A while ago I decided I wanted to make a couple of nice little apps for my Nokia 6600.

• Bluetooth AutoOff - disable Bluetooth and/or hide it after a configurable period of time
• PicGodfather - automatically change the template by which photos are named in the camera app, based on date (I can't think of another reasonable schema)

After my successful adventure with pys60 I decided/realized that the Python API does not contain appropriate functions for what I need in my apps, so I decided to setup the development environment for C++ with Carbide C/C++ (the recommended IDE for S60 development for Nokia).

Of course, the IDE is a Windows application and the reason for which Nokia doesn't provide an IDE for Linux (is expected since they are developing maemo and are so into OS) eludes me.
On top of that, I have an Debian Etch amd64 installation[1], so that's more fun.

Fortunately, thanks to Robert Millan and Ove Kaaven, wine is installable from unstable on amd64 and a chroot is not needed[2] anymore.


Now let's see the dependency tree:

• Carbide
  
• ActivePerl
• ScriptHost
• mfc42.dll
• correct mix of native and built-in dlls in wine configuration
  

Yes, that is all ... summarized. And you can imagine I went though leaps and bounds and wasted a night with this to find out the hard way.

If you don't care about the reasons/story, you can skip to the paragraph where I ran into license issues.

So, first Carbide needs Active Perl. Not any version, but ActivePerl-5.6.1.635. You will find out after you install Carbide c++.

Active Perl, by default, will refuse to install in wine. It relies on some Script Host support.
Good news: it is available on Microsoft's support pages. Bad news: the file is not provided until you go through some crazy scheme[3] to certify you have a genuine Windows installation.

Of course, the genuine stuff failed to work in wine, duh, but having a windows XP OS in qemu was really useful... to try to go further.

Now that I mentioned the Windows XP machine in qemu you might be wondering 'why didn't you installed Carbide c++ in there and start hacking in qemu?' . Well, I wish it was that simple! Believe it or not, the installation in the Windows virtual machine failed in a muuuuch earlier stage it initially did in Wine! It failed in the unpacking phase of the installation, while in Wine that part worked without problems (default config is for Windows XP emulation). Talk about irony!

After a while of trying, I took the risky path (maybe I should install an antivirus, as suggested by wine) and downloaded the kit for the script host stuff from some site on the net (shhh!). Good. I don't remember if I used cabextract or if it worked quite straight forward, but the special configuration entry in Wine Configurator suggests otherwise.

Back to Active-Perl. Now we can try again to install it.

wine msiexec ActivePerl-5.6.1.635-MSWin32-x86.msi

Guess what? The installation failed now, too. After some time of poking, I realised the bastard was looking for mfc42.dll in the installation. There was no word about that in the error message, only in the wine logs there were some hints. No wonder Windows users learn very early to ignore error messages (the error message was plain uninformative).

Where to get mfc42.dll from? The virtual machine! I tried to send them via email, but the link was too slow. Now I realised I could have used winscp, but I didn't thought of that at the time.

The rescue did come this time from M$, but with some effort. It appears that mfc42.dll is by default present on XP, so you only find it for download in some kit (vc6redistsetup_enu.exe) for Windows 9x. That works (lost some time to figure that out, too) since the kit contains a mix of 9x, NT and independent dlls. I think this installation didn't work and I had to cabextract the files by hand and copy them in system32. I registered the mfc42.dll module, after copying it in windows/system32.

wine msiexec /y mfc42.dll

Well, now I have everything installed Carbide should start... Well, no! License issues! I got a message about not having a license for the installation. Ain't that great? I just installed the thing and is the free/handicapped version. What gives? Well, in Carbide C++ 1.2, the Express part of the kit is broken and doesn't install the license file.

So, I installed the professional version since it had a longer trial period, hoping that now I'll be able to see the IDE and start working.

After this, I tried several times to start Carbide itself, but it failed at different points in time. I "just"[4] configured wine for this app to set the order to 'native,builtin' for msvcrt, ole32, oleacc and shdocw and got further.

Hopeless attempts follow....

At this point I got stuck. There was still some error from ole32.dll (apparently), but I couldn't go further.

