Yesterday I had my last day at $company and today is my first day in freedom. I'll write about my future plans in another blog post. Here I just want to express the joy I had yesterday afternoon when I did:

I've started using PHP in 2006 and used it almost exclusively until the end of 2009. I believe I've learned most of what one can learn about PHP in this time. In 2010 I started to work in Java and only started to understand how limited PHP is.
I know that java is far from perfect. So I don't stop there and already started to learn Scala and looking forward to learn other languages too. But Java is for sure a better answer then PHP, regardless what the question was.
There are many reasons, why you should not, never, for no project ever use PHP. I'll only tell you my personal top reasons:

• PHP is neither strictly nor statically typed. I fail to see any advantage in dynamic typing. But there are many advantages in compile time checks, automatic refactoring, call hierarchies and many other goodies that every IDE gives you for java.
• The first time I introspected a running JVM with jconsole and could peek into the inner workings of my application, I knew that PHP is a childish language. The JVM is great, its tool support is great. PHP does not give me nearly as elaborate development tools as the java world.
• PHP5 copied its object orientation syntax from Java (at least it looks like this). PHPUnit is a great tool (thank you SB!), but it's still only a very good copy of JUnit. Why not just use the original?
• PHP is typically choosen because initial development is very cheap. PHP programmers are much cheaper then java developers and you can move faster with PHP. The resulting projects however become a mess of unmaintainable code sooner or later. Nobody wants to work on the code anymore and shops with such PHP code burn one developer after the other to keep the crap running.

I once advocated PHP as a serious plattform and even gave three talks about PHP. I feel ashamed of this now and apologize. Please forgive me. It's not worth arguing about this post. Its just to make me feel less guilty about my foolishness in the past.

My server, which is among other things hosting this weblog, is a dedicated server originally hosted by the German webhoster webperoni. It was a bargain at that time, and still a good price, and I was satisfied with webperoni s performance and reliability. Unfortunately, they were taken over by another web hosting company, best known for their server4you brand. They moved my server to a different data center and continued to run it there. Unfortunately, server4you was less reliable and less flexible than my original hoster: For example, when one sector on the hard drive turned bad, they were not able to put in a new drive in my system, let me mirror the content, and then remove the old drive. In another, even worse, instance, my second IP address, which I bought from webperoni, was given to another customer. When I finally noticed and complained, they refunded me the charges that I paid for the IP. But understandably, I wanted to get away from that hoster. The contract is automatically prolonged for one year if not canceled in time, and I missed the deadline last year. This year, I finally got around to rent a slightly better and slightly more expensive server from Hetzner, which whom I already made good experience. I would have preferred to switch when I am back from India, but server4you would not even let me prolong the contract by just two months only a whole year or nothing. So they got nothing, and I started to work on the move yesterday. At first I set off installing the new system from scratch, setting up all the various services and copying over data and configuration. But quickly, I gave up and moved the system by completely by copying programs, configuration and data from the old server. The new system has its root partition on a LVM share on software RAID, and now uses grub2 to boot. I had a hard time to get it booting, and a hard time to debug the issues without access to the physical console. I finally understood the problem by running kvm -hda /dev/sda -hdb /dev/sdb -curses from the recovery system and observing that the initial ramdisk is having problems finding the root partition. The problem was that I thought addressing partitions via file system labels is the way to go now and manually added root=LABEL=root to the Linux command line in /etc/default/grub. But then the initial ramdisk would not activate the logical volume. If I had just left it to the grub package, which inserted root=/dev/mapper/vg-root, everything would work fine. The new IP address (88.198.48.143) has not propagated throughout the Internet yet. Running the following command for a variety of ports on the old machine (80.86.81.20) makes sure nobody notices:

port=443
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp --dst 88.198.48.143 --dport $port -j SNAT --to-source 80.86.81.20
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dst 80.86.81.20 --dport $port -j DNAT --to-destination 88.198.48.143:$port

The only question remaining is: What to do with the old server for the remaining six weeks? I am considering to erase the system, set up a plain Debian system and run a tor/freenet/whatelse node at full speed.

