One problem with keeping your journal in the French Revolutionary Calendar is that you have to keep looking up what the date is. It is nice to know that there are functions for converting Julian dates to French Revolutionary dates in PHP. Also a nice link on that page to the strange and mellow http://bottoms-dream.de/ , which isn't anywhere near as pornographic as it sounds. tags: french revolutionary calendar php bottoms

Blinky Redux I had Blinky Hockey again tonight -- the first time in a month that I've gone. (Blinky is the pickup hockey team my friends Meg and Patti started. It's for people who don't play hockey so good but want to learn. Like me.) Last time we had it, I flew out to California at 6AM the next day for 2 weeks, so I missed two practices in between. And then last time I had everyone over for Thanksgiving dinner, and I fell asleep putting the baby down. Doh. So it was good to go out this time around. I've been going to our local hockey rink, Ar na Mont-Royal, for free skating from 4-5PM a couple of times per week since we got home, and I think I'm getting a little steadier on the ice. I still haven't got the whole stop-on-a-dime thing or skate-forwards-backwards-forwards thing, but I'm able to get around without going face down. Which is good. Tonight we did some more sophisticated drills and had a good scrimmage at the end of practice. I didn't score but I had an awesome shot. It would have been cool if it were a score. Anyways, I think I'm going to have to keep practicing on my own. Going to the Ar na is great, but maybe I should fill our parking lot out back with water, like this R ves de Glace site suggests. That'd be cool. tags: hockey blinky skating montreal

Calendar wishlist So, I'm always trying to learn to use my calendar application, whatever's easiest and most available. I have a Treo 650 and Evolution, and they work OK, but they don't work great. I have a lot of things that I wish calendar programs had.

• Project management integration. This is probably the biggest one for me. I can't believe that we have two different kinds of programs for planning the exact same information: what you're going to do with your time. On top of that it's remarkable that so few of project planner programs talk to calendars (or vice versa).
• Hierarchical TODO lists. I'd like to break up tasks into sub-tasks that depend on each other.
• Effort estimates. I'd like to be able to make notes about how long I think a task is going to take, and when I'll get it done.
• Repeating TODOs. Probably the most egregiously un-ergonomic thing about modern calendaring programs. Almost everything I have to do in my life I have to do on a repeating schedule. I have to take out the recycling once a week before Wednesday morning. I have to pay rent before the 1st. I understand it's a tricky problem, but that doesn't mean I don't want a program to do it.
• Open invitations. I'd like to be able to send open event invitations to mailing lists and have people RSVP automatically (if they want). All the systems I've used require that I know the email address of each invitee ahead of time. And they rarely work across calendaring systems.
• Skipped TODOs. Sometimes I give myself a task todo and I just don't get around to doing it. I'd like to be able to mark a task as not done, but no longer important. I don't want to forget it forever, just remember that it never got done.
• Logging. It'd be nice if there were more and nicer interfaces to say what I did with my day after it's done. When did I finish that module? When was the last time Niko came over for dinner? It would be nice if my calendar helped me remember the past as well as plan the future.
• Sharing by default. I want to set up calendar sharing once, have my local and remote calendar synched transparently, and never worry about it again. CalDAV seems neat, but I have got no idea how to get it working.
• More shared calendars. I like using shared calendars; I wish more organizations published them. I'd like it if Bell Canada published a calendar that told me when to pay my phone bill, and I'd like it if MSLUG published a calendar of their meetings. I'd like it if I could mark my phone bill as paid, and RSVP for an MSLUG meeting, through my calendar interface.
• ACLs. Different people need to see different parts of my calendar. It'd be nice to have finer-grained control than "public" and "private".

tags: calendar wishlist

British now divide by zero. Either this "Dr James Anderson, from the University of Reading's computer science department" is a crappy computer scientist (not to speak of his mathematical skills), or this is a case of really bad journalism. Apart from having some facts wrong (infinity and -infinity aren't numbers, they're symbols outside of the numbers), he basically defines "0/0 = Nullity". Well, some of us might prefer the name "NaN" for this. "Not a Number". In floating point calculations, 0/0 may (if you've disabled exceptions) return NaN. So it is nothing new. And it's not particularly useful either, because all it solves is not having to raise an exception, but being able to continue your calculations (which will continue to return NaN) and handle the error at the end. With modern languages designed around exception handling, this of course is rarely ever used anymore. Some simple calculations you might find convincing: 2 * Nullity = 2 * (0/0) = (2*0)/0 = 0/0 = Nullity Nullity + 1 = (0/0) + (1/1) = (0*1 + 1*0)/(0*1) = 0/0 = Nullity Nullity / Nullity = (0/0) / (0/0) = (0/0) * (0/0) = (0*0)/(0*0) = (0/0) = Nullity So if you ever have Nullity anywhere in your equation the whole equation equals nullity. There is no way to remove Nullity from your results, since even Nullity/Nullity is Nullity. So you could just call it "I divided by zero, so the result is invalid". Thats probably not as pretty as "Nullity", but as useful. Some simple calculation, why you must not be allowed to divide by zero (independently from any nullity or whatever):

1*0 = 0 = 2*0     (This equation is right, isn't it?)
1 = 2             (I divided by 0 on both sides, removing the *0 factor)

