A long time ago, I wrote the system that still manages the Cuerpo Acad mico Historia del Presente group in the Universidad Pedag gica Nacional. Yes, I'm happy a good portion of my project, which took me over a year of work... But I must admit a nice deal of shame as well.
Of course, it comes from not properly understanding the domain data and information volume my system would be working with - and coming up with a stupid way to implement searches. I won't get too much in detail because, even if you had access to the full search facility in the system (no, it's not available for the general public), I would not like a swarm of curious people to make last week's events come back... Anyway, the group works by daily filling in tens or hundreds of articles in the system, and having some interesting search sessions every couple of months.
I knew the performance problem was caused by an inefficient searching mechanism (explicitly, category exclusion is the prime killer). I knew loadavg jumped through the roof, memory usage did so as well... But it was not until some weeks ago we installed the mighty Munin on the machines at UPN that we got this jewel - Thanks, Victor, for putting the graphics somewhere they can be shown! ;-)
So... How much does memory usage increase during searches?

Whoa. The system has 640MB real RAM. It has as well 1GB swap. Don't ask me how the hell it reports it was using ~2GB swap - but still... And how is our load average?

Have you ever seen a (single CPU, Pentium 4 1.7GHz) Linux system with a loadavg of 80?! For those who don't know, loadavg gives you the general status on how many jobs are pending scheduling by the CPU. 1 means that all of the CPU's time during a specified timeframe was used (and, on single-core systems, it's the optimal usage level). On this machine, things start getting uncomfortable at 6 or 7. I had never before seen values even half this large.
Sigh... Well, in my defense, I must say I've warned them about this problem for over two years. My contract with them has long passed - I've repeatedly recommended them to hire somebody to fix it. So far, they have not.

Tomorrow is the beginning of RoCoCoCamp 2007, a three-day unconference held right here in Montr al. It starts at 9:30 on Friday at the SAT and runs until Sunday evening. It's for all who are interested in wikis, weblogs, and creators interested in collaborating in on-line spaces. RoCoCoCamp is organized with OpenSpace Technology, where we collectively decide on an agenda where everybody has a chance to speak. There's no artifical divide between speakers and audience, so you can lead your own session if you have something to say. Think of RoCoCoCamp as a real-life wiki, where anybody can contribute. A detailed explaination of what RoCoCoCamp is about can be found on this invitation. I'm inviting you because I'm flying out on Saturday and can't make the whole conference, but I really hope you come. There will be discussions on:

• What projects people are doing around the world
• Development of collaborative tools like wikis, free wifi networks, content management systems, etc.
• Techniques for building collaborative communities
• Best practises for inspiring self-managment and self-policing
• Starting up new projects
• Plans for future collaborations

So how can you attend? I thought you'd never ask! See you there!

Once upon a time I wrote a collection of shell scripts for managing virtual hosting. Combined these allow me to easily.

• Add/Remove/List Apache2 virtual hosts.
• Add/Remove/List virtual domains for use by Exim4.

These work well, but every now and again I think I want a web-based control panel . After mulling this over for a while and remembering how many of the existing control panels are tricky I m actually going to do it. There are two hard parts:

• The user-interface is key.
• The format I m using for domains isn t appropriate.

The last point is the part I m worrying about right now. So far I have a list of mail domains, and a list of web domains and the two are unrelated. This becomes obvious when they are listed:

Domain	Facilities
steve.org.uk	MAIL
bar.steve.org.uk	WEB
foo.steve.org.uk	WEB

See? No link I d expect to see the domains listed as just steve.org.uk with links to Mail showing the mail setup, and web showing the subdomains. Or maybe they really should be listed seperately I can t decide. (For reference here is my live listing of domains where the problem becomes obvious. Note that you ll not have permissions to see my server stats ) So I need to decide how to handle this I also need to be "inspired" by OSWD. I think the plan right now is to store all data in a database, then regenerate the plain text configuration files on demand. That should give me the best approach if I restrict myself to running HTTPS on a custom port and avoid the ability to modify the files by hand Feel free to tell me this is misguided, or inspired. Although I remember the last time I talked about control panels and I m still not seeing a good solution. I want to be able to:

• Add/Remove/Enable/Disable apache2 virtual hosting setups.
• Add/Remove/Enable/Disable exim4 virtual domains with optional mailing lists (ecartis)
• Have only server admin vs. nobody no resellors etc.
• Avoid PHP like the plague.
• Have it be utterly secure. (Ha!)

