I have been living at home for the past few weeks, and as such have been reading the paper after breakfast. I can do this in Durham too, its just a bit more of a fight to get the paper. After a couple of weeks, I commented to my mother than the columnists seemed to be a bit dire. She pointed out that they all started well, and steadily when't downhill. One would assume that they just ran out of interesting things to say. I was looking at the Daily WTF today, now renamed to Worse than Failure, and I was reminded of this observation. When I found the site, I did look at the entries and go "WTF?", now I just look and go "meh". I'm guessing that its running out of spectacular material, and that each new posting pushes the boundary of what it takes to be a good posting, or in the case of the Daily WTF, a bad one. At the same time, the number of readers is getting bigger, so the numbers of comments are getting bigger, so there are more silly comments. Add in the bigger readership means more demand for material, and the site's operator starts accepting lesser quality stories and the comments go down hill. Slashdot is the worst example of this, with both dire stories and comments. OSNews has also fallen over this problem. All in all, this means that as a good blogger / news site, you have to accept the fact that you aren't going to post that often, and accept the fact that you aren't going to get lots of hits and have a steady readership. A few folk, such as Steve Yegge and Joel Spolsky, seem to do this. Of course, writing without readers means writing for yourself, which is the normal advice writers offer on how to get started. So the best way to start is the best way to continue, writing about stuff that interests you and not really caring about having readers.Oh, and incase you are wondering, I don't care about folks reading my blog, and sometimes wish they didn't. They tell me I'm wrong. They get me in the coffee shop and start arguing about stuff I wrote while drunk two weeks ago. anyway... Getting back to where I started, both newpaper columnists and sites going downhill doesn't really bother me. After a while, they slip into the crap threshold and I stop reading them. Its just sad that they slip away. PS: Edwin Brady tells the Daily WTF was always quite bad. Maybe its just me who takes ages to pick up on bad sites.

1 und 1 (1 & 1), "world's largest Web hosting provider by known servers", which recently bought GMX (Germanys largest Webmail provider) and has a significant market share in the DSL retail market in Germany, added an instant messenger service.The best: it's not just "yet another IM service", but just like Google, they have chosen the XMPP/Jabber protocol ("Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol"). So they can interoperate. I've successfully tried exchanging data between GMX and Amessage, which I'm using for my IM.Configuration was trivial in Pidgin/Gaim, pick Jabber as protocol; username and server are just these two parts of your email address. The password is the same as for your GMX services. This is set up in a few seconds.Hooray for open standards!

Open Usability has a poll for the next default KDE theme or so. Oxygene or so.However it lacks options... the first real question "which icon [...] showing the menu with all applications" is lacking the "None is appropriate" option.The first icon has some windows on it. I don't want to configure windows. The second has a package on it, package manager. Next is a diary/notebook and a text editor. Looking glasses, the KDE logo, a computer and a help icon. I mean, there is nothing at all looking like an "applications menu" in there.Other questions don't fit into the usability category too much - for example, there is a poll about the 'back' button in the web browser. And there are like three regular left pointing arrows and one which is a reload turned the other way. I'd pick the other three; any of them is fine. But I have to pick one...Sometimes options are just stupid (e.g. offering a phone icon for email), and sometimes none is convincing (the chat icons, I actually find the 'small human figure' icons quite appropriate, but there was no such icon offered).Speaking of icons - I'd really appreciate some new Debian artwork. Our web site is looking like it's from the 90s. If it werent for '2007' dates occurring on the first page, it would look like it hadn't been touched since then. Ubuntu and Fedora have really nice pages (layout wise, I'm not talking about the contents which I didn't look at). Gentoo is as miserable as ours. OpenSuSE doesn't do language negotiation and looks somewhat odd. Probably too 'wikiesque'. FreeBSD just got a facelift last year. The artwork looks like 2003 style to me, and that the page has a 'monospace fonts' feeling might even be intentional. I certainly don't want the Debian website to look like a "web 2.0 beta" application, but some modern 'serious' design would be nice to have.

