I'll be 0x24 (hex) or pow(6,2) (dec) years old next Sunday and it is becoming obvious that I need to change my lifestyle. On the physical side I'm sure that I have to loose between 20 and 30 Kg. if I don't want to have health problems in the future. The plan is to change my eating habits and do sport regularly. The basic idea is to do a diet seriously and keep part of the rules more or less forever (that's the habits change); the other important thing is to do some exercise, I've never liked sports too much, but I'm sure I can try to walk some days and swim others (I've been going once a week to the swimming pool during the last months and I'll be doing it twice a week starting this September). On the mental side, I need to reduce my obligations and care less about the work problems in and out of the office. To reduce my obligations and have more free time I decided a couple of months ago that I was going to leave the Uni, as it was taking away a lot of time that I can use for more important things; I notified it and after this September I won't be working for the Universitat de Val ncia anymore. Initially my idea was to keep my main work and use some hours each week to work on my PhD Thesis, but the truth is that I'm not interested anymore; I don't have anything specially interesting to say and my main motivation for getting a PhD has also disappeared (at some point I thought about becoming a full time University professor, but after three and a half years I've had enough, at least for a looong while). This leaves me with my work at the ITI as my main and only work, but after some months I'm seriously considering leaving it also. My main problem there is that I believe that I'm starting to suffer the Peter Principle or something similar; almost all my professional career I've been working as a technician, first as a programmer and sysadmin and lately as analyst and team leader or technical manager, but now, as it seems to happen always in the Spanish IT companies, I'm being forced to move to a pure project management work and, to be fair, I don't like it. I don't know if that means that I'll get to my level of incompetence, but if that is the case I think I'll have to try the Peter's Parry, that basically means to refuse a promotion (I've already done it asking to get a place under my theoretical level, although not on a convincing manner, it seems) or use the Creative Incompetence technique, that is, give the impression that you have already arrived to your incompetence level (probably it is too late to do that at my current place, but maybe on the next one I'll be able to do it). Maybe this is not the last level of the Peter Principle, as I'm sure that I can and will do this work (I'm thinking about moving, but I will not do it until I have a plan for the future, and that will probably mean a new job), but I'm also sure that I will never do it as well as I can do technical tasks because I don't have any real motivation to do it and while I plan to get the skills needed, they are not attractive to me. I understand that on the current IT world we need to have project managers, and I really hate bad managers, but that does not mean I like to become one, I prefer to be a team leader and work only on one or two projects at a time, instead of having more than five and not do real work in any of them; my main problem is that the challenges and tasks a manager has to do have nothing in common with the things I like from computer science and I'm too perfectionist to handle people that does not care about how things are done in a lazy way (a team leader with a couple of projects can handle technical people, when you are a manager with multiple projects you miss the day to day perspective and problematic people is more difficult to handle). Oh well, we will see how things evolve. The good thing is that I believe that one way or another I'll end up having a better life and, if I'm able to care less about my own work (and the one done by others) maybe I'll be able to stay at an acceptable level on the hierarchy without getting burn out and maybe some day I'll be able to work again on the things I like and keep my promises.

I spent some time fixing some outstanding issues with my blog. The LiveJournal import on my blog had the wrong timestamp. I had some old ruby script that I'd written two years ago when I still believed ruby would someday become my language of choice (it didn't) which converted the livejournal XML exports into something that blosxom would grok, but it didn't work anymore. Apparently ruby's XML library API changed slightly between then and now. Read /usr/share/doc/libxml-ruby/README, updated the script, ran it again, and it worked. So now the blog items are dated on the date they were actually written, rather than 2005-02-17. Since a few weeks, I've been offering a myrss version of my blog feed, which contains a saner version of a link to the item (linking to the path that I wrote it in, rather than some date-based ugly stuff). Liferea choked on it, though, as did the feed validator. Turns out I managed to enter a few minor typos. Fixed those. Apparently the typos weren't of the magnitude that planet would choke on them, but still. So now my blog is slightly improved. Isn't that great. I still wonder why I have this blosxom-writing-php-scripts-with-home-grown-comment-system rather than, say, drupal, but that's for another day. OTOH, drupal doesn't allow me to write a blog entry using a simple svn commit, with magic commit hooks fixing everything. Let's keep things as they are.

A common pattern in blog communication is referred to as a Meme. Here is one example of the commonly used definition of the term as applied to blogs. One common factor that doesn’t seem to get directly mentioned much when people define the term (but which always seems to be mentioned in passing) is the idea of tagging people. So the definition of a meme as applied to blogs seems to be a silly question that you answer in a blog post and then request that some other bloggers (usually 5) answer as well. At the end of this post I have included the dictionary definition of the term (here is the Wikipedia definition). I believe that it is incorrect to call a question such as “which superhero do you most identify with” a meme. Instead I think that there is a Memeplex associated with such posts. One meme is that when someone “tags” you (requests that you answer a question) it should be considered an honour (someone in the blog-sphere likes you enough to ask you random questions in a public forum). Another meme is that such discussion is a good thing (although an increasing number of people in the more serious part of the blog-sphere oppose this). A final one that is apparent to me (I’m sure that there are others) is that so-called memes and lazyweb posts are the same thing (I believe this to be wrong). I believe that lazyweb posts if written about interesting topics can contribute significantly to the community knowledge base. I also believe that chain lazyweb posts (here is a link to the only such post I’ve made so far) can also contribute if created in a sensible manner. Chain posts that don’t require any thought or input from the person re-posting them (EG “please post this message to all your friends so that they can know of the terrible war/famine/earthquake/whatever in some foreign part of the world”) are of course quite useless (you can make a post of links once a month if you want to spread the news about such things). Now I agree that some amount of conversation among bloggers in a community that is personal and not directly related to the main topics of discussion is good for building the community. From Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) [jargon]: meme
/meem/, n. [coined by analogy with gene’, by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as a replicator , esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase meme complex denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the hacker subculture’ meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, meme is often misused to mean meme complex. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons. PS This evening I had planned to go to a LUV meeting and see my friend Andy Fitzsimon (blog) give a talk about Inkscape (for which he is famous). I also had a day off work, so it was going to be a day of non-stop fun. But instead I got some sort of cold/flu, stayed in bed for much of the day, missed the meeting, and was late in my blog post. This sucks.

