Our adventurous friends Eric and Katie had invited us to join them on a hike in the Grand Canyon over the 4th of July weekend. As this struck us as something we'd never have considered doing otherwise, we thought we'd accept their kind offer. We're so glad we did. It was quite a bit of traveling just to get there. We flew out of San Jose on Thursday night, got into Las Vegas, rented a car, and then drove to Peach Springs, Arizona, where we stayed the night. We didn't get in at the Grand Canyon Caverns Inn until around midnight, and we had to get up again for a 5:00am departure (I think we actually got away by more like 5:30am), to drive to the Hualapai Hilltop, where the trail head was. Zoe handled all of this very well. She didn't end up falling asleep in the car until about 10:30pm I think, and dealt with the transfer out of the car at midnight very well and went back to sleep. The drive to the Hualapai Hilltop, along Indian Road 18, took about an hour. We had to dodge a bit of livestock on the road. The road itself was sealed and of good quality. We remarked on the way back out that as soon as you left the Havasupai Reservation and entered the Hualapai Reservation that there was a distinct degradation in the quality of the road. We parked at the Hilltop, and got ourselves organised, and commenced our descent by about 7:10am. The first 1.5 miles was very steep. There were a bunch of switchbacks and there was a fair few people coming up the other way already. There were also a few mule trains coming in the opposite direction that we had to dodge. The mule trains have right of way, so we had to stop and get out of the way to let them pass. Zoe thought they were pretty cool because they invariably had a few dogs with them as well, and she thinks dogs are awesome. The remaining 6.5 miles (it was an 8 mile/13 kilometre hike in total) were fairly easy. There was a lot of variety in terrain. Rocks, sand, dirt. It wasn't all in the sun, which was made it more comfortable. Heat wise, I think it was in the high 30's Celsius, with pretty much no humidity, so it didn't feel too uncomfortable. Towards the end, as we got near the water, there was a distinct change in the canyon. There was more greenery, and we started hearing insects and seeing bird life. When we first saw the water, it was hard not to just jump in, it looked so inviting. The total hiking time was about 4 hours 45 minutes, which included a reasonable stop to give Zoe some breakfast. We arrived in the village at around midday. Unfortunately the lodge wasn't ready for check ins until 1pm, so we had to twiddle our thumbs for a little bit. Zoe handled the hike incredibly well. We used a Macpac Possum child carrier that Nigel had passed down to us, and she didn't complain the whole time. She even took a nap in it. We were very relieved that it wasn't a problem for her. Sarah carried her, and I carried everything else. (I'm so glad I didn't see the photo of how I looked until well afterwards). In hindsight we probably brought too much stuff, but we didn't really know what to expect down there, so we'd rather have too much than too little. The village completely exceeded my expectations. I had this (silly) mental picture of it being just the lodge and not much else, but somewhere between 450 and 700 people live in the village. It had two general-type stores, a cafe that was pretty much like a fast food/takeaway place, an elementary school, and some sort of basic medical clinic. There was also a small general purpose community centre of some sort. The main store had pretty much everything you'd need in the food department. The cafe frequently ran out of various different things, but you weren't going to go hungry. For the remainder of Friday, we just stayed put in the village and let Zoe stretch her legs. Eric and Katie and their kids explored the first set of falls down from the village, unofficially named Rock Falls. On Saturday, we all hiked down to Havasu Falls. We met a couple of other families (amusingly both from the Bay Area) along the way, so we had some interesting conversations. I have no idea how long the hike was. Havasu Falls was impressive. Quite tall and narrow at the top, and quite loud. Zoe was impressed. We took her for a bit of a swim in the pools in the bottom. We had lunch there, and then Zoe and Sarah stayed there (Zoe took a nap in the KinderKot (also courtesy of Nigel) in the shade by the falls, and I took the Macpac with a water bladder in it to refill it at the spring in the campground, which was further down stream, and to check out Mooney Falls with Eric and Katie (and their kids), which was further downstream again from the campground. Mooney Falls was pretty insane. A lot taller than Havasu Falls, and a lot more treacherous to get to the bottom of. Parts of it were vertical. Chains and rickety ladders were involved. Caves were involved. I'm so glad I didn't have Zoe in the Macpac, because on multiple occasions, the top of it got bashed into rocks, so without having Sarah with me also to act as a guide, there's no way I could have safely descended with Zoe in the backpack. My favourite photo illustrating how crazy this was is this one that I took of Eric and Katie. This photo highlights some of the craziness involved to get down. I pretty much got to the bottom, had a quick look around and left Eric and Katie to it, because I figured Zoe would have woken up by now, and was probably bored. Turned out I had all of the sunscreen with me as well. So I climbed back up, and trekked back to the campground, refilled at the spring, and headed back up to Havasu Falls. After we reunited, we then hiked back up to the village, which to be honest, was the hardest bit of hiking we did. I was carrying Zoe in the Macpac, and it was hot, and it was mostly loose sand all the way. We were very glad to get back to the village. Zoe started showing signs of coming down with a cold and a cough, so we decided to cut short our stay in the village and leave on Sunday instead of Monday. We'd been tossing up between getting a helicopter or horses out. We ended up opting for the helicopter after learning that the horses still took about 3.5 hours, and you basically had no control over the animal. We were dubious as to how Zoe would go being bounced around on the back of a horse for that long. The helicopter ride also took all of about 5 minutes. The tribal members get first dibs on the helicopter, and there had been a death in the village, and I think a lot of people had come to the village for the viewing (the casket itself was flown out earlier on Sunday morning for a burial out of the village), so I suspect there was a higher number of tribal passengers than usual. We didn't get out until 2pm. Again, Zoe was incredibly good. She just hung out with us while we waiting for a flight out. There were plenty of dogs for her to be entertained by, and some other kids. She also took a pretty decent nap. So we finally got out, and got back to our car, and then the heavens opened. It absolutely poured down with rain. Sarah was keen to check out Hoover Dam, so we decided to stay near Boulder City in Nevada, and got a suite in the Hacienda Hotel and Casino for cheap. The next day was the Monday public holiday for Independence Day, and we were tossing up whether or not to take Zoe to a doctor to get her checked to see if she had bronchitis (we've been a bit gun-shy about bronchitis since the time she came down with it when we were in Australia). She ended up falling asleep in the car while we were hunting around for an Urgent Care facility that was open, so we decided to let her sleep and drove to Las Vegas. After she woke up, we took her to see the flamingos at Flamingo and the lions at MGM Grand. Zoe absolutely loved all the lights, sights and sounds of Las Vegas. In the afternoon, we took her to a doctor, and got the "first child, huh?" from the doctor (she didn't have bronchitis). After that, we went and briefly checked out Hoover Dam (just walked half way across the bridge in front of it and walked across the dam itself). The following day, we packed up and spent the morning on the Las Vegas strip again. This time we went to the Venetian (Zoe thought the gondolas were pretty cool) and then we flew out in the afternoon. So it was a lovely little family vacation. We ended up spending about as much time in Las Vegas as we did in the Grand Canyon, but that was okay. I'd really like to go back to Supai again, but I'm not sure if the stars will align themselves appropriately. If we did, knowing what I know now, I'd take a lot less food and put all of the luggage on a horse, and just hike in with the minimum of stuff. I'd probably be game to hike out as well if the bulk of the luggage was on a horse. Photos from the trip are here.

