Today as we were getting ready to head out, Terah said to me, "There are people on our yard with cameras and I don't know who they are!"

I looked out and they looked friendly, so I went on out and said hi.

I'm glad I did, too, because these weren't just any random people with cameras. The group included Ed, who grew up in what is now our house. He's probably in his 70s or 80s now. His wife, son, and daughter-in-law were along, too. They had all driven up from Oklahoma and wanted to see the old farm. Ed's family had sold it to my grandparents back in the 40s.

They apologized for tresspassing. I told them, "I don't mind as long as you share a few stories."

Ed told us that he remembered the second story and kitchen being added on to the house when he was about 10, shortly after it was moved to its present location. He remembered his dad building the elevator that still stands on our property. It is quite the marvel of engineering and craftsmanship. I learned that its first power source was an engine from a Model T.

Ed kept looking at the house smiling. A few years ago, maybe 2 or 3, he got to see the place for the first time in 40 years. But it wasn't doing so well then already. He said we had done a wonderful job restoring it. He remembered, back before there was a sidewalk, sitting on the porch letting his feet dangle in the mud. Or sitting out there Sunday evenings making ice cream.

I invited them to take a quick look inside. They politely declined, not wanting to impose. Terah and I assured them that it would be fine, though we did need to leave in a few minutes. They came inside and Ed started describing the place to his family.

He pointed to the oak floor in the living room. "Is that original?" I told him, "Yes, it is; we added on about 2 feet to it but the rest of it is original." He said that he helped lay that floor. I asked him something I had been wondering for awhile: did they put the oak floor on top of a pine floor? He smiled and said, "Yes, we sure did!"

We came to the office. He asked if the wood ceilings were original. Yes, I told him they are. He confirmed what I had heard about the reason for a burned spot on the office floor: that someone had opened a wood stove and a live log fell out. He also asked if we had taken out the chimney. Yes, we did, but we saved the bricks. "Ah! We had a chimney fire in there one time! We all thought the whole house might burn down." I told him that the bricks still were marked from that.

He told me of one time he was standing on the north side of the house, idly throwing stones at it. His sister was playing piano at a window, in what is now the office. One of Ed's stones went through the window and hit her (but didn't hurt her seriously). "Boy did I ever hear about breaking that window!" One of his relatives asked, "What about hitting your sister?" "Well, that wasn't as bad as the window."

This isn't the first time something like this has happened. It's really neat to hear stories about the place and learn about its life before it came to be in my family.

I was glad I went out and said hi to our visitors instead of ignoring them or chasing them off.

Good things can come from strangers sometimes. I think I'm going to gather up a batch of photos and send them to Ed and his family, along with a few questions for them!

thanks to Rapha l again. git gc, nice hooks, branch tracking, ... all this is yours. Now that git-gc is on alioth, as alioth has a gitserver (and hence provides a not dumb transport like http), please run git gc from time to time so that repositories keeps beeing small (hi XSF ;p) FWIW I also will maintain git-core backports on bpo starting ... now. [sorry for the closed comments, I can't stand spam on my blog anymore]

There are 1988 and 1989 papers by Cyclecraft Author John Franklin about poor accident records of the Milton Keynes Redways which are often cited by cyclists as showing why cycle facilities are dangerous or "farcilities". But I grew up riding the Redways and I think the closest I came to seeing a Redway-caused injury was when we accidentally rode onto an under-construction stretch by mistake and met a road roller. I journeyed to work all the way along the north-west edge when I was employed in MK one summer. (The cross-city Redway I used was fairly quiet on the journey to work around 0700 but quite busy on the return - looked like "school run" traffic.) I lived three miles from the MK boundary for a decade and so I've had some time to think about this. I think condemning the Milton Keynes Redways as dangerous farcilities is simplistic and misguided. Here's why: Milton Keynes was one of the first English cities to have cycle routes designed in from the start. This means that there are cycle tracks of types and in spaces that we hadn't seen before. Where else did you get a network of both low-friction surface high-speed cycle routes with sweeping bends and grade-seperated junctions and connecting routes to every estate? How many places have that added since? Almost nowhere. Milton Keynes is a massive cycle track experiment. In the 1989 paper, Franklin comments that it was "constructed with few limitations of space or finance" which simply doesn't ring true - the experiment didn't go completely to plan and the "secondary grid" of Redways between district centres mentioned in the 1998 paper has simply never appeared. Nevertheless, there are things that work amazingly well, but there are others which are now obviously stupid, like not protecting the sight lines at some junctions and putting late-80s estate routes alongside feeder roads, where they have more frequent and busier level junctions. I believe some of the London data also suggests that the non-separated junctions are one of the three most dangerous places, which suggests that Milton Keynes is not a cycle track advocate's perfect design in the first place. I'll continue to explain what else I disagree and agree with from the Franklin articles over a few more posts. If you have comments about the Redways or these articles, I'd like to hear them: please use the comments form at the bottom of my page.

