As many of the Planet Debian readers know, I bemoan Galeon 1.2 and therefore Woody. For a long time I haven’t found an appropriate browser replacement for Galeon 1.2 in Sarge, so I never switched my home workstation called “gsa” (Pentium II, 400 MHz, 572 MB RAM) to Sarge, since Woody was rockstable and just worked. Though, after a few Galeon 1.3/2.0 rants, someone pointed me to Kazehakase, which indeed is a fine Galeon 1.2 replacement. But I noticed that Kazehakase in Sarge was in an early stage and the Kazehakase from testing (now Etch) were already much more matured. So in comparison to Sarge with Etch I won’t have the problem of not having a mature and sage web browser in main. And due to security support for Woody ceased a few months ago and Etch is now declared stable, it’s time to reinstall my last Woody box with Etch. For that, a repartioning of it’s two hard disks (8 GB and 40 GB) sounds like a good idea and so I had look, what’s on all those partitions where I once had a shot on quite a few Linux distributions and other unix-like operating systems. (Although I was already a big fan of Debian at that time, I wanted to look over my own nose and ordered a few CDs of free operating system at LinISO.de.) So here’s what I found, never really used and will throw away quite soon:

• RedHat 9
• Mandrake 9.2beta2
• FreeBSD 4.8
• OpenBSD 3.3
• one more, not yet identified (or perhaps even never formatted) Linux partition

That should give enough space for an Etch installation without touching the Woody installation first. Thanks to Venty, I’ve got a DVD drive for that box, so I can install from DVD. And for toying around with all those other neat and free operating systems nowadays, I’ve got my MicroClient Jr. named “c2”.

In the company I work for, most documentation is maintained in Word format. Except mine. I have a dokuwiki and am thankfully allowed this exception as I am the only Linuxer in the company. Since Windows systems need external documentation (being hindered by the absence of commentable text configuration files), there is a policy that all configuration data needs to be explicitly documented. I hate that idea, since documentation is always outdated, and documenting configuration changes doubles the work that needs to be done. After finding out that dokuwiki has a command line interface, I implemented a mechanism that can run from cron and keeps wiki pages of configuration files up to date on an automated basis. On the target systems (the ones that need to have their configuration documented), I installed a script which generates a tarball containing the relevant configuration files on standard output. For more sensitive data, the script could do some basic sanitazion such as removing passwords from the configuration files before putting them into the tarball. On the system running the cron job, the following script runs:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -C
set -u
JOBNAME=“update-wiki-firewall-config”
DWPAGE=“php4 /usr/share/dokuwiki/bin/dwpage.php”
TMPBASE=“/tmp”
SSHID=“$HOME/.ssh/$USER-passphraseless-$(hostname)”
REMOTEHOST=“remote.fqdn.example”
REMOTEJOB=“pull-netfilter-init-config-tar”
SHAREDIR=“$HOME/share/$JOBNAME”
WIKINAMESPACE=“pointer:to:namespace”
start=’/*BEGIN generated firewall rules */’
end=’/*END generated firewall rules */’
insert=’/*INSERT generated firewall rules */’
umask 077
if ! TMPDIR=“$(mktemp -d $TMPBASE/fwconfig.XXXXXXXXXX)”; then
        echo >&2 “ERR: cannot create temp dir in $TMPBASE”
        exit 1
fi
cd $TMPDIR
mkdir remote
ssh -i $SSHID root@$REMOTEHOST $REMOTEJOB   \
 tar --extract --gzip --file - --directory remote
mkdir workdir
touch workdir/rulelistfile
echo “$start” >> workdir/rulelistfile
for fwfile in $(find $TMPDIR/remote/rules/up -type f   sort); do
  MTIME=“$(stat --format=”%y“ $fwfile)”
  PROSEEXPLANATION="$( $fwfile sed -n '/^#::#/ s/^#::#[[:space:]]*//;p;q; ')"
  if [ -z "$PROSEEXPLANATION" ]; then
    PROSEEXPLANATION="netfilter-init internal code"
  fi
  rm -f workdir/newwikipage
   $SHAREDIR/wikipagetemplate \
    sed \
        -e "s PLHfilenamePLH $(basename $fwfile) " \
        -e "s PLHproseexplanationPLH $PROSEEXPLANATION " \
        -e "s PLHmtimePLH $MTIME " \
        -e "/PLHcontentsPLH/r$fwfile" \
        -e "s/PLHcontentsPLH//" \
  > workdir/newwikipage
  WIKIPAGENAME=“$WIKINAMESPACE:regeln:$(basename $fwfile .rul)”
  $DWPAGE checkout $WIKIPAGENAME workdir/wikipage
  if ! cmp --quiet workdir/wikipage workdir/newwikipage; then
    cp workdir/newwikipage workdir/wikipage
    $DWPAGE -m “new contents imported from $fwfile” commit workdir/wikipage $WIKIPAGENAME
  fi
  echo “  * [[$WIKIPAGENAME $(basename $fwfile)]] - $PROSEEXPLANATION” >> workdir/rulelistfile
done
echo “$end” >> workdir/rulelistfile
$DWPAGE checkout $WIKINAMESPACE workdir/contentspage.txt
 workdir/contentspage.txt \
  sed -e "\ ^$ start//\\*/\\* \$ ,\ ^$ end//\\*/\\* \$ d; "   \
  sed -e "\ ^$ insert//\\*/\\* \$ rworkdir/rulelistfile" \
  > workdir/newcontentspage.txt
if ! cmp --quiet workdir/contentspage.txt workdir/newcontentspage.txt; then
  cp workdir/newcontentspage.txt workdir/contentspage.txt
  $DWPAGE -m “new contents page” commit workdir/contentspage.txt $WIKINAMESPACE
fi
cd /
rm -rf “$TMPDIR”

