Search Results: "ema"

18 May 2006

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Four

Day trip. Six busses full of Debian developers, maintainers, and supporters toured the area around Oaxtepec today. We clambered over several Mexican pyramids and a ruined mountain-top city. Walking in the main entrance I immediately felt that it was very familiar. I identified the pool where they purified themselves before entering the complex, and several altars. Some of the things the archaelogists called "altars" looked more like bed platforms. I told the guide maybe they were both; ancient religions were known for their homosexual sex rites. Then we saw the palace of Cortes in the city of Morelos. It is a very swank city, fun to walk around and shop. We got back at 10pm, tired but satisfied. Bought a t-shirt that says "100% GUAPO". The Hispanic contingent at Debconf went wild. They may give me some photos to post soon. Lisp redux. Kevin Mark read my summary of Peter van Eyndes presentation yesterday, and sent in this email:
Hi Ted, you seem to be having fun at Debconf! Saw your post about a book by Peter Seibel. Strangely enough I attended a meeting at lispnyc with him this week. They shot video which hopefully you can see. Checkout http://www.lispnyc.org/home.clp cheers, Kev
Well, thanks Kev! At lunch yesterday, a fellow developer, whose name I forget, told me that OCAML is far superior to Haskell in terms of performance because it is "statically typed at compile time" or something. I thought that was a characteristic of Haskell as well. I mentioned the benchmarks that Haskell is currently winning, and he brushed this aside. Which may be appropriate; optimizing for benchmarks isn't the same as optimizing for the general case. Food. We had lunch yesterday at a restaurant. I hate zucchini, but their zuchini stuffed with quesa (cheese) was delicious. I haven't found birria (shredded goat meat) in the market here yet, but the restaurant had some. At the end of the meal a vendor came into the restaurant with some crisp, deep fried confection called "churros", coiled like a big hose. Its cross section looks like a five point star. For P10 the vendor broke off four pieces, 5 inches long. Knut shared his with me; it was like a donut, only crunchy. John Sokol. John Sokol, part of the original 386BSD team, arrived late Tuesday night. Carrying 80 pounds of luggage, he not only took the Metro, but he walked up the mile longer hill from the resort entrance to the conference. The Metro is nice, but it has a lot of stairs. I was tired after traversing it; I could not have walked up the hill if I tried afterward. He brought a VOIP phone with him, but it gives an error saying his account has been compromised. It is probably looking at his Mexican IP address and blocking it. So John and I have no way of phoning the outside world.

Jeff Bailey: Savage Love

Dan Savage writes in his column this week,


The American Taliban doesn't think married heterosexual couples should be able to use birth control. If you care about your own freedom - not just your right to have premarital sex, but your right to decide whether, when, and how many children you're going to have you need to read "The War On Contraception."


I have trouble imagining what people are thinking. A world where couples don't have sex? Can you imagine how much fighting there would be?

Okay, okay, so that's not the point. But with articles like Chicago economist links abortion to falling crime rates, it's incredibly distressing to see another attempt at taking away freedoms. While things like birth control and abortion are not in immediate risk here in Canada, it's hard to predict how long it would take for our our current Conservative leadership to start entertaining those thoughts.

I'm all for a principled discussion on sex and sexuality. But why don't people ever consider the concept that providing more tools to people is better than providing fewer?

Ted Walther: Why didn't King Solomon kill the two prostitutes?