A preliminary schedule for the Core Days is now available. People who are scheduled for the Core days should be receiving an email shortly, and I hope to release a schedule for the Warm Up and After Hours tomorrow. Sorry for the delay in producing this, I know for many people they needed to know as soon as possible. Basically, the submissions this year was both excellent and numerous, which made selection very hard! NP: Listen and Learn, Hexstatic

Scott Lamb commented:

"Measuring police on the absence of crime is even easier to game, with horrible consequences."

In more detail, Baruch wrote:

"The result of measuring absence of crime will be that reports of crime will be rejected if the cops will think that they won't be able to catch the criminals. You will have to seperate the group that takes the reports and the group that handles them to make it work and even then I'm not sure someone won't find a way to go around that with another trick."

Well, if you read any cycling online forum, you'll have seen some reports of police rejecting reports of 'too hard' crimes like harassing cyclists. I think I've had one report accepted in the last year, about a moped user riding along a cycle track near a playground where I had noted the number plate, and two pretty certainly discarded. So, police discarding or discouraging reports of no-obvious-solution crimes seems to be happening already. andy r wrote:

"Hi there, Don't talk to me about tragedy of targets... As a teacher the word 'target' fills me with both fear and laughter. Last year my year 6 class and I worked our butts off and achieved the highest set of grades for any school in North Somerset, thereby rescuing the school from a very sticky situation with Ofsted. Within days of these results being known the senior LEA advisor suggested to me that the targets had, perhaps, in hindsight been too low. My reply was curt and Anglo-Saxon. Hindsight! Looking out of her hind? The LEA love targets. If you hit them you have not pushed the kids enough. If you exceed them you should have pitched them higher. Woe betide anyone who fails to meet their targets (I will this year, different cohort and those % from last year have been INCREASED!)... My kids have targets (though they have so many that they actually fail to remember them all). Teachers have targets for the numbers of children who are 'supposed' to achieve certain grades but the idiots who set them frequently have only a rudimentary grasp of mathematics. In my current school there are 45 children in a year group, so each one represents a little over 2%. In schools with small classes (perhaps 10 per year in some rural schools) 1 child can equate to 10%. If he's sick on exam day or is just not bright enough, that's 10% gone. And with the government expecting 75-80% of children to achieve a level 4 in their KS2 SATS, it's all too easy to drop blow your 'targets' through illness alone. But here's an even worse tragedy of targets in primary schools... a couple of years ago I had to disapply 2 children from SATS, simply because they have profound special needs and could not take the tests. In addition, the school had an Autistim Unit (now called something PC, but I forget what) which that year had 4 children in year 6. Therefore we had 6 children who could not take the exams. We filled in the paper work but were horrified when the results came in to discover that these children (who all had official exemption on disability grounds) were counted as having taken the test, even though they couldn't. For 'statistical' purposes these kids were classified as having scored zero! Out of a cohort of 36 children, 6 were classified as not having done a thing! The department of education acknowledged that this didn't help our statistics, but stated that it was their policy. In a school with a lot of very deprived kids this 16% scoring zero, added to a significant quanitity of under-achievers was enough to push us down to the bottom 100 primary schools nationally. You can only imagine how damaging that was for the school's reputation - parents took kids out, we were slated in the local press and had to fight like mad to justify our continued existence... Targets... bah! Hey, talking of which. The Health Trust has recently done a survey of local primary school children's weights and heights. In our day this sort of thing was compulsory. Not any more. Parents had to 'opt in' to the survey... And guess what? The parents of the largest kids refused to take part - as did the ignorant b*strds, but that's another story. So the WAHT will now be collating a totally skewed data set. I'm just waiting for the press release highlighting our slim North Somerset children... And of course, someone will be complemented on achieving targets for reducing childhood obesity, whilst infact the problem has probably - as it were- grown. I used to like the way that 'on time targets' were displayed in Didcot railway station. There was a board in foyer which highilighed punctuality. The impressive looking bar chart had these words written on it: "% of trains on time, compared to last month." And the brightly coloured chart was always up around 95%, ish. I was always suprised that nobody commented on that. 0.95*0.95*0.95...... month on month those trains were getting less and less punctual! But nobody bothered to point this out because 95% looks impressive! On many occasions I took the time to read, and re-read, the wording of those graphs so I know with 100% confidence that this was what they quoted. We never had a month with more than 100% punctuality compared to the previous month. Shame. That's enough. I'm off to the dog house."

