So, I'm back from Holidays, to find we now have a new Government in Ireland. (An unexpected choice of government, of which more later.) We were camping in Fouesnant, in Brittany; Family & Friends might like to see the holiday snaps here). Camping in France went well. With three children aged 7, 4 and 2, there is only so much you can expect from a family holiday. Like it or not, you have to mind the toddler fairly consistently, and the older kids would like your full attention too. This is a holiday ''for'' the kids; plan also a break ''from'' the kids later (a long-weekend, with kids at grandparents, for example). This was our first time camping abroad, and its well recommended. While we went touring with a camper van with the two older children two years ago, this is different in that we were at the campsite for almost two weeks: the kids got to meet and play with others in a way they couldn't before. Also, there were good facilities at the site in Fouesnant, and the swimming pools in particular were appreciated (Caveat emptor though: there were no lifeguards or supervision. We went off-peak, and there were apparently two accidents in the time we were there: a broken kneecap and chin when people came down the slides too soon after others and collided). It was the first time the children (a) had pocket money to spend, and (b) were able to walk to a (campsite) shop to spend it. Lessons were learnt in the finiteness of pocket money, especially by Caoimhe . The weather was fairly good: two wet days (though not overly so, compared to what we're used to in Galway); enough to give the 'authentic camping experience'. And for the children especially, just warm enough. Long drives South were not an option with young kids, and we wanted to see Carnac and Brittany in general. We went touring to two places: Mont St. Michel, on the way down, Carnac, and locally around Quimper and Concarneau. At seven, Cormac is beginning to be old enough to enjoy this, but Sadhbh at 2 is too young, and easily aggravated. Caoimhe can appreciate some of it, such as the well recommended Breton museum in Quimper, seeing the local costumes and clothing is just her style at the moment. We're looking forward to going back when the kids are older, or we can enjoy touring on our own. The camp site is dominated by English / Dutch / Irish. It is still term-time in Britain and Ireland, which meant the children on the site was full of 2-4 year-olds, with a shortage of playmates for Cormac. Next time, synchronise with English school times, etc. We went during Cormacs term-time because it was much cheaper (1000 Euro) than high-season. If Cormac was having difficulty in school things would have been different, as it is, we had no qualms in doing so. Things will probably be different next year with Caoimhe also in school at the same time, and we would go later. Suffice it to say I think synchonisation of school timetables is a bad idea, as it has led to these huge price differentials and parents taking their kids from school. As a friend with experience of the French school system points out, they've spent the last 40 years desynchronising their timetables ... So would we go again, or buy our own tents, etc? possibly. The brochure for next year arrived already, with large discounts for booking early ... Tags holiday, family, france, brittany, cormac, coimhe, sadhbh

Jaldhar Vyas points to the rogues gallery of oil producing states and argues that Neoconservatism is good, well at least it gets rid of the dictators such as Saddam Hussein while it grabs the oil. As he ightly points out, we are researching new alternative energy sources, and just as importantly (or even more importantly) energy conservation. But we have been doing this for decades. Sooner or later we have to realize that the "Oil Crisis" isn't due to a shortage of energy sources: its due to deliberate politics to make us dependent on oil. Peak Oil is "only" a crisis for us consumers, dependent on oil to drive our cars, heat our houses, and supply our food. For oil companies, it means (1) they are shipping oil at a greater rate than ever before, (2) at higher demand than ever before, and (3) in circumstances where pesky politics like OPEC can't interfere and try and moderate the price down (I'm not arguing OPEC or cartels are good; its just that its long-term 'maximize the benefit for the oil producing nations' strategy interferes with oil companies shorter-term profit maximization). For the Oil Companies, its a good thing. In this context we have to see our current dependence on oil as the result of deliberate policy by the oil companies. The small filip that USanian governments have done towards alternative energy, such as funding Hydrogen fuel-cell research, nuclear power, etc. are so long-term, and so small in scale, that they have to be seen as deliberately not solving the problem. Thinking that research into alternative sources is good is gpoing to save us (disclaimer: as a scientist I think research is a good thing :-)) is missing the real problem. Its politics: the oil companies have simply been better at politics than the strugging alternatives; we need to recognize this, and fight for alternatives. When oil prices reach $100/barrel, and we struggle to pay rising food and energy bills, its because other have deliberately caused the crisis. Oil has often been called a Curse because of the effects 'Oil Wealth' have caused so many countries. They are not co-incidentally dictatorships; Saddam Hussein remained in power in Iraq for so long because it benefitted the West (see the weapons supplies to Iraq in the so-called "Iran-Contra" affair, for example). Ditto Saudi Arabia, remaining 'friends' of the USA despite its ties to 911. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein was about consolidating even more power in the Gulf than America had previously, not democracy. What was planned for Iraq was democracy in name only: all real power was already neutralised, with decisions to US benefit cemented in place before the parliament met: non-negotiable contracts already signed giving US companies control. This is straight imperialism, and cannot be considered democracy or a good thing. Tags environment, oil, politics

