It's time to upgrade my xen servers to squeeze. I've already put this off too long and now I've to task to go from etch to squeeze in one long step. In order to avoid problems I just did a first upgrade etch -> lenny and then to squeeze. However, since so much has changed in the meantime, and so much twicking of essential components is needed (such as Xen !), I guess I could have gone directly from etch to squeeze in one go, and fix everthing in the process... Anyway, to late for this kind of considerations.

The xen debian wiki is full of invaluable information. Kudos to the xen team for their hard work. To get you started on squeeze you need to install the xen hypervisor. Everything is provided by one package: This will pull the latest linux kernel and xen-hypervisor to run on dom0 . By default the hypervisor is probably not going to be the default kernel. If you want to change this, you should edit the grub default values : to make sure that the default kernel on dom0 is the xen-hypervisor. This is tricky, because grub let you define a default w.r.t the list of available kernels. so if you install a new kernel, you have to change the default accordingly with the list of kernels in /boot/grub/grub.cfg. It would be nice if I could define the default kernel with a label instead of a number... ( ref #505517 ) Alternatively, as suggested in the wiki, you can just move the xen kernel out of the way ... When installing xen related tools, aptitude will also probably install by default rinse and xenwatch. The first one is to boostrap redhat machines and maybe you don't need it. The second one is a GUI and will pull in a lot of X-related dependencies. If we have similar needs, you can just remove what is not needed... Something that is new, is the new schema for virtual devices. Now all vms will see /dev/xdva1 instead of /dev/sda1 as before. This needs to be changed in the domU as well as in the xen config files (/etc/xen/vm.cfg). One fantastic news is that xen 4 now uses pyGrub. It is not mandatory (so if you want, you can stick with the old configuration file). But if you use pygrub, on the domU you can install whatever kernel you want. Finally, your users will have complete freedom to pick and choose their kernels ! There was a small detail I didn't notice on the debian wiki, that is, if you try to use grub2 in squeeze, it will fail when probing the device#601974 . The workaround described in the wiki is to use xvd a,b,c,... as device names (and not xvd 1,2,3,... ) to make grub happy. Once you have changed then naming schema, grub will be able to see the disks and install the bootloader. Another solution is to install the os-prober from unstable / experimental. It seems a patch is on the works. On newly created images, you can also pass the --scsi parameter to xen-create-image to ignore this problem altogeher... I'm not sure if this will have other implications...

The console name is also changes from tty to xhv0 . To get back the console you should add this line in the inittab of all you VMs. A last note is about the merge upstream of the xen patch !! \o/ yeiiii !!

Hrmh... I am listening to a local news radio station. Of course, what I am about to write lacks information and insight but it follows a conversation I have had with several groups of friends. Our de-facto president has decreed that the tuition for private schools will be deducted from the Impuesto sobre la renta (revenue/profit tax) up to a given tuition level (IIRC up to MX$2000 a month per child per school). The interviewed subsecretary said they expect this deduction will reach MX$13,000 million, around US$1,000 million. This is, about a third of what is assigned to the National University (UNAM). At a first sight, this sounds good. However, I just thought about a discussion I have had with many friends. This money the government will hand back to the taxpayers has to be cut from somewhere (after all, we are not in a country with huge superavit or anything like that). Why does this sound unfair ot me? Because it benefits the few in perjudice of the many. I did a quick search, and found this work based on numbers published by INEGI ten years ago: According to the last table, the money spent on private education was between 5% and 10% of that spent on public education Of course, it is almost impossible to infer the number of students from this alone. I know I could find authoritative data on this regard by searching a bit more, but after all I don't want to spend all (work!) evening on a blog post unless it creates some discussion. Lets say, just for the sake of the exercise, that this means that ~3% of the country's students learn in a private school. In Mexico, the quality of the basic public education (primary/secondary, ages 6 to 18) has fallen hugely in the last decades. Even when I was to school (but not when my parents), the first subjective sign that a family had broken the low-income barrier is that they were finally able to send their children to private schools. Because, no matter how bad they are, public schools are perceived to be worse. Of course, I was among the "lucky" ones to be in a private school. Higher education (universitary level) is still way better ranged. Anyway... I want to get this post over with. Why do I oppose this subsidies/tax devolution? Because it will lead to widen the difference between private and public education. And because it will be benefical only for medium-high and high classes People who are formaly employed (as I am) do not present a tax declaration, so we won't get any deductions. Between and of the country's economically active population work informally (from selling in the street to covering up huge transactions in large locals). Most of the population don't (directly) pay "impuesto sobre la renta", and will not get the benefit of this subsidy. This money has to be taken from other sources in order to be given to private education. If the government wants to improve the education for everybody, why not assign it to the public sector? To specific areas in the public sector, if they don't want to hand it over to the (yes, very, incredibly) corrupt SNTE (National Union of Education Workers)?

