Venkatesh Hariharan recently wrote an article on Indias traditions of knowledge and how Open Source meshes with them. Now having met him at foss.in and knowing of his work, I am 100% convinced he is on the side of the angels and their is no malice in what he wrote. However, his interpretation (really not his, but the conventional wisdom amongst the Indian elite.) of Indian history and culture is so monumentally wrong it bears correction. While I admit my hackles were raised by the cultural and theological mistakes made, there are implications for Open Source advocacy in India and the world at large too. He starts by giving the example of Nalanda, supposedly "the first university in the world." but more accurately a Buddhist vihara (monastery.) Its' very name indicated sharing. I use the past tense because Nalanda doesn't exist anymore. In fact except in a few border areas influenced by Tibet or Burma, Buddhism itself is so thoroughly extinct in the land of its birth, the place where it flourished for over 1500 years, that the only reason people like Hariharan or myself only know that there ever was such a thing due to the work of 19th century Western Indologists. How could this be? One theory is that a resurgent Hinduism coopted or persecuted the Buddhists into oblivion. However this is unsatisfactory. It does not explain why Jainism (a religion as old as Buddhism and equally heretical for exactly the same reasons from the Hindu point of view) still survives to this day and it doesn't explain how it could have happened for even the most advanced genocidal regimes of the 20th century have been unable to "disappear" undesirables to the extent which Buddhism disappeared. A more plausible explanation revolves around the fact that, as I mentioned before, places like Nalanda were Viharas. This doesn't mean that they can't have university-like properties too; after all the great academic institutions of Europe also had religious foundations but the monastic nature of a vihara is salient. A monastery is not a place you go to engage the world, its a place you go to escape it. To mix metaphors a bit, the viharas were cathedrals not bazaars. While there may have been a lively intellectual life within its walls, there is no evidence that Nalanda and its denizens interacted much with the surrounding culture. An economically unproductive institution of such vast size (15,000 monks at its peak) could only survive by the patronage of kings and other rich people. When that patronage dried up as for example when the medieval Muslim invasions swept away the old royalty, Nalanda and its sisters couldn't survive. Just as when a proprietary software company dies, its "intellectual property" often dies with it, when centralized Buddhism died, Buddhist ideas died with it. (Luckily Buddhism had spread to other countries by then and developed new, less monolithic forms so it was not lost to the world altogether.) In contrast Hinduism (and for that matter Jainism) while having all due respect for monks were and are primarily lay movements. The pursuit of morality (Dharma), wealth (artha) and pleasure (kama) in this world are equally valid human goals alongside liberation from the world (moksha.) and this manifested as the much maligned institution of caste. Hariharan quotes the conventional view probably familiar to Westerners from Anthropology 101, a lock-step hierarchy of four classes (varna is the Sanskrt word) with fixed occupations, with knowledge and privilege on top and ignorance and oppression at the bottom. The thing is, this view bears no relationship whatsoever with social reality in India now or historically. There is another Sanskrit word, jati, which can be translated as caste. There are thousands of these jatis and while Indian thinkers have periodically attempted to try and shoehorn them into the varna framework, they have had little success and varna is for all practical purposes just a theory. And this is not just a fall from some putative golden age (Like the canard that once caste was flexible and merit based and only later became rigid.) but the state of affairs throughout recorded history.