This is what happens when a geek has a baby geek.

Does anyone have a (partial?) policy for Tomcat on SELinux "strict"? It's definitely something I'd like to confine, however Java needs tons of permissions. Multiple ports, execmem, log files, fifos, on-demand extracted webapps and so on. :-(Has anyone started on writing a policy for this beast? If there is any way to confine it actually, given that it's pretty much a system on it's own.[Update: I'd like to point out that running tomcat on a SELinux 'targeted' system works fine by running tomcat in an 'unconfined' domain. Since tomcat usually isn't run with root privileges anyway, it's not that risky]

"a monthly public demonstration of Free Open Source Software (FOSS), aimed primarily at beginners. It's not specifically for Linux, as the software will be demoed on a WinXP system to lure people in ;) -- however, I will make some live linux distro CDs for the event. Here's the details: Title: Introduction to Free Software
Date: Wednesday 18th April
Time: Lunchtime 1-2pm
Place: Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol BS2 8JS
Map
Price: Free
The website"

The second one will be on 26th May 2007 at the Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol BS2 8JS (Map), 1pm-3pm, and is hopefully a music one with a barbecue (weather permitting!).

Leon Brooks blogged about the Right to Fork (an essential right for free software development) but notes that governments of countries don't permit such a right.

One of the criteria for the existence of a state is the ability to control it's own territory. Lose control of the territory and you lose the state, lose some of the territory and the state is diminished. Therefore preventing a division of the territory (a split after a civil war) is the primary purpose of a state. The other criteria of a state are the ability to tax the population, impose civil order, and to administer all other aspects of government. All of these operations are essential to the government and lead to the destruction of the state if they are lost.

It's not that governments want to prevent forking, it's the fact that the existence of the state (on which the existence of the government depends) demands that it be prevented in all but the most extreme situations.

With free software forking is not a problem as multiple groups can work on similar software without interference. If someone else works on a slightly different version of your program then the worst that they can do is to get the interest of more developers than you get. This competition for developers leads to better code!

With proprietary software the desire to prevent forking is due to the tiny marginal cost of software. Most of the costs of running a software company are in the development. The amount of work involved in development does not vary much as the user-base is increased. So doubling the number of sales can always be expected to significantly more than double the company's profit.

One thing that would benefit the computer industry would be to have all the source to proprietary programs put in escrow and then released freely after some amount of time or some number of versions have been released. If Windows NT 4.0 was released freely today it would not take many sales from the more recent versions of Windows. But it would provide significant benefits for people who want to emulate older systems and preserve data. I expect that current versions of MS-Office wouldn't properly read files created on NT 4.0, I'm sure that this is a problem for some people and will become more of a problem as new machines that are currently being designed are not capable of booting such old versions of Windows.

Recently I stumbled on a relatively new blog Tenured Radical that I really dig for it provides a compelling and witty, (if not at times very disturbing) picture of what I am soon to face, being I am at the cusp of starting an academic job. Not only is writing a real pleasure to read but she has a lot of good things to say and it is worth checking out (well maybe only if you are a student, academic, or university administrator though I reckon it may have wider appeal). At first, she blogged anonymously but now she has come out under the sun revealing her identity. Her recent post on the problems of grading hit home, I guess because it seems like in the last week all my friends are talking/complaining about is grading given it is the end of the semester and all (I thankfully don’t have to worry about that till next year). Grades and granting them, have such a complex psychology and set of consequences for teachers and students alike and she gives a nice taste of what they are.

I didn't intend to write (ok, rant...) on this topic again, but a few days ago, this "AppArmor FAQ", was posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing list. Again, this is a lot of 'marketing stuff', and doesn't have the facts quite right...Some quotes:

In the traditional UNIX model, files do have names but not labels, and applications only operate in terms of those names.

