I’ve been reading Baen’s collections of Christopher Anvil’s classic sf stories. In general, I’ve found them excellent; I thoroughly enjoyed the Free Library book Interstellar Patrol; and I’ve enjoyed all the stories of Interstellar Patrol II: The Federation of Humanity that I’ve read so far – with the exception of one. I agree completely with Alex Kasman of MathFiction: In my opinion, this story is slanderous and the author should be ashamed. I have very little to add to his review, and I won’t repeat his points here. I recommend reading the whole of Kasman’s review. On my first reading I totally missed that Dr. Phipps had been identified as a mathematician; I couldn’t believe my eyes when I went back and checked. A mathematician of the future, who is that ignorant of elemental set theory? The stuff is hammered down the throat of every mathematics freshman everywhere. It might be possible to graduate with that sort of ignorance, and I might accept it from a scientist who is not a mathematician, but to get a maths doctorate? No way. Fine, so we suspend disbelief on that point. The good Doctor is a professional imbecile. When he uses his faulty understanding of Cantor’s Theorem to suggest a plan of attack against the bad guys, I expected it to fail, naturally. I expected the bad guys to somehow diagonalize themselves additional warships, and so prove that their number is actually uncountable, when the good guys have just a countably infinite set of ships. But did we get this? No. Go read Kasman’s review, and the Anvil reissues. But by heavens, if you are educated in higher maths, skip Cantor’s War.

Russell blogs about his new 22" cheap TFT monitor. You lucky bastard.
I use a 17" Dell LCD monitor at work (sorry, cannot recall the model), and I've been quite pleased with it. Granted, 1280x1024 isn't what I had gotten used to (1400x1050 on my previous laptop and previous work machine), but it does the trick - And for my current laptop, I went for a smaller machine, with a 12" wide-screen 1280x800 monitor. I still find the monitor somewhat small, and the missing 224 pixels _are_ noticeable - but the size is well worth it.
But what I've been playing at work with is changing the monitor orientation - This 17" Dell monitor can be set up vertically (1024x1280), and xrandr will merrily change the orientation. So far, I'm happy with this setup. I still feel there are some video-related quirks, and maybe the pixels are a bit off (i.e. black letters in a white background have a bit of a shadow), maybe it was visible as well in the regular configuration, but not as noticeable. But well, I feel it easier to work with for most of my work cases - For having a full-screen browser, each row is smaller and more rows fit on screen - It's quite pleasant. For doing Web development, having a horizontally split screen (one above of the other) between Emacs and the browser is quite natural. And when I use more than two frames (i.e. for following logfiles or debugging multi-factored breakages on servers ;-) ), well, they are small enough that it's similar to having the ol' regular layout.
I'd still like to get a second video card and monitor. I remember working that way in the job I left four years ago, and it was very comfortable.
BTW, Russell, for your needs I suggest you to try Ion. After all, who really needs to have a root window/background after all? :-)

Snow, beautiful snow! We've got tons of snow coming out of the sky today. It's big and thick, what they call fourrure de li vre (rabbit fur) in Quebec. It's hard to believe we are having snow this late in the season (halfway into Germinal!), but it's kind of nice to have some snow. Especially since the United Nations report saying that Canada will lose its snow cover by 2100. Snow, please snow. tags: snow season climate change