Yes, this needs some more documentation and generalization. But it’s just a proof of concept that needs some polishing before being put into real life use. Here are the two template files for wiki page and contents page:

====== Firewallregeln PLHfilenamePLH ======
Last changed on target system: PLHmtimePLH
PLHproseexplanationPLH
<code>
PLHcontentsPLH
</code>

===== Dump of firewall rules =====
/*INSERT generated firewall rules */
/*BEGIN generated firewall rules */
/*END generated firewall rules */

The index page template relys on the HiddenComment dokuwiki plugin to be installed, or the placeholders show up in the rendered wiki page. The code uses the first comment line marked with #::# to generate a short explanation of the file being pulled into the wiki. dwpage.php is a fully-fledged command line interface to dokuwiki, committed new pages are fulled versioned as if entered through the wiki web front end. This way, the documentation in the wiki is guaranteed to be current and to fit the configuration found on the live system - it is directly pulled from the live system. Yes, rendering of the code is currently suboptimal. Working on it.

At work, I’ve got two screens on my Sarge workstation “snitch”. Since I want to switch virtual desktops independently on both screens, I don’t have a Xinerama setup but a Dual Screen setup. So my left and right screen do have different $DISPLAY (“:0.0” and “:0.1”) set. This is neither a problem for FVWM nor xlock nor XScreenSaver. But it is a problem for nearly every modern web browser available which checks, if there’s already an instance of it running. So if you try to start a new instance of a web browser on the other screen, most graphical web browsers make more or less problems:

• Galeon 1.3 and Epiphany always opens new tabs or windows on the display where its first instance is running, i.e. ignores $DISPLAY completely except on the first call.
• Kazehakase (0.3.7) just opens a new tab in the running instance.
• Firefox 2.0 thinks it crashed and asks if it should restore tabs and windows. Haven’t tried any further.
• Opera 9.20 pops up a dialog, says, there seems already a copy of Opera running and asks if it should continue with startup. If you say yes, only the bookmarks of one of the two instances get saved, probably those of the one with the last added bookmark or the one which exited last.