For long time I use few Python scripts to manage mails on IMAP account. On Tuesday I decided to put them under version control and improve them a bit, because I didn't want to have login information hardcoded in every script. I made several improvements, added support for distutils and then I decided that I could also release this to public. I've named them IMAP utils, I made announcement to freshmeat.net and Python Cheese Shop (thanks to ./setup.py register) and now I wonder that these simple scripts have over hundred downloads and eight subscribers. Maybe it is not that useless as I thought :-).

I think Boicottare Novell is an Italian-language translation of my judo explanation. Rock.

Steve talks about a tool some of us have needed for a long time, but never actually bothered to implement because applying the necessary changes in vim is still faster than writing a script to do it. The biggest issue for me is that the UI would have to represent grouping of items efficiently. If I have a number of domains registered to my company, I want my employees to be able to receive email at "firstname.lastname" in each of them, without ever duplicating the grouping information. For HTTP, the grouping works slightly different: a set of domains could be variants of the same name with different misspellings, abbreviations or top level domains. To keep things tidy, I redirect everyone who is not using the "canonical" name, using mod_redirtoservname. Thus, the group needs a "leader". Subdomains are usually independent setups, since there is not much point in having multiple names in the same domain for the same service. It may also be a good idea to somehow be able to configure delegations using SRV records.

One of the fun and useful things we've been able to do in Expectnation with the personal scheduler is to use the data to help us as organizers. We recently added in dynamic overlays to the organizer's view of the schedule, enabling us to create heatmaps of the most popular talks.
Screenshot of personal scheduler popularity overlaid on event timetable As well as satisfying natural curiosity, the heatmaps let us identify issues such as possible room overcrowding in advance. We're able also to record actual attendance figures as the conference goes on, and I will try and make an analysis of how attendees' intentions stack up against their actions. 

Once, I was telling an executive in a large technology company that mostly builds non-free technologies why I did not like most of their products and business decisions and about some of the things that I was doing to help their consumers work around them and avoid paying them in the future. Excited, the manager suggested that I consider a job with them at least in part as an advocate for these ideas within their company. I mentioned that my criticism was primarily principled and fundamental to the way his company did business. He responded, "yes, but if you take a job with us, you get to have your principles and a BMW." I don't think he understood my principles. Perhaps, he didn't understand principles at all.

A few years ago we needed to introduce employement contracts for all staff at Catalyst. When we got the example contract back from our HR consultant, she had quite naturally biased it strongly in the employers favour, and as a consequence it had a very anal and lawyerly clause in it regarding the ownership of intellectual property. This clearly wasn't going to work well in our environment so I decided to take the opportunity to try and write a clause which was fair and reasonable, which considered the likely desires of both parties, and which expressed an understanding of the sort of environment which often happens with free open-source software. It seems that many people who are interested in working on open source software are also people who will work on (i.e. fiddle with :-) things in their spare time, but they will not necessarily consider the possible consequences of using conmpany resources to do so. I have heard of situations where employment contracts (or perhaps even government enacted legislation) will give ownership of an individual's work to their employer in such situations, so I also wanted the contract to make it clear where and how this might happen. I would like to hear people's comments on the contract clauses which we use here. Is this fair to both parties? Have I missed something? Is the meaning clear? Also, I need to make it clear that it is OK for people to use this text, so I hereby place the text of the following Intellectual Property clause in the public domain. Intellectual Property

1. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, relating to work carried out while in the employment of $ COMPANY , remains the property of $ COMPANY , subject to the exceptions outlined below.
2. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, owned prior to joining $ COMPANY remains your property. If you choose to use such intellectual property, including source and objects during your time at $ COMPANY , $ COMPANY will have the rights to their continued use in perpetuity, including access to the source code of all versions of such software in use at $ COMPANY .
3. If $ COMPANY asks you to do something, then we expect that while you work on that something, you will be being paid by us and we (or our clients) will own the IP. In some cases we may elect to open-source that, and may decide to jointly own the IP or make some other arrangement, but it would be at $ COMPANY s option.
4. If you work on something by your own choice, and on your own time, then you are welcome to own the IP, but if you use the premises or computers of $ COMPANY to do that work then you must license it under a free, open-source license agreed with $ COMPANY .
5. $ COMPANY may choose to fund some part of your time to work on OSS projects in a non-directed way. $ COMPANY will expect to own the IP for such work, and to participate in the choice of license for such code.
6. All of the above is subject to confidentiality of client information, and constraints which clients may specifically request in relation to specific project work from time to time.

Over To You I wrote that because I couldn't find examples around the place of similar things. I guess I still see people looking for that sort of thing so I'm publising it here with the idea of providing a seed which can perhaps grow into something else. A few specific questions I would like you to think about:

• Are there any loopholes in this?
• Does this seem like a fair agreement?
• Is there anything missing?
• Is there any part you would like to see changed?

Then, perhaps, if we can see some general agreement on what would, or would not, be a useful standard we can encourage people to use it in their future contracts. I am hoping that through your collective wisdom I will be changing this clause in Catalyst's standard employment contract.

Hmm. Debian fixed this problems, but Ubuntu manages to get them also:

P: Configuring package volumeid
O: cp:
O: cannot stat  /etc/fstab'
O: : No such file or directory
O:
O: dpkg: error processing volumeid (--configure):
O:  subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1

Here is the first cut at a plugin I created, called Mailmodel. It's pretty simple, you install it, configure the email sender/destination addresses, and then, in your ActiveRecord objects:

after_save :mail_model

For those objects that you want to be notified of when they change. Think of it as 'scaffolding' for email notification of changes in your database (new comments, new users, new payments) when you aren't quite ready to set up notification for each individual thing. Available from: http://svn.dedasys.com/public/mailmodel/ Some improvements that could be made:

• Customize behavior for some objects: if it's a this, then include that and that in the object dump.
• Customized templates depending on object type in order to take the scaffoling analogy further.

Past weekend Warp had its first WARPtivity (which, as you may suspect, stands for WARP activity, you know, team building and that stuff). We (including all partners and almost all workers) spent a night and a day in the breathtaking Ordesa valley. I’m quite biased as I love the valley since I was a child and have enjoyed lots of weeks there, but it’s indeed one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately our regional government (PSOE and PAR, kick them out on the 27th May election) are spoiling most of the Pyrenees, I hope there is something left for the next generations. We arrived at Torla (a little village near Ordesa) on Friday evening, had a great dinner and some drinks and played table football. Next morning we woke up quite early and hiked through a nice forest path to the Horse Tail waterfall. After having lunch by the waterfall some of us decided to return by the Faja de Pelay, a higher path above the forest, with awesome sights. As it was still early May, there was some snow remaining in the path, making it a bit dangerous, as there is a 300 hundred meter cliff. Luckily enough we managed to survive and blog it

* With fontypython (Which is unstable now), you can play with any fonts without actually installing it to system (who needs fc-cache now?). Here is simple method to use it. Thanks Daniel for upload and Donn C. Ingle for writing this simple but useful program.

Yes, Microsoft have started swinging their patent bat a little harder. However, before everyone gets all screamy about the "235 patents" thing, read a little closer:

the Linux kernel [...] violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces - essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up - run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68.

