Who needs to read devel-announce when you receive over 60 emails like this? :D

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Kicking ass in an unflat world is The Economist's take on recent efforts in the world of business books. As the creator of Squeezed Books, their opinion was of interest to me. As is often the case, they don't disappoint, with lines like

Things to bear in mind as you do, he says, include the need for your company to have purpose, to seek out ideas from the fringes, and to embrace the democratising power of the internet none of which will be news to anyone who has been in business for more than a few minutes.

What really caught me eye, though, was this:

There is also growing demand from overloaded executives for shorter books. So in January Harvard will launch a new hardback series, Memo to the CEO , covering subjects such as lessons from private equity and the future of strategy. Each book will be about 100 pages long and will cost $20. In a similar vein, Harvard has adopted the approach taken by iTunes to pop albums, and has started to sell individual chapters of books online an idea that has been a hit with academics in particular.

A lot of good business books take a sensible central idea, and then proceed to fluff it up to a length where it can be published as a book. Often, this makes for a good read, as the anecdotes and case studies and whatnot are interesting, but for those in a hurry, or simply wanting to know what the basic point of the book is about, it's just padding. So, it looks as if the idea behind Squeezed Books is a good one, now I just need to get better at attracting more people to contribute summaries, and discuss the books on the site. One thing I've done to that end is stipulate that the summaries are available, unless otherwise noted, under a creative commons license.

Yesterday, my laptop locked up hard. So hard, it wouldn't turn on afterwards, but flash an error code. Unfortunately, Dell hides the relevant information very well - it took me some time to find in the forums that the error code means bad memory.After removing the memory module from slot B, I could turn my computer back on again. So either the module is dead or the mainboard part related to it.I bought my laptop second-hand in the US last year, and warranty probably is just over. Still I wanted to make sure that this isn't covered by warranty anymore, so I tried contacting Dell support.What a pain. No reply yet to my mail inquiry; and the "support chat" doesn't work right. Their support agent always asks for my phone number (WTF?) and then after some minutes says he's going to disconnect because I don't reply.I wonder if they ever tested their support chat with Gecko-based browsers.0 out of 5 stars for Dell support so far. Important information is inaccessible and the support doesn't reply in either email nor chat. It's not even giving bad replies.

I invite Wouter to Switzerland when he says that the problem with using Trains as office space is “of course, is that train rides aren't free, and that office rent is much more affordable...”: Our General Abonement costs ca. CHF 3000 (EUR 1800) a year and includes virtually all public transport in Switzerland, excluding only some cablecars in the mountains and similar things (and even there you sometimes get a price reduction.)

I've just gotten a 256slice from Slicehost and I will deleting my UML instance with Bytemark. I was a customer of Bytemark's for a number of years, and I was happy with them. I had the smallest VM they offered and was just using it to run my DNS, postfix (and clamav and amavis) and a couple of tiny websites. The 75M of RAM the VM has just isn't up to these tasks anymore, with fairly frequent OOMing. Although they upgrading their smallest VMs to 150M six months ago, I still hadn't been upgraded to that new size, which is one of the main reasons I looked for other options.

So Slicehost seems to have a good reputation and having gotten my slice last week I can say that's it's wayyy faster than my setup with Bytemark. Even if I had stayed with Bytemark I would have 100M less RAM and it would have been more expensive (darn you weak American dollar). I really liked Bytemark, they've been supporting DebConf for at least a couple of years. I wish them success, but at this point they're offerings just competitive anymore.

The one thing I really miss from Bytemark is their DNS slave service. You could run your own BIND and have Bytemark's nameservers be slaves to it. Slicehost only has a hosted DNS service. But this is a small quibble compared to all the upsides.

Last week ended in a rather annoying way. Apparently my car had developed a flat tire overnight one night, and I left while it was still dark the next morning, and didn't notice it. I had driven on it all the way to work with it fairly flat, which damaged the tire (but not the wheel). So that needed to be replaced, and it was still under warranty from the place I bought them, which is 45 minutes away. We had a family gathering on Saturday, but couldn't be there all that long because we had to get to this place before it closed.