The only graphical web browsers which simply just work on a Dual Screen setup are Konqueror, Links2 (called with the -g option for a GUI), Chimera 2, Amaya and of course Dillo. Unfortunately I’m neither a fan of KDE nor of Konqueror and I do want a web browser with CSS and tab support… And Amaya is, well, only a reference implementation… (Chimera 2 from Sarge btw. segfaulted on two of the four pages I tested it with. Seems to have problems with PNG images.) So my current setup is to have Kazehakase as my main work web browser (with all the local web applications I need) on the right screen while I have Opera on the left screen for surfing, looking up documentation, testing web pages and other things. BTW: I don’t use Gecko based browsers for surfing on that box at the moment, since there are some web pages (the spammer vandalised Kazehakase wiki for example, at least a few months ago) which manage to be rendered in such an ugly way by Gecko so that XFree86 with the binary Nvidia (at least the last five or six versions I tried) just crashes away — either at once or when you try to switch to a text console by pressing e.g. Ctrl-Alt-F1 while such a page is displayed.

Last week I started the final round of Debian upgrades for the servers I maintain here and there, which is mostly complete today. I haven't been so lucky with upgrades this time, for a long list of different reasons. In the end, the smoothest upgrades were those boxes I upgraded when etch froze or so. natura.oskuro.net is the box serving these pages. It's an old, extremely noisy Pentium 150 which I've been intending to replace for a while now. I started the upgrade early on Thursday, knowing it'd take a while (natura takes its time only to read the Dpkg database), and it had apparently finished when I was ready to leave the office. Three issues:

• apache2's enabled modules were forgotten and I had to reenable them again, plus IIRC the default "It works!" site got reenabled, hiding the blog for a little while.
• bind didn't like some change in one of the default configs and I failed to noticed it had not started. After the reboot, the box was unreachable remotely, but that was OK as I had to go visit my dad that night for his birthday, so it was fixed after one hour or so.
• Last, my blog stopped working, and while I thought it'd have something to do with apache2.2, I had no time to have a close look as I had to leave to Lleida this weekend. Yesterday I discovered that for some reason, the old tar.gz PyBlosxom install wasn't liking the new python2.4, so I decided it was about time to move to PyBlosxom 1.3, from the Debian package. Not without the mandatory "It works!" post published in the gazillion Planets, natura was ready to go.

The very same night of last Thursday, I decided to dist-upgrade the box which serves the Spanish Debian website mirror. That's the only purpose on the box, so you can imagine the upgrade should have been pretty straight-forward. And so it seemed, until, in the middle of unpacking, dpkg died with a horrible I/O error, and I dropped into an unusable remote terminal with no working commands. Fortunately, apache2 was still up and running, and the web service has been working without interruption since the hard drive crash, albeit with no syncs from www-master. Today, Sergio visited the campus and had a look. It was a XFS crash, which got cleanly repaired using an install CD. We have an empty partition in the box, and will probably move the system to it temporarily, and back to the RAID, but on ext3. When the box was back online, I just had to resume the upgrade process, make mdadm happy and update lilo.conf before rebooting into the new kernel. This box uses LILO for some obscure reason I can't remember too clearly anymore. The box has just one partition on a md array, on two SCSI disks on a aic7xxx-based controller. Can anyone hint me why GRUB would have failed on us back in sarge, and if any fixes in the etch version would work any better? Using LILO here is error prone, and basically feels like a step back. Anyway, www.es.debian.org is now back up and running with updated content. Sindominio.net had its bi-annual upgrading party last monday, but unfortunately I wasn't able to help much as when I tried to log into the server, I must have caught the system in the middle of some key lib upgrade or something, and again I was locked in a unusable shell which would only segfault. Given my previous experience, I assumed that something had gone wrong and the box would need to be fixed at the console, and after 20 minutes I gave up helping on that front. Until I noticed, quite a long while later that I was still getting mail from the server. I managed to log in to discover the upgrade was done, with just a few bits remaining to be done. The major issues were encountered with our pam and ldap setup, plus nscd kept dying causing quite a lot of mayhem all over the place. Great work from Seajob, Syvic, nogates, apardo and the rest of the people who handled it! With etch, we can finally move back to an official Debian kernel, something we've been longing to do for a long time. The only pending upgrade issue is that we need to move from our old jabber server to either the traditional jabberd 1.x or ejabberd; our current implementation is no longer supported in Debian. The last of the etch upgrades stories involves Sofcatal 's servers. The box was running on a CentOS 4.4, which was moved away into a subdir just after booting Debian-Installer, and then lobotomised so it would run as a Linux-VServer under a new Debian etch install. I'll probably write more details about it soon though, as it could be a maybe less scary alternative to Guillem's debtakeover. Yay for etch!

