Two semi-related things. Firstly, I just got notice that North Somerset Council are going to let North Somerset Housing pointlessly tarmac over a square of grass near us. Planning application 07/P/0464/F claims to provide 3 additional car parking spaces, but it tarmacs 7m width of grass while marking 6m width of current tarmac as no-parking: a net addition of 1m! Not enough for even one additional car! Now they've made this officially-acceptable reasoning, I reckon it will feature in a planning application for building more houses on the village's green spaces. How about: you can build a new house as long as you mark an existing house as uninhabitable? Secondly, Clevedon residents are petitioning the Prime Minister to stop Tesco expansion as reported in the Mercury. Expanding the Tescopoly in Clevedon will harm what already looks to me like an endangered town centre. OK, it's not the PM's responsibility to stop one store expanding in one town, but it is his government's planning policies which are aiding and abetting the continued growth of unsustainable 'big box' stores. I can see Clevedon from my office window. I'd need binoculars to spot Morrisons, but I think Tesco is visible with the naked eye already from the top of Worlebury hill. Every Little Hurts but they just keep on rolling like Renard, not noticing the pain.

There are a lot of pages out there explaining how to convert your mail from mbox to maildir. I’m going to add one more, resurrecting the “tips” section of my blog. (All the tips from my blosxom days are grouped together on one page — someday I’ll get around to breaking those up properly.) If nothing else, I’ll never have to write these instructions in an email to someone again, instead I’ll just send them the link to this entry. I hope these steps are specific enough so anyone savvy enough to even have this problem in the first place will be able to follow them. One thing I find consistently concerns people when converting to maildir is how to make sure no mail is lost in the transition. The steps below address that concern. It’s really not hard at all once you understand how maildir works. First, I’m assuming you have mb2md installed and procmail support. Also, if you plan to access your mail through IMAP, your IMAP server needs to know to use ~/Maildir if ~/Mail does not exist. This is often default behavior (at least it is for Dovecot). Finally, I assume that your inbox is in /var/mail/username, and your other mail folders are in ~/mail. So, here goes:

1. Edit your .procmailrc. The first two lines should read:
   MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/
   This will cause all new mail to be delivered (after you save your .procmailrc) to be stored in maildir format under ~/Maildir. The key for procmail to know to use the maildir format is the trailing slash in the “DEFAULT” line. Note that under the new system, your inbox and all your folders are kept in ~/Maildir, rather than having an inbox in /var/mail and your folders under your home directory. (This is nice because it makes it easier to back up all your mail together, among other things).
2. If you have any specific procmail rules in your .procmailrc, you’ll also need to change the target folders for that. For example, if you have a spam filtering rule like this:
   :0 H
* ^X-Spam-Level: *****
spam
It needs to be changed to this:
   
:0 H
* ^X-Spam-Level: *****
.spam/
   The trailing slash, again, tells procmail to use maildir rather mbox format for delivery. The leading dot will make the folder appear properly for your IMAP client (there’s a trick I suggest below for making “dot” folders easy to access with a command line client like mutt).

If you have mail being delivered to a nested mail folder, an additional change is needed because maildir has a flat hierarchy. So if your mail was being delivered to “misc/other/spam” the new target should be “.misc.other.spam/”.

Save your .procmailrc. From this point forward, all mail will be delivered to your maildir folders. You can now import all your old mail to the new folders without concern. Since maildir stores each individual message as a separate unique file, you don’t need to worry about any overwriting issues while you are making the transition. New mail will be delivered to newly named files; old mail will be imported to other, unique, newly named files.

Import your mail folders:
mb2md -s ~/mail -R
The -R just means to import recursively through all your folders; if your mail folder is Mail rather than mail, use that instead. No destination is needed because mb2md uses ~/Maildir by default.

Import your inbox:
mb2md -m

Move your old inbox out of the way. Most people won’t actually be able to move or delete files in /var/mail (since they don’t have directory write privileges), so the easiest thing is probably to just open the inbox in your IMAP client or with mutt and save or delete all the messages.

Move your old mail folder out of the way:mv ~/mail ,.bak Once you’ve confirmed that everything is okay, you should be able to delete ~/mail.bak (or compress it and move it elsewhere.) If you saved your inbox to mail folder in step 6, that will get moved out of the way here as well.

That’s it, you’re done.

Okay, so you’re not quite done if you access your mail with mutt rather than an IMAP client. (You could just point your mutt at your local IMAP server, of course). I’ve found the most convenient way to access the “dot” folders with mutt is to create a parallel symlinked folder structure without the dots. Here’s a hacked-together shell script that will do that. This could obviously be rewritten to be much more elegant (probably in perl). But we all have our messy scripts, right?