Share This

Having taken time out to go to the other side of the world to attend DebConf 7 in Edinburgh, and then after spending some time with my family, I have been somewhat distracted from things CalDAV for a wee while now. There are signs that I will be able to put a few more evenings and weekends into it in coming months. Current Status With the release of 0.8.0 I believe it is quite a usable application for shared group calendars. We use it at Catalyst for about 80 staff and, while we're not heavy calendar users, it manages without any noticeable performance problems. There have been an impressive number of downloads from Sourceforge, as well as substantial downloads from my Debian repository, and I believe that the program is in tens, if not hundreds, of installations. Future Plans In the immediate future I want to get the basic framework for querying properties about the owner of a calendar or a set of calendars. This will be used by Mozilla soon during their configuration of a new CalDAV source, and I think that Apple iCal probably uses them already. This is partly done, but it's implementation has been slowed by the necessity to refactor the handling of the REPORT method in general to make the code more modular and readable, and to support queries and properties in a more general manner. The refactoring of the REPORT method handling is in place now, so moving on to the handling of DAV:principal objects should become fairly straightforward. I may end up with a fair bit of quiet, undistracted time over the coming weekend so if I can get in the 'zone', it may get done, and we can start rolling towards a release 0.9. Release 0.9 will have a new name. One from the cast of thousands that have been submitted to me so far, or one that I will hastily think up in between, but the next released version will not be called RSCDS any longer. The main goals for further into the future are:

• Maintain interoperability with clients
• Improve specification compliance
• Extend coverage to related specifications
• Documentation improvements
• Configuration improvements
• Installation improvements

Interoperability I think that RSCDS does fairly well on the interoperability front. Unfortunately I have no access to the preview of OS 10.5, with it's native CalDAV client (though I have been told that it works with RSCDS). Likewise, other commercial CalDAV clients aren't available to me for testing either, so I have concentrated my efforts on supporting the featureset used by the various free CalDAV clients. My initial work focused around supporting Evolution, in particular, but with the recent effort put in by the Mozilla Calendar team the primary interoperability challenge is to enhance RSCDS to support their areas of development. If I could see how the OS 10.5 client behaves, too, I believe that would help identify a few points to extend, as well as suggesting some future directions. The best place to review interoperability would probably be at the CalConnect Roundtable 10 but I think that without some sponsorship for airfares I probably won't be able to make that. Maybe next time. Specifications Compliance As I read, and reread, the CalDAV (and DAV, and HTTP, and ...) RFCs the compliance with the various specifications improves. Recently I have put a lot of work into the calendar-query report, in particular, which means it now supports querying against arbitrary properties much more comprehensively. This is important because some of the client software is starting to do arbitrary queries also, and it is inevitable that queries for the classification of events, or the percentage completion of todo items will become more common. And now I notice that there is a new version of DAV in RFC4918, though not too many changes as far as I can see. The intent of this release is mostly to clarify, and slightly to extend, primarily in order to improve client interoperability. Coverage of Related Specifications In terms of general calendaring activities, the biggest hole in the CalDAV specification at present is standardisation around the location of other people's schedules. The current draft of the Scheduling Extensions to CalDAV appears to address that, and a lot more besides. I expect to start working on parts of this at some point, but perhaps not sooner than I see a client which starts using it, or when it is ratified, whichever occurs soonest. Documentation The documentation is OK. The wiki, in particular, is a reasonable resource for resolving problems (I believe), but it would be good to have some documentation of other things. One area that could do with enhancement is some documentation of how to check out a copy of the code, and how to provide patches back to me. Even better if other people can maintain their own trees which I could pull patches from, since we're using a distributed version control system (Git) to start with. Configuration The administration interface for RSCDS is OK, but could do with a few improvements to make it more usable. Really there are not a lot of reasons to be in the administrative interface, so these improvements should be relatively few, and relatively easy. This would be a good area for someone interested in helping out to become involved, because it does not entail reading large reams of RFCs, or watching tcpdumps scroll past for the debugging. Installation One thing that I have done right, I believe, was to provide the software from the beginning in a packaged form to make the installation easier. Although the software is packaged for Debian, however, it has not yet been uploaded to the archive because I have been waiting for the webapps-common package to enter Debian so I can use that for configuration. I think I have waited long enough though, so I will upload the next version to Debian for use by a wider audience. Security Security has always been a focus for me and I have had the code reviewed for any obvious security flaws. If any particular vulnerabilities are found they will be addressed with appropriate haste. Retrospective I've been working on this for a little over a year now, and I think I have largely met my goals for the project. It has certainly been an educational experience for me, and the effect of this work on other projects that I also participate in has also been valuable. Any new open-source project is always at risk of the developer losing energy and interest, but I believe this one has made it to a state where the bulk of the infrastructure effort has been done, and there are enough interesting challenges in the future to continue to keep me (at least) working on it into the future. The scope of this project is good, in that it is not at risk of expanding to take over the world. The intention behind this is simply to provide a back-end service for client software which should be very much Someone Else's Problem. In reality there have been times when I have had to get to grips with some of that client software in order to resolve problems, but those have by and large been good experiences.

MJ Ray writes:

There seem to be some 30 or 40 voters who really dislike me, but didn’t tell me that straight, preferring to be silent then vote me down. Are you cowards, or what?

This displays such an antipathy against secret ballots (which protect voters from social pressure, not to mention coercion of various degrees of severity) that I now consider MJ Ray an unacceptable candidate in any future election where I am enfranchised. By the way, since the election MJ Ray discusses had no None Of The Above option, there is no way to determine if his low rankings were due to dislike or just that there were better candidates. Added later on the same day:
MJR has responded to this post; his response is linked and reproduced in the comments section. MJR seems to have missed the subtle hint that his cowardice statement is a form of social pressure itself. In fact, he continues and elevates the pressure in his response, implying that if one is afraid of him, one should not vote (presumably, at least not ranking him low). That these statements are given after the vote has closed is a mitigating factor, but it does not absolve him, as the statements are applicable to any future elections where he is a candidate. I m now even more convinced that MJR belongs in the bottom of any ranked vote from me.