I tried to install the 1.1 trial version. Got stuck. In any way I couldn't start Carbide c++ :-(( .

GRAND FINALE!

In the end, I also tried the deprecated CodeWarior. Guess what? It installed and ran immediately. Although I am not sure if any of the previous poking had anything to do with it.



[1] I have some packages from unstable
[2] although I had one, I wanted to get rid of it, since gnash started to perform better in the latest versions - still not satisfactory, but OK
[3] some browser plugin WPGInstall.exe, iirc and some app which should send your privat^W^W^Wanalise your system to generate some code that should identify your system as genuine
[4] this also took me some time... start, identify the dll, change the order, restart...

Today, MJRay asks how to make MakeMaker (no redundancy!) do what he wants. Incidentally, I faced this issue just yesterday, preparing an application for internal use in my job. As sysadmin, I want all the homebrew software to be Debian-packaged, even if they're not the most policy abiding packages. I was installing some modules for mod_perl2, some utility modules and a couple of scripts. Of course, it also needed accesory files, like images for the web or templates for HTML, and configuration too. After reading the reply to this post, written by Randal Shwartz himself, I got convinced that there wasn't any frigging way to make the thing do it. So my solution was far from ideal, as I wanted to put everything in the Makefile, but it wasn't so ugly, considering that it was only meant for use in a Debian package:

• mod_perl and regular modules, using the standard method: put them under lib/ and MakeMaker takes care of them. As I didn't wanted site-wide modules, I changed INSTALLVENDORLIB in the debian/rules to point to /usr/share/pkgname/lib
• for scripts, perl or not: you list them in EXE_FILES, and then point INSTALLVENDORSCRIPT to where you want them. In my case it was /usr/share/pkgname/bin, but if you need to install CGIs, it would be valid to point to /usr/lib/cgi-bin.
• For support files, at first I put them under PMLIBDIRS control (as the rest of the modules), but I didn't like the resulting directory layout. So I processed them, along with configuration files, and stuff with debhelper tools.

In a nutshell, if you only want to process modules and CGIs, you can do it with MakeMaker

After a long time talking this as a mere potential would-be-nice thing, finally we are putting some action behind our words: One week from now, Sergio Mendoza and I will start a ~2 month long extracurricular course on Debian. The students? We have 12 students of the Facultad de Ciencias at my University. The students are pre- and post-graduate (licenciatura and maestr a), from the Phsyics and Astronomy areas. Sergio got this group as he is a teacher and researcher at Instituto de Astronom a.
While this first iteration is completely extra-curricular, unofficial and by invitation only, we expect this pilot course to be later presented as an official course in the Faculty.
Many people will remember I usually don't like general courses on Unix, Debian or whatever. What made me accept this time - even more, be enthusiastic about it? First of all, the requirements: We assume the students already know their way (at least as users) in a multiuser Unix-like system, so we won't be hand-holding them all the way through. Second, the focus: Sergio (who is among the first Debian users in Mexico and who got us our first full Debian mirror - which is actually a bit sick, but awaiting for prompt hardware upgrade ;-) ) wants them to focus on becoming developers. Not only developing science-oriented applications and libraries, but properly packaging and integrating them in Debian (and, hopefully, some of them will become interested in joining the project). We will also spend a good portion of the course on teaching them good practices on system adminsitration, teaching the principles behind what we do (i.e. I'm looking forward to participating, and in this case as one of the more students, in the sessions where different cryptography-related topics will be explained, starting from their mathematical foundations and going all the way up towards the implementation, where I'm more comfortable at).
It will be a nice experiment. I will be away for at least five of the lessons (Blame Debconf!), but I'm really looking towards the process and the results.
We will be making rough documentation of what we teach. We don't have a planned complete program, as we want to go with the group's real skills and interests, planning not more than three lessons ahead. This will be, however unofficial it is, my first time in front of a group in a university-esque setting (i.e. not short sessions, not capacitation built for a company, but with people eager to learn what we want to teach. I'll post again on this topic :)

Once upon a time I wrote a collection of shell scripts for managing virtual hosting. Combined these allow me to easily.

• Add/Remove/List Apache2 virtual hosts.
• Add/Remove/List virtual domains for use by Exim4.