Short version arrival was quite easy, the arrival wiki page is now up-to-date and my photos are uploaded every day to this Flickr set. I had a small problem departing from CDG to Zagreb after scanning my suit twice and complaining that it had too many electronic devices, they had me remove my Nexus S, Nokia N950 and Kindle 3 from the suit pockets and then scanned that all lot again. After that another security guy asked me to open my suitcase and started squishing my Ligo cheese and declaring in a grave voice that it was too soft to be legal . As I kept calm and explained the DebConf cheese party to him, he looked around, put the cheese back in the bag and said ok, ok, off you go . So I still have that softness for the party. I heard an even better anecdote from our next years hosts when they were travelling trough Germany, a border official asked a typical so, what are you here for? question. They answered that they were in transit for an IT conference and gave him the invitation letter. He read the letter, nodded and then said: DebConf, huh? So, who was the author of the Linux kernel? and when after the initial shock they gave the right answer, they were immediately waved trough. Now that s what I call good border security. I met up with the guys in the Zagreb airport caf , which was immediately after exiting the secure zone. We waited for dkg to arrive and get his baggage. The passport check too a couple of minutes, but the baggage claim looked to be taking almost a half an hour. After that was sorted out, we took out some local money in one of the 5 ATMs around and went to the bus. We were waived to just put our bags into the bus luggage space and get on, the driver went around to sell us tickets just before we drove off. It was one of the most comfortable and well air-conditioned buses I have been on in a long time. We were in the Zagreb bus station in less than half an hour. Then a funny part started an old man came up to dkg and immediately asked Are you going to Banja Luka? , and when he said yes, the man started dragging us along to the bus station saying that there is a bus to there that will leave in a couple minutes, but we were in luck, so we should follow him right to the bus. Driven by curiosity, we went on. The man dragged us to the far side of the bus terminal bus stops where there was a minibus with Bosnian number plates, but no official designation as a passenger transit bus and no other passengers. They asked a reasonable 120 kuna for the trip, but they looked very shady to me, so we refused. I think that if we agreed and we were lucky enough that they actually did get us to Banja Luka, the price would have risen along the way, for example using the highway tolls as an excuse. After getting cursed at by the old man and being demanded to buy him a beer for his efforts, we went upstairs to the real bus station where we were told that there were two buses to Banja Luka: one at 15:00 and another at 16:30, but that those two buses arrive in Banja Luka almost at the same time, so we got us tickets for the latter bus and went to a local bar to get some food and drinks. I somehow managed to get sausages in deepfried bread that for some reason cost almost triple of a hamburger and fries that others got, but it sure helped to pass the time and after all those 9 was not a bad price for a good meal. We were a bit surprised by the bus drivers asking us to pay 1 (or 8 kuna) for bags to be put into bus bag storage, especially as we for several minutes could not quite understand what they want of us as neither of them spoke either English, Russian or German. I don t remember when was the last time I crossed a real (i.e. non-Shengen) border in a bus, so getting out of the bus and walking one-by-one to the border official was a new experience. On the other border of two bus drivers collected the passports an then brought them back later, so that was less painful. And by then we were in Bosnia! And of the things that greeted us was a billboard for the casino in Banja Luka Hotel Bosna. By the time we got to Banja Luka, dkg had already made friends with an official from Croatian ministry of regional development that sat behind us on the bus and knew English very well (after living in Canada for some time). The bus station in Banja Luka looked almost abandoned like the bus stopped in the field with only a few taxi drivers and a bunch of buildings some distance away showing that this was indeed part of civilization. The taxi drivers would take you to the venue for 8-10 KM 5 or 50-100 kuna (if their meter is broken and you look to be really ignorant of the exchange rates). If you walk on a bit, there is a bus station with an ATM taking Visa cards and a bit further on a bus stop that will take you to the centre of the city for 1.5 KM. The train station looked fully abandoned when we went there, only a news kiosk was working there. The bus driver reacted well to the name Hotel Bosna and wave toward it when we passed by it. It is hard to miss, especially the blinking Casino sign or the white pillars with black letters Hotel Bosna on top. You just get off at the bus station Central and walk back a couple hundred meters. Then see all you Debian friends drinking in the cool bar and walk around the corner to the main entrance of the hotel to check in. The rooms are looking really great this is the best DebConf location that I have been to (I was not in Argentina). Soft beds with linens changed daily, nice air conditioning, towels (changed daily, if used), good shower, It is lacking in the speed and power of its free WiFi and in some place there is a clear impression that the hotel was built as a top of the line hotel a couple decades ago, but somehow has fallen into a disrepair since. Or it is simply used much more than expected. So far I would say that the DebCamp is running full steam two hacklabs have desks, chairs, power and network connection, one of them even has sufficient air conditioning. The network works great for me so far, at least in the venue. The hotel wireless is barely usable to read a blog post, preferably without photos. The food is being served well and on time. So far for lunch and dinner you walk up to the reception and get a food ticket based on your room number and go to the M level for the food (the M level is between the ground floor, labelled as PR , and first floor) where for breakfast and dinner there is a buffet, but for lunch you sit at a table and they bring you food. Vegetarians should clearly say vegetarian while pointing at themselves to get the special vegetarian option. So far food has been very good, except that that they often run out of popular items, such as fries, in the buffet. You can also ask for beer and other extra drinks with your food, but know that they cost extra up to 2.5KM for a beer, for example.