On the long bus ride back from the Mexican pyramids, I got to think about a long standing problem. If Israel's laws forbade prostitution, why didn't Israel's greatest judge enforce those laws? We've all heard the story of King Solomon and the two harlot's, where he finds the real mother by threatening to chop the baby in two. Since the laws of Israel carried a death penalty for adultery, why didn't Solomon enforce it? People today equate prostitution with adultery, but the Bible does not. Not always. As the wisest man who ever lived, a walking embodiment of true justice, Solomons judgement deserves a deeper look. Here is the text of the whole incident:
1 Kings 3:16-28 Then came there two women, that were harlots, unto the king, and stood before him. And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house. And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also: and we were together; there was no stranger with us in the house, save we two in the house. And this woman's child died in the night; because she overlaid it. And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom. And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead: but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son, which I did bear. And the other woman said, Nay; but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son, and the living is my son. Thus they spake before the king. Then said the king, The one saith, This is my son that liveth, and thy son is the dead: and the other saith, Nay; but thy son is the dead, and my son is the living. And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king. And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other. Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it. Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof. And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king: for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him, to do judgment.
Whoredom, harlotry, prostitution; they defile the land. When Judah thought his daughter-in-law Tamar had become a harlot, he ordered her to be burnt. The problem was not with the sex for pay, but with violation of Judah's property rights. Tamar had been bought and paid for, and belonged to his family for the purpose of increasing their manpower. Biblically, sex for pay is fine. A ketubah (marriage contract) guarantees a woman a certain financial allowance in return for performing her sexual duties. The problem is that prostitution lowers the birthrate of the population, thus reducing its manpower, thus reducing its brainpower, thus reducing its ability to protect and defend itself. The connection between prostitution and lower birth rates isn't obvious to the layman, so just take it for granted right now.
Leviticus 18:20,28 Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour's wife, to defile thyself with her. That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you. Leviticus 19:29 Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness.
Prostitution can fall into two categories; the woman is still the property of her father, or she belongs to a husband. Widows, divorced, and single women fall into the category of belonging to their fathers; they have a right to return to the family home and be supported there. How would a father prostitute his daughter? If he treats her harshly, refuses to marry her off to a suitable husband, does not feed or clothe her, train her or discipline her, she may well turn to whoredom to support herself. Look closely at the story of the two harlots. They say they have no man. They fall into the category of single women. Sex with a single woman is not adultery. Adultery carries the death penalty, but as single women, their prostitution was to be regulated by different laws. If a girl took up the prostitution trade, and then got married under false pretenses, pretending to be a virgin, the penalty was death. However no death penalty is indicated for the circumstance where the woman and her family were up front about her past. A man taking a wife needs to be able to accurately assess the risks of disease and future infidelity.
Deuteronomy 22:13-21 If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: And the damsel's father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him; And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days. But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.
Suppose a single woman was to work as a whore. What is the penalty? For the girl, no penalty at all. If she is a virgin turning her first trick, the man has to pay a hefty fine of fifty shekels to her father, who has the choice of giving her in marriage or not.
Exodus 22:16,17 And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins. Deuteronomy 22:28,29 If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.
When she is no longer a virgin, her father either allows her to be a prostitute, violating the law at Leviticus 19:29, or he doesn't allow her. If her father allows her, then he becomes liable for her behavior and she is not punished, as described in Hosea 4:13,14 quoted below. If her father doesn't allow her, she is again subject to the death penalty, as set forth in the next set of verses:
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
In the case of Solomon's two harlots, there is no evidence at all that their father disciplined or otherwise acted to prevent them from their trade. Perhaps their father was dead, but in that case his responsibility to his daughters would have fallen on his next of kin. It really is a matter of family responsibility, not of persecuting individuals. There is one remaining corner case; what of the married woman who becomes a prostitute? What if the two harlots had been married after all? It is a principle of the Torah that it must be applied equally. You cannot hit one party with the full penalty then let another get off free for the same crime. It is better to err on the side of mercy, so if you do not convict one, you should not convict another. This is violated daily by un-Godly governments who selectively enforce their laws to "make examples" of people. Such selective enforcement is neither fair or just. In Solomon's case, assuming the women were married, the other parties to the crime of adultery were missing. Without them, there was no way to proceed. This is why Jesus was able to say "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." The two witnesses rule also comes into it; before a person can be put to death two witnesses to the crime are required. Solomon's two harlots had no witnesses against them. When people engage in false worship, and use the services of whores, God will not punish the women who turn to adultery and infidelity. He will punish those who are responsible; the men, who failed to take their patriarchal prerogative in setting a good example of just, fair, respectful, and temperate behavior.
Hosea 4:13,14 They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow thereof is good: therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom, and your spouses shall commit adultery. I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses when they commit adultery: for themselves are separated with whores, and they sacrifice with harlots: therefore the people that doth not understand shall fall.
If you have any Torah questions, feel free to write in to ted AT reactor-core DOT org.

Eric Warmenhoven: Cingular sucks.