#!/bin/bash

cd ~/Maildir for x in .*
do
y=$ x##.
if ( echo $y grep -q ‘.’ )
then
mkdir -p ~/mymail/$ y%.*
fi
ln -s ~/Maildir/$x ~/mymail/ echo $y sed “s/.///g”
done for x in *
do
ln -s ~/Maildir/$x ~/mymail
done
Then, just add these lines to your .muttrc file:
set folder="~/mymail"
set spoolfile=”~/mymail” Any questions?

A comment on my post about the failure probability of clusters suggested that a six node cluster that has one node fail should become a five node cluster.

The problem with this is what to do when nodes recover from a failure. For example if a six node cluster had a node fail and became a five node cluster, then became a three node cluster after another two nodes had failed, then you would have half the cluster that was disconnected. If the three nodes that appeared to have failed became active again but unable to see the other three nodes then you would have a split-brain situation.

As noted in the comment the special case of a two node cluster does have different failure situations. If the connection between nodes goes down and the router can still be pinged then you can have a split brain situation. To avoid this you will generally have a direct connection between the two nodes (either a null-modem cable or a crossover Ethernet cable), such cables are more reliable than networking which involves a switch or hub. Also the network interface which involves the router in question will ideally also be used as a method of maintaining cluster status - it seems unlikely that two nodes will both be able to ping the router but be unable to send data to each other.

For best reliability you need to use multiple network interfaces between cluster nodes. One way of doing this is to have a pair of Ethernet ports bonded for providing the service (connected to two switches and pinging a router to determine which switch is best to use). The Heartbeat software supports encrypted data so it should be safe to run it on the same interface as used for providing the service (of course if you provide a service to the public Internet then you want a firewall to prevent machines on the net from trying to attack it).

Heartbeat also supports using multiple interfaces for maintaining the cluster data, so you can have one network dedicated to cluster operations and the network that is used for providing the service can be a backup network for cluster data. The pingd service allows Heartbeat to place services on nodes that have good connectivity to the net. So you could have multiple nodes that each have one Ethernet port for providing the service and one port as a backup for Heartbeat operations, if pingd indicates that the service port was not functioning correctly then the services would be moved to other nodes.

If you want to avoid having private Heartbeat data going over the service interface then in the two-node case you need a minimum of two Ethernet ports for Heartbeat and one port for providing the service if you use pingd. If you don't use pingd then you need two bonded ports for providing the service and two ports (either bonded or independently configured in Hertbeat) for Heartbeat giving a total of four ports.

When there are more than two nodes in the cluster the criteria for cluster membership is that a majority of nodes are connected. This makes split-brain impossible and reduces the need to have reliable Ethernet interfaces. A cluster with three or more nodes could have a single service port and a single private port for Heartbeat, or if you trust the service interface you could do it all on one Ethernet port.

In summary, three nodes is better than two, but requires more hardware. Five nodes is better than three, but as I wrote in my previous post four nodes is not much good. I recommend against any even number of nodes other than two for the same reason.

As Bastian has pointed out, wiki.debian.org has a butt-ugly theme. I agree.

Some of the people that were present in Extremadura in September know that I was working at the time to make a wiki theme more integrated with the www.debian.org theme.

The result is partially complete, but is better, IMHO, than the ugly default theme. Sceenshots and the source is available (in a darcs repo). If anyone cares to continue and close all the remaining points, I would be glad to see that theme changed.

Unless somebody does something about both issues.

Comments are welcome! Contributions are welcome, you just do:

darcs get http://users.alioth.debian.org/~eddyp-guest/darcs/wiki.debian.org_theme/

And hack on that modern-wiki.debian.org theme

I recently read through my blog's archive and guess what, today is its official second birthday! :) Its very first post was exactly two years ago and dealt with the upcoming LinuxTag. Thinking back, this blog has come a long way: from a simple list-like page without any navigational elements in my student webspace (constantly being in trouble with my 20Mb quota), to my first forays into php, to a rather horrible nested tables fest hosted on a friend's server, to today when I finally got my own server and domain and returned to simple handwritten html + css and blosxom. Its choice of content has mainly remained the same though: Debian, uni, personal life and the the occasional rant when there was nowhere else to complain ;)