So a few folks left some interesting comments in response to my link to the article on the rise of the alpha-girl based on the research of Harvard psychologist, Dan Kindlon. My response to both Joe and Karl is that it is worthy to lower the barriers to entry not because girls will change the cultural ecology of geekdom in positive ways (though they may) or because geekdom is inherently “omg totally awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” but for a much more mundane reason: it may allow girls to follow interests and eventually discover a passion. I think it is a great idea if more women were involved in geekdom and open source development not because it is inherently great but because I am sure there a lot of women out there who would enjoy it (and by extension, I am sure a lot who would not). By highlighting this article I am not advocating some forced hacker-female-labor-migration-policy but pointing to the fact that social conditions outside of geekdom play a role in ensuring more participation among women. But let me explain a few things before I argue my position a little further. First a little clarification, especially now that I have read the article. By alpha the author does not mean dominant, aggressive, and totally jerky, which is what might immediately come to mind when you read/hear alpha (especially if one knows any alpha-geeks or alpha-lawyers for that matter, who are much worse, imho). And I certainly don’t want any more alpha-anything (alpha-women, alpha-dogs, alpha-cats, alpha-hamsters ) given our world is already chock-full of alpha-jerks. By using the term, the author basically means confidence, which apparently is on the rise among girls, leaving them much more likely to be go-getters, undaunted by explicit and implicit barriers and obstacles and thus more likely then ever to enter arenas that have been thought of as traditionally male or in fact totally dominated by males. If this trend is indeed in place, I think it is great and I hope that this eventually translates into more girls/women populating traditionally male areas whether it is neurology, movie directing, hacking, or surfing. What I appreciate about the article is that his research can help us question the idea that women are naturally averse to competition due to their estrogenic hormones while boys, brimming with testosterone, just love it and exude it. I never identified with that conventional well-worn script, in part because I guess I am fairly confident and somewhat competitive. Being in academia for the last 10 years, I have witnessed a lot of really confident women that have helped inspire me and keep me going, especially when times got rough. What is fascinating about the article (and by extension probably his book) is that gender parity and equity and changes in the psychological makeup of women have not changed overnight but have taken a much longer time to settle in place. We are only now bearing the fruits of structural and educational changes first instituted decades ago and that tackled some serious forms of discrimination. As a result, we are seeing girls and women donning a deeper confidence that may help them participate with more success in the arenas they want to whether it be sports or in the workplaces (though there are certainly still major barriers and issues, which are addressed in the article). So why would someone want to participate in the world of free software and hacking in particular? My first answer is there may be any number of reasons why anyone, female or male or transgender or whatever, may want to do so for the love of technology, to feel an intense belonging to a community who share your passions and who work together to create something with a lot of value, to enjoy the challenge of learning, to spread freedom to every corner of the earth, etc… It is not that geekdom is inherently fun and exciting but that it will be interesting to some slice of the population men or women (or other) and what is the harm in lowering the barriers to entry, especially if it brings enjoyment and frankly a lot of economic security too? There are a number of girls/women who already find it worthwhile and I am sure many more who would. And the point is not to create some policy to make sure that we shuttle women into hackerdom but as a society we should equip them with the necessary psychological tools so that if they think this is worthwhile, and discover that they love it, etc, they will dare to venture in there and more importantly, stay if they want to. In terms of Karls point that a lot of people are professional geeks in part because they d have trouble being anything else; like being gay, it s not a choice, I think that is far too narrow of an assessment, not to mention an outdated caricature of geeks. While there is certainly a class of socially awkward geeks (if that is what you mean??), I would say they are in the minority though they may certainly stand out precisely because they are the odd ducks and because the stereotype is so entrenched. Many geeks I have met, while they may pretty darn focused on geekdom, also have full and rich lives/personalities that cannot be easily collapsed into one immutable personality type. Yes they may be obsessed with tech but aren’t doctors, academics, musicians, lawyers sort of fanatical too? I spend like my whole week working on academic stuff (part of necessity, part out of love). And at least hacking has way better conferences and economic perks, which may help explain why people stay Finally, I think you assume a little to strongly that we do what we do because we have a pre-formed existing desired to do so. While I think this is the case for many things (and I knew the minute I learned about anthropology, I wanted to be one, which was odd but it proved to be correct), I think desire is also formed as much through experience and hence the importance of exposure to different worlds and experiences. I know that there are many things I could have never imagined I would have loved–karoake and sailing are two things that come to mind—until I tried them about both took some degree of courage. In the later case, it took a lot of guts to move onto some ship at the age of 18 instead of going to college and I am so glad I did. This is an instance where confidence and an initial curiosity led to discovering a love and passion I never knew I had. So if desire can be formed and not just expressed, I think it is key to make sure people have all sorts of opportunities to cultivate the passions they never knew they had.

