Inspired by this post from Lars Wirzenius, I recently bought an electricity meter (or energy meter) and measured the energy consumption of everything I could find in my flat. I did not yet perform any long-term tests, i.e. measuring the average consumption over multiple days or so, only some quick ad-hoc checks. I just recorded the number of watts the respective device used when powered on. Here are the results: Kitchen stuff:

• Microwave. Off: 0 W. On: 1150 W.
  Depends on the configured "mode" of the microwave, I used the highest/hottest mode here.
• Coffee machine. Off: 0 W. On: 884 W.
• Mini-oven. Off: 0 W. On: 800 W.
  Depends on the configured "mode" of the mini-oven, I used the highest/hottest mode here.
• Kettle. Off: 0 W. On: 2035 W.
  Quite a shock. I bet there are more energy-efficient ones out there, but still...
• Toaster. Off: 0 W. On: 168 W.
• Fridge. Off: 0 W. On: 110 W.
  This needs testing over a longer period of time. Fridges are not powered all the time.

Computer stuff:

• Printer (Epson Stylus DX4200). Off: 0 W. Idle: 2.6 W. Printing: 10 W.
• Laptop (Toshiba Satellite A80-117). Off: 0 W. On: 40 W. Heavy CPU load: 50 W. In powersave mode: 32 W.
• PC (ASUS P4B266, 2 GHz). Off: 2.7 W. On: 60 W. Heavy CPU load: 92 W.
• Computer monitor (CRT). Off: 1.7 W. On: 77 W. Pretty dark screen contents: 60 W. Text console: 50 W.
• NSLU2. Off: 0 W. On: 3.5 W. Heavy CPU load: 3.9 W.
  This is one of the greatest pieces of hardware I ever bought, and these numbers are one reason for that!
• External USB hard drive. Off: 0 W. On: 9.6 W. Heavy I/O load: 10.8 W.
• DSL splitter + router. Off: 0 W. On: 1.2 W.
• Radio. Off: 0.6 W. On: 2.1 W.
• Shredder. Off: 0 W. On: 40-60 W.
• External loudspeakers ("bass booster"). Off: 1.5 W. On: 3.5 W.
• Portable mini CD player. Off: 0.4 W. On: 1.6 W.

By removing all devices which draw more than 0 watts in stand-by mode, I was able to reduce the overall (useless) energy consumption (and costs!) quite a bit. I also replaced a bunch of 40 W and 60 W lightbulbs with energy saving lightbulbs which are equally bright, but only consume 8 W or 12 W respectively. On the long run you can save quite some amount of energy (and money) with them. They do cost a little bit more than normal lightbulbs, but save lots of electricity costs and they also last a lot longer (8000-15000 hours vs. 1000 hours according to Wikipedia).

Adrian von Bidder made an interesting post in response to my post about Spanish wind power. He correctly points out that power sources that have seasonal variations and which may vary during the course of a day can not be used as the sole power source.

The ideal design would be to have wind power stations that are designed to have a peak power that is greater than the expected use for the country. Then when wind power is slightly below peak the entire use for the country could still be satisfied.

There are a number of power sources that can quickly ramp up, this includes hydro-electric and gas-fired power stations. Such forms of power generation could be used as backup for when wind and solar power are limited. Incidentally one thing to note about Solar power is that it is most effective during the day in summer - which is when there is the highest demand for electricity to run cooling systems. There is also an option for having the sun heat up rocks which can be used for generating electricity at night or at periods of peak demand. So eventually we could have all our energy needs supplied by solar and wind power.

If wind power was designed to exceed the demand at windy times there are a number of ways that it could be used. The first thing to do is to implement billing systems that vary the cost according to the supply. This information could be provided to customers via X10 (or a similar technology). Home appliances could take note of this information and perform power-hungry operations when it's cheap. Your freezer could cool itself to -30C when electricity is cheap and allow the temperature to rise to -5C when it's expensive. You could program your washing machine to start when electricity becomes cheap - usually a few hours delay before starting the washing is no inconvenience.