Kate and I have been thinking for a while now about maybe adopting cats once we were settled into our new apartment. Two weekends ago, we went to a local cat shelter and adopted a pair of kittens. Photos below; the brown one is a female named Diana, and the orangish one is a male named Mars.





Not only are they INCREDIBLY CUTE, but they're very sweet-tempered and affectionate, at least when they can spare the time from chasing cat toys and play-fighting with each other. There's really nothing like having a pair of purring cats curled up on your lap together.

Kittens make everything better. :-)

(PS: more kitty pictures are available here)

I recently looked at “Pending comments” in my blog and there was ~700 spam comments that lagged the hell ouf of my poor computer as I entered to see. A couple of minutes after I mentioned it, my friend tech wrote a script to rid of most of them, so to those of you who have experienced the same problem and can’t be arsed to make one yourself, you can fetch and edit it here :)

Someone at Nokia please bitchslap the designer of the Nokia 5500 keypad. It randomly loosened and became like this
Other than that the phone is very nice.
How is it supposed to be water resistant when the keypad is merely a bad glue-on though.

I'm looking at placing our directory adverts for the coming year, but most directory salespeople won't give useful statistics. So I'll run a SLOPpy poll: Which of the following directories would you use to find webmasters, sysadmins or software developers in England? Just tick the boxes, put any I've forgotten in the others box and click Send (and put your name if you want to be in the thank-you message).

Your name: 118118: Applegate: BusinessLink: BusinessPages: ChamberOfCommerce: EuroPages: FreeIndex: ITVLocal: IWA: Kompass: MarketingTool: ODP: PamsCom: Scoot: Thomson: TouchLocal: UFindUs: UK.Coop: UKWDA: W3CSites: WikiCompany: Yell: YellowPages: Others:

I have just installed a machine running CentOS 5 as a Xen server. I installed a full GUI environment on the dom0 so that GUI tools can be used for managing the virtual servers.

The first problem I had was selecting the "Installation source", it's described in the error message as an "Invalid PV media address" when you get it wrong which caused me a little confusion when installing it at 10PM. Then I had a few problems getting the syntax of a nfs://1.2.3.4:/directory URL correct. But these were trivial annoyances. It was a little annoying that my attempts to use a "file://" URL were rejected, I had hoped that it would just run exportfs to make the NFS export from the local machine (much faster than using an NFS server over the network which is what the current setup will lead people to do).

The first true deficiency I found with the tools is that it provides no way of creating filesystems on block devices. The process of allocating a block device or file from the Xen configuration tool is merely assigning a virtual block device to the Xen image - and only one such virtual block device is permitted. Then the CentOS 5 installation instance that runs under Xen will have to partition the disk (it doesn't support installing directly to an unpartitioned disk) which will make things painful when it comes time to resize the filesystems.

When running Debian Xen servers I do everything manually. A typical Debian Xen instance that I run will have a virtual block device /dev/hda for the root FS, /dev/hdb for swap, and /dev/hdc for /home. Then if I want to resize them I merely stop the Xen instance, run "e2fsck -f" on the filesystem followed by "resize2fs" and the LVM command "lvresize" (in the appropriate order depending on whether I am extending or reducing the filesystem).

Xen also supports creating a virtual partitioned disk. This means I could have /dev/lvm/xenroot, and /dev/lvm/xenswap, and /dev/lvm/xenhome appear in the domU as /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, and /dev/hda3. This means that I could have a single virtual disk that allows the partitions to be independently resized when the domU in question is not running. I have not tried using this feature as it doesn't suit my usage patterns. But it's interesting and unfortunate that the GUI tools which are part of CentOS don't support it.