This works for any number, not only for 1 or 2. So: if you divide by zero, all your numbers are equal (if you keep standard calculus rules such as associativity, distributivity etc. used in above equations). If that is okay for you, then you can divide by zero. I do prefer having 1 life to 0 life. And if 1 = 1000000, can you give me $1000000, I'll give you $1 back tomorrow... But: Maybe it's just a bad piece of journalism. He's a computer science guy. Maybe he knows about NaN. Maybe he's just trying to teach kids to use NaN when calculating, instead of teaching them to never divide by zero. There might be didactic benefits from this approach. The 1200 year old problem (Pythagoras, cited in the article lived 2500 years ago, I have no idea how they made up this number) IS easy to solve, if the result is called "invalid" instead of just having no valid result... That won't make your airplane land better, if it notices it's current height is Nullity... and what if his heart pacemaker obtains a result of "nullity", what is it supposed to do (as opposed to noticing it miscalculated?) [Update: he has published papers on this, too. Unbelievable... So above theory that it maybe is good for educational purposes is incorrect. Anyway, journalists shouldn't have reported on this without talking to some serious mathematicians...] [Update: Zoy, thats why I wrote "if you keep standard calculus rules such as associativity, distributivity, etc. - and I find these exceptionally useful. The last example is not using his rules, but standard math, but treats zero like all other numbers, to show that a canonical extension will just not give useful results. My whole point is NOT that you can't define 0/0=Nullity, but that it's not compatible with the standard calculus we're used to and relying on.]

Yesterday I put my laptop to sleep (on AC power) while I went to the christmas party of a company I worked for. After returning, I couldn't read my email any more; dovecot would segfault after login. Restarting dovecot didn't help, but a reboot helped. Sounds to me as if during sleep, some kernel cache of the dovecot application was corrupted (read only memory; cached by the kernel, which is why it survived the restart of dovecot). Whoa, this is like Windows. Rebooting the computer actually fixed something!

A member of the free software community recently sent me their CV and asked for assistance in getting a job. Some of my suggestions are globally applicable so I'm blogging them.

Firstly I recommend that a job seeker doesn't publish their CV on the net in an obvious place. Often you want to give different versions to different people, and you don't necessarily want everyone to know about the work you do. I can't imagine any situation in which a potential employer might view a CV on the net if it's available but not ask for one if it isn't there. If you are intensively looking for work (IE you are currently between jobs) then I recommend having a copy of your CV in a hidden URL on your site. This means that if you happen to meet a potential employer you can give them a URL so that they can get your CV quickly, but the general public can't view it. A final problem with publishing your CV is that it may cause disputes with former colleagues (EG if you describe yourself as the most skilled programmer in the team then a former colleague who believes themself to be more skillful might disagree).

Next don't put your picture on your CV. In some jurisdictions it's apparently illegal for a hiring officer to consider your appearance. If there are many CVs put forward for the position then it may be easier to just discard yours because of this. There is absolutely no benefit to having the picture, unless of course you are applying for a job as an actor. Incidentally I've considered applying for work as an movie extra. The amount of effort involved is often minimal (EG pretend to drink beer in the back of a bar scene) and the pay is reasonable. It seems like a good thing to do when between computer contracts.

I write my CV in HTML and refuse to convert it. If a recruiting agent can't manage to use IE to print my CV then they are not competent enough to represent me. If a hiring manager can't manage to view my CV with IE then I don't want to report to them. However I recommend against using HTML features that make a document act in any way unlike a word-processor file. There should be no frames or CSS files so there is only one file to email, and the text should be all on one page so the PGDN and PGUP keys can scroll through all the content. Tables, bold, and italic are good, fonts are a minor risk. Colors are bad.

Recruiting agents will often demand that your CV be targeted for the position that you are applying for. I often had complaints such as "I see only sys-admin skills not programming". To solve this I wrote my CV in M4 and used a Makefile to generate multiple versions at the same time. If a recruiter wants a version of my CV emphasising C programming and using Linux then I've already got one ready!

These are just a few thoughts on the topic based on a CV that I just saw. I may write more articles about getting jobs in the computer industry if there is interest.

Can't Get No Satisfaction [New York Magazine] is a pretty interestng article on burnout. (Credit to House Of Gyros for the tip.) Not sure that I agree with the view of interference and so on, but I think the observations about "hurry sickness" are interesting. They might be part of the reasons why I travel over land or by mass transport these days, even when alternatives are available: it may seem slower, but it's more predictable, you're not often totally blocked and the blockage doesn't demand all your attention like it does driving a car. Meanwhile, it's currently 25mph winds gusting 50 outside and so far I've seen a 2x3m fence panel go down, and a part-full rubbish bag just blew past my first-floor window... I think the trip into town can wait until tomorrow.

At the University of Chicago, the Department of Economics was right across from my home-stomping ground, the Anthropology Department. Less than 30 seconds away, the world views and methodologies packaged for students were actually much much further apart not do to physical space but mind space. Though “there” (not physically the whole time) for 8 years and now gone for two, it only today, this morning before the sun has arisen, when I have had more concerte exposure to what econ undergraduate students get taught during an introductory course thanks to a very well-written article, What We Learn When We Learn Economics. The article’s author is clearly biased in certain respects but what is nice is that he demonstrates well that the articulation of a largely free-trade, market-heavy theory of economics made famous by a group of Chicagoans, which is given in the name of neutrality, is also, like any sort of model, not free entirely from bias and blinders. And whatever your take on free trade economics is, the article is quite well-written so take a dip!