No. In the traditional UNIX model, filenames point to inodes, and the inodes contain data such as file modification dates and permissions. This is where SELinux stores the labels it uses for access control. In fact, the "unix owner" and "unix group" are pretty much the same thing as SELinux labels. And also work pretty much the same way.

Contrary to popular belief, AppArmor is *not* "Pathnames R Us", but rather "Use native abstractions to mediate stuff": when you mediate something, you should use the native syntax that users normally use to access the object.

Maybe the appropriate term would have been "naive abstractions"?And, no, security systems shouldn't be designed around what a user can easily grasp, because that might just not work... it should be designed around the way resources are handled and how you can successfully restrict access."Contrary to popular belief", SELinux *does* use path names. Actually in a very convenient way for the users. So I wouldn't claim SELinux is really harder to use than AppArmor because of its use of path names.The difference is that SELinux doesn't rely on the path names, but it still gives the user the possibility to use them. In fact, the only way I know to get a proplerly labeled filesystem is based on path names.If I'd for example keep my web stuff in /home/www, I can tell SELinux that the appropriate label is httpd_sys_content_t by doing

semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_content_t /home/www
restorecon -R /home/www

In AppArmor, I'd need to modify the policy for several applications to achieve this, because of it's dependency on path names. SELinux also uses an abstraction. One that is very convenient for users actually. SELinux does access control on object classes. What I'm doing in above example is to put these files into the "Web site data files" class. So please stop scaring people of "labels". That is just the technical term for what is an "object class", a concept every developer will be familiar with. (SELinux policy development has a couple of OOP-like features, btw., for example it is possible to give an application access to 'all log files'.)There are, however, some true statements hidden in there:

We also acknowledge that pathname based access control requires a way to perform pathname matching in the kernel, and this comes at a cost higher than comparing object labels [...]

So by providing string matching in the kernel, AppArmor trades run-time performance to grant reduced administrative work. It is however not obvious how large the difference in "reduced administrative work" is between AppArmor testing the filename "run-time" compared to SELinux using filenames to relabel files "on demand" (or, with restorecond, even on creation by using inotify).What I still seriously dislike is the FUD spread by AppArmor people such as

Label-based security (exemplified by SELinux, and its predecessors in MLS systems) attaches security policy to the data. As the data flows through the system, the label sticks to the data, and so security policy with respect to this data stays intact. This is a good approach for ensuring secrecy, the kind of problem that intelligence agencies have.

Why should this only be useful to "intelligence agencies"? Some people live in countries with very strict privacy requirements, and we might want to use these techniques to lessen the risk of leaking data. In AppArmor, I can copy a file with private customer data to the web server directory, and it becomes readable by the web server. In SELinux, the file will still be unreadable by the web server. Does that really sound like "only useful to intelligence agencies" to you?Dear AppArmor people, please stop trying to invoke fear of the NSA, just to make people use AppArmor. That makes you look very untrustworthy, you know...The SELinux kernel code is part of the Linux kernel, AppArmor is not. So in theory, that code has been reviewed much better than yours, and is maybe even less likely to contain a "NSA backdoor" than yours. Changes to SELinux are openly discussed on a mailing list, and go through peer review there. They foolow a very strict coding style, which makes review easier; obfuscated code doesn't have a place there. It's not like we were running a binary blob from the NSA we can't have a look at.

The online journal re-public: re-imagining democracy has a handful of articles on collaboration and wikipedia, adding to two special issues on reimagining the commons. Many are good. But I am disturbed over the true paucity of diverse voices, including women. The recent slew of articles does not have even one authored by a woman and there are only 2 represented in the re-imagining the commons special issues. Given that there are many woman researchers and practitioners who do work on this material, I honestly don’t think this represents a lack but a problematic oversight. Problematic most especially because they are “re-imagining democracy,” and this does not look to imaginative to me.