Ideally home power generation from solar and wind sources would be used. There is significant loss in the power lines that lead from power plants to the consumer, so there are efficiency benefits in generating power locally. A wind turbine for a home will give highly variable amounts of power, and the electricity use of a home also varies a lot. So batteries to store the power are required. When you have local battery storage you could use your batteries to power your home when electricity is expensive and use mains power when it's cheap. Also if it was possible to feed power back to the main grid then home battery systems could be used to help power the main grid at expensive times (if the electricity company reimburses you for putting power back in the grid then you want such reimbursement to be done at the highest rate).

Adrian also mentioned turning devices off when leaving home. It is common practice in hotels that when entering your room you will insert your key in a holder by the door which acts as a master switch for all lights and some other electrical devices (such as the TV).

This same idea could be adopted for home use, not based on key storage (although this would be an option) but instead on a switch near the front door. Push a button and all lights turn off as do human-focussed appliances such as the TV and DVD player turn off (not the VCR), etc. There could also be a night option which would turn off the TV, DVD player, and most lights. Obviously at night you want bedroom and bathroom lights to still work but many things can be turned off.

This is all possible with today's technology, small changes to usage patterns, and spending a little more money on technology. Currently you can get a basic solar power system for your house for about $10,000. That isn't much when you spend $300,000 or more buying the house!

Two of these toys just landed on my laps:

QLogic Fibre Channel HBA Driver
qla2xxx 0000:03:04.0: Found an ISP2422, irq 69, iobase 0xf6000000
qla2xxx 0000:03:04.0: Configuring PCI space...
qla2xxx 0000:03:04.0: Configure NVRAM parameters...
qla2xxx 0000:03:04.0: Verifying loaded RISC code...
qla2xxx 0000:03:04.0: Allocated (1061 KB) for firmware dump...
qla2xxx 0000:03:04.0: Waiting for LIP to complete...
qla2xxx 0000:03:04.0: Cable is unplugged...
scsi3 : qla2xxx
qla2xxx 0000:03:04.0:
QLogic Fibre Channel HBA Driver: 8.01.03-k
QLogic QLA2460 - PCI-X 2.0 to 4Gb FC, Single Channel
ISP2422: PCI (66 MHz) @ 0000:03:04.0 hdma-, host#=3, fw=4.00.27 [IP]

more FC-HBA! more fun! My Niagara T2000 has now 4 (3 PCI-E + 1 PCI-X) FC-HBA controllers topping what my ancient SAN can really do considering the age and the few parts branded Digital, but best of all is the above dmesg coming from a J5000 pa-risc machine. The Qlogic controller was the first one to actually pass the POST (opposite to the Emulex that hangs everything hard). One cluster, 5 different architectures, 7 machines. This project is becoming interesting to stress portability of things like OCFS2 or GFS2 and their user land tools. Sometimes i wish to have a few pcmcia -> FC-HBA to plug a ppc laptop and an amiga 1200 m86k :)

OK, Having agreed that Openid is a good idea to solve the multiple-login-issue, i've been looking at enabling it on the python-based projects I work with. Harder than it looks, for no apparent reason. Firstly, I've succeeded in enabling an Openid Server in my Pyblosxom blog. Just google to pyblosxom+openid+server and install. It works. Now I can log into openid sites with my blog address http://blog.scealnetworks.com. Alternatively, I can openid-enable the comments login on the blog by installing the openid comments plugin. Unfortunately this seems to conflict with the server above, and both seem to conflict with Debians python-openid. All three seem to have a common original codebase that has diverged, but I haven't had time to do any software genealogy and figure out which codebase is out of date. Any ideas anybody ? (other than emailing everyone involved). Secondly, I'd like to share the logins with my MoinMoin wiki. Again, a patch has been written for this, but to share the logins between pyblosxom and MoinMoin will need co-ordination. My current plan is to try and get all related openid sites to share /srv/www/openid-store on the server to share identities. This'll need patches, and probably justify making Debian packages out of the plugins. Finally, I'm working on a Plone website for IFAS, for observation tracking and co-ordination (see aop.irishastronomy.org and aop-test.irishastronomy.org if you're interested). Here, all the users already have logins on a related system in PHPBB on a different host. It would be nice to integrate them : query the SQL database on the PHPBB site? give them openid identities from the PHPBB machine?