Yesterday I wrote about the climate crisis. Today, let's start doing something about it.

Electricity, especially in the United States and China, turns out to be a pretty dirty energy source. Most of our electricity is generated using coal, which despite promises of "clean coal" to come, burns dirty. Not only does it contribute to global warming, but it also has been shown to have an adverse impact on health.

So let's start simple: reduce the amount of electricity our computers consume. Even for an individual person, this can add up to quite a bit of energy (and money) savings in a year. When you think about multiplying this over companies, server rooms, etc., it adds up fast. This works on desktops, servers, laptops, whatever.

The easiest way to save power is with CPU frequency scaling. This is a technology that lets you adjust how fast a running CPU runs, while it's running. When CPUs run at slower speeds, they consume less power. Most CPUs are set to their maximum speed all the time, even when the system isn't using them. Linux has support for keeping the CPU at maximum speed unless it is idle. By turning on this feature, we can save power at virtually no cost to performance. The Linux feature to handle CPU frequency scaling is called cpufreq.

Set up modules

Let's start by checking to see whether cpufreq support is already enabled in your kernel. These commands will need to be run as root.

# cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0
# ls -l

If you see an entry called cpufreq, you are good and can skip to the governor selection below.

If not, you'll need to load cpufreq support into your kernel. Let's get a list of available drivers:

# ls /lib/modules/ uname -r /kernel/arch/*/kernel/cpu/cpufreq

Now it's guess time. It doesn't really hurt if you guess wrong; you'll just get a harmless error message. One hint, though: try acpi-cpufreq last; it's the option of last resort.

On my system, I see:

acpi-cpufreq.ko     longrun.ko      powernow-k8.ko         speedstep-smi.ko
cpufreq-nforce2.ko  p4-clockmod.ko  speedstep-centrino.ko
gx-suspmod.ko       powernow-k6.ko  speedstep-ich.ko
longhaul.ko         powernow-k7.ko  speedstep-lib.ko

For each guess, you'll run modprobe with the driver name. I have an Athlon64, which is a K8 machine, so I run:

#modprobe powernow-k8

Note that you leave off the ".ko" bit. If you don't get any error message, it worked.

Once you find a working module, edit /etc/modules and add the module name there (again without the ".ko") so it will be loaded for you on boot.

Governor Selection

Next, we need to load the driver that tells the kernel what governor to use. The governor is the thing that monitors the system and adjusts the speed accordingly.

I'm going to suggest the ondemand governor. This governor keeps the system's speed at maximum unless it is pretty sure that the system is idle. So this will be the one that will let you save power with the least performance impact.

Let's load the module now:

# modprobe cpufreq_ondemand

You should also edit /etc/modules and add a line that says simply cpufreq_ondemand to the end of the file so that the ondemand governor loads at next boot.

Turning It On

Now, back under /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0, you should see a cpufreq directory. cd into it.

To turn on the ondemand governor, run this:

# echo echo ondemand > scaling_governor

That's it, your governor is enabled. You can see what it's doing like this:

# cat cpuinfo_min_freq
800000
# cat cpuinfo_max_freq
2200000
# cat cpuinfo_cur_freq
800000

That shows that my CPU can go as low as 800MHz, as high as 2.2GHz, and that at the present moment, it's running at 800MHz presently.

Now, check your scaling governor settings:

# cat scaling_min_freq
800000
# cat scaling_max_freq
800000

This is showing that the system is constraining the governor to only ever operate on an 800MHz to 800MHz range. That's not what I want; I want it to scale over the entire range of the CPU. Since my cpuinfo_max_freq was 2200000, I want to write that out to scaling_max_freq as well:

echo 2200000 > scaling_max_freq

Making This The Default

The last step is to make this happen on each boot. Open up your /etc/sysfs.conf file. If you don't have one, you will want to run a command such as apt-get install sysfsutils (or the appropriate one for your distribution).

Add a line like this:

devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor = ondemand
devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq = 2200000

Remember to replace the 2200000 with your own cpu_max_freq value.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have a dual-core CPU, or more than one CPU, you'll need to add a line for each CPU. For instance:

devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_governor = ondemand
devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq = 2200000

You can see what all CPU devices you have with ls /sys/devices/system/cpu.

Now, save this file, and you'll have CPU frequency scaling saving you money, and helping the environment, every time you boot. And with the ondemand governor, chances are you'll never notice any performance loss.

This article showed you how to save power using CPU frequency scaling on Linux. I have no idea if it's possible to do the same on Windows, Mac, or the various BSDs, but it would be great if someone would leave comments with links to resources for doing that if so.

Updated: added scaling_max_freq info

After this blog entry, I thought for a while, and decided to take over Debian package a day. I’m well aware that it needs a lot of time, so I’ll try to make this a collaborative work:

• It should be as easy as possible for readers to submit entries
• There will be a team of editors, willing to dedicate some time to this on a regular basis, who will receive new entries from users, improve them and publish them.