Reading job listings for any sort of IT job is depressing. It s been quite some time since I ve had to do that, but how many times have you seen something like this:

• 5 years of Java experience required.
• 3 years of Java experience with modules X, Y, Z required.
• 6 years of experience administering Linux machines running RHEL 4 on a Windows 2000 domain with 1500 clients in an educational setting preferred.

I could go on and on. As a job seeker, that sort of thing is fundamentally devaluing to someone who has strengths in being adaptable and quickly learning new tools, languages, or even entire environments. As an employer, it sends a message that you re not interested in more than a surface look at someone s strengths, and probably don t care to hire the best and the brightest. After all, would you turn away a rockstar programmer simply because he or she had been writing filesystem code in C the last 3 years instead of the latest whizbang Java web widget that will probably be obsolete in a year and unsupported in two? I am quite certain that there are plenty of managers that do. Even if you are a company large enough to have an entire team of people that do nothing but work on that whizbang app, don t you still want the best you can find, realizing that some of the best people to work on that app may not have even heard of it yet? (And that when the app goes obsolete in 5 years, you d rather not have to lay off a large team of single-skill people) Some of you may know that I work in IT at a manufacturing company. We have a small IT team here, about seven people, and are a heavy Debian shop. And we have a vacancy open up in our development/Linux admin group. I m the manager of that group, which is why I m thinking about this right now. We re too small for single-subject specialists to make sense, yet we re big enough to appreciate skill, experience, flexibility, and rigor. Consequently, when the occasion arises for me to look for new employees, I don t prepare a laundry list of things we use in-house and would like experience with. The list of almost-required things generally begins with Linux and ends with experienced , and has nothing else in between. In other words, I d like it if I don t have to explain to you what a symlink or a hardlink is, but I d be willing to do so if I think you d internalize it quickly. On the experienced side, it would be nice if you already have a well-developed sense of fear at running rm when you re root, or have designed a storage infrastructure for a network before, or are paranoid about security. But again, if people can pick up those traits on the job, we are usually still interested. If learning how to package up software for Debian, fix bugs in software you ve never seen in a language you ve never heard of, raise good questions about things you may not have lots of experience with, and write documentation for it all on a wiki sounds like fun, then that s probably the kind of person I want, even if you ve never used our particular tools before. If I were to judge based on the stuff I normally see in job postings, I guess you might conclude I m nuts. I don t think I am, but then again I m also the only person I know that formats his own resume in hand-crafted LaTeX. What do you all think? The next question is: how should one evaluate candidates given this sort of philosophy? I m not a fan of canned tests, or even whiteboard tests that tend to be some sort of canned topic that may test the applicant s specific knowledge base more than overall skill and flexibility. Similarly, as an applicant in years past, I ve struggled with how to present the I ve never used $LANGUAGE, but I know I could pick it up quickly and do it very well vibe. To certain people, that might sound like BS. To the more geeky managers, perhaps it sounds like what they want. We ve built a fairly diverse team on the back of this approach, and it s worked out well for us so far. I m interested to hear your thoughts. Oh, and if you d like to work for us, you should probably be sending me an email. No, I m not going to list the address here on this blog post. If you can t figure it out, I don t want to hear from you <grin>

A few weeks ago, I ve had to look into getting a QLogic QLE7342 InfiniBand adapter working on a Debian Squeeze system, with OFED 1.5.2. This post will probably save quite some time to anyone trying to do the same; it applies to all the QLogic adapters supported by the ib_qib kernel module. Note: on the ibverbs side of things, the adapters are supported by the ipath plugin, just like older QLogic adapters (that use the ib_ipath kernel module). First of all: grab a recent version of the ofa-kernel package. The ib_qib module in ofa-kernel from OFED 1.5.2 did not work at all for me. I used the ofa-kernel snapshot from 20110203. There are two things to know about the QLogic adapters:

• they don t autodetect the fabric speed by default, a dedicated utility has to be used to set the speed(s)
• the driver exports a sysfs-like pseudo-filesystem, ipathfs, that needs to be mounted

