Seems this message (which I have seen once or twice on my Linux systems) originated from a real failure mode in which the printer could, indeed, catch fire. Whoa. Mean time, my own old Kyocera FS-1500 is dead; the drum is damaged to a level that confuses the printer somehow, so that it now always thinks there's no toner left. If this were any type of modern printer, I'd just replace the drum. In this particular case, that's not going to happen, though; this printer is from 1992, and neither the toner container nor the drum are replaceable; instead, you have to clean the drum with some device that's part of the toner kit, and you have to refill the toner container using the contents of a box of toner that's inside the kit. Trust me, toner powder is messy.

Some people did ask me to add a “tech” category to my blog, and randomly post about useful little things that help making life easier. Well, Im not making a dedicated category for it, but one where I will put all my not-strictly-debian related “tech” content in. Up to now my blog only knew a debian category… :) Well, so the first thing i have a little to write about is clusterssh. It is similar to dsh, with the difference that clusterssh opens an xterm for every host you want to control, while dsh simply takes one commandline and executes it on the remote host(s). This way clusterssh allows you to step in and control a single host, if that one needs a little extra action, while keeping the connection to all other hosts open. After you are done with the extra action - just go back to control all hosts at once. Very helpful if you edit configuration files, and one hosts needs a little different value, while most stuff is the same. Or doing security upgrades and find out one of your colleagues was so “clever” to install an extra package which now makes aptitude want to remove half of your system. You can step in and fix the situation and then simply continue with all hosts. Usage of clusterssh is pretty simple - after you installed it type

  cssh machine1 machine2 machine3

and clusterssh will open 3 xterms and one control window. Whatever you type into that control window is then send to all 3 machines. As you can see in the picture I first executed one command on both hosts, by typing it into the CSSH window, and then selected one host directly, typing a command only this host sees. Now, we are all lazy, so lets make cssh easier to use. Noone wants to type hundreds of hostnames all the time. Luckily clusterssh has a concept where you map tags to servernames. If you are the admin of your machine and want to setup such a mapping for all of your users you edit /etc/clusters, if you just want to do it for yourself edit $HOME/.csshrc. Actually - do not edit it, but run

  cssh -u >$HOME/.csshrc

and edit the generated file. Ignore all of the config stuff for now, defaults are nice and good. Go to the bottom and add something similar to the following lines:

 clusters = foo bar
 foo = miau wuff:2222 root@milk:98 root@elsewhere
 bar = root@miau:443 web@ftp:443

Replace with hosts you can actually login to. The above defines two set of hosts, foo and bar. Now all I need to do to login to the defined machines is to type

 cssh foo

and clusterssh will open 4 xterms and login to the machines. At work I usually have up to 200-250 machines open with clusterssh, so it can handle large numbers of hosts at once. In such cases you might want to consider adding the -G parameter to the commandline, to not get clusterssh to resize the xterms. A last thing I like to do is - give the xterms opened by clusterssh a different layout. My window manager is setup to draw all my terminals maximized and also has some other settings that do not really help clusterssh terminals . But there is a simple way round this. Edit the following options in your .csshrc to look similar like

terminal_allow_send_events=-xrm '*.VT100.allowSendEvents:true'
terminal_args=-class CSSH

This will put all xterms into the class CSSH. As your normal settings usually apply to class XTerm this already ignores them. If you want to setup some more things, like a blue background and red foreground in CSSH windows, just add the following into your $HOME/.Xdefaults file (or do whatever steps your window manager might like to configure such things):

CSSH*background: Blue
CSSH*foreground: Red

Activate with xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults, done.

So Rapha l, what about castrating non-responsive developers? We could probably solve the dilemma by then.

I really dislike posts like (sorry AJ, you are just one example) AJ Towns blog post
“Some fun”. What I dislike? Well, the post lacks critical information: Which slashdot post inspired him? What data is he talking about? How did he turn the data into those graphics? Sorry AJ, your post is just the latest example of this style of post, and I really got frustrated over such posts, this is not meant as a personal attack. Edit:
So to make my wish clear: Please, fellow bloggers, don’t assume that your readers are following your favourite web resources as closely as you do (and with the same specific interests). Explicitly say what you are writing about, reference resources needed to understand what you are doing, at least give readers a chance to find out what you did. In AJs case, it would probably have been enough to reference the /. article or comment which inspired him.

The last five days I've spent at the combined Debian Edu, FAI and CDD meeting in M rida in Extremadura, together with 17 others. The Debian Edu / Skolelinux crowd was the biggest, followed by FAI, followed by CDD people, though many were part of more than one project. "As usual" it was great to meet many known faces and some unknown ones and to be able to discuss stuff in RL.