A jati consists of people who share a common (or fictive) kinship, who have particular food and ritual choices, and marry endogamously. While many jatis are associated with a particular occupation, many others are not. This is what caste means to a typical Indian (it is also the social organization prevalent amongst Jains, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians even if they don't accept its theological basis.) Yes, hierarchy and concommitantly oppression, are in some cases a byproduct of casteist thinking but they are hardly its raison d'etre. A comparison can be made to the Western nuclear family system. Some people think it is superior to any other form of social organization. Most people wouldn't go that far but go along with it as "the way it is." Some of those of a liberal persuasion might want tweaks of certain aspects of it. A very small fringe think it is nothing more than a nefarious plot to spread patriarchy, subjugation and racism etc. They are mostly considered kooks by the other groups. (Unfortunately when India and caste are concerned, the kooks are ruling the roost.) The diversity of jatis like the diversity of open source creates a certain resistence to disruption that a monoculture cannot. Thus though Hinduism also suffered grievously from invasions, it was able to hold on where Indian Buddhism could not. Brahmin (sic. That's an English mispronounciation.) is also misinterpreted as one who knows Brahma (masculine noun. The Creator God.) instead of Brahman (neuter noun. The supreme spirit pervading the Universe.) though even then it would be wrong because Brahmin, Brahma, and Brahman all come from a common root word brhati (feminine noun. Sacred speech.) as any Sanskrit dictionary will attest. Hariharan cites the example of the sacred scriptures (Sic. He means the Vedas) and the notorious statement of the Manusmrti saying that an unqualified person who hears them should have molten lead poured into their ears as examples of the proprietarization of knowledge. Now the long-suffering untouchables may have been afraid of many things but having lead earplugs was not one of them. There is no historical evidence that any such action was ever attempted. You can criticize the Manusmrti for even saying such a thing but that is a far cry from using it as evidence of historical attitudes. You see, the Manusmrti is not even in the most orthodox conception Hindu Sharia and the Vedas are not "Sacred Scriptures" in the sense that the Bible or Koran are. Rather they are part of a wide range of significant literary works respected in Hinduism of which other important examples are the two Epics the Mahabharata (which includes the Bhagavadgita), and the Ramayana, and the vast compendia of geneologies, philosophy, lore and legend called the Puranas. Hariharan actually missed a good chance to make his point here because while the Vedas are indeed "proprietary" the other works I mentioned are not and have in fact permeated all over India and even beyond its borders. Many Indian languages owe their literary existence to translation of the epics or Puranas. For instance one of the earliest monuments of Hindi literature is the Ramacharitamanasa, Saint Tulsidas's translation of the Ramayana. When he wrote it in the 16th century, he did face some opposition from those who didn't think such an august work should be rendered into a "vulgar" tongue, he also received encouragement from equally orthodox people (including those who believed the Vedas should be restricted to Brahmins) Today it is by many accounts the most popular Hindu holy book in existence. So really the whole idea that the Hindu canon shows a fall from open grace to rigidly controlled private property is just bogus. To those who have slogged their way though all this verbiage wondering what it has do with Linux and Open Source, let me assure you I am getting to the point :-) It's bad enough from my point of view as a devout Hindu that my religion would be misrepresented this way but from my point of view as a supporter of Free Software ideals, it is catastrophic. Linux and Open Source in India has spread, as in most parts of the world, primararily as a hobby amongst computer enthusiasts and for a hobby it's doing ok. However if you think of it as more than that, as a tool to enhance society and empower peoples lives, that is not nearly good enough. But how can one serve a society if one apparently has no clue about that societies history and mores? The developing world is littered with failed projects that were carried out with the purest of motives but no regard to what the putative clients actually wanted. Do we want Linux and Open Source deployments to go the same way? For a couple of years now I've been trying to get Indian and NRI programmers to get involved in localization in debian-installer and elsewhere but even with the small minority that are sympathetic to Open Source (a scandal in itself.) it is like pulling teeth. To their credit, Red Hat India pays people to work on such things but volunteerism is the heart of the Open Source movement as we all know so the apathy of Indian IT professionals is deeply troubling. Hariharan is trying to increase interest by appealing to the Indians' sense of cultural pride which is a good tactic--it has been successfuly applied by many non-western or minority cultures--but he is not going to be very successful if the vision of Indian culture he is presenting is as alien as Eskimo culture to the vast majority of the people. Western Open Source advocates also run into difficulties due to being tone-deaf in their understanding of how third-world cultures actually operate. When India declined to participate in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, some commentators on places like Slashdot were perplexed. Wouldn't a poor country want an inexpensive yet efficient pc using free software instead of high-priced imports? The thing they missed is that while people in India may be poor, thanks to a more-or-less democratic polity and more-or-less open communications, their frame of reference is no longer their village. Their trends are increasingly set in Mumbai, New York, Paris, and London. The forward-thinking amongst them know that computers are the key to the future. They also know Bill Gates is the richest man in the world thanks to something called "Windows" knowing which can get you a green card and your own chance of becoming rich. So if Linux comes along, presented as a cheap alternative which is "just as good", the fake Gucci handbag of IT if you will, it is not going to impress. Thinkpads and Dells appeal to the upwardly-mobile persons vanity, a third-world hand-cranked laptop does not. (This incidently is what is behind the "Nalanda university" meme too. Monasteries are yesterday. Universities are the in thing so we have to have some in our past and not just any but by golly, the first university in the world.) When they venture from pure technology into the realm of culture, Open Source advocates need to be a lot more sophisticated, not to mention accurate, in their arguments lest they fall on deaf ears. Platitudes and sentimentality about "spiritual" versus "material" culture aren't enough. There must be concrete demonstrations of the benefits of why the Open Source approach to knowledge is better. They must be more sensitive in their presentation to avoid needlessly antagonizing people who might otherwise be natural allies. I believe the Open Source ideal is good for India and the whole world, not just in software but for society at large and I wish Venkatesh Hariharan and all the others on the frontlines of the fight for openness the best of luck. But good intentions cannot excuse sloppy thinking.