I’ve created a page about translating my blog. Currently it has the following text: If you would like to translate any posts from my blog to a language other than English then please feel free to do so. I demand that any translations correctly cite me as the author of the original English version and give a permanent link to the original post, but I don t expect that this will cause any inconvenience. I also request that anyone who translates one of my posts gives me permission to do whatever I wish with the translated text (I want to mirror all translations of my work on my own site). I am unsure of what legal rights I have to demand this and have not yet considered whether I have a moral right to demand it. But I believe that it is the nice thing for a translator to do and hope that everyone who translates one of my posts will do so. Also I may grant permission for translations of my posts to appear on sites with Google advertising or other commercial use. I won t rule out the possibility of assigning monopoly rights on commercial use of the translations of my posts to specific individuals or organisations. Does anyone have suggestions for improvements? One of my multi-lingual friends suggested that I should be concerned about the risk of bad translations. But I desire to have people read my posts and I believe that this is a risk I just have to accept - I’m sure that there are enough multi-lingual people in the blog space to find such errors and help the translator correct them. Also I have to consider the best way to mirror the translations. I could add them to the same permalink page (producing long pages with multiple translations of my best posts), I could create a new post (resulting in English-language Planet installations getting posts that most people can’t read), or I could use a separate blog installation for the translations. Please comment if you have any suggestions. I’ll write another post in future with the solutions that I select and some analysis of the issues. Update: Thanks for the nice post Victor. It was seeing my blog in the list of “Enlaces Interesantes” on Victor’s blog that inspired my post about translation.

Share This

As some of you may know, I’ve been working with Linbox for the past 3 years, on and off, part time and full time, depending on the time of the year. I won’t be working with Linbox anymore after Mandriva, which has bought Linbox back in June, decided Linbox wouldn’t go ahead in the Enterprise VoIP business. I have been, for the past 2 years, the architect of Linbox’ VoIP solution. This unfortunate and ill-advised decision of stopping the development of a successful product at its beginning will effectively leave the current customers out in the cold, as technical support will probably be erratic at best. Looking back in the mirror, I’ve done a lot of things, small and big, during these 3 years:

• [2004] Developed a web-managed multi-service turn-key solution for SMBs, of which the web interface served as a prototype for the Linbox Management Console (a web-based server management framework);
• [2004] Developed the product deployment system based on FAI; still in use today, obviously updated since then;
• [2004] Wrote an AD to LDAP account (including password) sync script (customer with a special need); that resulted in me hacking OpenLDAP to port the lanman password hash support to gcrypt (Debian #245341);
• [2004] Started the hosting business;
• [2005] Started the development of the Linbox IP Telephony Solution (LIPS), based on AMPortal (now called FreePBX); ended up forking AMPortal to fix the gazillion bugs and bring it to a more usable state;
• [2005] Hacked up OpenXchange to add a click’n'dial feature to the addressbook; eventually we decided to dump OpenXchange, mainly for being an underdocumented pile of crap full of security holes (nice SQL injections, eh) and, over all, a false free software (no upgrade path, no doc, some components not released, GPL patches added to the non-free version without agreement, among other things);
• [2006] Prototyped the cluster version of the VoIP solution; this cluster version meant the solution could scale up to support thousands of users on multiple sites with redundancy and failover;
• [2006] Wrote a migration tool to migrate mails away from a FirstClass groupware to anything IMAPv4-compliant, straight out of the on-disk FirstClass storage database;
• [2007] Integrated the VoIP solution into the Linbox Management Console; after 2 years of consolidating the AMPortal web interface, I’ve finally got rid of that horrible thing;
• [2007] Integrated the cluster support infrastructure into the solution;
• [2007] Added proper faxing (over PSTN) support, at last.

And, more importantly:

• [2007] Deployed client sites without any interruption in telephone service.

I’m especially proud of that; the solution was ready for that moment, and my deployment plan proved to be the right one and flexible enough to account for everything that wasn’t ready in time (missing network infrastructure, things that had been forgotten on the client side, things that didn’t go as planned and last minute changes to accommodate users’ needs). The customers were very happy and enthusiastic with regard to their new VoIP infrastructure - so much that there was more to come. And more to come means more business for a company that definitely needs it, and is now turning that business down. So it’s all over now, and overall I’ve had a good time working there with the technical team. They’re all very talented, and we were 3 DDs working there - that figure is now down to 1 (yes, one, as in 3 - 2 = 1). I’ve been able to produce a really great free (as in speech) Enterprise VoIP solution that I liked quite a lot. I had great plans for the LIPS, but couldn’t carry out much of that until it was integrated into the Linbox Management Console. In the last weeks, I’ve had confirmation that my plans were right and I was going the right way. That’s history now, and I’m looking at what I’ll be doing next. It’s good because I can look for a job that either involves VoIP or not; it’s good to change after a while. It sucks because looking for a job sucks.

I got bored recently, so I rebuilt the whole Debian archive on one of my machines. To make this not a completely useless excercise, I used the Open64 compiler instead of gcc and created build logs for your perusal. So what is Open64? From the Wikipedia page:

Open64 is an open source, state-of-art, optimizing compiler for the Intel IA-64 (Itanium), AMD Opteron and Intel IA-32e architecture. It derives from the SGI compilers for the MIPS R10000 processor. It was released under the GPL in 2000, and now mostly serves as a research platform for compiler and computer architecture research groups. Open64 is licensed under the GPL. Open64 supports Fortran 77/95 and C/C++, as well as the shared memory programming model OpenMP. It can conduct high-quality interprocedural analysis, data flow analysis, data dependence analysis and array region analysis.

Open64 installation The installation is pretty easy fortunately:

$ wget http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open64/open64-4.0-src.tar.bz2
$ tar xfvj open64-4.0-src.tar.bz2
$ cd open64-4.0
$ export TOOLROOT=/opt/open64
$ make
$ make install (as root)

I think you need gcc-3.4 (gcc 4.x is not yet supported), and for some odd reason you also need csh as one of the install scripts seems to use it. It would be nice if someone could package Open64 for Debian, I definately don't have the time to maintain such a huge package (a whole maintainer team would probably be good here). Rebuilding the Debian archive There are several possible ways (and tools) to rebuild the Debian archive; I've used pbuilder/cowbuilder with the rebuild scripts from Bastian Venthur, which are now included in pbuilder. First we need to install the required packages, setup a cowbuilder base chroot, and get the list of packages:

$ apt-get install cowdancer grep-dctrl wget devscripts sudo
$ cowbuilder --create --distribution lenny --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow
$ cp -r /usr/share/doc/pbuilder/examples/rebuild .
$ cd rebuild
$ ./getlist lenny

Now we add Open64 into the cowbuilder chroot and fix up the chroot by pointing the gcc/g++ symlinks to Open64:

$ cp -a /opt/open64 /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow/opt
$ chroot /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow
$ cd /usr/bin
$ mv gcc gcc.orig
$ ln -s /opt/open64/bin/opencc gcc
$ mv g++ g++.orig
$ ln -s /opt/open64/bin/openCC g++
$ exit

In addition, we set the CC and CXX environment variables to Open64, which will make 90% of all (autoconf-using) packages automatically use Open64. We need a small script for that:

$ cat c.cfg:
export CC="/opt/open64/bin/opencc -m32"
export CXX="/opt/open64/bin/openCC -m32"

Now edit the buildall script. Change the Debian mirror used there (optional) and make it use our c.cfg script by adding the --configfile /path/to/rebuild/c.cfg option in the "pdebuild" line. We can now finally start building the archive:

./buildall list.lenny.i386 lenny

You can also run multiple buildall instances at once to speed up the archive rebuild on SMP/multicore machines, and you can even abort the command and simply restart it later. The script will continue where it left off. Results The whole rebuild (with 2 instances of buildall running at the same time) took ca. 9 days on an AMD64 Athlon64 X2 (dual core, 1.8 GHz each) machine with 1 GB of RAM. I really should have used something like apt-proxy to speed up the rebuild and save some bandwidth, but I read about apt-proxy too late... All log files from my rebuild are available for detailed analysis if anybody is interested (you can browse the logfiles online or download all of them as tarball). I didn't perform any detailed analysis, just some rough numbers here:

• Succeeded package builds: 8425
• Failed package builds: 2509
• Total number of packages rebuilt: 10934

If anybody does some more elaborate analysis, please let me know.

As people who have seen my laptop know, I use the wonder Darkilouche theme by Jakub. To complement it I'm after some decent black and white (ideally #F5F5F5 as the primary colour) icons for Network Manager, seahorse-agent and so on. I just tried redrawing the NM status icons in Inkscape, and basically it's obvious that I should never attempt to draw an icon ever again. I thought that the High Contrast icon theme would have what I want, but it doens't cover Network Manager yet. Does anyone know any suitable icons? NP: Backup 01, TRS-80

The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about pre-fabricated houses from Ikea and suggests that they could solve the housing price problems. The article states that in the UK the pre-fab houses would be more than 25% cheaper than regular houses in the UK. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the introduction of Ikea pre-fabricated houses in the Australian market (which they currently don’t plan to do) will reduce house prices by 25%. This won’t solve the problem. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2006 the median income for males was $600-799 and for females was $250-399. A couple who are both at the high-end of that scale would gross $1200 per week, this would possibly allow them to pay $1600 per month towards a mortgage, if they were in the middle of that scale then they would gross $1000 per week which might allow paying $1000 per month towards a mortgage. With current interest rates that would make any mortgage greater than $200K unreasonably difficult for a couple at the high end of the median income range to repay and a mortgage greater than $120K would be unreasonably difficult for a couple in the middle of the range. The ABS median house prices show that the cheapest places to buy houses in 2005 were Adelaide, Hobart, and Darwin with median prices of $208K, $209K, and $216K respectively. So a couple who are both at the high end of the median income range can only afford to buy a house in the three cheapest cities in Australia (which are also not densly populated). The two largest cities are Sydney and Melbourne which had median house prices of $363K and $300K respectively, they would not be affordable to a couple who are anywhere near the median income - not even with a 25% reduction in price! I believe that people on a median income should be able to afford a median prices house - the majority of Australian families should be able to afford the majority of houses! The above analysis only covers families wanting to purchase a house with two incomes. The “traditional” Australian idea of having the man earn the majority of all the money that is required while his wife looks after the children (which is a bad thing for other reasons) is obviously dead. A man who earns 50% more than the median income will have trouble paying for a house while supporting children if his wife doesn’t also work. It is generally accepted that anyone who doesn’t purchase a house before having children will never own a house. It seems strange that the major political parties talk about wanting to support families and to support “the Aussie battler”, but won’t do anything serious about house prices (which is the most significant issue for such people). Giving a first home owners grant of $7000 (which is less than 3% of the required money). One possible way of alleviating this problem would be to remove Negative Gearing (or at least modifying it to encourage construction rather than buying existing properties). Then the price of properties that are rented out would reflect the rent value instead of being significantly over-priced. Another possibility would be to make public transport more efficient and with a wider scope. The desirability of a location is to a large extent determined by how much time/money/effort is required to get to the centre of the nearest city for work. Making the mass public transport support larger numbers of people (by larger and more frequent trains, trams, and buses), have shorter journeys (by a more frequent service to reduce waiting and express and connecting services where possible), and more routes (by building new train or tram lines every time a new major road is built) would significantly increase the desirability of properties that are further from the centre of cities. That would decrease the market pressure on prices of properties that are a currently 30 minutes or one hour travel from the centre. It would also be a significant benefit if people who currently spend 30 minutes commuting could spend only 20. If public transport was improved and negative gearing was abolished then I expect that there would be increased demand for new houses that are further away from city centres, and that pre-fabricated houses would make a significant difference in the price. But while the majority of the value of a house is contained in the land that it rests on I can’t see that making a difference.