• Nobody can get it up anymore
• Everybody's horribly sick (and needs illegally acquired medicine)
• The world below the equator is full of dead filthy rich people who need their money transferred off some obscure account by someone above the equator
• The world above the equator is filled with filthy rich people who win the lottery every other day. Twice.
• ... and to fix that, luckily there're stock markets that work, with guaranteed interest rates of 20% or more.
• And last but not least: everyone has five pentabytes of diskspace.

Now if only.

Things not to do with lvm and crypto At least as of june, 2007, you should never do this: "...I need some encrypted storage space...":

lvcreate -L1G -n test vgname
cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/vgname/test
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/vgname/test test1
mke2fs -j /dev/mapper/test1
mount /dev/mapper/test1 /mnt
# ...copy important data to /tmp...

"...oh, I need more space...":

lvresize -L+1G /dev/vgname/test
# cryptsetup resize test1 did not seem to
# work, so why not try this instead:
cryptsetup reload test1 /dev/vgname/test
resize2fs /dev/mapper/test1

Message from syslogd@localhost at Sun Jun 10 13:17:37 2007 ... localhost kernel: journal commit I/O error

"...oh damn. What happened?":

umount /mnt
mount /dev/mapper/test1 /mnt

EXT3-fs warning (device dm-13): ext3_clear_journal_err: Filesystem error recorded from previous mount: IO failure EXT3-fs warning (device dm-13): ext3_clear_journal_err: Marking fs in need of filesystem check.

"...let's check it then...":

umount /mnt
e2fsck /dev/mapper/test1

"...what the hell is going on?":

e2fsck -fy /dev/mapper/test1

"...$ & ! ^ @ $ ( Y ^ Q ! @ % # !!!".

My internal clock is finding it hard to believe that it’s light outside right now, which might have something to do with the fact that I’m sitting in Shannon, Ireland. Since I only got maybe two hours of sleep on the plane, I wonder if I’m going to crash horribly later today. I haven’t flown internationally since 2000, so I was a little paranoid about it being a horrible nightmare, but so far it hasn’t been. I haven’t managed to trip any metal detectors yet, though I did accidentally leave my laptop in my bag when I sent it through the scanner at Logan. The security people were nice enough about it, however. I’m not carrying much in terms of carry-ons, so things have been smooth. I completely forgot that “long-haul” flights serve meals. Aer Lingus has a standard meal offering consisting of “chicken” or “beef”, neither of which are very good for vegans. Apparently if you call their reservations office in advance of your flight you can order special meals, of which vegan vegetarian is an option. But I definitely don’t remember this being mentioned at all (or at least very prominently) during the booking process, so I never thought of checking. I had just written off being able to eat the airline food and brought granola bars and snacks. Apparently this was a wrong assumption. I was originally going to FlyGlobespan, but ended up changing my mind after experiencing their entirely broken website which didn’t allow me to make a booking, and waiting a week for a response to their “feedback form” and never getting any, all the while watching their fares creep up as every day passed. Luckily the flight I ended up getting wasn’t too much more expensive, and even allowed me the flexibility to fly into London and out from Glasgow, making it easier to accomplish my plans of visiting Dafydd Harries, Hanna Wallach, and Matthew Garrett in the “other” Cambridge before ending up at Debconf!

Modern Intel SATA chipsets (anything from the ICH6m onwards) can be driven in two modes - one that looks awfully like an old-fashioned PATA controller, and one that conforms to the AHCI specification. Windows deals badly with AHCI, so BIOS authors tend to program them to PIIX mode. Some BIOSes have an option to let you choose which is used, but most don't so you end up stuck with PIIX mode.

