FISL and Sacix
I am warming up for the next FISL - Porto Alegre, Brazil. Actually working on Sacix next release - a.k.a Sagui. We will have 3 mini community telecenters there where you will see Sacix running. For those who have no idea what i'm talking about - Sacix is a custom Debian distribution for labs and community telecenters that can be used to provide a full GNOME desktop for thin-clients or fat-clients and since Sacix is a profile based CDD, it has a 'desktop' based that is nothing but the Debian Etch Desktop with minor add-ons. Actually our major failures are: lack of human resources, website written in portuguese only. Sacix Sagui will have support for at least english, portuguese and spanish and (hopefully) the website will start being translated soon.

After Etch release, I plan to start a new group dedicated to merge Sacix features back to Debian (for Lenny) and act as a glue between debian-desktop supergroup, pkg-ltsp and related groups/packages e.g: dhcp server, tftp and nfs - there's a lot that needs to be done in terms of preseed friendliness on these. The good news is that the feature merge is already happening, but I'm the only person handling it directly. I'm not sure about the group name yet, but it might be Debian Sacix since "Debian Thin-Client(s)" or something similar don't really fit.

Anyway, I would be glad to see a Lenny user downloading our first ISO being able to choose not only the default desktop environment we've today but being able to select it and also the 'thin/fat client server'. In the end his server should be able to provide Debian Desktop Lenny through the lan for the clients. With Etch you need to install the default desktop environment and after that ltsp-server-standalone package, configure stuff like dhcp, nfs and run ltsp-build-client.

Get involved sending me a message!

See you during debconf! I can't wait to work IRL with some of you to improve Debian as a whole. Don't hesitate to contact me through the IRC for a bug squashing session or write new stuff from scratch. I've some plans for Debian Sacix, Utnubu, Simple-CDD, Debian Live, Ltsp and gnome-tasksel related work.

At 8pm on Tuesday, April 10th, I will be giving a talk about Debian to the Long Island Linux User Group (LILUG)

"The list of features is a mile long but let me summarize them all down to this simple statement: everything just fucking works exactly as you would expect it to."

No, this is not about Debian Etch :-) (but I guess we could make that happen).

Here is the origin.
Sorry for indirectly advertising non-free software, I just liked the quote.


Update:

Martin, it seems (just at first glance) that Zimbra is licensed under a MPL license and is non-free:

"The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) Server and Zimbra Ajax Toolkit are both licensed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License (MPL), and require that modifications made to existing files be given back to the Community."

Gar. I had to go downtown today to sign some legal papers with our lawyer. He's taken a gig as the interim chief of staff for the president of Concordia University, but he's kept a few of his older clients, including us. Maj and I stopped at the bank beforehand to sign some mortgage papers, and then we went to the SAQ across the street to buy some wine. We then piled back in the car, drove downtown, and with a little time to spare we stopped at Zyng for lunch, walked around St. Catherine a little bit, did some furniture shopping, and then met our lawyer near his office. We had a good coffee together and saw the new engineering building there -- it's quite nice. When Maj and I got back to the car, I realized that I didn't have my remote starter for the car -- which also disables the car alarm. This little gadget has been a real pain for me since we got the car -- the thing that attaches it to the keychain almost instantly broke, so I've had to carry it around separate from my keys. And now it was gone, and I had no idea where it was. So we retraced steps -- another 45 minutes walking around to the noodle joint, the furniture store, the Concordia caf . Nothing. We looked around on the street for a while, then jumped in a cab and came home. Maj had her keys here, so I borrowed them, cabbed back to where the car was parked, and as I was getting into the car I saw this: That's the clicker, right under that SAQ brochure about Italian wines. DOH! Moral of the story: attach your car-alarm clicker very carefully to your keychain. Sure, not much of a moral, but it's what I learned today. tags: car alarm clicker montreal concordia zyng car

RSS validated So, after starting an RSS 1.0 feed for my blog, I was having some problems using it in different readers. A few Google searches later landed me at the [$$vote for http://validator.w3.org/feed/, which is totally cool. Why didn't I know about this before? It turned out that my Tag URI format was invalid. I was using tag URIs for RSS item identifiers, and I'd left off the all-important validity date. So I had to update those. It seems to be working pretty nice, now; the validator gives the all-good sign for both my RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 feeds. tags: rss validation w3c

