I've spent the last week and a bit in Edinburgh, at DebConf7. I found it took me a couple of days to adjust for some reason, but after I'd managed to lose all sense of time everything went much better. I'll probably spend the next week recovering and catching up with real life. I have to say I don't feel I achieved a whole lot while I was there. When I went to my first DebConf (DebConf4, in Brazil) I spent a lot of time hacking and making progress on things. I didn't manage to do so well in Finland, nor this year. I'm not sure that's entirely what DebConf is about though. I saw a lot of people; the UK crowd who turn up to most things, people I hadn't seen since Finland, and those who I hadn't see since Brazil (and must try harder to see more often). And of course several names I was able to put to faces. This is a really useful part of such events - I find it's much easier to deal with people online once I've met them in real life and have an idea where they're coming from. Having said I didn't achieve much I did many to leave with a lot of things in my personal todo list. I had the calendar conversation a couple of times again, at greater length, resulting in being told that I should just do it. So I need to think about a proper design. I started looking at Just Writing Code, but the problem is such that I believe a more rigorous approach is required. Another item was ARM hacking; I sat in on the ARM BOF and caught the end of the Emdebian stuff, as well as talking to Wookey and Neil Williams quite a bit about it. Wookey's convinced me that working on mainline Balloon2 support is still useful, even if everyone is more interested in Balloon3. And I thought a bit about starting to do some AM work again, assuming I can find enough time to do a decent job of it. Mao was sadly lacking; I got a couple of games in, but not the number I'd come to expect from previous DebConfs. I think the trick is to find Marga sooner... In addition to the travel to Edinburgh we ended up with a daytrip to the Isle of Bute - thanks to Patty Langasek for organising this. We managed not to lose anyone, and had a visit to a public loo from 1898. Post DebConf a bunch of us ended up in Solva for a party to celebrate Daniel and Rob's civil partnership. It was well worth the travelling, and good to see people who hadn't been at DebConf. Finally, on the way back home, we detoured via Stonehenge. Anyway. Now I'm back home, Katherine's turned up for a bit and hopefully I'll manage to do some of my todo list. See y'all next year in Argentina, assuming I can find the funds.

I received some time ago (don’t remember exactly when, I’ve since deleted that mail) a mail from Tux Games informing me that a mail that I (supposedly) had sent them is being held pending my confirmation that the message is not spam. Now, I have never ever before heard of Tux Games, so it seems likely that the message being held indeed is spam – and was not, in fact, sent by me. Email source forgery is trivial if you know how the system works, and spammers routinely forge email sender information. Tux Games is itself engaging in spamming by sending unsolicited confirmation mails to people. I replied to the mail saying so, and asking them to stop doing this. The message bounced. Today, I received another message from Tux Games. The original message is still in the queue, and has not been read by a human. I am asked to confirm it is not spam. It is tempting to do so.

I'd say vlosuts is just about alpha at this point. It perfectly manages building an image and then upgrading (at least on the systems I've tested it on) and I haven't seen any major bugs. The main feature I'd like to get working is support for a Xen backend. This shouldn't be too difficult, it's just taking me a bit of effort to get Xen working. It would've been easy enough, but I just couldn't get the network configured. I followed guide after guide, and finally figured out the problem was that my wireless card didn't support bridging. Which explains why I'd never managed to get that to work in the past either. So now I'm reconfiguring my Xen setup with NAT, which should give me a system good enough for testing. After that I'll start fixing some of the less important bugs and adding some features here and there.