In the last weeks I've focused more on doing things than writing about them. I've (for the most part) managed to become an early riser, getting up at 5 o'clock each morning, and gotten a number of things sorted in the two hours between breakfast and going to work. The time for this got taken away from the part of the evening where I'm too tired to do anything meaningful and so end up reading emails. This, of course, means that I will have less time for reading mail, and so I've changed my mail setup so that list mail no longer goes into my inbox. This was long overdue, and it is a good thing that the blue "message" LED now only lights up for mail addressed to me (and spam, but I'm going to deal with that later).

Today's featured spam is from Digital Parts, Rowan House, Bricklehampton Lane, Pershore, Worcestershire, WR10 3JT sent via ukcompanydeals.com and reroute-all.com. They get a special mention for including the fully buzzword-compliant footer

"Marketing communications are delivered in accordance with EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications. [...] All communications are targeted to business users only."

and then sending their weasel words to one of my personal org.uk addresses, clearly marked as "UK non-trading individual" at Nominet. No real contact details included, so if you get the same spam, please link this to help them find themselves on search engines.

The latest news is that Spain has wind power as it's main source of electricity. The second largest source is nuclear and the third is coal. This is due to some particularly windy weather recently, but Spain is also a world leader in both manufacture and installation of wind power systems.

Other countries should follow their lead. Wind power is very cheap once it's installed, there are minimal ongoing costs and when things go wrong the scope of the problem is very small (unlike nuclear power plants which have the potential to contaminate large areas).

Sorry no link, this news is too new to be indexed by google.

I figured this new shiny OpenID thing was cool enough to start using it. There's just this one problem: I didn't want to have to go through the "register on a website and remember yet another password" dance once more; and since I have this marvellous Kerberos realm set up which works for authenticating against my webserver, too, why not use that? So I downloaded the JanRain PHP OpenID library, and went hacking. It's not all that hard, really:

diff -ruN ./lib/actions.php /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/actions.php
--- ./lib/actions.php	2006-12-08 23:56:22.000000000 +0100
+++ /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/actions.php	2007-03-08 14:18:32.000000000 +0100
@@ -88,17 +88,24 @@
     if (!isset($input['openid_url']))  
         $errors[] = 'Enter an OpenID URL to continue';
      
-    if (!isset($input['password']))  
-        $errors[] = 'Enter a password to continue';
+    if (!isset($input['password']) && !isset($_SERVER["REMOTE_USER"]))  
+        $errors[] = 'Enter a password to continue, or log in using an ' .
+			'apache logon method';
      
     if (count($errors) == 0)  
         $openid_url = $input['openid_url'];
         $openid_url = Auth_OpenID::normalizeUrl($openid_url);
-        $password = $input['password'];
-        if (!checkLogin($openid_url, $password))  
-            $errors[] = 'The entered password does not match the ' .
-                'entered identity URL.';
-         
+	if(isset($_SERVER["REMOTE_USER"]))  
+	    if(!checkUser($openid_url, $_SERVER["REMOTE_USER"]))  
+	       $errors[] = 'The apache user does not match the openid URL';
+	     
+	  else  
+           $password = $input['password'];
+           if (!checkLogin($openid_url, $password))  
+               $errors[] = 'The entered password does not match the ' .
+                   'entered identity URL.';
+            
+	 
      
     return array($errors, $openid_url);
  
@@ -166,4 +173,4 @@
     return sites_render($sites);
  
 
-?>
\ No newline at end of file
+?>
diff -ruN ./lib/render/login.php /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/render/login.php
--- ./lib/render/login.php	2006-12-08 23:56:22.000000000 +0100
+++ /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/render/login.php	2007-03-08 14:53:56.000000000 +0100
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@
 require_once "lib/session.php";
 require_once "lib/render.php";
 