Greek Wikitravel Expedition So, I'm going to be interviewed this week for Hellas Spectrum, a Greek-language television show here in Montreal focusing on the local Greek community and culture. (I know - wow!) Apparently the interview will be "mostly" in English, with "a little bit" of Greek. Uh-oh. I studied some Greek in college, and I spent a summer in Crete and made my way pretty nicely, but I definitely haven't used the language in years. So this should be fun. I'm pretty embarrassed that I'm so inept in my ancestral tongue, and I hope that Amita June learns more than I have. The whole thing has reminded me that we don't have a Wikitravel language version for Greek -- yet. So I started a Greek Wikitravel Expedition to try to collect a group of users to make the wiki work. I've asked already on Greek Wikipedia, and I hope to find some more centres of Greek Open Source/Open Content culture on the Web. Greek people are disproportionately represented in science, engineering, and technology, so I think there will be a lot of interest. So, question for the LazyWeb: where are the good Greek Open Source/Open Content community Web sites? Influential Greek bloggers? What's the Greek Barrapunto? How can I get more interest in this project in the Greek Internet community? Contact me and let me know. tags: greek wiki wikitravel

When looking through my Webalizer stats recently I noticed that *.search.live.com is transferring about four times as much data from my domain than *.google.com. This wouldn't concern me if I saw some people being referred to my site from live.com, however I see almost none, while google.com is responsible for referring about half the traffic to my site!

Then I looked through the aggregate stats for all web sites hosted on my ISP and noticed that live.com has three times the bandwidth use of google while not showing up in referrals.

I did a couple of test searches with live.com and it seems that one reason why I'm not getting hits is because the search engine just isn't much good. The search string "bonnie++" does not return any links to my program on the first page (maybe live.com can't handle a '+' character).

So I'm now wondering whether there is any reason to permit the live.com servers to use my bandwidth. It's costing my ISP money for no apparent good cause.

In the past there was a previous MS search engine that I had to block because it's attacks (which can not be described in any other way) were using half the web bandwidth of the entire ISP). This case is not so obviously an attack and I'm wondering whether I should permit it to continue for a while just in case they end up giving me some useful referrals.

Of course the other possibility is that if we all block their servers then the live.com results will become even more useless than they currently are and they'll give up on the idea.

I look forward to comments on this issue.

“google keywords” - being the top search !
“ca passe” - a passe pas
“i’ve got married” - congratulations
“blitzer blog” - not here
“how to gzip vmdk files without powering off vm” - wow, that’s courageous
“cat and mice codes” - is it related to spaghetti code ?
“php script rm *.*” - what are you expecting to do ?
“should i use ubuntu or debian” - debian !
“why sucks is not scientifically correct” - yes, why ?
“drop laptop crash” - try and tell me what happens
“ext3rminator” - work in progress

* At early morning, I got call from home: “Your pic is in DivyaBhaskar Newspaper!”. I told: “Today is 1st April!”. And I just recalled that I had send some information regarding ‘Gujarati Blog World’ and it might got published. You can see more information on this on My Gujarati Blog. * Again switching to CLI 2 theme. Doesn’t work well but can’t resist myself..

We had a good brunch today. Friends Heather, Damien, Niko, Karine, Sarven, Brigitte and John all came over for some quiche, roasted potatoes, green salad, bread, cheese, wine, beer, asparagus, coffee and papaya. All in all a good time. We'd hoped to walk over to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac with anyone who wanted to see it. The previous owner was packing the last of his stuff today, and we were supposed to pick up the keys this evening. But we hadn't heard from him by 7PM, so we packed everyone off to home and put the baby to bed. Then he called at 8PM, so I drove over to the new house and had a chat with him while picking up the keys. He had a couple of leftover Bor ale Cuivr es, so we drank them while he showed me around the house. I helped him take the last of his cleaning supplies out to his car, and then I went back inside, to our house. Wow. I just walked around for a little while, turning on and off the lights and looking through the windows and trying to imagine what our life there is going to be like. We're not going to move in for another 2 months, so it seems a little remote. The house felt nice, though. It's on a quiet street in a great neighborhood, and I could tell it was a good place to live. I'm excited to get started with it. tags: house 4690 rue Pontiac homeowner keys