The publishing rate should depend on the number of ready-to-go entries in the queue. Starting with publishing twice a week should be okay. I have already started to set up a wordpress blog (using drafts to prepare entries + mails to coordinate should be enough for now ; we can always switch to something more complex later). TODO List :

1. Get control over the debaday.debian.net domain. I couldn’t do it directly since DAMs seem to want to wait until Christmas to deliver my Debian account, so buxy did it for me. Should resolve soon.
2. Get added to Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu. If the posting rate stays low, it shouldn’t be a problem, and we can always change this later.
3. Write the initial pages explaining how to contribute, etc.
4. Get the first entry online.
5. Recruit editors to share the load.
6. Wait for you to submit entries

Update (08/12/06) : Debian Package of the Day won’t be added on Planet Debian: a recent discussion concluded that non-personal blogs should not be on Planet Debian. So you have to subscribe directly to its feed (if you read Planet Ubuntu, you probably don’t need to, since it was added there).

Cutting Free reviewed ippimail: Free Software web-mail with a feel-good factor as a googlemail replacement. Steev commented:

"Nothing against ippimail, I do like the fact that it uses ad revenue to fund charities, even of my choosing, however, the difference between ippimail and googlemail IS the interface. No offense to the developers, but squirrelmail/horde really needs to be updated. There are many issues with it, which is why any time I use a webmail service that has squirrelmail/horde installed, I immediately look for a way to download the mail and read it in a mailclient of my choice, the thing is - that is going against the whole point of webmail. I haven't researched a lot of your arguments against Google, and I plan to, but just wanted you to know that even though I like what ippimail is doing, I simply cannot stand the interface."

I can't comment much on that: I've used squirrelmail without problem in the past. I tried to look at googlemail soon after its launch and was defeated by its totally-WCAG-busting interface. Simon Martin responded with a comment:

"Steev, The interface to Squirrelmail is being updated slowly. To speed the process, help spread the word about ippimail so we can afford to spend more time/money on it." "Hula also seems to be gathering momentum since the community got their hands on it properly..."

Christmas is coming soon, and we'll be off to California again at the end of the month to be with family and friends for the holidays. My immediate family sends out gift suggestion emails at the beginning of December, and I'm always the last one to send mine out. So I'm getting it done today. Probably the most consumer-y thing that I want for X-mas is a portable digital media player that can run RockBox. I really want to get more into podcasts and videocasts and that sort of thing, but I'd like to have a portable player for the stuff. Chaining myself to an iPod is just too unpleasant. Any suggestions? tags: xmas rockbox

Hampr My friend Ryan Finnie, created the excellent one-disk recovery distro Finnix. He also just started a new bookmarking service called Hampr, complete with its own Hampr FireFox extension. One thing I like about the service is that it uses OpenID, and only OpenID, for login and user profile services. It's the latest on the directory of OpenID-enabled sites. A cool idea, and it works well for me. tags: hampr bookmarks openid

The new look OK, it's the old new look, but this article on current style in Web design is interesting and informative. Good job. tags: webdesign web2.0

'Most websites' failing disabled [BBC NEWS] reports that a survey found that an amazing 97% of websites are inaccessible, 78% used colours with poor contrast (a frequent complaint of mine because my eyesight isn't normal) and 73% relied on JavaScript for important functionality (among other things). What is really depressing is that the survey was commissioned for the International Day of Disabled People and the page linked for the IDDP itself uses colours with poor contrast (if you've not noticed, try setting your browser to white text on black by default) and relies on JavaScript for navigation: ARGH! Someone please fetch the pitchfork - I want to correct that webmaster with it. For now, I've sent an email instead.

As I mentioned I saw Steve's Nokia E70 at Linux Expo and was quite impressed. After various bits of investigation into the cost of an unlocked version I thought I'd try ringing Vodafone to ask about an upgrade (thinking that I had 6 months left on my contract, but that they still might be able to do me a better deal than £290). Turns out my contract had expired back in August. Excellent. So I've been the owner of an E70 for a couple of months now. First, the bad. AFAICT this is mainly Vodafone's fault. There's a new version of the E70 firmware out, v2. However only certain variants of the E70 have been approved for this version. Vodafone haven't yet done this for their handsets. The main manifestations I see of this are the phone being slow to rotate the screen when it's opened up (at least a few seconds) and the wireless being flakey. In particular it really doesn't like my WEP enabled house network - it'll associate, get an IP address via DHCP, exchange some packets and then stop. It can see my neighbour's non protected wifi fine, and another WEP network I tried (though I saw pauses with that). This is a pain, but as most of the time when I'm using wifi out and about it's not WEPed it's not a showstopper. As a phone it's fine. I'm not a demanding user; I expect it to make and receive calls. It does. The addition of the keyboard is very useful for the few occasions I send SMSes. I haven't tried the funky SIP stuff (partly due to the WEP issue, partly as I already have a SIP hardphone). Where it's really neat is mobile web and ssh. The web browser is quite nice (suitable for checking airport flight departure boards and cinema times as I discovered last weekend). The addition of PuTTY really makes the phone for me. It's small enough that I carry it with me most of the time, and yet it has a screen that can do 80x43 (even if it's very small) and a keyboard. It's really neat for checking my mail/irc while on the move. And because it's all built in I carry it with me in a way I never managed with the Zaurus. Battery life seems better than my old v600i; with 3G turned on that managed 2 days max whereas with 3G enabled the E70 can happily manage at least 3 days and that's with a bigger screen and probably more use in general. I haven't felt the need to try it with 3G disabled yet. The main thing I need to do with it still is get round to putting some games on it. Of the sort suitable for playing while waiting for a pizza order to be ready, or waiting for one's wife[0] to do whatever it is she's doing. I'll get round to it. I like the phone though. Oh, I have a rant about the firmware upgrade. I emailed Vodafone to ask when they might approve the upgrade and moan about the wifi. They got confused about my mentioning wifi and assumed I meant GPRS, but pointed me at Nokia for firmware upgrades. I rang Nokia and they pointed me to my local Nokia Service Centre. I went to them and asked for a firmware upgrade and they said no problem and took my phone off me for 24 hours. In order to reflash the same bloody version I already had back on wiping my settings (which I'd backed up, but that's not the point). Muppets. [0] I need to blog some more on the whole wedding thing, but I thought I was due something slightly more technical.