Using the “ulimit” controls over process resource use it is possible to limit RAM for processes and to limit the number of processes per UID. The problem is that this often is only good for accidental problems not dealing with malicious acts. For a multi-user machine each user needs to be allowed to have two processes to be able to do anything (IE the shell and a command that they execute). A more practical limit is five processes for a single shell session (one or two background jobs, a foreground job where one process pipes data to another, and the shell). But even five processes is rather small (a single Unix pipe can have more than that). A shell server probably needs a limit of 20 processes per user if each user will have the possibility of running multiple logins. For running the occasional memory intensive process such as GCC the per-process memory limit needs to be at least 20M, if the user was to compile big C++ programs then 100M may be needed (I’ve seen a G++ process use more than 90M of memory when compiling a KDE source file). This means that a single user who can launch 20 processes which can each use 20M of memory could use 400M of memory, if they have each process write to a pages in a random order then 400M of RAM would be essentially occupied by that user. If a shell server had 512M of RAM (which until quite recently was considered a lot of memory - the first multi-user Linux machine I ran on the net had 4M of RAM) then 400M of that could be consumed by a single hostile user. Leaving 100M for the real users might make the machine unusable. Note that the “hostile user” category also encompasses someone who gets fooled by the “here’s a cool program you should run” trick (which is common in universities). I put my first SE Linux Play Machine [1] on the net in the middle of 2002 and immediately faced problems with DOS attacks. I think that the machine had 128M of RAM and because the concept was new (and SE Linux itself was new and mysterious) many people wanted to login. Having 20 shell users logged in at one time was not uncommon, so a limit of 50 processes for users was minimal. Given that GCC was a necessary part of the service (users wanted to compile their own programs to test various aspects of SE Linux) the memory limit per process had to be high. The point of the Play Machine was to demonstrate that “root” was restricted by SE Linux such that even if all Unix access control methods failed then SE Linux would still control access (with the caveat that a kernel bug still makes you lose). So as all users logged into the same account (root) the process limit had to be adequate to handle all their needs, 50 processes was effectively the bare minimum. 50 processes with 5M of memory each is more than enough to cause a machine with 128M of RAM to swap to death. One thing to note is that root owned system processes count towards the ulimit for user processes as SE Linux does not have any resource usage controls. The aim of the SE Linux project is access control not protection against covert channels [2]. This makes it a little harder to restrict things as the number of processes run by daemons such as Postfix varies a little over time so the limits have to be a little higher to compensate, while Postfix is run with no limits the processes that it creates apply to the global limit when determining whether user processes can call fork(). So it was essentially impossible to implement any resource limits on my Play Machine that would prevent a DOS. I changed the MOTD (message of the day - displayed at login time) to inform people that a DOS attack is the wrong thing to do. I implemented some resource limits but didn’t seriously expect them to help much (the machine was DOSed daily). Recently I had a user of my Play Machine accidentally DOS it and ask whether I should install any resource limits. After considering the issue I realised that I can actually do so in a useful manner nowadays. My latest Play Machine is a Xen DomU which I have now assigned 300M of RAM, I have configured the limit for root processes to be 45, as the system and my login comprise about 30 processes that leaves 15 for unprivileged (user_r) logins. Of recent times my Play Machine hasn’t been getting a lot of interest, having two people logged in at the same time is unusual so 15 processes should be plenty. Each process is limited to 20M of memory so overflowing the 300M of RAM should take a moderate amount of effort. Recently I intentionally have not used swap space on that machine to save on noise when there’s a DOS attack (on the assumption that the DOS attack would succeed regardless of the amount of swap). Now that I have put resource limits in place I have installed 400M of swap space. A hostile user can easily prevent other unprivileged users from logging in by keeping enough long-running processes active - but they could achieve the same goal by having a program kill users shells as soon as they login (which a few people did in the early days). But it should not be trivial for them to prevent me from logging in via a simple memory or process DOS attack. Update: It was email discussion with Cam McKenzie that prompted this blog psot.

• [1] http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/play.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channels

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Here's a question that has bugged me for a while, and to which I've never found a satisfactory answer. How do people handle mailing list moderation when they have spam filters active? For instance, I get a lot of spam in the moderation queues for the Apache mailing lists I moderate. Sometimes gmail flags it as spam, and I can't quite say it's wrong... I mean the body of the email that's help up for moderation is often full of spam words. But the moderation message itself isn't really spam. I'm afraid of confusing the filter if I let it through. I guess this is where an open source system might be better, as you could simply put a rule in saying "if it's a moderation email, don't even bother looking at the keywords". Gmail's awfully convenient though... anyone else out there with the same problem?

