Last Gammu release in this year is out. There are no major changes compared to 1.15.91, but it brings lot of bug fixes to stable series. Full list of changes since 1.15.0:

• Added identification of some Sony-Ericsson and Sharp phones.
• Increased maximal number of entries per contact.
• Fixed various compile time warnings.
• Improved MinGW crosscompilation.
• Localizations update.
• Fixed detection of first free memory location if memory is empty (bug #434).
• Fixed mysql.h include path (bug #441).
• Fixed decoding of one char SMS (bug #442).
• Detect Nokia 3109c (thanks to David Meier).
• Automatically find MinGW compiler and allow overrides (bug #438).
• Fixed parsing of some memory entries (bug #450).
• Fixed decoding of some corner case SMS (bug #447).
• Phones capable of switching to OBEX mode from AT have it now automatically enabled. Please report problems with this.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/

It's an end of year tradition for non-profit organizations to do big fund-raising and membership pushes. As I mentioned several days ago, I am personally giving to two organizations this year: the Wikimedia Foundation and the Free Software Foundation. The FSF has a goal of 500 associate members by year-end and it's an important goal that will sustain the foundation's activities. While membership dues keep the lights on, the fact that the foundation has a robust and growing membership is equally, if not more, important. FSF executive director Peter Brown put an appeal online in both video and text versions. In it, he lays out some of the most important issues for the next year. You should watch the video version in OGG Theora or this YouTube version (requires Gnash or non-free Flash). The appeal briefly lays out the FSF's plans for next year. My partner Mika Matsuzaki and my friend Oliver Day shot and edited the video. Please pass the link around to those you feel might be interested. Here's my appeal:

Now is the time to join and give to Free Software Foundation. 2008 is going to be extraordinarily important year for free software. Eben Moglen likes to quote Gandhi's "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" progression when describing the free software movement. As I pointed out when I joined the FSF board, we're beginning to see powerful interests fighting free software. It's going to increase in the next few years. Things will probably get a lot uglier for free software before they get better. We can win but things are far from settled. The FSF is the front-line organization in this fight and we need a robust and proactive foundation, and an active and involved membership, if we're going to win. Here are the issues that I'm going to pushing the FSF to pursue in the next year. Expanding activism outside our traditional technologist communities: In part through the work of projects like Defective By Design, we've seen the tide turn for DRM on music in what what may be the FSF's greatest success last year. I'm going to push the FSF to continue the campaign to attack DRM for video, eBooks, and the other places it is cropping up. The most remarkable thing to me about Defective By Design is that its participants and supporters are not, for the most part, people who develop or use GNU/Linux or even know what GNU is! If advocacy for software freedom involves a conversation we can only have with people who understand what POSIX is and how one uses it, we've already lost. Through DbD, BadVista, and other projects, the FSF has made major strides in the last year. It need to do much more and needs your support to do so. Get proactive about software patents: As a community, we've had our head in the sand about software patents for far too long. There are companies and patent trolls sitting on massive, growing piles of software patents. They are not our friends and they do not mean us well. One cannot write non-trivial software today without running a serious risk of infringing patents. The software patents minefield we've found ourselves in is a very fundamental threat to the success of free software and we've already begun to see the first casualties and costs. We must eliminate software patents. Now. The US is very important in this fight (much patent law is "exported" from the US) and almost no organization is working on software patent elimination there. Not enough people are thinking and acting strategically on this issue. The FSF is planning to make major steps in this fight in the coming year and we need your support to do so. Web services and the changing face of software: This last year, I worked to help launch the new version the AGPLv3. The license addresses the role of copyleft for software like web-services which, due to the legal particulars of the GPL, did not extend to the purveyors of web services. Of course, access to source code does not make the users of all web-services free (e.g., the GMails and the Facebooks). Nobody seems to know what freedom for webserver entails. There might not even be good answers. In the next year, I'm going to push the FSF to help start several conversation and to begin to follow up on what I think was an important first step with the AGPLv3. While this is not a major organizational priority yet, it's a major action item that I will be pursuing through the FSF. If you feel strongly about this issue, whatever your position, become a member, stay involved as these projects develop, and have your voice be heard. We don't know the answers yet and we need your input as much as we need your action.