JFS So, I'm one of those idiots who uses the IBM Journaled File System 2 (JFS2) as his root partition. Why? Because I've tried all the different journalling filesystems for Linux (reiserfs, ext3, xfs, jfs) and JFS is the one that works for me. It just seems to be the low-profile, clean, nicely-working FS. Unfortunately, I've been tracking Feisty Fawn for the last couple of weeks, and somewhere in there the JFS utility package, jfsutils, got uninstalled. Who knows why? But when I rebooted my machine today to try out a new kernel, my root partition came up in read-only mode -- because the system couldn't check the partition, because fsck.jfs couldn't be found. The fix, of course, would be to boot a live CD, chroot to the hard disk, and apt-get install the jfsutils. I typically use Finnix for this and other rescue/recovery projects, but in this situation Finnix failed me. My main computer is a honkin' amd64, and the x86 Finnix disk didn't want to let me chroot and run any amd64 binaries (like the stuff I needed to apt-get install jfsutils). So I ended up downloading and burning a Feisty live CD, dicking around with boot parameters for a while (noapic nolapic nosplash nonothing...), and finally got to a nice, friendly Gnome terminal. I mounted the hard drive using the Nautilus tools, and then tried to chroot to it -- D'OH! Permission denied. Took me a while to figure out that Nautilus mounts drives noexec by default. Once I got that working, I got jfsutils installed and was able to boot my machine again. Yay. Moral of the story: figure out a way to make packages that are crucial to you crucial to your package manager, too. Oh, and Finnix needs an amd64 build. tags: jfs feisty fawn ubuntu jfsutils finnix nautilus

YULblog YULblog meetup tonight at the Quincaillerie. YULblog is our local Montreal monthly blogging get-together. It's pretty fun, and has the highest female-to-male ratio of any technology event in Montreal. Which is great. I have a ton of work to do tonight (since I spent the afternoon dicking around with live CDs), but I'm going out anyways. YULblog comes but once a month, after all. tags: yulblog blogs montreal

N hours later Good time, that! I walked down rue Rachel to the Quincaillerie this evening around 9PM through a storm that was like being in a snowfight with Borribles. Thud thud thud! Big chunks of snow. But the Q. was pretty hoppin' for a snowy night in April, and I got to see Robin, Steve, Niko, Patrick and others. It was a fun time; the snow made it all the more special. tags: snow yulblog

I just received the latest Dell advert, they are offering a 22 inch monitor with 1680x1050 resolution for $499 including delivery! This is a great deal, I've got the same model of monitor at home (I paid $750 for it almost six months ago) and have been totally satisfied. The same monitor with a $499 price is amazing value.

In the past I blogged about the benefits of larger monitors for software development. Now these benefits are available to most computer users in first-world countries.

Now that 1680x1050 is commonly available I expect to see higher resolution monitors dropping in price, at the $800 and $1200 price-points there will need to be something better than that.

The next development will be new software to take advantage of this. One thing that I have heard of is a window manager that splits the display into two halves (in this case they would be 840x1050 resolution). The benefit of having this configuration (according to the people who use it) is that for maximising a window will make it take half the physical screen. This means that you could have a debugger in one half of the screen and your application in the other, to "maximise" the application would not occlude the debugger. Or you could have a web browser and a MUA each using half a screen.

Of course the same result could be achieved by getting two physical displays, but this requires a graphics card that supports "twin-head" operation, and the purchase price of two displays (which will add up to more than $500).

Splitting a screen into two virtual displays is not something that would suit my working patterns. For a lot of my work I just have a screen filled with as many Xterms as will fit. For the GUI stuff I am happy to manually resize things. Maybe a KDE addition that would allow one "Desktop" to be split while another isn't would work.

A final impediment to splitting the screen is that 840 pixels is not enough to correctly display all web sites (many of which are designed for 1024x768). Maybe if I had a split desktop with an icon on the title-bar of the window to unsplit it for one particular window then it would work.

Another use for a large display is virtualisation. I previously blogged about how to use Xephyr to run multiple X sessions on one display, as Xen is now supported in all Linux distributions and KVM and other
virtualisation technologies are also being developed there should be a lot of demand to have multiple virtual machine GUI displays on one desktop (although you could probably do this by manually sizing the windows).

These are just some wild ideas, I have no plans to write the code for any of them, so it'll be a matter of whatever is desired by the people who write the code or pay them. But one thing is certain, the low prices of such monitors will drive new research into how to use them effectively. New technology to effectively use large displays will then drive demand for even larger displays (as will the people who just want to get something better and more expansive than their neighbours). I wonder when we will get to the stage when people are satisfied. For basic office applications commodity PC hardware has far surpassed what is needed for people to do their work.