I’ve been there before, but somehow I hoped that HP has come to its senses, so when my girlfriend got a HP Compaq 6715b laptop with a Broadcom wifi card that does not work with the open source driver and randomly crashes under load with ndiswrapper driver, I said - “well, I’ll just get an Intel mini-PCIe wifi card and plug it in”. I should have know better. While there is no obvious impenetrable error message like on NX6110, the 6715b simply ignores any non-HP wireless cards. They do not show up in lspci and don’t even appear in Vista. I have all the latest drivers and latest BIOS. I will look a bit for a workaround, possibly along the same lines as before (make a non-HP wifi card look like a HP wifi card), but I really must say - despite all the support for Debian HP has on the server side, I will have to recommend everyone I know to never, ever buy any HP laptops! By having an easy access latch to the WiFi slot they seem to embrace user choice, but in the confines of their BIOS they just cut through the heart of it by only allowing their own cards to be installed and used. Note: it is possible that the card itself is non-functional, but given the previous experience and some similar messages on the forums about all kinds of other HP laptops .. I wouldn’t bet on that. I would love to be proven wrong on this or shown a way to either make the non-HP IPW3945 card work or how to make the original Broadcom wifi card work in a stable manner. Currently it causes 4-8 hard lockups a day if the laptop is left acting as a bittorrent seed for a few thousand clients. Now i am just too tired to deal with this reasonably and should rather head for bed.

Akoha s sister company, Standout Jobs, has been hosting Montreal on Rails for quite a while. We figured we d get into the act. So we re sponsoring the first Montr al Python gathering tomorrow. Sadly, we don t really have enough space for everyone, so we re commandeering the Standout Jobs offices upstairs. After all, what good are siblings if you can t ask them for favours? I will actually be on a train to Toronto, so I m going to miss David Goodger talking about crazy awesome stuff he does in Python. But you should go! Intimidated? Don't think that Python is for you? Worry not! Python programmers are friendly, charming, and helpful. Montr al Python 1
Thursday, 7 February 2008
18:30 21:00
Standout Jobs
3981 boul. St-Laurent #615
Free admission ( Website Facebook Google Maps )

Public Service Announcement: The LinuxBIOS project, a Free Software project which intends to replace the proprietary BIOS found in most computers these days, has been renamed to coreboot. The old name has become quite a misnomer in recent years; the name LinuxBIOS created the impression that it's a drop-in BIOS-replacement and that it's using Linux or is Linux-specific in any way. Neither is the case.

• coreboot is not a BIOS in the sense that it provides the legacy BIOS callbacks / interrupt routines. Instead, coreboot is just a small hardware initialization firmware. It does some basic hardware init, then hands over control to one of many possible payloads. This can be a boot loader such as FILO (or GRUB2, which shall ultimately replace FILO) if you want to boot from disk, or Plan 9, or memtest86, or a Linux kernel, or OpenBIOS/OpenFirmware/SmartFirmware, or...
• coreboot is not Linux or Linux-specific. Yes, it can indeed use Linux kernels as payload (i.e., you put the Linux kernel in your flash ROM chip together with coreboot) or boot a Linux kernel indirectly using FILO/GRUB2. But as mentioned above it can also be used (together with the fitting payload) to boot other OSes or systems such as Plan 9, Windows, FreeBSD, and others.

The initial author and project leader of LinuxBIOS/coreboot, Ron Minnich, explains in more detail why the renaming was done in his original announcement on the coreboot mailing list.

New Gammu testing version is out. This is mostly bug fixing release, especially with lot of tweaks for Windows build and for AT driver. Full list of changes:

• Do not link with irprops.lib on Windows.
• Various MSVC compilation fixes.
• Improved AT model parsing and added tests.
• Fixed possible crash in reading SMS from AT phones (bug #515).
• Proper fall back to automatic model when user enters wrong one.
• Added identification of several phones.
• Fixed reading of messages from AT phones without ME memory.
• Improve charset detection on Motorola phones (bug #522).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/. PS: Debian users can get packages from experimental.