Please, support the FSF in the efforts listed above, and in others, by giving generously. If you're not a member, please join the FSF as an associate member. If you are already a member, please consider making a tax-deductible donation. The FSF is a very lean, very humble organization of passionate and dedicated individuals working tirelessly for software freedom. Every little bit helps. Members pays USD $120 ($10/month) and student members pay half that. FSF has members across the world -- where a weak dollar often makes it even cheaper. Member support and participation builds capacity and credibility for the foundation and keep the organization responsible, responsive, and in tune with our community.

As Tolimar was asking about it and I am using the setup at some places to get past idiotic^Wbroken firewalls, where you always want to kill the clueless people that did set them up - lets write a bit how to ease ssh usage at such locations. Imagine a place where you can’t ssh elsewhere directly, you have to go through at least one, in some cases two or three hosts, to get anywhere sane.[1] So the topic is SSH jumphost. Thats basically what you do manually if you

  ssh some.host
  ssh next.host

where some.host is your jumphost. Add as many some.host as you want into this chain. We are all lazy and don’t want to type that by hand, one ssh is enough for everybody. Hurray, ssh already provides what we need, namely the ProxyCommand directive, it’s just not known as much as it should be. For this example imagine I have to ssh via the following host chain to get out: kosh -> vir -> babylon5 -> sheridan and also want to have my local port 2525 forwarded to sheridans port 25. The following config snippet (.ssh/config) is doing that[2]

 Host yay
 ProxyCommand ssh -q -A -X vir ssh -q -A -X babylon5 'nc -w1 sheridan 22'
 LocalForward 2525 localhost:25
   
 Host vir
 ProxyCommand ssh -q -A -X kosh 'nc -w1 %h %p'

The effect of this is:

• When I run ssh yay this will run
• ssh -q -A -X vir which in turn runs
• ssh -q -A -X kosh where it will start the nc command, replacing %h and %p, so it runs
• nc -w1 vir 22 which simply “pipes” all data to host vir, port 22, where it then runs
• ssh -q -A -X babylon5 to login to babylon5 where it finally uses
• nc -w1 sheridan 22 nc to let ssh connect to the target host

and I end up having a shell on host sheridan. The LocalForward line also tells ssh to tunnel my port forwarding over that multi-hop session, voila, done. Of course there is a little caveat with this - all hosts do have to know the next one (ie. .ssh/known_hosts should have the right data). You should also think about using ssh keys (maybe including Agent forwarding). You really dont want to see 5 Password: prompts right behind each other for a 5-hop setup - with no clue if its for the next host or for a typo… [1] For added fun, which I have at one place, add things like a proxy with user authentication done in a way that tools like tor or openvpn can’t get through it and you always wish those admins use Windows, just so they suffer. Anyway, I talk about the first part only, using jumphost, other ways getting around crap admins needs, in my case, an own script to do it, not part of this topic… [2] Yes, one can do it in lots of ways and those here might not be the most optimized/nice/whatever ones. But they work and are just examples here, select your own parameters if you dont like mine!

