completely out of my understanding how FLOSS "spirit" can fit with this (the same stands for the political stance of Eric "Gun" Raymond, indeed). Mysteries...
• Lucas wonders how to find cheap flights. Voyages SNCF (aka Expedia), the online travel agency of the French railway company, always gets my preference. Yes, French *railway*.
• MJ also posts about biking. I have to mention that easy bike-on-demande systems in cities are one of the best ways to develop this. Barcelona's system seems pretty cool. Paris' Velib is amazing and so is the system in Lyon (who initiated the movement in France). All this is something I personnally follow pretty closely (I'm a addicted reader of the French professionnal magazine named "Ville et Transport", "Town and Transportation") in the hope it also develops in my Suburbia.
• Too many technical issues on Planet. I can't follow..:-)

On a slow line (like mine, @56k) even updating pbuilder could be a problem (or a really boring task):

[host]$ sudo pbuilder update
[...]                                                      
Get:4 http://debian.fastweb.it unstable/main Packages [5302kB]

5Mb are enough to do this trick (NOTE: it will work only if you machine and the pbuilder use the same mirror). First, update your box apt packages list with

[host]# apt-get update

once done, you'll find in /var/lib/apt/lists/ the packages list we need. Let's copy those files in a new location:

[host]# cp -arp /var/lib/apt/lists/ /tmp/

then, login into the pbulder chroot with:

[host]$ sudo pbuilder --login --bindmounts /tmp/lists/ --save-after-login

(/tmp/lists/ will be mounted inside the chroot with the files we've just copied, and --save-after-login will save our changes once done). Now

[chroot]# cp /tmp/lists/*astwe* /var/lib/apt/lists/

to copy the lists for Fastweb mirror only (the one I'm using), now

[chroot]# apt-get update
Get:1 http://debian.fastweb.it unstable Release.gpg [189B]
Get:2 http://debian.fastweb.it unstable Release [86.4kB]
Get:3 http://debian.fastweb.it unstable/main Packages/DiffIndex [2038B]                                                       
Fetched 88.7kB in 12s (6962B/s)                                                                                               
Reading package lists... Done
[chroot]#

now only few files are downloaded.

I used this trick earlier, in cases where creating or updating the apt packages list for pbuilder was a problem, since the files always resulted corrupted.

When people think of computer scientists, they think of someone with bad health, a bad skin color and no fitness at all. While there probably are some like that, I actually don't know many. Instead I know people who do things like fighting with sword and rapier. My main sports is advanced lindy hop dancing (which does include occasional aerials and such, but mostly involves 'jumping' around at high speeds). I like dancing most because of the social aspects of it.Myselfi, I can claim to be the very opposite: I just came back from 5 hours of sports, and I'm not even exhausted, just very hungry. The 5 hours include riding about 13 km in half an hour through the city (and we're suffering from a heat wave these days, with winds from the sahara desert reaching germany), then two full training sessions (that really used to stress me when I started), then the ride back of 13 km again.My body mass index is 18.something, so I'm slightly underweight, but I actually eat a lot - but I also eat healthy and diverse. Most of my food I cook myself, so I know it's fresh and where I got it from. I'm not vegetarian, I do eat meat about two times a week. I also try to have some variety there, pork, beef, lamb, deer, chicken, ... I don't drink much alcohol and I do not smoke.So don't stick to that prejudice that computer science people or geeks are physically in a bad shape. You can be both a geek, soical and athletic. The people I know how are in really bad shape actually watch too much TV and such, they neither engage their body nor their mind, nor leave their house much to meet other people.