Totally unoriginal, but I thought it was amusing. I also get some strange search phrases: "My gas meter is making a clicking noise" - then stop using the computer and call your gas company! (In England, the contact number should be on a label on the meter, or in most phone books under "Gas".) "My computer is making loud ticking noise" - that's better. Open the case and listen to the fans and hard disks. One is probably broken. "How many cars are there on the roads today" - too damn many? "How to send an email so that everyone doesn t see the addresses" - put yourself in the To line and everyone else in the Bcc (blind carbon copy). See my email guide for other handy tips. "How do i say in an email that there is an attachment" - How about "There is an attachment"? "Samsung yp-u2 linux" - it works as long as you don't want to upgrade the firmware. More... "How to satellite aiming motor europa" - point it at the sky, not at europa. I'll add more instructions to my satellite page as I rebuild my system. "MJ bad" - at least there are 4 times as many "good" searches. "How do I get the software for the samsung ml-4500" and "Samsung ml-4500 xp drivers" - I have a Ghostscript driver patch. Does Ghostscript work as a printer driver on XP? "Cycle tracks near sandringham" - there's part of NCN1 alongside the A149, but most of the other cycle routes near Sandringham are along quiet roads (which is fine). "What does wag stand for regarding football?" - Wives And Girlfriends. BTW it's a stupid TLA IMO. "Wretton planning", "Wretton parish council", "business properties for sale in Wretton" and "properties for sale in field lane Wretton" - I've not been to Wretton in some time, let alone mentioned its planning or set up an estate agent there! "How to grow grapevine in a conservatory?" - damned if I know. I would think the temperature change each time you open a door would hurt it too much. "Hanging washing out over night" - it's a bad idea if it's going to freeze. "Why some people take so long to reply to emails" - we're busy trying to thaw the washing out. "Satellite frequency for ulster tv for sky plus box" - 10906MHz Vertical polarisation 22Msym/s, but can you record "other channels" on Sky Plus or should you buy a real DVR? "Where can i find a picture of st james swimming pool in kings lynn?" - try Norlink's Picture Norfolk section. "What happened to opensource.org?" - It was transferred from SPI to OSI. Strangely, the next search phrase listed was "simple example of unethical behaviour"... "What to do about death?" - be very still and start to rot? "bf uk cbhf" - I give up. Did 8 of you headbutt the keyboard? "I hate belkin" - Me too. "Interesting questions to ask someone" - no, not on this site. "Bar" - best idea yet. Cheers!

I agree with dlisited.Kermits rendition of NIN’s HURT is better than the original and definitely on par with Johnny Cash’s piercing version. Now I would like to see him do AC/DC’s thunderstruck. That would rock.

I have long recognized that to be usable by young kids, xjig really needs a better user interface. So I wrote a launcher, xjig-menu to address the problem. It adds a file open dialog (via zentiy) and support for more file formats (via imagemagick). Update

I have put this script in subversion and added a man page. Check it out:

  $ svn co svn://svn.debian.org/pkg-games/people/synrg/xjig

or browse the repository.

I'm back from Vienna (Ask Alfie for picture(s) of me wearing my partner's hat ..!) with a new need to update my killfile. I use procmail to filter my mail, and my current setup looks like this:

# If the sender is in the killfile then drop the mail into killfile
:0:
# grep for it in the killfile
* ? grep -i  formail -rtzxTo:  $HOME/.procmail_killfile
/dev/null

This invokes formmail to get the sender of each incoming message and then drops the mail into /dev/null if the message is from somebody whos email address is contained in ~/.procmail_killfile - there are two problems with this approach:

• It doesn't handle killing threads, only senders. I guess using a similar approach to grep for message-id's in reference would work, but I'm having a hard time thinking it through properly.
• It doesn't cope with people who use multiple addresses. Perhaps message-id would be useful here, although again if people use multiple sending hosts then they would have different components.