Share This

I received a private email in response to my post about getting work in another country regarding hotel prices in London. The person who sent me the message had considered London but ended up moving to Japan instead partly due to living expenses (although Japan seems unlikely to be much cheaper). The first issue concerns security of hotels. When living in hotels (for almost a year in London and about 6 months in the Netherlands there were a few occasions (IE one brief occasion every 4+ months) when I left my laptop under my bed at a hotel, but almost all the time I took it with me. At that time I aimed to have a minimal set of luggage, one large suitcase containing clothes, books, etc (things that are generally not worth stealing) and one small case containing my laptop, digital camera, passport, and other small things that are valuable or which would cause excessive inconvenience if I lost them. Also in the small case I would take fragile items. Then when leaving my hotel I would pack most of the items from the small suitcase (pretty much everything apart from the digital camera) into my laptop bag and take it with me. This limited my losses from hotel thieves to a digital camera (no incriminating pictures and I could always buy a better one) and a couple of bottles of liquor. Good hotels have a hotel safe which you can use. But for a cheap (affordable) hotel there is no such option. Hotels in London ARE expensive, but if you are prepared to lower you standard of living they aren’t too expensive. One thing to note about UK hotels is that the idea of having a toilet and shower in every room is a new concept and all the cheaper hotels lack this. It’s a standard feature for a hotel to have a wash-basin in every room, a toilet is optional, and a bath or shower is another option. There are various types of shared bathroom in UK hotels. The better ones vaguely resemble the facilities you might expect to find at a public swimming pool (large spaces, clean tiles everywhere, and a changing area in addition to the toilet and shower cubicles). The worst ones are basically what you might expect to see in a private home but with less cleaning. To get the best deals on small hotels in London you have to find an area where there are many hotels and inspect them. It is quite acceptable to ask for the key to a room so that you can inspect it and determine if you want to rent it. One area where I lived for some time in London is near Victoria Station. Victoria is one of the largest stations in London, it has both a Tube (underground/metro for trains within the city) and a British Rail (for travel to other parts of the country) station. Victoria Station also had facilities for checking in to a flight and having your checked luggage delivered to Gatwick airport via the Gatwick Express. This was really convenient, you can check your luggage and then do some last minute shopping before going to the airport! I’m not sure if they still do this though (comments appreciated). Another good thing about Victoria Station is the large shopping area which included a tourist information centre and a store that sold freshly baked bread. Often in the morning I would buy bread from the section that had the most steam coming from it (which was the most freshly baked) before catching a train. Victoria Station is quite near many of the places you want to visit in London so I could walk to the British Museum and other places that are worth visiting (this depends on how fit you are). But the real reason for staying there is that the were many cheap hotels in the area. I could just walk down a street and know that I could find a room at one of the hotels. One feature of UK hotels is that they almost always include free breakfast as part of the deal (with no option to exclude it). Of course this means that if you are capable of eating a significant breakfast and then skipping lunch then you can save some money. A down-side to cheap hotels is that they almost never have a telephone in your room (just a pay phone in the hall), and if they do have a telephone then it will be wired in. Before wireless net access became common this was a problem as you couldn’t use a modem. More expensive hotels had an extra socket for a modem. In London there is a significant number of people who stay in hotels from Sunday night to Thursday night with their company paying (so they don’t stay in the cheap hotels). This means that most of the good hotels have cheap rooms on the weekend. So while living in London I would often stay at a good hotel on the weekend to get net access (and a few days in a luxury hotel at a cheap rate is a good change from a cheap hotel). Nowadays wireless net access is common so it would be easy to find a free access point anywhere in London and there would be no need for this. But the possibility of getting cheap hotel rooms on the weekend is something to keep in mind. One benefit of this was when I had an employer paying for my hotel bills from Sunday night to Thursday night (as part of a deal to placate my colleagues who complained about working at the other side of London). I spoke to the hotel manager and suggested that having me check out every Friday and have the room empty on the weekend was not good for them and that they should offer me a significant discount to stay 7 days a week - they made me a good deal! At that time I had the lowest cost of living apart from when I lived with my parents while the hotel in which I stayed was quite comfortable (a large comfortable room with toilet and shower and a good hotel breakfast). Moving to the Netherlands was quite easy for me as I was staying in hotels. All I had to do was to pack my suitcase, check out of the hotel, and catch the flight. One significant advantage of living in hotels is that you can easily move to another region or country. This gives the possibility of taking advantage of career opportunities that would not be possible if you owned a house and would be difficult if you rented an apartment. When in the Netherlands I ended up staying in hotels of the Bastion chain (a chain or franchise of business hotels). I stayed in a couple of other hotels first and wasn’t particularly happy but with Bastion hotels I was always happy. I arranged a deal of a small discount in exchange for not getting the breakfast that was normally included (I like to sleep in and the Dutch breakfast didn’t appeal to me). One significant benefit of the Bastion hotels over London hotels was the size. The smallest room had two single beds, a large Dutch-style bathroom, two chairs at a desk that spanned about 3M of a wall (with multiple power sockets and a phone socket), and a good TV. At the time the hotel would play two movies over the TV system every night from video cassette. The videos played on the TV in the restaurant and in the rooms (if you selected the appropriate channel). Once I became known to the staff they would do nice things such as playing the movie I requested (instead of the scheduled one) and pausing the movie when I finished dinner so I didn’t miss anything while walking to my room. Also instead of giving me a free newspaper every day (in Dutch) they gave me some free drinks vouchers every week. Once you become a regular customer at a hotel the staff are always willing to change the deal to make you happy - even when it’s a chain. One of the convenient factors of living in a business hotel is that they are located near business areas. I spent several months living in a Bastion hotel that was about 400M walk from the office where I worked. That was particularly convenient when the network broke at night - I could just walk back to the office to fix it! The deal I had with the Bastion hotels made them about 50% more expensive than the (fairly luxurious) two bedroom apartment that I later moved to. So hotels are expensive and living in them is only an option if your employer pays for it or if you work in an industry where pay is reasonably good. Given that the vast majority of people who read my blog work in the computer industry (and I suspect that they are better paid than average) this should be a viable option.

Share This

So, depending on who you talk to, we've got about 9 weeks to go, or maybe 8 weeks. It all depends on whether we can have our way and have a caesarean on the 8th of October. Of course, the baby may have other thoughts on the matter as well... We've had our last planned house guest until Sarah's Mum and Aunty arrive, so we've put the mattress in storage and donated the bed frame to Goodwill. We've acquired a crib (I keep wanting to call it a cot) and a changing table/chest of drawers and put them in place in the baby's room. Last night we bought a car seat. I think the only major item left to get is a stroller. Sarah's pregnancy is still going well. The baby's still extremely active, and has had the hiccups quite a few times in the last week. Apparently that's him trying to breathe. I'm somewhat surprised they don't drown in there trying to do that... Speaking of breathing, our overly cautious obstetrician wanted Sarah to have two shots of steroids, to aid in the baby's lung development "just in case" he was born (or had to be delivered) very early. We felt it was somewhat unnecessary, but thought we'd be kicking ourselves if something happened and we didn't do it. There didn't seem to be any outrageous adverse effects from doing so, so we went along with it. Twice in a week (the second time today) Sarah's had blurry vision followed by a headache, so she called up the hospital today when it happened, and they told her to come in and get checked out. We spent about 4 hours in labor and delivery this afternoon. It turns out the reason they wanted us to come in was because the symptoms could be a sign of preeclampsia. The tests proved otherwise, and they couldn't really offer an explanation for what was going on other than migraines, so they eventually sent us home again. It was nice to get a preview of hospital's labor and delivery ward.