In response to Home video hub on a shoestring, Justin asked, “Why not just stream the media over cifs/nfs/sshfs?” Why indeed? Well, as my fellow amateur Internet broadcaster Justin Zeigler (coincidentally of the same first name) observed, “some people mistake the unix way as doing things the oldest way possible.” There are niceties streaming video solutions provide that are much better suited to solving my particular problem. Streaming puts the burden of handling different codecs and providing material at a bitrate the client systems can handle on the server. Remember, I said my client system is underpowered and the network I’m delivering across is wireless B. These constraints make streaming video the ideal solution. Now, if I only wanted to stream the music videos and other material designed to deliver over the Internet, I’d be fine with a remote filesystem. But DVDs and mythtv recordings are too demanding on my little laptop’s resources to work at all. But, just to make sure, I tried both sshfs and nfs today. Sure enough, I could stream a Quicktime music video from sshfs just fine. However, neither sshfs nor nfs could deliver the material from a mythtv recording fast enough for the client to keep up. I tried both vlc and mplayer, and both were so stuttery they were unplayable. I gave mplayer a larger buffer (32K) which cleaned up the first few seconds of play while the player read from the buffer, but after that, it started stuttering again. And this was with only one floor of separation between the WAP and the laptop, to make sure I had a solid connection. Clearly, Videolan’s ability to transcode on the fly and stream over the network is a great convenience to me. I suppose I could do a file-to-file transcode and then read the resulting file from sshfs, but I don’t find that nearly as handy as the streaming solution. So I’m sticking with Videolan, as I find it the easiest to use, most elegant solution to delivering a broad range of video material from our powerful hub system to our less powerful client system.

Hecl is a weakly typed programming language, which, for a scripting language is often an advantage. Instead of cluttering your code with lots of (casts) or performing.to_s all the time, things "just work" depending on the context (and assuming that you've verified your data or have error handling for when things go wrong). I've been pondering a weakness of this model that Tcl doesn't adequately solve, discussed here: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=37354848 The summary is that if anything can and will be converted to a string at some point in its lifetime, GC'ing "complex objects" (things that can't be represented by a string) gets difficult. In order to be able to go back to an object from a string, you have to maintain a hash table with string handles that point at the actual objects in whatever language you are using, and that in turn requires that you somehow keep track of the lifetime of those objects. Doing GC in Hecl itself is something I'd hoped to avoid - up until now, we have managed to get by ok with Java's GC. The 'best' solution seems to be Salvatore's, discussed here: http://wiki.tcl.tk/13847 But even that is relatively complex, and at least initially, involves a couple of tours through the entire string-space of the running program. Unfortunately, I don't think there's really a clever way around the problem, though... what the weak typing giveth, the weak typing taketh away (or something along those lines). I am not sure what this means for Hecl at this point, whether we simply say "clean up after your own objects", introduce some sort of string typing, or something else entirely...

Edit: to be fair to the GCC crew, it seems the guy who closed me the bug to the face was not very representative of'em. Thanks to them to their very good compilation suite btw ! a bit of history I've been bitten today by a problem due to the fact that I use the gcc __attribute__((nonull(...))) as a hint in my C headers to say to the programmer that it's up to him to check if what it pass to my function is NULL, or not. I had written (erouneously) that bit of code:

/* in the .h */
__attribute__((nonnull(1)))
char *m_strrtrim(char *s);
/* in the .c */
char *m_strrtrim(char *s)
 
    ssize_t len = s ? strlen(s) : 0;
    while (len > 1 && isspace((unsigned char)s[len - 1]))
        len--;
    return s + len;
 

