Improving package managers I noticed two posts on improving package managers none of which mentions Debtags. Daniel Burrows mentions various issues:

• the current sections in Synaptic are useless
• there are better keyword search technologies than strstr()
• we could use popularity contest data to sort results
• it would be cool to do amazon-like things using popcon data

David Nusinov mentions that the ideal package manager should look like Google, where you search for things using just a simple one line text entry and pick from the results what you want to install. I should probably do a bit of recap of things that have been going on. I'll go through that list again:

• The current sections in Synaptic are useless

Agreed. This used to be a bug about this, which has been closed by Debtags more than one year ago. We now have much more useful category data for about 73% of the archive (including experimental), but what we lack is software using it. Here's a quick trick to try:

1. install debtags, and this gives you an easy to read text file in /var/lib/debtags/package-tags.
2. from that file, pick packages that have the tags role::program, scope::application and interface::x11.
3. display the results, and use the tags works-with::* and use::* to navigate the results.

There is a python-debian package in experimental that has a debtags module you could play with. Why is that that so far noone has written a simple package manager just for gamers, which uses only the game::* tags? Do you think Debtags gives you too many tags? Then check out:

• The Debtags smart search, and especially how it does not show you all the tags, but it is able to infer the tags you want from your google-like query (hi David!).
• The Debtags tag editor, and especially the search-as-you type feature on all the tags and the tag search (analogous to the Debtags smart search, but it only searches tags.
• The Debtags tag cloud, and if you don't like that one try to make your own: there are countless ways of generating tag clouds from Debtags data.

To summarise so far, we not only do have better categories, but also a number of cool algorithms to use them, and some interface prototypes as well. Just don't expect me to write a package manager as well: that's a job that so far I decided to leave to someone else. adept gave it a try, with positive results.

• there are better keyword search technologies than strstr()

Indeed, Xapian for example. I use it as part of the backend of the Debtags smart search, and here's our Xapian-powered normal keyword based package search interface which does stemming, indexing and all you want to ask from a serious full text index. In that page you don't see all the nice features of Xapian, but only the ones that I needed for my Debtags evil plans. Have a look at the documentation and give it a try. Here is a way to see Xapian's similarity matching in action:

1. go to the Go tagging! page
2. click on a random untagged package
3. the system gives you a rather relevant selection of tags
4. look at it again: the package was untagged: how could the web engine possibly figure those tags out?

What is happening under the scenes is that:

1. I ask Xapian: "what packages are similar to this one?".
2. I aggregate the tags of the resulting packages.
3. I rank the tags by how many resulting packages have them.

While we are on this topic, why don't we decide that we maintain a Xapian index of our package descriptions in, for example, /var/lib/apt/fulltext/, so that various applications can share it?

• we could use popularity contest data to sort results

Indeed. Anyone would like to implement this little "popcon" tool? Having the data easily accessible locally can encourage people to use them. The Debtags Go tagging! page already uses popcon data to show the most common untagged packages at the top, with double reason: it shows packages that more people are likely to know (and therefore likely to categorise) and it pushes for the most common packages to be tagged more urgently.

• it would be cool to do amazon-like things using popcon data

Indeed. Anyone volunteers to implement a prototype? The full unaggregated (but anonymised) popcon data are accessible to every Debian Developer on the host gluck.debian.org in the directory /org/popcon.debian.org/popcon-mail/all-popcon-results. Ideally one can do many interesting things with this concept: besides tag suggestions, one could identify the packages that are most representative of an installed system, and also offer negative suggestions like: "people who have packages like yours usually don't have this package: would you like to remove it?". There is more than all this that could be done. Recently, almost by accident, I had the idea of querying packages by example, like pointing to a file and find packages that can work with it. I've asked Jeroen to have Mole collect info on all files that could possibly get installed in /usr/lib/mime/packages/ (as suggested by Bernhard R. Link), to see if that prototype can be made more accurate. Query by similarity would be nice: I don't like this program, but what else do we have that does the same job? This is best implemented using Debtags data, since it directly maps to semantic properties. Note that you don't have to show a single tag to the user to implement this kind of interface. Do we have a way to point at the X window of an application and get the name of the package that installed it? Wouldn't it be about time to have it? Why don't we have a system updater utility that shows the Debian weather? Why aren't more people playing with semantic web? But more generally, the problem with package managers is that we seem to be irrationally compulsive in wanting to make the one and only big easy and complete interface for everyone. Other more reasonable people would tell you that if you have two very different kinds of users you may want to consider having two different user interfaces. Ubuntu for example installs by default 3 package manager interfaces: Synaptic; the thing that you access from the application menu to add applications to it; and the update manager. Does it sound like a waste? To me it makes lots of sense. We have lots of interesting, usable metadata; we have algorithms; we have prototypes; we have ideas for lots of cool, implementable features. The question is, are we able to write applications that just combines what is needed from all this treasure to provide the right interface(s) for our base(s) of users? Even if my English in 2004 wasn't easy to understand, a read here might still be useful. There is so much really cool stuff to be written, just within reach.