These work well, but every now and again I think I want a web-based control panel . After mulling this over for a while and remembering how many of the existing control panels are tricky I m actually going to do it. There are two hard parts:

• The user-interface is key.
• The format I m using for domains isn t appropriate.

The last point is the part I m worrying about right now. So far I have a list of mail domains, and a list of web domains and the two are unrelated. This becomes obvious when they are listed:

Domain	Facilities
steve.org.uk	MAIL
bar.steve.org.uk	WEB
foo.steve.org.uk	WEB

See? No link I d expect to see the domains listed as just steve.org.uk with links to Mail showing the mail setup, and web showing the subdomains. Or maybe they really should be listed seperately I can t decide. (For reference here is my live listing of domains where the problem becomes obvious. Note that you ll not have permissions to see my server stats ) So I need to decide how to handle this I also need to be "inspired" by OSWD. I think the plan right now is to store all data in a database, then regenerate the plain text configuration files on demand. That should give me the best approach if I restrict myself to running HTTPS on a custom port and avoid the ability to modify the files by hand Feel free to tell me this is misguided, or inspired. Although I remember the last time I talked about control panels and I m still not seeing a good solution. I want to be able to:

• Add/Remove/Enable/Disable apache2 virtual hosting setups.
• Add/Remove/Enable/Disable exim4 virtual domains with optional mailing lists (ecartis)
• Have only server admin vs. nobody no resellors etc.
• Avoid PHP like the plague.
• Have it be utterly secure. (Ha!)

Modern processors have a variety of low power modes that can be entered while idle. These "C states" are numbered, currently ranging from C0 (a running CPU) to C4 (a deep runtime sleep state). The problem with these states is that the deeper the sleep, the longer it takes the CPU to wake up. In order to avoid excessive reductions in performance, the kernel must keep track of the processor usage pattern and avoid putting the CPU into a deep sleep mode when it's likely that it'll be needed for more work in the near future.

Traditionally, the kernel has had a fixed timer tick - that is, a fixed number of times a second, the timer will generate an interrupt, wake the kernel and allow processes to be rescheduled. This limits the maximum amount of time the CPU can remain idle, as this timer will fire even when the system is otherwise idle. A tick rate of 1000Hz is desirable for reducing latency, but will also result in the maximum sleep period being 1ms. This is less than ideal.

2.6.21 introduced dynamic tick functionality. Now, rather than having a fixed tick interval, if the system is idle the kernel looks at all outstanding timers and schedules a wakeup in time to answer the next timer. This allows much longer periods of sleep without compromising latency. However, for this to be useful it's desirable to have as few timer wakeup events as possible. The longer the CPU is going to be asleep, the deeper the sleep state that can be used.

Intel have recently released Powertop, an application that tracks the causes of wakeups. These wakeups can fall into two categories - kernel and userspace. Pure userspace timers will usually be due to an application having a timer to handle some sort of trivial activity, like blinking a cursor or polling for state. There are a couple of ways to improve this:

• Just remove the timer - does it actually need to exist at all?
• If you're polling for state, consider whether it would be possible to move to an event driven model. For example, right now screensavers poll the X server in order to obtain information about whether the session is idle. The X server has to keep track of this information anyway, so a simple extension could be added to notify applications when the user has been idle for a certain period of time.
• Make sure you're only waking up when you need to. For instance, you might want to periodically check whether any new email has appeared. If there's no route to the internet, don't bother.
• If you must use timers, try to schedule them to go off simultaneously. It's better to wake the kernel up once and do twice as much work than it is to wake it up twice. If you're a glib application, g_timeout_add_seconds() will round to the nearest second, so use it if possible.