Recently a Debian user left a really nice note letting me know “It makes
me happy and proud to learn that boricuas are Debian developers! (Hopefully you are not the only one). This is for me the best Debian News since Etch released. Proud and happy for you.” Here I have to confess, however that I am neither a DD nor really a true Boriqua. I have studied Debian for many years, but have never officially joined. In terms of PR, none of my family is originally from there as my father is Jewish American and my mom was born in Russian, wandered as war refugee for many years in Europe and eventually landed in Venezuela, where I was born. But I have made my home in PR for many years and do consider it one of my many homes. Speaking of many homes, I also feel, even though I am not a DD, that Debian is an important touchstone in my life. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Manoj recently related to this topic, who almost mistook me for a DD: [biella] who is that DD that wrote an anthro thesis on debian? [08:55]
[biella] he is brazilian [manoj] I was gonna say that the dd who did an anthro thesis on debian
was you, then it struck me that you are not a dd, but I still
think of you as one now, and then it struck me further that
making you a dd might compromise your postiion as an observer After many years following the project, I have grown quite attached to it, and every year, a few months before Debconf I am reminded of this attachment. I have managed to make Debconf only every other year, and usually when I face this fact, a sense of melancholia and slight sadness sets in, especially when I hear of everyone making plans to go. I always start to question my decision to stay back, then hit all sorts of websites for cheap tickets, and start to wonder if I can perhaps manage to complete some work there, which is the main reason this year I am staying away. I then make myself confront REALITY and remind myself that the whole reason I love attending Debconf is because of its extreme vitality, which after a week, leaves you wrung out and tired, because you put so much of your attention and mind, soul and heart in the events. So even if I go for a week, or longer, you usually need a week ore more to recover. I am not sure I can spare such time this year, especially since less than a month after Debconf, I am packing my bags and moving back to the east coast of the United States. And as I learned last year and the year before and two years before, these sorts of long-distance moves take a lot of your time. My longing reminds me of how important it is to celebrate those things in life you love. And while there is more to Debconf than a celebration, much of it is just that, a chance, a space, a place by which and where you celebrate. And since I sit only in the shadows of Debian, I imagine the pleasure and joy runs deeper and wider for those who sit at its heart. So if you are on the fence on whether to go, this is your friendly public service announcement that it is, indeed, so worth your while.

Gunnar is following up on the init script blog posts by Erich and me. First a note to Gunnar: The idea of the init scrip snippets isn’t exactly my own idea, but rather taken from a comment to one of Erich’s posts (IIRC), I don’t know the original author anymore. Anyway, I really think that some init script generator should work. It should even be possible to fetch variables from /etc/default/<daemon-name> if needed. I’m just doing a braindump of what I have in mind for the start and stop of a daemon. I would expect a configuration file (currently I think one for each operation might be best, but INI-lookalike files might also be OK). So for the start operation, I would expect these options:

1. simple daemon, uses a default config with a hardcoded path and needs no options or only static options passed:

   [SIMPLE]
   /path/to/daemon
   option 1
   option 2
   option 3
   

   Where I chose to name one option per line so whitespace and controll characters can be part of the options without the need to quote anything.
2. a bit more complicated, needs a few variables from /etc/default/daemon:

   [TEMPLATED]
   /path/to/daemon
   option 1
   %PARAMETER_FROM_ETC_DEFAULT%
   --parameter=%ANOTHER_ONE_FROM_ETC_DEFAULT%
   

   Where the script generator would have to make sure that the parameters from /etc/default are filled in at runtime. I would expect POSIX-Shell-Scripts in /etc/default for this.
3. Really complex: A custom script snippet is needed which has to do some specificc tasks, like cleaning possible stable locks which had been left behind.

   [SCRIPT]
   rm /var/lock/daemon.lck
   /path/to/daemon --background --and --other --options
   

   Where the script generator would simply take this script and use it where it would otherwise generate its own code.

As for stopping, I generally see only three options for the sysv-like background processes: Either a script is needed (see above for how that would look like) or a process needs to be killed according to a PID-file or the process name (with the later being rather bad). So this would result in:

1. [SCRIPT] like for starting the daemon
2. killing by PID-file:

   [PIDFILE]
   /path/to/pid-file
   

3. killing by process name/executable:

   [PROCESS]
   binary
   

   or

   [PROCESS]
   /path/to/binary
   

   where the generator would either only look at the name of the process (first version, no full pathname) or for a process with the given executable (from /proc/ /exec, I would expect).

Alright, this would leave the cases of running (instead of backgrounding) the server and stopping such a running server (the later should be fairly simple unless the stopping of the server requires additional actions other than simply killing it) as well as the reload/restart/status stuff. But these should also be relatively simple actually. What would be interesting for me:
Does any init system require information that is not part of the following list? I would plan with supplying information how to:

• start server in background
• start server in foreground (without the need for a terminal)
• determine wether a server runs (status)
• determine wether a server is ready to serve requests (also part of status)
• determine wether the server is installed (and able to be started)
• stop a background server
• stop a foreground server (unless specified, a simple SIGKILL to the process is assumed)
• restart foreground server (unless specified, a simple stop-start cycle is assumed)
• restart background server (unless specified, a simple stop-start cycle is assumed)
• reload config (unless specified, it is assumed that reloading doesn’t work and a restart is needed)
• reopen logs (unless specified, the “reload config” operation is assumed to do this)
• some meta information: short description, needs writeable filesystem(s) mounted, needs a certain daemon to be running already (or even: able to serve requests), enhances other daemon X and should be started before it (don’t care if X isn’t installed/configured), is enhanced by daemon Y and should be started after it (don’t care if Y isn’t installed/configured), replaces daemon Z, should only run once at startup, …

Finally, even with all that information available inside a Debian package, this would still leave one question unanswered: Who triggers init script generation? If a daemon package does so in postinst: How do I switch to a different init system? If the init system does it in postinst: What happens to additional daemons installed later on? If they get regenerated during system start: How much penalty does that cause? Currently I think the route to go is to provide a command to daemon packages’ postinst that (re)generates only the needed scripts for that package and have a command used in an init system’s postinst which regenerates all of them. That should do. Regenerating during boot would most likely take too much time and has other problems, too, like the availability of a writeable filesystem to store the generated scripts.
Alright, if someone would like to see this post (or rather parts of it) on the Wiki page about an Init HackFest, please transfer it there yourself. I’m currently not able to log in, for whatever reason.

