These days I tries to remaster ?OpenSuse 10.2 in order to put several own packages onto the DVD and customise some settings here for Oscar. This DVD should install itself without any questions correctly configured. First of all, the only way to control the autoinstallation is to use autoyast. And in order to use autoyast you've to create an xml file which specific settings in it. ?OpenSuse has an own tool for creation of this xml file: Start ?YaST2 and select the Autoyast module there and then create a reference profile from the running system. (Then simply save this file created by autoyast itself and perform an xml check on this file... you'll see that this check will raise errors.. argh Okay. the next thing is: If you want to use the autoyast gui to select additional packages, your package selection from the last time is purged... so you must every time the complete bunch of packages.... this sucks! Mh... let's see how this will continue.. but I know that remastering a Debian DVD is much easier

Once again I'm working on furthering the creation of the NVIDIA packaging team. I already have 2 members plus myself but I am seeking people who will help with the ever growing legacy packages. Please email rdonald@debian.org with your interests if you want to help even if in other areas.

I'm worried that my Debian Planet credentials are a bit weak, so have a technical post rather than one discussing the fact I'm unemployed in 3 days, or that I'm going back to NI for a week after that to try and get the new house sorted. Oh. Wait. Ooops. Anyway. While I still have easy datacentre access to my colo box (the.earth.li) I thought it might be a good time to think about upgrading it. The most limited resource has been disk space; it was a Dell 2550, so dual PIII-1GHz + 2GB RAM which is nice, but SCSI hotswap drive bays. So nice disk, but anything large is expensive. I think SATA has come along nicely, so was happy to change over to using that instead. As it turned out the old machine was over 5 years old (doesn't time fly!) so there's been a disk performance boost anyway from using new technology. I ended up buying the new machine from Sentral - their website isn't great, but they're very helpful by email and Black Cat had bought machines from them in the past with no problems. It's a Core2Duo E6600 with 4GB RAM and 2 * 750GB Seagate ES SATA II drives in hot swap bays. I pondered a quad core chip and an extra drive (there are 4 bays total), but decided I didn't really need them at present and keeping power consumption down was a good idea. Last time I upgraded the I just did a straight copy of the data over to the new disks. This time there were a couple of things that meant I didn't want to do this. Firstly, I decided to go 64 bit. The chip can do it, I have 4GB RAM, it seemed like a good idea. That meant a dpkg --get-selections on the old box followed by a dpkg --set-selections on the new one, followed by an apt-get dselect-upgrade. Is there a way I could have kept my aptitude knowledge about auto installed packages? I did have a look, but didn't see anything obvious. That gave me the same packages. I also installed ia32-libs to ease the transition for my users who had self compiled bits. Then I had to copy the rest of the data over. /home was easy enough, plus a few other filesystems that didn't have packaged data on them. I manually reviewed changes in /etc but there wasn't anything non obvious thankfully. /var was trickier. I was pleased to discover that Mailman config appears to cross archs quite happily. A pg_dumpall did the trick for PostgreSQL. Rebuilding the overview database for inn took all night. Maybe I should move away from tradspool. There were a few other things to fix up (I hate Berkeley DB), but by and large it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Oh, except that copying that much data across takes a long time. And rsync isn't that much help when the data includes lots of mail folders, some of which are over 1G big (and receiving mail, so constantly changing). I'd started out with a 100M link between the old and new machines, as I hit the e1000 Tx Unit Hang bug. Disabling the power management solved that, giving a 1G link. Still took ages. The second major change with the new box is I've decided to go Xen. That should let me hand out machine slices to users who want to do weird stuff, without me really having to support them. And allow me to throw up test machines when I need to. This was actually really easy to install. I did a basic etch install onto a 2G partition, installed xen-linux-system-2.6.18-4-xen-amd64 and then rebooted and had a dom0 up and running. I gave the main VDS (ie replacement the) a 600G partition, access to both processor cores and 2G of RAM - ie still quite a few more resources than it used to have. Then it got a bit tricky. I wanted lvm to be available within the VDS. So I did all the VG creation and a base install (using debootstrap) from the dom0, then added a filter to /etc/lvm/lvm.conf to exclude /dev/md2 (the 600G partition). And tried to boot the domU. Which was fine, until it tried to mount the root fs at which point the initramfs complained it couldn't find / and bombed out to a shell. The confusing bit was that doing vgcreate -a y found and brought up the lvm partitions fine, at which point the rest of the boot process would complete. Very odd. Much digging eventually led me to discover that the LVM initramfs script only gets run if the specified root partition has a - in it. Argh! I prefer the format /dev/<vgname>/<lvname>, but once I changed to /dev/mapper/<vgname>-<lvname> it all worked fine. The new machine has been in service for the past week and so far it all seems fine. I don't notice the fact it's a Xen instance and it still feels quite nippy. Plus the extra disk space is great as I don't have to worry so much about things getting full. Yet. I haven't noticed a change with the 64 bit side either, but I think on a server that's going to be much more the case - I haven't moved my desktop to 64 bit primarily due to the lack of Flash and Java plugins (I don't see the point of a chroot as there's not really a pressing reason to go 64 bit if it's going to be hassle). I threw up another domU instance to test out some bits and that went smoothly too (I'm using an LVM VG on the dom0 to share out to the other domUs, which will all have a less complicated setup than the main one). So all in all I'm pleased with both the hardware, and the software - I hadn't expected setting it up to be so easy. My last Xen experience was under sarge where it hadn't all been integrated in the same way as it is under etch. Oh, one other thing I did; I rebuilt the AMD64 netinst Etch CD to output to the serial console for both isolinux and the actual installer. And then did the install over the serial console, even though the machine was beside me. The CD is still in the machine which means that I have a fallback if it all falls over horribly - I can access the BIOS, tell the machine to boot from CD and then hopefully prod and see what the issue is. Or even do a complete reinstall if necessary. It was surprising easy to modify - I just had to edit isolinux/isolinux.cfg and add SERIAL 0 9600 at the start and then console=ttyS0,9600 cdrom-detect/eject=false to the append lines for kernel parameters. Definitely worth considering if you have a colo box properly serial consoled up.