I ve recently got a new Xperia X10 Android phone for my with with Virgin mobile, it s generally been working OK although I am having some issues [1], I ll write another blog post soon about other problems I ve discovered with the phone and how I ve solved some of the previous ones.I upgraded my wife s phone first because I can t be without Nagios SMS messages if things don t work. So now that things are generally working I want to get myself an Xperia through Virgin (and have my wife s phone get the Nagios SMS in the mean-time). But since last Friday the entire Virgin sales infrastructure has apparently been down. It started with just declining my attempts to purchase a new phone on a separate account, but when I decided to add a second phone to my wife s account the web site told me that they are upgrading their CRM system and it should be fixed on the 22nd of Feb (yesterday). The web site is now saying that I should check back in 2 hours for an update , it s been saying that for a couple of days now.So for most of a week potential Virgin customers have been turned away. It could be that Virgin stores are processing sales on paper, but they offer some significant discounts for web sales the plan I want is a $39 per month plan and I ll get 3 months free for buying on the web. I m not about to visit a store and lose $117! I m sure that many people are losing confidence in Virgin and taking their business elsewhere. I have only just installed the 3G Watchdog free Android app that monitors bandwidth use and automatically turns off 3G when the quota is reached. For the first few days of using the phone which were more data intensive than usual I had no monitoring and no way of using the Virgin web site to discover how much was used. If Virgin bill me extra for data use I ll complain and demand that they alter the bill.This is even worse for pre-paid customers who can t add credit to their account while this happens!Virgin state that they are upgrading the hardware, operating system and database our platform uses to ensure that we can service our Members even better for years to come [2]. I wonder how people get themselves into such a mess. I guess they didn t have a decent test environment to allow testing the upgrade process before doing it on the live data, I can understand a routine small upgrade going wrong and corrupting data in a way that takes some time to resolve. But when everything is upgraded then everything should be tested, and tested before going live! One thing that Virgin could do to regain some credibility is to publish what went wrong and what they learned from it. I would be much more happy to trust my personal data and my business critical phone to a company that learns from it s mistakes and publishes plans on how they do better than one that just does PR.According to Whirlpool they did the same thing on the 25th of January, so they have had two outages of their billing/CRM system in two months! [3]. The Whirlpool thread has discussion about last month s down-time and this month s down-time.On the up-side, Whirlpool user Kevin JD is a Virgin representative who advised customers to send email to telesales@virginmobile.com.au with a contact phone number if they have any issues. It s good to see a company engaging with it s customers.Update: An hour after emailing the URL to this post to Virgin I got a call from a service representative. It wasn t a very productive call as I already knew that their servers are down and they can t do anything. But it s good to know that they are very enthusiastic about making things better. One useful thing that I learned is that my wife s service is probably on a pro-rated bandwidth quota. As she got the phone in the middle of the month we can only do 100M of data transfer not 200M before the end of the month, by my rough calculations I ve downloaded well over 50M of data (maybe as much as 100M) from the Android marketplace. So it might be necessary to negotiate about the bill as soon as their CRM system works.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/18/xperia-x10i-first-experience/
• [2] http://www.virginmobile.com.au/upgrade
• [3] http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1626553

Okay, I finally decided it's about time to make Debian package out of German-Czech dictionary for which I'm providing builds for StarDict. Daily snapshots are (as usual) available in my Debian repository and the monthly builds will be uploaded to Debian (once it passes NEW queue). The dictionary currently lists only few words, but I hope it will improve in near future.

Filed under: Debian English Stardict 0 comments Flattr this!

Short version: Dear FSF, thanks for your appreciation of Debian Squeeze achievements in getting rid of non-free firmware blobs. We still disagree on the overall freeness assessment of Debian, but I'm positive that steps like this one can further future collaboration, in the interest of both projects. Long version follows.

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Historically, the relationships among Debian and the FSF have gone through mixed fortune (and that's quite an euphemism). On the one hand, Debian is committed to 100% Free Software, is an open project explicitly inspired by "the spirit of GNU", has been sponsored by FSF in its infancy, and properly calls itself "GNU/Linux" (or even "GNU/kFreeBSD"). On the other hand, Debian is the project who considers the GNU FDL license to be only conditionally free and which is not considered to be an entirely Free system according to FSF.
So much for the history corner. As a long time member of the Debian Project, as well as an FSF(E) fellow, I've always felt a bit sad about this state of affairs. Not because the two projects should have aligned goals; they clearly focus on different aspects of the quest for a Free (Software) world. Not even because they should agree on how to build a Free distribution: history has shown that FSF technical positions do not always get along with Debian's more "pragmatic" style, as embodied by point 5 of the Social Contract. Rather, my sadness is rooted in the belief that not getting along have encouraged duplication of efforts which could have been easily avoided (e.g. multiple distributions concurrently freeing up kernels). Furthermore, I'm more and more convinced that Debian nowadays enjoys a rather privileged position among Free Software vendors. Indeed, even though GNU/Linux distributions have reached a popularity we didn't dare to imagine 15 years ago or so, most distributions are under the direct or indirect control of commercial vendors. Those commercial vendors play a very important role in the promotion of Free Software. For instance, they are structured in ways that enable them to seal OEM deals with hardware manufacturers to sell computers with GNU/Linux pre-installed. Commercial vendors, by their own nature, are also in general better at marketing than non-commercial vendors. On the flip side however, commercial vendors are not yet relevant enough to drive proprietary drivers out of the market and, as a consequence, cannot yet afford not to support hardware which need such proprietary bits to work. Among mainstream GNU/Linux distributions[1] Debian is one of the very few vendors if not the only one that is both very relevant and, thanks to its independence, can afford taking Free Software's side: no commercial urgency can force Debian to negotiate on that. That is quite an asset to be used in the promotion of Free Software, especially to a public that is interested in and willing to understand what Free Software really is about. Such an "aware" public is on the rise as of lately, together with the general awareness increase of risks entailed by living a digital life, when that life is not under our control (think, as an example, at how often the "Facebook privacy debate" has hit mainstream medias in the last year). The "aware" public is the natural target of both Debian and the FSF. Dividing it would not serve well the cause of Free Software. With all that in mind, last August I took the chance of being on the "right" side of the Atlantic Ocean for DebConf10, to discuss possible venues of collaboration among Debian and the FSF. I sat down and discussed at length with John Sullivan, who I happen to know for his Debian involvement, in his capacities of FSF representative and operations manager. We discussed various topics, with the intention of bringing them up to the respective communities[2]. Then, inevitably, we ended up talking about the overall freeness of Debian and his exclusion from FSF listing of Free systems. (FSF is of course entitled to such judgements, pretty much as Debian is entitled to its own judgements on FSF licenses. Nevertheless those judgements contribute to dividing our public and might lead to wasteful duplication of efforts, where Free Software could better be served by collaboration.) The main ground for exclusion from that list used to be the compromises Debian has made in the past about non-free firmware blobs. But, as I pointed out back in August, those compromises would have been gone starting with Squeeze, making that argument moot. Today 6 months later I'm delighted to cheer at FSF's decision to publicly recognize the achievements Debian has delivered with Squeeze.
Thanks! It's a nice gesture that I've very much appreciated. I'm confident steps like this one will help future collaboration if, on both sides, we will be able to spot actual venues for collaboration. Needlessly to say, I still disagree with the overall FSF assessment of Debian non-freeness. Apparently, it still stands on the basis that Debian also provides a repository of nonfree software [ ] [which] is not part of the Debian system. [ ] but users would be hard-pressed to make a distinction and that people can readily learn about software available through it by browsing Debian's online package database. I respect the principle of non advertising non-free software and I even agree that it is a good principle. But unfortunately it's also a very blurry principle on which, in my opinion, Debian actually scores very well. No non-free software is offered to users by Debian; it's just for users that really want to have non-free software (or need to, in order to run a Free OS on their computers), that Debian tries to stay out of their way. For the "aware" public discussed above, I think it's much better to draw the line where software freedom ends and use that line to explain what does crossing it entails, than locking them up pretending non-free software do not exist. But fair enough: for the time being, I guess, we will need to agree to disagree on this one. Getting a little bit closer in the occasion of the Squeeze release is still an important step forward. It's up to each of us now to seek out initiatives which attract the interest of both projects and that can benefit from synergies.