When I finally got to run the install process it had a virtual graphics environment (which is good) but unfortunately it suffered badly from the two-mouse-cursor problem with different accellerations used for both cursors so the difference in position of the two cursors varied in different parts of the screen. This was rather surprising as the dom0 had a default GNOME install.

Open Usability has a poll for the next default KDE theme or so. Oxygene or so.However it lacks options... the first real question "which icon [...] showing the menu with all applications" is lacking the "None is appropriate" option.The first icon has some windows on it. I don't want to configure windows. The second has a package on it, package manager. Next is a diary/notebook and a text editor. Looking glasses, the KDE logo, a computer and a help icon. I mean, there is nothing at all looking like an "applications menu" in there.Other questions don't fit into the usability category too much - for example, there is a poll about the 'back' button in the web browser. And there are like three regular left pointing arrows and one which is a reload turned the other way. I'd pick the other three; any of them is fine. But I have to pick one...Sometimes options are just stupid (e.g. offering a phone icon for email), and sometimes none is convincing (the chat icons, I actually find the 'small human figure' icons quite appropriate, but there was no such icon offered).Speaking of icons - I'd really appreciate some new Debian artwork. Our web site is looking like it's from the 90s. If it werent for '2007' dates occurring on the first page, it would look like it hadn't been touched since then. Ubuntu and Fedora have really nice pages (layout wise, I'm not talking about the contents which I didn't look at). Gentoo is as miserable as ours. OpenSuSE doesn't do language negotiation and looks somewhat odd. Probably too 'wikiesque'. FreeBSD just got a facelift last year. The artwork looks like 2003 style to me, and that the page has a 'monospace fonts' feeling might even be intentional. I certainly don't want the Debian website to look like a "web 2.0 beta" application, but some modern 'serious' design would be nice to have.

In a previous post, I claimed that SELinux uses a kind of object-oriented approach, and that this has several advantages over path name based access.Since SELinux policy isn't actually a 'program', the term is somewhat surprising. It's just one fragement of "object oriented programming" that is available in SELinux, and actually a rather simple fragment. Also it's not how it's evaluated; but the OOP 'design pattern' of 'classes' is somewhat present in the SELinux reference policy. The syntax is kind of twisted, too.Let me give you a simple example policy fragment:

type mylog_t;
logging_log_file(mylog_t)

This fragment defines a new type, and 'inherits' from the 'log_file' class. (you can think of "logging_log_file" as com.tresys.oss.refpolicy.system.logging.log_file if you are a Java freak)The logging_log_file 'class' (which technically is a M4 macro, and maps to the SELinux 'typeattribute' 'logfile' - this would be called an abstract class in other programming languages) in turn will make mylog_t also be a "file_type" type attribute.So above line means that the new mylog_t type will 'inherit' certain access rules. Namely those defined via the logfile type attribute or file_type.This means that I can write policy to grant access on "any file" (e.g. for security scanners such as 'samhain' or the SELinux relabeling utilities, backup application, etc.) or just to any log files (e.g. for logrotate). Independend of where they live or who wrote the policy for them.So if I write policy for a custom application, add mylog_t for files living somewhere in /home/myapp/logs, I don't need to modify the logrotate policy, because that policy contains:

logging_manage_all_logs(logrotate_t)

(You can again think of this as logrotate being derived from a "log file manager" class, though it's implemented differently this time. Also note that multiple inheritance is no problem in SELinux policy)Macro names in the reference policy usually start with a namespace prefix. In this example, it's logging_. Since it uses M4 for processing the files, the syntax is largely determined by what is easy to use in M4.

While attending LCA it occurred to me that the lecture notes from all the talks that I have given lack a copyright notice. So I now retrospectively license my lecture notes in the manner that probably matches what everyone was already doing. The Creative Commons web site has a form to allow you to easily choose a license. So I have chosen the below license, it applies to all lecture notes currently on my web site and all that I publish in future unless they contain special notice of different license conditions.