As part of my research, I may have to conduct a survey among Debian contributors. The word "survey" usually elicits frowns because surveys are often misconducted. MJ has taken the time to draft up some advice to surveyors. Problems with surveys generally fall into one of two categories: content and presentation. I'll refrain from making statements about content (Wikipedia has some stuff on questionaire construction) and instead concentrate on presentation in the following. Commonly in the digital age, surveys are administered via a web page or e-mail. In my recent Ph.D. transfer report, I identified a number of shortcomings with these approaches: Asking Debian contributors to click radio buttons on a web page is a bit like expecting a mountain biking champion to ride a tricycle across a paddock: painful, if not offensive. Furthermore, web surveys can only be taken while on-line, when most of us have better things to do. E-mail surveys address some of these problems, but create new ones: answers cannot be constrained to a domain (think multiple-choice), character set and formatting issues make evaluation difficult, and it's impossible to prevent users from attaching comments or modifying responses. In thinking about the issue, I came up with a third means to administer a survey: a console tool. Think of a Debian package which provides a console application controlled by a study-specific data file. The data file specifies the questions and their answer domains, and the tool presents those to the participant. Since most of Debian happens on the console anyway, such an approach to surveys seems more appropriate. Interaction with the survey tool would be as easy as pressing the 2 or 4 keys to select one of the multiple choices, and the tool would immediately move on to the next question (and not wait for the user to hit enter). Obviously, n and p should allow navigation back and forth across the set, and c would spawn a text editor to give the user a chance to attach a comment to his/her current response, in which s/he might criticise the question or provide additional information. Finally, the tool should be able to pick up where it left off, should the user chose to exit/suspend the survey for now. Integration with debconf or another interface abstraction is also worth consideration. There is more to it: people change their minds and should thus be able to amend responses. With their consent, it might be valuable to track such changes and inquire about their motivations. As I was thinking about how to realise this, I suddenly arrived at version control: use Git as a backend storage. The set of cool features this would enable seems to be endless: it works off-line and can be used to track aforementioned changes, but also offers the possibility to create a squashed result in case the participant prefers to submit only the final result. Furthermore, it's a trivial change between anonymous submissions, and submissions authenticated by a GPG signature. In addition, the survey tool should be able to display questions according to previous responses (control flow). For instance, if the survey determines that a given user is a contributor to the bug tracking system, but not a project member, it wouldn't make sense to ask when s/he received his/her Debian account. Furthermore, questions could be dynamically creatable from context, so that the survey can drill into depth depending on previous responses, rather than asking the same questions to all participants. I am currently applying for funding to outsource the development of such a tool. If you are interested in coding it up and getting paid for it, speak to me. Here are some more specifications to keep in mind before jumping on:

• the result must be released under a Free licence.
• the tool should be implemented in Python and use PyGit. Missing Git bindings should be implemented in and contributed to PyGit.
• the logic should be in a reusable module, and the application a thin layer on top of that.
• data files must be able to specify at least multiple-choice, Likert-scale and free-form-answer questions.
• data files should be able to encode conditional flow.
• data files should encode whether submissions can/must/mustn't be anonymous.
• data files should encode policy whether changes can/must/mustn't be tracked.
• it would be nice if data files could encode dynamic questions assembled at run-time.
• questions and answers must be translatable using standard .po files.
• in addition to the console interface, a debconf interface would be nice.
• every response results in a Git commit object, and commit messages may be automated or queried from the user, depending on context and configuration.
• data files should provide parent/seed SHA-1 hashes such that every participant essentially commits to a branch off the same parent, using e.g. uuencoded bundles.
• submission should take place via git-push or git-send-email, depending on whether a net connection exists or not.

These are likely to be incomplete, but should convey the basic picture. Feedback is always welcome! NP: Oceansize: Frames Update: James Andrewartha pointed me to purity, which asks multiple-choice questions on the console. It has the kind of interface which I envision. Also, Chris Lamb suggested this personality survey as a base line. Well, actually he just suggested I look into it.

A common feature in blog software is a Blogroll, this is a list of links to blogs which are associated in some way with the blog in question - most commonly it’s a list of blogs run by friends of the blogger in question. Now in the case of friends with very similar interests (IE same religious and political beliefs, sexual preferences, hobbies, etc) this wouldn’t cause a problem. In the case of commercial blogs it also will work well (EG Google runs a large number of blogs which contain links to all the rest - they may not interest all readers but should be expected not to offend any). In the case of personal blogs where people don’t always have the same interests there is scope for problems. A link to the main page of a blog is an unconditional recommendation for the blog. There are not many of my friends who I share that much in common with that I would be prepared to give such a recommendation for a frank personal blog, and for those few I am unwilling to do so as it generates social pressure to include others. Some of my friends who didn’t get listed in my blogroll would probably get offended, even though it’s only the occasional post that I strongly disagree with which would make me refrain from such a listing. I appreciate it when people add me to their blogroll, but don’t have any expectation that the listing will remain (I’m not going to get offended if someone changes their criteria for listing and removes my entry). But I consider it an equal compliment when someone cites one of my blog posts as a reference and recommends that other people read it. Citing an individual post has the advantage (for the person citing the post) they are specifically not recommending my entire blog. For example if you recommend one of my posts about Linux and one of your readers goes further into my site and is offended by my posts about politics then it’s not your issue. Tim Berners-Lee made an interesting point [1] “so readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don’t just hit the back button once, they hit it twice“. I know that some people who would be interested in the technical Linux issues I write about don’t read my blog because they are offended by my political beliefs, I am not concerned about this - but I don’t expect that everyone who chooses to link to me will necessarily want to make the same trade-off. When citing individual posts it’s possible to strongly agree with one post and strongly disagree with another by the same author. Probably the best way of acknowledging your friends via blogging (if you choose to do so) would be to make an occasional links post which contains short positive recommendations to the best posts your friends wrote. If every month or two someone writes a links post (post which has little content, merely recommendations for other posts) which references your posts then you know that they like you (and you get a Technorati.com boost), so a blogroll entry hardly seems necessary. An additional benefit for giving such direct credit is that the person receiving the links will know what you consider to be their best work which will help them in their future writing. I believe that adding this feature to common blogging software was a mistake. The small number of people who actually need this (such as Google) can create it via a HTML widget (IE writing raw HTML for the page - it’s really easy to do) and the rest of the population would be better off without it.