While I can forgive a journalist the sin of not knowing the difference between Linux-the-kernel and Linux-the-entire-FOSS-ecosystem, can people who should have a clue about this please stop perpetuating the inaccuracy? Yes, 42 patents is still pretty bad, but it's not 235, and getting facts straight is what we do on this side of the debate -- the frothing and bullshit is what the other guys do. Once you start looking at the various categories of patent, it really does make it obvious that there's some straw-grasping going on here. If GUI elements really infringe on 65 Microsoft patents, it seems reasonable to assume that KDE and Gnome have a subset each, so presumably nobody gets the full brunt of that lot. Also, those 68 "assorted FOSS programs" patents probably includes such widely-used classics as this pearler of a program (chosen at random from Freshmeat for it's likely small userbase; no other ridicule is intended or implied). What galls me, though, isn't the bandying around of random inaccurate numbers, it's classy things like this:

[some Microsoft sock-puppet] refuses to identify specific patents or explain how they're being infringed, lest FOSS advocates start filing challenges to them.

Yeah, we'd hate it if the patent system were at all used in the manner in which it were intended. I don't suppose anyone else is getting SCO-style "we've got 100,000 lines of infringing code, but we're not going to tell you which ones" flashback at this point? Personally, I think that if Microsoft ever does starts with a patent smackdown, it won't be 235 patents, it'll be two or three, the strongest ones they can find, and 90 minutes after the plaintiff(s) is/are served the infringing code will be history, and we'll go back to living our lives as normal. That's even assuming that the patents are legit, which is by no means a given (even with the US' insanely broad patent provisions). As the linked article explains, the US Supreme Court has started getting a bit noisy on the subject of over-broad and pointless software patents, so perhaps Microsoft is just getting it's licks in before the Supremes take it's noisy rattle away from it. There's some side-commentary on this issue at Groklaw, and the Patent Law blog has a quick mention of it too (with all sorts of nice frothy comments, to boot).

Sam commented:

"Quality motion. This is exactly the point that I raise at just about every committee meeting I attend, but to have it formally supported by the wider membership is a good step. If things don't improve soon, we should try that line of attack in the Central and Eastern region."

One suggestion in the debate was to have a co-operatives fortnight, similar to the fairtrade fortnight, to promote the Co-operative Group (tCG) membership, other tCG businesses and other local cooperatives. Let's see whether SW can lead the way again! ;-) The question-and-answer session was pretty interesting. All of the questions were submitted in writing. Some of them were submitted in advance and others during the lunch break. No spoken questions were taken and most Insurance (CIS) and Bank questions were held back because no-one from financial services was there. The answers were grouped under a few headings.

Ethics, answersed by Catherine Staveley

1. CIS's voting record is public, but some details are buried under sustainabiliy on the group's corporate web site.
2. The panel were asked to define a few terms. By ethical, tCG means generally being "a good neighbour". Materiality is how much a business relates to tCG's aims and they think shelf penetration is how much space and promotion a product gets in the stores. The financial services profits aim to be all-ethical.
3. Members were asked to please take part in the consultations about the new food retail ethical policy.
4. tCG has a "triple bottom line" - in addition to looking at profits, we also consider our effects on our communities and sustainability.
5. tCG is leading the way on packaging minimisation: onion nets are already biodegradable, work continues on developing biodegradable fruit nets and a new light-weight (but still strong) whiskey bottle has just been launched. We'll see whether it's possible to give more dividend points for buying less packaged goods.

Food retail, answered by David Parker (regional food), Gary Metcalfe (operations), Clive Netherway (top 100 stores) and Nick Lowe (sales and support)