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely Nicolas Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April. Update: M. Mouette had a point about this original blog post, so I corrected its title. Now he can answer on the content if he likes to..;-)

Last July, I started an experiment, called Project Ummikko, with a friend of mine to see how well Linux is suited for a new user who has used Windows for many years, but is not a techie. I installed Debian, with GNOME, for her, and she went cold turkey: she started using Linux only, unless there was something she had to do, but could not achieve under Linux. It has been half a year, and it's time to report on the results. Translating and abbreviating her own words:

The good part of using Linux is that I don't need to worry about viruses or defragmenting the hard disk and so on. I would be happy to remain a Linux users for things like that. In basic everyday use I'm happy. The things that make me want to return to Windows are gaming, flash and other multimedia, and a feeling of helplessness. I want to play Alpha Centauri and adventure games I can borrow from friends. Flash doesn't work, and installing software from Debian via Synaptic is difficult, I'm not comfortable with it. With Windows, I'm used to being able to go online to find a program to solve some problem I have, or some plugin I'm missing, or some toy program I want, and after a few mouse clicks, I have it installed. There's many things that just don't work with Linux, like Second Life, or when my ISP would give two free movie downloads this month and next, but it only works on Windows and Mac. I have a feeling of being left out. I could manage with Linux, with the assumption that I have someone like Lasu to do installation and tweaking. The best thing about this experience? It was interesting to be able to make the experiement, the meta level has been the best thing. The best thing about Linux is the kind of maintenance things like no viruses or defragging, Linux doesn't rot like Windows does.

After we had the above interview, I upgraded her Debian, and this fixed at least most of the problems related to flash. Synaptic remains uncomfortable, and there's not much that can be done about Windows-only software. I was pleasantly surprised by the results. I had expected much worse problems, but I'm happy to report now that Linux really does seem ready for the average Windows user. The uncomfortability of Synaptic may be partly due to the fact that it is a different model from Windows: you get all your programs from one place, instead of anywhere on the Internet, partly due to just not using Synaptic much at all, and partly due to Synaptic not being perhaps as easy to understand as possible. I personally find Synaptic to be very nice, and use it regularly, but I am biased by having used Debian package managers for over a decade. Even if she had learned to use Synaptic, it would, of course, not have been enough: there's lots of Linux software that hasn't been included in Debian. My friend therefore feels that it would be nicer, more liberating, to be able to just download any old Linux software from a web page and install it easily. My conclusions: package management for Debian based systems could do with some work targetted towards neophytes. I am sure there are things that could be done to make package installation easier, less daunting, without dumbing down the system.

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely M. Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April.

If any planners want to see the impact of your short-sighted regulations, please visit Bowthorpe

"planning regs mean you only have to provide one space per home. Hence families with two cars, or couples who work in opposite directions and need two cars, often have to block their roads without meaning to do so."

Surely short-sighted would be to cater for today's car parking requirements? Thanks to climate change, oil decline and other reasons, it looks like there won't be as many cars tomorrow. Two-car households may be a temporary problem. If people are parking inconsiderately, bring in a one-car-per-house permit system with edge-of-zone car parks (and let two-car houses buy permits from car-free houses). If you build roads big enough for today's peak use, then in the future, there will be oversize roads for the traffic levels when that land could have been better used for housing. Ah, criticising the barking policies of Antony Little... blogging like it's 1999.

Cooperatives SW is the regional council of cooperatives and mutuals in South-West England (Gloucs, Bristol, Wilts, Somerset, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall and the Isles). I attend on behalf of the small workers' cooperative partnership that I work for. At the 2006 AGM I was elected to its steering group and today (2007-01-22) is my first meeting. I'll be going along and learning about how coops are communicating and marketing in the region, and hopefully something about the nuts and bolts of structural funding. I think that's what BASIS bids are. I'll be travelling to the meeting by train on First Great Western, who have hit the headlines this morning because of a mass protest against overcrowding on the Bristol-Bath route. It'll be extremely unusual if there's any overcrowding on daytime Bristol-Taunton trains. I'll bike to the easiest station, but I can't remember whether I can take my bike on these trains. Update: The above was blog 128 on the BBC's First Post blog. Firstly, funny to be a power of 2. Secondly, the name just makes me think of hot grits and Natalie Portman.