The gloom from my last entry has more or less lifted. To refresh, my desktop died shortly after a lightning storm; no definite cause and effect relationship, but a strong correlation. I shut it down, and after the next reboot I got scary errors all over the place, starting with this disclaimer:

HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor

Now, that may be true, or it may not be. Certainly the disclaimer is sensible, since machine checks are usually caused by failing components. And it persisted for most of a day every time I tried to boot the machine, but there was quickly a new addition: different scary errors on ata1. And it got rapidly worse. On Friday morning, having let the machine cool and relax overnight, I brought it up on a rescue CD and could get at /boot (a separate partition), but not at /etc (from inside my RAID/LVM setup). I went out and bought a new SATA drive and attempted to recover /boot onto it, but I had waited too long; at this point I could still get at the partition table, but not the contents of /boot. Some things to note here.

• As far as I know, you still need a separate /boot if your root uses RAID + LVM.
• Therefore your /boot is obviously not backed up by your carefully constructed RAID.
• But that’s fine because all that really mattered was your kernels, and you have them still lying around on your mirrored disk. Right?
• Of course, right. But dynamically generated initrds, while technically awesome, are awkward to recreate from a rescue CD. Especially a 32-bit rescue CD when your root filesystem is all 64-bit.
• It can’t be hard to find a rescue CD with a 64-bit kernel, right? No, not right either. I did eventually find a 50MB Gentoo install CD that worked serviceably well.
• Your laptop has a convenient CD burner, right? No, not right, turns out it doesn’t write CDs after all. Oh well, Windows file sharing plus the wireless plus the Mac Mini in the other room… there you go.
• You didn’t need anything else from /boot, right? Like your carefully constructed voodoo incantation to boot Windows… whoops… hopefully you remember how that worked…