1. Local stores: Minehead Post Office contracts have been exchanged and planning permission granted in Budleigh Salterton - both sites should be ready in a couple of months.
2. There are new small stores at Amesbury, Ilfracombe, Perranport and Lyneham (where it's hurting Tesco Express more than anyone). tCG have also acquired 7 stores from Higgins, one from Savages and a petrol station with minimarket in Bath. Dawlish has just opened, giving a total of 14 new stores. In addition, 50 stores are being refitted in the south-west region.
3. The Falmouth store is a bit of a puzzle: whether to split the existing store or develop a nearby site.
4. tCG stores have outperformed the The Institute of Grocery Distribution index for 15 months in a row and is now seeing growth-on-growth.
5. Problems with product stocking should be taken up with store managers first.
6. Home delivery has been trialled and failed several times, but is being trialled again in the new OCO stores. (What does OCO mean? There's one at Portishead.)
7. Supply problems with RSPCA Freedom Foods meats will be investigated.
8. The Westbury-on-Trim Stoke Lane store will only be expanded if its turnover increases.
9. Suppliers are still letting some stores down on delivery times. This will be re-checked.
10. The best response to the crocodile community projects of other companies is to strengthen tCG's community project funding in areas before other supermarkets open new stores.
11. Local produce is rarely stocked because of problems with availability and meeting tCG technical standards (I could almost hear the hackles raise at this answer!). Organic is only usually stocked in areas where surveys suggest the target audience lives (which I guess is why my tatty 60s store has more sweets and sugar drinks than fresh food). Similar biases exist for other ranges.
12. Missing product complaints will get written answers: Clipper tea and sugar-free Mintoes.
13. There was a complaint about the lack of notices about the unique status of co-op milk. (In short, we own our farms so our milk had better not be getting abused.)

Corporate questions, answered by Frank Jones

1. Compensations of the merged tCG/United Co-op societies are shown on page 12 of Stronger Together.
2. There was a question about a 10% profit target which I didn't understand. The answer was on page 13 of the annual report.
3. Party politicians were in the hall.
4. The results of the merger meetings were unknown at the time.
5. The Co-operative Funerals are derecognising the GMB union, which has worried many members. The comment from the floor was "there's usually one motive for derecognising a union"!
6. There's a 16% pay increase for executives who don't join tCG's pension fund, which is what would have been paid into the fund for them. Whether it applies to all employees will be checked and a written reply given.

Strategic questions, answered by David Doyle

1. Travel offers will be promoted in the food stores. tCG wants to avoid "silo" businesses which don't cross-promote with other businesses where appropriate.
2. Leaflets of other tCG and other co-ops should be stocked, particularly at festive times.
3. Offsetting CO2 is not a complete answer to climate change, but it was the only one of five suggested actions which was approved. Is the Co-operative Travel chain underperforming because it doesn't offer enough ethical choices? Some shouting from the floor about them still not offering European rail tickets.
4. The regional view of the United merger... This was nicely controversial, as it bloody well ought to be... There's no requirement for a tCG membership vote, so there will be no tCG membership vote. There was a hierarchical vote: very few of the Cornwall area turned up at the regional meeting in Bristol, but Devon and Somerset turned out in numbers and the south-west's delegates to the national meeting voted against 5 of the 6 merger resolutions, which were passed anyway. The chair stepped in and cut short the debate, stating that everyone knows the south-west is unhappy about certain aspects, like not having a choice on the first merged chief executive, but what's done is done.

Finally, a list of questions being sent for written answers were given by Andrew North and the chair (was it Colin House? It's annoying to find one name and lose another).

When I first saw UltraStar (a PC conversion of the famous karaoke game Singstar), I decided I wanted it in Debian, but I found it quite difficult to port it (even being GPL), as it was programmed in Kylix/Delphi. There are lots of songs around there for UltraStar, and it is also possible to import them from SingStar. UltraStar-NG (the NG stand for Next Generation) is based on UltraStar, but it’s being recoded in C++. It allows you to add your own songs in the forms of mp3s along with a song text and a music video file. The game allows a computer to evaluate how good you are when you sing by analyzing your voice pitch. We‘ve already finished packaging UltraStar-NG for Debian yesterday, and it is now waiting in the NEW queue for the FTP-Masters approval. Lets hope it’ll be available soon SingStar is a karaoke video game for the PlayStation 2, published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and developed by SCEE and London Studio. It is popular karaoke game in which players sing to music videos in order to score points. Players interface with their PS2 via SingStar USB microphones while a music video plays on screen. Lyrics are shown at the bottom of the screen. SingStar matches a player’s song voice to the original track, with players scoring points according to how accurate their singing is. Usually, two players compete simultaneously.