QLogic offers a complete IB stack based on OFED and dubbed QLogic OFED+ . The complete package weighs in at over 500 MB and contains the QLogic-blessed drivers, OFED stack, libraries and, of utmost importance to us, the QLogic-specific utilities. Unfortunately, as simple as the QLogic utilities are, they don t come with source. The package also only exists for RedHat 4 and 5. So, go to the QLogic support website, select your hardware and download the QLogic OFED+ Host Software for RHEL 5 package. In the tarball, one directory contains the OFED stack and another contains all the utilities (QLogic-Tools.*). For setting the adapter speed, you ll want the iba_portconfig utility along with the initscript (shipped as iba_portconfig.sh). The desired adapter speed is set in the initscript by choosing the proper arguments to iba_portconfig (-s 1 for SDR, -s 2 for DDR, -s 4 for QDR or any combination thereof). The iba_portconfig initscript must run after the drivers have been loaded. Which brings us to loading the driver and mounting the ipathfs. This is all handled by the openibd initscript provided in ofa-kernel (under ofed_scripts/) and its companion script dedicated to QLogic adapters, truescale.cmds. This initscript will load the OFED stack and drivers; if a QLogic adapter is present, it ll mount the ipathfs in the right place. Voila, once this is done, the adapter should happily report itself ACTIVE/LinkUp.

This is a wonderful beginning of the week. I ve lost my n900. Most likely, case was not properly mounted on my belt today, and fell down at some point. Chance to get device back is near-zero. It does not respond to calls to itself ( off or out of network coverage ) so likely somebody found it, and turned it off and/or replaced SIM, etc. I ve used it for more than a year. It had lots of customizations, large chat logs, and lots of other data. And it was tightly integrated into my day-to-day life.
Some backups are available but not very recent. And not sure that these backups could be used to recover things into other device and, given all those recent news about Nokia, it is definitely unwise to buy a new n900, as well as any other Nokia device. This blog will unlikely get any more n900-related posts. I m quite frustrated, and can t do anything useful already for several hours .

Last week, we learned how to get rid of obsolete packages. This time, we re going to learn how to bring back your computer to a state close to a pure Ubuntu/Debian installation. Thanks to the power of APT, it s easy to add new external repositories and install supplementary software. Unfortunately some of those are not very well maintained. They might contain crappy packages or they might simply not be updated. An external package which was initially working well, can become a burden on system maintenance because it will be interfering with regular updates (for example by requiring a package that should be removed in newer versions of the system). So my goal for today is to teach you how to identify the packages on your system that are not coming from Debian or Ubuntu. So that you can go through them from time to time and keep only those that you really need. Obsolete packages are a subset of those, but I ll leave them alone. We took care of them last week. Each (well-formed) APT repository comes with a Release file describing it (example). They provide some values that can be used by APT to identify packages contained in the repository. All official Debian repositories are documented with Origin=Debian (and Origin=Ubuntu for Ubuntu). You can verify the origin value associated to each repository (if any) in the output of apt-cache policy:

[...]
 500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny/main i386 Packages
     release v=5.0.8,o=Debian,a=stable,n=lenny,l=Debian,c=main
     origin ftp.debian.org
[...]

From there on, we can simply ask aptitude to compute a list of packages which are both installed and not available in an official Debian repository:

$ aptitude search '?narrow(?installed, !?origin(Debian))!?obsolete'
or
$ aptitude search '~S ~i !~ODebian !~o'

You can replace search with purge or remove if you want to get rid of all the packages listed. But you re more likely to want to remove only a subset of carefully chosen packages you re probably still using some of the software that you installed from external repositories. With synaptic, you can also browse the content of each repository. Click on the Origin button and you have a list of repositories. You can go through the non-Debian repositories and look which packages are installed and up-to-date. But you can do better, you can create a custom view. Click on the menu entry Settings > Filter . Click on New to create a new filter and name it External packages . Unselect everything in the Status tab and keep only Installed . Go in the Properties tab and here add a new entry Origin Excludes ftp.debian.org . In fact you must replace ftp.debian.org with the hostname of your Debian/Ubuntu mirror. The one that appears on the origin line in the output of apt-cache policy (see the excerpt quoted above in this article). Note that the term Origin is used to refer to two different things, a field in the release file but also the name of the host for an APT repository. It s a bit confusing if you don t pay attention. Close the filters window with OK. You now have a new listing of External packages under the Custom Filters screen. You can see which packages are installed and up-to-date and decide whether you really want to keep it. If the package is also provided by Debian/Ubuntu and you want to go back to the version provided by your distribution, you can use the Package > Force version menu entry.