Steven's blog post reminded me that I had to make a note about the two email responses I received to my own. I received one email from Pro Guns Person A quite quickly after my blog post went up. He was quite civil, and had things to say such as:

The truth is, if a few good citizens were armed and nearby, they would have had a chance to stop the killer before he could do any more harm.

and went on to say how if a person really wanted to, they'd break laws to get guns, so gun control doesn't achieve anything, except leaving the good guys unable to defend themselves. Sure, they'd break laws to get guns. You can't stop them if they really want to, but you can make it harder. And you have to make it harder universally. It's no good if one state cracks right down, if people can just pop over to the next state and pick up a firearm instead. I agree with Steven. Leave the gun toting to the people trained in their use (i.e. law enforcement). Frankly, it disturbs me that "defending yourself" equates to being able to shoot the attacker. I think it's Texas where you can legally shoot trespassers. Scary stuff. Pro Guns Person A went on to say:

To close, again without intending offense, please do not call for gun control if you aren't even a citizen of this country. The real problem is the societal issues that drive people to do these things. The truth is, fifty years ago in this country, people could leave loaded guns in their unlocked cars, even in high school parking lots...and nothing like this ever happened. But now, even though we have far more restrictive gun laws, things like this do happen, because of the societal problems.

I have the right to express my opinion, irrespective of my citizenship, as do you, Mr Pro Guns Person A. You don't have to like my opinion, just as I don't have to like yours, but I respect your right to have your opinion. No offense taken, either. You were very polite in putting across your point, I appreciate it. (By the way, I agree. Society's gone to pot.) Pro Guns Person B's email was along a similar theme: the bad people will always get their mitts on a gun, and the good people won't be able to defend themselves.

Think about these figures (I'll write about the US, since that's the nation you wrote about now): In the state of Arizona the gun per person ratio is 2,5 (on average 2,5 guns owned by 1 person, and these are the legally purchased ones). In the state of New York there is an official prohibition on guns. So why is it that New York has the higher armed crime rate among those two? (and one of the highest across the country)

I don't think reverting the entire US to a "wild wild west" scenario is really going to help matters at all. Sarah was saying that she'd found some statistic somewhere, probably saying something like what this page is saying. Now this was done at a Federal level, so that's why it worked, whereas anything done piecemeal, is going to cause a situation like what Pro Gun Person B was describing in his email.

So this Monday was the 111th running, as they call it, of the venerable Boston Marathon, and my first time there. After the fairly serious storm warnings -- and the corresponding health warnings, delivered through two emails from the race organizers and a handout at registration, we got very, very lucky as the rain more or less stopped shortly after the start. And there was relatively little wind, and mostly laterally, rather than the 'in your face' gusts at the projected 30 to 50 mph.
There were actually six of us running from our little informal group in River Forest / Oak Park, and fellow rookie Russ and I decided to 'take it easy' and just 'go for a long run'. I ended up with a fairly even pace between 7:45 and 8:10, averaging 7:57 for a total of 3:28:24, or a few seconds faster than my very first marathon in Chicago. Which is quite pleasant, given the conditions, and the hillier course. The race went pretty well for all six us, which is nice too. Given how we trained together, it is neat how we all ended up within seven minutes of each other. The race itself is quite stunning. With the required qualifying time comes a 'seeding' system for the start, so one tends to run most of the course with runners of fairly similar speed. That made for nice cameraderie on the course -- and for beautiful sights of nothing but runners rolling through the hills of Massachusetts. I think I'll be back next year.

At DebConf7 in Edinburgh, I'm going to moderate a derivatives round table. At DebConf5 I put on a similar sort of panel. Here's the description I submitted (please ignore the placeholder list of panelists on the DC7 site):

The Debian-Derivers round-table will bring together representatives of organizations involved in producing Debian derived distributions to discuss the political, organizational, and social barriers to collaboration with Debian and with each other.

The idea is to bring together a representative group of folks from our derivative community -- groups like Ubuntu, Linspire, Knoppix, Guadalinex, Maemo, etc. etc. -- and provide a space where they can describe their successful and unsuccessful experiences working with Debian and with each other. On the other side, it will give Debian developers a chance to ask questions of the group, both individually and as a whole. My first step, of course, is to build that panel. If you have worked on or represent a Debian derivative and think you will be at DebConf, you may have a spot on my panel. Give me an email at mako@debian.org and lets talk!