My parents got back from a whirlwind trip to Canada this afternoon, and we thought that since their visit here was scheduled before we knew Sarah was pregnant, we thought one small way they could participate was to come along to an ultrasound screening that determined the baby's gender. So we lashed out on one of those gimmicky 3D/4D ultrasounds, and didn't tell Mum and Dad what was going on until we got there, so as to make it a bit of a surprise for them. I think Dad thought we were going to see a baseball game, because when Mum asked what to wear, I told her it didn't matter, and that it was a spectator activity. I called it as a boy before the sonographer made a call. She initially thought it was a girl, but revised it to be a boy as the scan progressed. I'll update this post with some of the images later.

Another beautiful day here in Paradise. Montreal is fantastic in the late Spring/early Summer -- it's a great time to be here in the city. Yesterday, Amita June and I went to Parc Jean Drapeau, the beautiful park on an island in the St. Lawrence, the former site of Expo 67. We played at the (really cool) new playground, ran around in the grass, and looked at the river rushing by. Today I rolled out a new table-of-contents layout on Wikitravel; you can see an example on our page about France. It's the culmination of about 11 months of debate and compromise amongst Wikitravellers, me, Maj, Internet Brands, and pretty much everyone else under the sun. It took a looong time, but we eventually got something that most people could live with and (shock!) some people actually liked. It wasn't easy, and my earlier unilateral decisions about it were so upsetting to people that it produced our current Wikitravel:Technical infrastructure policy. It's been great to finally reach some closure on this particular issue, since it was such a source of learning for me. tags: wikitravel wiki montreal amitajune toc

RoCoCo -- one week and counting We've got about one week before RoCoCoCamp starts. It's going to be pretty exciting; we've had a lot of responses and the list of participants is growing strong. But there are still a lot of infrastructure things to be done -- I'm going to be really impressed if we get them all done before next Friday. I'm getting more and more amazed that the folks in Portland (Oregon) manage to put on RecentChangesCamp there. It's pretty hard to do a three-day unconference. tags: rocococamp barcamp barcampmontreal recentchangescamp

Kanren So, I've just finished re-reading The Reasoned Schemer, the sequel to The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. Reasoned is a really nice introduction into what seems to be a classic compulsion for Scheme freaks: re-implementing the logic language Prolog more-or-less in Scheme. The little language that unfolds in Reasoned is elegant, simple, and best of all, extremely Scheme-y. There's a really long digression into binary mathematics and deriving bitwise operations for arithmetical functions, which all seems to be the long way around the block since it's unlikely that users of their system would use anything but the math system built into the host language, Scheme. The implementation in TRS is laid out at the back of the book. It's a learning version of a bigger project, called Kanren. I've been fiddling with the system, which has re-inspired my dream of creating a declarative language framework for Web applications. I'd like to see what Web programming in Kanren would be like... I'll see how it goes. tags: kanren scheme the reasoned schemer logic prolog

Domains Another way I spent my time today was that we've finally gotten around to transferring the wikitravel.org/.net/.com domains to IB. IB's owned the site for a while, but we've never really had a reason to switch the domains over, so it's gone undone for a long time. And I'm kind of glad. It sucks transferring domains between registrars. wikitravel.org was on Joker. which used to be my registrar of choice, but which has been superseded by Godaddy. Transferring a single domain took 6 Web forms (on two different sites), 3 security codes, and 4 email confirmations. Thankfully, this also gave me a chance to transfer over my speculative domains phonojournalist.com (for telephone photos) and phrygiancap.org, for general freedom issues. I like the phrygian cap, what can I say? All right, so I have a lot of domains that I'm unlikely to ever exploit. If that's so wrong, I don't want to be right. tags: domains ib joker godaddy phonojournalist phrygian cap

Gustavo Franco announced the debianart project.

For those who can remind it better I setup a CNAME for this: art.debian.net.

Actually it points to art.modprobe.de which then redirects the virtualhost to debianart.org because there are some web server setup limitations on the provider side of debianart.org, but this should work

Hey Yay, Backup Manger 0.7.6 came out of the SVN repo! Check it out. Expect the Debian package to be uploaded soon in sid.