Besides various small different things, I worked on the Debian Edu etch r1 release, our lenny roadmap (see the bottom of our roadmap page which also covers etch r1) and the (technical side of the) german translation of the Debian Edu documentation. Non edu related the new setupharddisk2 for FAI took most of my brain activity. And I've signed all keys allready :-)

We stayed at a very nice hotel in the even much nicer city of Merida, which features a lot of roman ruins and history. For example, we walked over the biggest roman bridge in the world! The only thing that was bigger was the amount of good food we were forced to eat every day... Incredible. This was my second visit to Merida and this time I finally managed to visit the amphitheatre (with seats for 15000 people) and the Roman theatre. (Unfortunatly the english page about Emerita Augusta is a stub.) If you happen to come around that area make sure to spend some time sight seeing, it is really worth it! People living in Merida literally fear to rebuild their houses, because as soon as they start to dig, they find something historical and have to turn their property into a museum :-)

In case you have not seen it yet, you should watch this small movie from euro news about the free software efforts in Extremadura. Insightful and very good promotion, also to show around.

Many thanks to C sar, Jos Luis and the Junta de Extremdura for hosting such a great meeting! You rock!

On a unrelated note, spam has gone crazy yesterday while traveling back, 15000 mails were not catched by my so far well working setup. ARG. I still used to have a catchall setting, which was useful to give out addresses like $company@mydomain, but now I will explicitly list those addresses and disable catchall. And luckily for you I will not blog about every spam mail I got... :) Generally I dont consider spam (the source of) evil, it's money: as long as money rules the world, there will be spam. So since it's a social problem, it is hardly solvable by technology. (That is, as long as you want to receive mails from strangers, which I do.) IMO what's worse than spammers are autoresponders to spam. Most of those 15000 mails were auto-replies to spam. OMFSM.

apt-xapian-index: performing a simple query I've recently posted an introduction of apt-xapian-index. Today I'll show how to make simple queries to apt-xapian-index. If you feel like reimplementing my examples in another language, let me know and I'll include it to the post. What I'm going to build is a replacement for apt-cache search that:

• is much faster than apt-cache search
• scores results by relevance, so you get the best matches first
• does stemming of search terms, so it matches 'edit' when you type 'editing'
• understands debtags tags.

This is just a beginning: in future blog posts I'll show how to enhance a search with interesting advanced features. First thing, we need to import the Xapian module, found in the package python-xapian. Documentation on the Python Xapian API can be found in /usr/share/doc/python-xapian. Then we open the apt-xapian-index database: Now we build a query from the command line arguments. We'll assume that if an argument is in the form foo::bar, then it's a Debtags tag instead of a normal keyword. For normal keywords, we also search for the stemmed version, so that we can, for example, find "editing" when the user searches for "edit". Now we have the terms for the query, and we can create a query that ORs them together. One may ask, why OR and not AND? The reason is that, contrarily to apt-cache, Xapian scores results according to how well they matched. Matches that match all the terms will score higher than the others, so if we build an OR query what we really have is an AND query that gracefully degenerates to closer matches when they run out of perfect results. This allows stemmed searches to work nicely: if you look for 'editing', then the query will be 'editing OR Zedit'. Packages with the word 'editing' will match both and score higher, and packages with the word 'edited' will still match 'Zedit' and get included in the results. We then run the query. Queries are run through a xapian.Enquire object: The Enquire object returns results as an mset. An mset represents a view of the result set, and can be iterated to access the resulting documents. Here we iterate the mset and output the result of the query, looking up short descriptions with apt: This is it. You can use the wsvn interface to get to the full source code. You can run the code passing keywords and Debtags tags. Try running it as:

    ./axi-query-simple.py role::program image edit
    ./axi-query-simple.py role::program game::arcade
    ./axi-query-simple.py kernel image

You can search Debtags tags using debtags tagsearch. In a later blog post, I'll show how to use apt-xapian-index to implement a better-than-you-would-ever-have-thought-possible tag search. Next in the series: adding simple result filters to the query.

To stop myself from endlessly wasting time browsing computer hardware I have actually bought a new computer.