I'm convinced the Web 2.0 bubble will impact soon. Granted, some will survive, some will struggle - but some will just blow up. Time to sell for these. There are several reasons why I believe this will happen "soon":

• Too many clones. How many facebook/linkedin/xing/studivz/... clones can you name? We could make a "Memory" (aka: Concentration, Pairs) type of game from them...
• Too little benefit - did you actually have some benefit from these services except being able to show off how many people you know?
• Many of the web2.0ish stuff is just pretty graphics with no real use. How many of the tag clouds you see are actually useful? On the contrary, how many of these new sites have accessibility issues?
• Privacy issues - you've probably seen the bad press MySpace has recently been getting because of stalking and even paedophiles.
• Content issues - I've heard of child pornography been uploaded to e.g. MyVideo (a YouTube clone popular in Germany, since it's doing huge advertising and is on TV), and them taking multiple days to remove it. I wouldn't be suprised if that happens with YouTube as well, but they probably are faster in reviewing and deleting such contents.
• Licensing issues - there was a lawsuit started agains RapidShare, and they probably are bigger than the P2P filesharing networks by now. They're proud of having 80 GBit bandwidth, and I assume 95% of their traffic is actually violating copyright. They try to get out by claiming of having no control over their users content, but that is bullshit. They make a living of having people download this stuff from them.
  Also when I recently browsed MyVideo a bit, it seemed to have like 95% of videos that either come from some TV or have been on the net somewhere else for years; most definitely violate someones copyright. But so far, noone has been caring enough, apparently.
• Security issues - Javascript and webbrowsers aren't well-suited for writing reliable and secure programs. Face it. We're already seeing the first attacks on the Google API, expect much more of these attacks to surface. I wouldn't be surprised if spammers already make heavy use of such APIs to harvest email addresses.

Many people have been keeping an hungry eye on YouTube, Rapidshare and others. It's just a matter of time until some of these predators goes for the kill. My predictions for the post-web2.0-bubble time:

• User content will be restricted to plain text unless you register and verify your ID, so if you upload copyrighted material, the owners can go right for the user that uploaded.
• Privacy will be a key feature of services, maybe some privacy service providers will surface, that allow you to have a verified ID without exposing it directly to the web service, or having to verify again and again for different services. However phishing will be even more of a threat then.
• More restrictions for unregistered users means lower eyeballs, which in turn means less advertising money and thus less services that can be offered completely for free; however many services do not work as crippleware.
• APIs on the web will largely go away again. A specification for making them safe for scripting will be underway, but only supported in Firefox 3+
• True client applications will come back. Vista with C# and Mono on Linux allow for such applications to be written much easier, and they will not suffer from the browser security restrictions. Why would you write a web-based word processor fighting with HTML limitations, the JavaScript language and browser security when you can do it much easier in C#?

Improving the speed of upgrades is a never-ending process. Last year, I worked on GConf schema registration which was painfully slow. Today, the introduction of apt-delay, which compensates for the absence of hooks in dpkg, paves the way for further improvement: single call for gconf-schemas (although we wouldn't gain much now), but also more recently widespread dog-slow stuff like update-mkinitrd and fc-cache. However this approach doesn't work for ldconfig, as this command must be launched before considering the package as configured. Therefore, you can't hook it into apt-delay and hope everything installs fine before running ldconfig. The ldconfig case can be solved by itself, as it is possible to use the simplest caching method by simply looking at the timestamps of the directories it scans. This patch (for glibc 2.5) adds simple checks to see whether the directories actually need to be rescanned before regenerating the cache. The improvement is visible as soon as you upgrade two libraries together - and generally, unstable users upgrade them by packs of ten, if not more. As Aur lien Jarno seemed to agree with the approach, I hope to see it included soon, at least in experimental.

Happy global warming...:-(... Please spread the word around: we are all responsible for this with our daily attitude with regards to the respect of our environment. Environment respect is no more (and has never been) a joke.

Says the guy blogging about booking flights from Paris to Edinburgh...