Update: From now on I am releasing all lecture notes under a non-commercial share-alike license. I had previously not given a specific license to the content on my blog - now I am specifically licensing it under a non-commercial share-alike license. This means (among other things) that you may not put my content on a web page that contains Google AdWords or any other similar advertising.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

During the last DebConfs I have advocated for people to donate their old laptops to developers that are not so fortunate with their economical situation. This year’s DebConf I will not be attending, but nevertheless, I would like you to think about it. If you have an spare laptop that you don’t use and you think you can give it up, bring it along with you and give it to someone who is in need of one.

BarCamp Montr al 2 is coming up soon. Yup, our second big full-day unconference is happening next Saturday at the SAT. We're bigger and better this time, and we'd love to have you show up. What is BarCamp Montr al? It's an unconference. It's a gathering of active, interesting people who want to get together and share our experiences. It's for individuals and groups, artists and technologists, young and old. Nominally, there's an Internet-technology feel because that's what BarCamps around the world have traditionally done. But because Montr al has such a vibrant arts scene, we've also got talks that are about anything and everything. So how do you participate? Well, you can't just be a spectator. Nope, unabashed consumption is not our way. Show up on Saturday and give a presentation on a project that you've been working on. Or show up a little early and help us set up. Or stay late and clean while chatting with the exciting people you've met. We want you to be part of our community. We've got fifteen-minute presentations ranging on exciting topics like:

• Taking good photographs
• Building Web 2.0 applications
• Online multi-player games
• Lasers
• East-asian culture
• Starting a company

Have you got something to say? Or something to show? I hope so. Now that I have you convinced, you're going to want to know how you (and your interesting friends) can attend BarCamp Montr al 2
Saturday, 28 April 2007
9:30 18:00
Societ des arts technologiques
1195 boul. St-Laurent
Free admission ( Sign up Upcoming Google Maps ) See you there!

Steven's blog post reminded me that I had to make a note about the two email responses I received to my own. I received one email from Pro Guns Person A quite quickly after my blog post went up. He was quite civil, and had things to say such as:

The truth is, if a few good citizens were armed and nearby, they would have had a chance to stop the killer before he could do any more harm.

and went on to say how if a person really wanted to, they'd break laws to get guns, so gun control doesn't achieve anything, except leaving the good guys unable to defend themselves. Sure, they'd break laws to get guns. You can't stop them if they really want to, but you can make it harder. And you have to make it harder universally. It's no good if one state cracks right down, if people can just pop over to the next state and pick up a firearm instead. I agree with Steven. Leave the gun toting to the people trained in their use (i.e. law enforcement). Frankly, it disturbs me that "defending yourself" equates to being able to shoot the attacker. I think it's Texas where you can legally shoot trespassers. Scary stuff. Pro Guns Person A went on to say:

To close, again without intending offense, please do not call for gun control if you aren't even a citizen of this country. The real problem is the societal issues that drive people to do these things. The truth is, fifty years ago in this country, people could leave loaded guns in their unlocked cars, even in high school parking lots...and nothing like this ever happened. But now, even though we have far more restrictive gun laws, things like this do happen, because of the societal problems.

I have the right to express my opinion, irrespective of my citizenship, as do you, Mr Pro Guns Person A. You don't have to like my opinion, just as I don't have to like yours, but I respect your right to have your opinion. No offense taken, either. You were very polite in putting across your point, I appreciate it. (By the way, I agree. Society's gone to pot.) Pro Guns Person B's email was along a similar theme: the bad people will always get their mitts on a gun, and the good people won't be able to defend themselves.

Think about these figures (I'll write about the US, since that's the nation you wrote about now): In the state of Arizona the gun per person ratio is 2,5 (on average 2,5 guns owned by 1 person, and these are the legally purchased ones). In the state of New York there is an official prohibition on guns. So why is it that New York has the higher armed crime rate among those two? (and one of the highest across the country)

I don't think reverting the entire US to a "wild wild west" scenario is really going to help matters at all. Sarah was saying that she'd found some statistic somewhere, probably saying something like what this page is saying. Now this was done at a Federal level, so that's why it worked, whereas anything done piecemeal, is going to cause a situation like what Pro Gun Person B was describing in his email.