• Giga-byte GA-G33M-S2H mainboard. (G33 chipset with DVI on board. Thanks Björn for the pointer!)
• Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66 GHz, 4MB 2nd level cache)
• 2 GB RAM
• some other stuff, including an absurdely large heatsink. (Thermaltake SI-128 SE). Unless you are using a huge case you must mount this heatsink on the mainboard before installing it in the case. Otherwise you'll need to rip out all cables and start from scratch as I did. ;-)

Contrary to my initial plans I have gone for G33 instead of G965, since according to all benchmarks I could find the latter is not a lot faster (just a little bit, both are dog slow compared to almost any separate card). This allowed me to use a board with DVI on board and use one of the cheaper E6x50 CPUs (FSB 1333). I am still running mainly etch, just with a newer kernel from backports.org and Holger's Xorg backport. Everything sees to work.

In my previous post about Advice for Speakers [1] I referred to the common problem of going through presentation materiel too quickly due to being nervous. In extreme cases (which tend to happen when giving a presentation for an unusually large audience) the materiel for an hour long presentation may be covered in 10 minutes or less. This is a problem that most speakers have at least once in their career. I recently heard an interesting (and in retrospect obvious) way of dealing with this problem. That is to label each note card with the estimated time through the presentation when it should be presented. If you are reading from the 10 minute card at 2 minutes into the presentation then you need to slow down. Of course this doesn’t work as well if you follow the “strict powerpoint” method of presenting where the only notes are the slides. It would be good if a presentation program supported having windows on two displays so you could have one full-screen window on an external video device for the audience to see and one window that’s not full-screen on the built-in display in the laptop for the speaker. The built-in display could have speaker notes, a time clock, and other useful things. I have just filed Debian bug report 447207 [2] requesting that this feature be added to Open Office. It was closed before this post was even published due to Unstable apparently having some degree of support for this and the rest being already on the planned feature list (see the bug report for details). I found the complaint about a feature request being against Etch interesting as Debian doesn’t have bugs tracked against different releases, so it’s not as if a bug reported against Etch will get any different treatment than a bug reported against Unstable.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2006/09/07/advice-for-speakers/


• [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=447207

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No "debian" on ubuntu.com: undoubtfully a bug! The mention that the word "Debian" does not appear in the recent announce about Gutsy on the ubuntu.com website by Lucas reminded me something. Indeed, though I'm yet another DD that so far has never played the ubuntu bashing game, I remember having in the past tried to find the word "debian" on the ubuntu website. At the time of writing, using the site search on ubuntu.com, results in just a few hits, all of them are marginal: OpenOffice.org maintenance, the fact that Canonical employees are part of Debian, and an announcement as old as Ubuntu 5.04. What I want to see there is just a tiny teeny sentence that explain where a huge deal of Ubuntu packages come from and a mention of all the wonderful collaborative maintenance projects in which DDs and Canonical employees (or even MOTUs) work together to build great packages. So I wondered that it was probably a fault of mine: I wasn't looking in the right place of the website. Let's try with http://www.ubuntu.com/debian, since the ubuntu website is CMS/Wiki based it seems like a good attempt, doesn't it? But no luck: "Sorry, the page you are looking for was not found". But then, down in the page, I saw the root of the problem: "please consider reporting this problem as a bug". It is obvious now: it's simply a bug in the website! Let's point the maintainers to it ... As a careful bug reporter I first searched to check whether the bug was already reported, according to this search it hasn't (though now that you're clicking on it you're probably seeing something, when I did I got "No results for search debian"). So let's report the bug, the result is bug #154274 on launchpad. Let's see what will happen to it. Update: the reply on launchpad was really fast. I've followed up with what I think should be mentioned on the ubuntu website regarding Debian. Feel free to help out with your comments in the launchpad entry.

Bruce Schneier summarised a series of articles about banking security [1]. He mentioned the fact that banks don’t seem to care about small losses and would rather just deal with the problem (presumably by increasing their fees to account for losses). There are some other interesting bits in the article, for example banks are planning a strategy of securing transactions with an infected computer [2]! Now there are some possible solutions to this, for example if the bank issued a hardware device that allowed the customer to enter the account number, amount to transfer, destination account, and PIN number and then produced a cryptographically secure hash (based in part on a rolling code) that the user could type in. The only way that you are going to do anything securely with an infected host is if everything is offloaded into an external device. In which case why not just do the Internet banking on the external device? It’s not difficult to make a hardware device that is small enough to carry everywhere, has a display, an input device, net access, and which is reasonably difficult to crack externally. Consider for example a typical mobile phone which has more RAM, CPU power, and storage than a low-end machine that was used for web browsing in 1996. Mobile phones have a good history of not being hacked remotely and are difficult for the owner to “unlock”. A locked-down mobile phone would be a good platform for Internet banking, it has wireless net access in most places (and with a Java application on the phone it could do banking by encrypted SMS). Being locked down to prevent the user from reconfiguring the software (or installing new software) will solve most of the security problems that plague Windows. If when signing up for a new phone contract I was offered the possibility of getting a phone with secure banking software installed for a small extra fee then I would be very interested. Of course we would want some external auditing of the software development to make sure that it’s not like some of the stupid ideas that banks have implemented. Here is a classic example of banking stupidity [3]. They display a selected word and picture for the user when they login to try and prevent phishing (of course a proxy or a key-logger on the local machine will defeat that). They also ask for an extra password (of the simple challenge phrase variety) if you use a different IP address, of course as the typical broadband user doesn’t know when their IP address changes they wouldn’t know if their data was being proxied and dial-up users will enter it every time. A google search for “internet banking” picture password turns up a bunch of banks that implement such ideas.