Looking at the current spam attack at our BTS I wonder how long it’ll take ’till the feature that our BTS is controllable via mail becomes a pain in the ass because of the spam. I’m sure we have some spamfilter and some brave people controlling it, since in the last time it was relative quiet and spam free. But the current attack makes me think if we couldn’t raise the barrier for spam somehow. Not sure how to achieve that though.

Erich Fromm, 1900 - 1980, internationally renowned Jewish-German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanistic philosopher. Fromm describes three ways in which we escape from freedom: 1. Authoritarianism. We seek to avoid freedom by fusing ourselves with others, by becoming a part of an authoritarian system. There are two ways to approach this. One is to submit to the power of others, becoming passive and compliant. The other is to become an authority yourself, a person who applies structure to others. Either way, you escape your separate identity. Fromm referred to the extreme version of authoritarianism as masochism and sadism. Authoritarians respond to a painful existence by, in a sense, eliminating themselves: If there is no me, how can anything hurt me? 2. Destructiveness. Others respond to pain by striking out against the world: If I destroy the world, how can it hurt me? If a person’s desire to destroy is blocked by circumstances, he or she may redirect it inward. The most obvious kind of self-destructiveness is, of course, suicide. But we can also include many illnesses, drug addiction, alcoholism, even the joys of passive entertainment. 3. Automaton conformity. If I look like, talk like, think like, feel like… everyone else in my society, then I disappear into the crowd, and I don’t need to acknowledge my freedom or take responsibility. It is the horizontal counterpart to authoritarianism. The person who uses automaton conformity is like a social chameleon: He takes on the coloring of his surroundings. Since he looks like a million other people, he no longer feels alone. He isn’t alone, perhaps, but he’s not himself either. The automaton conformist experiences a split between his genuine feelings and the colors he shows the world.

I've been using GNU a2ps from ancient days. I prefer to print out things prettily and read them on papers (with highlighters at hand) rather than on computer displays. You may safely say I'm a caveman. Unfortunately, the upstream development of GNU a2ps is basically dead. I know there are some promising replacements (most notably Cedilla), but the problem is, I got used to the good ol' GNU a2ps too much. It still works for me. And to make it worse, I'm a Lisp illiterate (do not throw stones at me, please). So, I finally took over the official maintainership of GNU a2ps, and now preparing a new maintenance release. No flashy new features (such as the much needed UTF-8 support), but most of easy bugs are fixed. You can obtain the current tarball: http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/a2ps-4.13c-rc3.tar.gz (I'd like to upload this to alpha.gnu.org, but GNU sysadmins don't give me the needed permission yet). Or, you might want to obtain it through the anonymous CVS:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/a2ps co -r a2ps-4-1x a2ps

Note that specifying the tag "a2ps-4-1x" is important. So, at least you have someone to blame w.r.t. GNU a2ps now. Please give it a try and tell me how you think (Debian packaging is underway). The a2ps mailing list is also revived, it's not yet another spam honeypot anymore. Join there if you want. Or, if you are kind enough, please join the development at Savannah.

Tag this post with del.icio.us!

Just quit my full time job, (hopefully) I'll just work for them keep leading the Sacix (www.sacix.org.br) development and not also in front of a team maintaining our ISP in parallel as I was. Sacix is yet another Debian/Ltsp based distribution but unlike many others from this camp we aren't focused on education. Yes, 0-200 age range! There's GNOME by default and regular apps (including gcompris, but as i wrote, education isn't the primary goal), we're also a custom Debian distribution and we've multiple profiles (artwork and set of packages). In other words almost any community telecenter project or lab can fit over our infrastructure. Sacix has more than 100,000 end users!

Sacix was all over the place during FISL in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Three setups running and the feedback of our upcoming Etch based release called Sagui was great! Arara (Sagui-1) supported only pt_BR, with Sagui we wanted to make sure that we weren't turning the life harder for English and Spanish speakers. Unfortunately, the website is over trac and I would like to hear about sane solutions on how to handle bugs in these three languages and a good plugin to start translating the wiki pages. Comments?

Thanks Paulo for contributing with usbfloppy drivers support (yes, this weird stuff really exists), tons of tests and ideas! We've been working very hard during the last two years releasing minor stuff here and there and nobody seemed to care, when we put the pieces together they finally get it and recognize it as something. ;-) Thanks for the others contributors, you know who you are and 'Sacis' wiki article too.