This is a bit of a shame, since AHCI supports functionality that isn't really present in PIIX mode. For laptop users, one of the more interesting features is AHCI's link-level power saving. At the cost of some performance, it's possible to save 0.5W or so. There are patches beginning to appear for this, but it's no help to people stuck with PIIX support. Over the past couple of days I've been looking into what's necessary to reprogram the chipset into AHCI mode. The biggest issue is finding some MMIO space for the AHCI registers. Most BIOS authors don't program the AHCI base address register, which means trying to find some spare address space to map it. I've hacked support for this into the PCI layer and added a quirk that attempts to reprogram chips into AHCI mode. It's not really ready for proper use yet, but it'd be good to get some amount of testing to see if there are obvious issues. The code is here and ought to apply to current git. Obviously, you'll need ahci support in your kernel.

I often want to write blog posts about HTML code and about source code in various languages. One problem I have is that the characters I want to use have special meanings (EG < and >), another is that I indent source code to make it readable and I don’t want the spaces trimmed from the start of lines. I initially wrote a simple Perl script to replace characters such as < with HTML codes. I then had to extend it to escaping quote characters because Wordpress tries to get smart and change quotes in a way that might look nice when dealing with plain text, but is just a pain when dealing with code. The next problem I had is that when I used the <PRE> tag around some text to preserve the white-space Wordpress would double-space the text (IE insert a blank line between every two lines of code). This was annoying when reading it and in some situations would change the meaning of the code! The solution I have found to these problems is to use the below script and not use the <PRE> tag. Also I tried using the <CODE> tag, but it made no difference to the end result as far as I could see. The below script is what I am currently using. It is working well with shell scripts, HTML, and XML so far. Update: The way that -- is munged by Wordpress to – is something that I find particularly annoying. I already had this in the script but forgot to mention it in the post.
(more…)

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For about nine years, my domain deuxchevaux.org was hosted (which means web, DNS and a catchall e-mail forward) by Internett at Saarbr cken. Although it was a sponsered hosting without much support I was quite happy with their service. But especially my ideas and demands regarding spam filtering grew out of the possibilities of a mass hosting solution. Since I run my own web, mail and name servers for a while now, it was no question that also deuxchevaux.org should become self-hosted. Since I run a root-server at Hetzner and their “robot” also offers domain handling, I planned to transfer deuxchevaux.org to them. Therefore I first had to register my two DNS servers (sym.noone.org and virt.noone.org) with them. In the documentation there was a note that for .org domains, name servers in a .org domain have to be registered with the same registrar. And just a few hours after registering the name servers via their web interface I got a mail from Hetzner Support that the domain of my name servers are not registered with Hetzner and so I cannot use them form .org domains. Asking for the cause of this rule, I got the answer that this is a rule by Hetzner’s upstream registrar, Cronos AG. Well, since I don’t understand such arbitrarily looking rules, I was looking around for another registrar with usable web interface. On the DaLUG mailing list, someone recommended eDNS. Since their single user account is free of setup and monthly fees, I signed up with them and started playing around with their web interface. When I tried to transfer deuxchevaux.org using the Auth-Code, I got the response that the transfer failed and when I clicked on “Details”, I got “$VAR1 = [];” as detailed information about the failure. Data::Dumper says hello. I wrote them and asked if they can tell me, what that should mean last Thursday and got no answer so far. I don’t think, I’ll register domains with them anymore. So where to try it now? Someone recommended GoDaddy, but I neither like their website (way too much targeted on beginners and mainstream) nor do I want to apply for a credit card or a PayPal account to be able to pay their bills. So a bill from my UML hoster Korypet (aka VD Server) caught my eye: They were lowering prices for registrations at some top level domains (and in comparison to the recent lowerings at eDNS the new prices also apply to existing contracts) including .at and .org (and I only have .at, .ch and .org domains). I didn’t knew they also do domains outside of selling them in packages with UML hosts. So I wrote to Korypet support, if they offer a web interface for domain handling and got a reply less than two hours later: Not yet, but they’re working on it. Until then, I can request domain handling tasks by e-mail to their support. Since I know their UML managing web interface – which works fine – and since I’m happy with their support, service and prices since years (I’m customer there since 2003), I replied with all the necessary data for the transfer. Well, the transfer failed, too. But in comparsion to Hetzner or eDNS, they made the effort to exactly find out, what happened. So what did happen? The rule which the Hetzner support guy told me that it was from their upstream registrar wasn’t from there but from Public Internet Registry (PIR) itself. And the rule seems to match not that often, so that many people involved in domain registration don’t know about it (and usually neither understand its existence when they hear about it). Also I have no understanding for this harassment and so I felt the strong urge to get one over on them. Korypet suggested several solutions fitting my needs (i.e. the usage of my DNS servers for my domains). They even offered A records under some of their PIR registrered domains pointing to the IP addresses of my DNS servers for no fee, but luckily some A records under my own .ch domain sufficed. So the transfer was successful on Friday evening, 6pm local time, my own mail server (running Postfix) was happily rejecting a lot of spam to (and even from) non-existing users (which came in over the catch-all before) as well as hosts greeting with not fully qualified or invalid HELOs and greylisting others via David Schweikert’s Postgrey. The number of accepted mails and recognized spam sunk immediately by approximately factor four on the whole mail server, although deuxchevaux.org isn’t the only domain that receives mail there (but was the only one which had a catch-all before). So in the long run, I’ll probably move all .org and .at domains over to Korypet since they have not only fair prices but also a competent and individual support. (And yes, this is a recommendation. ;-)