• [1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/10/future_of_malwa.html


• [2] http://www.cio.com/article/135551/Hacker_Economics_MPACK_and_the_Next_Wave_of_Malware/2


• [3] http://www.ufcu.org/accounts/member/online/index.php

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It's been a while since I wanted to post about a project I started.
But today when I read Russell Coker's post about his SE Linux repository I decided it was time to blog about DeBaBaReTools.

---

So, what is/are DeBaBaReTools?
is: a project which tries to unify different packages-building systems (pbuilder, buildd, etc) and different repository tools (debarchiver, reprepro, etc) in a single system by providing an incoming/ system.

are: Debian Bash-Based Repository Tools.

Or in other words:
DeBaBaReTools handles new packages by:

• Verifying (signature, size, md5 sums)
  
• Building (packages are listed to be built under certain architectures and then an other set of scripts take care of building them, so different build systems and hosts can be used)
  
• Installing (by making use of a tool which handles the repository itself, e.g. reprepro)
  

DeBaBaReTools is NOT a rewrite of a repository tool (like reprepro, debpool or debarchiver), neither yet an other building tool (like buildd or pbuilder). It is rather a glue between those two kind of tools.

So, how does DeBaBaReTools work?
As already said, they are a set of scripts which do all the work.
These are some of the scripts (more might be written later, they are under development):

• checkSums: just like but doesn't allow the signatures check to be skipped (not really a feature), it uses gpgv and only uses the keyrings specified by KEYRING rather than using the debian-keyring keyring if installed. Available checks (in order): signature, size, md5sum
  
• processIncoming: it takes care of checking the files in pub/UploadQueue, moving them to accepted (and soon to rejected or new), and running the repository's commands to install the packages from incoming/. It also takes care of moving the source/packages to incoming/ when necessary. Packages are verified by checkSums before moving anything to accepted
  
• needsBuild: this script processes .changes and .dsc files in accepted/ and marks them to be built on the architectures supported by the repository.
  
• wannaBuild: processes the packages that need to be built and calls the given build system (pbuilder, buildd, etc), and installs (and soon upload) them to the UploadQueue so they are processed by processIncoming and then installed in the repository.
  
• wannaLock (not yet written): this script will take care of managing a distributed package building lock system
  
• wannaUpload (not yet written): this script will take care of uploading/installing the built packages to the UploadQueue directory of the repository (will use dput, and similar).
  
• needsReBuild (not yet written): will test all packages with edos-debcheck and mark the packages to be rebuilt when necessary. This feature will not be in needsBuild because of the long run it requires and also because of some checks performed by needsBuild.
  

Note that at the moment these are the only supported backends: gpgv, du, md5sums (all built in checkSums), pbuilder and reprepro.

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? :)

So, here's the magic:

The backends system
DeBaBaReTools doesn't try to re-invent the wheel, but it makes use of all the available tools so it works as less as possible.

This is where the backends take action. They are even more shell (even tough DeBaBaReTools clearly specifies they are Bash scripts they should work on any other POSIX-compatible shell) scripts which are loaded on demand and according to the user settings.

This opens a wide range of possible combinations of backends; making DeBaBaReTools work with almost anything.

The probe.sh script searches different directories for the specified backend (and will soon support user-hinted backends).

I think an example says more than a thousand words:
When needsBuild finds a package that needs to be built in a given architecture, the toBuild shell function is called. In order to provide the already said flexibility, needsBuild will at startup time call probeFile "buildQueue" which will then check several directories for the required backend (buildQueue in this case). Once it finds the given backend (backends/buildQueue/) it will check for any user hint (which will specify the real backend to be used) and then for a default one (default.sh which is a symlink to a real backend, plaintext.sh by default).