Btw, I'm just having a break from a 'code merging' session with Vagrant Cascardian. New ltsp package coming soon! It will be on the pile of my recent uploads: python-gdata, pyspf (thanks ScottK) and alacarte.

So, yes these three topics, the caveat, the book Better than Well and Hot Latino Bodies are related. You just have to stick with this long post to find out why… *** As I progress slowly but surely with my book manuscript, I am really coming to see how a dissertation and book are quite different creatures. I think one of the most important and noticeable differences is that a book has a lot more short caveats and warrants than necessary in a dissertation. I think there are two main reasons for this. One of which is has to do with your committee members, the primary and (usually only readers) of the dissertation. They are a lot more prepared and adept to ingest complex ideas than lets say undergraduate students, because that is what they are trained to do and because most of them are much more familiar with your topic because they have been with it nearly as long as you have. In a dissertation you are also allowed to (and often expected) to go on and on, ad naseum, with your theoretical explanations that help substantiate what are otherwise shakier, initial claims. For various reasons, for a book, especially if you are not some FFT (Famous French Theorist), you are strongly encouraged to dump most of the theory in favor of providing a streamlined version (which really, is preferable of course, but extraordinarily hard to pull off). I have been thinking a lot of the caveat because I have just finished re-reading a book Better than Well that is not only fascinating in its own right but brings the caveat to a stunning art form. The author, Carl Elliot, is a philosopher/bio-ethicist and the topic of the book, broadly speaking, examines how the rise of new enhancement technologies (prozac, plastic surgery, sex change surgery) is bound tightly with longer-standing, distinctly American ideals, such as the autonomous, self-directed and authentic self. It is one of those rare books that can be read by your father, aunt and uncle, tossed over to a willing teenager, and assigned in all sorts of college courses and still manage to impress all sort of academics in all sorts of fields. Part of the reason for his broad appeal is because the book is thoughtful and clever and so chock-full of really interesting examples that you are hooked and want more of his tasty intellectual Kool-Aid. So while he has one main focus, which largely triangulates between enhancement technologies, selfhood, and consumerism, in the process of exploring them, you learn about a bunch of other really neat topics: suburbia, the history of cosmetics and childhood, odd social phobias, long-gone and culture- bound disorders like dissociative, fugue, amputee wanabee’s, extreme blushing, and so much more. Along with crystal clear writing, he also throws in some classically funny lines, my favorite one currently being: For better or worse, suburbia has come to stand for something than can be survived only with minor tranquilizers. Another reason he manages to pull this Houdini-like feat is because of his judicious and artful use of the caveat, which is really the only way he can bring forth complex ideas, in a fashion that is much more accessible than is usually done in a purely academic book. To take on example, when he introduces the usefulness theories of Thorstein Veblen, an economist usually known (and only barely), by academics, he opens in the following way, because in many ways, if you just decided to pick up a copy of Veblen, his style make strike outdated:

Reading Veblen nearly a century after he wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class, it is not easy to know which parts of the book to take seriously. It comes off as equal parts intellectual theory, social satire, and crackpot polemic, (and goes on for a full more paragraph) and then says Where Veblen is prescient, however, is his sense that in a consumption economy, consumer goods would become markers of who we are. p. 103

In this way he can say, ok Veblen is useful because of this specific reason” and yet communicate to his academic readers that he knows the limits of Veblen. No matter how much I love the book, and now matter how I think his use of the caveat is stunning, there are two problems I have with it. In one case, I think he fails to give one of the most important caveats. He paints a picture in which all of American society is ensnared in dominant social codes and mores (which somehow all point back to consumerism and capitalism and a desire to improve the self). While there are points he seems to back away from that sort of statement, and a few rare points where he ascribes his insights to the group I think he should mainly be sticking to white, liberal-leaning middle-class Americans I think there are more instances where he paints a picture of America as far more uniform than it actually is. According to his account, no one is immune to the forces he so eloquently writes of and so in the end the environmentalist activist, is as caught up in the traps of consumer life-style as is the investment banker on Wall Street. It lead hims to say such statements as

Many Americans today learn who they want to be by listening to a Methodist minister or a civics teacher but by watching advertisements for The Gap.