Hey IBM Now that OS/2 has reached its end-of-life, it's time to release as much code as you can out of it under a liberal Open Source license. There are millions of lines of code in OS/2, and I doubt that much of the Microsoft code written in the 80s is still there. IBM talks a mean game about Linux and Open Source (see http://www.ibm.com/linux ), and to a large part they've been pretty true to their word. But having a huge codebase available that could very clearly benefit the Open Source world, and that's not being developed further, is a bad idea. Clear the rights, release the software. Abandonware is a terrible thing to waste. tags: os/2 ibm open source

This afternoon I had another visual migraine. It was a little different from the previous ones in that it had more significant visual affects and in that it affected the right side of my vision. My central vision was OK, the left side was quite good, but the right side was mostly occluded by bright flashes. Closing my right eye seemed to make it a little better - apparently my right eye was more affected than my left. Previous visual migraines had only affected my central vision.

It happened shortly after going outside and it was a sunny afternoon, so maybe the bright light helped trigger it. The Australian optometrist chain OPSM advertise transitions - lenses that darken when exposes to UV light so they act as sun-glasses when outdoors, this sounds interesting (I don't want to have prescription sun-glasses as well as regular glasses). However there is one concerning item in the advert - "protect your eyes from dazzling sunlight, harsh artificial lighting and the glare from computer screens", I don't want my glasses to go dark when I'm looking at a computer screen (a large portion of my waking hours)!

Spring has arrived in many parts of North America. But in Edmonton, North America’s largest and most northernly city, spring has sort-of-come-but-not-really as it recedes fairly quickly. There will be a day of explosive warmth (you know, a balmy 45-55 F) and of course locals strip down to near nakedness, wearing shorts and, the more flamboyant will don an 80’s inspired cut-off tee. Hot. This sartorial statement says WE are SO ready for the long winter to leave … for good. Despite the collective sentiment, which is probably shared by 99.999999% of Edmonton’s inhabitants, the winter cold, snow, and breeze are indifferent to our deepest pleas and they come right back, making us sport at least a few layers of winter clothes. Within this dance between winter breeze and spring warmth, I have spent most of my time staring at my computer doing everything possible to transform half-baked ideas, hunches, sentiments, and theories into coherent words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters for my book. I am working on it full-force and am enjoying it more than I have in a year though from time to time I get fed-up, lost, sick of it, and my writing soul descends back, deep into one of Dante’s infernal rings, where I fester with my frustration, convinced that I should have become an organic flower farmer/acupuncturist that I almost became (well not really, but I have always fancied that combination as an ideal and fulfilling career path). Slowly I usually make my way back up, brush off the cobwebs of despair, and proceed anew. Within this highly secluded life of monastic-like repetition, thankfully, I have been enjoying some new things this spring. Once a week I head over to an University of Alberta off-site library facility to pour over archive material for a new project, which I am not going to talk about here (it is super-duper-top-secret) but it has been interesting working at an archive, especially one that is housed in an old Ikea. Since I am one of those right-brained people, I like to listen to music while I work, and lately I have also become pretty obsessed with house & electronic music, mainly thanks to a local DJ, David Stone whose weekly radio show on CJSR, BPM, is simply the bomb. He claims to bring the latest and greatest of electronic dance music from around the world and I think he is totally right. If you like this type of music, do catch his weekly show on Sat nights at 6 PM (MST). I sometimes get a little sad when I listen to some good music or see some stellar performance because it reminds me that what I may one day have to offer to the wider world an academic book and article here and there simply cannot bring the type of joy that musical performance and other creative expressions can bring. While you can listen to songs and over again, a book, if it is really superb, may attract a second or third reading. An academic book or article may at times light an inner light of joy, but let’s face it, it is usually a pretty cerebral light oh’ joy, leaving untouched those part of the brain, soul, heart, where more visceral, mysterious, yet fully self-enveloping feelings of joy reign high (but I am trying my hardest to stick a funny section or two in every chapter to leave a trace of laughter because if I can’t manage that with an ethnography on hackers, I will have failed miserably). Every track David Stone plays is something I want to listen to over and over again and thanks to mplayer stream dump function, I can. And funny enough, is that in the last month software believe it or not has brought me much joy as of late. I have been using free software since 1997 and I used to get A LOT more annoyed no make that a downright frustrated with programs (or lack of programs) than I do now. In fact, now, I am simply stunned whenever I upgrade to a version of a program. For example, Word Press 2.0 is like so much nicer in terms of usability and functionality than 1.5. The same goes for Open Office, the Gimp, and even Firefox, which has some bugs, but is so much better than its predecessors. I once described free software using the well-worn clich as “the gift that keeps on giving. And I think that this is becoming more and more true. And like wine, with the passing of time, these gifts usually get better and better. And like a unexpected present that arrives on your doorstep, these software packages induce some joy, because it is actually pretty neat to see these programs develop and grow into something stronger and more useful; so thanks to those who spend their time hacking away at making and improving this software and thanks to those (you know who you are) who helped with my recent WP upgrade!