---

[1] Sorry, I've no decent definition of "mainstream distribution" to offer, besides folklore and well-established distribution review sites. (Heck, I don't even have a decent definition of "well-established distribution review site" to offer!).
[2] which hasn't happened yet, due to the proverbial amount of available spare time.

We have many orphaned packages in Debian. Those are packages that no longer have a maintainer willing to care for them. They are a problem for several reasons. Often, there have better alternatives (that s often why the maintainer gave up maintenance), but users keep installing them because they show up in apt-cache search. Or, they might be broken, without anybody noticing because they only have a few users. Also, developers need to take them into account. They might slow down transitions, have RC bugs that need fixing, etc. So, there are good reasons to remove some of the orphaned packages from the Debian archive. Not all of them. But those that have been orphaned for a long time without anybody stepping up to take over the maintenance, have very few users according to popcon, etc. Removing some of them also makes it easier to expose the ones that should really find an adopter. Also, that removal is not final. The good reason to do this now is that we are at the beginning of a release cycle, and that it will be easy to reintroduce packages that are really needed during the next two years. Also, packages (both source and binaries) are still available on snapshot.debian.org, so users can still install them from there, and re-uploading them to Debian is very easy if someone wants to adopt them. So, how do I proceed? I use bapase, and go through specific sets of packages (using a custom version of bapase to restrict the list to those packages). For example, orphaned packages that have a popcon lower than 50, have been orphaned for more than 500 days, and whose orphaning bugs have not been modified in the last 100 days. Then, I read the bug log, and decide if there s a reason to keep the package. If there s not, I request the removal. As of today, there are 471 orphaned packages in Debian. The goal is not to get down to zero, but it s certainly possible to get down to 200 or 250. How can you help? Start from the list, and find some easy targets. You can take a look at bug #483252 if you want to re-use my template. Also, one thing that is currently missing in the process is that orphaned packages that have reverse-dependencies should not be removed without removing their dependencies (if appropriate). An easy and efficient way to know if a given package has reverse (build-)?dependencies would be great, so I could integrate this info into bapase and exclude those packages from the list, or mark them somehow.

Packaging updates

• dbconfig-common: New translations, features, and a particularly nasty bug fixed.
• cacti: Some packaging fixes, and a few upstream patches cherry-picked into the next version. Also uploaded the new upstream version of cacti-spine.
• xmlrpc-c: New upstream version, including a long postponed library transition.

Help wanted: cacti I've also filed an RFA bug for cacti (and spine), as i'm not really using cacti any more in my day to day work. The packages are in pretty good shape, but it would really be for the best if someone who actually used cacti were able to more thoroughly test new versions before they were uploaded. I'm also open to co-maintaining the package and/or sponsoring uploads; so if you're already using cacti and looking to get involved in debian development, this could be a fun place to start Debian patch tracker Finally got around to fixing a couple post-release (and older) issues in the patch-tracker. Hopefully it should be back to updating and following the latest stuff in the archive. Next up I'll see if I can find someone from DSA to upgrade the hosting machine to squeeze and install a few extra dependencies for the next feature update, which contains a pretty substantial rewrite of the guts from some home-rolled wsgi+cheetah goo to a more established and maintainable django-based system. In the meantime, please let me know if you see any problems (via maintenance cat or otherwise), and I will take a look.