I m organizing August Penguin, the yearly free software / open source conference in Israel for and by the community. We celebrate the 10th time we re holding this conference. I started going to these conferences just after high school, later I got more and more involved and now this is my 2nd year of being the main organizer (with a few others who provide great help). To celebrate the Linux 20th anniversary and August Penguins 10th anniversary, I thought to print copies of the Linux 20th anniversary T-shirts. I tired to contact the Linux Foundation to coordinate this, but got no response. I m writing this post to ask for help with finding the people who can approve this printing in behalf of the Linux Foundation. For those who can read Hebrew, the conference schedule is available at Hamakor s wiki. The rest are welcome to read the English version (provided by Google translate, so not totally accurate).
Filed under: Israeli Community

Before arriving to DebConf11, I arranged my flights so that I had a day and a night in Paris as I have not been there before. So after checking out of my work apartment in Tampere, going to work there with all the things from that apartment, then flying back to Riga, going to a midnight screening of the last Potter movie and finally getting back home around 2am, I quickly checked that I have everything needed for the conference and went off to sleep only to wake up at 8am again, pack everything (into a single carry-on bag, after a year of experience travelling by air weekly and watching Up in the Air twice) and be off to the plain to Paris. The CDG airport is quite huge, even compared to something like JFK it feels bigger and more concrete. And yet so dark and lacking interesting features that the only photo I got from it was this I then used the B line train to get to my hotel(9.1 ), drop my stuff there and another metro ticket (1.7 ) to go to Arc de Triomphe (M tro Charles de Gaulle-Etoile), went up there and walked the length of the Champs-Elys es right up to the Louvre. Then I walked to the river, crossed it to a small island to see the Notre Dame and then went back following the other bank of the river Seine seing both some more normal non-touristy streets of central Paris and also some other magnificent buildings, like Les Invalides and ending up at the Eifel tower. It was a rather easy walk that was only spoiled by some rain in the end so I did not get to take some night photos of the Eiffel tower as I wanted. But the experience still was breathtaking. The scale of the buildings was impressive. The pervasive gold-gilded decorations do expand on the splendour and the same time the full access to all the previously-royal places brings them down to people. The city looks well built and the planning mostly makes sense, especially if you are on foot. Car drivers might have a different opinion about it considering the maze of roads and traffic circles and underpasses I saw in central Paris. It is often said that Riga is a mini-Paris. Mostly, that is said in Riga. But walking the back streets of Paris I can see where that comes from the architecture, the street design, the small cafes and some cobblestone roads and some historical buildings with a few modern building thrown into the mix, and a tower too. Visually Riga does look like Paris a lot, but for the feeling, I still think that Riga feels more like Berlin with its mix of eastern and western Europe. I had one incident when some girl in front of Louvre started to ask me to sign something, gesturing to show that she was mute, it looked like a donation racket, but I did not get to find it out in detail as a swift security guard appeared and started running for the girl, who immediately took off running along with several friends. I guess the guards know them very well. On a more positive note, in one of many confetterie shops I noticed the macaron sweets that my friend advertised loudly some time ago, so I decided to buy and try some. They cost 7 for a box of 6. The taste was very, very sweet. Basically it tastes like froffed up and then frozen sugar made into cookie form with a cream layer between two cookies. So basically it is like an Oreo cookie, but much, much, much more tender, airy and sweet. The two of the 6 cookies were partly crushed while I tenderly carried them for 5 minutes in their box while searching for a place to sit down and eat them. After that I also had a proper dinner in a restaurant that was not too near the touristy paths, but still it was a bit lacking. The starter was quite nice I mean it is hard to screw up cutting off a piece of foie gras (basically a piece of liver paste with a layer of extra geese fat), but the main dish was disappointing I ordered a medium rare steak. First of all it came with a side of fries, that in itself was an insult to Paris, baked potatoes would have fit much better with this dish. And despite the main part of the steak being very nicely done to medium rare, the cut was done badly and the edges of the steak had sinew that was too chewy to eat or even cut normally. Other interesting things I liked about Paris:
* high street shops of fashion labels and car manufacturers, that showed off the concept cars and also sold small branded accessories, such as Mercedes Benz key chains * Statues some made of stone, some of iron, some covered in gold, everywhere and made with great quality * Bicycle rentals, I mostly saw the locals using them * Segway tourists * And countless classic postcard shots of very recognizable architecture The Eiffel tower was immensely impressive. It towers over everything around, especially because there simply is nothing high enough around it. It would not have been so impressive in the middle of New York, for example. The age and openness of the construction makes you really feel the massiveness of this marvel of functional architecture. But in the end Paris also looks like a great city to just kick back and relax in P.S. I am amazed that when I put a link to a Flickr image (such as http://www.flickr.com/photos/aigarius/5950187165/in/set-72157627230456160 in a separate paragraph in my WordPress article text, something along the way translates them into proper linked images with a reasonable size. Progress is amazing.

On the bus heading to the airport to go to DebConf 11, I chanced to sit down beside an older Croatian gentleman. If I've ever met another Croatian living in Portland before now, they did not have occasion to make themselves known to me. He spoke highly of Tito at some length, and of Tito's success at holding the Russians at bay in the 1960s when the rest of the Communist block was being held there by the thumb of the Russian military. If I've ever met another person living anywhere who approved of Tito, they've not had occasion to make that opinion known to me either. Wacky experiences like that are why I love Portland's mass transit network.