If you have an hour to spare, I suggest watching this talk by astrophysicist David Dearborn entitled "The Use Of Nuclear Explosives To Disrupt or Divert Asteroids". It starts with a general introduction to the problem of NEOs (Near Earth Objects) and how, as the efficiency of our observation methods increased, we've come to realize that the inner solar system is literally packed with them — and that among them, quite a few large ones are bound to cross Earth's orbit in the near or distant future.

It then goes on to explain that even if you can detect an asteroid early, and observe it for a sufficient period of time (say 10 years) to calculate its orbit, you may not actually have any assurance that the object won't be a threat, because of non-gravitational forces:

• light bouncing off an object in space changes its trajectory, because photons carry momentum and exert a non-negligible force (an effect known as solar radiation pressure)
• more importantly, since the object also radiates heat, the emission of thermal photons modifies the object's orbit in non-predictable ways depending on its shape and composition (the Yarkovsky effect)

All this combines to make computations difficult, and as a result the time frame to react to a potential threat is a lot shorter than we would like (since of course, the more time you have, the better).

The meat of the talk is a presentation of two computer simulations: one where a nuclear device is used to heat an asteroid enough to change its trajectory and prevent a collision ("nudging"), and a second scenario where a nuclear explosive is used to blow the object into smaller chunks which can then simply burn in the atmosphere, or in the worst case cause less damage than a single collision (if they remain on a collision trajectory at all).

Overall, it makes a good case in favor of nuclear explosives as tools and nuclear technology as the most efficient method of transporting energy, beyond the other uses (military or civil) we already have for it. I find this very interesting.

Oh, and if you're not into astrophysics you might be interested in this talk by Mike Pinkerton on open-source and the early days of Mozilla instead; it's very good too.

Who else could do things such as solving Sudoku puzzles… in XSLT ?

What

migration of lists.linux.org.au and linux.org.au email to new server

When

Saturday, March 31 09:00:00 GMT-7 - Sunday, April 1 17:00:00 GMT-7 (Sunday, April 1 02:00:00 GMT+10 - Monday, April 2 12:00:00 GMT+10)

Contact

admin@linux.org.au (oh gawd, not more spam)Caesar on #linux-aus on Freenode

Details

I'll be performing a move of all of the Mailman lists for lists.linux.org.au from the hastily slapped together copy of digital running inside of a Xen instance hosted by IVT (thanks, Jon!) to a brand-new installation in a Xen instance called morton.linux.org.au on the hardware donated to Linux Australia by HP sometime after linux.conf.au 2006. I'll also be moving linux.org.au mail and local mailboxes from digital morton. All shell users of digital have already had their home directories migrated from digital to morton and been individually notified. I don't expect the outage to be anywhere near as long as specified, but I'm reserving that window of time for any problems, rollbacks, troubleshooting, etc. I'll monitor #linux-aus after I've moved the MXes and enabled mail delivery on morton, for any issues that arise.

If you admin a heavily loaded SpamAssassin server...