So, after some futzing around I was able to boot the Gentoo rescue CD, partition the new hard drive, mount the remaining disk in degraded mode, reinstall the handy Debian packages of my kernels, have it magically recreate ramdisks, and then reinstall grub. By the way, --no-floppy obviously means something different to grub than it does to me, as most of the reinstalling grub process was still spent waiting for my non-existant fd0 to time out. Then I added the new disk to the array, let it reconstruct for two hours, and rebooted. Lo and behold… no more machine checks! I am a happy camper. Despite the tribulations above I came out remarkably well, since I seem to have lost nothing but my grub menu.lst file. And now I have rdiff-backup configured to back up /boot onto the array in case I ever need to do this again.

James Purser writes about the current plans for Internet filtering in Australia and concentrates on the technical issues (whether it will degrade the ISP service) and the issue of who’s moral standards should be enforced for the entire country. But the fact is that children have never had any problem accessing porn. When I was in grade 4 at primary school (~9yo) a group of boys decided to walk to the local shopping centre at lunch-time and I joined them. At the shopping centre the other boys read Playboy (that was before such magazines were required to be displayed in sealed plastic bays). I didn’t read Playboy because there were some electronics magazines that were more interesting. When in grade 6 (~11yo) a friend told me about his parents video collection which featured fellatio and sodomy. I don’t recall whether he offered to show me the videos but being a good friend I’m sure he would have done so if I had asked. In the early years of high school some boys ran a black-market for second-hand porn magazines (ick), they also sold new magazines that were significantly more expensive. When in year 12 digital porn was just becoming popular and the exchange of porn on floppy disk began. I’m sure that now children use USB sticks to exchange porn that they get from the Internet or other sources. When I was in year 10 a female dancing instructor ceased working for the school after an up-skirt picture of her was stuck on a notice-board (I guess that her resignation was related to the picture but can’t be sure). The evidence that I witnessed while at school is that 15yo boys are prepared to photograph unwilling women and exchange the pictures, and that the exchange and sale of all manner of porn is not uncommon at school (including primary school). I don’t think that the schools I attended were in any way unusual in this regard. When I was at school cameras were large. Unless you had a polaroid camera (which was even larger) the film had to be developed - and the staff at the photo company were potential witnesses. I expect that these factors significantly decreased the amount of such activity. Now a significant portion of children have a mobile phone and it seems that a built-in camera is a standard feature in all new phones now. Digital cameras (which have much better quality than phone-cameras) are becoming quite cheap. It’s widely regarded that giving a teenager a mobile phone is good for their safety (and it certainly makes it easier to discover where children claim to be) and it’s also widely regarded that a digital camera is a good toy (babies as young as 2 are often given the old camera when their parents get a new one). We should expect that the number of children who have digital cameras to rapidly approach 100% of children who desire them. Given these factors it seems to me that it would be a good idea to allow teenage boys access to better quality porn than they are unable to produce (with either willing or unwilling subjects). It has already been shown that increased access to porn reduces the incidence of rape. I expect that the same also applies to the issue of making porn, people who have good access to porn will be less inclined to make their own. There is some nasty porn out there. If they were to try and prevent access to porn that is illegal under Australian law (IE pictures of children, animals, rape, etc) then I don’t think that anyone would object. But preventing access to soft porn such as Playboy (which is so tame that it’s hardly porn by modern standards) is a really bad idea if it will increase the risk of up-skirt photos and the production of child rape movies. Let’s be sensible and accept the fact that children who want to see porn will see it and focus our attention on what type of porn will be seen by children and whether the “actors” are consenting adults. PS I spent several years living in Amsterdam and working as a sys-admin for ISPs there.