Alan Robertson (a major contributor to the Heartbeat project) commented on my post failure probability and clusters. His comment deserves wider readership than a comment generally gets so I'm making a post out of it. Here it is:

---

One of my favorite phrases is "complexity is the enemy of reliability" . This is absolutely true, but not a complete picture, because you don't actually care much about reliability, you care about availability.

Complexity (which reduces MTBF) is only worth it if you can use it to drastically cut MTTR - which in turn raises availability significantly. If your MTTR was 0, then you wouldn't care if you ever had a failure. Of course, it's never zero

But, with normal clustering software, you can significantly improve your availability, AND your maintainability.

Your post makes some assumptions which are more than a little simplistic. To be fair, the real mathematics of this are pretty darn complicated.

First I agree that there are FAR more 2-node clusters than larger clusters. But, I think for a different reason. People understand 2-node clusters. I'm not saying this isn't important, it is important. But, it's not related to reliability.

Second, you assume a particular model of quorum, and there are many. It is true that your model is the most common, but it's hardly the only one - not even for heartbeat (and there are others we want to implement).

Third, if you have redundant networking, and multiple power sources, as it should, then system failures become much less correlated. The normal model which is used is completely uncorrelated failures.

This is obviously an oversimplification as well, but if you have redundant power supplies supplied from redundant power feeds, and redundant networking etc. it's not a bad approximation.

So, if you have an MTTR of 4 hours to repair broken hardware, what you care about is the probability of having additional failures during those four hours.

If your HA software can recover from an error in 60 seconds, then that's your effective MTTR as seen by (a subset) of users. Some won't see it at all. And, of course, that should also go into your computation. This depends on knowing a lot about what kind of protocol is involved, and what the probability of various lengths of failures is to be visible to various kinds of users. And, of course, no one really knows that either in practice.

If you have a hardware failure every 5 years approximately, and a hardware repair MTTR of 4 hours, then the probability of a second failure during that time is about .009%. The probability of two failures occuring during that time is about 8^10-7% - which is a pretty small number.

Probabilities for higher order failures are proportionately smaller.

But, of course, like any calculation, the probabilities of this are calculated using a number of simplifying assumptions.

It assumes, for example, that the probabilities of correlated failures are small. For example, the probability of a flood taking out all the servers, or some other disaster is ignored.

You can add complexity to solve those problems too ;-), but at some point the managerial difficulties (complexity) overwhelms you and you say (regardless of the numbers) that you don't want to go there.

Mangerial complexity is minimized by uniformity in the configuration. So, if all your nodes can run any service, that's good. If they're asymmetric, and very wildly so, that's bad.

I have to go now, I had a family emergency come up while I was writing this. Later...

---

End quote.

It's interesting to note that there are other models of quorum, I'll have to investigate that. Most places I have worked have had a MTTR that is significantly greater than four hours. But if you have hot-swap hard drives (so drive failure isn't a serious problem) then having machines have an average of one failure per five years should be possible.

Update: Francies commented:

"I also emailed Barclays regarding their non-listing of Linux and had the "128-bit encryption" where again Linux was not mentioned (have they even heard of it? A friend mentioned today that he has read that Barclays will be issuing chip and pin or card devices to all online banking users so could it be that these will be Windows only? If so the Linux community should complain in case all banks get the same idea."

I've also seen Barclays announce the chip-and-pin readers and a BBC report about them. Anyone seen these before? Comment form at the end of the page.