Chris Cunningham commented:

"Errr, standing charges on gas are pretty rare now. British Gas abolished them years ago, for instance. Standing charges for electricity are generally a good idea if you use any reasonable amount of electricity though. The single best piece of advice I can hand out for saving money on utilities is to take meter readings every month. Not only does this make it much easier to negotiate re-estimation of poorly-calculated start/end reads, it also gives you an immediate idea of how much you're using. I'm rather surprised that you didn't take the opportunity to rail against the evils of privatisation which led to this situation. Deregulated utilities are a bit of a nightmare in the UK, speaking from experience working for one."

Standing charges may be pretty rare, but they are still allowed and npower put them on so-called deemed contracts. I can see why that makes sense to a company like npower. It seems a good way to make sure you can bill a customer who hates you. Reading your own meter is a good idea. Doesn't really help if you've only just moved in, though. npower still argue that the absurdly low meter reading they're using for your start value (which would mean a bigger bill) was the final reading given by the previous occupier. I can't really comment on the evils of privatisation: I never interacted with the public utilities. Interestingly, the "deemed contract" problem seems to come from the regulations. Gas Act 1995 Schedule 2B section 8 creates the deemed contracts and doesn't explicitly handle the situation where someone moving in has an existing gas contract and doesn't want the deemed contract at all. This seems a misregulation bug as much as a deregulation one.

Nothing really worth noticing here, the Paris area being southward enough and not hit by this major storm over northern Europe. Many people still remember Dec 26th 1999 and have been very careful, indeed. I'm just listening to the morning news and am Seeing that UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and a part of northern France have not been as lucky as us here (this doesn't seem to be finished and more Eastern parts are still to be hit). The damages seem to be pretty high and so is the number of casualties. I hope that all you people are safe and well with no damage to your lives or belongings. Happy global warming...:-(... Please spread the word around: we are all responsible for this with our daily attitude with regards to the respect of our environment. Environment respect is no more (and has never been) a joke. This is a matter of survival for us and our children. Do us a favor: break one SUV a day...:-)

We're at 5 minutes to midnight, and it appears that Joost is the new TV - it appears to be getting some reaonable coverage at the moment, but looks far too much like another closed app using proprietary protocols - the world has gone DRM crazy - someone stop it, I want to get off. DRM is a myth, if you can play it, you can copy it (not neccessarily easily, but it's still possible). The NewScientist article is quite interesting in the claim of "piracy-proof"... if you can play the video, you can capture it, if you can listen to music you can record it, when is the media industry going to realise that DRM is a very dumb idea that shouldn't have been allowed to get this far - pirates can (and always will) find a way, how about going back to trusting your users rather than tarring them all with the "you're a pirate" brush. The Register 's article appears to have a typo in it... well, unless you really do need a 500mbps line in order to use Joost - seems unlikely, I think they meant 500kbps. Anyways - nice idea, not sure that it's better than anything else though, I'll continue buying DVDs that let me play back when I have no interweb connection. Back to being at 5 minutes to midnight, eeep! We're all going to die! Maybe it's the introduction of DRM that's led to so much terrorism, or maybe just that the media industry appears to be out to shaft everyone. Bah. Only one other article has caught my attention this morning, it's another look at the iPhone, it appears that no one is actually getting a reasonable amount of time to play and review this device, and it brings up a number of my issues with the iPhone. So, yes, that's the morning covered - maybe more this evening.

Quick question for the Interweb regarding bash completion. If I do cat ~/[tab], I get to pick from 182 completions, as it lists all of the dotfiles. Is there a way of telling bash to only complete dot files if I put a dot, otherwise only complete non-hidden files? Answers on a postcard, or if you must, a comment on this blog. Thanks! NP: IBM 1401, a User's Manual, Jóhann Jóhannsson