Lisa has been thinking for a short while that she’d like to get a Motorola RAZR phone. We were AT&T Wireless customers, which now makes us a weird type of Cingular customer where we not only have our AT&T plan, but also special AT&T customer service representatives (which I’ll get to in a bit). So we went into our local Cingular store and she asked about getting the shiny new black RAZR, and they said that it wouldn’t be a problem, they’d just need to upgrade our service, and since we’re on the same plan and the service is changing, I’d need to upgrade my phone as well. AT&T Wireless has a email-to-SMS gateway and gives every phone its own email address, yournumber@mmode.com. Since AT&TWS only charges if you send a message but not if you receive a message, I use it all the time (mostly for stock quotes but also for various other things). So in an average month I probably receive 30-50 emails on my phone, as well as the occasional spam, all of them free. Cingular has the same service, yournumber@cingularme.com. But unlike AT&TWS, Cingular charges you both for sending and receiving messages. (”Text, Instant, and Multimedia messages are charged when sent or received, whether read or unread, solicited or unsolicited.”) So my 30-50 messages a month are going to cost me $3.00-$5.00 a month. Of course, I could always get a package, which will limit those 50 messages to just $3.00. Or I could get a $20 package that lets me receive 2500 messages. That’s not the point. The point is that once that limit is hit, it goes back to $0.10 per message, regardless of the plan. That means that some evil person can send you thousands of messages and you could end up owing hundreds of dollars. The only way to prevent that is to call Cingular and turn off the E-Mail Messaging feature from your service. (You can use the Message Center to “Create block and allow lists to limit e-mail messages received” and “Control what times of day your phone can receive e-mail messages.” Also it looks like you can block email containing some spam attributes. But none of those things guarantee that you’re not going to get a bunch of junk.) I tried calling Cingular to confirm this, and when I entered my phone number, it redirected me to AT&TWS customer service, who confirmed that AT&TWS does not charge for receiving text messages, and confirmed that Cingular does charge for receiving messages, but did not have an answer for how Cingular deals with spam. In fact, they didn’t seem to have a lot of information about the Cingular service at all, other than how to “upgrade” my account to a Cingular account. I had to call Cingular sales, who also didn’t know the answer to how to prevent abuse; but they were able to transfer me to Cingular customer service, who confirmed that yes, I really do have the potential to get screwed if I don’t turn off E-Mail Messaging.

17 May 2006

Bernhard R. Link: When things suddenly go very fast

or in other words: 
     grep -s -q 'dn\.regexp' /etc/ldap/slapd.conf && cat <<EOF
     Ha ha, sucker! Ever asked yourself why your ldap database is so fsck'ing
     slow despite all the caches and indices you added?
     EOF

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Three, Part II

X Window security. Wandered outside the hack lab to sip a drink and cool down. There I saw Keith Packard and Bdale Garbee. Quickly introduced myself to them both, then asked Keith what his take was on the recent OpenBSD complaints that X11 is insecure by design [1] [2]. Keith said he wasn't going to respond to those complaints, because DRI/DRM already provides what Theo de Raadt says he wants in the way of kernel control over dma and register access on video cards. Many X11 video drivers are not yet converted over to doing things the DRI/DRM way, and so Theo is correct that X11 has huge security holes. But they are not permanent; the future is already arriving. Although DRI/DRM is positioned as a 3d technology, it is intended that even 2d drivers in the future will conform themselves to its API. Keith also said that OpenBSD's representative on the X11 team is easy to work with and cooperates well with the team, so there is hope that if OpenBSD turns its attention to X11 support, everyone will soon benefit from the comprehensive security audit. Although the DRI/DRM design solves the security problems, it is a bitch to implement. Mode switching alone is so finicky and is so tied into both the video hardware and x11 server optimizations, that it has never successfully been implemented in the kernel. Keith said he supported the idea of isolating the mode switching code out into a small, privilege separated userland utility. There were many other things said, which sounded positive, but without the aid of a tape recorder, I can't remember them. Putting packages out of main. Learnt a trick today, courtesy of Phil Hands and Ralph Amissah. If you want to upload a package into a part of the distribution other than main, you alter the Section: field of the debian/control file in your package. Suppose your package fits into the text section, because you use it to process text. Maybe you reimplemented awk. If you put Section: text the package will go into the text portion of the main repository. If your version of awk depends on a library that is in the non-free section, you would put it in the contrib section. So you would put this in your debian/control file: Section: contrib/text and Bob's your uncle. Politics. I find myself doing vastly more politics at this conference than coding, although I am getting some of that done too. When people are deep inside their own worlds, it takes a lot of work to bridge between the worlds. So far it seems like time well invested. Embedded. If anyone needs any embedded work done, Wookey is your guy. Send him an email with a proposal.
  1. 2006-05-11 22:00:04 Re: security bug in x86 hardware (thanks to X WIndows)
  2. 2006-05-13 20:07:35 Re: security bug in x86 hardware (thanks to X WIndows)