After we got home, there was a bit of work to do out in the yard. Jacob was tired of being indoors, so I took him out with me. He came with me as I put air in our 5-gallon air tank, and watched as I used the tank to do the monthly tire inflation on our pickup. (When you paid $75 for the vehicle, fixing a tire that only has to be inflated once a month doesn't seem all that cost-effective)

And then he got his first ride in the pickup. We were just moving around trash on the yard, and he enjoyed it. We hopped in and out several times to load or unload things. Though he was very annoyed that I didn't let him use the stick shift while I was driving. My parents said that he sounds like his dad.

We have a bedtime routine for Jacob, and I read a book to him right before putting him to bed every night. This morning, Terah got out the book that I read to Jacob last night. I was in a different room, but Terah is quite sure she heard him say "dada read this!" That's his first sentence (that one of us heard, anyway)

Some of you may have read that my relative Venita had a brain aneurism recently, and remarkably, seems to be recovering from it. Today in church, our pastor said, "I'm happy to report that this morning, Venita called me, asked me to thank everyone for all the prayers, and to ask the choir to sing up to heaven -- and they have." She's still very weak, and just sitting up to eat is a struggle, but she is improving.

Terah and I had invited my two aunts that grew up in what is now our house over to help decorate for Christmas. They were here today, and we spent all afternoon decorating, and we had spent the last couple of days finding decorations. It was a fun time, and the house looks great and feels more like home. We're happy to have had the help thinking about where to put everything, and actually putting things there. The tree isn't up yet, but it will be soon. We're thinking that it will be nice to be decorated early this year, rather than our usual just-before-Christmas decoration event!

It was neat to hear a few stories about how my grandma decorated the place; she died when I was young, and I don't remember her. Jacob, of course, was in on all the action. He watched, played, and threatened to make the nativity scene quite unpeaceful, but more interesting to a 13-month-old.

The Goerzen Christmas will be here this year. The last time Goerzens celebrated Christmas in this house was 7 years ago -- a month or so before I met Terah, as it happens. It seems so long ago in some ways. The house has changed; the 1970s yellow wallpaper is gone, as is the drop-ceiling tile that grandpa had installed to save on the heating bills, as is his wood stove and the metal tractors that he had in his closet that I used to play with when I was little.

But as I sit here typing this post, I'm looking at the spot where I used to play air hockey on grandpa's table during family gatherings -- and whenever else I could convince grandpa to get out his air hockey table for a game. Over in the corner is where he always had his Christmas tree, with the woven wheat ornaments my grandma had made. Terah decided that corner would be perfect for the tree, before she ever knew where it used to be.

Here's a picture I took at that Christmas 7 years ago:



Sitting here right now, looking at all that has changed, and all that hasn't... 7 years wasn't that long ago after all. I'm sure this year will be the first of many happy Christmases to be celebrated in this place.

I’ve been playing around with Gallery and wpg2. I’m still a bit puzzled attempting to integrate Gallery and Wordpress. I’ve resolved most issues; the main remaining issue is to display images in the Ajaxian theme without running over the borders in the Ajax/slideshow views. Also, the embedded image apparently doesn’t render in the RSS feed. Update: I’ve given up on the G2 tinymce plugin and the WPG2 tag for now and just hardcoded the image and album URL. Update 2: now the embedded image is working again for no good reason. Suggestions on the entire configuration are welcome. In any case, I took some pretty photos today in our back yard (use left and right arrow keys to scroll through images after clicking on the one below — I still can’t get the navigation icons to appear): Before: Proof of Spring 2007. Technorati Tags: Autumn, Foliage, Trees, Wordpress, WPG2, Gallery

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David H rdeman has contributed two really valuable guides to my Debian on NSLU2 site that will be of great interest to many NSLU2 users:

• The first guide is for people running Linux on a flash device, such as a USB flash stick. Since flash only supports a limited number of writes, it is important to reduce the wear and tear on the underlying flash device. David's guide gives some practical advice of how to achieve this.
• The second guide gives a few tips and tricks that can be used to reduce the amount of RAM a system uses. This is particularly interesting to NSLU2 users since 32 MB of RAM is not a lot.

These guides mention Debian but most of the advice applies to other NSLU2 firmware flavours and to Linux in general.