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When debugging window managers or testing your X applications in other window managers, running them in an dedicated fake X server can be quite nice. While every reasonable complete window manager (even the old twm and vtwm can, and of course all of fvwm, qvwm, wmaker, ratpoison, ...) can replace itself with any other, running a window manager in a window of its own makes many things easier: single-stepping a window manager within a debugger when that debugger runs in an Xterm on the same server is no fun. And if some testing needs a more complicated setting, switching may destroy that. And it is just more comfortable to have the editor handled by your favorite WM, while you need another WM to test some aspects of an program. (It&aposs hard to see if inital sizes and layouts work well, when your WM does allow windows to choose their size. And if your WM does not have a bug another has, it&aposs easier to test a work around in the other than trying to port the bug ;-> )

So, here is some example invocation I use:

     #!/bin/sh
     Xephyr :2 -reset -terminate -screen 580x724 -nolisten tcp -xkbmap ../../../../../home/brl/.mystuff/dekeymap -auth ~/.Xauthority &
     export DISPLAY=:2
     icewm
     

Which Options are useful depends on what to use it for:

-reset -terminate means to terminate when the last child exited. This is usefull if you want it go away fast. Not usefull if you want to switch window managers without other clients running.

-screen 580x724 tells how big the window should be. This is just the size of one of my working frames, so it integrates well into my workspace. (It would be nice if Xephyr could change its resolution uppon resize of the window, though i fear programs will either be confused when the size of their X server changes unadvertised or because of too many advertisements of its changing).

-nolisten tcp as there i no need to let the world speak to your X server

-xkbmap ../../../../../home/brl/.mystuff/dekeymap I gave up figuring out how to select a German keyboard, so it justs gets 8 lines of fake description only specifing German keyboard.

-auth ~/.Xauthority tells Xephyr to require authentication. Without this everyone is allowed to control your sub X-server and all programs within it. Don&apost forget to create an token before with xauth add, though.

One of the reasons I was relictant to write a wiki before starting work on ikiwiki was the wiki/blog spam problem. Now that ikiwiki is reasonably mature, it's interesting to look back at how that turned out. The basic spam prevention mechanism in ikiwiki is the same as the one many wikis use: By default, it requires registration before you can edit a page. This is a pretty small stumbling block for spammers, especially since ikiwiki doesn't bother with email verification. It even prefills the login form with your username and password after you register. It would take about 5 lines of perl to defeat its registration process. Suprisingly, only one spammer has spammed any of my wikis. To defeat that spammer, I added the most common second layer defense against spam: A blacklist. Again I implemented the bare minimum, a way to blacklist a given user and ask them to "go away". Nothing to blacklist IPs, nothing more complex. That was put in place last October and I've had no problems with spam since. Around the same time, I made a change that I feared might open up a whole new class of spam, when I added openid support to ikiwiki. As far as I know, noone with an openid has tried to spam an ikiwiki wiki yet. Ikiwiki did grow one other common spam prevention tool. Josh Triplett added support for a user account creation password, so you have to know the password to get an account at all. This isn't used by default though. The only other possibly anyi-spam measure is that ikiwiki does allow locking down pages so only an admin can edit them, or so they can only be edited via commits to a revision control system. I use these methods for personal stuff like my blog, and might have cut down on the incentive to spam. Spamming a discussion page is just not as interesting as adding spam direct to my blog's rss feed. It seems likely that any new wiki system will have less spam at the beginning, especially if the spammers have to write code to bypass its registration system. That one spammer spparently did so fairly early is suprising. That no others have tried since is also suprising. My ease at blocking the spammer by simply banning them suggests that they were going after the easiest possible targets, and that it's not yet worth their while to work around even the simplest countermeasures. But if so, why did they add support for an entirely new registration system? My guess is that their existing code happened to work with ikiwiki's registration system. (This would take probably 20 lines of perl. ;-) Of course, there's all kinds of counterspam measures that I could implement if needed. By the way, if you use ikiwiki and have had problems with spam, I'm of course interested in fixing that. It'll be interesting to see when additional measures turn out to be needed, as the wiki and sites using it become better known.