We had a great weekend this last weekend here in Montreal. Yesterday, June 24, was Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day here in Quebec -- the national holiday of this cool and fun nation. St. Jean Baptiste is important to me in a lot of ways. Of course, it's cool that it's the national holiday of our adopted new home. But John the Baptist, the patron saint of Quebec, is also our family's name saint. ''Prodromos'' means "forerunner" in Greek, and it's one of the titles of St. John. Most of all, it's the day that Maj and I moved to Montreal. We came in on St. Jean Baptiste Day, 2003, and we've been here ever since. We drove my beautiful 1972 Citro n DS from San Francisco, where my niece Elena had just been born, all the way out here. We arrives on June 24th and wandered around the McGill Ghetto looking for our sight-unseen sublet. It's hard to believe it's only been 4 years -- it seems like so much longer. We had a good day yesterday. The three of us went to Piknic in the afternoon and hung out with our friends Jeremy and Lina and their two great kids Clea and Sylvie. We had a lot of hummus and pasta salad and bread and cheese and generally had a great time. Meg and Catherine came and hung out for a while, and also our friend Kristen, who's 7 months pregnant and has a 10-month-old. Good luck on that one. Most of all a pretty day enjoying the outdoors in our new home town, as well as fun dancing to house under a big Calder statue. How great is that? tags: montreal quebec stjeanbaptiste prodromou piknic jeremy lina

72 hours from Flickr I forgot to mention that we had a really nice time on Friday evening going to the 24 Hours of Flickr party at the SAT. Heather Champ, community leader at Flickr and welcomer to partiers, put it well: "We have three requirements for Flickr parties: the food must be good, the drinks must be copious, and the schwag must be ample." And that's exactly what happened. All the usual Montreal suspects were out in force: YULblog types, Web entrepreneurs, Web pranksters. It was great seeing m-c and c-c, who wore their awesome Flickr Socks -- although they each had a matching pair. I also talked to Allen Morris, which was really fun. He's a developer living now in Saranac Lake, one of the towns in the Adirondacks I find strangely compelling. We exchanged GPG key signatures and talked a lot about the Bay Area (California), where we both once lived. Probably my best talk was with Heather Champ and Derek Powazek. We talked about their joys of creation of JPG Magazine, the despair of leaving it, and looking forward to the future. We also chatted a lot about print on demand technologies, which we're evaluating for Wikitravel. Heather took the photo of my friend Ben Cerveny at Burning Man that's become his avatar icon on about every social software platform I know of. It must be good to capture someone in the way they want to think of themselves. I took my own self-concept picture by putting the camera on the dashboard of my Citroen. Heh. All in all a good party. One thing I was interested to find out was that there's a Yahoo! Quebec, which launched last month and I guess just slipped by me. Sadly, if you click on the "English" button, it takes you to... Yahoo! Canada. Hey, Yahoo! There are actually a lot of anglophones here! Just in case you were wondering. tags: yahooquebec 24heuresflickrmontreal 24hoursflickrmontreal flickr montreal party

Montreal Web Development Book Club Montreal Web scene stalwart Heri Rakotomalala -- the man with the magic name, originally from Madagascar, along with Montevideo and Marfa, one of the M-places on my travel wishlist -- recently started a Montreal Web Development Book Club. It's a meeting for people interested in the practical side of the Web to talk about the books they read and let that drift into talk about the work we do and ideas we have. I think the book club is an awesome idea. Book clubs are a great grass-roots intellectual meetup that we don't often celebrate in the post-flash mob BarCamp-ized world. The great thing about a book club, for Web people, is that it filters out the bullshitters and dilettantes. If you're going to a book club, you're going to have to know what you're talking about, and you're going to have to care about the subject. The book gives focus that keeps the conversation from drifting to tangential topics. Flakes and hangers-on just don't have the stamina for it. Also, we met at La ka, so it was nice to have some beers in a good place on a hot night. Why not? We managed to talk about a lot of good books, too. Jean-Fran ois <something> (I didn't get his last name) talked about In Search of Stupidity, a look at the last 25 years of marketing and business blunders in the high-tech realm. Our industry is subject to a lot of decisions that seem absolutely self-defeating in hindsight, and the book goes in-depth on 15 case studies -- like Wordstar, Ashton-Tate and Borland. It sounds like a great cautionary tale for Web 2.0 startup mavens. Heri talked about the book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web -- the infamous "Polar Bear Book". It sounds like a really good book for doing initial planning for a Web site, but I'm really interested in tools for profiling an IA effort. We get about 2 million unique visitors a month at Wikitravel, for example, which is a huge amount of usability data I could be mining. But I don't really have the tools for it, so I don't do it much. I'd love to know, for example, about people who land on a Wikitravel page from a search engine and then leave. What were they looking for? Why couldn't they find it? Also, users who browse through our pages clicking on links, then resort to a full-text search. What did they think they were clicking on, and what were they looking for instead? Did they find it? How can we put that in front of them in the first place? Most of all, I want to know how and why people start editing Wikitravel pages, and why they stop. Of people who click the "edit" button, only 1 in 17 click "save". (That is one bit of clickpath analysis I've done.) Why? I've often been tempted to put a survey up when someone navigates away from our edit page. "Why didn't you save? Tell us so we can fix it for other people." I talked about the book I just finished reading a few weeks ago, Everything is Miscellaneous. It's the latest book by Dave Weinberger about how we impose order on information to make it easy to understand and retrieve. It's an awesome book -- really fun -- especially for someone married to a knowledge management expert. I don't think I gave a good enough description of the book to ignite the club's interest, but I hope they check it out, because it's really readable and good. At the end of the meeting Heri took a poll and decided that we'll continue doing the book club on the last Monday of the month. I've already picked out my book for next month: RESTful Web Services. I've heard good things about this book (admittedly mostly from the co-author Leonard Richardson) and I want to give it a look-see. So book-club fodder it is. ''Update: Heri has his own book club report here.'' tags: bookclub montreal heri webdev montrealwebdevbookclub