The snow we got a couple of days ago hasn't abated here in Montreal. We had a cold snap right after the snowfall, so temperatures have been around -20C for the last couple of days. Last night Maj had her French classes at the Montreal YMCA, and Micaela had spent the day seeing art museums and visiting bookstores downtown. (She's a poetry nut -- loves finding books by Canadian poets, francophone and anglophone, that she can't get at home in Melbourne.) So Amita and I went to meet her about halfway from our local Metro station, at the Pizzad lic on Ave Mont Royal. I covered Amita in about 10 layers of clothing, then put her on her little purple sled and dragged her up towards Mont Royal. She kept wanting to get up and walk herself ("Up!" is her newest and most insistent word), but when she was standing she wouldn't walk at all. So it was a long time getting to the restaurant. When we got there, Micaela was leaning against the front door shivering. Apparently Pizzad lic is out of business (bummer!). A graver cause for concern, however, was Amita's face: the parts showing around her scarf were tomato red from the cold. Gah! We rushed her home (crying all the way), and when I got her undressed she had a red stripe across the middle of her face like the people in those frozen pizza ads. I bathed her cheeks in cold water, and then gave her a hot bath, and by the time she was out she was calm and regular-colored. We got pizza delivered at home, which she enjoyed a lot. No permanent damage, as far as I can tell, except to my self-confidence as a competent parent. When Maj got home later that night, she reminded me that for extremely cold weather you have to put Vaseline on babies' cheeks to protect their delicate skin from the cold. Amita and I went to Loblaw's this morning to do some grocery shopping (in the car), which was a much more reasonable experience. Tonight for dinner I made pat chinois, a plate with baked mashed potatoes and ground beef known to English-speakers as shepherd's pie. (I make it with mushrooms and veggie beef.) Here in Quebec it's called "Chinese casserole", for unknown reasons. The best guess is that French Canadian lumberjacks worked at sites in the USA where it was common to have Chinese immigrant cooks. Confronted with a potato dish they didn't recognize, they assumed it was a meal from the cooks' home country. I don't know if this origin is true or not, but it sure is a good story. Anyways, it's good stick-to-your-ribs food, which you need on a night like this. When it gets down to -28C (as it will tonight), you need a lot of carbs running your internal furnace for you. tags: montreal snow cold shepherds pie pat chinois quebec babies amitajune

Piknic lectronik The good snow we're having means that one of my favourite events of the year is going to be white and cold and fluffy and fun. For the last few years, Piknic lectronik, the group that produces weekend outdoor parties on le Ste H l ne on the site of Expo 67, has done a single, crazy outdoor party in the dead of winter. This year, the party, called "Igloofest", is happening in the Vieux Port on the Quai Jacques Cartier. It's going to be two nights, January 19-20 (that's 29-30 Niv se for you aficionados of the French Revolutionary Calendar), from 5 to 11PM. We're going out on Friday night -- our pals from Ninjatune are part of the party, and our friend DJ Ghost Beard is on that evening. It should be a great time; I'm really looking forward to dancing in the snow and having vin chaud afterwards. tags: montreal piknic lectronik party dancing ninjatune winter snow

BarCampMontreal II: Camp Harder Just got the news from my blogroll: Sylvain Carle notes that the second BarCampMontreal will take place April 28th. That's going to be close for us; we'll be at the Wikitravel Get-together in Puerto Rico up until the 22nd. And we plan to fly there from Miami. But, hey: stranger things have happened. Our BarCamp last year was an absolute blast (see my follow-up on Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV); lots of fun people doing interesting things in fun ways, and then talking about it. I'd really like to be there for this next one. tags: barcamp montreal barcampmontreal wikitravel puerto rico

Louisianne I'm happy to see that in an alternative history universe called Ill Bethisad, the French Revolutionary Calendar is used in the North American francophone nation of Louisianne. On the downside, my city of Ville-Marie is in the royalist enclave of New Francy, which uses the boring old calendar. Ill Bethisad is an impressive alternative-history project, and the wiki format seems to really be conducive to its further development. Great idea, and nice to see the ol' FRC included. tags: alternative history french revolutionary calendar ill bethisad north america

Baby Lessig Congrats to Lawrence Lessig and family on the birth of a new son. tags: baby lessig