• [1] http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/170

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We were hit pretty hard in Boston. My office was shut down and deserted by mid-afternoon, but I decided to stay until late afternoon — big mistake. You might think the trains wouldn’t be as affected by the snow. And they weren’t — it only took me twice as long to get home, while it took my brother over six hours to drive from Somerville to Roslindale. Still, it was a pretty extraordinary scene at South Station around 4:30pm. It was packed inside and out. A few trains arrived, and no one got on or off. I was wondering if they were ghost trains until finally things started moving. The odd color balance in this photo set is because these were all taken in the dark with very long exposure times. But the apocalyptic cast may actually be appropriate. Earlier: Proof of Fall 2007, Blizzard 2007, Blizzard 2005, First Snow 2004, Winter Sunset 2005. Technorati Tags: Boston, Roslindale, Snow, Blizzard

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Microsoft has an article on their website in which they compare Windows to "Linux". As can be expected, the comparison is rather one-sided, and in some cases flat-out wrong. Usually I ignore this type of things, but this time I decided to just point out why it's so wrong, and put it online. Comments are welcome.

On Monday I was at a Vanessa Mae concert in arena “Riga” in Riga, Latvia. The concert was almost an hour late due to flight delay. It would have been fine if the organisers would let us into the hall or at least informed the several thousand people about the delay and its reason and not just have us stand in the rather restricted lounge. around half an hour after the planned start time, we were let to our seats and some ten minutes later an announcement was broadcasted explaining the reason for the delay. Vanessa came out with her own band and a local Latvian string orchestra. I wonder if she played with local orchestras in other locations as well. The orchestra preformed perfectly as far as I could tell, which is not much because they were mixed way down and were barely audible most of the time. I am a big fan of Vanessa Mae - I like classical music, I love her interpretation of that music and I appreciate how she made classical music more acceptable for a modern teen to like. That said, the concert was a mix of joy and disappointment for me. The joy came from hearing the music that I know and like and seeing how it is played in real life. It was a great joy and most of the time I was bobbing in my chair as a very happy boy. However, there were moments when I cringed and unfortunately there was more than a handful of those during the two hour concert. The problems could be put into three categories: 1. Vanessa missing a note or even a handful of them badly. I will be an optimist and blame that on the tuning - just the day before she was playing in Seatle in 80% humidity and then came to Riga and 20% humidity. She had to retune her wooden violin after each song because of that. She apologised for that mid-show. 2. Spotlight and camera missing the action. At times Vanessa steps back and one of her band members goes on a solo, but most of the time the person controlling the spotlight and the person controlling the camera were not ‘in’ the action and just stayed on Vanessa. The worst cases were when a couple seconds into the solo the camera would start to pan over to the band member playing the solo part, spend a couple more seconds framing and focusing and then after another second the spotlight did the same and by that time the solo part was over. Two cameras and two spotlight should be used for such cases with people controlling them having a clear idea of what happens next. One camera should always be on a wider angle shot and one for closeups, so that when a switch is coming, you could switch to wide angle a couple of seconds before the switch, give the closeup camera time to change target, re-frame and re-focus and then switch to it. And for the spotlights, one would always track the main person and the other seeking out the next person of interest. 3. Mixing problems. Vanessa was always way too loud and drowned out the other instruments even when that was not desirable. Background orchestra was too low. In general the mixing was very pop-ish - no dynamic range. The worst cases of this were Bolero and Storm. Storm is my favourite melody and I especially love the slow and quiet beginning of the song, but that was skipped entirely in the concert cutting straight to the loud part. Some other songs were also brutalised that way. I know that true artists generate most of their income through concerts and for that reason I recommend every Vannessa Mae fan to buy the tickets to her concerts, but if you are an audiophile .. don’t go there - stay at home with you trustworthy stereo system and FLAC recording of great sound. The concert is there to support the artist and for the atmosphere not for the best sound, unfortunately.