As threatened promised, I have produced a renamed version of Ion3 that should avoid upstream trademark claims and thus be DFSG-compliant. Some translations are out-of-date, but I'll release a first version now and try to get those updated later. The new name is ParticleMan. When I put the name to a vote some time back the winner was Iceparticle, but there's already an icewm and I couldn't resist the TMBG reference. (Whoever suggested this name to me: I had already thought of it but forgot to include it in the poll.) The packages are in my repository for now.

Here is what happens when a (mad)tty meets a (mad)mutt Okay, for real it has zillions of usability issues right now:

• you shouldn't resize the mutt without leaving your $EDITOR first ;
• you cannot interact with the rest of mutt either ;

But all those things needs a proper event loop (and anyone that ever looked at the mutt code knows that well ). and yes it works for emacs too

Can you get more geeky than this?!!!???

A stupid idea that popped up in my head this morning (actually reading the backlog of #debian-devel-fr and a remark by Lucas Nussbaum): it would be interesting to list bugs tagged as "pending" more than, say, one year ago and report them somewhere (-devel or a web page). I think that in the majority of cases, there is probably something broken when a bug is marked pending for more than one year..:-)

As I stand in a near cattle-car packed South Station, waiting while no trains arrive and no trains depart (”signal difficulties”), I wonder if forces are conspiring to make MBTA service so poor that it enters a death spiral of poor reputation for reliability, increasing fares, lower ridership, less revenue, etc.. One or two long delays or canceled trains in a short time span can be ignored, but after a while it may become impossible for the T to recover the lost goodwill. There’s a saying in trademark law, “once you’ve lost a customer, they’re often gone forever.” Are signal difficulties for real, by the way? More on this topic: this excellent op-ed in the Globe about the importance of mass transit to the local economy and life sciences in particular; contrast with this news about what the T plans as its next big project (hint: “T TV”). Not much good news here, either. Is anyone listening? Technorati Tags: MBTA, Boston, Mass Transit

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As I stand in a near cattle-car packed South Station, waiting while no trains arrive and no trains depart (”signal difficulties”), I wonder if forces are conspiring to make MBTA service so poor that it enters a death spiral of poor reputation for reliability, increasing fares, lower ridership, less revenue, etc.. One or two long delays or canceled trains in a short time span can be ignored, but after a while it may become impossible for the T to recover the lost goodwill. There’s a saying in trademark law, “once you’ve lost a customer, they’re often gone forever.” Are signal difficulties for real, by the way? More on this topic: this excellent op-ed in the Globe about the importance of mass transit to the local economy and life sciences in particular; contrast with this news about what the T plans as its next big project (hint: “T TV”). Not much good news here, either. Is anyone listening? Technorati Tags: MBTA, Boston, Mass Transit

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Explaination for non German Readers: Today the german parliament passed an act, which orders all communication-connection data (caller-ids, times, email-communication, other internet-transactions) have to be stored for 6 months.

More info on vorratsdatenspeicherung.de

On debian planet. I read the C and multithreading post of Miriam Ruiz, but I don't agree with some conclusions:

First of all, I don't agree with Linus. C standard doesn't allow such optimizations. One of the driving point of C standard (and thus C) is that compiler should do what a programmer write, without much optimization, i.e. C should remain a low level language. It was iterated also for the principles of new C1X standard.

Second point. Volatile is not the right solution. volatile means that a variable should be read every time it is accessed, so the variable should not be but in registers (remember the nearly obsolete register keyword).

The problem of multi threading is not only that variables could changes (but this is a fact also of
single thread programs, when you write a signal handler [which are specified in C standard and which are handled correctly]), but for semaphores there are "barriers", i.e. you should not move read or write across such barriers.

What do volatile have with barriers? Nothing. If you read the standard (you can check also only the one page C appendix), you see that C specify what are the "standard" barrier, and they are nearly in all obvious points (i.e. a ";" is also a barrier), so moving instructions is "illegal" for C.
Ok. volatile had few other barriers, but across ";" there is already a barrier, so volatile is not the solution of barrier problem (AB locking).

References: see C wiki and C standard.