1. Use SQL for Bayes and AWL data. This allows your spamd processes to store their tokens simultaneously, instead of fighting over the lock for the Berkeley DB files. I use MySQL, postgres works too.
2. If you use network tests, install a local caching nameserver. Even if your nameserver is on the LAN right next to the mail server, it'll be worth it.
3. If you use OCR, make sure that the caching mechanism works. This is especially important in corporate environments where people use images as signatures. For extra points, store the image hashes in SQL too.

Also, the old prefork (--round-robin) algorithm works much better in my case than the new Apache-like scaling algorithm. YMMV.

I just received a question about SE Linux via email. As I don't want to post private messages containing material that's globally useful I'll answer through my blog:

> other than strict and targeted policies......other policies like
> RBAC, MCS, Type Enforcement are also there....how are these policies
> implemented

The two main policies are the strict policy and the targeted policy. The strict policy is the earliest and was originally known as the sample policy (but was given the name "strict" after targeted was developed).

The strict policy aims to give minimal privileges to all daemons. The targeted policy aims to restrict the programs that are most vulnerable (network facing daemons) and not restrict other programs (for ease of use). There is currently work in progress on combining those policies so the person who compiles the policy can determine which features of strict they desire.

RBAC means Role Based Access Control. The strict policy assigns users to roles and the role then limits the set of domains that can be entered. For example the user_r role does not permit the sysadm_t domain so a user who is only permitted to enter the user_r role can not perform sys-admin tasks. Like many terms RBAC is used in different manners, some people consider that it means direct control by role (EG role user_r can not write to /dev/hda), while SE Linux has a more indirect use of roles (role user_r can not run programs in domain sysadm_t or any other domain that allows writing to type fixed_disk_device_t - the type for /dev/hda). You may consider that the strict policy supports RBAC depending on which definition of the term you use.

Generally the targeted policy is not considered to support RBAC, although if you consider a role to merely be a container for a set of accesses that are permitted then a SE Linux domain could be considered a in the RBAC sense. I don't think of targeted policy as being a RBAC implementation because all user sessions run in the domain unconfined_t which has no restriction. I think that to be considered RBAC a system must confine user logins.

Type enforcement is the primary access control mechanism for SE Linux. Every object that a process may access (including other processes) has a type assigned to it. The type of a process is known as a domain. The system has a policy database which for every combination of domain, type, and object class (which is one of dir, file, blk_file, etc - all the different types of object that a process may access) specifies whether the action is permitted or denied (default deny) and whether it is audited (default is to audit all denied operations and not audit permitted operations).

MCS is a confidentiality protection mechanism where each file has a set of categories assigned to it. The set may be empty, may contain all 1024 categories, or any sub-set. Each process has a set of categories that determines which files it may access. File access is granted if Unix permissions allow it, if the domain-type model allows it, and if MCS allows it (on an MCS system). I have just had an article on MCS published in Linux Journal.

MCS is an optional feature for people compiling Linux from source or for distribution vendors. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and Debian the decision was made to include it, so the strict and targeted policies for those distributions include MCS.

There is another policy known as MLS. This is a policy build that comprises the strict policy plus Multi-Level Security. Multi-Level Security aims to give the highest confidentiality protection and comply with the LSPP (Labeled Security Protection Profile - roughly comparable to B1) Common Criteria certification. It would be possible to build a targeted policy with MLS but that wouldn't make sense - why have the highest protection of confidentiality with anything less than the highest protection of integrity?

As for how the policies are implemented, I'm not about to write a tutorial on policy writing for a blog post, I'm sure that someone will post a link to a Tresys or Fedora web page in the comments. ;)

> there r some packages of linux in which some changes has been made
> to support linux......for eg:- coreutils, findutils

That is correct. Every program that launches a process on behalf of a user at a different privilege user (EG /bin/login, sshd and crond) and every program that creates files for processes running in different domains (EG logrotate creating new log files for multiple daemons) needs to be modified to support SE Linux. Also ls and ps were modified to show SE Linux contexts as well as the obvious programs in coreutils.

> 'Z' is the new thing that have been added to most of the
> utilities......wherever I search I get the changes made only in few
> utilities like ps, mv, cp, ls
>
> Can u help me by giving all the changes made in each of the utilities.....

Unfortunately I can't. This has been identified as an issue and there is currently work in progress to determine the best way of managing this.