I created this new blog and am starting from scratch on this blogging thing. I plan to blog more on open source software and Debian development.

Paul Wise called attention recently to the fact that there's renewed activity around multiarch in the face of the squeeze release. Although I fervently wish we could have gotten multiarch support into squeeze, it's better late than never; and real progress is being made now, thanks mostly to the efforts of wonderful package management experts like Raphael Hertzog, Guillem Jover, and David Kalnischkies. Don't believe it's finally coming? Here's some output from my amd64 multiarch chroot:

$ dpkg -l '*:i386'
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
  Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
 / Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
 / Name           Version        Description
+++-==============-==============-============================================
ii  gcc-4.5-base   4.5.2-3ubuntu2 The GNU Compiler Collection (base package)
ii  libc6          2.13-0ubuntu1+ Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdb4.8       4.8.30-5multia Berkeley v4.8 Database Libraries [runtime]
ii  libgcc1        1:4.5.2-3ubunt GCC support library
in  libpam-modules <none>         (no description available)
ii  libpam0g       1.1.2-2ubuntu1 Pluggable Authentication Modules library
ii  libselinux1    2.0.96-1multia SELinux runtime shared libraries
ii  libstdc++6     4.5.2-3ubuntu2 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
iU  libuuid1       2.17.2-9.1ubun Universally Unique ID library
ii  selinux-utils  2.0.96-1multia SELinux utility programs
ii  zlib1g         1:1.2.3.4.dfsg compression library - runtime

If you're as excited about this making its way into Debian as I am, you might be wondering what you can do to help. That's great, because I'd love to tell you! Perhaps you happen to maintain a package that provides executables; and perhaps other packages depend on your package exclusively to use those executables; and perhaps some of those packages depending on your package are shared libraries. If all of the above is true, please consider declaring this package to be Multi-Arch: foreign as defined here. Note: it is very important that you not use this on any package that will provide architecture-dependent interfaces to its reverse-dependencies. So if you're shipping both shared libraries and executables in the same binary package, don't do this. But if your package does fit this description, this is one part of multiarch that you can safely start implementing today. This will go a long way towards getting the system ready to handle multiarch libraries when they land. My own efforts to help with getting Multi-Arch: foreign packages documented in the archive are trackable here.

People are using computers, everywhere, really! ;)
As you might guess correctly, so do I.Basically, I am using three computers: my laptop (ThinkPad X201s, awesome machine, but pabs told me not to post any more adverts for ThinkPads on Planet Debian *g*), my smartphone (Motorola Milestone, yes, that counts as a computer) and random_pc (for random as in my girlfriends or some other trusted (!!!) friends computer).
My laptop is running Debian GNU/Linux unstable with Xfce4.6, my smartphone is running Android 2.2.1 Froyo, my girlfriend has Ubuntu with GNOME, a friend runs Debian unstable with GNOME, another one Arch Linux with KDE4 and so on. And on all these machines I want be able to work, which means I have to read mail and rss, chat via IRC, JabberXMPP and ICQ, have a look at my to-do list, ssh into different machines, write some code, tweet and dent etc.In the following series of posts I will describe how I can handle about 90% of my work on every (trusted) computer out there, using ssh, screen, mutt, irssi, BitlBee, newsbeuter etc.As I am describing the setup as a Desktop in a shell , let s start with a login- and desktop/window-manager: ssh+screen.sshObviously, you need a machine to ssh into it, where the Desktop will live on. For me, that s my home router/fileserver/vm-server dorei, running Debian GNU/Linux LennySqueeze with OpenSSH as a kind of login manager ;)Yes, my user is allowed to login with a password instead of a public key. And well, that s all for the login-manager, no extra configuration needed.screenAfter logging in, I start my window-manager with screen -rd, -r for reattach a running screen session, -d for detach it if it is already attached somewhere else. Or I can start a new session by just typing screen. Inside the screen I have multiple windows (one can create new ones with ^A c) with all the needed software running. I can switch windows by pressing ^A N, N being the number of the window, ^A n for the next window, ^A p for the previous one or ^A ^a for the last one. Or I can get a window-list with ^A w. If needed, I can rename windows with ^A A, followed by the new name. That should be enough for almost everyone. Let s just add a window-list to the bottom (as you might have seen on GNOME, Xfce, KDE and even Windows ;) by adding the following to the ~/.screenrc:

caption always " "                    # clear line before hardstatus
hardstatus alwayslastline "% = kb [ % B %H:$USER % b ][ %=% w %?%-Lw%?% b (% W %n*%f %t%?(%u)%?% b )% w %?%+Lw%?%?%= % b ][% B  %l % B % W %d.%0m % b ]"

You get the current host- and username, the machine load and the date for free ;)Even if it is possible, I do not have any autostart like stuff in my .screenrc as the machine is running stable and I start the screen and the apps inside maybe once a year after a reboot.screenrcMy .screenrc looks like this:

# detach on hangup
  autodetach on
# don't display the copyright page
  startup_message off
# set scrollback to 2000 lines, default 100
  defscrollback 2000
# set silencewait to 15 seconds, default 30
  silencewait 15
# new shells should be started as login-shells
  shell -$SHELL
# make a fancy statusline
  caption always " "                    # clear line before hardstatus
  hardstatus alwayslastline "% = kb [ % B %H:$USER % b ][ %=% w %?%-Lw%?% b (% W %n*%f %t%?(%u)%?% b )% w %?%+Lw%?%?%= % b ][% B  %l % B % W %d.%0m % b ]"
# make higlighting bold, black on blue background
  sorendition +b bk
# some fixes, no I do not know where they come from :)
  termcap  xterm hs@:cs=\E[%i%d;%dr:im=\E[4h:ei=\E[4l
  terminfo xterm hs@:cs=\E[%i%p1%d;%p2%dr:im=\E[4h:ei=\E[4l
  termcapinfo  xterm Z0=\E[?3h:Z1=\E[?3l:is=\E[r\E[m\E[2J\E[H\E[?7h\E[?1;4;6l
  termcapinfo xterm* OL=100
  termcapinfo xterm 'VR=\E[?5h:VN=\E[?5l'
  termcapinfo xterm 'k1=\E[11~:k2=\E[12~:k3=\E[13~:k4=\E[14~'
  termcapinfo xterm 'kh=\EOH:kI=\E[2~:kD=\E[3~:kH=\EOF:kP=\E[5~:kN=\E[6~'
  termcapinfo xterm 'hs:ts=\E]2;:fs=\007:ds=\E]2;screen\007'
  termcapinfo xterm 'vi=\E[?25l:ve=\E[34h\E[?25h:vs=\E[34l'
  termcapinfo xterm 'XC=K%,%\E(B,[\304,\\\\\326,]\334, \344, \366, \374,~\337'
  termcapinfo xterm* be
  termcapinfo xterm xterms xs ti@:te=\E[2J
  termcapinfo wy75-42 xo:hs@
  termcapinfo wy* CS=\E[?1h:CE=\E[?1l:vi=\E[?25l:ve=\E[?25h:VR=\E[?5h:VN=\E[?5l:cb=\E[1K:CD=\E[1J
  termcapinfo  hp700 'Z0=\E[?3h:Z1=\E[?3l:hs:ts=\E[62"p\E[0$~\E[2$~\E[1$ :fs=\E[0 \E[61"p:ds=\E[62"p\E[1$~\E[61"p:ic@'
  termcap  vt100* ms:AL=\E[%dL:DL=\E[%dM:UP=\E[%dA:DO=\E[%dB:LE=\E[%dD:RI=\E[%dC
  terminfo vt100* ms:AL=\E[%p1%dL:DL=\E[%p1%dM:UP=\E[%p1%dA:DO=\E[%p1%dB:LE=\E[%p1%dD:RI=\E[%p1%dC
  termcapinfo linux C8
# some bindings
  bind k
  bind ^k
  bind .
  bind ^\
  bind \\
  bind ^h
  bind h
  bind 'w' windowlist -b
  bind 'W' windows
  bind 'K' kill
  bind 'I' login on
  bind 'O' login off
  bind ' ' history
  bind = resize =
  bind + resize +3
  bind - resize -3
# Mutt demands this
# http://wiki.mutt.org/?MuttFaq/Appearance
 defbce on
 term screen-bce

That s all for my screen setup. The obvious, boring screenshot follows:See you next time, when I will present my mutt setup here.

There are many ways to run some commands simultaneously on multiple hosts like cssh or dsh. They come handy for example when you are installing software updates on a set of hosts. dsh is a rather simple comandline tool allowing to execute a command over ssh on multiple hosts. However it doesn't allow any interactive input -- so you can't look at the potentially upgrading packages and press y to accept and you can't go through debconf promts or similar. This is solved by cssh which opens a XTerm for every host and a input area that is broadcastet to all of them. this is working really well -- you can execute your update on all hosts and still do individual adjustments just as needed: switch focus from the broadcasted input to one of the terminal windows and anything you type just goes there. Now cssh has a big disadvantage: it requires a running X server (and doesn't do too well with a fullscreen windowmanager). Requiring X is quite a blocker if you need to run that ssh multiplexer on a remote host, for example if the firewalling doesn't allow direct connections. Fortunately you can make tmux behave as we want -- in a simple terminal: First you need a script spawning the ssh sessions in separate tmux panes and direct input to all of them -- here called ssh-everywhere.sh (you could also write a tmux config I guess):

#/bin/sh
# ssh-everywhere.sh
for i in $HOSTS
do
  tmux splitw "ssh $i"
  tmux select-layout tiled
done
tmux set-window-option synchronize-panes on

Now start the whole thing:

tmux new 'exec sh ssh-everywhere.sh'

And be done. Update If you want to type in just one pane (on one host) you can do that as well: C-b : set-window-option synchronize-panes off and moving to the right pane (C-b + Arrow keys)

GnuTLS has recently made Nettle its prefered crypto backend. I think Debian will need to continue to use libgcrypt for license reasons. While GnuTLS+libgcrypt and its dependencies are LGPL-2.1+ nettle itself is LGPL-2.1+, except for small GPL-2+ parts (serpent and blowfish). But these are being replaced by LGPL-2.1+ implementations currently. However nettle's public key library (libhogweed) uses and links against the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library which is LGPL-3+. Afaiui this is a deal-breaker, GPL-2 (without the "any later version" clause) and (L)GPL-3 are incompatible. A nontrivial number of GnuTLS using applications and libraries are licensed (L)GPL-2. I started checking but stopped at "j" after finding cherokee-1.0.20, cluster-glue-1.0.7, cups-1.4.6, drizzle-2010.09.180, echoping-6.0.2, elinks-0.12~pre5, gtk-vnc-0.4.2, inspircd-1.1.22+dfsg and jd-2.8.1~beta110214.