My current mailfilter has two features which increase my day-to-day productivity:

1. a "tickler," which is a reminder system inspired by the tickler file component of David Allen's Getting Things Done action management method: I can submit emails and notes to the tickler along with a timestamp in the future, and the tickler delivers the mail (or note) to my inbox when the timestamp has passed.
2. the ability to delay certain types of mail (e.g. Debian mail is held until the weekend, while news items and the like are only delivered at night).

My current implementations work alright, but they're brittle and crap. What's worse is that the two features could be combined and handled by one and the same tool, but I implemented them differently for now: The tickler consists of a Maildir, to which I can submit mails, either by mailing a note to a specific email address (currently broken, thus not linked from here), or by adding a tickle stamp (X-Tickle header) to a message with this script, saving it to the local tickler mailbox and asking offlineimap to shove it to the server. On this server, the tickler queue is regularly scanned by a script, which resubmits mail whose timestamp has expired to my mailfilter, where it is treated somewhat specially as a resubmitted mail. After almost three months with this setup, I can identify the following shortcomings:

• Since the queue is only processed on the server, I cannot register a mail with the tickler without going online and synchronising my mail before the timestamp expires. So if I am on my way to a conference on Monday and tell the tickler to resubmit a given message on the next day, but I don't connect before Wednesday, I won't get the mail on Tuesday (because the mail does not actually reach the tickler until Wednesday, when it's immediately resubmitted). I have not found an algorithm that would let me run a queue processor on the server and my laptop without the two causing mail duplication and potentially interfering with each other.

• I keep all my mail in a single Maildir to make searches easy. Since mail registered with the tickler is stored in a separate Maildir, I often need to search two Maildirs if I am looking for a specific message. This is awkward.

• The queue processor has to iterate the entire queue, which is fine for a hundred messages, but it does not scale.

• I have not found a way to ask mutt to tickle me about a message I send without going to the sent messages folder and scheduling the message for tickling manually. One approach would be record=no and a custom sendmail script, which would store mail to the store or tickler Maildirs, depending on whether the X-Tickle header is present, but I want to avoid a custom sendmail script for reasons unknown. Another approach might be to set bcc to the appropriate tickle address, but this would result in duplicate mails, unless I set record=no individually.

When I implemented the delay queue, I knew of these problems and went a different way: delayed mail is stored in a Maildir and a (msgid, timestamp, filename) tuple is inserted into an sqlite3 database on the mail server. This script regularly processes the queue. If I just sent you the chills, at least we have the same taste. There are numerous problems with this approach, the foremost being that Maildir filenames are not guaranteed to be constant: mails jump between the new and cur directories, and tags, such as seen are encoded in the filename (thus, symlinks also cannot be used). My script now uses an ugly heuristic, which at least makes it work. I should investigate whether inodes could be used instead as I think those wouldn't change throughout the lifetime of a mail, at least while it's not moved between folders. I initially considered just dumping messages to files and encoding the timestamp in the files' mtime, but then I would not be able to access the queue with mutt in case I needed to fetch a delayed mail prematurely, or if I wanted to synchronise the queue with offlineimap as well. The past few days, I've been condensing experiences from both approaches and am working out a new technique to combine both features. In essence, I think the database/index approach is the best, if I can figure out a way to uniquely identify mail message files, ideally across folders. Assuming I can use inodes for that, delayed mail would then be stored into the delayed Maildir and an (inode, timestamp) tuple saved into the database. Tickler mail would be stored along with all other mail in my store Maildir and would get a similar entry in the database. This approach solves some problems and leaves others. Assuming I synchronise the store Maildir remotely (which I do), then I can easily fathom making modifications via IMAP which causes orphan records in the database (if only IMAP would allow me to store key=value pairs for mails ). Furthermore, I'd have to submit mails to the tickler by bouncing them to an email address, and deleting the local copy, unless I want duplicates. If now the mail is somehow dropped, I've lost mail. Still unhappy about all of this, still searching for a better implementation, I'd appreciate any feedback! NP: Luminous Flesh Giants: Duma I Upadek