Back in June, I wrote about my switch to VPSLink for my virtual private server (VPS) host.

Now it's 6 months later, my initial contract is up, and it's time to consider whether to renew it.

Overall, VPSLink has worked out reasonably well. I have their Link-4 plan, which provides 512MB RAM, 20GB of disk storage, and 500GB of bandwidth for $40/mo (or down to $33/mo if you pay for 12 months in advance).

Reliability and Uptime

VPSLink has been reasonably reliable. I wouldn't say that they have been exceptionally reliable, though.

Some outages:

• Back in July, the server was down for more than 8 hours. vpslink support blamed it on filesystem corruption; they rebooted, the system came up, FS went into readonly mode, so they went back down for fsck. I don't know what FS they use.


• In October, an outage of about 30-60 minutes that apparently was due to load problems on the host. The control panel also was broken during this time. Apparently there is a reboot queue, and the system can only reboot one customer's VPS at a time, and everybody wanted to reboot. But the UI was not really designed for this situation and presented very confusing status messages.


• In November, a kernel panic caused an outage of about 60 minutes.


• Various other outages that were resolved fast enough that I never emailed them about it.

They have generally responded to support requests in a reasonable amount of time, and support has been approximately as helpful as I'd expect.

Overall, there've been a few issues but, aside from that 8-hour outage in July, nothing especially remarkable.

Automated Tools

VPSLink has a "control panel" where you can reboot, start, or stop your virtual machine. You can see how much bandwidth you've used in a month, your IPs, and billing information.

You can also create support requests and view the status of support requests there. You can also view all correspondence on a given ticket, and add new correspondence to it -- a nice touch that's useful if your email is down because your VPS is down.

The reboot/start/stop facility didn't work during one outage, though.

Resources

The 20GB of disk space is nice to have, though I never used it all. No complaints there.

But the memory setup is rather strange. This may be because VPSLink is using OpenVZ instead of its more popular (and featureful) commercial counterpart Virtuozzo, or something such as Xen.

Those that have used OpenVZ/Virtuozzo know there is a /proc/user_beancounters file in the virtual environment that reports on the limits of resources allocated to your virtual server. VZ lets the server admins regulate the amount of resident RAM, swap, inodes, pending IP connections, amount of virtual RAM, etc, etc. About 3 dozen items in total.

Unlike some companies like JohnCompanies, VPSLink was not willing to make any adjustments to this file for me. For instance, my mail server may need more simultaneous open files than they have by default, but they wouldn't work with me to make reasonable adjustments.

But the larger problem was with regard to RAM. This was particularly annoying. VPSLink does not permit any access to swap, so the 512MB is what you get. But tools like top show the entire memory allocation on the host, and are mostly useless in tracking down your own usage.

You can look at the privvmpages entry in /proc/user_beancounters to get an idea of your current usage, but that's it. There is a script on their wiki that will turn this into a more useful number, but again, it's not the most helpful.

The minute you try to allocate anything past 512MB, your processes start getting killed. According to /proc/user_beancounters, even though my system normally hovers around 70% of that 512MB allocated, I've had 290,567 instances where a process has been refused its request to allocate memory since the last reboot. Such instances usually cause a process to crash.

Other Virtuozzo companies like JohnCompanies will give you "burstable RAM", so if others aren't using their full RAM allocation at the moment that your machine goes over your regular limit, you can go over it to a certain extent. That was very effective at preventing crashes during times of higher than usual memory usage, and I never had trouble with this at JohnCompanies.

I've had a lot of trouble with VPSLink because of these hard, no-exceptions limits. Getting hit by the Google bot at the same time as the MSN bot could raise memory usage enough that processes would start getting killed. Depending on which process it is, it could take down cron, apache, the mail server, whatever. And there is no log of which processes die because of this.

In normal circumstances, this wouldn't pose even a noticeable impact to a server; inactive bits could be swapped out, etc.

I am also suspicious of exactly how OpenVZ calculates memory usage. Since moving to a physical Linux box, my memory usage seems to be much lower than the privvmpages would seem to indicate, even though it's running the exact same code.