I would have probably dismissed as not realistic enough for even The Daily Show this kind of story, had someone suggested it a few months ago: Rupert Murdoch s corporation (owner of FOX News, Wall Street Journal, News of the World, etc) would have been found to have illegally accessed other people s voicemails. These included voicemails from a cellphone belonging to a recently-murdered girl, which interfered with the police. And they had also bribed Scotland Yard officers for information, and actively covered it up. The story would close one of Britain s biggest newspapers, and force the resignation of various government and Scotland Yard officials. That it would lead to the first high-profile investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of an American corporation bribing British officials. That one of the central figures in the scandal would suddenly die at a young age. That there was a question of how the former editor of Murdoch s newspaper whom he steadfastly defended until one day he didn t would be taken from jail to testify before Parliament. That CNN would live stream a hearing of a British Parliamentary subcommittee instead of the news conference given by the President of the United States. And that during this committee hearing, some guy would attack Rupert Murdoch who, until then, looked like he had a few drinks too many the night before with a shaving cream pie. And that Rupert Murdoch s newspapers and TV channels would portray News Corp. as a victim of the liberal press in all this, and that they should just be left alone. So maybe the last one was believable, but my goodness. Just when it couldn t get any stranger, a SHAVING CREAM PIE?!

See previous post for the rationale. I ve then started migrating my mail using evolution. First I ve installed dovecot and set it up so as to store my mail inside my $HOME/Maildir/ dir. Evolution will run dovecot on demand through a pipe, instead of through network access like with regular remote IMAP servers. So dovecot won t be started as a daemon. I ve been inspired by Roland s setup for this (even though I not using offlineimap). Inside Evolution, I ve configured a second mail profile, for this local IMAP server, using the custom command to connect to server :
"MAIL=maildir:$HOME/Maildir /usr/lib/dovecot/imap" I ve migrated my existing mail folders using copy to function on all top-level mail folders from the local evolution storage, to copy them to the IMAP folders. Note that some folders that include a dot ( . ) need to be renamed, as the dot is a path separator for IMAP. I ve adapted Evolution s vfolders definitions so as to take into account the active remote folders instead of the local ones, and that s it, the mail is migrated. I m using fetchmail + procmail to fetch mail from remote servers and to deliver it to the Maildirs, using dovecot s deliver program, with something like : DELIVER="/usr/lib/dovecot/deliver" :0: w
$DELIVER I ve migrated the filters of evolution to server-side Sieve rules so that dovecot s deliver sorts incoming mail in the right Maildirs. The dovecot config needs to be adapted to activate the sieve plugin (dovecot-sieve Debian package), in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/15-lda.conf : protocol lda
# Space separated list of plugins to load (default is global mail_plugins).
mail_plugins = $mail_plugins sieve
log_path = /tmp/dovecot-deliver-errors.log
info_log_path = /tmp/dovecot-deliver.log

The original Evolution filters rules were stored in $HOME/.config/evolution/mail/filters.xml, so I wrote a quick python DOM parsing tool to extract the (long) list of definitions and generate Sieve rules for the $HOME/.dovecot.sieve config file (in which folder hierarchy uses a . path separator instead of a / ). The sieve-test program can be used to check is sieve rules function as you want. Now this is all setup, I only need to configure notmuch to index all the Maildirs. But this is left to another post.

I ve been fed up with Evolution being so buggy and slow, which was making managing my mail ever more painful as time passes. Still, one of the advantages of Evolution over other MUAs is the vfolders feature, which I ve been using intensively for years. Would there be some alternate way of managing my mail ? I ve been reading about notmuch s progress in becoming a very powerful mail management / retrieval tool (it could very well replace the vfolder feature of Evolution), but unfortunately, it is not (yet) integrated with Evolution. Others have documented their mail setup, and it seems that I could achieve a middle ground solution by migrating all my mail folders, currently stored inside Evolution s local storage, into Maildir folders managed by a local dovecot IMAP server. Evolution would still be my MUA, but it would store my mail inside Maildirs through dovecot. I ve been told that Evolution may be less buggy with IMAP than with local folders, which could solve my main annoyances. Also, it would make it possible to index mail with notmuch, as it supports the Maildir storage format. I ve then decided to take the opportunity of a holiday period to start the migration attempt. I ll document it in another post.

This weekend, the boys got what they ve been waiting for: another trip on Amtrak. For the last week or so, Jacob has had a morning ritual. He ll look at the calendar, figure out what today is, figure out when we ll get on the train, and then figure out how many days it will be. As the number gets lower, the excitement gets higher, of course. Friday morning, we woke the boys at 2:30AM to get to the train station. The only Amtrak trains through our area are middle of the night departures. Jacob is normally hard to wake up, but when I tell him that I m waking him up to go to the train station, he wakes up faster than I ve ever seen him before. It takes about 3 seconds for him to process that in his groggy state, and then he sits up straight, throws off the covers, and is instantly ready to go. Both boys were excited even in the station waiting room. Oliver has been on an Amtrak train before, but it s been awhile and he probably doesn t remember it. He constantly talked about it, jabbering as much as his vocabulary lets him. Once we were on the train, Terah and I would have liked to get some more sleep. The boys, on the other hand, were now wide awake, and didn t fall back asleep until about 5:30. That means Terah and I didn t, either. Here s what it usually looks like: When it came time for breakfast, we went to the dining car as usual. Jacob had already been telling us for days what he would eat for breakfast on the train: I always have French toast on the train, dad. And so he did. A few minutes later, I heard the waitress telling other people they were out of French toast, so I was glad I didn t have to disappoint Jacob over that! But it was Oliver that really came alive on this trip. I don t think I ve ever seen him so excited. It was almost constant. He happily talked about anything he could see or touch. But he also listened to other conversations, and would frequently pick out one word from a sentence and try to say it. He does that at home too, but not nearly so often as on the train. Both boys wanted to go exploring a lot my word for taking them for a walk in the train and seeing what they might find. We walked up and down the train several times, Jacob excited over opening the doors between the cars, and Oliver excited just to be there. Oliver s excitement kept him from sleeping well. He did eventually get a short nap, but that wasn t quite enough to avert a couple of tantrums later in the day. The reason for the trip was the 80th birthday party for Terah s grandpa. And it so happened that Oliver s 2nd birthday would be over the same time. So, Saturday morning, we all went for breakfast at Das Dutchman Essenhaus, one of the favorite local restaurants in northern Indiana. After that, it was over to a relative s place for some birthday festivities. The children got mini cakes to decorate as rail cars. There was frosting and all sorts of toppings. Great fun was had by all, and it was wise that this activity took place in a garage rather than indoors. Yes, that is a marshmallow stuck to Jacob s nose. Then in the evening, it was off to another relative s place for some more family time. Jacob had a great time all day, and was in high spirits. He asked me to sit by him at dinner, and started one of the longest conversations I ve had with him in some time. We just talked about the things that happened in the day, but it was nice when I told him, I like sitting by you, Jacob, and he said, Dad, me too! The big highlight for the day happened in the evening. We were gathered around a fire with a guitar to do some singing. Jacob was happily perched in his lawn chair, but got very excited when he saw some lightweight airplanes flying overhead. These kept flying at some distance, and he kept pointing them out to us. But that wasn t even the most exciting part. That came when the fireflies came out. Jacob ran around, catching them in his hands, and excitedly showing them to whatever person happened to be closest. He was laughing with joy for such a long time. At one point, someone asked him if the bugs were tickling his hands. He said, evidentally just realizing it, Oh yes, they ARE tickling my hands! He was one very happy boy. Sunday I had to leave to get back home, while Terah and the boys will return a couple of days later. Although I do sort of look forward to a train trip that I can relax without having to manage two young boys, I do miss them already and will be happy to have everyone back home in a few days. (This post written during the trip and posted a week later after arriving home)