I've added the __attribute__((nonnull)) by mistake, and indeed sometimes used m_strrtrim on strings that I knew to be NULL. The point is, gcc is able to use the nonnull attribute to optimize code, and that's very legitimate. In my case, it optimized the s ? strlen(s) : 0 into strlen(s). And without surprise, it caused segfaults. I had a hard time finding that bug, because I've never thought that it could come from the header. As it could not come from the m_strrtrim function, I've looked very hard for stack overwrite and so on in the caller, but even valgrind did not catched anything interesting (except an invalid read size of 1 in strlen). It's when (in order to see if it was a gcc optimization bug) I've generated the preprocessed source that I saw the damn prototype in the preprocessor output, and that was suddently obvious to me why it segfaulted. the wishlist bug Since it was quite an unusual problem, that can make you loose a lot of time, because the bug lies very far from where it's revealed, I've opened a wishlist bug in gcc to ask for a warning when you test some pointer against NULL that you should already know to be non-NULL. like the warning about always true (or always false) comparisons for e.g.:

size_t len;
// ...
if (len >= 0)   ... // always true
if (len < 0)   ... // always false

That's gcc bug#30043. Or I should say was. My bugreport has indeed be closed a first time as INVALID, because the reader thought I said the gcc optimization was not legitimate (*sigh*). I reopened it explaining more precisely that I only begged for a warning, not for anything else, and that YES I DID READ THE DOC. The bug has just been closed as WONTFIX this time, with an explanation that still makes me stare at it with a blank look:

I don't think a warning is the right thing in this case because the developer should have read the documention [ ]

WTF !? If reading the documentation can make you a perfect programmer that never do any mistake, then god, I must be a super-mega-coder that always write perfect code ! Sadly, reading the doc do not prevent you to avoid cuts (aka segfaults) when you juggle with razorblades (aka code in C). I can understand that it's hard to do in the present state of GCC, and that's it's not an urgent feature, given how peculiar that request is. But I'm completely stunned to see that a guy that is in the compiler business just consider that a warning is useless, and that the documentation is the key answer. I use an over-long compilation line in my projects ^{[1] [2]} especially because a compiler is really better than me to catch many kind of errors. And it's vital to do so. I've seen too many people that only compile with gcc -g -O2 and optionnally with -Wall when they don't forget it. But from a guy in the compiler business, well, that's just yet-another-illusion that collapses.

It’s now possible to dynamically link web data into Google spreadsheets. For example, stock information can be pulled in via the simple formula GoogleFinance(ticker, attribute), where attribute can be any number of metrics from market capitalization to P/E ratio. Not much to choose from yet—at this point, there’s only GoogleFinance and GoogleLookup, which seems more novelty than useful, and I’d love to see more than just the obvious metrics available for GoogleFinance, things like cash per share, revenue growth over the past m years, number of insider purchases over the past n months, etc. However, it’s a great start, and it’s pretty easy to see where they’re going with this—after all, most spreadsheets are inherently linked to external data sources, though I’d wager a majority of them are “linked” via copy and paste. I look forward to the day when you can pull in all manner of structured information into a spreadsheet via similar formulas. To me, this is the real value of “Office 2.0″. To compete, the office challengers have to go beyond just copying Microsoft Office on the web—success will come from exploiting the new platform, not cloning the old model. Pretty easy to see something like this grow into a platform all its own too. With a few more financial metrics, a slightly more powerful macro language, and the ability to connect to more arbitrary data sources (say, Google Base or the CSV files my bank makes available to me), I could track my finances on the web in a Google spreadsheet and give Quicken the boot (for what I want to do, Quicken is like driving a nail with a sledgehammer). Update: Google spreadsheets has an API now too.

Wow. Behdad makes a casual mention to the coolest hack in the world. Yes, there are better solutions but they are heavy, this is quick and lean. Love it! The only problem is that typically GTK+ is built with PLT hacks, so the probes cannot intercept the calls. With a GTK+ built without the PLT manipulations, this should do exactly what you expect:

#include <gtk/gtk.h>
#include <bprobe.h>
PKG_CONFIG_CFLAGS(gtk+-2.0)
PROBE
void
gtk_widget_show (GtkWidget *w)
 
        LOG ("gtk_widget_show");
        return SUPER(gtk_widget_show) (w);
 