When cloning a Linux/Debian system 1:1 you should have a checklist of what’s important to change on the cloned system. For cloning I use the grml Linux Live-CD of course (the following tips are part of grml-tips as well). To create a 1:1 clone I boot grml on the systems (usually using the ssh=password bootoption to be able to access the system remotely as well) and use something like:

Listener:
# nc -vlp 30000 > /dev/sda1
Source:
# dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=$VALUE   nc -vq 0 $IP_OF_LISTENER 30000

When I have to leave the place where the clone process is running and if the CD-ROM doesn’t reinsert CDs on reboot automatically (usually that’s the case for server systems) I can use my remote-reboot procedure via ssh later on like:

eject &>/dev/null
umount -l /cdrom
eject /dev/cdrom
echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger

But stop: before executing the last steps to reboot the server you should take care of a few important steps, otherwise rebooting might fail and you won’t be able to login via SSH. That’s my personal checklist:

• Using LVM? If you want to rename any devices using vgrename/lvrename do not forget to adjust entries in /etc/fstab, lilo/grub,…
• Check that labels/UUID/… for stable devices inside your configuration path (bootloader config, /etc/fstab, /etc/udev/*,…) match with the present setup (of course that’s especially important if you change any labels/UUIDs/… on your box after cloning)
• Using udev, right? Do not forget to adjust any statically configured network interfaces as well - check out /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules and /lib/udev/write_net_rules (that’s probably the most common and serious pitfall when cloning systems BTW)
• Make sure to configure your network setup accordingly (using /etc/network/interfaces)
• Do you use any kernel modules on one host you don’t want to use on the other one? Check blacklisting, configuration,… in /etc/modprobe.d/ and /etc/modules.
• And last but not least: if you change any of the "core files" (see above bullets to get an idea what I’m talking about) make sure to rebuild your initrd (executing ‘update-initramfs -c -t -k $KERNEL_VERSION’), and when using lilo don’t forget to execute lilo as well

Tip: I highly recommend the use of a version controll system for maintaining /etc, for example etckeeper and mercurial should do the job for you.

Graphs wanted for Homepage and Vcs-XXX field stats I've recently set up a couple of stats page for some fields usage in Debian packages: one for the Homepage field, one for the Vcs-XXX fields. As Raphael observes, those stats need percentage and graphs, and even Lucas asked me about that back in Extremadura, also providing a sample gnuplot script. These days my time is quite lacking, and I'm also missing the time to put its sample script to work So I've made available the source code which is generating the two stats above (see the "source code ... is available" notice at the bottom of the pages). Patches are welcome for generating percentages and graphs, thanks in advance