If I think back to fond memories of being with my dad during my childhood, there s one thing that always comes back first. It s those late summer evenings outside. Dad often had outdoor projects going on of some sort. I d go out there hanging around, maybe chatting, maybe playing with cats, or maybe doing something of my own. Dad often had an old AM radio sitting around and would be listening to a baseball game while working. As it got darker, lights would come on, and the bugs would start flying near them. Sometimes dad would be working just inside the barn, and the bugs would start flying in there, while some light poured out the big front door. There s something about that scratchy AM signal, the evening slowly getting darker, the slow pace of the baseball game, and just being around dad and a peripheral part of whatever he was doing that stirs a wonderfully fond recollection in me. I don t remember the specifics of any one of those times, nor do I really remember how often it happened, but it does stick with me. We ve had a routine in our house, starting early enough that neither of our boys know anything different, where right before bed, I read a book and sing a song to each of them individually. Last November, I was looking for some books to challenge Jacob a little more than what we had been reading. I found The Complete Winnie the Pooh used for $4 on Amazon. This contains the original A. A. Milne stories, not the Disney series. It had a few line drawings, but there were many pages without any. It s 352 pages and written in a rather dated form of British English. So for all these reasons, I wasn t sure if Jacob would like it. But it was $4 so I bought it. And Jacob was hooked. Each evening, we start bedtime with looking at the map of the 100-acre forest, just inside the cover. He gets to pick out 4 things for me to describe, and then we turn to our story. We usually read somewhere between 2 and 5 pages at bedtime, depending on how well he got ready without wasting time. And then we sing. A. A. Milne has his Pooh character make up songs throughout the book. They are printed with words only, no tune, so I make up a tune for them as we go. Jacob has taken to requesting these songs for his bedtime song as well. Jacob always gets to choose his bedtime story, and sometimes he chooses a different one but about 75% of the time, it s been Pooh. A few weeks ago, he started noticing that we were almost to the end. He got very concerned, asking what we d do next. I suggested a different book, which he didn t like. Then I pointed out that we could restart the Pooh stories from the beginning, which was exciting for him. Last night, we finished the book. The very last story was an interesting one, suggesting Christopher Robin growing up and no longer having imaginary adventures with the animals, but making Pooh promise to always be there for him. I don t think Jacob caught onto that meaning, though. When we finished it, we had this conversation: Jacob: Dad, is that the end? Me: Yes. Jacob, getting a big smile: Yay! So can we start back at the beginning tomorrow? Me: Sure! Jacob then gave a clap, shouted Yay! again, and was a very happy boy. Sometimes I wonder what our boys will remember in 25 years of their fun times with me. I don t know if Jacob will remember all the days reading about the animals in the 100-acre wood when he was 4, or maybe he ll remember watching train and combine videos, or playing radio hide-and-seek, or maybe something entirely different. But I have no doubt that I will remember sitting on the couch in his room, holding him on my lap, and reading a 350-page book to a loving 4-year-old. As Pooh aptly put it, Sometimes, the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.

I'm someone who sometimes has a beard, and sometimes doesn't. Today, I'm someone with a fairly long beard, although it's not (yet?) one of the likes of andrew or maddog. I don't think it looks very well on me, but you can blame the government (or lack thereof) in Belgium. How?! What?! Yes, the government. A while back, a movie critic working for the RTL (a Francophone Belgian TV station) decided to keep his beard until the Belgian government took the oath of office. He was quickly joined by an actor, and then by a Flemish radio presenter (dutch, with pictures). And then by a whole bunch of people. I didn't join them, initially. But after a while, when my beard was starting to get long again, people started asking me, 'is that for the government?' And initially I said no. But people kept asking. Since it seemed like a good excuse for not having shaven that long, after a while I just decided to say 'yes' for the heck of it. And now, after having said so for quite a while, I've kindof grown to the idea. Which, I guess, means that if the impossible happens, and someone back home manages to form a government that will take the oath while I'm still in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I'll have to go out and buy some razor equipment. But I don't expect that to happen. Today, exactly 400 days after the previous election (yes, it's really been that long), it still doesn't look as if there's going to be an agreement on anything. I wish there was something positive or funny that I could report on in this whole thing, but it doesn't look like it. Sigh.