In my server's postfix main.cf file: bounce_queue_lifetime = 8h This, instead of the "5d" default, reduced the size of the mail queue on my server from 1200 mails to 130. In these days where spammers just spam randomized addresses on servers, that sounds to be a good idea. Dear Lazyweb, other suggestions? Or is this indedd a not so good idea?

I’ve just returned from renewing my passport (an important step in getting to DC7). They asked for originals and copies of my previous passport, my military service card, my voter’s registration card and my birth certificate. They forbid you from signing the application until you’re right at the counter, take three prints of each index finger and ask for three recent photos, then take one themselves anyways. Sadly, they did not ask for my GPG fingerprint. It would have been cool.

So, found glusterfs today, looks quite interesting, may have to play when I've got some spare tuits... Also, I'm about to take over upstream development of xmms-scrobbler, so currently thinking of which revision control system to use... I'm very tempted to use tla because I know it and use it for everything else that I do, but I've been tempted by the evils that are git, hg and bzr... most likely going with tla because it makes the most sense to my often broken little mind, and I like the abrowse command rather too much :) What else? Probably lots of stuff, oh, looking for a nice multiple project group type build daemon - we've got 4 main branches of a piece of software at work, and packages should be auto built for each of the branches on a commit (ish) - we're currently running 4 copies of cruise control to build the debian packages, that's a little bit on the heavy side, though - and all it'd need to make it actually work for me would be to have a project group config option, so you can assign a number of processes per project group... but it doesn't have that - I just discovered CruiseControl.rb, which is a bit lighter, but it's still not quite what I'm after. May end up writting a small python buildd to deal with it instead, and hook it in to the svn repository with some post commit hooks. Also got a whole lot of Nagios configuration to finish off to monitor a bunch of servers. So, that's a small brain dump... more when I remember what the hell it was that I was supposed to be doing - been a hectic day!

At DebConf7 in Edinburgh, I'm going to moderate a derivatives round table. At DebConf5 I put on a similar sort of panel. Here's the description I submitted (please ignore the placeholder list of panelists on the DC7 site):

The Debian-Derivers round-table will bring together representatives of organizations involved in producing Debian derived distributions to discuss the political, organizational, and social barriers to collaboration with Debian and with each other.

The idea is to bring together a representative group of folks from our derivative community -- groups like Ubuntu, Linspire, Knoppix, Guadalinex, Maemo, etc. etc. -- and provide a space where they can describe their successful and unsuccessful experiences working with Debian and with each other. On the other side, it will give Debian developers a chance to ask questions of the group, both individually and as a whole. My first step, of course, is to build that panel. If you have worked on or represent a Debian derivative and think you will be at DebConf, you may have a spot on my panel. Give me an email at mako@debian.org and lets talk!

As a followup to the talk given at Galway Astrofest 2007 by Dr. Aaron Golden on work done by the Cool Stars research Group here at NUIG, the detail of this work were announced this week at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting 2007. Other press releases can be found at Spaceflight Now, and NRAO, though the best summary is probably at the NUIG Webpage (Thanks to Ronan Newman for the links). Kudos to all involved: Gregg and Stephen are currently writing up their PhDs and should have an interesting dissertions from this. Basically, they discovered that some Brown Dwarfs can act as Pulsars, blasting out huge amounts of radio-wave energy. Brown Dwarfs are objects between 'Planet' and 'Star' in mass terms, often thought of as boring failed stars, not large enough to ignite into fusion. They were thought by most to be highly boring : this discovery was completely unexpected. As the group in Galway has a lot of pulsar experience, they were well set to explain this. It looks as though this phenomena is due to a 'coherent maser' : an effect seen in large planets such as Jupiter, where the magnetic field spins up electrons from a solar wind. Certainly, it makes Brown Dwarfs, undiscovered until 1994 but thought to be widespread across the universe, more interesting things to look at.