So, if somebody at some point wants to use a sqlite database to store all that information, that person would have to write a file called backends/buildQueue/sqlite.sh (or make it available in any of the include paths which can be extended via the EXTRA_PROBE_DIRS env variable) and either set a user hint or make default.sh point to it.
The sqlite.sh script can then call any external tools (or even more scripts) to insert the information in the database, read it and more.

I know this is a lot of blahblahblah but no single line of code is shown.
I've already requested an alioth project but it was denied because the package isn't already in the Debian archive.
If you are a DD and you think this sounds like a good project please contact the Alioth admins and convince them to create a project account for DeBaBaReTools.
Once created, many other people will be able to work on it and make it work with virtually any tool.

Any kind of feedback is very welcomed but I hope they are constructive ideas.

Why did I start this crazy project?
Because AFAIR only dak is able to do such job but I think dak is just too complex for a simple system to manage an a repository with an incoming system. And AFAIK there's no script which is able to do this job besides dak.

I hope this post makes sense because I don't want to review it again (I'm tired) :)

:bye: all

Christian Perrier is wondering why the official announcement about the Gutsy release does not even contain the word “Debian”. It’s not new: Debian is virtually nonexistent in Ubuntu’s communication. It seems that the last Ubuntu release to acknowledge its Debian origins was Dapper (June 2006), maybe because that was the “Long Term Support” release. The fact that there’s no “Ubuntu is based on Debian” paragraph on www.ubuntu.com was raised during Debconf, and it was supposed to get fixed, but it seems that it didn’t happen for some reason (there was such a paragraph before the website redesign). In other news, I’ve been trying to install Ubuntu Gutsy inside qemu, but it fails miserably while booting the installer. I removed the “quiet” and “splash” options from the kernel cmdline, and discovered that after trying to “mount the root filesystem”, I get dropped into busybox with no error message to google for. Feisty fails as well, but Dapper boots fine. So much for the Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning “I can’t install Debian” joke!

Donnie Berkholz wrote an interesting article on Who made Gentoo Linux, and when?. Has someone already done something similar for Debian? It would probably be possible (and easy) to use the debian-devel-changes archives (available since 1998) for that.

I currently follow a few Debian mailing lists by scanning the list archives instead of being subscribed. I find that makes it a lot easier to not read everything and to resist the temptation to reply. I've also started following the linux-kernel mailing list, which has anywhere between 100 and 600 posts per day (and next to no spam). First through the archives at lkml.org; later I tried subscribing but that resulted in drowning in mail and some issues with the "ignore/watch threads" option in kmail made me unsubscribe again after a few days. I ended up subscribing to the linux.kernel news group instead, which works well as it's quite easy to tag threads 'ignore' and filter out ignored threads. In both cases the problem was that sometimes you do want to reply to a post, but how to do that without breaking the thread? My news reader is not smart enough that I can tell it to use the original mail headers, and for the list archives a solution is even less obvious. So I wrote a little script that allows me to just paste the subject and headers of a post directly from the Debian list archives. For the kernel list I configured my news reader to display some of the original mail headers, so I can also just paste those. The script will then parse the pasted info and generate correct Subject, To, CC, In-reply-To and References headers. With a few extra lines of code it even generates correct replies to bug reports. After that the script just calls 'mail' with the correct options which asks me to type/paste the body of the mail. Problem solved. So, just in case D-I colleagues were wondering if maybe I'd resubscribed to the d-boot list, the answer is "no".

Why do we shop over the Internet? Why do we let ourselves be treated like cattle in ways? The other day, I won an eBay auction and was notified shortly afterwards by the seller ("smile_plus168") that the item was not in stock anymore. So why did you list it, you muppet? If I retract my bid on eBay, I get punished for it, but sellers can do what they like? It was the icing on the cake to then receive the following note from the seller:

Would you pls still give me a positive feedback to me .pls don't worry about yours ,once you given it to me ,my ebay system will give you the same by AUTO.

Are you out of your mind? Then I got a note from an Amazon seller ("e-bug.de"), filled with spelling and grammar errors and letting me know that

unfortunately, the number of articles in stock was not enough to ship one out to you.