Ok while he bit about the civics teacher may be true, any consideration of lets, say… the religious right in this country, which, as we know from recent elections, don’t represent a teeny-tiny itsy-bitsy minority (and for a fascinating glimpse into the world, I would recommend Jesus Camp), would bring holes, and sizable ones, to that sort of statement. Many Americans do in fact listen to their minster. And this does not only help explain the deep divisions in this country, but I bet because they do listen to their pastors, their notions of the good, the self, etc, are going to be pretty distinct from those he describes (and gain see Jesus Camp to get at this point) It is not that the religious right exists outside of the web of consumerism we are all at least partially caught in, and indeed, a lot of the new Protestant religious movements here and elsewhere as Jean and John’s Comaroff’s work has shown can be all about securing a more robust middle class lifestyle. But we must remember that even something as powerful as consumer capitalism or dominant ideals of an authentic, beautiful self though powerful and more often than not work in concert with each other do not quite have the power to efface all meaningful difference between lets say a white, liberal middle class woman and let’s say, many Latinos, who, do, let’s not forget, comprise a huge portion of America. Many Americans have a very different picture of the ideal female body than the picture he explores, which is skinny and lanky and forever youthful (and hence the appeal of botox and lipo). Let me provide just one example drawn from the annual Puerto Rican day parade and this hold true for the one held either in NYC or Chicago. Along with a blizzard of Puerto Rican flags, what you may also notice is the abundance of really bright spandex being donned on ladies that are not by any standard of the word slim. I am sure that any middle class lady (you know, the type who spends 5 days of the week working out at the gym, wishing her thighs were just a little thinner), would feel morally repulsed in seeing that sort of image, that is if they even bothered to go to the parade. But among many Puerto Rican men (not all) a sexylicious and extra-curvy, meaty Puerto Rican woman, decked out in tight & bright spandex, will like bring on a loud HAY MAMITA, ven ac ”………………… which roughly translates into You are HOT… Like I want you NOW. (more…)

Excellent news for the day: Rob announced OProfileUI and released version 0.1.1. OProfileUI is a graphical interface to OProfile, similar to Sysprof, but with the advantages that it uses OProfile and has a client/server architecture. Why is this so great? OProfile: OProfile is in mainline Linux and shipped in most distributions. OProfile can profile both user space and kernel space, and works on x86-32, x86-64, IA64, PPC, ARM, MIPS, Sparc and more (although OProfileUI has only been tested against x86-32 and ARM so far). Client/Server: with a client/server design you can run the lightweight oprofile-server on the target device (this only links to GLib) and run the interface on your desktop machine, moving the intensive work of analysing the profile data from the target to the more powerful desktop. This also lets you profile one machine doing tasks where it is normally tricky to run a profiler, such as logging in to GNOME from GDM, by moving the control interface to another machine. I've been fanboying Rob over this for some time now, I'm really pleased that it has finally been released. Let's go profile!

I think people are still a little euphoric over the etch release, but I'd like to let people know why Xorg 7.2 is still in experimental. Julien Cristau has done a ton of the grunt work, uploading all the usual library updates to unstable, and they're looking good so far, so at least that part is in place. The problem relates to the fact that the XSF wants to push forward with moving from Xlib to XCB. XCB represents a significant improvement over the traditional Xlib, and it's important that we work to nurture and standardize it. The good news about XCB is that most people transitioned over to it without any noticeable issues. Everything pretty much seems to work transparently, which is testament to the amount of care and time the XCB team has put in to creating it over the past several years.

But now for the bad news: there's some regressions, and they're almost all in non-free software. The biggest issue is this one: XCB will break java. You can work around it in older versions of java (as documented in that bug report) but in the newer ones you can't do much of anything. The XCB team and XSF (there's actually a fair bit of overlap there, because the XCB guys are Debian developers and I consider them XSF team members in that sense) were trying to hash out a solution to the problem. We're still working on it, but it represents the problems with depending heavily on non-free software in a free software context. Hopefully Sun will actually try to respond to the issue and release a java update that works with XCB. We can hack around the problem by disabling some checks in XCB, but the problem is really with buggy software, and we want to catch and fix those bugs. Essentially though, I'm not willing to break java in unstable so we're at something of a standstill.

In addition, there's a bug with a bit of proprietary Nvidia code. The XCB guys have a handle on that one, and think they can patch XCB itself to work around it, so hopefully that's a non-issue. Finally, some number of users have reported major performance degredation using XCB in some configurations. The XCB guys were actively going after that bug as well yesterday, so hopefully that'll be resolved soon too.

So that's where we're at. The server is looking good, and thanks to Julien and Drew Parsons we've got the latest X server release candidate and new drivers sitting in experimental, complete with the new (intel-only right now) randr 1.2 hotness, so if you want it, you know where to get it. I've finally begun my small contributions to the having a fully automagic configuring X server in experimental as well, but I'll blog about that when I reach my first milestone.

In the last two weeks I've discovered (or was told about) some programs quite useful for an outdoor technician (amateur photographer):

• gpscorrelate which adds GPS tags on exif fields correlating gps tracks and photgraph shooting time. Finally, I am able to geoposition my trekking pictures automagically!. Next step: some way to create google maps paths with POIs.
• hugin for image blending. The following image was obtained in Gredos composed from four pictures.
  