When Reddit sold to Cond Nast and the founders all moved to California, their old place in Davis Square was empty for a few months and they let Mika I move in and take it over. It's an awesome place and we're still there along with some Web 2.0 graffiti they left on the roof. And so it is with pleasure that I've agreed to be interviewed by redditor Danny Piccirillo in a giant igloo he helped build -- if the unseasonably warm weather streak of weather doesn't manage to melt it before next week. Questions are being gathered at Reddit so feel free to go there and ask me any question you'd like to see me answer in an igloo.

Eh. Why does mksh built with (a patched: mkstemp(3) added) klibc work suddenly, unexpectedly? To reproduce, I just uploaded mksh_39.3.20110218-1.dsc and you can run DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=mksh-static=klibc,dietlibc,eglibc dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot to verify it, once you have mkstemp(3). (I will probably send a smaller implementation of that in, later.) I have that and the open fix and the m68k patch applied, nothing else where did my bug go? ObQuestion: what s the legal (copyright/trademark) status of the Atari logo (the one in rainbow colours, with three things going up, right and left leg looking like an umbrella stand s)?

In Ubuntu, the use of ptrace is restricted. The default allowed relationship between the debugger and the debuggee is that parents are allowed to ptrace their descendants. This means that running gdb /some/program and strace /some/program Just Works. Using gdb s attach and strace s -p options need CAP_SYS_PTRACE, care of sudo. The next most common use-case was that of crash handlers needing to do a live ptrace of a crashing program (in the rare case of Apport being insufficient). For example, KDE applications have a segfault handler that calls out to kdeinit and requests that the crash handling process be started on it, and then sits in a loop waiting to be attached to. While kdeinit is the parent of both the crashing program (debuggee) and the crash handling program (debugger), the debugger cannot attach to the debugee since they are siblings, not parent/descendant. To solve this, a prctl() call was added so that the debugee could declare who s descendants were going to attach to it. KDE patched their segfault handler to make the prctl() and everything Just Works again. Breakpad, the crash handler for Firefox and Chromium, was updated to do effectively the same thing, though they had to add code to pass the process id back to the debuggee since they didn t have it handy like KDE. Another use-case was Wine, where for emulation to work correctly, they needed to allow all Wine processes to ptrace each other to correctly emulate Windows. For this, they just declared that all descendants of the wine-server could debug a given Wine process, there-by confining their ptrace festival to just Wine programs. One of the remaining use-cases is that of a debugging IDE that doesn t directly use ptrace itself. For example, qtcreator will launch a program and then later attach to it by launching gdb and using the attach command. This looks a lot like the crash handler use-case, except that the debuggee doesn t have any idea that it is running under an IDE. A simple solution for this is to have the IDE run its programs with the LD_PRELOAD environment variable aimed at a short library that just calls prctl() with the parent process id, and suddenly the IDE and its descendants (i.e. gdb) can debug the program all day long. I ve got an example of this preloadable library written. If it turns out this is generally useful for IDEs, I could package it up like fakeroot and faketime.

Some projects have historically sucked; they've been incomplete, they've been hard to use, they've had poor documentation, or they've had regular security issues. Over time projects that started off a little poorly can, and often do, improve. But their reputation is usually a long time in improving. For me? Personally? PHPMyAdmin is a security nightmare. So while it is nice to read about it gaining the ability to be themed, and even receiving submissiosn from users (a rare thing for projects to receive such external contributions) I just find it hard to care. I see PHPMyAdmin written in a blog, in a news article, or on a users machine and I just think :

• "PHPMyAdmin? That's that thing that has security problems."

Harsh. Unfair. Possibly no longer true. But I do tend to stick to such judgements, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Ideally people wouldn't be dogmatic, would be open-minded about re-evaluation situations. In practise I'm probably not such a unique little snowflake, and there are probably a great many people to this day who maintain views which that are based on historical situations than the current-day reality:

• Java is slow and verbose.
• Perl is line-noise.
• Sendmail is an insecure mess.
• ...