Any improved recipes are greatfully received. And that's all I'm going to say about Debian communications for today.

Spring has arrived in many parts of North America. But in Edmonton, North America’s largest and most northernly city, spring has sort-of-come-but-not-really as it recedes fairly quickly. There will be a day of explosive warmth (you know, a balmy 45-55 F) and of course locals strip down to near nakedness, wearing shorts and, the more flamboyant will don an 80’s inspired cut-off tee. Hot. This sartorial statement says WE are SO ready for the long winter to leave … for good. Despite the collective sentiment, which is probably shared by 99.999999% of Edmonton’s inhabitants, the winter cold, snow, and breeze are indifferent to our deepest pleas and they come right back, making us sport at least a few layers of winter clothes. Within this dance between winter breeze and spring warmth, I have spent most of my time staring at my computer doing everything possible to transform half-baked ideas, hunches, sentiments, and theories into coherent words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters for my book. I am working on it full-force and am enjoying it more than I have in a year though from time to time I get fed-up, lost, sick of it, and my writing soul descends back, deep into one of Dante’s infernal rings, where I fester with my frustration, convinced that I should have become an organic flower farmer/acupuncturist that I almost became (well not really, but I have always fancied that combination as an ideal and fulfilling career path). Slowly I usually make my way back up, brush off the cobwebs of despair, and proceed anew. Within this highly secluded life of monastic-like repetition, thankfully, I have been enjoying some new things this spring. Once a week I head over to an University of Alberta off-site library facility to pour over archive material for a new project, which I am not going to talk about here (it is super-duper-top-secret) but it has been interesting working at an archive, especially one that is housed in an old Ikea. Since I am one of those right-brained people, I like to listen to music while I work, and lately I have also become pretty obsessed with house & electronic music, mainly thanks to a local DJ, David Stone whose weekly radio show on CJSR, BPM, is simply the bomb. He claims to bring the latest and greatest of electronic dance music from around the world and I think he is totally right. If you like this type of music, do catch his weekly show on Sat nights at 6 PM (MST). I sometimes get a little sad when I listen to some good music or see some stellar performance because it reminds me that what I may one day have to offer to the wider world an academic book and article here and there simply cannot bring the type of joy that musical performance and other creative expressions can bring. While you can listen to songs and over again, a book, if it is really superb, may attract a second or third reading. An academic book or article may at times light an inner light of joy, but let’s face it, it is usually a pretty cerebral light oh’ joy, leaving untouched those part of the brain, soul, heart, where more visceral, mysterious, yet fully self-enveloping feelings of joy reign high (but I am trying my hardest to stick a funny section or two in every chapter to leave a trace of laughter because if I can’t manage that with an ethnography on hackers, I will have failed miserably). Every track David Stone plays is something I want to listen to over and over again and thanks to mplayer stream dump function, I can. And funny enough, is that in the last month software believe it or not has brought me much joy as of late. I have been using free software since 1997 and I used to get A LOT more annoyed no make that a downright frustrated with programs (or lack of programs) than I do now. In fact, now, I am simply stunned whenever I upgrade to a version of a program. For example, Word Press 2.0 is like so much nicer in terms of usability and functionality than 1.5. The same goes for Open Office, the Gimp, and even Firefox, which has some bugs, but is so much better than its predecessors. I once described free software using the well-worn clich as “the gift that keeps on giving. And I think that this is becoming more and more true. And like wine, with the passing of time, these gifts usually get better and better. And like a unexpected present that arrives on your doorstep, these software packages induce some joy, because it is actually pretty neat to see these programs develop and grow into something stronger and more useful; so thanks to those who spend their time hacking away at making and improving this software and thanks to those (you know who you are) who helped with my recent WP upgrade!