From time to time, especially when I move to a new city, I throw myself into craigslist to check out the local scene and flavor of the classified ads. Today I came across what I think is about the most comprehensive equal opportunity statement ever:

We are a results oriented, goals driven team with a strong commitment to excellence. We hire the best and the brightest individuals without regard to race, color, religion, creed, age, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, citizenship status, alienage, mental or physical disability, genetic predisposition or genetic carrier status, on the basis of knowledge or belief that the employee or applicant has tested positive for AIDS, AIDS-related complex or HIV, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law. TheLadders.com is an equal opportunity employer.

Two questions: 1) Has anyone seen a list so extensive? 2) Are they missing anything? So if you are a Puerto Rican, Dominican, twice-divorced lesbian, polyamorous, pregnant, into a mix of Santeria and Catholicism, Iraq war vet wheel chairbound, not quite a citizen bc you enlisted through Mexico, mildy autistic, with sickle cell anemia, and are a kick ass Linux Wizard/system administrator, please, do apply.

Matt Lee commented:

"MJ, I'm disappointed that you'd think the FSF would use Skype. Further, to post it, without a retraction that I can see, helps neither the FSF nor yourself. A clarification above the post would be nice. I just found this post via a search for something else, and so it has now reached the search engines. Hope you're well, matt"

Thanks for the comment. Hope you're well, too. Just to be clear, right at the top, I didn't think FSF would use Skype. That's why I was so bloody surprised when the radio interview made it sound like they did! I almost spluttered breakfast across the room... It was worth posting on the web, because it got the interview clarified, which wouldn't have happened otherwise. I found out later that FSF's systems apparently deleted my email unread, without delivering it to Peter Brown, or anyone else who could answer the questions. The FSF guest's reply and my apology are on the same page as my original here along with a call for help summarising the need for free-software-friendly VoIP. I've also changed the "preface" post to try to make it absolutely clear. If anyone is mirroring my page and hasn't copied the retraction, please let them know. By the way, I was called over Skype today, for the first time that I'm aware of. The caller told me they used Skype and the VoIP artefacts were pretty noticeable. Is that usual? I guess that could be how Peter Brown knew it was an interview over a Skype call.

Pedagogical faultlines, being held in Amsterdamn in mid-September, re-examines pedagogy in light of new media technologies as well as traditional institutions…. Hopefully they will have the programme up soon, but it certainly looks quite intriguing.

One thing that I don’t like is blogs that provide no method of feedback. When I want to read something with little or no possibility of feedback I’ll read one of the many newspapers that are available. Craige McWhirter’s blog is one of them. The CAPTCHA system doesn’t work (I must have tried at least 20 times with both Konqueror and Iceweasel) and he doesn’t provide an email address. He does provide a mobile phone number which is handy for people in the same country. AKISMET works fairly well on my blog and makes the spam quite managable. As the number of legit comments are not that great I manually approve them thus avoiding having a spam ever appear on my blog - showing a spam encourages more of the same. The comment I wanted to make on his post was to reference my previous blog post on this topic and suggest that one thing that can be done is to improve public transport which will increase the area of land available to people who work in central city areas. This means that the land prices can decrease and housing prices will follow. Another issue is that he suggests assisting people in paying rent. While this may sound like a good thing the current system of Negative Gearing is designed to decrease rent, but instead merely increases the price of owning a house.

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Last month the new thread I was afraid about has started. Called Considerations for 'xmms' removal from Debian, the maintainers of the xmms package proposed the removal of it.

I used xmms (and, before, x11amp) for something like 9 or 10 years. I know, I love it. I can't bear other players. Amarok is heavy, rhythmbox seems like a joke to me. I like to load my 6500 files playlist in one shot, press 'j' and jump to the song I want. I don't see how it could be easier to use a music player.