A friend recently asked for advice on a “REALLY small laptop/word processor thingy that would pretty much fit into a (big) pocket, and that only needs to write/word process“. The first problem here is that most people associate “word processing” with desktop publishing and document management. Programs such as MS-Word are considered as having the features required of a word-processor (which includes spelling and grammer checking/correcting, annotations, colours, etc). Programs that have all those features take a lot of CPU power. A Pentium-4 system might be considered the minimum requirement for running a recent version of MS-Word. But a hand-held device can’t have such a powerful CPU (it’s too small to be able to dissipate the heat from such a CPU or contain batteries that can produce enough power to tun it). The next problem is the issue of screen space. A VGA resolution screen (640×480) is regarded as high resolution in the PDA market. Such a resolution does not work with a word-processor that has three toolbars at the top of it’s screen and a paperclip taking up space at the bottom right! I’m sure that everyone who was using computers in the early 1990’s can recall the minimal word-processing programs. One thing to consider is that 640×480 in a 15 inch CRT screen is much more useful than 640×480 in a hand-held device as the larger screen can have fewer pixels per character and therefore display more text on the screen. An added complication is that there are two methods of input for PDAs. One is to have a hardware keyboard (which may be a separate device or may be part of the PDA) and the other is to have a keyboard displayed on the screen. A hardware keyboard makes the device larger and a software keyboard takes up precious screen space (you just can’t win). My PDA is an iPaQ model h3900. It has 64M of RAM, 32M of flash, no hardware keyboard, and a screen resolution of 320×240. I have done some serious writing on my iPaQ (including writing an entire article for Linux Journal) and it works reasonably well. For serious writing you can produce plain text on a PDA and then easily paste it into your program of choice on a PC later (PDAs generally support connection to a PC via serial port and/or USB). The challenge is editing files that originate on a PC using a PDA. Generally I try and use HTML and TeX for my formatted documents so the text versions of those formats are easy to edit once you have learned them. Taking data from a MD-Word file, editing it on a PDA, and then taking it back to the PC would cause many problems and probably wouldn’t be worth attempting. Recently I have been using my iPaQ for writing notes about email and blog posts that I will write. If I get an idea then I immediately write some notes about it on my iPaQ and then usually type it again instead of downloading it. For example the notes for this post were “write about RAM, storage, and screen resolution”. Often getting the initial ideas to start writing is the hard part. Writing a 500 to 1000 word blog post or message is easy once I have the ideas. If I was going to buy a new PDA now I would prefer one with a hardware keyboard, the loss of screen space for a keyboard on the touch-screen is a serious impediment to writing. The maximum amount of text that can be displayed on the screen at any one time limits the complexity of what I work on (see my post about monitors for developers). Another factor is the fact that for small notes the amount of time taken to remove the stylus from it’s bay is greater than the amount of time saved by using it. So I end up writing small notes using my finger-nail on the touch-screen which is significantly slower than using a keyboard (even the crummy ones that PDAs have). Of course the keyboard would still have to be QWERTY and have raised keys so that I can touch-type. I haven’t investigated this seriously as my iPaQ is good enough to last me for another year or two at least and I’ve got an unused spare iPaQ to replace it when it fails. But if anyone has any recommendations of Linux based PDAs with keyboards then I would appreciate some comments.

Share This

Salon.com recently reviewed Zonbu, a highly compact general-purpose computer with no moving parts. Zonbu's key features are its incredibly low power consumption, network-connected storage and that it works right out of the box without any installation. Under the covers, it's a Gentoo Linux installation with mainstream open source apps such as OpenOffice and Firefox.

Zonbu and its skins — high-powered dressing for a low-power device Price-wise, you can get the Zonbu for as little as $99 if you commit to two years' subscription to the network storage. Understanding the open source ethos, Zonbu also offer the box without any tether for $250. As with the Mac mini, supplying the keyboard, mouse and monitor is up to you. Preloaded with an office suite, email, IM, web browser, multimedia player, games and Skype, Zonbu is aimed at being a general computing appliance. You can't install anything else on it, but then again, that way you can't break it easily either. It sounds the sort of thing I'd be happy leaving with non-technical family and friends. Storage with Amazon S3 Low-power solid state devices are nothing new of course, there are a variety available, and things such as the NSLU2 have been in production for some years. The novel thing about the Zonbu however is in how it manages its storage. The Zonbu has 4GB of compact flash storage on board, which it uses as a cache for Amazon's S3 storage network. All your files get encrypted and sent to S3, and are retrieved when you need them. One really neat consequence of this is that you can get at your data via the web any time you want. Secondly, it gives me some sense of security for my data. I don't know if Zonbu will give me the 'keys' to my data on S3, but it wouldn't be hard for them to provide an easy way to migrate out. Either way, S3 is a place I'd trust with my data. Why Zonbu is important Windows, and to some extent, Mac OS X, are becoming the needy children of computing, always tugging on your arm and asking you something. In contrast, Zonbu looks like a great step towards "appliance computing". Its features are more like those you'd expect from your phone or cable TV provider:

• it's a black-box appliance that users don't need to care about, with little or no vulnerability to malware
• the real value of the product is in the network
• the system is upgraded as part of the subscription

Zonbu has the potential to change domestic computing. The low price point lowers the barrier to computer ownership. Low maintenance needs lower the technical barrier to entry and use. And Zonbu's a green and economical technology, yet as useful as the full power version. As a company, I feel Zonbu to be a well-intentioned player because of their strong support for open source, and the ease with which you can get at your data despite its appliance nature. I hope they continue to develop in this open data direction. Zonbu itself probably won't attain ubiquity, but it will change the marketplace and open up a new category of network-connected appliances for the home. Further reading

• Zonbu home page
• Gizmodo hands-on review of Zonbu. I love that the first comment is a question about whether it can run vi or emacs...
• Real life with the Zonbu Mini-PC. Very detailed blog of a Zonbu user.
  
• Dress up your Zonbu. Get rid of the drab default exterior with some amazing-looking covers

If you read only one article about why we’re doing what we’re doing with Solaris, read this one: Q&A: Sun’s Top Operating System Brass Talk OS Strategy. This absolutely nails it.

Anyway, back to pure Linux stuff. A while ago, the Ubuntu Technical Board were asked to take a look at Automatix. I've finally got around to doing so, and here are my initial conclusions. I'd appreciate any factual corrections, and note that at this point this is my individual opinion rather than any sort of official statement.