Here's a mini-review of my new external storage arrangements for the Macbook Pro.Thanks to my music collection, an appetite for shooting photos in RAW format, and general untidiness I'm not exactly blessed with spare space. Something had to be done.
The solution I came up with was an IcyBox IB-360StUS-BL external SATA/USB2 enclosure, wired to a Sonnet Tempo Express 34 SATA adapter.
Icybox IB-360StUS-BL enclosureEnclosure The IcyBox is such an affordable little box that it seems silly not to have one to hand as a precaution, especially given the cheapness of hard drives these days. The enclosure is convection cooled, so has no noisy fan, and is an a reasonably attractive alumnium package that fits in with the look of the Macbook Pro quite well. The blue LED is switchable, just in case you don't want that bling look on your desktop.Inside the enclosure there's both PATA and SATA connectors. I chose to use a SATA drive, a Samsung HD400LJ. There are two headers for connecting a SATA drive. One goes to the USB 2 adapter, one straight to the outside of the enclosure for wiring to a SATA port on the computer.Four screws secure the hard drive in its tray. The tray then slides into the frame and is secured by four screws in the base. I didn't find it that easy to get these in, but they seemed secure enough once screwed in.The IcyBox comes with plenty of cables, including a SATA-SATA cable, a bracket to relocate an internal SATA port to the PCI card cover on a regular PC, and a USB cable. The power supply is of the external brick sort. SATA adapterThe other half of the equation is the Sonnet Tempo Express 34 SATA adapter. This fits into the Macbook Pro's Express Card port — you knew that something had to eventually, eh? The Tempo card features two eSATA ports, which are of a different design to the  SATA ports featured on the Icybox. This means you need to buy an eSATA-SATA cable. You can either spend $20 on one from Sonnet themselves, or get a cheaper unbranded one for about the tenth of the price: just make sure its reasonably well shielded.Once plugged in, the external drive shows up on the Mac as a SCSI device, and behaves like any removable media. As such, it needs to be unmounted from the desktop before you eject the Tempo card.The only bug with the Tempo card I've found is that things don't seem to work that well if you boot the machine with the card inserted. The very helpful people from Sonnet tell me this is an issue with the underlying Silicon Image chipset, and they're working on sorting it out. (I was very impressed with the technical knowledge, friendliness and speed of response from Sonnet's support department.)PerformanceI'm no benchmarking guru, but it's clear that the external Samsung HD400LJ outperforms my internal 7200rpm SATA drive on the Macbook Pro. Brief experiments with XBench suggested that this performance boost was probably between 20 and 40%. It's certainly vastly preferable to the performance hit you get when you use a USB or Firewire 400 drive with the MBP.ConclusionIt's early days yet, but I'm happy with my new setup. The extra port on the Tempo adapter allows for the connection of another drive, or if I use Sonnet's own products, up to 10 drives! I feel happier knowing the disk isn't competing for attention with all the other USB gadgets I have plugged in. The other big plus point for me is the quietness of the Icybox/Samsung combination.Links:

• Icybox 360
• Sonnet Tempo SATA Express 34
  

 

... was in the unlucky situation to get a topic for a short talk assigned by his English teacher, he felt uncomfortable with. Luckily he found some skilled IT people via a mailing list, who helped him regarding this topic. The final version of his slides about the advantages of the Windows operating system are more or less funny, so you might want to take a look at them yourself. No, I don't know why English teacher assign such topics.

This morning at LCA Andrew Tanenbaum gave a talk about Minix 3 and his work on creating reliable software.

He cited examples of consumer electronics devices such as TVs that supposedly don't crash. However in the past I have power-cycled TVs after they didn't behave as desired (not sure if it was a software crash - but that seems like a reasonable possibility) and I have had a DVD player crash when dealing with damaged disks.

It seems to me that there are two reasons that TV and DVD failures aren't regarded as a serious problem. One is that there is hardly any state in such devices, and most of that is not often changed (long-term state such as frequencies used for station tuning is almost never written and therefore unlikely to be lost on a crash). The other is that the reboot time is reasonably short (generally less than two seconds). So when (not if) a TV or DVD player crashes the result is a service interruption of two seconds plus the time taken to get to the power point and no loss of important data. If this sort of thing happens less than once a month then it's likely that it won't register as a failure with someone who is used to rebooting their PC once a day!

Another example that was cited was cars. I have been wondering whether there are any crash situations for a car electronic system that could result in the engine stalling. Maybe sometimes when I try to start my car and it stalls it's really doing a warm-boot of the engine control system.

Later in his talk Andrew produced the results of killing some Minix system processes which show minimal interruption to service (killing an Ethernet device driver every two seconds decreased network performance by about 10%). He also described how some service state is stored so that it can be used if the service is restarted after a crash. Although he didn't explicitely mention it in his talk it seems that he has followed the minimal data loss plus fast recovery features that we are used to seeing in TVs and DVD players.

The design of Minix also has some good features for security. When a process issues a read request it will grant the filesystem driver access to the memory region that contains the read buffer - and nothing else. It seems likely that many types of kernel security bug that would compromise systems such as Linux would not be a serious problem on the HURD. Compromising a driver for a filesystem that is mounted nosuid and nodev would not allow any direct attacks on applications.

Every delegate of LCA was given a CD with Minix 3, I'll have to install it on one of my machines and play with it. I may put a public access Minux machine online at some time if there is interest.