Anyway. PHPMyAdmin? I'm sorry for singling you out, even with your fancy themes, language translations, and other modern updates. It's just a name that conjours deamons for me. Though I'm sure there are a great number of people who love it to pieces. ObQuote: "You don't want to know my name. I don't want to know your name. " - Spartacus

I have just got a new Xperia X10i for my wife. It s with Virgin who use the Optus network. Optus apparently have better coverage than Three (who we have been using for 6.5 years) and Virgin offers the best deals they have good phones on low monthly rates and do nice things like selling most phones unlocked (the Xperia is one that comes unlocked).I chose the phone for use in system administration work. A large screen should be good for reading email and running a ssh client. Hopefully I will be able to use the phone s Wifi to provide mobile net access to a laptop for any problem that can t be solved on a tiny screen. My wife doesn t do much sysadmin work nowadays, but it ll save some effort if we can both use the same model of phone. Also according to Amobil.no the Xperia X10 is the second best phone for camera-phone functionality [1], and my wife would really like to take some good pictures with her phone (she loves the LG U990 Viewty that she has right now).ScreenOne major reason for choosing this phone is that it has the biggest and highest resolution of any phone that doesn t cost a huge amount of money. It does well in this regard, the screen is very good to look at. However it is apparently not particularly sensitive and we still have the protective cover on the screen which makes the swipe to unlock operation quite difficult. My wife generally likes to keep the protective plastic on such screens for a while to prevent damage, but she may take this off sooner than on other devices.Sony FoolishnessOne reason that this phone is cheaper than any other phone with similar specs is that it s made by Sony. Sony won t provide updates to Android 2.2 or better and they have their own stupid applications installed in an intrusive manner. The main screen of the phone has a large icon for the Sony Timescape program. If you choose a background image of a person s face then the Timescape logo is in the ideal location to obscure the person s eyes. Generally it s not desired to have the person in your phone background look like Zorro. Fortunately you can delete icons from the home screen, you just have to press and hold the icon until a trash-can appears at the bottom of the screen and then drag it to the trash.Phone BookThe core phone functionality is fairly important for a mobile phone. But it seems that every modern phone has some serious failings in this regard. The Xperia comes with a phone book that is reasonably good for managing contacts and partially coalesces multiple entries with the same name which is convenient as I somehow managed to import 3 copies of each entry in my wife s phone book. The down-side is that the multiple entries are still stored, so when it comes time to update someone s phone number my wife will have to separate the entries and then delete all but one of them, adding probably a minute of effort for each one. With 60 phone book entries that s probably an hour of wasted time during the course of her phone use.They really should do a time based analysis of phone use and optimise the UI for efficiently performing common tasks. I think that an ideal design would start off by asking the user to rate the importance of phone functionality, camera, facebook, twitter, etc and then give a UI that matches the important tasks. A device that has 384M of RAM, 1G of built-in Flash storage, and an 8G micro-SD card (which Virgin provided with the phone) should be able to offer a selection of UIs.CameraThe configuration for the camera allows some settings to be changed easily and others have to be changed through the advanced settings which requires one more button press and a few extra taps on the screen. One real stupidity is to have the phone light be in the advanced settings, so if the room happens to be a little darker than expected you suddenly need to go to a lot of extra effort to turn on the light.Finally it would be really good to be able to take a quick picture. I would like to be able to be able to press a combination of buttons and have it immediately take a picture regardless of what had been running before. Not press the main menu button, the camera icon (which I made a link from the home screen), wait a second for it to load, and then press the shutter button. Ideally I would like to press a combination of hardware buttons to have it immediately take a picture even when the screen is locked. I don t want to wait for the screen unlock process, sometimes the perfect shot is only available for a second.WifiIt doesn t support ad-hoc networks. This is really annoying for me as I don t own an access point and I don t plan to buy one just for a phone. My laptop (Thinkpad T61 with Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan]) doesn t seem to support running as an access point, and my EeePC 701 with an Atheros AR5001 has the same problem, here is the error message:# iwconfig wlan0 mode master essid x
Error for wireless request Set Mode (8B06) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Invalid argument.I have a cheap Realtec USB Wifi device that claims to support being an access point but just fails when I try it. So presumably it doesn t really support it but the driver is buggy.It seems that I may need to put a custom Android installation on it to get ad-hoc working.Also it s apparently necessary to root the Xperia to get Wifi tethering to work for providing net access to a laptop. So I guess I ll hacking it soon.Internet AccessThe Virgin web site couldn t help me set up the Internet access because I ported a phone number from another Telco. I had to use the phone number supplied by Virgin to login to their web site and the site then wanted to sent (probably SMS) the settings to my phone, but of course it couldn t SMS to that number as I ve got the Three number active. Presumably they were expecting that customers would setup Internet access before porting their old number.I phoned the Virgin tech support and used the settings they suggested, but it didn t work. Then I took the phone to a Virgin store and it started working after they rebooted it with no changes to settings. Just like Windows used to be. :(Email Access Default AppThe email setup defaults to port 143 IMAP access, so even when a mail server provides access on port 993 for IMAPS and on port 995 for POP3S probably most users will not use any encryption because their phone doesn t default to it. Also one annoying feature is that when I gave it the email address test@coker.com.au it decided to use test as the user-name for IMAP by default. It seems that a very large