Automatix is a combination system configuration/package installation
tool, aimed at making it easy for users to install features like
graphics drivers, media codecs and software not distributed as part of
the Ubuntu distribution. It is provided as a .deb file containing a
python GUI frontend that calls out to a shell backend. The frontend
parses an XML file which contains module descriptions and function
names for installing and uninstalling modules, with these functions
being part of the shell backend. An install module will typically
check whether another package manager is running, and if not either
install a set of debs or download and manually install a
tarball. Uninstall modules generally remove the same software or clean
up the manually installed files.

The following is a list of identified issues with the current version
of Automatix - it is the result of a few hours of investigation, so
may not be complete.

• Automatix is, in itself, a poor quality package which fails to
  conform to Debian or Ubuntu policy.
  
  
  • It is inappropriately flagged as belonging to base
    
  • Depends on essential packages
    
  • Has a short description of more than 80 characters and no long
    description
    
  • Provides no email address in the maintainer field
    
  • Contains no copyright information in the standard locations
    
  • Ships a TODO file as a control file
    
  • Provides no man pages
    
  • Ships files in /usr/etc
    
  • Contains many files inappropriately flagged as executable
    
  • Changelog is in /usr/etc/automatix2/ax_data ?
  
  These issues are primarily cosmetic and in themselves are unlikely to
  cause any harm to the system.
  
• In debug mode, automatix will write files to your home directory as
  root. Again, more of an irritation than anything dangerous.
  
• Provides platform-specific data in /usr/share. Potentially an issue
  if /usr/share is shared between multiple architectures, but since
  Automatix is x86/amd64 only probably not a real problem.
  

• #!/bin/bash
  #created by arnieboy 
  foo= gksudo -u root -k -m "enter your password for gedit root access" /bin/echo "Do you have root access?" 
  sudo gedit $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_URIS

  appears to be an attempt to ensure that the user has sudo rights. This
  will break if timestamp_timeout is set to 0 in sudoers - gedit should
  be run directly from gksudo. This is repeated in more than one
  place. The assumption that sudo will not need to prompt appears
  prevalent throughout the code.
  
• catagory_data.xml - nitpick, but should be category
  
• "Please NOTE that downloading and installing w32codecs, libdvdcss2
  and other non-free codecs without paying a fee to the concerned
  authorities constitutes a CRIME in the United States of America"
  
  Somewhat dubious legal advice - the issue has nothing to do with fees,
  and isn't just limited to the USA.
  
• Automatix checks that other package managers aren't running at
  startup (by grepping for a static list of application names in the
  proces list), but doesn't enforce this by carrying out any locking of
  its own. This leaves Automatix open to race conditions.
  

• if ps -U root -u root u   grep "dpkg"   grep -v grep;
     then
       killall -9 dpkg

  May well leave the system in an inconsistent and unbootable state, and
  is carried out without warning. This is entirely unacceptable and will
  leave a stale lockfile in any case.
  

• function reloadnautilus  
         killall -9 nautilus
   

  Not actually used anywhere, but could potentially lose user
  information without warning.
  
• Most install functions contain a sleep statement for no obvious
  reason. They then call dpkg_check, which sleeps again. It's not at all
  clear what this is meant to be doing.
  
• Passes --assume-yes to apt-get, which will (as a result) happily
  remove packages without giving the user an opportunity to
  intervene. This is especially bad when removing Automatix modules -
  any package that depends on one of the packages being removed will
  also be uninstalled, even if the package was originally installed via
  something other than Automatix!
  
• Has no internal dependency management. Unable to keep track of why
  packages were installed, so prevents the removal of the multimedia
  module because that would remove sections of other modules without
  explicitly removing that module. Installing swiftfoxplugins will pull
  in several plugin packages, but removing swiftfoxplugins will not
  remove them even if nothing else depends on them. Also means that
  package installation and uninstallation have to be manually kept in
  sync - uninstall will not always remove all packages that were
  installed.
  
• Has no concept of file tracking, so will just remove entire
  directories. Makes no attempt to ensure that a user-installed version
  is not already installed in the same location, so effectively assumes
  that the /opt namespace belongs to it.
  
• Will remove Ubuntu repository packages in favour of tarballs with
  no warning.
  
• Setting ctrl-alt-del to open gnome system monitor will destroy any
  existing user configuration for run_command_9
  
• Installing streamtuner will create a world writable directory in
  /opt/ripped with no sticky bit, allowing users to interfere with other
  users' files.
  
• mplayerplugin moves totem plugin files to a backup, but does
  nothing to prevent package upgrades of totem replacing them.
  
• Only updates the java link after installing new java, not the rest
  of the java alternatives
  
• amsninstall installs tls libs that are never removed, copying over
  the ones in the tcltls package. This means that the md5sums in the
  tcltls package will no longer validate.
  

• sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libesd.so.0 /usr/lib/libesd.so.1

  is really not
  such a good idea.
  

• ln -s /tmp/.esd-1000 /tmp/.esd

  looks like it'll only ever work for
  the first user on the system, and there's nothing to recreate it on
  boot.
  

• sudo sed -i "s/^vboxusers\(.*\):$/vboxusers\1:$AXUSER/" /etc/group

  - assumes that the system isn't using some sort of user directory
  service.
  
• installs truecrypt suid root - not ideal, given its less than
  stellar security record
  
• Unmounts filesystems without checking to ensure that the unmount
  succeeded.
  
• Deletes lines from fstab and replaces them with device nodes
  rather than uuids.
  
• Includes acroread 7.0.9, despite the new Acrobat license appearing
  to grant no right to redistribute.

Conclusion:

Automatix exists to satisfy a genuine need, and further work should be
carried out to determine whether these user requirements can be
satisfied within the distribution as a whole. However, in its current
form Automatix is actively dangerous to systems - ranging from damage
to small items of user configuration, through removing user-installed
packages without adequate prompting or warning and up to the (small
but existing) potential to leave a system in an unbootable state.

The current design of Automatix precludes any reasonable way to fix
some of these problems. It is attempting to fulfil the role of a
high-level package manager without actually handling any sort of
dependency resolution itself.

A more reasonable method of integrating Automatix's functionality into
Ubuntu would be for the Automatix team to provide deb files to act as
installers for the software currently provided. These could then be
installed through the existing package manager interfaces. This would
solve many of the above problems while still providing the same level
of functionality.

In its current form Automatix is unsupportable, and a mechanism for
flagging bugs from machines with Automatix installed may provide a
valuable aid for determining whether issues are due to supported
distribution packages or third party software installers.