This is the first link to the Taft Hill Neighborhood Association. Probably only of interest if you live on or near Taft Hill Park/Terrace in Roslindale, Massachusetts, but I’ve got to get it out there somehow. This was also my first experience with the Google Maps API. It took about two minutes to figure out, except that the syntax to display a “hybrid mode” map was not trivial to find. For the record, it turns out the answer was:

map.setCenter(new GLatLng(latitude, longitude), zoom, G_HYBRID_MAP);

Let’s see how long it takes for my new email address to start receiving spam.

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After asking last week if anyone had any experience with Project Honeypot, I got one response, from Chris Samuel, who was pretty positive about the whole thing:

I'm one of the people contributing, from the stats on my site it appears I've contributed to the identification of 6 harvesters and a comment spammer. I'm only running it on one site at the moment, but it seems to be a useful service and once it's up and running it seems fairly inconspicuous.

I decided to give it a go myself, and signed up. It's pretty nifty the way it all works. You can do a number of different things to be part of the project, from linking to other people's honeypots (through the trivial act of adding some HTML to your web pages), or you can setup a honeypot of your own (which is done in an ingenious manner, and just requires you to be able to run one of a bunch of different forms of dynamic script -- about ten minutes work, tops). You can also contribute a domain (or subdomain) which the project will use as a spamtrap domain -- all you have to do there is add an MX record. The use of lots of different domains makes it harder for spammers to filter known spamtrap domains out of their lists. In exchange you get good karma from helping to identify network abusers, and you can monitor chunks of IP space (such as space that your company sub-leases to others, for example) for evidence of abuse, or use the collected data to block abusers from your own web servers through the project's http:BL service. The http:BL, for me, is probably the most valuable "payback". It lists IP addresses that have been used recently by comment spammers, address harvesters, and other abusers of HTTP resources. It's not a list of spam sources, though -- there's no shortage of DNSBLs for that. The project has an Apache module that can query the list and re-route or block requests from those IP addresses, and there's also a Wordpress plugin that queries the list (not that I use Wordpress, but it's an example of what can be done). Unlike Chris, I haven't helped to identify any bad activity yet, but there's been some activity on my honeypot, so I'm hoping that I'll catch someone soon. I think it's worth getting involved and contributing what you can -- there's very little cost involved (I got all my resources setup inside of an hour, and I haven't noticed any increased load on my server or bandwidth), and everyone wants to stop Internet abuse. So please, take a look at the project and consider joining.

Two days ago, I noticed that a post from last year about my wallet getting stolen had attracted over 60 spams. So I went in, deleted all of them individually (because I can't select multiple comments to delete in Blogger), then closed comments on the post.

This morning, I caught up on my Planet Debian email, and discovered that Blogger had decided to make that post "new", so it showed up on Planet again! Argh!