So I had some outages on my server that were caused by OpenVZ memory limits, which didn't get listed in the overall outages above.

This problem is the #1 reason I'm leaving VPSLink.

Performance

Overall performance has been acceptable. The CPU speed appears to be reasonable and about as expected.

The disk performance has been more problematic, however. It tends to be rather slow. There have been times when I can type "ls" in a directory with about 10 files and it takes 5-10 seconds to respond. And I wasn't even using "-l".

Now that sort of thing is certainly the exception. But it makes databases -- and websites that rely on databases -- very slow.

The performance measurements over at RealMetrics also show VPSLink as being at the bottom of the pack for disk performance.

Overall

VPSLink is a reasonable value, and if monthly cost is important to you, probably a good choice. Don't expect it to be spotless, though. I would call the overall experience pretty average. Nothing too spectacular in either direction in any respect.

Over the last few weeks, I have been very busy at work, and therefore hadn't have much time for Debian. Especially, I haven't been able to help the Dunc-bank project as much as I wanted to. However, it recently became obvious that I brought my contribution to the project's impressive success (despite being not too dramatic). That was, orphaning libpng. The one thing to know about libpng is that upstream developers like to break their software at every single release. Given the number of packages depending on it, it is not reasonable to upload new versions less than 6 months before the release; this is the reason why I carefully kept the working 1.2.8 version. However, despite being warned, the new maintainer decided to upload two new upstream versions with a high urgency to fix two security issues, instead of backporting them. Looking at the rest of the changelog is eloquent :

• removal of the libpng3 package despite my explanations of why not to do so - a change reverted later;
• moving development examples to the shared library package - I'm sure the 91% of users having libpng12-0 installed, according to popularity-contest, will be glad to have them;
• last but not least, removal of a patch that was introduced to not export some useless symbols - of course, this was done without bumping the shlibs, just like the two new upstream releases.

The result is now, according to the unofficial RC bug list, no less than six libpng-related release-critical bugs:

• broken on amd64;
• incorrect dependency information;
• new bug introduced upstream;
• pngcrush broken.

Before anyone asks me: no, I'm not volunteering to fix these bugs. Maintaining libpng is a tedious and time-consuming task that requires more motivation than I currently have. It is way too late in the release process, and my advice for a short-term solution (suitable for a release in two months) would be to revert completely to 1.2.8 and backport the security fixes. The medium-term solution involves even more work, but I think there is no more choice: the library needs to be split in two, one private library with an unstable ABI for software like pngcrush and optipng, and one public library with a very strictly fixed ABI (probably following closely the LSB). Good luck to anyone implementing this. The long term solution is more appealing: rewrite everything from scratch. The PNG specification is much clearer than the libpng code, and calls for a clean reimplementation using modern programming techniques. For a completely unrelated, but more entertaining moment, I recommend the reading of this Bjarne Soustrup interview, where he tries to defend C++ against all common sense. The introduction really made my day: C++ remains the archetypal "high level" computer language (that is, one that preserves the features of natural, human language). Something to meditate on.

Ryzom is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) developed by the French company Nevrax. It is based on the NeL game engine (also from Nevrax), which is GPL'd already. As "due to market conditions and other unforseen cirucumstances, a request to begin bankruptcy proceedings has been filed at the commerce tribunal", the Free Ryzom Campaign has formed with the aim to buy the source code and game data and release it under the GPL:

Help us make Ryzom a Free MMORPG! Donate now to help us purchase the source code, artwork and other game data associated with Ryzom, so we can breathe new life into it as an open, democratically run player project.

They've even set up a Social Contract (modeled after the Debian Social Contract) which states among other things that "Ryzom and all materials produced by the Free Ryzom Project will become and remain 100% Free Software". If you want to support the project, you can make a donation pledge (used to convince the official presiding over the liquidation process). No real donations are possible at the moment. More info/material on the game:

• A presentation, which explains the game, factions, items, ecosystem etc.
• The Ryzom Wikipedia article
• A whole bunch of Ryzom trailer videos at YouTube [1]
• The project FAQ
• Current plan and status
• A Digg article about Ryzom

I'm looking forward to the day where I can apt-get install ryzom and play a fully free MMORG... [1] I recommend using the Mozilla/Firefox/Iceweasel VideoDownloader extension to download the videos and watch them with mplayer. (via Karl-Tux-Stadt)