Over the last few days, I have had to perform a number of clean installations, some using Debian, some using Ubuntu. Whenever handing over freshly OEM'ed hardware, I like to include a copy of the CD media to the customer, as a courtesy. This works extremely well for Ubuntu, from whom it is possible to order official release CD. Customers always get a nice buzz out of that. For Debian, though, I always get embarrassed looks over the home-burnt CD, because it projects a lack of professionalism. Enterprise customers want a commercially pressed CD and they want it to be the official one published by Debian; explaining to them that Debian doesn't publish pressed CD media produces an instant lack of trust in Debian. What can I say? It's their perception and, as the old saying goes, the customer is always right. This got me thinking, why doesn't Debian have its own ShipIt like Ubuntu? Granted, Debian is a non-profit organization, but surely that would not prevent selling official CD media to help cover at least some of its operational expenses, now, would it? One way to implement this would be to hire the exact same CD pressing plant that Canonical employs to handle their CD ordering and shipping logistics. They already have the procedure and tools in place to handle this; they just need to add a branded version of that ordering site for Debian's needs and to receive official ISO files from Debian's Release Manager every year or so. How about it?

Incredible but true: from the three cities in three countries I've been in today, Hamburg is the warmest.

Managed to "read" half of my 11000 mails backlog today during the journey, yay!

Unpacked all the tech stuff on my bed and managed to do laundry already, yay yay!

Found a nice green surprise on my Desktop at home, when I came back. Yay to more tech toys ;-)

Missing DebConf again and already! Thanks to everyone who made it a great experience, I'm looking forward to DebConf8 already :-)

Ok, I'm officially back. Yup, when you have a meeting just over your regular lunch time and are suddenly seen as the guy who will fix the institute's video needs just because you worked manning cameras with the amazing DC7 video team, it just means you are back home. Lets see how several projects that have sprang up in the last couple of weeks (both at DebConf and at work) start materializing.
Anyway... DebConf was great. Just great. This time I had time both to feel I was useful and productive (mainly doing video-related stuff, although on some other points as well), to attend several interesting talks (although manning the camera did not leave my attention as complete as I would have liked), to have several nice chats, to play a good couple of hands of Mao - Hell, thanks to Kitty, I managed even to have some chats _while_ having a hand of Mao!
Of course, I was not productive neither with my Real Life duties nor with with the Debian stuff I wanted to hack on - In fact, the most productive period during the two and a half weeks I was away (excluding probably the two days I spent understanding/hacking Pentabarf with Dami n) was the flight back - During the ~12hr we were on the air, I managed to read the second half of my book, to review two chapters for a thesis, to write a (really simple) article and to work on another one.
Anyway... Thanks to everybody. I had a great time, and am only looking forward towards Argentina.
Ah, and I also got The Debconf Flu.