I got refunded in both cases, but still feel let down. I find it unacceptable that such asymmetry exists. After all, clicking that "Yes, I agree" button is making a binding contract, just like putting an item up for sale. If you don't have the item, you can't sell it. Seems like standard merchandising 101. NP: Oceansize: Frames

Since I never really found a nice overview of which CPU flags (see /proc/cpuinfo) mean what, so I gathered some information using the web, with the most notable sources being the BOINC FAQ entry on CPU Register Acronyms at [1] and the output of the nice little (though seemingly mostly unmaintained) cpuid utility. See my results at [2]. Any suggestions for enhancements and completions are highly welcome, just leave a comment to this post. [1]: href=”http://boincfaq.mundayweb.com/index.php?language=1&view=176
[2]: http://blog.incase.de/index.php/cpu-feature-flags-and-their-meanings/

A few days ago, I wrote about my recent purchase of an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter built in 1944. Terah and I were at an antique store, and it was $25 and sorta an impulse buy.

Since then, something unexpected has happened: I'm getting interested in using manual typewriters.

I've been busily tracking down ribbons (Nukote BW277 doesn't work on it, even though their website says it does), typing paper (business-supplies.com has it at a decent price with free overnight shipping on most orders over $50), and various tidbits of knowledge (such as: what does the lever numbered 0 to 6 beneath the right ribbon spool do?)

Today I went to a local office supply store. Not OfficeMax or OfficeDepot -- they do carry ribbons for typewriters of this era, but not the right ones for my particular machine. But the store that has been owned by the same family since it opened in 1899 on Main Street, where it remains.

And, surprise, they had the ribbon I need!

It seems that typewriters are experiencing a certain resurgence in popularity. People that have computers -- and perhaps never knew a world without them -- are buying typewriters. Because of interest, novelty, or even usefulness. There are quite a few typewriter repair shops that still exist, most of them happy to work on typewriters up to a century old.

So why am I excited about it?

Part of it is the fun of making a really old piece of technology work.

Perhaps part of it is knowing that I'll be typing at a machine that was built the same year as D-Day, the year when the first German city fell in World War II. Part of it is knowing that this 40-pound machine was built to last, in an era before planned obsolescence. And, to a certain extent, it has outlasted its manufacturer.

Part of it is curiosity: will I write differently on a typewriter than a computer? It seems that most people that have tried both say that their writing is different on a typewriter, and often better. Perhaps it is the difficulty of editing that forces more rigorous thought up front.

Christopher Watkins wrote:

[Manual typewriters] just plain shame me into working. As with any fine instrument, they're made to be used, their very design bespeaks this, and there's been many a night I've caught one of my typewriters glaring sternly at me from the shadows, implicating me in a grand failure to honor their structural destinies. Chagrined and challenged, I dutifully sit down to see what I can do to contribute to the machine-age legacy I've been called on to uphold. . .

When you sit down to write a song at the piano, you're going to write differently than if you have a banjo in your lap. And if one instrument isn't bringing the magic and the muse, maybe another will. Typewriters are the same; they make me write in a different fashion, and also provide an alternate trigger for inspiration. And as an electric guitar is different from an acoustic steel-string guitar is different from a nylon-string classical guitar is different from a national steel resonator guitar; so does each individual typewriter differ. My Underwood is different from my Royal is different from my Remington is different from my Corona is different from my Hermes. And if one isn't giving me the juice, another might.

Brian Drake added (emphasis mine):

Or you print out the document again because someone misplaced it. Misplaced it! When we were on typewriters, let me tell you, no one misplaced a hundred-page contract! That meant another two days of typing, and tying up at least two secretaries to get it done then. . .

Gore Vidal said he could tell when a book had been written on a word processor. I can, too. Sometimes I can see the cut-and-paste.

I've worked as a professional proofreader and copyeditor, and I can attest that the computer has not led to better writing. What it has led to is more writing, acres and acres of it. Books have grown fatter and fatter while their content grows slimmer and slimmer.

These seem to resonate well. More typewriter essays here.

And perhaps a typewritten blog post or two, once I try out my new ribbon.

Since I now have a business licence so I can actually charge people if they ask me questions about computers, I need to occasionally send a letter to the tax office. This means that I finally need a printer. Since I expect to be using it for about 50 pages a year, I don't really see the point in spending too much money on it, but I expect it to work those few times I actually need it. The ability to print documents that remain readable for ten years is important, so it's probably laser or thermal transfer; colour printing isn't important to me. I've had a pretty bad experience with a Lexmark Optra E (squeaky noise, crumpled envelopes, feed not working, collecting dust in the mechanics due to being top-fed). So, I'm interested in printer stories.