Lately a lot of what gets published on intellectual property seems to cover well-covered ground and so there is a lot of reinventing the wheel (and I find this especially so in Law Journal Articles, which are a very special breed of writing in that they usually make one point but it takes a seventy to a hundred pages to do so). But this collection Symposium: Intellectual Property and Social Justice caught my interest and while I cannot vouch for even one of the articles (I just came across this five minutes ago), the titles at least seem original and interesting. And best, is that they are available for free download.

If you have an hour to spare, I suggest watching this talk by astrophysicist David Dearborn entitled "The Use Of Nuclear Explosives To Disrupt or Divert Asteroids". It starts with a general introduction to the problem of NEOs (Near Earth Objects) and how, as the efficiency of our observation methods increased, we've come to realize that the inner solar system is literally packed with them — and that among them, quite a few large ones are bound to cross Earth's orbit in the near or distant future.

It then goes on to explain that even if you can detect an asteroid early, and observe it for a sufficient period of time (say 10 years) to calculate its orbit, you may not actually have any assurance that the object won't be a threat, because of non-gravitational forces:

• light bouncing off an object in space changes its trajectory, because photons carry momentum and exert a non-negligible force (an effect known as solar radiation pressure)
• more importantly, since the object also radiates heat, the emission of thermal photons modifies the object's orbit in non-predictable ways depending on its shape and composition (the Yarkovsky effect)

All this combines to make computations difficult, and as a result the time frame to react to a potential threat is a lot shorter than we would like (since of course, the more time you have, the better).

The meat of the talk is a presentation of two computer simulations: one where a nuclear device is used to heat an asteroid enough to change its trajectory and prevent a collision ("nudging"), and a second scenario where a nuclear explosive is used to blow the object into smaller chunks which can then simply burn in the atmosphere, or in the worst case cause less damage than a single collision (if they remain on a collision trajectory at all).

Overall, it makes a good case in favor of nuclear explosives as tools and nuclear technology as the most efficient method of transporting energy, beyond the other uses (military or civil) we already have for it. I find this very interesting.

Oh, and if you're not into astrophysics you might be interested in this talk by Mike Pinkerton on open-source and the early days of Mozilla instead; it's very good too.

As there are now tow legacy versions of the NVIDIA drivers the question comes up, "What do we call this new one?"

Here is a poll where you can give me feedback on the issue.

What

migration of lists.linux.org.au and linux.org.au email to new server

When

Saturday, March 31 09:00:00 GMT-7 - Sunday, April 1 17:00:00 GMT-7 (Sunday, April 1 02:00:00 GMT+10 - Monday, April 2 12:00:00 GMT+10)

Contact

admin@linux.org.au (oh gawd, not more spam)Caesar on #linux-aus on Freenode

Details

I'll be performing a move of all of the Mailman lists for lists.linux.org.au from the hastily slapped together copy of digital running inside of a Xen instance hosted by IVT (thanks, Jon!) to a brand-new installation in a Xen instance called morton.linux.org.au on the hardware donated to Linux Australia by HP sometime after linux.conf.au 2006. I'll also be moving linux.org.au mail and local mailboxes from digital morton. All shell users of digital have already had their home directories migrated from digital to morton and been individually notified. I don't expect the outage to be anywhere near as long as specified, but I'm reserving that window of time for any problems, rollbacks, troubleshooting, etc. I'll monitor #linux-aus after I've moved the MXes and enabled mail delivery on morton, for any issues that arise.