portion of the active email accounts nowadays are on systems that handle multiple domains and thus require the domain name in authentication, and a large portion of the remainder accept domain names even when they aren t required. Besides it s a lot easier to delete a domain name when it s not needed than to type it in when it is.The default hostname for sending and receiving mail is the domain name, if the MUA configuration program had checked the MX record it would have known that smtp.sws.net.au is a better default choice for the mail server. I ve now started the practice of creating a CNAME entry named m in every domain I run, so when someone is setting up a mobile phone they just have to add m. to the start of the default hostname to use for sending and receiving mail. By doing this I can probably save an average user at least 30 seconds of typing, which is particularly important if I happen to be talking them through the process!The MUA uses IMAP commands to load the text of the message without attachments and then loads attachments on demand, this will be handy for when people attach unreasonably large files. With IMAP caching and partial loads the core functionality seems OK, and some quick tests of standard but not commonly used IMAP functions such as noticing that mail has been deleted by another client seemed to work well. The performance of loading a new mailbox with 369 message was quite poor, I m not sure how much of this is due to the network connection and how much is due to the client implementation. This is a real concern for me as I typically have about 7,000 messages in my IMAP account and 3,000 unread messages most of which are in two folders.Another problem is the fact that there seems to be no way of searching in the list of messages, sorting/grouping by subject or sender, or showing unread messages. This makes the Xperia unsuitable for the task of reading mailing lists when on public transport. I would really like to be able to sort through a folder of mailing-list mail, delete messages that I don t need to keep and flag ones that need attention when I have the resources of a desktop system when I m on a tram or in other situations where a laptop can be inconvenient.One undeniable bug I discovered (as opposed to the missing features I listed) is that when a message has a line with a URL followed by many spaces it won t load correctly in the web browser, the spaces will be treated as part of the URL. I ve changed the default signature in my email to have a description followed by a URL to avoid triggering this bug. Presumably other Android phones are bug for bug compatible. :(Moxier MailThere is a complete set of email and calendaring applications preloaded from Moxier.com. The Moxier mail client uses company.com as an example domain name (they should use example.com does no-one read the RFCs?). It s nice that they verify the SSL certificate and display the details when it s not signed.Unfortunately Moxier doesn t support anything other than Exchange, and I can t delete it either as it s part of the base set of applications from Sony.SMSThe SMS application is supposedly conversation based. This doesn t seem like a benefit to me, it s a pity that there is no option to make it act more like every other SMS implementation I ve used over the last 12 years.BatteryThe battery is described as having a capacity of 1500mAh, for comparison a AA rechargeable batteries have capacities ranging from 1800mAh to 2800mAh. My first mobile phone had a rechargeable battery that took the same space as 4*AA batteries and the phone was designed to run on AA batteries if the main battery wasn t charged. I would like to have an Android phone that had a battery pack of similar size to at least 2*AA batteries, and 4*AA would be OK too.The Xperia battery was reported as being half discharged after playing with the phone for less than an hour. Basically when doing anything with the phone that is remotely intensive I need to have it plugged in. Unless of course I m using one of the star-chart applications LightsThere are two white leds in the gaps between the keys for Settings, Main-Menu, and Back on the front. They are quite bright and annoying to look into at night.SSHSSH was one of the reasons for getting an Android phone, but it was one of the last things I worked on because everything else was so much fun. I m currently using ConnectBot, it supports storing ssh host keys, generating a key-pair from random screen touches, locking and unlocking the key-pair (with a pass-phrase) and pasting the public key to an open window. All the basic functions just work although it s rather inconvenient to enter the CTRL keys.The next thing to investigate is a small and light Bluetooth keyboard. Using an external hardware keyboard will save me from the pain of entering CTRL keys (which is even worse than the pain of entering passwords that contain digits and mixed case). It will also allow me to type a lot faster and use the entire screen for the ssh session.Current Bug SummaryWifi doesn t do ad-hoc mode or tethering.MUA doesn t correctly handle URLs in messages if many spaces follow the URL and is also unsuitable for mailing list mail.Sometimes requires a reboot to make Internet access settings take affect.Camera light can t be easily turned on and off.This isn t too bad.ConclusionMost things do what I want. Once I get a MUA working with all my email, Wifi doing what I want, and a Bluetooth keyboard it ll be a fairly ideal mobile sysadmin terminal. I ll probably order one for myself this weekend.

• [1] http://www.amobil.no/artikler/norges_beste_kameramobil/79081

Shock news: a Tasks release! Announcing 0.19:

• Lots of translations
• Fix i18n in the about dialog

Yeah, it's all go on the Tasks front... Tarballs on the Pimlico site, or gnome.org. NP: Yanqui U.X.O. - Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Thanks to Clint for the link; I've just gone and pledged to support the Freedom Box Foundation with some money.

I recently ended up acquiring a Windows 7 Professional license. While I rarely have a need for Windows, that one rare instance is important. Many of the bank's web interfaces are tightly dependent on IE. I do have a copy of CrossOver but that doesn't help much. Most times, IE crashes when trying to render pages. Must be having some OLE dependency. So I convinced myself to install Windows7. For my banking needs and also to catch-up on how that platform has been doing. From my limited usage, my current impression has been that Windows 7 is a great revive. [passwordless] sudo is conceptually implemented into Windows 7. I'm not sure how good that would be given that most users would have the tendency to just click on 'Yes' without paying attention to the pop-up. Anyways.....I installed Windows 7 onto one of my spare partitions to get the full experience (than doing it in a VM image). read more