Following the thread, I must admit that, yes, xmms is old, gtk1.2, unmaintained, etc. I had to switch, sooner is better.

So I use now Audacious. At least I try to. Last time I tested it, the search (jump, 'j' key) function was not working. No it is, it works like xmms, and I'm happy. I know that upstream author of audacious dislikes being compared to xmms, but, screw you, you're like xmms, and I like it, so I like audacious for this. The plugins and the interface is like xmms, so it's great also.

However it's buggyyyyyyy. Third day of use, serious bug reported as #436557. It segfaults sometimes, or simply blocks reading a file.

The information loading 'on demand' is so crapy compared to xmms. I mean, it's fucking slow! When I put shuffle on and I lick 'next song please', then it hangs reading informations. xmms was doing what in a better way.

However, dear audacious-author-that-already-hates-me-for-comparing-xmms-and-audacious, I really think it'll be a real alternative for old xmms users like me and a lot I know (yes, I know a lot of people, damn it!). Developement seems to be very active, so I'll continue to report bug and use it.

Yes, I believe in audacious.

news.com.au reports that MS has hired former Miss Australia Erin McNaught to sex up the computer industry’s geeky image and describes her as a “University Drop-Out” (later in the article it’s revealed that she deferred her course so she might end up completing it). Hiring her is supposed to demonstrate that IT careers have “gone from geek to chic”. There are lots of more professional ways of demonstrating that idea. One way is to compare the median income of IT people ($54,422 according to payscale.com) to the median for the Australian population ($13,200 to $20,000 for females and $31,200 to $41,600 for males in 2006 according to the ABS) which clearly indicates that IT people get paid more than most Australians. Another way is to use adverts such as the Apple adverts for Mac vs PC, and Novell adverts for Linux vs Mac vs PC. Note how the female Linux character in the Novell adverts is cool and cute while still keeping all her clothes on. Yet another possibility would be to find some cute female MS employees and get them to do the promotion. MS is one of the largest IT companies in the world and has a large presence in Australia, surely they have enough female employees that they can find someone to do this promotion who isn’t famous for wearing a bikini! Hiring a model who is famous for swim-suit work to promote the computer industry isn’t going to affect the career choices of any but the least talented male students and if anything will scare off female students (who are already under-represented in the computer industry). The fact that the news.com.au story included a set of pictures of hew in swim-suits and lingerie with the title Erin McNaughty really says it all. It seems to me that Danni Ashe (wikipedia link) is better qualified for the MS job - after all she has even been recognised by the Guinness book of records for her work in sexing up the computer industry. Unlike Erin she has created web sites herself and started a very successful online business. Surely if being famous for wearing bikinis makes Erin suitable then being famous for wearing no clothes at all makes Danni even more suitable! :-# But seriously, has anyone ever hired the Chippendales (wikipedia) to advertise in the computer industry? There is a reason why that sort of thing doesn’t happen, and the same reason would apply to hiring an ex miss-Australia. Updated to fix a bad link.

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After my venting yesterday I received an email from an Amazon employee who reads Planet Debian, and he pointed me at http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=537868, which covers how to make a claim. I've no idea how one is supposed to directly find that page, as it didn't jump out at me when I went looking. I've filed a claim, we'll see what happens...

Automatically-generated links in email newsletters are usually ugly because they contain tracking data, to measure response to each individual copy of the newsletter. If your links are ugly, I think it is stupid not to override them when you launch a link-shortening service. The FON MOVIMIENTO Newsletter: August 2007 contained:

"With FON GET SIMPLE you can convert all of those long, impossible-to-remember URLs into short, easy-to-remember URLs that make your Internet travels simple. https://fon-en.custhelp.com/rd?1=AvcE~wolDv8SWivzGhIe~yL~Jvkq~_3~&2=118 "

Oops.