Had a great time at DemoCampMontreal2 tonight. There were a ton of people there, the demos were great, and the bar at the SAT was open for business, so it was possible to drink beer and watch demos. There were all very solid projects with lots of interesting stuff going on. My favorite aha! moment came from Hugh McGuire showing off Collectik, his new social-podcast-aggregation platform, when he demo'd how he uses the site, and I realized that that's how I want to organize my podcast listening, too. I also liked Kakiloc, a location-oriented social networking site. They let you tell your friends what you're doing and where you are, and the friends can see it on the Web, by SMS, or through IM. Sound familiar? Yeah. Kakiloc's advantage is that they have more geo-oriented interface, and some extremely powerful rules that trigger activity when you (say) get close to someone in your circle of friends. However, I think in a world of Worse Is Better Kakiloc is going to have a hard time making a sale. Twitter already has the mindshare in this market, and the network effect makes it more valuable for people to stay with the popular platform. I also really dug the films from OpenSourceCinema.org, although they skirted the "demo" concept pretty scarcely. One thing that was neat was that the OSC Web site was built by a real-life barn-raising: Sylvain Carle put out the call for some help, and people convened on his house to build the Web site. Cool idea. All in all I had a really good time. DemoCampMontreal2 worked out well. tags: DemoCampMontreal2 kakiloc collectik opensourcecinema

Bait and switch So, on the way out the door to DemoCamp, I grabbed a handful of loonies out of my bedside change basket for the parking meters downtown. When I got to SAT, though, I realized that the "loonies" I'd brought were in fact Sacagawea dollars. I'd gotten them as change from the ticket machines on the Las Vegas monorail. Doh! Fortunately, downtown Montreal parking meters take credit cards, so I was OK. tags: loonie sacagawea parking meter monorail

Feisty Upgraded to FeistyFawn on Wednesday. Worked fine, nice smooth upgrade (who expects that?). Nothing revolutionary, but the software works well. tags: feistyfawn ubuntu upgrade

A lot of people seem to post their votes onto planet these days. More so than 2 or 3 years ago. I'm still not going to post the full details, but here's my usual summary, based on the debate and the platforms.

Above None Of The Above

• Sam Hocevar - I share his view of the problems, although I don't agree with all the suggested actions. A bit quirky, but seems nice enough.
• Aigars Mahinovs - I think he could be an accountable and fair DPL. Has ideas - not all good ideas and I don't like the aim of releasing less often - but I can't see him driving on if he's getting flamed to a well-done crisp. A leader more than a ruler.
• Gustavo Franco - nice guy, but maybe I just think that because I've had more direct contact with him than other candidates recently. I agree with most of his views of the problems, except Ubuntu and the tattoo. Maybe too inexperienced for this time.
• Raphael Hertzog - I think the team model is a good idea for the size of the project now and it learns from past attempts.

Borderline

• Wouter Verhelst - I'd be voting mainly based on what I've seen of him. I don't want to vote for someone standing with a low-detail platform, as that's just scary. Even when people break promises, it's hard enough to remove them. The debate did give a bit more detail. I fear the adoption of ESR-style "authority follows responsibility" - that's just impractical for parts of the debian infrastructure.
• Simon Richter - Generally OK, but I'm worried by the cutting it fine with the platform, not posting any rebuttals and being late for the debate because one battery went flat.

Below NOTA

• Steve McIntyre - This won't surprise anyone: it's because of the manner in which the Debian UK Society retail business was started; but also the trial misadvertised as mediation of the d-i conflict. I shudder to think what social conformance tests he wants in NM.
• Anthony Towns - last year I didn't vote for this politician (while correct in one way, most DDs have never even seen me in a mediation situation and he didn't have the courage to cc me on that email) because I thought that email suggested he'd be a terrible DPL. This year, he's demonstrated how terrible and the platform and debate suggests he hasn't even noticed: he thinks he's been a successful leader, despite the recall vote. One or two interesting ideas, but not enough to overcome that. His rebuttal seems to utterly miss Sam Hocevar's point about how being not-evil (Corporate Social Responsibility, as seen in the private sector) is different from actively being good (Concern for Community, as seen in the third sector): is that being dense or devious?

So, how wrong am I this year? Is there more trouble ahead?


- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
e0acebd2-71f1-4df8-ae4d-50355ad7aa81
[ 6 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 6 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 3 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 3 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 2 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 4 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 1 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 6 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 5 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My rationale follows, if you care... I've been pondering how to vote for well over a week, and I'm still not entirely happy that the ballot I've chosen accurately expresses my wishes, but it's the best approximation of them that I can come up with at this time. My dilemma has two parts

1. I don’t think the current office of the DPL is effective, due to how it is viewed by a significant proportion of the project (if not an outright majority), so regardless of how much I might like the goals and ideas proposed by an individual candidate I’m very pessimistic that being electing as DPL will actually bring those things to pass.
2. Much of what will make a good DPL is about how a specific set of ideas and goals will be put into action, and how interpersonal relationships between the DPL and various parties will be managed. This comes down to the personal character, experience and leadership skills of the candidate While I can form some level of an opinion about each of these aspects from mailing list archives, and IRC, etc. I don’t really feel comfortable making judgements in these areas until I’ve actually met them in real life. Too many people come across badly in the (severely limited) online communication methods we use, and are actually very decent reasonable people in real life. Out of the candidates, AJ is the only one that I’ve ever actually met and talked to.

Given these problems, my first step in choosing how to vote was to eliminate those candidates who I will rank below NOTA based on their published platforms. I have nothing personal against any of these three people, but given the other possible candidates I think that we’d be better off having another election than just electing one of these three for the sake of it.

• Wouter Verhelst - Wouter’s platform lacks any detail that tells me what he stands for or where he wants to see Debian go. Wouter’s platform also seems very conflict averse, it favours discussion and agreement over making hard decisions. I think Debian needs to make some hard decisions and the project leader needs to be someone who is able to willing handle (civilised) conflict.
• Aigars Mahinovs - Most of the topics that Aigars proposes to work on do not make my list of the most important issues for Debian to solve, and as others have pointed out, are possible better dealt with by other organisations.
• Simon Richter - Simon doesn’t actually state what he wants to achieve as DPL or where he sees Debian’s future direction as being, other than some vague hints that he is against projects that are similar to ‘dunc-tank’ and that we need a common goal. Stating what that common goal should be, would have lifted this above NOTA.

That leaves five remaining candidates:

• Anthony Towns - AJ gets my top ranking because I think that having some consistency in the DPL is a worthwhile goal. While I think that the whole Dunc-tank fiasco could have been managed much, much better, there were obviously hostile factions that would have made anything AJ did look bad. AJ’s platform seems to mostly involve him leading infrastructural improvements (good) and encouraging others to work on things that they want to see changed (also good). The one area where I possibly disagree with Anthony is around what the DPL role should look like. Anthony appears happy with the current state of the DPL office, I think that some significant changes are needed. However that’s going to require constitutional changes, so I’m not going to rank Anthony down on that basis alone.
• Steve McIntyre - Steve comes second primarily because he’s implicitly endorsed by AJ and everything that I’ve seen online related to Steve suggests that he is a level-headed, decent individual with good leadership skills. If I can’t have consistency in the DPL office via AJ, then Steve would definitely be the next choice. Steve’s platform also doesn’t contain anything that I disagree with.
• Sam Hocevar and Gustavo Franco - Sam and Gustavo are ranked equally based purely on the basis of their (relatively similar) platforms containing lots of great ideas and vision for Debian that I agree with. I don’t for a minute think that they will be able to achieve all of it, but at least by providing clear goals and a mandate for implementing them we might be able to start down the track of regaining some common purpose as a project. I have some reservations about Sam’s style based on what I’ve read in archive, but seeing as I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to people I haven’t personally met, I’m going to assume, that if elected Sam will be a great DPL.
• Rapha l Hertzog - Rapha l gets my final vote above NOTA to indicate that I support the idea of a board governing Debian, but that I don’t think his particular proposal is the correct way for the board to run. If Rapha l were to win, I wouldn’t object to him placing his suggested board in ‘office’ for the upcoming year, but I hope that a major piece of their workload would be to lead the discussion, drafting and passing of a constitutional change to replace the DPL with an elected board with rotating terms of reasonable length (2-3) years.