My work permit in Canada expired on December 1 (that's 10 Frimaire for you French Revolutionary Calendar fanatics), so I needed to renew it. It's possible to renew these things by mail, which is worrisome and time-consuming, or even to go into an office in Montreal (near-mythical, crowded, reportedly ineffective). I've never liked doing either, so whenever we have to deal with immigration, our family drives the 50km down to the border with the US. They have a big immigration facility there, and if you drive out of Canada and back in again, they have lots of nice officers in bullet-proof vests to deal with any immigration issues on the spot. It's called "driving around the flagpole" here, but Maj and I try to make a trip out of it when we have to go. So we drove down to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks last Friday morning -- sufficiently distant and different to seem exotic, without being too far away for a weekend trip. Plattsburgh, the nearest American town to us, is, well, kinda boring. We've spent a day in Burlington (Vermont) before, and that was pretty fun, but we wanted to try something different -- so Lake Placid it was. Friday was a crummy day for a drive, though -- there was snow and freezing rain in equal measures, so the roads were a little dangerous. The hood of our car kept building up this several-inches-thick icy-snowy mass that I was afraid would rip off the hood and go careening into the dark, so I kept stopping to chip it off with my handy ice scraper. Once we got down to the Adirondack park, though, the rain was just a regular drizzly non-freezing kind, and we could actually enjoy the scenery. The roads in were remarkably small -- hard to believe that not one but two Winter Olympics were held at this remote location. When we got to town, we took a look around at the main drag -- a single street that fronts onto Mirror Lake and points directly into the Olympic centre. We stopped at the Great Adirondack Brewing Company for a late lunch, and had a nice crabcake and caesar salad with roasted shrimp. Maj is a little squeamish about eating seafood in the mountains -- with good reason, since she's been burnt before -- but we both ate up anyways, and it was real good. Amita June had a grilled-cheese sandwich that came with french fries shaped like little happy faces. Awww. We then went to check into our motel, the Wildwood Inn. I've got a weakness for a certain kind of woodsy mountain motel -- lots of wood paneling and alpine flavor -- and I especially like paying motel prices. The Wildwood was just what I like -- clean, inexpensive ($65/night), and charming, with a nice view from our room out onto Lake Placid proper. It also had a nice big indoor heated pool complex and free WiFi. (On that subject -- why is it that so many motels in North America now have perfectly acceptable free WiFi, but major hotels in big cities charge you $30/night for crummy WiFi with complicated authentication schemes that take half an hour to configure? Is it just because the big hotels charge too much for everything, or is it because they know they can rake business travelers over the coals and it all will go on the expense report? It makes me really mad to pay for WiFi, and it makes me extra-mad that it's usually so complicated and of such poor quality. Anyways.) We took a big nap and went out after dark (4:30PM) to look at the town and get some dinner. Unfortunately, it was still raining big fat cold raindrops all over downtown. The ski season was supposed to start this weekend in the Adirondacks, but with all the rain they canceled opening the runs, and with the bad weather and no skiing the town was pretty empty. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed, and when we eventually got to one, the Black Bear, we were the only people there. The Black Bear turned out to be really nice. They had a good selection of organic vegetables and seafood nicely prepared but not too fancy -- what we Californians call "California cuisine". I dunno what anyone else calls it. Amita liked it because they had a big chalkboard on the wall and she spent most of her time running between our table and the board or drawing big jagged marks on the wall. That night the wind and storm howled outside our motel room -- I dreamed the place was falling down. When we got up in the morning, though, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside -- the first one of the season! Maj and Amita June went outside on the motel lawn to play around -- Amita doesn't remember last winter, I don't think, so snow is new all over again for her -- and I went to clear off the car. Then we went downtown to get some breakfast. We shopped for books (I bought James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder) and winter gear (Maj almost but didn't buy some boots) walking up and down the main street in the light snow, then piled into the Soulshine Bagel shop for some bagel sandwiches and coffee. The food was good -- the bagels were thick and doughy, not like the little Montreal bagels I've grown fond of -- but the place only took cash, and we hadn't gotten out any American money yet. Oops. They were nice enough to take our Canadian cash, which earned them a decent tip, and then the three of us walked back to the car in the snow, Amita trying for the first time to catch snowflakes on her tongue. After our nap, we went out with good intentions to go visit the Olympic Centre and get ourselves a little bit of cultural value from the trip, but the early dark and our darker natures drove us instead to the Lake Placid Pub in a residential area right by Mirror Lake. The Pub was great -- really good beers (I liked the 7% Ubu Ale) and fine pub-grub. There was a table of kids next to our table, and they had a little table barbecue on which they were making s'mores. They kept handing Amita their extra graham crackers, which she noshed contentedly. This morning we went to the Saranac Sourdough deli and bakery for an early breakfast. It was right across highway 86 from our motel, and they had great pancakes. I had a big spinach-crab frittata with sourdough rye toast -- really satisfying. We took the long route back to Montreal -- west through Saranac Lake then north up to Malone (New York), a little town on the Salmon River with a big collapsed mill in the middle of downtown. By the time we got down to Malone, all the snow was gone, and it was back to that bitter snowless winter look all over the place. Malone had some nice architecture, but we ducked into the homey Nancy's Village Diner for some lunch. Then out onto the road again, through Chateaugay and Mooers and back to the border after a brief stop at duty-free. Our immigration issues took about an hour -- that was pretty good turnaround -- and we were on autoroute 15 back home to Montreal pretty quick. Not far from the border, though, the snow started coming down hard, and by the time we got to the St. Laurent river it was sticking to the road, making driving a little hazardous. But we managed to get home OK, glad for a nice little weekender. tags: lake placid montreal new york saranac lake adirondacks immigration snow maj amitajune

I'm considering building myself a Via EPIA-based media/NAS box in the new year, as a replacement for the LinkStation NAS I have upstairs (my latest Unison run took 24 hours due to the limited RAM) and the ThinkPad X22 I have under the hifi (as it only plays music, and doesn't do video). I notice that all of the EPIAs have hardware MPEG acceleration, though I'm not sure what models have what features. I plan eventually on using the box to play DVDs and random MPEG streams from (say) BitTorrent, and play and record DVB-T streams. Can anyone say if the Via EPIA MII 6000 is capable of this, or should I go for something a little more powerful like the SP8000EG? The former has an "MPEG Accelerator" whereas the latter explictly states accelerated MPEG decoding and encoding. Please email me or leave comments, thanks!