We already studied one weird error of dpkg, let s do another one:

Unpacking replacement libexo-common ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libexo-common_0.6.1-1_all.deb (--unpack):
 unable to open '/usr/share/doc/exo/html/C/images/exo-preferred-applications-internet.png.dpkg-new': No such file or directory

Rather difficult to understand on the first look right? Let s see in detail what s usually happening when you get this error. The first hint comes from the file extension .dpkg-new . This extension is used by dpkg to unpack the updated files near the old files. When everything has been unpacked, they are renamed over the old files. The failure happens precisely when dpkg tries to rename the file (in fact when it tries to fsync() it before the rename) but why does it fail? Usually because there are unexpected symlinks (or bind mounts) involved that resulted in two different files being installed in the same directory. For example consider package that provides /dir1/a-file and /dir2/a-file. Now imagine that on the target system, /dir1 is a real directory but /dir2 is a symbolic link that points to /dir1. When dpkg processes /dir1/a-file.dpkg-new everything is fine, but when it tries to process /dir2/a-file.dpkg-new it will fail because that file is the same than /dir1/a-file.dpkg-new which has already been renamed. Diagnosing further the problem requires to understand why there s a symlink instead of a real directory. It might be two packages that were badly coordinated, or a problem in the package itself because it lacks some code that drops the symlink in the preinst (so that dpkg installs the real directory instead of keeping the symlink). There might be variations in the way two files end up sharing the same directory, but this simple example should have clarified the nature of the underlying problem.

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Keeping an eye on something with a webcam is really easy: just a matter of setting up for example (c)vlc to multicast from /dev/videoX to the network, and done. Example:

# Streaming:
cvlc v4l2:///dev/video0 --no-audio --sout "#transcode vcodec=mp2v,vb=3072 :std access=udp,mux=ts,dst=224.0.0.1 "
# Playing, possibly on a remote machine:
vlc udp://@224.0.0.1:1234

Notes:

• v4l2 vs. v4l depending on the distribution (sid vs. squeeze).
• Triple slash needed, two for the v4l[2]:// part, one for the device (/dev/video0).
• Why this address? See Wikipedia s Multicast address article.

Possible problems:

• If switches don t have IGMP snooping enabled, throwing multicast at them turns it into plain broadcast. In other words: instead of having packets sent to the hosts subscribed to that multicast address, everyone gets those packets, polluting the network.
• Trying to stream from multiple devices may fail, due to USB bandwidth issues. At least that can be seen with two random devices using the uvcvideo module, getting No space left on device when the second (c)vlc is started.

Where to go from here:

• fswebcam to the rescue! It can capture a frame from a given device. The following options are particularly useful: --resolution to request a specific resolution (the device will fall back to another resolution if the requested one is unavailable); --frames to specify the number of frames to capture (lower noise, but possibly higher blurriness).
• A tiny python wrapper around it makes it possible to set various webcams, with different options (number of frames, delay between two captures, resolution), operating at the same time thanks to the help of the threading module. To avoid encountering the same bandwidth issue, a tiny lock ensures a single fswebcam instance runs at a time.
• That also makes it possible to save all images as videoX-timestamp.jpg and to log rotate them after a while, for further viewing/reviewing during a given time window.
• Thanks to ImageMagick, it s also trivial to process the captured images:

  # Only keep a rectangle of width W, height H, starting at the point (X,Y):
  convert -crop WxH+X+Y capture.jpg capture.jpg
  # Include a timestamp on the top-left corner:
  convert -box white -font Fixed -draw "text 2,12 \"$timestamp\"" capture.jpg capture.jpg
  

• Keeping a videoX-current.jpg symlink for each /dev/videoX device is trivial.
• Add to that a lightweight webserver and a single page showing the most recent capture for each device thanks to the symlinks, with a meta refresh of say 5 seconds, and tada! Keeping an eye on multiple things at once. Of course that s not a real video, but that can fulfill some needs.

I decided to go to DebConf11 by car. Not willing to do this alone, I asked for volunteers to join me in my car trip. One such volunteer showed up, and the car trip happened. Now, since I remembered to push the correct buttons on my dashboard after I completely fueled up the car and checked the tire tension and other things, I am now proud to be able to present you with the following statistics on this trip:

1. Total distance travelled: 1466.8 km
2. Average driving speed: 95.9 km/h [0]
3. Total number of kilometers wasted on 'oh, crap, we forgot something': 10 (approx) [1][2]
4. Total amount of fuel used: 81.3l
5. Average fuel consumption rate: 5.5l/100km [3]
6. Total amount of kilometers spent behind the wheel by Jeremy: 50 (approx)
7. Total amount of kilometers spent behind the wheel by Wouter: the rest.[4]
8. Time of departure: 2011-07-16 21:00
9. Time of departure after point three and making sure we had everything: 2011-07-16 22:00
10. Time of arrival: 2011-07-17 15:15 (approx) [5]
11. Outside temperature at departure: 12 celcius
12. Outside temperature at arrival: 35 celcius
13. Longest (voluntary) break: 1 hour (approx; breakfast, tanking, bathroom visit, watching the sun rise)
14. Longest (involuntary) break: 45 minutes (approx; customs check) [6]
15. Last fueling stop: 4 AM.
16. Amount of kilometers left to go before the car said bleep, you need to tank soon: less than one.
17. Most tense moment: on crossing the slovenia->croatia border, confusing the border police officer ("no, I'm Wouter, that is Jeremy" yes, we both had photo-ID), who then promptly holds on to our documents, asks the car's papers, and tells us to please park over there and wait a moment while he gets us to be handled by guy in a somewhat more military-looking uniform.[7]
18. Biggest "uh-oh" moment: after crossing the croatia->bosnia and herzegovina border, watching the very, very, very, very, very[8] long line of trucks queueing to cross the border. In the other direction. And then realizing that you probably need to go through that very same queue on the way back
19. Largest single toll fee: 15 [9]
20. Last bit of time spent asleep before this trip: the minutes surrounding 2011-07-16 05:00:00 [10]
21. Time wasted writing this blog post when I really should've gone to bed instead: 45 minutes
22. Time now: 21:02:54