Stephen Touset commented:

"The worst offender in my experience is the "Verified by VISA" program. They restrict you to a subset of characters (alphanumeric, if I recall correctly) and even restrict the maximum length! You know what the worst part of it is, though? If they were using a widely-published, widely-analyzed, and widely-reviewed secure hash standard like SHA-1, Whirlpool, or any number of alternatives, these restrictions wouldn't be in place. This tells me that they're likely not using a well-reviewed standard, and instead have probably come up with their own bastardized password "encryption"."

I'm a bit worried by this, but I'm moving my customers to Verfied by VISA and Mastercard 3DSecure because of the carrot-and-stick used by the payment gateways. Am I sleepwalking off the cliff here?

DebConf7 finished today. This was my first DebConf, and probably not my last one :-) I had a really interesting time in Edinburgh, despite the weather (but at least we are prepared for DebConf8 now!). The organization team really did a fantastic work, the venue was gorgeous, etc, etc, etc. Again, I was positively surprised by how nice everybody was at DebConf. It’s weird to think that the same people are part of the regular flames on the mailing lists. Which proves that most flames are just caused by people being passionate about Debian, and looking for the best for the project, and not by people trying to be annoying, like one could think :) I gave a talk about the usual QA stuff I’m doing: archive-wide rebuilds, piuparts runs, and how to make all this more efficient by working inside the collab-qa project. So far, it’s not like a lot of people have been joining the project, which is kind of a failure. But at least everybody seem to think that the idea is good. I also gave a lightning talk about Debian Package of the Day, which I didn’t plan to give originally (I think I never prepared slides in such a short time). I think it was well received, and we even got a new submission half an hour after the talk. I even managed to clear some tasks on my TODO list during Debconf, the most visible one being the “automated monthly mails to maintainers of packages with serious problems”. I was quite afraid of being flamed, but I sent 250 mails, and only one person replied aggressively. I also got a lot of positive feedback, so the next batch will probably use slightly less strict criterias. And of course, the most important result of debconf was the numerous discussions, that resulted in a lot of good and interesting ideas.

Okay, so that happened. Now all I have to stress about is getting my passport back in the mail successfully before I want to depart on Saturday. My appointment was at 9:30am, which Id foolishly made without considering that arriving on a Sunday, I'd still need to get to a post office on Monday morning to get a postal money order and a stamp. Given that you're not supposed to arrive any earlier than 15 minutes prior to your appointment, that didn't leave me a lot of time. Post offices here open at 9:00am, but I'd managed to locate one within a fairly short distance of the US Consulate. Last night, I went for a recce to figure out how to walk to Consulate from the hotel, and where the post office was in relation to the Consulate. I was relieved to discover that the post office was literally about a minute's walk around the corner. That made me feel much more comfortable about pulling everything off on time. So this morning, I arose early, and walked to the post office, arriving there at about 8:30am. There was already a considerable queue outside the Consulate, something I hadn't considered. Not long after I arrived at the post office, a postal employee was coming in and she told me that they weren't opening until 10:30am for some reason. Damn. My well-laid plans were shot to pieces. She told me the nearest post office that opened at 9am was on Baggot Street, and pointed at my Google Maps printout to something labeled as Baggot Lane. It didn't look that far away, and I still had about 25 minutes up my sleeve, so I scurried off. I walked the length of Baggot Lane, no post office. Then I realised there was an Upper and Lower Baggot Street one street over, tacked on the end of another street (they seem to like spontaneously changing street names on straight bits of road around here). So I scurried off over there, but couldn't see any sign of a post office. It was now a bit after 9am, so I didn't want to waste more time just finding the post office, and so I jumped into a taxi, and I'm glad I did, because it turns out the post office was in the back of a newly renovated convenience store, and there was no external signage whatsoever, so I wouldn't have stood a snowflake's chance in hell of finding it on my own. The taxi then dropped me back at the Consulate at bang on 9:15am by my watch, and I jumped on the end of the queue. The process was a bit unusual in that the Consulate is on the corner of the intersection of a couple of fairly busy roads, and there's a guardhouse on the perimeter of the boundary, where you have to line up and talk to someone through a speaker-box (contending with all of the traffic noise) and they verify you have an appointment, and have all the prerequisites, then you get in another line to go through the guardhouse and get your stuff x-ray-ed and yourself metal-detected. Then you get to walk across the yard, into the building itself and wait. I must suck when it's raining, because you queue outside on the street for a little while. The Consular processing went perfectly smoothly. They weren't interested in any of my supporting paperwork, or my updated resume that I'd prepared. I was only asked why I was applying in Dublin (rather than Australia) and that was it. They reckon I should have my stuff back in a couple of days. So the take-away from all of this is don't make the appointment so bloody early in the morning if you still have to run around and collect prerequisite items. Duh. Colour me dumb. Now off to work after a cup of tea to recover.