So don't worry, I didn't lose my wallet again. Blogger is just nuts.

tm suggested:

"delete the feeds you find yourself reading less and less frequently"

In general, maybe, but there are always exceptions, like feeds which rarely update but carry important information when they do. I guess I should scan my subscriptions to see if there are any extremely unupdated feeds. Update: tm clarified:

"I meant those feeds you've subscribed to, but find out you don't read so often, regardless of how often they're updated. for me, one of those is/was: http://feeds.howstuffworks.com/DailyStuff"

That's not so easy for me to tell. I read my subscriptions through a planet-like page, so they appear in the page flow whether or not I expand them or not. Matt Palmer replied:

"I've got to say that I've never had a problem commenting on Limes & Lycopene. I suspect that the problem you had with Alexis Sukrieh's blog was likely unrelated to SpamKarma2 (or if it was SK2, it was a dodgy deployment -- you don't sound too sure what the cause of his breakage was). On the other hand, if there is anything broken on a blog, the polite thing to do is to tell the owner about it -- it might not necessarily be a problem for everyone (although with SQL errors and things like that, it should be possible for the site owner to get error reports via e-mail, but how often do you reckon that gets done?). And yes, Captchas give me the faeces too. For L&L, at least, I know for a fact that any problems will get looked at and fixed up damn quick. Contact e-mail is on Kathryn's site."

I sent a pingback. No response yet. I'll try email if there's no response later.

"Oh, and a comment on your comment system -- the text entry box is tiny (6 lines by maybe 35 characters just isn't enough for a literate comment)."

My preference is for 40x20 but if I make it that big, I get feedback that it's too big. It's always a compromise. It's meant to be about 22x8 now, but what size should it be?

Not so long ago, I blogged about my trials and tribulations with Blue Cross Blue Shield of NJ. I got a very interesting response that I will blog about later today or tomorrow, though I can’t say the outcome has been to my liking. While my problems with BCBS have not reached the status of truly horrific, I do think they are indicative of the how many insurance companies operate: with total lack of transparency and often, integrity (again more on this later). For those of you who have had horror stories, Michael Moore is now calling for collecting your horror stories as a consequence of the American health care system and health insurance companies. Do take the time to make a video if you have a story to tell.

Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Sucede que entro en las sastrer as y en los cines
marchito, impenetrable, como un cisne de fieltro
Navegando en un agua de origen y ceniza.

El olor de las peluquer as me hace llorar a gritos.
S lo quiero un descanso de piedras o de lana,
s lo quiero no ver establecimientos ni jardines,
ni mercader as, ni anteojos, ni ascensores.

Sucede que me canso de mis pies y mis u as
y mi pelo y mi sombra.
Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.

Sin embargo ser a delicioso
asustar a un notario con un lirio cortado
o dar muerte a una monja con un golpe de oreja.
Ser a bello
ir por las calles con un cuchillo verde
y dando gritos hasta morir de fr o

No quiero seguir siendo ra z en las tinieblas,
vacilante, extendido, tiritando de sue o,
hacia abajo, en las tapias mojadas de la tierra,
absorbiendo y pensando, comiendo cada d a.

No quiero para m tantas desgracias.
No quiero continuar de ra z y de tumba,
de subterr neo solo, de bodega con muertos
ateridos, muri ndome de pena.

Por eso el d a lunes arde como el petr leo
cuando me ve llegar con mi cara de c rcel,
y a lla en su transcurso como una rueda herida,
y da pasos de sangre caliente hacia la noche.

Y me empuja a ciertos rincones, a ciertas casas h medas,
a hospitales donde los huesos salen por la ventana,
a ciertas zapater as con olor a vinagre,
a calles espantosas como grietas.

Hay p jaros de color de azufre y horribles intestinos
colgando de las puertas de las casas que odio,
hay dentaduras olvidadas en una cafetera,
hay espejos
que debieran haber llorado de verg enza y espanto,
hay paraguas en todas partes, y venenos, y ombligos.
Yo paseo con calma, con ojos, con zapatos,
con furia, con olvido,
paso, cruzo oficinas y tiendas de ortopedia,
y patios donde hay ropas colgadas de un alambre:
calzoncillos, toallas y camisas que lloran
lentas l grimas sucias.


Pablo Neruda

Our GP didn't weight or measure Leif at his 2 month mark, but I was surprised to see a baby scale at the vet's yesterday (For more on the adventures with Lucy, see auzure_skies' postings).

So, as off 2007-06-06, Leif is 16.8 pounds or 7.6kg. =)

As I mentioned before, I'm getting quite harsh in unsubscribing from buggy feeds. I'm also being quite harsh in not subscribing to sites which have broken feedback systems like no comment box or email address, broken (rather than non-existant) trackback/pingback support, eyetests, or dumb tools like Spam Karma 2. Therefore, I'm not subscribing to Limes & Lycopene, recommended by Brane Dump: The Thoughts of Matt Palmer, because although it's an interesting site it has a broken feedback route, which makes it less attractive. It's more than a bit annoying to want to interact and then be blocked by a broken site. I still subscribe to about 100 sites, but that number will probably fall further. How do you decide what sites to drop?