As mentioned in the past I got a new TV this year. It's an LG 32LCD2DB with a native panel resolution of 1366x768. As well as the usual SCART/component inputs it has VGA and HDMI. Currently my homebrew PVR outputs to the TV via a full featured DVB card with onboard MPEG2 decoder, but this limits me to 720x576 output and a basic OSD. My current box is a PIII-800 with a basic onboard SiS graphics chipset, so it's not got the grunt to drive the TV directly itself. I'm thus on the lookout for an upgrade. Let's start with my constraints. I have a Silverstone LC-02 case. I'd previously planned to upgrade to something bigger, but the discovery that LinITX can provide a variety of riser cards to suit PCI-E/PCI as needed means I don't have to. The LC-02 will take a MicroATX board and provide me with 2 slots, one of which is taken up by the PCI DVB card. This box lives in my living room, so it needs to be quiet - the current incarnation is a bit too loud but I believe that's mainly due to using a standard heatsink+fan assembly, so I'm hoping that something specifically designed to be quiet will be better. An lirc dongle and wireless keyboard/mouse are already sorted. I'd like to expand the use of the PVR to be a more general PC as well; up until now it's just been a PVR, but being able to check email/IRC would be nice, as would the ability to play games. Up until now I've run VDR, which takes full advantage of the MPEG2 decoder, but I'd like to give MythTV a decent try. All of this points to wanting more than just a HD hardware MPEG2/MPEG4 decoder. First lets start with the graphics chipset options. The contenders seem to be ATI, Intel, nVidia and Via. From my reading ATI lack any form of XvMC support in both their Free and binary blob drivers, so we can discount them. nVidia have support, but only in their binary drivers. The Nouveau project have support on their TODO list, but I can't see any sign of it yet. I'd really rather avoid non-free drivers, so that leaves us with just Intel and Via. I really like the look of the Intel G965/X3000. They've opened up their driver development and it seems to be quite active from reading the Xorg mailing lists. However they don't have any XvMC support; Keith Packard on the xorg list in February says "For media purposes, the current drivers aren't taking full advantage of the hardware yet", though later on does say "XvMC is on several of our lists; I don't know when someone will pick it up and implement it". Unfortunately I get the feeling it's not a high priority; I've seen/heard several comments about the fact that any processor that'll get hooked up to this chipset will be more than fast enough to cope without the assistance. That may be true, but I don't want my CPU to be spending all its time trying to decode MPEG2 or MPEG4 at 1920x1080i while the GPU sits mostly unused. I'd much rather the GPU was used to the full giving me spare CPU cycles, or perhaps the ability to clock it a bit slower for common use cases, reducing power and heat. I'm keeping Intel on my list because I hope they do get round to proper support sooner rather than later. They've also talked about the fact the GPU is programmable which would make it perfectly possible to add MPEG4 acceleration to the chipset; that would be pretty sweet. It's a bit odd to end up with Via on the list. I mainly think of them as associated with MiniITX boards, but they do also produce various motherboards for Intel/AMD CPUs with integrated graphics. They managed to shoot themselves in the foot for a period of time by limiting the maximum accelerated resolution to 1024x1024, but recently they've released the CX700M /P4M900 chipsets which appear to do 2048x2048. The OpenChrome project have these up and running to a basic level from what I can tell, but work on XvMC support appears to be progressing with various patches and reports flying about on the list. So currently it looks like Via has the best option (albeit through the Free software community, rather than a concerted effort on their part), while Intel has something that could be very appealing if the driver was more complete. The other factor is the CPU. 3 contenders this time; AMD Intel and Via. My current PIII-800 is rated at 20.8W TDP. Modern processors are in general a lot hotter, but I need to keep in mind that I'm looking for a quiet machine, and that the case doesn't have a huge amount of room for big cooling systems. AMD's dual core chips all start at 89W or more, though some of their single core lower end CPUs are more like 67W. Of course the Intel graphics won't work with it and I'm not 100% sure Via has a suitable Athlon chipset at present either (the 2 I found were for Intel/Via). Intel's P4 offerings aren't much better for power consumption, with many of the highest end chips being over 100W. Core 2 Duo looks promising; 65W, so more than the current CPU, but a lot more grunt. Via come out tops here; 20W for their 2GHz top end processor. However this is only single core and compares poorly to the equivalent clock speed of Core 2 Duo. A MiniITX board with a 2GHz C7 and a CX700M would probably make a fine PVR, but I'm not convinced about there being enough grunt for anything else. The Via chipsets appear to have more active in-progress support for media acceleration, which suggests a P4M900 + Core 2 Duo. That's contrasted with what looks to be the more powerful X3000, that actually has a manufacturer who seems to want to get full Free support out there. I'm probably a couple of months off actually making a decision; partly because I want to watch how it all plays out in the hope that the Intel chipset will get some more support, or that the Via chipset will be proven to be reliable in operation. And assuming I do make a video chipset/CPU decision I then get the joys of trying to find a motherboard with DVI + SP/DIF. I know the G965 can do DVI out with an ADD2 card in the PCI-E slot, but I don't know if the P4M900 supports the same thing. I can't see an Intel MicroATX 965 board with SP/DIF out - there's an HD audio header, but this doesn't seem to be a direct mapping. Can I get a converter?