New Jersey is one of the states holding presidential primaries on this Super Tuesday and since you asked, I voted for John McCain. The chief reason for my vote is of course the war against Islamic terrorism. Now that we are finally gaining the upper hand in Iraq, we can't afford to elect someone who will fail to see victory through. Mind you this isn't necessarily a reason not to vote Democrat. The anti-war wing of that party has been thoroughly marginalized. Hillary atleast has a commendable reputation for viciousness. Even Obama has made some encouraging remarks (ok that was probably a red herring but I have the audacity to hope you see.) But while the Democrats do not take the anti-war crowd seriously, they do depend on them for a great deal of their funding. A Democratic president might feel the need to throw them some bones inadvertantly screwing up things in the process. On the Republican side, Huckabee might leave tactical planning to Jesus. Romney would toe the line but there is no sign that he has any original thoughts on the matter. While I continue to support the President, it must be admitted that this whole war is stretching out as long as it is because mistakes were made. We need options beyond "staying the course" and "cutting and running" and McCain a military hero and early supporter of the surge could be the one to find them. The other big issue is supreme court appointments. One, possibly two justices may need to be replaced in the next four years. We need to ensure that the court does not veer leftward again as it will inevitably do during a Democratic administration. Here there is a big split in the Conservative establishment. Ideologues consider McCain to be insufficiently pure and worry he will end up appointing another Souter or O'Connor (both appointed by Republicans it should be noted.) Pragmatists point out that McCain is viewed more favorably than Romney or Huckabee amongst the independent and moderate voters who will be crucial to victory and that even the slight chance of a bad choice is better than the certainty of a bad choice if Clinton or Obama get to make it. Social issues are important to many Republican voters and in this area too there is some grumbling about McCain being too liberal. Some have even suggested that if McCain beats Huckabee or Romney, a Democratic victory and four years out of power would be preferable in order to bring the GOP back to the straight and narrow. Although this contingent is loud I frankly don't think they have the influence people think (As evidenced by the actual performance of Huckabee or previous champion Fred Thompson.) When push comes to shove, they will rally behind the party candidate especially if McCain makes a bona fide social conservative (Huckabee himself?) his vice-president. On economic issues, the president's job is to not interfere and let business run itself. I don't see any of the Republican candidates being much different in this regard. Or the Democrats for that matter. [Careful readers will have noticed I have avoided mentioning Ron Paul. Paulestinians, consider this carte blanche to send me your long, rambling, incoherent screeds about how Dr. Paul has the answers to everything. Because God knows I haven't read enough of them lately.] Update: Kevin asks what I think about the candidates in terms of "geek" issues such as net neutrality, DMCA etc. IMO there is not a whole lot of difference between the major candidates on these issues. Republicans one would think would be more beholden to corporations in general. Democrats on the other hand have a closer association with the media who are behind many of the sillier IP laws. Overall, I don't think it ought to be much of a factor in choosing the president even for Free Software types. Rather we should focus on the legislative branch (in Congress as well as the states) which holds the real power here and in the court of public opinion.

Yes Junichi, this new release explicitely deprecates dashed form of git commands, as they will probably go away from the $PATH for many good reasons:

• the shell completions are way better hence the need for git-* being in /usr/bin has gone for quite some time now;
• the amount of git-<tab> completions scares the hell out of new users, let's do like bzr (that has more commands than git, and many undocumented ones unlike git whatever they say, they just hide them) and don't publicize our guts for nothing (though everything will always remain documented);
• there are some issues with dashed commands being in the $PATH that generate misfeatures, for example if you have a ssh command in $HOME/bin it won't be picked because git puts the path where dashed command live front (to avoid versions mismatch) hence you pick /usr/bin/ssh again (hi dato !);
• we may not have a 1:1 relation between git commands and dashed version for the rest of git's life;
• aliases (that you can configure in $HOME/.gitconfig already don't work with the dashed form for obvious reasons, so it's better not using the dash for consistency's sake.

So we gave our users a pretty good timeframe to adapt their scripts, hence the deprecation notice. Also note that best practices about scripting are now documented in the gitcli(5) man page I wrote.

To: Chris Lamb <chris@chris-lamb.co.uk>
Cc: web-discuss@openjdk.java.net
From: Tim Bell <tim.Bell@Sun.COM>
Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2008 08:42:14 -0800
Subject: Re: "Mailman day”
Hi Chris:
> It is somewhat of a tradition in the free software world to wish each
> other a “Happy Mailman Day” at the beginning of each month.
>
> However, the OpenJDK mailing lists seem to send the reminders about the
> middle of the month. Could this be changed?  
That was when I got around to turning on the reminders.  I’m glad to hear
someone noticed.  All of the internal feedback on this so far has been
negative.
I will change the cron job to the first of the month.
>  (In addition, the mailman@openjdk.java.net email address listed at the
>  top of http ://mail.openjdk.java.net/mailman/listinfo bounces.)
Good to know.  I will check that out.
Cheers - Tim Bell

Yay!

I'm really pleased to announce here that one of the projects Maj and I have been working on for a long time has finally come to fruition. Today Wikitravel Press launched its first two Open Content printed guidebooks -- Wikitravel Chicago and Wikitravel Singapore. When we started Wikitravel back in 2003 (!), our sincere hope was that at some point in the future, people would be able to carry Wikitravel guidebooks with them on a trip. I think that mobile technology is excellent, and it's amazing how much you can read on a cell phone or PDA these days. But there's still something so convenient about a printed guidebook: it never runs out of batteries; you don't need an uplink to read it; you don't have to worry about it getting stolen because you flashed it out in the wrong caf or restaurant. To be honest, I thought that one of the "traditional" guidebook publishers would step in and use Wikitravel content in their guides. But that didn't happen, and along with our partner Jani Patokallio, Maj and I decided to start a publishing company ourselves. Thus Wikitravel Press, and our first two books. We have a number of other books in the pipeline, and our hope is to have a few dozen available by the end of the year, and a few hundred by the end of the following year. I'm working on the Wikitravel guide to Montreal, and Maj and I are collaborating on Buenos Aires. We're taking a 6-week trip to Argentina in February/March, so this should be a great time for research. I heartily encourage any writers or editors who are interested in working on travel books to contact Wikitravel Press about your ideas of bringing Wikitravel content to print. I think this is a great opportunity for people who want to encourage Open Content, or who want to get into the travel writing field, or who just love the idea of wikis-to-books. tags: wikitravel wikitravelpress travel guidebook singapore chicago

I am going to make some suggestions to a company that might possibly sponsor development of free electronic text books for schools (suitable for running on an OLPC machine). I would appreciate any suggestions for things I should include. I will make my suggestions as a blog post summarising all input I receive and send the URL to the company in question.