But it was fun. And that's all that matters. Those who've shown up at debconf already, or who will arrive soon: see you tomorrow. Those who will arrive later: see you soon. And those who won't arrive: better luck next time, I hope. [0] this includes times when the car isn't moving with the engine running, but not times when the car is turned off, locked, alone and forgotten, in the rain, while those idiots who were supposed to be its drivers were inside having a drink.
[1] Which is surprisingly little. Usually I manage to need more.
[2] Jeremy forgot his^Wa Debian banner. I forgot something, I can't recall what. I decided to bring some CD's to enjoy during the trip, and a 3.5mm audio connection cable which we end up not using
[3] According to the dash. I'm too tired right now to check it. Also see the next two points. [4] This could incorrectly be interpreted as a criticism on Jeremy. It's not his fault that I only told him a day before we left that I have a manual transmission. And in fact, if anything, I'm unhappy with the fact that I even had to hand him the wheel for those 50 km. I would've loved to be able to say "I went all the way from Mechlin to Banja Luka, all by myself".
[5] I forgot to check the clock, to be honest.
[6] What, you think I have a chronometer?
[7] The last four points could really have been written as two. Figuring out which goes with which is left as an exercise to the reader.
[8] very, very, very
[9] 7-day Slovenian road tax vignet
[10] Once I wake up, I hardly ever manage to fall asleep again. Esecially if it's light outside.

Yes I am going to attend DebConf11.

Some weeks ago I noticed that one of my backup servers was not removing the old backup generations it was making. It had over 18 months worth of daily backups, done with rsync and "cp -al". This is not the world's greatest backup system, but that's entirely irrelevant for this rant. The cron job that would do that did not exist: I had forgotten to enable it. So I ran it by hand. Then fixed it, when I noticed it was buggy, and didn't remove any old generations prior to 2010. After that I removed years-old backups of machines that haven't existed for years. Disk usage:

       Size  Used Avail Use% 
before 5.4T  2.6T  2.6T  51% 
after  5.4T  892G  4.3T  18% 

Inodes:

          Inodes    IUsed     IFree IUse%
before 732577792 77645915 654931877   11%
after  732577792 16871789 715706003    3%

That's about 61 million files removed, over the course of three weeks, of which the machine was down due to crashes for about one week. It should not take two weeks to copy a couple of terabytes (it's less than two megabytes per second). It should definitely not take two weeks to delete it. Almost all the time it was up, it was removing files. There were a couple of times when it finished one run and was idle until I woke up and started the next run. Say a day in total. Why is "sudo rm -rf" on a large directory tree, or set of large directory trees, so slow? I suspect part of the problem is that the system call API is beautiful, but simplistic: you need to call unlink or rmdir on every file separately, and that means doing an inode lookup separately for each file. Having a system call to delete everything in a directory would have a chance of removing things more efficiently, I suspect. However, since I've not done any profiling, nor even analyzed the relevant source code in the kernel, I might be entirely wrong. I wonder if anyone else needs to remove large directory trees frequently? I do that a lot, because of my backup software development hobby. But I may be in a unique position, and nobody else would benefit from fast removal. (I'll note that my backup server is using ext3, and that ext4 is much faster at removing files, particularly large files, but it's still not fast enough.)

The question was recently asked, How do I perform crash recovery on a MySQL master/slave database cluster? Because replication is async, a transaction that has been committed to the master may not be able to leave the master before the crash happens. The short answer is, you don t. Asynchronous replication, by it s very nature, is prone to these sorts of issues, and MySQL doesn t make life easier in general by using query replay. Some of the issues aren t massive: for instance, if a slave crashes, the master will keep replication logs for the slave until it comes back up (as long as the slave comes back before the master decides some of the replogs are too old and starts deleting them, of course), so as long as you can live without a master for a while, you can recover and continue along your merry way. Promoting a slave to be a master, on the other hand, is a situation frought with peril. Here, you ve just got to hope hope that your chosen slave is consistent with the master s state at death (because it s async, you have no guarantees about that), and that all the other slaves have the same ideas about what counts as the current state of the data. If your newly-promoted slave managed to apply an update that another slave didn t, that slave will be out of sync with reality (until such time as the now-dead master comes back and replays all those queries hahahaha). To even guarantee that any slaves have a consistent view of the data as compared to the new master, you ve got to rereplicate everything from the new master, because MySQL s where are you up to? counter is master-specific. I ve heard people who have to deal with this sort of thing these days say that the Maatkit tools are handy for dealing with various issues of this type (monitoring, repairing the database when it gets inconsistent). However, I prefer to keep right the hell away from MySQL replication altogether, after a year of having to gently coax an insane MySQL tree replication setup to do the right thing for any extended period, and watching a group of DBAs at Engine Yard go slowly insane. My preferred alternatives are:

• For pure HA, replicate at the disk level using DRBD. You lose some of the supposed benefits of MySQL replication ( you can do dump backups off the slave! Woooooo! ), but you at least get consistency.
• If you think you need a harem¹ for load purposes, use some other way of scaling MySQL that doesn t involve throwing an update to an amorphous blob of servers and hoping it sticks in the right places. Sharding can work, as can aggressive caching (intelligent storage of precalculated query results in memcached can work wonders) or just buying a bigger machine.
• If you want to do anything fancy (my tree-replication scheme falls into this category), just don t. MySQL replication isn t the answer to these sorts of situations, it s the question. The answer is No! .

Never discount the value of the Jaws approach to scaling ( we re gonna need a bigger boat^Wmachine ) hardware is so ridiculously cheap, relative to the clueful sysadmin time needed to make (and keep) MySQL replication running, that you really need to be at the huge end of town (where other scaling issues are going to bite you in the arse first) before spending too much time on your database is worth the investment. Even then, you ll get more bang for your buck from:

• Optimising your queries;
• Optimising your MySQL configuration;
• Using a k/v store for really non-relational data (sessions, I m looking at you)
• Sharding your data

than you ever will from the constant, mind-numbing grind that is keeping MySQL replication going.