*yawn* It’s made me tired writing all of that out. Maybe sometime soon I should explain in more detail exactly what parts of Debian’s governance model I think need changing or maybe I need to wait until I’ve achieved a few more technical things and gained enough respect before anyone will listen to my opinions…

I just received a question about SE Linux via email. As I don't want to post private messages containing material that's globally useful I'll answer through my blog:

> other than strict and targeted policies......other policies like
> RBAC, MCS, Type Enforcement are also there....how are these policies
> implemented

The two main policies are the strict policy and the targeted policy. The strict policy is the earliest and was originally known as the sample policy (but was given the name "strict" after targeted was developed).

The strict policy aims to give minimal privileges to all daemons. The targeted policy aims to restrict the programs that are most vulnerable (network facing daemons) and not restrict other programs (for ease of use). There is currently work in progress on combining those policies so the person who compiles the policy can determine which features of strict they desire.

RBAC means Role Based Access Control. The strict policy assigns users to roles and the role then limits the set of domains that can be entered. For example the user_r role does not permit the sysadm_t domain so a user who is only permitted to enter the user_r role can not perform sys-admin tasks. Like many terms RBAC is used in different manners, some people consider that it means direct control by role (EG role user_r can not write to /dev/hda), while SE Linux has a more indirect use of roles (role user_r can not run programs in domain sysadm_t or any other domain that allows writing to type fixed_disk_device_t - the type for /dev/hda). You may consider that the strict policy supports RBAC depending on which definition of the term you use.

Generally the targeted policy is not considered to support RBAC, although if you consider a role to merely be a container for a set of accesses that are permitted then a SE Linux domain could be considered a in the RBAC sense. I don't think of targeted policy as being a RBAC implementation because all user sessions run in the domain unconfined_t which has no restriction. I think that to be considered RBAC a system must confine user logins.

Type enforcement is the primary access control mechanism for SE Linux. Every object that a process may access (including other processes) has a type assigned to it. The type of a process is known as a domain. The system has a policy database which for every combination of domain, type, and object class (which is one of dir, file, blk_file, etc - all the different types of object that a process may access) specifies whether the action is permitted or denied (default deny) and whether it is audited (default is to audit all denied operations and not audit permitted operations).

MCS is a confidentiality protection mechanism where each file has a set of categories assigned to it. The set may be empty, may contain all 1024 categories, or any sub-set. Each process has a set of categories that determines which files it may access. File access is granted if Unix permissions allow it, if the domain-type model allows it, and if MCS allows it (on an MCS system). I have just had an article on MCS published in Linux Journal.

MCS is an optional feature for people compiling Linux from source or for distribution vendors. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and Debian the decision was made to include it, so the strict and targeted policies for those distributions include MCS.

There is another policy known as MLS. This is a policy build that comprises the strict policy plus Multi-Level Security. Multi-Level Security aims to give the highest confidentiality protection and comply with the LSPP (Labeled Security Protection Profile - roughly comparable to B1) Common Criteria certification. It would be possible to build a targeted policy with MLS but that wouldn't make sense - why have the highest protection of confidentiality with anything less than the highest protection of integrity?

As for how the policies are implemented, I'm not about to write a tutorial on policy writing for a blog post, I'm sure that someone will post a link to a Tresys or Fedora web page in the comments. ;)

> there r some packages of linux in which some changes has been made
> to support linux......for eg:- coreutils, findutils

That is correct. Every program that launches a process on behalf of a user at a different privilege user (EG /bin/login, sshd and crond) and every program that creates files for processes running in different domains (EG logrotate creating new log files for multiple daemons) needs to be modified to support SE Linux. Also ls and ps were modified to show SE Linux contexts as well as the obvious programs in coreutils.

> 'Z' is the new thing that have been added to most of the
> utilities......wherever I search I get the changes made only in few
> utilities like ps, mv, cp, ls
>
> Can u help me by giving all the changes made in each of the utilities.....

Unfortunately I can't. This has been identified as an issue and there is currently work in progress to determine the best way of managing this.