+if(!isset($_SERVER["REMOTE_USER"]))  
 define('login_form_pat',
        '<div class="form">
   <p>
@@ -31,6 +32,33 @@
   </form>
 </div>
 ');
+  else  
+define('login_form_pat',
+       '<div class="form">
+  <p>
+    Enter your identity URL into this form to log in to this server. This
+    server must be configured to accept your identity URL. Since you already
+    logged on through an Apache method, entering a password is not required
+  </p>
+
+  <form method="post" action="%s">
+    <table>
+      <tr>
+        <th><label for="openid_url">OpenID URL:</label></th>
+        <td><input type="text" name="openid_url"
+                   value="%s" id="openid_url" /></td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td colspan="2">
+          <input type="submit" value="Log in" />
+          <input type="submit" name="cancel" value="Cancel" />
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+  </form>
+</div>
+');
+ 
 
 define('login_needed_pat',
        'You must be logged in as %s to approve this request.');
@@ -62,4 +90,4 @@
      
     return sprintf("<ul class=\"error\">\n%s</ul>\n", $text);
  
-?>
\ No newline at end of file
+?>
diff -ruN ./lib/session.php /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/session.php
--- ./lib/session.php	2006-12-08 23:56:22.000000000 +0100
+++ /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/session.php	2007-03-08 14:34:49.000000000 +0100
@@ -129,6 +129,16 @@
  
 
 /**
+ * Check whether the logged-on user matches the specified OpenID URL
+ */ 
+function checkUser($openid_url, $user)
+ 
+    global $openid_user_urls;
+    return isset($openid_user_urls[$openid_url])
+        && $user = $openid_user_urls[$openid_url];
+ 
+
+/**
  * Get the openid_url out of the cookie
  *
  * @return mixed $openid_url The URL that was stored in the cookie or
@@ -202,4 +212,4 @@
 
  
 
-?>
\ No newline at end of file
+?>

It expects an array in config.php like so:

openid_user_urls = array(
	"http://wo.uter.be/" => "wouter@GREP.BE"
);

(in the case of kerberos; if you use a different authentication method, the syntax of that array will most likely be different, too) It's still not perfect; all my changes really do is bypass the password check if it notices that apache has already authenticated the remote user; but I still need to "log on" at the PHP level, which also requires me to enter my OpenID URL. A somewhat cooler implementation would pre-enter the OpenID URL in the form. A really cool implementation would not even show me the logon form, but go straight to the "logged on" state, using the OpenID URL as given by the consumer, and the information apache provides us on the remote user. But it's a start. Adding OpenID capabilities to my blog comment entry script is proving slightly more challenging, however. More on that later.

Hobix There were some issues concerning Hobix and the new Ruby (1.8.6) that entered Sid recently. I’ve solved the problem, as you can see, and uploaded a Subversion snapshot package to experimental. Update: It seems that hobix 0.5~svn20070319-1 accidently was uploaded without share data. This was spotted and fixed by Arnaud, thanks! A new version (0.5~svn20070319-2) is on its way to experimental! Ruby D-Bus A few weeks ago I wrote to Arnaud Cornet about the fact that it is quite amazing that there is no up-to-date implementation of D-Bus for Ruby at all after such a long time. This resulted a few days ago in our Ruby D-Bus project. Some stuff is working already, quite low-level still, but really nice. I’m looking forward to designing the high-level API. I found out that other people had the same thoughts as us and also started to work on an implementations on their own without telling anyone. So, it seems there are three implementions now (as far as I know) that all have specific features working. I hope we can merge everything into one project. We’ll see what happens… OpenID I have taken some interest into OpenID, having to register some accounts on arbitrary forums. I ran into the fact that Rails recently got OpenID support and that support for phpBB is coming up, which is nice. Finally it could be over with all the logins and all the password. At the moment I haven’t found a statisfactory identity provider yet, so I started working on my own service. Ruby OpenID has an example server implementation which I am working on to become FLOIDS: the Free Luon OpenID Service. Koditoj Recently, I inventoried all the programs I authored or co-authored in the past 8 years. There is some stuff in there that maybe deserves a second life or at least some description. So, in a series of posts that I’ll call ‘Koditoj’ (free translatable from Esperanto to ‘things that have been coded’) I want to go over all these programs and libraries and give them some attention. More to come soon…