I have seen the "right tool for the job" comment one too many times, and felt like writing something about it. Real tools are pretty simple, really. Things like saws and hammers have been around for thousands of years, and don't require a great deal of thinking to understand. Some people are masters with hand tools and create wonderful works of art with them, but the tools themselves are not complex. My programming language, Hecl, is a pretty simple one in a lot of ways (it has to be, to fit on cell phones), and at last count, the core has 7670 lines in a rough count that includes comments. That entails quite a few "moving parts" compared to even something like an electric drill. Programming languages are complex. Certainly to create, but even to use well; to understand the nooks and crannies and ramifications of the language's design is not something that is accomplished in a few days for most people. Your average programmer really doesn't know all that many languages, and even those who know many probably don't use most of them on a day to day basis. I like learning new languages, yet still wouldn't relish the idea of going through the mental task-switch required to move between too many in one day. What this means, is that when there is a job to be done, most programmers will reach for what they already know, rather than the best possible system, and that makes sense. If you know Python, why not write web software in Python, if you get asked to create something for the web? Or if you know Tcl because you create gui's with Tk, you're still likely to pick it when you need to create a little server. There are reasons why something like Erlang might make for a better server platform than Tcl, but is it that much better to justify dropping everything, learning a new language, committing to a new set of infrastructure requirements, and adding another thing to ask of people joining your organization? Most likely, it is not, unless the server you're writing is for a telephony switch that has to be on all the time, in which case, yes, maybe you do need Erlang. If, as is often the case, it wasn't something that had to be the best in the world, all that extra time to learn a new language would have been mostly "wasted" (ignoring, of course, the fact that for individuals, learning new things is almost always good, but that's not what we're talking about). Even the smart folks who hack away in languages like Haskell are fond of using what it has to offer, rather than jumping ship to something else at the first hint of the "something else" being better at their language of choice for a given task. So both Tcl and Erlang were up to the task of creating a little server. You could have used Ruby or Python as well. Java might prove a bit more verbose, but it's certainly up to the task. Any number of languages would be, of course. So it's not like there is a "right tool" and a "wrong tool". Maybe a better analogy is languages are like toolboxes, or even whole workshops, full of tools. Most of them have most of the common tools like hammers and saws, some sort of web libraries or the means to create tcp/ip servers. Where they differ is in things like the amount of tools available, the specialized tools that you get for free, the craftsmanship and ease of use of the tools in the hands of both experts and beginners... or in some cases (lisp, say), some fancy tools and supplies that make it possible to build yourself some new tools if you need to (that only you know how to use, but that's another topic). Some sets of tools really aren't very good for some jobs - you don't want to build blazing fast 3-d shooter games in PHP, just as you wouldn't want to use a regular set of screwdrivers on a delicate watch. However, even though you'd want to use a toolset that also has some specialized tools for working on the watch, you'd rather own a toolbox that came with the watch tools as well as the regular Phillips screwdrivers, because those are pretty handy around the house, and it wouldn't do to have only the watch tools for fixing common household items. The point being, languages are big investments, so those that do more, even if they're not the absolute greatest or first choice for a given task, are generally going to be more useful to more people, especially those just starting out who want a "safe" choice, a language they know will let them do a variety of things, rather than only one or two things (pound nails, say) really well.

Following Lucas^[1] post about NM, I used his data to create the following two nice graphs^[2]. Both are the normalized datas of average count of people waiting for Front Desk, the DAM or their account. The first one does that on a 90 samples window (roughly 3 months) and the second one on a 180 samples one (roughly 6 months). This kind of smoothing actually eliminates high frequencies, hence we see what a usual behavior each step has. What is clear to me is that FD situation is clearly fixed for quite a long time. FD was definitely an issue one year ago, but it has been really really fixed: for more than a year, even on the 6-months smoothing graph that has quite a long memory, the average queue is around 3 people, I can't see how it could even be reasonably improved. Of course, given that the Keyring step is just after the DAM, and that people at those steps works in batches, the data is a bit biased, though it gives a pretty good idea of the bottlenecks of the whole process.

Very nice tool I recently discovered: ink, a small tool using libinklevel, used to query the ink level of your printer (USB or parallel). In my case this is an Epson Stylus DX4200 (which works very nicely and out of the box btw). Installation:

$ apt-get install ink

Usage:

$ ink -p usb
ink v0.4.1 © 2007 Markus Heinz
EPSON Stylus DX4200
Cyan:                          76%
Magenta:                       76%
Yellow:                        76%
Photoblack:                    72%

Graphical ink level display:

$ apt-get install qink

Another nice tool built upon libinklevel is called qink, which is a QT-based GUI which displays the same information graphically (see screenshot). A list of printers supported by libinklevel is available.