Steve McIntyre responded on his own blog to claim I

"blatantly missed the point, presumably to cause offence"

so I've updated the original to try to be more accurate. I didn't post to cause offence. I posted mainly because Evan simply unlinked, rather than leaving a "I've gone" post, so many readers wouldn't have realised what had happened. While I was posting, I wanted to express my disappointment at this sorry situation. That "presumably to cause offence" is typical of the public online mud-slinging I've come to expect from a few particular developers. That is trolling. It's far smarter, more subtle spin than anything I can write. I feel you'd only presume that if you already wanted to think ill of me, as it's untrue. (If you know me, I doubt you'd presume it.) If a post is "troll-like", it's probably an error. (I was taught writing by tabloid news... seriously. I try my best to overcome, but I don't always succeed when writing in a hurry, reacting to news.) Please, if anyone feels one of my posts went a bit awry, please take it up with me, either directly (email, IRC, jabber, telephone) or in the forum where it went bad. It's stupid to start criticising with a public notice in a different forum, unless you're trying to turn a mistake into a multi-modal flamewar. Myself, I had already replied in the original forum to the debian-project thread about why I disliked the unlinking suggestions. It didn't look much like a discussion: Steve McIntyre only posted once, then took no further part, and Planet Debian had already lost one valuable author. (For those who don't know, any debian developer can alter PD settings at present, but I think you'd need a brass neck to go against a stated position of debian's second-in-charge like that.) It looked like we were talking about bumping people off the planet again, without involving our users (one of our priorities?) in the discussion. So I posted.

As many may recall, I wrote a couple of scathing posts about my less than stellar experiences with Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey/ So, I am happy that people are finding the post and leaving their own horror stories. While it sucks that they have had problems, it is key to splatter these stories over the net. It it is a good indication that if I start my BCBS complain site, the name and domain which already exist (and the name is quite clever, imho), it will flourish. I am still on the fence about it as I am “giving” BCBS another chance to come through with the payment. I am in fact about to write my first appeal letter and send it off hopefully this weekend. In another month I should know whether they approve my claim or whether I will have to move to the second appeal process, which apparently goes to an external review board. But hopefully the posts and comments will keep coming as they are good grist for the BCBS mill.

It's been one of those days.

It started with me forgetting my laptop bag at home. Then I had to work with an attorney on some things. He's a nice guy, and does a good job, but you know, it's not what I'd really like to spend my day doing.

Then in the middle of the afternoon, I hung up the phone and checked my email. About 50 messages from Samba telling me that processes with various PIDs had crashed unexpectedly. Uh-oh. I think we still have some 80ish people using that.

About a minute later, a coworker says, "John, I've been bad." "Is that why I just got 50 emails from Samba?" "No. Well, yes. Well, maybe. I don't know."

It turned out he was working on a restore from tape that, out of necessity, grabbed more data than he needed. He meant to type rm -r ./var but typed rm -r /var instead. Oops. He hit Ctrl-C halfway through, so /var was still there enough to send email but not enough for Samba (or, apparently, NFS) to work.

As he dashed off to pull yesterday's tapes from offsite storage, I prepared the restore and made a plan. We hadn't installed any software since yesterday, so I restored var to a temporary location, took the server down into single-user mode, overwrote the /var that still existed, and rebooted the Xen instance in question. Everything back to normal. Except, that is, for the potentially dozens of users that will require assistance running SCANPST.EXE because their Outlook PST, being the fragile heap of garbage that it is, will have somehow been corrupted by this little incident.

So, what did we learn from this?

• Deleting /var was probably the least annoying outage I've had to deal with yet. Certainly less nerve-wracking than the time I was working on a live, powered-up server and my wedding ring shorted out something on a circuit board. I didn't know if that thing would just reboot or if we'd be down for hours waiting for parts...