NP: Londinium, Archive

I don t have a TV here in Ghana (and I don t miss it at all), but some audio-visual content consumption from time to time is nice. Therefore, I started to subscribe to various Podcasts, using the comfortable Democracy Player. Here are my regulars , also see my list of German podcasts.BrickfilmsSome like lego. Some like stop motion animation. I like both. Therefore, I am a big fan of lego movies, and the brickfilms blogcast delivers the best ones directly to me. Unfortunately, does not get posted to very often.Olde EnglishMy sense of humer is not every one else s. Therefore, I guess not everyone will enjoy the sketches of the Olde English comedy group. I could try to list some of my favorites episodes, like One picture every day , but discover that for yourself.BSODInteresting, highly technical hour-long podcast covering interesting topics such as how the telefone system works (and what funny things you can do with it), bulding a infra-red remote control gun that will control your (or anyone s) TV from quite a distance and similar topics. It could cover a bit more software topics, and less Windows based things and personally, I think the Bastard Sons of Dial-Up put slightly too much emphasize on bad language and underground-activists-like appearance. But that might be genuine, and the content is of good quality, so it is worth watching.The Tech JunkiesOnly three episodes so far, but these two guy are doing great and funny things with electronics (such as testing what happens when you plug a speaker into the power outlet). They also have covered lock picking, and I especially enjoyed seeing a bump key in action, as so far I only read about that technique.Player 1 vs. Player 2A two-guy talk show about computer games. Slightly oriented towards old and console games, but still interesting for most gamers, I d say. They have not released a new episode for almost a year now, I hope that they will start sending again some day.

I don t have a TV here in Ghana (and I don t miss it at all), but some audio-visual content consumption from time to time is nice. Therefore, I started to subscribe to various Videocasts, using the comfortable Democracy Player. Here are my regulars , also see my list of German podcasts.BrickfilmsSome like lego. Some like stop motion animation. I like both. Therefore, I am a big fan of lego movies, and the brickfilms bodcast delivers the best ones directly to me. Unfortunately, does not get posted to very often.Olde EnglishMy sense of humer is not every one else s. Therefore, I guess not everyone will enjoy the sketches of the Olde English comedy group. I could try to list some of my favorites episodes, like One picture every day , but discover that for yourself.BSODInteresting, highly technical hour-long videocast covering interesting topics such as how the telefone system works (and what funny things you can do with it), bulding a infra-red remote control gun that will control your (or anyone s) TV from quite a distance and similar topics. It could cover a bit more software topics, and less Windows based things and personally, I think the Bastard Sons of Dial-Up put slightly too much emphasize on bad language and underground-activists-like appearance. But that might be genuine, and the content is of good quality, so it is worth watching.The Tech JunkiesOnly three episodes so far, but these two guy are doing great and funny things with electronics (such as testing what happens when you plug a speaker into the power outlet). They also have covered lock picking, and I especially enjoyed seeing a bump key in action, as so far I only read about that technique.Player 1 vs. Player 2A two-guy talk show about computer games. Slightly oriented towards old and console games, but still interesting for most gamers, I d say. They have not released a new episode for almost a year now, I hope that they will start sending again some day.

A long time ago (until Nov 2004), there was this good blog which described one cool Debian package every day. It allowed to discover a lot of interesting software, but it suddenly stopped being updated. It would be nice to resurrect this. A team of editors could work on this, and readers could submit new entries. Editors wouldn’t need to be Debian users : we could have Ubuntu users too, and it would be a nice way to determine what are the things that have been packaged in Ubuntu that we should (but don’t) have in Debian yet. Leave a comment if you would like to dedicate some time to this (either as an editor, or as a regular submitter of entries). If there’s enough manpower, I’ll try to setup a mailing list or something to discuss the minimum infrastructure we would need.

Here's what it's been doing:

2 days ago: high of 69
yesterday: daytime high of 23 plus "breezy" winds at 30MPH
today: forecasted high of 26, 3-7 inches of snow, winds at 25MPH, gusting to 35MPH

Yesterday, I drove to the doctor's office and back to work, a drive of about 15 minutes. During that time, I encountered:

• calm
• thunder and lightning
• freezing rain bad enough that my windshield almost froze over in less than 5 minutes
• calm again
• sleet

I've heard people from all over the country say, "if you don't like our weather, wait 5 minutes."

In Kansas, we really mean it.

In case you are maintainer and have any RC bug sitting with your package, and you have already commited a resolution to your source repository, please upload your package in a timely manner. It is really annoying if such bugs sit there, and are not resolved (and have their negative impact about our users!), and at the same time, it wouldn't be too difficult for the maintainers to upload the fix.