There are a lot of pages out there explaining how to convert your mail from mbox to maildir. I’m going to add one more, resurrecting the “tips” section of my blog. (All the tips from my blosxom days are grouped together on one page — someday I’ll get around to breaking those up properly.) If nothing else, I’ll never have to write these instructions in an email to someone again, instead I’ll just send them the link to this entry. I hope these steps are specific enough so anyone savvy enough to even have this problem in the first place will be able to follow them. One thing I find consistently concerns people when converting to maildir is how to make sure no mail is lost in the transition. The steps below address that concern. It’s really not hard at all once you understand how maildir works. First, I’m assuming you have mb2md installed and procmail support. Also, if you plan to access your mail through IMAP, your IMAP server needs to know to use ~/Maildir if ~/Mail does not exist. This is often default behavior (at least it is for Dovecot). Finally, I assume that your inbox is in /var/mail/username, and your other mail folders are in ~/mail. So, here goes:

1. Edit your .procmailrc. The first two lines should read:
   MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/
   This will cause all new mail to be delivered (after you save your .procmailrc) to be stored in maildir format under ~/Maildir. The key for procmail to know to use the maildir format is the trailing slash in the “DEFAULT” line. Note that under the new system, your inbox and all your folders are kept in ~/Maildir, rather than having an inbox in /var/mail and your folders under your home directory. (This is nice because it makes it easier to back up all your mail together, among other things).
2. If you have any specific procmail rules in your .procmailrc, you’ll also need to change the target folders for that. For example, if you have a spam filtering rule like this:
   :0 H
* ^X-Spam-Level: *****
spam
It needs to be changed to this:
   
:0 H
* ^X-Spam-Level: *****
.spam/
   The trailing slash, again, tells procmail to use maildir rather mbox format for delivery. The leading dot will make the folder appear properly for your IMAP client (there’s a trick I suggest below for making “dot” folders easy to access with a command line client like mutt).

If you have mail being delivered to a nested mail folder, an additional change is needed because maildir has a flat hierarchy. So if your mail was being delivered to “misc/other/spam” the new target should be “.misc.other.spam/”.

Save your .procmailrc. From this point forward, all mail will be delivered to your maildir folders. You can now import all your old mail to the new folders without concern. Since maildir stores each individual message as a separate unique file, you don’t need to worry about any overwriting issues while you are making the transition. New mail will be delivered to newly named files; old mail will be imported to other, unique, newly named files.

Import your mail folders:
mb2md -s ~/mail -R
The -R just means to import recursively through all your folders; if your mail folder is Mail rather than mail, use that instead. No destination is needed because mb2md uses ~/Maildir by default.

Import your inbox:
mb2md -m

Move your old inbox out of the way. Most people won’t actually be able to move or delete files in /var/mail (since they don’t have directory write privileges), so the easiest thing is probably to just open the inbox in your IMAP client or with mutt and save or delete all the messages.

Move your old mail folder out of the way:mv ~/mail ,.bak Once you’ve confirmed that everything is okay, you should be able to delete ~/mail.bak (or compress it and move it elsewhere.) If you saved your inbox to mail folder in step 6, that will get moved out of the way here as well.

That’s it, you’re done.

Okay, so you’re not quite done if you access your mail with mutt rather than an IMAP client. (You could just point your mutt at your local IMAP server, of course). I’ve found the most convenient way to access the “dot” folders with mutt is to create a parallel symlinked folder structure without the dots. Here’s a hacked-together shell script that will do that. This could obviously be rewritten to be much more elegant (probably in perl). But we all have our messy scripts, right?

#!/bin/bash

cd ~/Maildir for x in .*
do
y=$ x##.
if ( echo $y grep -q ‘.’ )
then
mkdir -p ~/mymail/$ y%.*
fi
ln -s ~/Maildir/$x ~/mymail/ echo $y sed “s/.///g”
done for x in *
do
ln -s ~/Maildir/$x ~/mymail
done
Then, just add these lines to your .muttrc file:
set folder="~/mymail"
set spoolfile=”~/mymail” Any questions?