Number of Inhabitants per doctor

So this Sunday I am off to Japan along with a few other members of my department for a week long visit. I am going to attend a conference being hosted by the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. The number of faculty members housed under this initiative is simply impressive and I look forward to meeting many of them and learning how they are conceptualizing and moving forward with the interdisciplinary study of digital society. I have not had much time to think about the trip outside of 1) how do I get to my hotel 2) preparing for my presentation but I will have a little free time on Tuesday, Thursday morning, Sunday morning and a few evenings to see some sights and see some people. With the help of Junichi and others, we are organizing a gathering with Debian developers as well as the local and some visiting Creative Commons folks on Wed night, the 14th of November. Do come around if you are there and interested (and you can leave me a comment or email me at biellaATnyuDOTedu too. While I basically am going to be like-a-lemming and follow my colleagues who have made some plans, if you think there is something Not To Be Missed in Tokyo, do leave a shout out in my comments or ping me via email. I would appreciate it!

I wrote a lot of messages on Sunday, trying to clear some things up and start a few slow balls rolling before various workshops, meetings and training sessions this week. Sadly, I botched at least three subject lines. One was the "Dear Blogger" post on this site which was written to someone who blogs, not Google's Blogger site. Few people saw the second mistake, so I'll not republish it here. The third was trying to ask whether debian t-shirts like the one I wear are affected by the Uzbek cotton problems which were in the news several times last week. That was on debian-project so I got some personal abuse for the botched subject. Debian lists are more funny than fun - some people get less flak for mailing violent threats than I do for a misjudged subject line... Oh, and about the cotton-picking: it appears the debian project doesn't know where material for debian-branded clothing comes from and some seem to argue strongly that we should remain ignorant of it...

You may have noticed a range of things mounted on a tmpfs file system. tmpfs is actually more pervasive than it might appear. It was created to build a filesystem interface ontop of shared pages of RAM. This is useful because there are a number of ways to access shared RAM; notably SysV IPC Shared Memory (shmget, shmat, etc) and mmap of anonymous memory (MAP_ANONYMOUS). In order to have a consistent infrastructure implementing all of this the kernel abstracts RAM as a filesystem and your mapping as a file. To this end the tmpfs filesystem was created to present this abstraction. It deals with issues such as caching, security and the ability to swap pages in a consistent manner (i.e. using the same infrastructure every other file system does). Overall, tmpfs is implemented in mm/shmem.c. In the initialisation function the file system is mounted internally by the kernel with vfs_kern_mount so it is always around. It gets fairly complicated because it has to keep track of swapped out pages and the general complexity that come with implementing a full filesystem. As described above, there are several distinct ways to get access to this file system.

• The SysV IPC shared memory layer (ipc/shm.c) is a wrapper layer which manages IPC keys and internally plugs itself into the tmpfs code. Essentially creating a key with shmget() ends up calling ipc/shmem.c:newseg() which calls mm/shmem.c:shmem_file_setup() which then creates a struct file for the shared memory. This new file reuses the file operations from the tmpfs filesystem, but is not actually put into the file system (i.e. linked to the superblock). When shat() is called to attach to this memory the SysV IPC layer will internally translate this into a mmap of this file. This is what is used by the Shared Global Area of Oracle and some Java implementations, amongst many other things (see /proc/sysvipc/shm for a comprehensive list).
• The second common thing to do is an anonymous mmap. By default MAP_ANONYMOUS ignores the file-descriptor, but an analagous methodology is to explicitly map /dev/zero. If you look at the implementation of /dev/zero in drivers/char/mem.c you can see code such as

  static int mmap_zero(struct file * file, struct vm_area_struct * vma)
   
          int err;
          if (vma->vm_flags & VM_SHARED)
                  return shmem_zero_setup(vma);
  

  which ends up backing shared areas with tmpfs.
• The third way is actually mounting tmpfs and using it from userspace as a normal file system. glibc implements the POSIX shared memory call shm_open by creating and mmaping files on a tmpsfs mount (by default looking in /dev/shm). Other utilities also use the tmpfs semantics and mount it at other points; the obvious one of course being mounting /tmp on it!

tmpfs: more than meets the eye! Update: hopefully a little clearer, thanks to Helge Bahmann for comments.