• It was really nice knowing what was going on, rather than trying to find that bit out


• One coworker commented, "if he had to delete part of an operating system, at least it wasn't Windows. We wouldn't have recovered in 15 minutes if it was." True.


• Bacula is great.


• Backups are great, even if you don't use Bacula to make them.


• I dislike programs that take server load from 0.3 to 9.5 just telling you that there's something wrong with the server.

Fascinating and surprising (at least to me) observation on the Netflix Community Blog about user demand for half-star movie ratings:

So here s what I learned from months of testing this across the country: when we make the star options possible, we get fewer ratings. Significantly fewer ratings. We have argued these results internally for some time, and our best guess is that the complexity of doubling the number of choices from 5 to 10 deters many people from rating, so they just give up. ( 3 stars? No, 3 stars.. no 3 stars no oh forget it )

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I'll be 0x24 (hex) or pow(6,2) (dec) years old next Sunday and it is becoming obvious that I need to change my lifestyle. On the physical side I'm sure that I have to loose between 20 and 30 Kg. if I don't want to have health problems in the future. The plan is to change my eating habits and do sport regularly. The basic idea is to do a diet seriously and keep part of the rules more or less forever (that's the habits change); the other important thing is to do some exercise, I've never liked sports too much, but I'm sure I can try to walk some days and swim others (I've been going once a week to the swimming pool during the last months and I'll be doing it twice a week starting this September). On the mental side, I need to reduce my obligations and care less about the work problems in and out of the office. To reduce my obligations and have more free time I decided a couple of months ago that I was going to leave the Uni, as it was taking away a lot of time that I can use for more important things; I notified it and after this September I won't be working for the Universitat de Val ncia anymore. Initially my idea was to keep my main work and use some hours each week to work on my PhD Thesis, but the truth is that I'm not interested anymore; I don't have anything specially interesting to say and my main motivation for getting a PhD has also disappeared (at some point I thought about becoming a full time University professor, but after three and a half years I've had enough, at least for a looong while). This leaves me with my work at the ITI as my main and only work, but after some months I'm seriously considering leaving it also. My main problem there is that I believe that I'm starting to suffer the Peter Principle or something similar; almost all my professional career I've been working as a technician, first as a programmer and sysadmin and lately as analyst and team leader or technical manager, but now, as it seems to happen always in the Spanish IT companies, I'm being forced to move to a pure project management work and, to be fair, I don't like it. I don't know if that means that I'll get to my level of incompetence, but if that is the case I think I'll have to try the Peter's Parry, that basically means to refuse a promotion (I've already done it asking to get a place under my theoretical level, although not on a convincing manner, it seems) or use the Creative Incompetence technique, that is, give the impression that you have already arrived to your incompetence level (probably it is too late to do that at my current place, but maybe on the next one I'll be able to do it). Maybe this is not the last level of the Peter Principle, as I'm sure that I can and will do this work (I'm thinking about moving, but I will not do it until I have a plan for the future, and that will probably mean a new job), but I'm also sure that I will never do it as well as I can do technical tasks because I don't have any real motivation to do it and while I plan to get the skills needed, they are not attractive to me. I understand that on the current IT world we need to have project managers, and I really hate bad managers, but that does not mean I like to become one, I prefer to be a team leader and work only on one or two projects at a time, instead of having more than five and not do real work in any of them; my main problem is that the challenges and tasks a manager has to do have nothing in common with the things I like from computer science and I'm too perfectionist to handle people that does not care about how things are done in a lazy way (a team leader with a couple of projects can handle technical people, when you are a manager with multiple projects you miss the day to day perspective and problematic people is more difficult to handle). Oh well, we will see how things evolve. The good thing is that I believe that one way or another I'll end up having a better life and, if I'm able to care less about my own work (and the one done by others) maybe I'll be able to stay at an acceptable level on the hierarchy without getting burn out and maybe some day I'll be able to work again on the things I like and keep my promises.