Live CD on a removable disk, the Debian way In [live-cd-on-removable-disk] at some point I wrote:

Enrico's note: do we have anything in Debian that we can install and just does that?

Here are the answers: Sven Mueller writes:

Well, Enrico, a tool I really grew fond of, which auto-configures X on Debian systems is xdebconfigurator, it lacks being auto-run on each system start, which I consider a feature on normal systems, but for your proposed usage (i.e. a portable USB-storage based Debian system), it would certainly be the right thing. Essentially, it never failed on me. Except for VMware virtual machines, where all it did wrong was that it proposed too high resolutions which resulted from my dual-screen Windows setup I ran VMware on. You might want to give it a try.

Tollef Fog Heen writes:

I added the support in casper for doing this almost a year ago and it has saved me lots of debugging time. Booting the live CD that way is almost as fast as booting an installed system. If you couple this with using the persistent storage support in casper, you can get the configure-on-boot support together with persistency. In a later update, slh is quited saying that xresprobe doesn't work on AMD64. This is wrong, I wrote that support based on code by Matthew Garret a little more than nine months ago. I wouldn't recommend incorporating it in new-written code, but rather use libx86

And finally, Marco Amadori writes:

Without needing to look for tools external to Debian, there is already the Debian Live software in sid: live-package, that creates a live system, and casper, that generates an initramfs that can configure a Debian system on the fly. So far there is no hard disk target for live-package, but the "Iso" target can already do the job quite well. At boot time, Casper's initramfs scans all the block devices, so it works also for USB keys and hard drives. To obtain a hard drive image, you just need to invoke "make-live" with the options to have the required software, then copy the content of the iso (or of the directory ./debian-live/binary) on a partition and install the boot loader. This is what the future "HD" target of live-package will do; so far it can only build ISO and Netboot images.

BluWiki has put up a new Vendors page, which lists various (a lot of IMHO) vendors and their attitude to open source as a pos/neg sort of list. Quite interesting though still incomplete.

David Nusinov says:

when a prominent DD gets busy in his personal life, we don't say that his personal life is trying to kill Debian. Similarly, when a prominent DD gets hired somewhere and gets very busy and he doesn't have as much time for Debian, we don't say that the employer is trying to kill Debian.

Going to work for on a Debian derivative is a bit different from going away from Debian to spend time as a new father/mother, or working as a MSCE, or whatever. If things are done right (by the employee, by Debian, by the employer), work spent on Debian derivatives can benefit both Debian and the derivative. I believe this even happens in many cases. One other point: Looking at the whole Dunc Tank debate, I guess hiring some people to work on Debian directly (which is just what I might do if I had spare cash in large amounts) wouldn't necessarily improve matters a lot, it'd just shift the debate (ah, he's trying to buy Debian...). Myself, I'm not entirely sure if the existence of Ubuntu is good or bad for Debian. More attention to .deb-based distributions is a good thing, certainly (I was astonished to see in a local bookshop that Ubuntu and SuSE were the only boxed Linux versions you can buy. No Fedora, nor Mandrake, nor Xandros or any of the others.) OTOH it would certainly be nice if more people would use (and then report bugs and start to help fixing them) Debian itself. But I can't see this happening anytime soon with our community as it is now. And then there's the 'it's good enough for us' and 'we don't want no steenking newbies' lines of thought. While I don't agree with the first one, I admit that finding a compromise between a newbie-friendly and gadget filled system for desktop use and a rock-stable professional tool is not easy. Two different sets of install CDs might be worth a try.

I finally got around to upgrading the bunch of WordPress blogs that I administer. I do not use the the Debian package, instead each blog is a separate copy, some with customizations. The official instructions make it a pain to upgrade customized WordPresses, so I have used another technique for a while now. This technique assumes a Unix-style system with all the usual goodies installed and command-line access, as well as Unix competence of the person performing this operation. I leave it to others to write step-by-step instructions for people lacking such competence (feel free to leave a comment). Step 0: Back up all your WordPress installations! Step 1: Make sure that you have a copy of the vanilla WordPress directory (unpacked from the zip or tarball and not changed afterward) for the version that you are currently running. I have it (in this case version 2.0.4) as the directory wp-2.0.4. Step 2: Download the new version, unpack it and rename the unpacked directory to include the version number (in this case, wp-2.0.5). Step 3: Create a patch file for this upgrade by running diff -Naur wp-2.0.4 wp-2.0.5 > ~/wp-2.0.4-2.0.5.diff. Step 4: Eyeball the patch to see if it looks sane. (I have on one occasion created a patch that deletes the whole WordPress installation. That is not fun. So check that the diff is sane!) Step 5: Apply the patch to your WordPress installation by changing to the WordPress installation’s directory and running patch -p1 -i ~/wp-2.0.4-2.0.5.diff. Step 6: If patch rejected some hunks, eyeball the .rej files to see if you need to manually merge the changes in. This should only happen if you have customized the installation. Step 7: Run the database upgrade script by going to the admin page and following the instructions. Step 8: Verify that it all works. *** It is also possible to manage the installations in darcs or in other version control systems. I haven’t bothered with that yet.