Danny Angus writes about the potential threat posed by small storage devices with large capacity [1]. His post was prompted by a BBC article about Hitachi’s plans for new hard drives [2], they are aiming for 4TB of data on a single drive by 2011 and a 1TB laptop drive. One thing I noticed about the article is that they made the false claim that current drives are limited to 1TB, the storage capacity is determined by the total surface area which is proportional to the square of the radius and the height of the drive (AFAIK there are no practical limits to the number of platters apart from the height of the drive). So if a 5.25 inch hard drive was to be manufactured with today’s technology it should get a capacity equivalent to at least three times the capacity of the larger 3.5 inch drive. The reason that 5.25 inch drives are not manufactured is that for best performance you want multiple spindles so that multiple operations can be performed concurrently. Using 3.5 inch drives in servers allows the use of more disks for the same amount of space in the rack and the same amount of power. The latest trend is towards 2.5 inch (Small Form Factor AKA SFF) disks for servers to allow more drives for better performance. With 3.5 inch disks a 1U system was limited to 3 disks and a 2U system was often limited to 4 or 5 disks. But with 2.5 inch drives a 2U server can have 10 drives or more. I know of one hardware vendor that plans to entirely cease using 3.5 inch drives and claims that 2.5 inch disks will give better performance, capacity, and power use! In regard to Danny’s claim (which is entirely correct) about the threat posed by insiders. I don’t believe that a laptop with 1TB of capacity is the threat. In a server room people notice where laptops get connected and there are often strictly enforced policies about connecting machines that don’t belong to the company. I believe that the greatest threat is posed by USB flash devices. For example let’s consider a database with customer name (~20B), birth-date (10B), address (~80B), phone number (~12B), card type (1B), card number (16B), card expiry (5B), and card CVV code (3B). That’s ~155 bytes per record in CSV or TSV format. If you have data for a million customers that’s 155M uncompressed and probably about 50M when compressed with gzip or WinZip (depending on which platform is being ripped). No-one even sells a USB flash device that is smaller than 50M, I recently bought a 2G flash device that was physically very small and cheap (it was in the bargain bin). The next issue is, what data might be worth stealing that is large enough to not fit on a USB device? I guess that if you want to copy entire network file shares from a corporation then you would need more than the 16G that seems to be the maximum capacity of a USB device at the moment. Another theoretical possibility would be to copy the entire mail spool of a medium to large ISP. For the case of a corporate file server you could probably get the data at reasonable speed, 1TB of data would take 10,000 seconds or 2.8 hours to transfer at gigabit Ethernet speeds (if you max out a GigE link - it could be as much as five times that if the network is congested or if the server is slow). It’s doable, but it would be a rather tense three or more hours waiting by an illegally connected laptop. For the mail server of a large ISP there is often no chance of getting anywhere near line speed, it’s lots of small reads and seek performance is the bottleneck, such servers are usually running close to capacity (and trying to copy data fast would hurt performance and draw unwanted attention). Another possibility might be to copy the storage of an Intranet search device. If a company has a Google appliance or similar device indexing much of their secret data then copying the indexes would be very useful. It would allow offline searches of the corporate data to prepare a list of files to retrieve later. It would probably be more useful to get online access to the data from a remote site. I expect that an unethical person could sell remote access to someone who is out of range of extradition. All that would be required would be to intentionally leave a flaw in the security of the system. In most large corporations this could be done in a way that is impossible to prove. For example if management decrees that the Internet servers run some software that is known to be of low quality then a hostile insider could make configuration changes to increase the risk - it would look like an innocent mistake if the problem was ever discovered (the blame would entirely go to the buggy software and the person who recommended it). A large part of the solution to this problem is to hire good employees. The common checks performed grudgingly by financial companies are grossly inadequate for this. Checking whether a potential employee has a criminal record does not prevent hiring criminals, it merely prevents hiring unsuccessful criminals and people who have not yet been tempted enough! The best way to assess whether HR people are being smart about this is to ask them for an estimate of how many criminals are employed by the company. If you have a company that’s not incredibly small then it’s inevitable that some criminals will be employed. Anyone who thinks that it is possible to avoid hiring criminals simply isn’t thinking about the issues. I may write more about this issue in a future post. Another significant part of the solution to the problem is to grant minimum privileges to access data. Everyone should only be granted access to data that they need for their work so that the only people who can really compromise the company are senior managers and sys-admins, and for best security different departments or groups should have different sys-admin teams and separate server rooms. Of course this does increase the cost of doing business, and probably most managers would rather have it be cheap than secure.