16 May 2006

Christian Perrier: Debconf 6 - day 2

Back to a normal schedule now and, thus, woke up at 06:00..:). Quiet hacking near the pool, with a few mosquitos so that I don't feel alone. We had a nice breakfast at the Tower (too lazy to go in the village and have some more barbecue food). Watching Lior discover that he actually ordered a giant piece of meat was kinda funny (less funny for Lior, though). After hacking in the hacklab, I'll have to gather people for the 1st i18n infrastructure session. I hope I'll find everybody...we'll see. I quickly attended Mark Shuttleworth Ubuntu report. I'm quiet balanced about it as it is still giving good promises....but the real achievements aren't coming. Rosetta which is a promising framework, even though it still has IMHO many design flaws or missing features, will not be free. So that seems to definitely rule it out from our i18n infrastructure project. Talking about it, I escaped from Mark's talk and ran into the hacklab to handle what was supposed to be an informal session about i18n infrastructure, which I did set up very quickly (and badly, with many schedule changes). It finally turned out to be an interesting brainstorming with about 30 people attending and many interesting exchanges about what we would like to see in future i18n infrastructure. Thanks to all people who participated, it was a real pleasure to animate that one. After lunch, I've been quietly attending Manoj's workshop about SELinux. It flies way over my head but it is always interesting to hear about these security things. I also took the opportunity to a very good discussion to setup plans for the i18n meeting in Extremadura with Dario Rapisardi and Cesar Gomez Martin.

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Three

Laundry day. New roommate Thaddeus Black is really on the ball; today is the first laundry day we've had at the conference, and he was prepared for it, and reminded the rest of us when we woke up. I think I'll wait until the Thursday laundry day. To get your laundry done here, you put it in a plastic bag, and mark it somehow. Then the bags go into a pile, and some company hired by the hotel comes and washes them, and returns the bags of clean clothes to you the same or next day. You can even choose between regular drying and sun drying the clothes. Debian. Yesterday someone filed a bug against my expect package; today Alec Berryman sent in a patch that fixed it. Thank you Alec! The fixed package is now uploaded and should be available to everyone tomorrow. Food. Ville Vuorela brought a big bag of candies from Finland for Simon Richter, who shared them with the table here in the hack lab. They were salty and sweet, with mild licorice flavor. They were quite good. My friend Jesus Monroy, a food columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area, had a few comments on my food adventures yesterday, which I will quote here:
Pancita is Spanish for stomach. Most likely you had a type of menudo, or soup dish. This is a very common and popular dish. Usually used for hangovers. Check the chicken vendor's spices when you can. With some hope he did not use MSG. MSG, as you may know, can be toxic in large amounts. It's not unheard of in Mexico, but they don't know that MSG can be toxic. My mother has refused to eat at some friends houses because they use so much the chicken tastes extremely over-salted. MSG toxic effects are lathargy, nausea, headaches, all the way to death (very extreme). Then again too much salt, or just water, can be toxic. As for the church, they have not changed much in 500+ years in Mexico. Most likely what you saw was what was built.
Conference. Today I attended the one presentation that motivated me to attend Debconf; Peter van Eyndes Common Lisp presentation. Common Lisp, of course, is the best programming language ever, in terms of developer time. Haskell is similar, but is designed more for machines to run fast, than for developers to develop fast. The LISP community has almost universally switched to using darcs for their revision control system, which is not only the easiest to use I have ever found, but is also written in Haskell. Nine people attended Peters presentation. He showed us how to drive the Lisp compiler from inside emacs using slime, with its advanced auto-completion features. He demonstrated the common lisp controller which has advanced dramatically in the past five years. It is now simple and intuitive to load libraries into your Lisp program. He showed us how to package lisp libraries using asdf, which has long been an opaque mystery to me. Luca Capello fom Switzeland, the maintainer of the stumpwm window manager was present, and he promised to demonstrate stumpwm later tonight. stumpwm is not yet as advanced as ratpoison, but it could become far more advanced and whiz-bang than ratpoison could ever be. It has potential. I also met Erick Lopez of Mexico, who wants to package cl-wiki, but is looking for a sponsor. As a Lisp developer, he will be an asset to Debian. After the presentation Peter opened the floor, and every question I'd had about Lisp for the past few years was answered very satisfactorily. At the end, Peter showed us a book called Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel, which he praised highly for those who want to use Lisp for "real" things. Such as a streaming MP3 server. I'm sold! But if you are poor (povre), you can read it for free at Gigamonkeys.