WTF IS THIS SHIT? Ok, that above would be what a newly-baptized “FOSS advocate-slash-zealot” would say upon seeing Federico Pascual Jr.’s PostScript regarding the FOSS bill. I suppose I could have said that myself a couple of lifetimes ago. But, there is more than meets the eye. While I would like to think of myself as a “FOSS veteran”–believe me, I have still so much to learn about it–I would like to step into the shoes of such a person when approaching an article as sensational as Mr. Pascual’s. Despite what seems to be a most interesting article on the mechanics of government software usage, it fails to address the one particular bit that is just as important as the proposed bill itself: the real Free and Open Source Software. Let me nitpick this article bit by bit:

FREE RIDE: A bill is being pushed in Congress forbidding all government agencies and state-controlled firms from buying and using any of the computer software sold in the market!

Alas, when I first heard of the FOSS bill sometime before September, I also had a bad impression of it. Perhaps I was just too politically allergic at that time (yeah right,) but I tried to adopt a wait-and-see’ approach first and let the dice roll. Perhaps because this bill was to be introduced by a very visible congressman with alleged leftist ties made me feel uncomfortable, but then, so was (and still is) with the current administration. Or perhaps I just felt it wasn’t damn right to legislate FOSS as an end-all solution, preferring instead of presenting is as a process for reforming the local software industry. Looks like first impressions definitely make a difference.

The proposed law to be called “Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Act of 2006″ commands government offices to use only information and communications software that are given away for free and have no restrictions as to their use. The objectives appear to be to save money for the government and to encourage the making of free (non-commercial) software.

So? What’s wrong with these objectives? FWIW, the early FOSS bill draft did seem to have such a Draconian section as forcing the government and allied offices to use, and use only, FOSS. IMHO that by itself ran against the very fundamental ideal of FOSS: the freedom of choice. Not Hobson’s choice, but real choice. The current bill IIRC now allows this true choice; unless there is an extreme case where FOSS cannot be applied without becoming non-self-sustaining (not to mention self-liquidating,) agencies may implement their infrastructure using FOSS as their primary instrument, with the application of open standards (that is, open document formats, open communications protocols, etc) unifying the disparate components. Perhaps right now, this situation may seem kind of far-fetched, but its not really that far-off, considering what other nations and cities have done (or not done) with FOSS. Munich, Extremadura, Beijing… the list is not yet that long, but its bound to go a long way Now, while the government may now adopt open standards and open-everything, does not mean that the openness’ forgoes security, either; the government may opt to use well-known encryption protocols and even base their own security infrastructure on them. In fact, they are free to even look inside the source of these well-known standards, to study them, and to branch off new implementation that may even change the way these standards work. In fact, even without this bill in place, the government can participate in the production and development of FOSS!!! Wait a minute, wasn’t I supposed to defend this bill? Eh, well. I suppose this bill is good and all, but like I said earlier, there are those first impressions made by the parties involved in the making of this bill which unsettles me. IMHO I would rather see applications of this first in key cities (the happy works in Munich and in Extremadura are no accident, believe me) which in turn, would allow both local the national government to see just exactly how this FOSS magic works. Then, when the observations have been made, the papers are in, and the workers get hired, then, maybe, we’ll have a nation where FOSS can be mandated as a very strong preference, but never a forced one. Its all about growing up, really. I’m being reminded of Tom DeMarco’s The Deadline, where a newly-retrenched guy from a telco literally lands into the fantastic job of his life, managing an entire nation of software engineers and architects to develop several killer apps within a year (or so; raid you nearest Book Sale and be lucky Its a great experiment: when it succeeds, you’ll be the first to be present, but when it fails, you’ll be the first to be nowhere.

But I can also hear in the background a call to an unholy war against multinationals whose popular software run virtually all maybe 95 percent? of the computers of the world.

Now this is a low blow. Maybe partly because of the prevailing images of the advocates–geeks and leftists, my, what a c-c-c-combo!–is what drives Mr. Pascual to make this point. But really, multinationals are not the main concern. FWIW, FOSS is multinational in nature: it is even multi-denominational and multidisciplinary. FOSS is one of the things that make anonymous people like you and me Internet superheroes. FOSS connects the Internet’s tubes and keeps away the trucks. FOSS makes the Internet serious business, yet also drives them crazy. The Linux distros that I have worked, am working, and continue to work on, are all multinational: Debian and Ubuntu. People from all over the world, from all 7 continents, participate and work on what would arguably be the biggest software distribution the human world may ever produce, freely, regardless of motivation or goal. I suppose all the folks involved have only one common goal, and that is to see a work created for the benefit of the community by the community. I suppose the background howl comes from somewhere altogether, but its hardly just from FOSS. FOSS is the epitome of what is truly multinational, and one thing that is not truly controlled by any one single person, corporation or not.