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As part of the KDE3/QT3 cleanup after the Squeeze release, Debian is about to remove the kkbswitch package from it s archives (unstable, testing). I got a request to keep the package available as it solves some complicated situations when having more than two keyboard layouts. As a response to that request I m staring to look for someone who is willing to port kkbswitch to QT4. I d be more than happy to continue maintaining the package if such a port is done.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, Free software applications

As much for my own reference as anything else... I quite often use vmplayer on my work desktop, and occasionally on my laptop. Other options might work better for other people, but the company have already settled on using vmware on their Linux machines to give users access to Outbreak, Office etc. I try to avoid them as much as possible, but about the only effective option for calendaring at work is Outbreak. *spit*. And on my laptop, I just have a vmplayer setup containing a trivial Windows XP installation for things like Nokia firmware updates. It's more hassle than I can be arsed with to move to something else - the only thing worse than using Windows is installing it, in my experience. In most respects, vmplayer is working OK for me. But: it has one intermittent and really annoying bug. Every now and again, as I switch away from the vmplayer session to another desktop using Ctrl-Alt, then Ctrl-Alt-Cursor, vmplayer eats the state of the X keyboard modifier keys. This makes things interesting after that point: my normal use of emacs, firefox, xterms, mutt (etc.) is fairly heavily dependent on being able to use the Shift and Ctrl keys. This looks like it has been documented as a bug in a number of places over the past few months/years (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) but there doesn't seem to be a fix coming. However, what I have found out is that there is a workaround: setxkbmap will reset the modifier key state when things have broken. If only I'd been able to find that earlier - I've ended up restarting X or rebooting in the past... :-(

MySQL supports a plugin interface since 5.1, which enables creation of server components. Plugins can be loaded at server startup, or loaded and unloaded at runtime without restarting the server. Most of these plugins require the full MySQL source tree during their build, which was not available in Debian as a binary package until I uploaded 5.1.54-2 to unstable last week. I had this item on my TODO list since MySQL 5.1 was uploaded to Debian unstable, because it is not possible for a Debian source package to build-depend on another source package. Thankfully, Clint Byrum from Ubuntu sent me a small patch which added the new binary package.

The first package making use of the new mysql-source-5.1 package is HandlerSocket, a NoSQL plugin for MySQL. It is currently waiting in Debian's NEW queue for approval, and I am sure we will see more plugins/packages (XtraBackup from Percona is another well known candidate) making use of the new binary package in Debian soon.

A new release of Gnash, version 0.8.9, is due in the near future. Plenty of bugs have been fixed, but some users are still going to have problems playing YouTube videos. Here's a short explanation. At some point last year, YouTube started setting HTTP cookies in your web browser, to keep track of which of their video servers is nearest to your machine. This lets them provide a better experience for you (I guess). Here's a diagram of what goes on in your browser: As of Gnash 0.8.8, a workaround was added, calling an NPAPI function NPN_GetValueForURL to ask the web browser for the relevant cookies. New diagram: The downside is that this function was only added in NPAPI version 1.9. This means:

• Only the NPAPI plugin has this workaround, not any of the other gnash plugins (e.g. the native kparts one for Konqueror).
• While most browsers do implement NPAPI, not all of them have been updated to include this newer function yet. So the versions of Epiphany and Chromium shipped in Debian at the time of writing do not work with gnash/YouTube as far as I am aware (but Webkit has fixed this upstream).

What does Adobe's plugin do? I imagine it's something like the following: So, the good news is, this problem should almost certainly get fixed over the coming Debian release cycle, if only because all the browsers will get updated. In the meantime, disabling cookies (and removing stale ones from YouTube) is a workaround.

As I've already written, SourceForge.Net has limited things which you can do on git/mercurial servers and one of the things they have prohibited is sending emails. This is one of few things which almost every projects uses so it has brought quite obvious reaction, people are reporting bugs that it stopped to working. The major reason for reporting bug is that this change was not at all communicated to users (nor users nor project admins), so it was just a surprise and every body expects bug and not this kind of reply. As I don't have way to reopen the ticket, I had to open another one, that the documentation is wrong and I hope the reply will be slightly better. SF.net, if you still don't believe people used this feature quite a lot, just look at number of bug reports you have in your tracker right now...