So Debconf7 has come to an end, and I’m pretty sure this has been my best Debconf so far. Although I did not manage to attend many talks and discussions, and did not socialize as much as I would’ve wanted with the people I did not already know (does Mao count as socializing?), I’ve on the other hand felt good throughout all its duration, which is great. On the productivity side, I think I’ve done okay. Strangely enough it’s not been Debian the main target of my hack hours, God only knows why. Instead, I made a couple of contributions to Bazaar, one of the new generation distributed version control systems. But I’m sure my Debian work will gain momentum in the near future, so no worries. Finally, I must say I’m in debt with a bunch of people who thought it was worth having me attend, and brought me here when it seemed it was too late. I’m very grateful for that, really. As always, thanks to the orga team for their terrific work, and hope to make it to Argentina next year. Update 1: Forgot to say, I went to the Genderfuck party in The Forest. It was pretty cool, and a first. Update 2: Brittish Airways lost my luggage (and I seem not to be alone in this). P.S.: I think I’ve got the Debconf flu. \o/

Enrique Dans writes about the "The Coming Battle: Apple's iPhone vs. Corporate IT Departments". He makes an interesting point on how this new gadget can be a point of friction between managers of IT departments and their employees using this kind of gadgets, usually corporate executives. Syncing the database with RIM devices, or redirecting email accounts (iPhone is not capable of using corporate Blackberry or MS Exchange servers), can be a problem in corporate world. If you read those articles, they blame iPhone for not supporting all these enterprise-class software. Basically, IT departments are blaming iPhone for not supporting their competition systems, and they are not requiring all them (and themselves) to be using standards, which were just designed to avoid this kind of problems. They are afraid. No more comments.

Enrique Dans writes about the "The Coming Battle: Apple's iPhone vs. Corporate IT Departments". He makes an interesting point on how this new gadget can be a point of friction between managers of IT departments and their employees using this kind of gadgets, usually corporate executives. Syncing the database with RIM devices, or redirecting email accounts (iPhone is not capable of using corporate Blackberry or MS Exchange servers), can be a problem in corporate world. If you read those articles, they blame iPhone for not supporting all these enterprise-class software. Basically, IT departments are blaming iPhone for not supporting their competition systems, and they are not requiring all them (and themselves) to be using standards, which were just designed to avoid this kind of problems. They are afraid. No more comments.

The scanning of the Debian source archive for security bugs has begun. I've wrote about this previously and there was some interest in how it worked, so I've put up a simple webpage describing the process. There are a lot of results to go through, but so far I've managed to find one local root exploit and many many many trivial problems. Sample bugs:

• came: buffer overflow in handling $HOME
• aatv: Buffer overflow in handling environmental variables.

Unfortunately my usertags seem to be broken. This was working a day or two ago. Not sure if I fucked up or if the BTS is broken ..?