Ross Burton: Contact Lookup Applet 0.14

Contact Lookup Applet 0.14 is released, especially done for sebuild. Translators: Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Clytie Siddall (vi), Daniel Nylander (sv), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Frank Arnold (de), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), I aki Larra aga Murgoitio (eu), Jean-Michel Ardantz (fr), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Marcel Telka (sk), Maria Soler (ca), Maxim Dziumanenko (uk), Micha Kastelik (pl), Miloslav Trmac (cs), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), Yavor Doganov (bg), ygimantas Beru ka (lt). You can grab it from the usual place. Debian packages heading towards Sid once I update my pbuilder...

MJ Ray: The "Trademark Free Content Give-away Not Open Wikipedia DFSG Unintended Consequences Comic" Update

I've collected rather too much material for blogging, so over the next few days, I'll be publishing lots of links. I start today, the day of an SPI board meeting on irc.oftc.net #spi, with the trademark and copyright link list. [continues with links on my site]

Wouter Verhelst: On huge ISPs and multi-level support requests.

Adam They just told you how to get past their front lines: Call their business support on the toll-free phone number she gave you. Here's my take at what happened: Really. Call them. You'll find that you will be talking to someone knowledgeable about what SMTP is, and who is able to put a request with SMTP administrators to fix this issue if that is required. Take it from someone who used to work at one of Belgium's largest ISP's (at least, it was that when I used to work there—they've lost some market share since).

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Two

Photography. My roommate Aigars is quite a photographer, he came with his digital SLR and several lenses, an item I've lusted after for some time. Large apertures and manual controls are what every real photographer demands, and digital SLR's deliver. I told him my idea for a small sky recording station so that people could make movies of the paths that the stars take, and how it changes over the year. Ultimately I want a network of these stations, all uploading their pictures so I can examine them for anamolies. This is a hard problem, because stars are so faint. Aigars said to take a picture of the whole sky, a 1000 millimeter lense and a $50 computer scanner with some modifications should be able to do the job.

Me and Andreas Schuldei
Programming. Finally made progress in programming, now that I know where everything is in Oaxtepec. My IRC bot didn't handle things gracefully when the server refused to let it log in, but that is fixed now. Tomorrow I hope to add multi-channel support. Reading through the new IRC RFC, I have the information I need to make a proper configuration file for the software. The design is sketched out and feels right, finally. Weekend vs. Weekday. Oaxtepec is much quieter today. Saturday and Sunday there were far more vendors on the street, and they stayed open much later. Today everything closed down around 6pm when the church bell tolled the summons to mass. I couldn't find the coconut man; maybe he only comes on weekends. Half the stalls at the mercado were empty. During the weekend, the resort was full of vacationers swimming, barbecuing, picnicing, playing soccer, or just sunbathing while the kids ran around. Everyone, young and old, but mostly young adult men and women, were running around in bathing trunks and bikinis. The happy noises were great to wake up to. This morning the sounds were quieter, but still present. The swimming pools here get a lot of use. During the weekend, there was a large tent where some ladies were giving body massages for $10. I didn't see them today. Probably they will be here again next weekend. Food. Tried a dish called "pancita" today. I saw people eating noodles and assumed pancita was a noodle dish, like the Filipino pancit. But no. It is a type of tomato soup filled with chopped up beef rind and chunks of fat. For only P31, I bought a small chicken. It was perfectly marinated and roasted, better than Kentucky Fried Chicken. I paid the money, and the shopkeeper brought out a pair of scissors and cut the chicken into all the appropriate pieces for easy eating, just like they do in Korea (viz the use of scissors) Church. Attended mass tonight, since the church was so close. The church is magnificent. It really is a cathedral inside; to see the ceiling you have to crane your neck. And when you do, you see paintings of angels playing instruments. I went into the nave to pray, and saw a giant depiction of the ark of the covenant. It was very realistic, with the cherubim covering it with their wings. And above it, was a painting of the wine and bread offering, which were offered on the altar daily. The priest was a black man from Illinois; after a bit of attempting to speak to each other in Spanish, we realized we both spoke English, and got on famously from then on. The cathedral opens at 10am, closes for lunch from 2pm-4pm, and then is open until mass is finished. This must be what the church was like in the beginning; a place where believers could drop in any time to be with others of their kind, to meet, eat, drink, discuss, and elevate each other to a higher plane. I am sad that we don't have this in Canada. Debian. There were some Debian talks and presentations, but nothing too interesting. Finally met Mark Shuttleworth, Anthony Towns, Manoj Srivastava, and Roblimo Miller. Clifford Beshers of Linspire almost convinced me to look into the Haskell computer language. I couldn't quite tell what Haskell has that LISP doesn't, apart from forcing strong types on you and being very fast and efficient in benchmarks tests. Marga didn't give me meal tickets before, so Graham printed some up for me today. By pure serendipity, I sat at dinner with the only other Canadian developers at the conference; Simon Law and Eric Dorland from Montreal. The drinking started at 11pm and is still going strong; the atmosphere is very convivial right now, but half of us are still tapping away at our keyboards.