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Awesomeness. Thanks to Jeff for organising it. My talks went really well, thanks to everyone who attended, asked questions and gave feedback. Huge kudos to the other participants. Some great things were shown off and discussed. I’d also like to use this opportunity to promote Josh Stewart’s Gloss. It’s a replacement MythTV frontend using Clutter. He’d love to get some more MythTV users to test it.

A Snowman in Melbourne

Last year at LCA Crispin Cowan suggested to me that I make a joint offer of a combined tutorial on SE Linux and AppArmor as a way of publicly comparing the two technologies. I ended up not accepting the challenge, among other things I had a long-term project going in production in early December that needed some ongoing support. Crispin’s plan B was to just give a lecture about AppArmor. Recently Crispin joined Microsoft [1] and John Johansen of Suse was going to give the talk in his place. The LCA people made a minor mistake by having the conference web site give the description of the tutorial option [2] (which I don’t believe was ever going to happen as I had not accepted the offer), but it’s easy to understand the webmaster copying the wrong description when the one person makes two offers (which I believe is not a common practice). So this morning I and about 150 other people were waiting in the main lecture theatre and no-one from Suse turned up. Being fairly audacious when the announcement was made that the event was officially cancelled I stood up and asked if anyone would like an impromptu talk about SE Linux instead. The audience received that idea quite well. My talk wasn’t as good as I had hoped, not having had a proper breakfast or any caffeinated drinks reduced my mental stack space. So I could talk well on one topic but when questions diverted me to a side topic I found it difficult to remember the previous point I was making. Fortunately when giving an impromptu talk with no notes or presentation materials the audience expectations for a consistent plan of the talk seem reasonably low. ;) I started by talking about my SE Linux Play Machines. Some of that material had been covered in previous talks at other conferences (such as at a previous SE Linux Symposium), but some things (such as my use of Xen) I had not previously covered, but none of it had been mentioned in a talk in Australia for a while. Having given an hour-long talk about SE linux yesterday to an audience with many of the same members I wanted to start by talking about something that they hadn’t heard before, and I was also wearing a Play Machine T-shirt (with the root password printed on it) [4]. After I finished talking about my Play Machines and started covering some of the same material as yesterday about a quarter of the audience left (which was fair enough). I then spoke about general SE Linux issues, largely in response to questions. I covered the differences between the policies (including the history of policy development), the JFFS2 XATTR development (and how SE Linux couldn’t be used on an iPaQ without it), issues of disk space usage for XATTRs for SE Linux labelling on various filesystems and how it drives the use of context mount options, poly-instantiated directories (including some discussion on how the actual storage location for such directories can be on a different filesystem and how this could be convenient when using encrypted filesystems), how Apache/PHP work in a SE Linux environment, and a lot more. I couldn’t resist mentioning to the audience the irony that I had declined a challenge for a joint presentation and then got a sole presenter spot (and a large audience) due to the Suse guy not showing up. For future situations I plan to load lecture notes from all my common talks on my iPaQ. Then next time I have such a speaking opportunity I can give a better prepared talk. Update: It turned out that the LCA people had been informed that the Suse talk was cancelled and had made a mistake, see this link for details.

• [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard/archive/2008/01/17/crispin-cowan-joins-the-windows-security-team.aspx


• [2] http://linux.conf.au/programme/detail?TalkID=210


• [3] http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/talks/sage-2006/PolyInstantiatedDirectories.html


• [4] http://www.cafepress.com/play_machine

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On January 26th 2008, the OCaml community has its first meeting in Europe. There was 5 different talks, including one from me. The meeting was pretty constructive and i think some great things should come out of it. In this post, i will focus on the Debian maintainer point of view. The meeting was organized by me, with the help of Garbriel Kerneis and Vincent Balat. I wish to thank Mme Turgis from ENST/ParisTech who has made possible all this to happen. Introduction: I announce the creation of OCamlCore, a SS2L. It will provide commercial support for OCaml and related products. It will also provide community with some resources (including a GForge, a planet, some SCM repository...) For now, i will open administration to Debian people who wish to help (for root rights) and from the whole community for other task (gforge and general administration). For now, i will choose alone who can administrate and who cannot... This is not a very open position, but this server is also for my company. Xavier Leroy give us a nice talk that has let us see some future direction:

• OCaml 3.11 will have native dynlink
• hope to integrate GHC like type system (GADT: Generalized Algebraic Data Types)
• need to work on parallelism, following different paradigm

But above all, Xavier talked about the fact that there is a lack of manpower at INRIA and invited the community to build tools and other things (including a CPAN like distribution) to make the language more widespread. He also stated that a lot of things will stay in place in the name of backward compatibility. OCsigen Vincent Balat has given us a nice talk about OCsigen, a new framework for programming web application. This program is already in Debian and it is at the root of Debian discussion about moving .cm[ao] into libxxx-ocaml package. This new framework allows to program web application using continuation, which should ease a lot of aspect. It also features static type checking, including static verification of the generated HTML pages. GODI I was impressed to see G. Stolpmann coming to the meeting. Unfortunately, i cannot follow the whole talk, since i have some phone call to make, in order to book the restaurant. From what i have seen, it seems that GODI is growing, in term of manpower. They have some issues with OCaml 3.10, because of camlp4 and some packages. At the end of the conference, he was pushing for a more general use of GODIVA. In particular, it requires to have a very uniform way of building software. It should be the foundation of a build standard for OCaml software. In my humble opinion, i don't agree on this point. Basically, its proposal was based on configure/make all, which is too C style way of doing. It is not bad, but just exclude ocamlbuild enabled software. ocamlbuild Nicolas Pouillard has made an introduction on how to use ocamlbuild. I have discovered how it was working, since i didn't have time to work on this topic. It seems a good thing. I hope to be able to try it at some point. The conclusion was about modifying ocamlbuild to allow the use of multiple plugins. For now, the plugin is a separate file which is compiled first and then loaded, as a special case. Nicolas is looking for a full OCaml way to handle this for multiple plugins. OCaml in Debian I have spoken about different aspect of Debian packaging. After a short introduction and some history about OCaml in Debian, I come to some conclusions/problems:

• we have an early integration, which makes Debian handle a lot of packages, but this is due to a long history
• we still are not able to cope with libraries incompatibilities when rebuilding, we only have addressed ocaml package ABI problem
• the debian package management system is not really compliant with the OCaml way of creating libraries, which is our main problem
• native compilation is broken on 3 arches (Xavier Leroy told us that this should be solved for ARM)
• use of Alioth has made us more efficient to integrate packages
• Debian team are working by step: from time to time we begin to integrate a lot of packages, mostly because of some maintainers wishing to integrate a software with a lot of dependencies

Talking with Xavier give me some additional informations:

• ARM is fixed, it should compile with Debian stable on ARM, he explains that the problem is related to the multi ABI flavor of ARM
• he says that we should not have any problem concerning bytecode stripping of executable, if there is still some we should find the OCaml library that triggers this behavior
• I realize that this behavior can be triggered by ocamlmakefile, that still have a "-custom" option
• he promises me that he will send me a simple test to find custom bytecode application (combination of "file X" and a specific string at the end of the file)

At the end of the presentation, there were some questions. I discover that many people are ignoring the ABI problem with OCaml and its libraries. They seem to discover that it requires regular rebuild of our packages. I also have a discussion about the fact that Debian binary distribution doesn't fit developers need. It seems that developers prefer to have the source of libraries they compile and also the most recent release. But at the same time, people avoid using GODI, which also have the problem of needing to wait for a particular library to be released... After some discussion, I point that some companies prefer to live in a frozen world, which Debian stable can provide. Living in a frozen world helps company developers to have the same environment from the beginning to the end of a project - which can last years. It also help to avoid build environment de-synchronization between company developers. There was also a question about interaction between installed OCaml package and GODI software. I cannot answer it, expect with a "patches are welcome". OCaml on a JVM using OCaml-Java Xavier Clerc explained us how he has achieved running a full OCaml environment on a JVM. This work was pretty impressive, because he was able to compile OCaml top level and provide it as an applet. This is something amazing (and working). He stated also that this should allow to do some binding with java graphical user interface from OCaml. I was pretty busy with a phone call (to a restaurant for the dinner), so i don't have attend the whole conference. Anyway, the project is promising, but it needs to recompile every library using its compiler. I think this is not suited for Debian for now. Workshop The workshop was shorter than it should have been. This is due to accumulated time shift during the day. However, it was pretty interesting, because everybody can talked almost freely. The initial discussion was about the "Unicode situation". This was a question about Unicode in Unison, but there is no real solution about it. For reader information, unison has problem with filename containing UTF-8 char. In particular when syncing two directories which are on two file system with a different encoding on each. Even if the file can be represented on the two file systems, the comparison (between UTF-8 and ISO8859-15) fails. This is because the comparison is a byte to byte comparison. We discuss further the idea of OSR (OCaml standard recommendation) which was briefly discussed in the morning. I think David Teller (who have also done a great part of the IRC retranscription) was very keen on this idea. I invited Nicolas Pouillard to discuss the three following subjects. About camlp4 documentation, Nicolas told people about the he set up. About ocamlfind and ocamlbuild, he went back to the multiple plugin problems. About ocamlbuild and GODI, Gerd, Nicolas and Xavier tried to build a list of what metadata can be shared. This includes list of files to be installed (PLIST in GODI). Concerning the "feedback from the Gallium", Xavier explains that he has done this in the morning (which is true). I think that Xavier implicitly agreed on the fact that if this kind of event happens again, he can do another talk about future of OCaml. Concerning Summer of Code, I just remind that people can write description of Google Summer of Code project in the cocan wiki. Another one remind about Jane St Capital summer of code. Points concerning common interfaces raise the discussion about OSR. The organization of next year events doesn't raise particular interest. I think people would be interested to have one next year, if something comes out of this meeting.