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Did not exist.Will never exist.There was quite a lot of buzz about privacy with that new IPv6 thingy. Some say it is bad, as you will have a static address. Some say the privacy extensions will fix everything. I say: lemme rant ;)First of all, that was the internet, when I started using it back in 1999:

[ New Yorker Magazine, March 1993] On the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog And that s the internet today:

[ robcottingham.ca] How the hell does Facebook know I m a dog?

Well, I d say that s not correct. Even in 1999 facebook could know you are a dog (if you ignore the fact, that there was no facebook in 1999), it s just noone really cared about it. But let s start from the beginning :)An IP-address is a 32-bit integer

An IP-address is technically a 32-bit integer, formatted into 4 8-bit parts (you can read more about IPv4 at Wikipedia), which makes a total of 4,294,967,296 possible IP-addresses. Your ISP has a range in this address-space it can give to its customers (you). My ISP (Unitymedia) owns about 300,000 IP-addresses (based on the RIPE database), which is about 0.007% of the whole address-space. If you look at the RIPE page, you see two common netname prefixes (DE-KNRW and DE-IESY-HFC) which match two regions of Germany where my ISP has its customers (Unitymedia is a merge of ish and iesy). What does that mean? It means one can map a Unitymedia customer into one of these regions, even if he would change his IP-address (Unitymedia uses DHCP with high lease-times, so this does not happen actually). It does not map the customer to a dog yet, but I bet real GeoIP databases can map them correctly to a city (I didn t try much, but this site suggests it works: http://www.ip-adress.com/?lc=en at least they map me correctly to Duesseldorf).Dynamic IP-addresses do not improve privacy

Given the above facts, even if Unitymedia would give me a new IP-address every X hours (many DSL-providers have X=24), it is still possible to map me into a set of about 150,000 users (here user means customer, there still may be multiple computers connected via the same line). I would even go further and say the set is much smaller, as I think I am not able to get every free IP-address from DE-KNRW-*, as these should be bound to cities/regions (GeoIP databases exist, you rememember?) and I do not move with my line.Routers and reverse DNS kill privacy

Currently, my IP-address is 62.143.232.104, which has a reverse DNS entry ip-62-143-232-104.unitymediagroup.de and does not say anything about me or my location, besides of the obvious Unitymedia customer . But look at the traceroute:

4  7111A-MX960-01-ae5.frankfurt.unity-media.net (80.81.192.181)
5  13NOC-MX960-01-ae8.kerpen.unity-media.net (80.69.107.26)
6  1411G-MX960-01-ae9.neuss.unity-media.net (80.69.107.2)
7  1411J-MX960-01-ae1.bilk.unity-media.net (80.69.107.70)
8  PH-1411J-uBR10k-06-Te-1-2-0.bilk.unity-media.net (80.69.102.106)

Frankfurt is about 250km from here, Kerpen about 60, Neuss about 10 and Bilk is a part of the city I live in, about 4km away from my home. I guess you get the idea :)Browsers kill privacy tooDo I have to say more than a link to https://panopticlick.eff.org/? My Chromium scores one in 1,400,000. How much IP-addresses did I have to hide in again?We are at the dog level now, dogs use BoneOS with FireBark, not Linux with Chromium :)IPv6 kills cute kittensOh, and privacy, because with IPv6, there are 2^128 IPv6-addresses out there, of which your provider will maybe own a /32 (2^96 addresses) and give you a /48 (2^80 addresses) or (more likely) /64 (2^64 addresses). Then you enable the great IPv6 privacy extensions (RFC4941) and happily hide in your own assigned subnet, still being a customer of your ISP, still living in the same city and using your old browser It s just about mapping subnets instead of individual IP-addresses then. And we can t get lower as the dog levelPeople can annoy meI did not write all this to teach you, you can do yourself with Wikipedia and RFCs. There is a person out there, who thinks using a random name, mail address and twitter account could fool me into thinking that s a new, yet unknown, person to me. Well, I am not stupid, sorry. When you comment on my blog, your IP-address is logged, when I approve the comment, I often look at the reverse DNS and the whois entry of that IP-address (sorry, I AM paranoid). I even might check my webserver logs (or Piwik) where did you come from (Google etc), writing accidentally in your comment does not help :) Also, if you are trying to fool me, don t use your own computer, running Windows 7 and Firefox which I installed. Oh, and probably do not use your home line which I used to login into my admin-area using my unique Chromium ;)Sorry Hanna Lena, the chicken has just eaten her own eggs And yes, one can track down a single person on this big thing called internet, IPv6 will not change this (in any direction).