A lot of online magazines are currently reporting about Debian, its port to the Hurd kernel and plans for the next release. However, there seem to be quite some misunderstandings. One online magazine took the cake by titling Debian 7.0 Wheezy: Erste Pl ne f r Hurd statt Linux-Kernel (rough translation: Debian 7.0 Wheezy: First plans for Hurd instead of Linux kernel), and a colleague already asked me, if we are really going to drop the Linux kernel. So let's clarify one thing: The Debian Project does not plan to drop its port to the Linux kernel (nor its two ports to the FreeBSD kernel for what it's worth). Apparently it all started with a short status report and if you read it, you'll just read that some people are trying and planing to get Debian 7 (aka wheezy) to be released with an additional port to the Hurd. It is not yet clear if they will achieve their goal, nor did anyone ever mention anything about replacing the Linux or the FreeBSD kernel. So, calm down, nothing changed, just someone talking about the possibility of adding yet another port to the next release. Please note the adding.

Squashing release critical (RC) bugs is one of the most helpful way to contribute to Debian. Because those are the bugs that we need to get rid of in order to release the next stable version. Let s see how you can help. The process is really simple:

1. Find a RC bug that you can fix
2. Prepare a fixed package
3. Send the patch to the BTS
4. Get your fixed package uploaded

I have already covered points 2 and 3 in a former article: How to prepare patches for Debian packages. So I m not going to repeat myself in this article, instead I ll cover how to find a release critical bug to fix and how to get your package uploaded. Find a RC bug with UDD The Ultimate Debian Database (UDD) provides a neat interface to query the bug tracking system: http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi. The form contains many options to customize the query, we ll try explain some. First, at the top, you can decide to list bugs based on whether or not they affect testing/stable/unstable. Indeed, thanks to version tracking the BTS knows if a bug applies to the version of the package present in a given distribution. I suggest you pick a choice that includes sid because that s where you re going to push your fixed package. If sid is not affected by the bug, you can t do much about it (except if you want to join the release team and help ensure updates are flowing from unstable to testing). I usually go for wheezy and sid because that filters out packages which are not in testing (and are thus not blocking the next release). Then you have lots of filters to further reduce the list of bugs. It s important to reduce the noise as you typically have several hundreds of RC bugs at a given time. I suggest you the following settings for a start, but you re free to try other combinations depending on what you want to achieve (I ll give some examples later):

• ignore bugs tagged patch (a fix is already available);
• ignore bugs tagged pending (a fix has already been committed to the VCS repository);
• ignore bugs newer than 7 days (that s the time we should leave for the maintainer to take care of the bug by himself);

I usually sort the results by source package so that I immediately see if several RC bugs are affecting the source package. And I might add popularity contest information to get a feel of whether the package is widely used or not. You can see the results of the suggested query here. Other interesting queries:

• List of RC bugs blocking the migration of their package (i.e. affecting unstable but not testing, with different version in both distributions).
• List of RC bugs on packages that you can adopt (i.e. bugs affecting any distribution but on orphaned packages, sorted by decreasing popularity).

Find a RC bug with rc-alert The downside of the above method is that you get bugs on packages that you don t know at all and that you might not care about. Some of them might even be better removed instead of fixed. With the rc-alert command (provided by the devscripts package), you will get a list of RC bugs
on packages that are installed on your computer. It should be much more restrictive. And you have command line options to further filter the list just like with the UDD form. Bonus feature: you can also filter by debtags allowing you to restrict the bugs to packages which are implemented in programming languages that you know.

$ rc-alert --include-dists TU --exclude-tags P+ --debtags implemented-in::perl,implemented-in::python
Package: gwibber
Bug:     608724
Title:   gwibber bypasses certificate checking when providing the login/password for OAuth
Flags:   [     S  ] (security)
Dists:   [STU] (stable, testing, unstable)
Debtags: implemented-in::python, interface::x11, role::program, uitoolkit::gtk, works-with::im, x11::application
[...]

Get your fixed package uploaded Usually sending the patch to the BTS is more than enough. The maintainer or another Debian developer will pick it up at some point. But if you re interested in becoming a Debian maintainer/developer, it might be worth to push your changes more quickly and get credited by a proper upload with your name. Instead of just preparing a patch, you should also prepare a fixed package following the rules of a Non-Maintainer Upload. Put this package somewhere online (for example on mentors.debian.net). When you send your patch to the BTS, include the link to the updated package and express your wish to get this update sponsored. If you haven t heard anything from the maintainer after 2-3 days, try to find a sponsor on debian-mentors@lists.debian.org. NMUs are easier to review than completely new packages and many Debian developers like to kill RC bugs, so there s a good chance that you ll find someone. Now happy RC bug-squashing! And if you really enjoy it, you can subscribe to debian-bugs-rc (~3000 mails per month)

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On Friday, June 24, the last day of Open Source Bridge, I won a scarf! It says, "Open Source Citizen." I wasn't the only one. The attendees nominated people who "made an extra effort to help others and share their knowledge," and the conference committee chose the three people they felt exemplified this. The winners were Sumana Harihareswara, Igal Koshevoy, and me. In case you don't know Sumana, she's the new Wikimedia Volunteer Development Coordinator, a friend, and a commenter here at Asheeshworld. In the photo of her and her new scarf, you can also see Ward Cunningham. I suggest reading her wrap-up about the conference, and checking out the notes from her talk. I haven't met Igal, but I've learned he's a fixture of the Portland tech scene. He's user number one on opensourcebridge.org and one of the original contributors to calagator, the most important event calendar in the Portland tech world. That's just a brief summary; follow him on Twitter to keep in touch. I started the conference a little shy, not wanting to introduce myself to people, so I hung out with Sumana. She talked to everyone she could find, and there I was standing next to her. On the first day, it was only because of Sumana's outgoingness that people knew who I was. On the second and third days, I was involved in two sessions: a panel on open source communities and a talk about the OpenHatch training missions. I was extremely honored to be chosen. There were so many other spectacular people I met for the first time, like Valerie Aurora, Jacinta Richardson, Brian Aker, and Alex Linsker. These are all people with three crucial traits: they're extremely knowledgeable, friendly, and opinionated. I'm glad I had a chance to attend and meet them! Photo credits: Thanks to Noah Swartz for the photo of me. Sumana's photo comes from her post to wikitech-l. Igal's comes from his Open Source Bridge user profile.