Things in the kernel can be trickier. Kernel interrupts may be appearing because of some kernel code specifying a timer, but an alternative is that a userspace application is poking them. Many of the same considerations as userspace apply here:

• If you don't need especially high-precision timing, use round_jiffies(). It'll result in synchronisation of many wakeups, and reduce the overall number.
• If you're being woken up by userspace, figure out why. HAL polls storage devices every couple of seconds, generating several interrupts. This is necessary because most storage devices don't notify the system when media insertion occurs. Conversely, alsa sends notification events whenever the hardware state changes, and so it's not necessary for userspace to poll. If you can provide useful information to interested parties without them having to repeatedly ask, then do it.
• If your hardware is idle, then do what you can to quiesce it. The Appletouch pad can be put into a mode where it doesn't send packets until touched, but once touched will continue sending packets. Watch for a stream of contentless interrupts, and put the hardware back to sleep.
• If the hardware can generate interrupts when something happens, then use them - don't poll unnecessarily

Fixing these issues can range from the trivial (removing unnecessary timers) to the complicated (teaching gstreamer about alsa notifications, teaching the mixer applet to listen to signals from gstreamer). It's all helpful, though. Ideally you want your processor to be averaging at least 20ms in the deepest C state before it's woken up again. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there, and every fix improves battery life.

Just a quick note: amd64 binary packages of emacs-snapshot are now available on emacs.orebokech.com.

(In related news, it seems that emacs22 packages have been uploaded to experimental so I'll move emacs-snapshot back to the trunk soon.)

Steve talks about a tool some of us have needed for a long time, but never actually bothered to implement because applying the necessary changes in vim is still faster than writing a script to do it. The biggest issue for me is that the UI would have to represent grouping of items efficiently. If I have a number of domains registered to my company, I want my employees to be able to receive email at "firstname.lastname" in each of them, without ever duplicating the grouping information. For HTTP, the grouping works slightly different: a set of domains could be variants of the same name with different misspellings, abbreviations or top level domains. To keep things tidy, I redirect everyone who is not using the "canonical" name, using mod_redirtoservname. Thus, the group needs a "leader". Subdomains are usually independent setups, since there is not much point in having multiple names in the same domain for the same service. It may also be a good idea to somehow be able to configure delegations using SRV records.

When I moved to Edinburgh and lived in a student flat we decided we needed pets. Gerbils were chosen as they were small, cute, and easy to hide. (Because we weren t actually allowed to keep pets ..) After a few years of gerbils we graduated to rats. The king of the rodent world. Rats rock: They are small, cute, agile, incredibly soft, very non-bity and highly intelligent. Time passed and I moved out to live alone and then started to move up the food-chain with my own pet cat. (Tigger). Badness^tm happened, and Tigger was replaced by Six. I got hit with a year of illness, mostly, and so I decided to do the decent thing and return Six to somewhere where he could be loved and get the attention he deserved. Since then I ve been petless, and basically afraid to commit to looking after a cat/dog for the 10+ years that they would (hopefully) live. I want to have a cat. I would love to own a Dog, and after talking about things in a circular fashion for many weeks with my girlfriend we decided to compromise. So tada .. I have rats again. Two beautiful females. Here is a picture of one of them upon my girl s shoulder. So two rats, Basil for me, and Moptop for Meg. All being well they will live for the next couple of years, and then we might return to the bigger pets.

... is by waiting for the reverse engineers to offer better drivers than their fgrlx-crap (which doesn't even support my ATI card, and has some flicker artifacts on the Xpress 200m of my moms laptop).It does "solve your opensource issues" if you wait for opensource people to do the work...So the only good mainstream graphics choice these days remains intel, right? They might not be high-end enough for some games, but I don't care. It has all the 3D I need, and I could even run Compiz/Beryl if they would offer any benefits.

A few years ago we needed to introduce employement contracts for all staff at Catalyst. When we got the example contract back from our HR consultant, she had quite naturally biased it strongly in the employers favour, and as a consequence it had a very anal and lawyerly clause in it regarding the ownership of intellectual property. This clearly wasn't going to work well in our environment so I decided to take the opportunity to try and write a clause which was fair and reasonable, which considered the likely desires of both parties, and which expressed an understanding of the sort of environment which often happens with free open-source software. It seems that many people who are interested in working on open source software are also people who will work on (i.e. fiddle with :-) things in their spare time, but they will not necessarily consider the possible consequences of using conmpany resources to do so. I have heard of situations where employment contracts (or perhaps even government enacted legislation) will give ownership of an individual's work to their employer in such situations, so I also wanted the contract to make it clear where and how this might happen. I would like to hear people's comments on the contract clauses which we use here. Is this fair to both parties? Have I missed something? Is the meaning clear? Also, I need to make it clear that it is OK for people to use this text, so I hereby place the text of the following Intellectual Property clause in the public domain. Intellectual Property

1. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, relating to work carried out while in the employment of $ COMPANY , remains the property of $ COMPANY , subject to the exceptions outlined below.
2. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, owned prior to joining $ COMPANY remains your property. If you choose to use such intellectual property, including source and objects during your time at $ COMPANY , $ COMPANY will have the rights to their continued use in perpetuity, including access to the source code of all versions of such software in use at $ COMPANY .
3. If $ COMPANY asks you to do something, then we expect that while you work on that something, you will be being paid by us and we (or our clients) will own the IP. In some cases we may elect to open-source that, and may decide to jointly own the IP or make some other arrangement, but it would be at $ COMPANY s option.
4. If you work on something by your own choice, and on your own time, then you are welcome to own the IP, but if you use the premises or computers of $ COMPANY to do that work then you must license it under a free, open-source license agreed with $ COMPANY .
5. $ COMPANY may choose to fund some part of your time to work on OSS projects in a non-directed way. $ COMPANY will expect to own the IP for such work, and to participate in the choice of license for such code.
6. All of the above is subject to confidentiality of client information, and constraints which clients may specifically request in relation to specific project work from time to time.

Over To You I wrote that because I couldn't find examples around the place of similar things. I guess I still see people looking for that sort of thing so I'm publising it here with the idea of providing a seed which can perhaps grow into something else. A few specific questions I would like you to think about:

• Are there any loopholes in this?
• Does this seem like a fair agreement?
• Is there anything missing?
• Is there any part you would like to see changed?

Then, perhaps, if we can see some general agreement on what would, or would not, be a useful standard we can encourage people to use it in their future contracts. I am hoping that through your collective wisdom I will be changing this clause in Catalyst's standard employment contract.

Piotr, ShipIt for Debian? What for? To improve our sales? To increase our number of users? What are official CDs? Is there any official CD vendor? I have no clue how much Canonical can invest on shipping Ubuntu CDs worldwide, but I widely prefer to see that money used on bringing Debian developers from all over the world to the Debian conference held somewhere every year. Do you think that’s very little money? I don’t think so, and the project still tries to remain stood up to produce a free universal operating system, with an excellent quality assurance. Shipping Debian CDs for free from the Debian project? What for? How does the project make benefit from that?

While most of our products are labeled, labels often don’t reveal all that much because really who can decipher the meaning of all those weird oxidase-perio-para-whatever in your shampoo? But thanks to the environmental working group, you can access a very large database Skin Deep, which is a “a safety guide to cosmetics and personal care.” So find out what toxic stuff are in your personal care products, ditch em, and take further action: As they state on their website:

Due to gaping loopholes in federal law, companies can put virtually any ingredient into personal care products. Even worse, the government does not require pre-market safety tests for any of them. This is unacceptable. Sign the Environmental Working Group’s petition to Congress to turn this around and make personal care products safe.

So check out the database and the petition.

I once wrote a plugin gaim called gaim-thinklight, which simply blinks your ThinkPad s ThinkLight when you get a new messge. Very recently, gaim was renamed to pidgin, so gaim-thinklight is now called pidgin-blinklight. I changed the second part not because of trademark issues (as gaim did, IIUC), but because it also supports ASUS laptops since the last version. At least I hope so, I implemented that, as I do not have an ASUS laptop please tell me if it does or does not work.If you run Debian unstable, you ll soon be able to apt-get install pidgin-blinklight. Others can find the sources on the debian package page. I m still too lazy to host that code somewhere else as well...