I just realized that the Debian Installer is ten years old! It actually got started ten years ago last summer, but now is also an apt anniversary -- ten years ago, I successfully booted d-i for the first time. It's amazing that d-i has been around as long as Debian Developers who have "been with the project longer than most". (Many of whom have been long-time contributors to d-i themselves.) Astonishing that my basic design has held up and remains relevant. And every time I boot up the Debian kFreeBSD installer, or run the graphical installer, or hear someone raving about how easy Ubuntu was for them to install (and know d-i was underneath), I'm amazed at the places people have taken d-i. The code has recently moved to git. As changes like ext4 by default start to flow in to d-i, with Wheezy development starting up, I hope to see more people enticed into working on d-i. Anyone can do like Matthew Palmer has done with netcfg -- pick a component of d-i that interests you, check out its git repository, and take it from being reasonably well team-maintained to awesomely you-maintained. In five or ten years Matthew will be able to look back at all the people who have used d-i to install over IPv6, and on WPA wireless, and with his other netcfg improvements. Trust me, it's a great feeling. Previously: d-i retrospective (better written than the above & well worth a re-read)

I ve got a few mails lately enquiring about the lack of visible activity on forked-daapd in recent times. Well, for one, I ve been busy with other things, but there s also been some non-public activity. So, here s what should happen in the next few months, in no particular order:

• overhaul of the database schema and code;
• metadata handling will (finally, probably) move away from ffmpeg;
• release of the libdispatch-based forked-daapd code.

The database overhaul will bring a much-needed speedup on small devices and big libraries. It s being worked on, but it ground to a halt with new year and all. Hopefully it ll resume soon. I m also giving up on ffmpeg for metadata extraction. It doesn t work well at all (as everybody knows by now) and it s actually getting worse and worse. With the ffmpeg takeover/fork (call it whatever you want) it s unclear what s going to happen on this front. So I m giving up and the metadata scanner will probably switch to using TagLib (one more dependency, yay). Last, but definitely not least, the libdispatch codebase should finally see the light at the end of the tunnel in the coming months. I ve been working on this since July last year, moving away from libevent. If you never heard about libdispatch, or Grand Central Dispatch, read my previous post on the subject. I ll talk about it in more details at a later date. Finally, as far as Squeeze is concerned, I plan to provide forked-daapd backports as long as it ll be practical to do so. This is it for now. I don t have a one more thing in my sleeve, sorry. Time is at a premium right now, so big things have to wait.

Since MySQL 5.5 was declared stable in December last year, I regulary receive e-mails from people asking when it will get uploaded to Debian. The good thing is that the initial conversion from automake to cmake has already been done by Clint Byrum from Ubuntu, and we are going to use his work as a basis for our packages. The not so good thing is bug #59078, an issue in libmysqlclient which breaks ABI compatibility. According to Lenz Grimmer from Oracle the MySQL upstream developers are already looking at it.

I am still not sure if it is a good idea to upload MySQL 5.5 in the current state to experimental, but I am definitely not going to upload it to unstable until this issue is fixed.