Desde su concepci n, Planeta Linux ha exhortado a sus participantes a sindicar contenido exclusivamente relacionado con tecnolog a, computaci n, software libre y Linux, en orden incremental de preferencia. Pronto se determin que la exhortaci n no era suficiente y se pas al requerimiento. H ctor Colina y Milton Mazzarri, por nombrar dos venezolanos, estuvieron involucrados en los Lineamientos y las Preguntas Frecuentes de Planeta Linux Venezuela. Como para ese momento ya hab amos hecho un grupo inicial de “venezolanos con blog que hablan de Linux” (b sicamente gente de VELUG, SOLVE, Debian Venezuela y de unplug.org.ve), no tuvimos la oportunidad de requerirles que tuvieran una categor a dedicada a Planeta Linux. A las nuevas personas que se inscrib an por la lista, en ocasiones se les requer a la categor a si su blog conten a, a primera vista, contenido no relacionado con Linux. En todos los casos, se requer a estar de acuerdo con los Lineamientos. En el caso de las personas que me solicitaban a mi directamente (que desde hace no mucho tengo acceso al SVN de Planeta Linux) yo les requer a una categor a particular, a menos de que su software no lo permitiera. En este ltimo caso, muy a pesar de los quejones de oficio, elimin bamos a la persona de PL. Es el caso de Luigino Bracci, quien en alguna ocasi n lleg a llenar todo Planeta Linux con contenido pol tico parcializado, y quien manifest que su sistema de blogs no le permit a agregar categor as. Hay casos en los que una persona que escribe poco o que suele escribir de Linux llega y hace algun desastre al estilo Alberto Capella con su foto a tama o gigante. En esos casos alguien se da cuenta y me avisa (aunque es un error, al final de la p gina hay direcciones de contacto y en Venezuela somos varios que administramos!) pero estoy involucrado en muchas cosas como para dar respuesta inmediata a ese tipo de casos. Y ah viene otro problema. En Planeta Linux NO PODEMOS moderar un post o a una persona. Solo podemos suspenderlo o eliminarlo. No podemos borrar una imagen ni un post ni nada, porque en 15 minutos perdemos los cambios. Espero que eso de algunas luces cuando haya algo de que quejarse en Planeta Linux. El ltimo caso es particular. Jes s Lara hizo varios posts no relacionados con Linux en su blog. Particularmente hubo gente que reclam que hab an recien escrito algo relacionado con Linux y los posts de Jes s “empujaron” los posts relacionados con Linux hacia el final del Planeta. Por lo tanto suspendi la suscripci n de Jes s y lo contact el 9 de Abril. Cre una categor a y me lo comunic . Eso es suficiente para volver a reactivar su suscripci n (en este caso me tard unos d as porque el commit fall y nunca me enter de ello, ni Jes s me lo inform , realmente) Ya hay mucha gente que sindica categor as en PL, y pronto ser n muchos m s. Cont ctenme si quieren hacer el proceso pronto. Por favor, la pr xima vez que encuentren un problema en Planeta Linux:

• Av sennos a Milton Mazzarri, David Moreno Garza o a mi, o a trav s de los medios de contacto de Planeta Linux. Podemos ayudarles, y el trabajo voluntario no nos excluye de responsabilidades.
• Den ideas y soluciones, que son muy bien recibidas. No den cr ticas ni flameen, porque recibir n lo mismo de vuelta (aqu son bienvenidos todos los que usen Linux en Venezuela, no traigan los vicios de los grupos de usuarios y las listas de amor y dolor)
• Descarten la teor a de la conspiraci n. No todos los que est n involucrados en proyectos comunitarios de Software Libre tienen problemas de cari o ni necesitan pensar que otros los atacan o necesitan meterse en la vida de los dem s. Lo m s probable es que lo hayamos olvidado o no tengamos tiempo. Usen el sentido com n.

As Bastian has pointed out, wiki.debian.org has a butt-ugly theme. I agree.

Some of the people that were present in Extremadura in September know that I was working at the time to make a wiki theme more integrated with the www.debian.org theme.

The result is partially complete, but is better, IMHO, than the ugly default theme. Sceenshots and the source is available (in a darcs repo). If anyone cares to continue and close all the remaining points, I would be glad to see that theme changed.

Unless somebody does something about both issues.

Comments are welcome! Contributions are welcome, you just do:

darcs get http://users.alioth.debian.org/~eddyp-guest/darcs/wiki.debian.org_theme/

And hack on that modern-wiki.debian.org theme