This is somewhat old news but these two articles are worth linking here and linking together for they convey nicely, in the words of AC/DC, how “money talks” and also how numbers can talk about how money talks. One article is Senators who weakened drug bill got millions from industry from USA Today and the other is on a topic that has been receiving a lot of play in the NYTimes Psychiatrists, Children and Drug Industry s Role. I am not so much a researcher of numbers in so far as I don’t produce them, and think it is a good idea to cultivate a healthy skepticism of them, but I do appreciate what they can tell us. I think the article in the NYTimes is particularly insightful because it is based on “public reports of all drug company marketing payments to doctors” in the state of Minnesota, the *only* state that requires this access. The authors of the article are careful to hedge and qualify their findings, but many of them do suggest that the more money a doctor gets, the higher the likelihood they will prescribe more meds and of a certain class. Hopefully more states will pass such legislation and more research will be done. This is my favorite quote from the article

“There s an irony that psychiatrists ask patients to have insights into themselves, but we don t connect the wires in our own lives about how money is affecting our profession and putting our patients at risk, he said.”

People were calling it futile when I asked back in last July for people to kick AMD to open up ATI's graphics drivers. Myself, I sent one email to ATI and, to my surprise, actually got a reply from a person at ATI who knew what a license is and what Open Source/Free Software is and who actually took the time to reply to my email. That was already a positive signal. And now they're really doing it: releasing drivers for ATI graphics chips under an Free license. At least they announced it, and I guess by now companies have realized that announcements like that not only are applauded to, but also get followed up on. So thanks AMD, and thanks Intel for putting up the pressure by supporting their own graphics chips. And now everybody turn their heads towards Santa Clara, CA, USA and give them a wake up call. And of course lets hope that AMD will go ahead with this project soon, and pick a sensible license. (Damn. The laptop I've got here still hasn't magically changed its graphics chip. No, I didn't buy it myself.)

Not to be missed: well-known enfant terrible James Grimmelmann is guest-blogging on PrawfsBlawg. His opening commentary on the relationship between law practice and computer science:

Practicing lawyers, like practicing programmers, are professional pragmatists. Both must make their cases (and case mods) out of the materials they have available; both starve or eat steak depending on whether their creations work. The day-to-day practice of law is unlikely ever to require much high theory. We can mourn that fact because it means that they look at us with suspicion, or celebrate it because it frees us to chase Truth and Beauty and it will remain a fact either way.

Aside from the fact that I don’t eat steak, I think this is correct. Via a commenter on James’ entry, I learned that the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is implementing a wiki (the entry page could surely use some more content). Surprisingly, it was not Posner but Easterbrook who spearheaded the effort. This is a very interesting development, but I expect it will be quite a while before any other circuit takes up the idea. Finally, I have been meaning to write about this New York Times story describing Jonathan Coulton’s success as a musician breaking with the traditional distribution /promotional channels (via 43 folders, a productivity blog that is still on my “probation” list). Unfortunately, slashdot beat me to it. I first re-discovered Jonathan Coulton during his guest episode of the Show with Ze Frank. In any event, the article is well worth reading:

More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as a reasonable middle-class living between $3,000 and $5,000 a month by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he d be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140 . In total, 41 percent of Coulton s income is from digital-music sales, three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site. Another 29 percent of his income is from CD sales; 18 percent is from ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11 percent comes from T-shirts, often bought online

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More than a year ago, I published an election methods library called RubyVote. Interest in the library surpassed any of my expectations: I know of at least one startup using the library heavily in their core business and a number of fun sites, like Red Blue Smackdown, that are using it as well. The point of course, was to make complex but superior election methods accessible in all sorts of places where people were making decisions suboptimally. It its own small way, it seems to have succeeded enormously. Over the last year, I've been asked by a variety of people if they could use RubyVote for their own organizational decision making -- tasks like electing leadership of a student group or members of a non-profit board of directors. Since RubyVote was just a library without a UI of its own, I had to tell them "no." I caved in eventually and got to work on a quick and dirty web-based front end to the library. That project grew into Selectricity which is a primarily web-based interface to a variety of different election methods and voting technologies. You can currently try out quickvotes which can be created in half a minute and voted on in a quarter but which bring all of the power of preferential voting technologies to bear on very simple decisions. Prompted by Aaron Swartz, I also built a mobile phone version that's lets you send a short email or SMS to create or vote in a election. For those that follow research in voting technologies, there's not a lot of new stuff here. What's new is that this project, unlike the vast majority of voting technologies, is interested in the state of the art for everyone but governments. Clearly government decisions are important but they're one set of decisions, usually only once a year. Selectricity is voting machinery for everything and everyone else. It was announced in a variety of news outlets today that Selectricity was selected for grant from mtvU and Cisco as part of their Digital Incubator project. As part of that, I'm going to be working with some other voting technology experts to bring tools for auditable elections, cryptographically secured anonymity, and voter verifiability to the platform (I have only rudimentary functionality today). There are a couple people who will be joining me on the project this summer and we will building out what I hope will be an extremely attractive platform for better every-day decision-making. More than the grant though, I'm excited about the visibility that use by MTV will bring to the project. Most of all though, I'm just excited about more free software and more (and more accessible) democratic decision making. My adviser Chris Csikszentmih lyi put it well:

One of the big arguments against preferential voting, or new voting technologies, is the fear that they would disenfranchise the average person who doesn't yet understand how they work. Certainly, making all voting technologies open source is critical, but the issue of familiarity is worth considering. We re hoping that MTV and eventually American Idol will move their voting over to Selectricity, allowing it to work as both a technical tool but also pedagogically, training future voters. Why not integrate democratic processes into all your software and communications tools? Why not use the best democratic processes available, so long as they're available to everyone?

Thanks to a Mr. Kandinski, I just learned about what looks to be like a really useful (and pretty) guide for graduate students and young professors.

Here is the first cut at a plugin I created, called Mailmodel. It's pretty simple, you install it, configure the email sender/destination addresses, and then, in your ActiveRecord objects:

after_save :mail_model

For those objects that you want to be notified of when they change. Think of it as 'scaffolding' for email notification of changes in your database (new comments, new users, new payments) when you aren't quite ready to set up notification for each individual thing. Available from: http://svn.dedasys.com/public/mailmodel/ Some improvements that could be made:

• Customize behavior for some objects: if it's a this, then include that and that in the object dump.
• Customized templates depending on object type in order to take the scaffoling analogy further.

pusa, a server I administer at uni, suffered a massive data accident on Wednesday. When I went to see why it didn't come up from a reboot on Friday, I found out the initrd hadn't been able to mount /. Weird... Luckily, the two new disks were already installed in the host and waiting for me to finish the migration to the RAID1 and the new Linux-VServer setup, but unfortunately I've been way too busy and it was too late for some of our data. A fsck of /dev/hda1 resulted on large portions of the data going to /lost+found. Discovering this made me feel like a great fool after not having dd'd the device before doing this (a dry-run of fsck had not reported anything useful). I found out some of the lost data in random directories, but in general lots were missing, and others made no sense:

/oldpusa/etc: gzip compressed data, was "libpng.txt", from Unix, last modified: Wed Dec 20 00:58:51 2006, max compression

I hoped for my PostgreSQL stuff being intact, so after dd'ing /dev/hda5, I fsck'd the image. The result was an empty filesystem, and a lost+found full of stuff. I can't find a directory with stuff that resembles postgresql data at all. I did find a directory with a PG_VERSION file in it, but the rest of the files in it (around 100) had numeric names and little more. If anyone thinks I might be able to rebuild my /var/lib/postgresql from this, I'll be infinitely grateful. Anyway, I haven't written to the corrupted after I fucked up the root partition. I'm very interested in knowing what could cause corruption on all partitions, making them unmountable, but still recognisable by fsck, even if the result is not good at all. Maybe a corrupted partition table? If so, what does the Dear Lazyweb recommend me to try out? I suspect the first portion of all partitions were damaged, but maybe just that. Some partition table shift , which makes the filesystems lose the first superblock (trying other superblocks didn't work either)? Suggestions is very welcome by comment or email, and detail on what tools and how to use to try out things, better. My backup of PostgreSQL is not so recent, and recovering some SmartList data would also be great. As for the mandatory where are your backups , the answer is basically we had no resources to store them until very recently, and when we finally got the disks I've had no time until now to set it up entirely, so some bits (db, lists, web) were still not running off the new drives. The luckiest people have been the MUD owners, who have had no data loss at all, as they were living entirely on /dev/md0. Losing MUD data probably means getting angry calls at 4AM or so. :)