Rob Myers commented:

"Since all CC licences allow NC copying and distribution, any DRM that limits copying in any way is a breach. Or any DRM as it is also known. And since the CC licenses all support fair use and DreAm (an oxymoronic idea that I thought had died of lack of interest) restricts it, that's another problem. Not to mention how harmful electronic enforcement of CC licenses would be."

That's an argument I've heard from several CC supporters, but I don't accept it: fair use is inconsistent globally. What is fair use in the USA might not be fair dealing in England, or the other way around. As to whether any DRM is possible under CC licences, there's the small matter of Lessig's "praise for better DRM" which seems to acknowledge the existance of TPMs that restrict in a CC-OK way. Rob continues:

"Mako's arguments are a rehash of ones that were considered in depth when the debate was happening. Terry covered most of them [in an article on a magazine web site]"

Maybe the points Mako presents were considered, maybe they weren't, but it's very hard to tell from the limited transparency of CC. I think the points are clear, direct and difficult to argue against - that may be why it's so hard to get a good debate with CC about this. What's more, Terry Hancock's article is a rehash of his old list posts. I think Terry's points were all covered in mailing list discussions and they don't even try to make a case for the TPM-ban in CC-BY. I like recycling, but it's disappointing to see people use the press to recycle old threads. Also, I don't find it particularly surprising if someone writing for a magazine web site isn't entirely comfortable with some forms of redistribution. Rob finishes with:

"And I would add that, as someone who has installed GNU/Linux on my iPod, who has recently read the Yellow Dog Linux announcement for the PS3, who uses their PS2 as a CD and DVD player, and whose son seems to get MP3s, images and movies onto his PSP OK, I do not understand the argument that the best way of "helping" users is to help third parties trap them under DRM regimes rather than assisting users in installing and using free software."

Maybe that's not understandable because it's not an argument that's used, except as a straw man by pro-format-discriminators? Personally, I think it's a pretty poor show that you have an iPod, PSP and so on - weren't Apple's and Sony's DRM-mania well-known when they were bought? Which brings me on to why I feel locked-media distribution is worthwhile: educating people to make better device choices next time. I bought an Ogg player this time - hearing Cory Doctorow's talks as MP3 was partly why. If CC 2.0 had had an aggressive-patent ban similar to CC 3.0's TPM ban, maybe that wouldn't have happened.

Have you ever had a need for a large number of "real" network interfaces on a Linux box? For security reasons, you don't just want to hook everyone up to a single switch and use virtual interfaces (because it's too easy for one of the connected devices to play silly buggers with his neighbours). Up to a certain point, you can stuff more NICs into a box, and when it fills up you can switch to those outrageously expensive 2- and 4-port NICs. But eventually you're going to run out of space[1] or money. At that point, you need something more interesting. For me, this week, that "more interesting" has been Ethernet VLANs. Linux Journal has a good intro to the technical aspects of how to setup VLANs and Linux. VLANs are some crazy stuff. They're implemented by wrapping a little number around every Ethernet frame indicating which VLAN the packet is "on", and the switch (you need a higher-end device, appropriately configured) makes sure that packets don't roam onto ports they're not meant to be on. For a single switch, this isn't very interesting, and you don't really need an IEEE standard to make it work -- just a lot of little jumpers. However, VLANs are mostly useful on larger networks, which tend to use more than one switch. So you need a way for your VLANs to roam amongst your switches -- hence the packet tagging. You stick the tag onto the packets and fling them off to another switch, and packets coming in with the tag are corraled into their VLAN. Naturally, you don't want end-user devices whacking their own VLAN tags onto packets (untrusted data, and all that), so you define most of your ports as being "untagged". Packets that come in on these ports are treated as regular ethernet frames and tagged with the appropriate VLAN ID, and packets that go out have their VLAN IDs stripped before being sent. (This implies that you can tunnel VLANs in VLANs, and I'm pretty sure that is doable in most switches, modulo some nasty problems that can, and probably will, occur). The ports that aren't designated "untagged" spit out tagged packets -- and this is where my interest lies. Like most every other computer-related standard, Linux can decipher and work with VLAN tags (the 8021q module is what you're looking for). You just load up the module, hook your NIC into the appropriate port on your very expensive switch, define your VLAN tags with vconfig, and suddenly you've got vlanN interfaces, which map to real RJ-45 ports, and you can hang network devices off these and get lots and lots of "real" network interfaces on your Linux router. It's all so simple, right? Nothing ever is, of course. The trials and tribulations I've had over the past two days have included:

• Not being able to talk to the switch via serial console (so I can configure the damned thing). Turns out the cable I had wasn't a null modem cable, and the switch needed one (the documentation was contradictory on this point, so we started off with the regular kind and a gender-bender -- which should have been my first clue). So Jaycar got ten more of the company's dollars for the proper cable. After that, all was well, and I could find out that...
• The console interface is horrendous on the switch I've got, at least for defining VLANs. I just enabled the (slightly less hideous) web interface, and used that instead. It still sucked, but it sucked less.
• Once everything was configured and the test rig all wired up, I spent about 20 minutes plugging cables into various ports on the switch and watching a distinct lack of packets flowing. It turns out that new VLAN trunks (the technical term for "a port that gets all VLANs, with tags still attached") on this switch get configured as "disabled". Yes, of course that's what I want -- it's overwhelmingly likely that I won't want to use that new trunk I just configured. Sheesh.
• The first NIC I used as the VLAN interface on the server (a Tulip-based home brand thing) didn't play nicely with the VLAN packets. As you'd expect, the extra bytes for the VLAN ID need to be a part of the packet -- and that size is normally limited to 1514 bytes (1500 bytes of payload plus a 14 byte Ethernet header). Adding the VLAN tags increases this by 4 bytes. Although some NICs comprehend the utility of supporting VLANs, and will handle these oversized 1518 byte frames, others don't. This NIC just didn't want to handle it. The symptoms were large pings just disappearing (they didn't show up in tcpdump on the destination interface). As I've had to track down MTU problems in the past, and it's always painful, I wasn't keen on introducing a known one right at the start, so this had to be rectified.
• The next NIC I tried (a Netgear FA311 -- uses the natsemi driver) had a fantastic failure mode. Packets arrived having had their VLAN tag stripped -- so the 8021q module didn't know it was a VLAN packet, and couldn't drop it into the appropriate vlanN interface. I know everything was otherwise alright, because ARP packets were tagged to the VLAN fine, but the ICMP packets that followed weren't tagged. Scratch that one off the list.
• The third NIC was an RTL8139D. The driver didn't even recognise this card, which confused the hell out of me. It turns out that this particular card (PCI ID 1904:8139) isn't a real RTL8139 (despite having RTL8139D and the RealTek crab printed on the chip) but is rather a dodgy knockoff (some might say "as opposed to the dodgy original?"). Why anyone would bother to knock-off the world's cheapest ethernet chipset, I have no idea -- if I were an electronics counterfeiter, I'd go after something expensive, like a 3Com card. Far more profit.
• The fourth NIC, a real RTL8139D, worked like a charm. I know it isn't exactly the most fantastic NIC on the market today, but I don't have any 3x59x or eepro cards around, so this'll have to do for now.

Thankfully, once all those dramas were done, the whole thing just kind of fell into place, and now I've got a machine which has up to 2048(ish) network interfaces (with huge, glaring caveats on that upper bound, of course). With a bit of luck, the live installation in a couple of days will go smoothly. You can stop sniggering now.

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1. In this case, there wasn't a lot of space to begin with, as it's a 1RU box I'm working on, and the 4-port NIC didn't want to place nice with me for some reason anyway.

Sven, when a prominent DD gets busy in his personal life, we don't say that his personal life is trying to kill Debian. Similarly, when a prominent DD gets hired somewhere and gets very busy and he doesn't have as much time for Debian, we don't say that the employer is trying to kill Debian. The same should be true when that employer is Canonical.