The downside of NYC is that it is pricey but the upside is that there are a lot of free events to balance out the equation. Last night, I went to one of such free events at Lincoln center to see one of my favorite Puerto Rican folk singers, Roy Brown who was opening for Arlo Guthrie During Roy Brown’s last song, he called out another folk singer who I had never heard of Tao Rodriguez-Seeger to join him and I think that was probably one of my favorite songs of the night. Tao who comes from a family of folk singer types, usually performs with The Mammals and less frequently with The Anarchist Orchestra. His voice, at least in Spanish, is resounding and overpowering yet at the same time sports a certain type of gentle softness. It is striking and beautiful. If you like folk music, in English or Spanish, I would check him out. Here is a clip of a song recorded with Tito Auger and Roy Brown and a link to their recent complilation CD.

Xen Migration This afternoon I mostly migrated Xen guests from their old host to their new. (As part of a an upgrade of facilities. Upgrading in place would have been much fiddlier and more annoying!) The migration took almost three hours, which was longer than anticipated but shorter than I'd feared. In the future I'll know to do it differently, but I managed to script it fairly well after the first couple were done manually. Everything appears to be working correctly so I will soon nip out for some high quality beer. Xen Help?

One thing that I wanted to do with the new host was track bandwidth usage upon a per-guest basis. This should be possible with something like vnstat - however solutions counting traffic by interface name are not a good mesh with Xen - since by default a guest will have an interface with a name like 'vif20.0' - and no means of mapping that to a specific guest. Each of my guests has been allocated three IPs which are defined like this in the Xen configuration file:

vif = [ 'ip=1.2.3.4 1.2.3.5 1.2.3.6' ]

This works prefectly. This also works:

vif = [ 'ip=1.2.3.4,vifname=foo 1.2.3.5 1.2.3.6' ]

Unfortunately anything else I've tried to give each IP a static interface name fails. I've seen reports of this online but no solutions. Given a configuration file like this the Xen guest doesn't receive any traffic upon the second + third address:

vif = [ 'ip=1.2.3.4,vifname=foo1',
        'ip=1.2.3.5,vifname=foo2',
        'ip=1.2.3.6,vifname=foo3' ]

Any suggestions welcome.

The main reason for the lack of activity during this week was that I had some problems with my router, a NSLU2 running the debian arm port. This was the machine I wanted the softfloat rrdtool I was talking about in these 2 posts.

It turns out that for some weird reason the USB controller of the slug resets when there is too much traffic going on. I got lots and lots of messages like:


$ grep reset -A 1 /var/log/syslog grep -E '(reset repeated)'
Aug 3 07:02:27 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
...
Aug 3 11:50:29 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Aug 3 11:51:03 ritter last message repeated 4 times
Aug 3 11:53:15 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Aug 3 11:53:46 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Aug 3 11:55:48 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Aug 3 11:56:07 ritter last message repeated 2 times
Aug 3 11:56:52 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Aug 3 11:56:57 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2


That wouldn't have been a problem as long as the damn thing worked, but in some cases after the reset the root filesystem was lost and all the services running on the machine died (except the networking itself since all of that is part of the kernel and is loaded in memory).

It took me about three evenings to get to this conclusion (imagine being locked out of a machine which advertised running ssh, http, and dns services, being able to telnet and getting a respons, but the full protocol failed).

It all became more clear when, while being connected via ssh I got his result:

eddy@ritter ~ $ ls
-bash: ls: command not found

"WHAT?" was the first reaction, then I figured that life without ls is unbearable and came up with this bit:

alias ls='for I in * ; do echo $I ; done'

Quite cool to understand a little bit about the system. Still, cat was unavailable so having /proc and /sys available did not help that much. At some point I was thinking about a busybox shell, tried that, it didn't work since it wanted to remove some important bits like the initramfs tools.


I googled again and found a good starting point for a discussion of the same problem someone else was having. I ended up trying all the proposed solutions: rmmod-ing ehci-hcd, blacklisting the module, regenerating a initrd image with the blacklisted module... None of these worked (individually) and I ended up having an even more unstable system when ehci was not present (I was loosing the root FS after aprox. 1 min after logging in remotely immediately after start). Restoring the image with ehci was a pain (not to mention the time spent trying to figure a way to revert the change safely, since bricking the machine was not out of the question - imagine loosing the FS while flashing the ram drive image).

I finally managed to revert the ehci enabled image and tried the workaround proposed in this gentoo BR. I tried 128 and now I am at 64 and I am still getting those resets; Still something good came out of this, I followed Michael Prokop's Use root=UUID on NSLU2 article and I think I have now a stable root file system just thanks to him.

Now I am stuck:


grep -E '(max_sect reset)' /var/log/syslog
Aug 3 07:02:27 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Aug 3 08:27:38 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Aug 3 08:38:43 ritter manual message: max_sectors was set to 128
Aug 3 08:55:25 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Aug 3 09:31:47 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Aug 3 09:54:11 ritter set_max_sectors: max_sectors was set to 128
Aug 3 10:09:32 ritter set_max_sectors: max_sectors was set to 128
Aug 3 10:15:27 ritter set_max_sectors: sda's max_sectors was set to 128
Aug 3 10:24:24 ritter set_max_sectors: sda's max_sectors was set to 128
Aug 3 10:38:12 ritter set_max_sectors: sda's max_sectors was set to 128
Aug 3 10:47:04 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Aug 3 10:48:27 ritter set_max_sectors: sda's max_sectors was set to 64
Aug 3 11:04:36 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Aug 3 11:06:16 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
....
Aug 3 15:05:58 ritter kernel: usb 3-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2

Should I try setting to 32?

In case you're wondering, I am doing the setting with this script:

#!/bin/sh

MAX_SECTORS=64
DISK=$(ls -l grep 'uuid.* / ' /etc/fstab awk ' print $1; ' sed 's#.*/\(.*\)$#\1#' tr -d '[0-9]')

[ -z "$DISK" ] && logger -t 'set_max_sectors' "error: could not detect root disk" && exit

echo "$MAX_SECTORS" > /sys/block/$DISK/device/max_sectors
logger -t 'set_max_sectors' "$ DISK 's max_sectors was set to $ MAX_SECTORS "

exit 0


Dear (not at all) lazy web, what can I do to fix/workaround this issue? Any help would be gratly appreciated (personal mail or comments).

Note: I am reluctant to try the fix proposed in the last comment that claims to fix the issue since compiling an arm kernel natively is a pain and I would like to have an official kernel from Debian Etch, as I do now.