• [1] http://blog.killerbees.co.uk/2007/10/all-your-data-are-belong-to-us.html


• [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7044606.stm

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I just read a nutty post claiming that Neo-Conservatism is good for the environment [1]. The first bogus claim is that Saddam had WMD and war was required because he was a despot. The fact is that the Iraqi government was always repressive, there are many factions in Iraq that don’t like each other and a repressive government is the only way to keep such groups in a united country. The current civil war in Iraq and the effective secession of Kurdistan (which currently seems to be involved in an undeclared border war with Turkey) demonstrates this. Saddam was always a despot, but he did improve the living conditions of most Iraqis - the best way to avoid a revolution is to convince the majority of the population that things will get worse if there is change. I suggest reading the Wikipedia page about Saddam Hussein [2]. The best information on Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) seems to be on the conservative military analysis site Defense and the National Interest [7]. It covers all the issues related to invading other countries from a conservative point of view. Note that Neo-Conservatives are not Conservatives, the real Conservatives hate the Neo-Cons more than anyone else does. The amusing statement is made that “apologists claim it was one of the most advanced Arab nations” and then a link is provided to information on Saudi Arabian censorship. It’s worth reading the wikipedia page about the history of Saudi Arabia [3], among other interesting facts “the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the country’s television and broadcast facilities and oversaw the development of its defense industry” (does the US army share responsibility for the censorship?). It’s widely regarded that if the US military support was removed then the Saudi government would be overthrown. Referring to Saudi Arabia hardly seems like something you want to do if trying to justify occupying other middle-eastern states. An unsubstantiated claim is made that under-developed countries produce excess pollution due to inefficient technology. Unlike some people I try to get some facts before posting so I looked up the wikipedia page on CO2 emissions per capita [4]. It seems that the highest ranking first-world country is Luxembourg at #4, the next is the US at #10. The countries on the list that rank higher than the US have a combined population of about 11,000,000 while the US population is 302,000,000 - some quite mental arithmetic suggests that the US produces about 20 times more CO2 than the top 9 countries on the list combined! It doesn’t seem that having the highest technology is helping the US protect the environment, I guess that they just use it to build bigger cars. The next thing I noticed is the countries that are at the bottom of the list - they are the world’s poorest countries. It seems that countries without much money just can’t afford to burn lots of oil, while countries with lots of money can. No real surprises there. The lowest ranking on the list for a country that is unlikely to be regarded as being in abject poverty is India at position #133. The next lowest is Turkey at position #98 followed by China at #91. As a final point of reference Switzerland is at position #69 a produces just under 27% the CO2 that the US does (on a per-capita basis). According to the CIA World Fact Book Switzerland has an infant mortality rate of 4.28/1000 and a life expectancy of 80.62 [5], while the US has an infant mortality rate of 6.37/1000 and a life expectancy of 78 [6]. I believe that the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy are the two factors that are most representative of quality of life as they are the easiest factors for measuring the overall health of the population. Being healthy is one of the most important factors in quality of life. It seems to me that by all objective measures the Swiss are doing better than the people of the US, yet they produce less pollution and never invade other countries. Probably the most ridiculous statement in the post is “see rapidly dwindling resources wasted on jihad and revolution“. A revolution (locals using force to create a new government) takes little resources and most actions that a more simple-minded analysis might call “jihad” takes almost none. Sending an invasion force to the other side of the world and supporting an occupying army for years does however use significant resources, consider that the Hummvee is the least fuel-efficient vehicle on American roads in terms of work done (trucks and buses use more fuel but carry large amounts of cargo or many people), but it’s also the most fuel-efficient vehicle used by the US army in Iraq. There is the possibility that Jaldhar was attempting satire. If so then I suggest that satire be kept separate from serious web content to avoid confusion about where the satire ends. But if you want some satire about oil then I suggest consulting theonion.com. Before someone accuses me of being impolite, over a year ago the best estimate for the death toll from the occupation of Iraq was 655,000 [8]. Current extrapolations from the previous medical research suggest that the death toll has now exceeded 1,000,000. Regardless of whether the original post was intended as satire or not, I’m not laughing and I don’t feel the need to be polite to someone who makes excuses for such loss of life. Finally as a positive suggestion towards the environment (and any other issue that you may want to discuss), I suggest analysing the issues before writing about them and not blindly trusting other people. When you write a post make objective claims with references to back them up. When you read a post consider the points that are made and the references that are cited. Do the references support the claims? Are there other interpretations of the evidence? Are the reference sites reputable?

• [1] http://www.braincells.com/debian/index.cgi/search/item=176


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_hussein


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Saudi_Arabia


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita


• [5] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sz.html


• [6] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html


• [7] http://www.d-n-i.net/


• [8] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6040054.stm

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