Call me pessimist, but I can't see how wind power works as a civilisation's main power source without massive backup by either energy storage or alternative energy sources for those times when there's just no wind. There are only few (if any) locations with winds which blow 24*7 at enough strength. So our world needs, even more than wind power, any technology that reduces power consumption (which can mean, in many cases, fall back to some old-fashioned technology. Like a proper on-off switch instead of a standby mode. /me would probably vote in favor of a law mandating on-off switches on all electrical devices.)) (Oh, and to Joey, in case he didn't notice: Winter's back! :-)

In the last week or so I've discovered a couple of GTK+ tricks I didn't know, so I thought I'd share them.

1. Control-Backspace in an entry deletes from the cursor to the beginning of the text. I had previously hacked up custom binding for Control-u, but this is bound by default. Thanks Emmanuale for pointing this out. Update: as proof that my fingers are still using C-u, Control-Backspace actually deletes a word and not the entire entry.
2. Middle-clicking on a scroll bar will move directly to that point, instead of moving towards that point by a page. Very useful, I'm glad Mitch mentioned this in a bug.

NP: Didn't It Rain, Songs:Ohia

2007-03-21: (the "so use a news search service that works instead of Google, then" update): Spain's wind energy reaches new high

Working on cluster testing is not easy and debugging can be extremely more complicated that you can think of given the distributed nature of the software you are running. So RedHat Cluster guys (Patrick and Lon) and I have been sitting together on IRC for the past couple of days trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with this bug that did block services from being switched from one node on the cluster to the other that is sort of vital functionality for a cluster itself. Everything turned up to be a kernel race condition in the DLM (Distributed Lock Manager) that we were able to workaround in userland by changing the way the resource manager tells the kernel (via libdlm2) to de-allocate the lock_space with a one liner. So what's the point? Simple.. these guys could have just turned me down and send me away since we were testing on Ubuntu, but they didn't. They have been of great help (nevermind that you can really have a good time working with them) and extremely responsive. They really rock hard. Clearly.. get to know your upstream! it's vital for your activity as Ubuntu Developer. Get to know what you are working on! Packaging is not just a matter of creating a debian/ dir in your source to build the code and ship a .deb. You have to know what's in that code and how things work. Upstream can always help you, but you need to be helpful to upstream too and let them understand that you are not just another packager for yet another distribution.

Now that live-helper¹ has superceded live-package I have a config for the junior livecd work-in-progress in the debian-live repository:

sudo apt-get install live-helper
svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debian-live/configs/junior
sudo make-live --root junior &>make-live.log

This will build a usb image for the gnome-junior package list. If you want a regular iso image or want to try the kde-junior or xfce-junior lists, just make the appropriate changes in config. I have tested the usb image on a 1G usb key. At this point I’m not layering on customizations, but am focusing on basic usability issues: X autoconfiguration, sound, menus, etc. Once I’m happy with these I’ll move on to the kinds of customizations we’d like to make for children.

¹ live-helper is still in NEW at the moment. I’ve been checking it out from svn and building the package myself, though you can also get Daniel’s packages from his site. My config should work with a2-1 or later.

update For the time being it is best to stick with live-helper from svn, as my configs are being developed to work with trunk, which is still in flux (e.g. config variables are renamed without notice, etc.)

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debian-live/dists/trunk/live-helper
cd live-helper ; debuild -us -uc

Collab-maint never ceases to amaze me. And Subversion, too (all dvcs fans, stop now! I know, I use darcs, is cool). I always find more and more interesting this about Subversion.

And, no, this is not about Subversion or some VCS, is about integration of services. We need more of that. generally speaking. I am also thinking about look and feel of different services (BTW, I have found a nice pretext to motivate my halt on the work for the Debian wiki theme :-D - see current state of work, if you care).