Xen (a system for running multiple virtual Linux machines) and has some obvious benefits for testing Heartbeat (the clustering system) - the cheapest new machine that is on sale in Australia can be used to simulate a four node cluster. I’m not sure whether there is any production use for a cluster running under Xen (I look forward to seeing some comments or other blog posts about this). Most cluster operations run on a Xen virtual machine in the same way as they would under physically separate machines, and Xen even supports simulating a SAN or fiber-channel shared storage device if you use the syntax phy:/dev/VG/LV,hdd,w! in the Xen disk configuration line (the exclamation mark means that the volume is writable even if someone else is writing to it). The one missing feature is the ability to STONITH a failed node. This is quite critical as the design of Heartbeat is that a service on a node which is not communicating will not be started on another node until the failed node comes up after a reboot or the STONITH sub-system states that it has rebooted it or turned it off. This means that the failure of a node implies the permanent failure of all services on it until/unless the node can be STONITH’d. To solve this problem I have written a quick Xen STONITH module. The first issue is how to communicate between the DomU’s (Xen virtual machines) and the Dom0 (the physical host). It seemed that the best way to do this is to ssh to special accounts on the Dom0 and then use sudo to run a script that calls the Xen xm utility to actually restart the node. That way the Xen virtual machine gets limited access to the Dom0, and the shell script could even be written to allow each VM to only manage a sub-set of the VMs on the host (so you could have multiple virtual clusters on the one physical host and prevent them from messing with each other through accident or malice). xen ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/local/sbin/xen-stonith Above is the relevant section from my /etc/sudoers file. It allows user xen to execute the script /usr/local/sbin/xen-stonith as root to do the work. One thing to note is that from each of the DomU’s you must be able to ssh from root on the node to the specified account for the Xen STONITH service without using a password and without any unreasonable delay (IE put UseDNS no in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. The below section (which isn’t in the feed) there are complete scripts for configuring this. (more…)

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Those of you that look at photos on my blog may have noticed that I recently switched from a self-hosted Gallery2 installation to the popular photo-sharing site Flickr.

I initially decided to try Flickr for a simple reason: digikam's image upload to Gallery2 has never worked for me, and I hoped that its Flickr upload would work (it did).

I had heard good things about Flickr from friends and colleagues, so I gave it a try.

First Impressions

Almost the first thing I noticed about Flickr was that there are people there that are interested in the same things I'm interested in. I discovered the Anabaptist History group. I've been contacted by a person in North Dakota that is interested German-speaking Russians, as my ancestors were. There are groups about Debian, classic-style black & white photography on digital cameras, and really just about any topic. These groups contain both discussions and a photo "pool" to which any group member can post.

In one sense, Flickr is social networking via photography.

Flickr also seems to be a company with a clue. It has tons of open APIs, permitting everything from flickrfs (mount flickr as a FUSE filesystem) to countless uploaders, mashups, scripts, etc. Despite a couple of recent high-publicity controversies, they seem to be laid back overall and haven't been turned into a corporate drone by Yahoo. There's an RSS feed for just about everything, too.

What is Flickr?

Depends on what you want it to be. It could be that place where you post your cell phone's snapshots, or a place to share photos with family in private, or just a place to find other's work.

I found sharing and talking with others to be infectious. I went from never getting comments on photos on my Gallery2 site to wondering what people will think -- and looking at their photos too.

Let's look at its different aspects in more detail.

Uploading Photos

You can upload photos manually with a HTTP form, or you can use any of the numerous uploading tools. Most of these will let you scale down your images on the fly, should you wish to. Most will also let you assign tags and write descriptions as they're being posted, as well as define who can view the photos. Uploaders are available for every common platform.

Flickr has a AJAX tool called the Organizr that helps you assign tags, add photos to groups, put them in sets, etc. It's fairly nice.

Sharing Photos

Making photos available to the public is easy. You can just them them a link to your photostream. You can also tag photos and give people a link to photos with a specific tag. And you can create sets -- photos around a specific theme.

Security

Each photo can be made visible to: just you, just your contacts marked "family", just your contacts marked "friend", any of your contacts, or anyone at all. This can be defined per photo.