<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&amp;bc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;fc1=000000&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;t=dedasys-20&amp;o=1&amp;p=8&amp;l=as4&amp;m=amazon&amp;f=ifr&amp;asins=B003YH9MMI" style="width: 120px; height: 240px; float: left; margin-right: 10px;"></iframe> I tend to be a sucker for business books, to the point where I created (and later sold) a site to discuss them. Part of the motivation for creating that site was that a lot of them tend to contain one good idea, and an inordinate amount of fluff. This book does not - it's good material that could not easily be summarized because it's full of information. I think it's actually one of the more relevant books I've ever read in that, for my situation, the idea behind it really speaks to me. I work as a consultant during the days, and I like it a lot. Rather than working on the same old thing year after year, I get to meet new people, new clients, new situations, and help them out, which is motivating. However, consulting has its downsides too, in that it doesn't create a great deal of long-term value. Once you've finished up a project, it's on to the next one, or no money comes in. I'm also a bit older and more set in my ways: I did my time in the California Bay Area, and I don't relish going back and working like mad on a "Real Startup" with VC backing, crazy hours, and having the thing consume my life. The idea behind "Start Small, Stay Small" is to find and create really niche products: stuff that will earn you some extra money as a developer, but also niches that are small enough to not really be interesting to larger companies that need a lot of income to justify a forray into a particular market segment. This, then, becomes your 'competitive advantage': Microsoft, or even 37 Signals, simply isn't going to chase after a market that is worth 20,000 dollars a year. And yet for someone working on their own, if you manage to set up something that brings in that money, and mostly automate it so that it's not a second job, it's a tidy extra bit of money. Several projects like that might even be enough to live on, depending on your lifestyle. With that in mind, the authors, Rob Walling and Mike Taper, delve into the details of how to go about doing so. The whole thing is done under the assumption that you don't have a lot of time or money to throw at things that don't bring in concrete results in relatively short order. Various subjects discussed in detail include how to find a niche, how to create a sales web site, how to measure market demand, conversion rates, how to productively outsource less critical portions of your business, and much more. They also discuss what sorts of numbers to look at for various aspects of the business, and anchor the discussion with real numbers for many things, rather than just giving you a hand-wavy phrase that's not that useful in the real world. It's not a 'timeless' book as all the concrete numbers and techniques reference technologies, sites, and the market dynamics of 2011, but after all, that's part of what makes it good. Other things I didn't like so much were being sold on their for-pay "micropreneur community", and the relatively high price of the book but I think it's worth it given the real advice you get. If you don't like marketing, and think that products succeed or fail on their merits alone, of course the book will leave you cold, but of course you're wrong about that anyway!

Now that Squeeze has been released, we (the pkg-xfce group) are in the process of uploading 4.8 to Debian. And we are uploading it to experimental for good reasons. Not that 4.8 is broken, but the packages are, and we're aware of it. Some packages are still in NEW, some are not uploaded because of some licensing issues, some have not been uploaded because we didn't yet have the time. What does this mean for you? That you should *not* upgrade to Xfce 4.8. Not all packages will be upgraded, and mixing 4.6 and 4.8 is a bad idea. We don't know yet what will happen (and that's the whole point of uploading to experimental), and it seems that there are issues indeed. So unless you're willing to fix the problems, don't upgrade to 4.8. It's not complete and it *will* break your install. I wouldn't recommend building and installing from our svn repository (for the sames reasons) nor from another (since upgrade path won't be guaranteed and we won't be able to fix them for you). So please be patient, we will upload 4.8 to unstable at one point, and there will still be polishing to be made if you want to help.

After recent attack on sf.net servers, some services have been unavailable for some time. Now things are returning to "normal" operations, CVS has been made available yesterday. But this has lead to other (quite unrelated) change, affecting all SCM services:

outbound email is not functional, so any script utilizing this will fail. If you need to send outbound email, a workaround would be to use curl and and external site or Project Web to send the email.

I think this is just wrong. If this is as a measure against spam, it will rather open dozens of other places where to send spam, because every project wanting commit notifications (or using CIA.vc), will need to deploy some script on web to send mail. And I guess it simply won't be much protected. Maybe it's time to consider changing service provider... PS: The bug I've reported on this topic is here.

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The first day of GNUnify 11 has passed. My talk on Haskell went, as far as I can tell, well. Attendance was good (rough estimate: just above 50), although it was not as packed as later talks, and there some questions being asked. There were some technical problems with the microphone, I m not sure how that affected the people sitting in the rear rows. Also, I fear that the video recording of the talk might have suffered we will see. Later throughout the afternoon and evening I would repeatedly find myself cornered by five to ten students of SICSR who would question me about Haskell (Why should I learn it, where is it used, how is different from Java?) mostly volunteers who were busy and thus unable to attend the session. I think I got some of them at least curious about Haskell. I did attend a talk on virtualization and a short demo of GNOME 3 and otherwise just talked to people or sat in the speakers corner. The pampering by the organizers continued if I would stand for half a second with a slightest, even false, hint of help-needing on my face, they would ask me if I need any thing. When I pass they would step back to free the path. It made me feel a bit uneasy, but I figured that normal behavior in the Indian culture and they, being hosts to me, would not feel comfortable any other way. We had dinner at the side of the pool of the Symbiosis university, and more interesting talk happened. So far, nobody seemed to be interested in GPG keysigning, maybe I should give a talk about GPG and the web of trust next time.