It’s probably impossible to get too much of Bruce Schneier, although I honestly wouldn’t mind if he stopped Friday Squid Blogging. His latest Wired.com article on the false dichotomy between security and privacy is an excellent counterpoint to a recent Lawrence Wright profile in the New Yorker on Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell. The Lawrence Wright article was surprisingly uncritical, considering the New Yorker’s usual zealous approach. Check out, for example, his description of the “Clipper” chip:

In the nineties, new encryption software that could protect telephone conversations, faxes, and e-mails from unwarranted monitoring was coming on the market, but the programs could also block entirely legal efforts to eavesdrop on criminals or potential terrorists. Under McConnell s direction, the N.S.A. developed a sophisticated device, the Clipper Chip, with a superior ability to encrypt any electronic transmission; it also allowed law-enforcement officials, given the proper authority, to decipher and eavesdrop on the encrypted communications of others. Privacy advocates criticized the device, though, and the Clipper was abandoned by 1996. They convinced the folks on the Hill that they couldn t trust the government to do what it said it was going to do, Richard Wilhelm, who was in charge of information warfare under McConnell, says.

(emphasis added). Compare, for example, EPIC’s Clipper Chip information page. Schneier, by contrast, sees right through the core:

We’ve been told we have to trade off security and privacy so often — in debates on security versus privacy, writing contests, polls, reasoned essays and political rhetoric — that most of us don’t even question the fundamental dichotomy. But it’s a false one. Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don’t have to accept less of one to get more of the other. Think of a door lock, a burglar alarm and a tall fence. Think of guns, anti-counterfeiting measures on currency and that dumb liquid ban at airports. Security affects privacy only when it’s based on identity, and there are limitations to that sort of approach. Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and — possibly — sky marshals. Everything else — all the security measures that affect privacy — is just security theater and a waste of effort. By the same token, many of the anti-privacy “security” measures we’re seeing — national ID cards, warrantless eavesdropping, massive data mining and so on — do little to improve, and in some cases harm, security. And government claims of their success are either wrong, or against fake threats. The debate isn’t security versus privacy. It’s liberty versus control.

Read the whole essay. And send it to your mother, as well. Technorati Tags: Schneier, Privacy, Security

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I live in a cooperative living group, and during the fall semester a person who we’d invited to live with us who is a dwarf and relies on a scooter for most of his transportation decided he’d like to move in. Unfortunately, while he can get out of his scooter and come inside by himself, we had no stepless entrances such that he could bring his scooter inside to protect it from the angry Cambridge winter. Mmm, frozen batteries. So, we’re a coop and we maintain the house ourselves—so we decided to build one, of course. A ramp up to the back porch! Nevermind the fact that we need to sink four-foot foundation holes in the ground in January. We got started right away at the beginning of IAP, while people were still trickling back into town from all over the country. First we surveyed out where the posts should be sunk: Then it was time for excavating the holes where concrete would eventually be poured. This involved a power auger of DOOM: It’s advertised as a 2-man tool. Two 200-pound construction workers, that is. We had to put four people on it plus one person with a shovel clearing dirt to make it manageable, and even then it was a pain. There’s a delicate rhythm you have to get into to avoid getting the bit stuck—DOWN. UP. CLEAR. And inevitably there are rocks and roots that have to be dealt with. We lucked out with a fairly warm weekend to do the digging on, but on the first day we still had to deal with a couple inches of frozen ground: There was also some fun stuff involving having to clear away our (frozen) mulch containers and use a concrete cutter on a weird old concrete pathway that used to run through the same area: Next we mixed and poured concrete: And placed hardware in the concrete to hold the posts: Framing: Eventually it became functional, woo: And done! (except for metal handrail): This all took place over the course of about three weeks. And now our scooter-bound housemate can bring his wheels inside! The house still isn’t totally accessible to wheelchairs/scooters, but at least the first floor is. It really brings me pride to see things like this go from start to finish here. We can do it! This guy who is moving in has really influenced my life—he’s really good at making people feel comfortable talking to him, and for me it’s gone from “wow this is awkward, I have no idea what to say” to “talking to a person with different physical abilities and characteristics seems normal”. And that’s made me a better person.