Six months ago, a political group in Spain made a big fuss and noise when the Government of Venezuela closed down the anti-chavist RCTV TV station, and waved the flag of freedom of speech, called the democratically elected government a regime , and called their president a dictator . On Sunday night, these very same people, following orders from the leaders of the Valencian government or should I say regime , drove up to the top of the Carrasqueta peak in Xixona, in the South of the Valencian Country, and protected by the winter's darkness, proceeded to force open two locks, broke into ACPV's property and unplugged and precincted the equipment which had been broadcasting the signal of TV3 and the rest of the public Catalan TV channels to the South of our land, for the last 21 years. Although this wasn't unexpected it is probably one of the biggest attacks to freedom of speech, choice and plurality since democracy was restored in the state. The political benefit PP is planning to obtain from this attack is clear: pleasing the regional right-wing cavemen who think we have nothing to do with the Catalan culture just 2 months away from some very decisive elections will probably give them a handful of extra votes. There are also economical interests involved, like having right-wing media groups control even more digital TV channels that they already do, but that's really anecdotic now. Two nights ago, it was the South. In a matter of days, the antennas in the Bartolo, in the North of the Valencian territory, will also be unplugged, blackening the screens of thousands of Valencians who think they have the right to watch decent quality TV in their mother tongue. Thank you, fascists.

Using opreport --xml output. oprofile is a tool that collects profiling information, and oprofile reports are output using opreport command. opreport usually gives text output which is processable by human beings, but pretty hard to process from computer program. However, recent versions of opreport does give you XML output when you give it the -X option. The output format is pretty simple, and it is trivial to write some XSLT code to process the XML output into some kind of HTML.. The XML output was obtained with the following command-line (of course, I call it 'opshell.sh' and have it as a shell script. $@ is the command to invoke, which in this case I ran 'dmesg')

An interesting discussion appeared on #debian on OFTC regarding TOR. One person was of the view that "many intelligence and other agencies are probably heavily involved in tor". As the discussion continued (yes, I should have pointed out it was OT for the channel...) it appeared that privicy and anonymity were getting confused.

Now, I'm not a huge TOR fan (being an oper on OFTC), but I seriously doubt that government agencies are 'heavily involved'. I was pointed at an article to back this claim up, but the article doesn't. Instead, it (and the original claim) raises a couple of interesting issues.

Firstly, there is a difference between privacy and anonymity, although closely related. Privacy allows you to keep information about yourself secret, and anonymity allows you to keep you yourself secret. In the case linked, although the people browsing were anonymous, and maintained privacy, this was broken when they revealed information about themselves. Breaking this privacy broke their anonymity. TOR doesn't even grantee complete anonymity:

Tor can't solve all anonymity problems. It focuses only on protecting the transport of data. You need to use protocol-specific support software if you don't want the sites you visit to see your identifying information. For example, you can use web proxies such as Privoxy while web browsing to block cookies and withhold information about your browser type. Also, to protect your anonymity, be smart. Don't provide your name or other revealing information in web forms.

[http://www.torproject.org/overview.html.en]

Used properly, TOR can be a very powerful tool to help, but certainly isn't a silver bullet. It needs to be used properly to prevent your identity being known (anonymity). However, without privacy, this is nothing.
Even without these safeguards, it would require significant resources (and may not be possible) to reliably retrieve useful information about one particular person. This leads to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which is the main issue I have with TOR, but that's a different post.

So, the question is: do you want privacy or anonymity when using the internet? You need to know what you want before you use a tool, as nothing can beat user education on how to keep your browsing details out of the 'wrong hands'.

Cliff has an absolutely wonderful post about "egg and daughter night" in his hometown in Nebraska. A great read.

Saturday evenings used to be quite the occasion around here too, from what I'm told. But nobody can tell the story like Cliff.

Is there an existing system which will allow me to query Apache logfiles via an SQL string? (Without importing into a database first). I've found the perl library SQL::YASL - but that has a couple of omissions which mean it isn't ideal for my task:

• It doesn't understand DISTINCT
• It doesn't understand COUNT
• It doesn't understand SUM

Still it did allow me to write a simple shell which works nicely for simple cases:

SQL>LOAD /home/skx/hg/engaging/logs/access.log;
SQL>select path,size from requests where size > 10000;
path size 
/css/default.css 13813 
/js/prototype.js 71261 
/js/effects.js 37872 
/js/dragdrop.js 30645 
/js/controls.js 28980 
/js/slider.js 10403 
/view/messages 15447 
/view/messages 15447 
/recent/messages 25378 

It does mandate the use of a "WHERE" clause, but that was easily fixed with "WHERE 1=1". If I could just have support for count I could do near realtime interesting things... Then again maybe I should just log directly and not worry about it. I certainly don't want to create my own SQL engine .. it just seems that Perl doesn't have a suitable library already made which is a bit of a shocker!