Why did I wrote this? I had this conversation (trimmed for the sake of brevity):

goneri wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 03:42:56AM +0200, Eddy Petri or wrote:

>> goneri-guest@users.alioth.debian.org wrote:

>>> -use lib "/usr/share/svn-buildpackage";
>>> +#use lib "/usr/share/svn-buildpackage";

> Yes, you're right.
>
> How do you have the commit messages?

I subscribed in PTS - see "Subscription - Package Tracking System" and choose "Adanced Mode"
instead of "Subscribe", check the corresponding check boxes  ;-)  .

/me will blog about this.

Thanks for the continuing comments on this topic. Added: ANZ Bank, Berliner Volksbank, Mint, Tesco Updated: Cooperative Bank, Deutsche Bank, NatWest, Sparkasse, UBS Are there other national lists of these that I should link to? Anyone want to start some?

OK. Here we go:

To select a devkit when you are setting up a scratchbox target via sb-menu, the target MUST NOT BE in the list for it to be selected (Pressing Enter should remove it from the list for it to be active!!!).

And I had to spend days wondering why is the cpu-transparency list empty even though the cputransp devkit is there in the devkits selection menu!

/me is really pissed off.
read more

As I am not a DD yet, I don’t have vote rights. That means I cannot vote in the DPL election. The only way I can influence the decision is to influence other people and try to make them vote the right way (or alternatively, just vote what I would have done) Is there a vote sponsorship page anywhere? <big smiley> If anyone got a spare vote, you are most welcome to send in my ballot:
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
e0acebd2-71f1-4df8-ae4d-50355ad7aa81
[2] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[7] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[2] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[1] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[5] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[6] Choice 6: Raphael Hertzog
[8] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[4] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[3] Choice 9: None Of The Above
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
And yes, jcristau, Myon, Q_ and others - I need to get back to my application.

Awhile back, one of my favorite bloggers, Philip Dawdy of Furious Seasons, deviated from his usual posts that place a big fat critical magnifying glass under the marketing (and other shady) tactics of Big Pharma and wrote a very thoughtful, (also furious) account of Web 2.0 claiming:

this whole Web 2.0, social networking, virtual community business is essentially a pornography of the self a projected, fictionalized self that is then worshipped by the slightly less-perfect self.

It is a little off the top at times but makes some really good points that I agree with (and generated a really interesting discussion). It merits reading alongside Danah Boyd’s recent rumination on the very same topic, fame, narcissism and MySpace, where she seeks to address narcissism but she deflects blame the suite of technologies and places it instead on the broader set of cultural practices that sustain this accentuated inward focus:

My view is that we have trained our children to be narcissistic and that this is having all sorts of terrifying repercussions; to deal with this, we’re blaming the manifestations instead of addressing the root causes and the mythmaking that we do to maintain social hierarchies. Let’s unpack that for a moment.

These two read nicely with an older piece in Harpers Attack of the superzeroes: why Washington, Einstein, and Madonna can t compete with you . The author, Thomas de Zengotita claims “Being famous isn’t what it used to be” because new technologies of mediation and reflexivity (and by new, he means a lot more than web 2.0, it includes reality shows, focus groups, karaoke, the hyper-representation of the real stars, alongside the usual suspects) and concludes that we life as if we were always on stage, concluding somewhat disparagingly “We are all method actors now.” Of course, this is an important part of the story but not the whole story. There are times, for example, these social technologies help to patch up what is arguably as common in North America as is this narcissistic self, which is the fragmented self, that comes into being, for example because many of us, migrate here and the, for example, for work. So a social networking site like Facebook, provides somewhat of a stable point of reference, where there are individuals collected, in the same place, even though the people are no longer really in the same place. It is at least a recognition of certain relationships whose “local” face has now passed but instead of completely completely fading into the realm of memory, the past lives on, albeit in transformed ways, within a virtual space. This facet of social networking is not particularly narcissistic, but is building new technologies of memory that I think works somewhat against the conditions that fragment the self. And while the patching up of the person may make an individual “whole” and “individuated” it seems it is a form that is much more mundane than the “pornography” or “narcissism,” explored above, though of course, they do abound–but karaoke, that is always pornography of the self. But… porn can be fun.