A friend recommended me Steve Miller and Sharon Lee’s Liaden books. The first question, reading order, was not very easy to find an answer to. I went with publication order within the Agent of Change sequence – Agent of Change, Conflict of Honors, Carpe Diem, Plan B, and I Dare. In retrospect it would have been better to start with Conflict of Honors followed by Agent of Change, as this corresponds to story chronology, and AoC and CD have the same protagonists while CoH doesn’t. The story speed between Plan B and I Dare was too fast to break the sequence, but it might have made the latter book fuller if I had read the first batch of prequels Local Custom and Scout’s Progress before it. The second prequel sequence Crystal Soldier and Crystal Dragon works well at any point in the series, as does the third (single-book) prequel sequence Balance of Trade. I’m still reading Fledgling and the first short story collection. Confusing? I thought so, but it definitely is worth the investment. Instead of all the usual superlatives, I’ll say something unique to this series: These books changed my perspective in that I now cannot read (in any fiction) about a character bowing without asking in my head “in which mode, dammit!?”. (Update on 8th June: The friend referred to above, after reading this section, said (I paraphrase): “In the peculiar mode of humans, of course”.) The Liaden books are romances in a (very good) science-fictional setting. With two exceptions, each book creates at least one new lifetime romantic pairing, and they’re in my opinion convincing romances. One of the exceptions deepens one of the earlier relationships, so there is no lack of romance there. The only place I know where one can get all the novels reliably is Webscriptions, as e-books. Some of the paper books seem to be hard to find, and the recent closing down of the main publisher Meisha Merlin cannot help there. * * * The promotional material for The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle includes a quote by Robert Heinlein: Possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read. It is hard for me to disagree with that statement (including the qualifier, in all honesty), having recently read this book. Mote is a complex first-contact story, set in Pournelle’s alternate history (originally future history) universe. It begins in the year 3017. The recently created Second Empire of Man gets a visit from the aliens, leading to a counter-visit by humans to the aliens’ star system. The aliens seem friendly, but are they? What could they possibly be hiding? In retrospect, the Moties remind me (in style, not in detail) of Orson Scott Card’s Piggies (Speaker for the Dead and sequels); I would be surprised if Card had not read this book before writing his. The sequel, The Gripping Hand is not the masterpiece that Mote is, but I had no trouble enjoying it. The solution to the Motie problem has held for decades, but it won’t hold forever, and it might actually be breaking down now. The mission: save both humans and Moties from an eventual assured mutual destruction. * * * I actually started reading Pournelle’s alternate/future history from the cronological beginning. This is another series where reading order becomes a complicated matter, as many of the books tell parallel subthreads of the story; and it becomes even more complicated by the fact that there is an omnibus edition in which the story is told in chronological order, this having been accomplished by breaking the books down into chunks and then arranging the chunks in chronological order. My reading order went as follows: West of Honor, The Mercenary, Prince of Mercenaries, Go Tell the Spartans and Prince of Sparta. This is a good reading order; my only problem with it is that the protagonist of West of Honor fails to appear in most of the other books. The following is not in my opinion a real spoiler, even though it reveals certain key events of the series. The premise is that sometime between the 1970’s and the early decades of the 21st Century the United States and the Soviet Union form a union, called the CoDominium, which dominates the international politics of the Earth for most of the 21st Century. In early 21st Century, faster-than-light travel is discovered, and the CoDominium starts to colonise other star systems, first with voluntary colonists and then with convicts and involuntary colonists. The series takes place in the final decades of CoDominium, and focuses on the actions of one John Christian Falkenberg (though he is not the protagonist of all the books), first as an officer in the CoDominium (extraterrestrial) military, and then as the Colonel of a mercenary outfit, Falkenberg’s Legion. The Legion is at the center of events that eventually (after the events described in these books) leads to the creation of the first Empire of Man. The books are entertaining military science fiction, solid, enjoyable journeyman pieces.

An interesting opportunity appeared at work. I am going to make a custom D-I image.
It will involve:

• using a custom kernel,
• modifying the repo on the CD,
• using preseeding
• (probably) making a custom initrd.

This way I will probably get back in touch with D-I development ;-) .
Fun, fun fun. Doing Debian stuff at work, payed by my employer!