On a global basis, you can define whether you make EXIF information visible on the site, default security for new uploads, who can post comments, who can post photo notes or add tags, and who can use the "all sizes" button.

You can also control how much of your profile to make public. Settings range from making everything public to concealing even your email address.

For sets, you can also send out a "Guest Pass" (GP). A GP lets someone that is not a Flickr member see non-public photos. I use GPs to share family photos, so that family doesn't have to create a Flickr account to see them. GPs can be tied only to sets.

Groups

Flickr groups appear to have been designed for discussions, but I find them most attractive because each group has its own dedicated photo pool. Members of the group can add their photos to the pool. Some groups have tens of thousands of photos, and others a few dozen. It's an interesting way to find images. There are a lot of group management tools as well.

Free vs. Paid Accounts

Free account holders can upload up to 100MB of photos per month. There is no cap on bandwidth consumed by views of photos or management of them. Free users can create up to 3 sets and put photos in up to 10 groups.

The photostream for free account holders will show only their 200 most recent photos. Additionally, the "All Sizes" button will max out at the Large size, which generally will be 1024 pixels along the longest side.

Paid accounts are $25/year and include unlimited upload bandwidth (10MB max per photo though), unlimited photostream size, unlimited sets, and removal of all ads on the site. Additionally, the original upload is made available to you. If you have enabled the All Sizes button, it's also made available to the public. One nice thing is that with a free account, all that data is saved, even if it isn't available. So if you later upgrade to Pro, it's all there.

Prints

Flickr sells prints of your photos for $0.15 each. As with viewing, you can designate who can purchase prints of your photos. I ordered a test batch and they turned out very nice -- approximately the same quality as Shutterfly, which is one of the better consumer-quality labs. They are a bit pricier than Shutterfly when buying in bulk, though the convenience of all the Flickr uploaders may make up for that.

Annoyances

There are a few things that bug me.

One is that the "All Sizes" button is either on or off. Once I upgraded to pro, suddenly my original size images were available. There is no way with a pro account to limit image availability to the 1024xwhatever size like there is with free -- either you give people the medium size only (500xwhatever) or you give them everything. Those that want to have the originals on Flickr generally upload twice: once in original size, kept private; and another resized to 1024xwhatever, made public.

It is also complex for some people to join Flickr. Several of our family and friends had trouble with the signup process, since you first have to create a Yahoo account, then a Flickr one, which can use a different username. It's a nice flexibility, but overly complex for people that just want to sign up quickly. Guest Passes have received rave reviews however -- with the one caveat that the guest pass URLs aren't bookmarkable (they set a cookie and then redirect to the real target).

There is also no built-in way to see all the new photos in the groups you're a member of. However, each group's pool has an RSS feed so I have just subscribed to them with bloglines.

Overall

Overall I am happy with Flickr. I will be migrating my Gallery2 install to it, and will not miss having to maintain Yet Another PHP Script on my server. The best part about Flickr is the community, which has already taught me about mpix.com, which I'll write about tomorrow.

I’m just sitting in the night venue of Debconf7 and do several tasks in the same moment, that includes: * Getting kind of a spanish course on IRC in #debian-qt-kde * Get some news from friends in .ch via MSN (there were several unweathers and other troubles) * Think about tdbackup which is the topic of this blog entry. So what is tdbackup? It is just another backup implementation but it should work kind of distributed. I manage several servers and in that farm are 3 backup servers with a tape drive, every sunday i mount parts of the other machines via NFS and write them with tar to the tape. Until I did that by hand because there was no implementation which fits my needs unfortunately. This is the point where tdbackup jumps in. I want to create a GUI which edits an ini file in the form of: [backupmachine 1] mount = bla1:/home mount = bla2:/home tdbackup will then distribute a specifically generated configfile to each backuphost and a little python script which is called by cron and mounts the file systems, write some information into mysql and generate warning messages via e-mail if the tape is almost full. So, I will be able to sleep better because the stuff is auto-documented in a way. I’m still thinking about how exactly i want to implement that, if there are any interested people who would like to join that project, please just tell me.