It’s been a crazy few weeks. I’ve heard the phrase “drinking from the fire hose” many times, and while I’ve never actually tried to do that, I suspect the experience is something like this. I’m having a blast though. A few quick first impressions:

1. First things first: The lead up to the announcement was remarkable—not at all what I expected from a big company. As Jim Grisanzio pointed out, the PR people did a great job coordinating everything, but the bloggers were very much in the lead here. In fact, I was given so little (OK, no) guidance on what “the message” was supposed to be that I sent a draft of what I was going to post to Jonathan, and he replied, no one is allowed to run their posts by me, just speak your mind, that’s what we all do. The message: Sun really is as transparent as it appears from the outside perspective.
2. In the other direction, the people here are not only open to the outside perspective, they want to hear it. That’s a big part of the reason I’m here now. Solaris has lost a lot of developer mindshare to Linux over the past 5-10 years. There are important lessons to be learned from that, and we (yes, I feel like it’s “we” already) are intent on doing just that.
3. Maybe it’s just the people I’m working with, but this place feels like a startup. There’s a lot of positive energy, a real sense of urgency, and people genuinely seem to love what they’re doing. The difference: It’s a startup with actual resources. You know, like 30,000+ people. A potent combination indeed.

Regular blogging should resume shortly.

The LSB functions in Debian can do fancy and non-fancy output. However, the output is not really fance compared to grml, gentoo and Ubuntu. They have these nice, colored ok or fail messages in brackets
If you are like me and you always want to have the coolest bling bling Try this patch:


Of course this only works for init scripts including and using the lsb functions (should be most of them).

I upgraded my mailserver, etc box to etch. It was fairly painless, a few tweaks to do here and there. I'm looking forward to newer version of things like Spamassassin. I'm also booked for my trip to Edinburgh, I'm really looking forward to that, since I've never been there and it's where my mother was born (well not Edinburgh, but Scotland).

I was looking forward to going to the New York etch release party, but I had to come out to Mountain View earlier this week. Luckily I think I will get to attend a BAD meeting this week. Being part of Debian sure is cool these days.

So, this is my last evening (and when I remember correctly the first one I’m at home) of my holidays. All began last Friday called “Karfreitag”, a national holiday. To be correct, the first party was already on Thursday and they continued daily till Monday evening. The best event in this time was Sunday afternoon, some minutes after I waked up Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 aka Etch was released, what a feeling. It was especially interesting because it’s the first stable release with some of my packages and it was a great experience to see how releasing and planning works. I often think back to the two bug squashing parties in Zurich, one in September and one in October iirc. Back to my holidays: First it was planned that I go with my sister to Zurich from Monday evening till Thursday evening, but then I got a appalling call from madduck who told me that he is in the hospital in Zurich with several broken bones. We planned to sleep in madducks flat and so we couldn’t get the key and went Tuesday morning. Walking through Zurich, getting some informational material from the University Zurich for my Sister (she maybe wants to study there) and the visiting madduck. After the visit we went again to the center of the city and walked without a real destination. In the evening we finally went to Oerlikon and went to “our” flat. After installing our sleep places (goddamn, I want to have a waterbed) we went to Migros to buy some food and drinks for the evening and the next day. The next day we really got up quite early and visited Zurich with a city guide, a lot of sightseeing and hanging in some bars. In the afternoon Daniel Baumann also was in Zurich and we went to have a drink together and also Tobias Ast came and staid with us till the next evening. We really had fun together and the main thing we did on Thursday was relaxing on the lake of Zurich and in the evening we went home. Then it was finally friday, I looked forward to this day for about one week, why? The release party in Zurich!! It was my first release party on the Irchel area in Zurich, we grilled, had some beer together and talked about god and the world. It also was the first time i met Adrian von Bidder and Mathias St rmer in person, especially with Adrian i had a longer interesting discussion about network devices from Cisco and their special prices. Saturday was already the next party day. When I was 13 we had a supply teacher for our sick teacher for 2 months, I was her horror pupil. Fine - some weeks ago I met her again in a Pub in the evening and we staid together the whole evening and became good friends in a way, so I was also invited (as the only of her pupils) to her flat share party. I met several “new” people and some of them (mostly IT students) recognized my Debian t-shirt and I had some interesting discussions about free software and had to explain the philosophy of Debian to some of them. So yes, now it’s sunday, I’m more tired than before my holidays but I’m really happy, my holidays were great because of some adventures. Regards to all to my friends… Tomorrow I will continue working and have several tasks open, especially upgrading some Debian servers from Sarge to Etch (Spamfilters, LDAP, Proxy servers…) and I hope I won’t have many troubles. In addition I have also some tasks open for Debian which I’d like to complete this week.