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf6 day 2: Java is non-free, at last!

The first session in the morning that I attended was the BOF about Python. After an introduction to the current state by the Python maintainer (Matthias Klose) and a few other people we run overtime and the BOF was extended into another time slot. Also the session was plagued by the room switch hanging which affected both the network and the recording. It really looks that that strange situation with a bunch of python-foo, python2.3-foo and python2.4-foo packages will be fixed. Later in the day guys from Intel gave a talk about some kind of data mining stuff they were doing with hardware database from Ubuntu. The tool was called Toppler (from Dilbert) and basically was a hardware database. They pondered about possibilities of getting some useful information from the huge pool of data, but the examples that they showed were just lame. For example they showed how you can get a list of 1234 reports relating to this wireless card, but that is not what I want to know - I want to know if it works and if it does not work, what can I do to fix it. The showed an example of an OEM entering his computers hardware configuration to see what distro works on that hardware - that is completely useless: as an OEM I at that point would already have chosen a distro and what I really would like to know is what will and what will not work from my hardware configuration in that distro, why it will not work and how to fix that. That would be approaching useful status - so far they only have a SQL DB with a simplistic web fronted. At the same time to give out that kind of information you would need much more datapoints to make a correlation - datapoints most of which can not be tested automatically and require user interaction on submitting. On the other hand the more user interaction they need, the less users will want to submit that data. They already have at least 10 times too many questions (there were 30 + options) if they really want this to be something that users will want to contribute to. Also there is no real direct motivation for users to contribute to that database - maybe OEM's have that kind of motivation, but they must decide to use Linux first. In short I only saw mountains of social and technical problems with this project and really little in terms of benefit. That's what you get when you have too much money to burn. After that there was a "yearly" Ubuntu report from Mark Shuttleworth. Most of what Mark said was already widely known if you followed Ubuntu's development a bit. Dapper will release on 1st of June and will be supported for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the servers. Edgy Eft will be a developer driven highly experimental release that will be done in 4 months and its planning will be done in Ubuntu conference in Paris (18th-23rd June). In Dapper KDE is given equal weight to Gnome and in Edgy the same will be done to XFCE. There is a graphical installer - Ubiquity and a graphical upgrader that works around strange things that APT has not been designed to handle. Mark can only guess what will be in Edgy as developers will decide this one, but most probably Xen and XGL will be integrated, startup will be reworked by adding paralel init scripts with dependencies and maybe even APT will be replaced by some kind of SMART tool. I have not heard anything about it before and Mark also gave no further detail. but in any case Edgy promises to be "the Ubuntu equivalent of a release of Debian experimental". Way to go not to stick into the enterprise stability. I am really looking forward to that. Another announcement came from Sun - thanks to hard work of many people the license of Sun Java was changed to allow it to be included in Debian non-free repository. FHS and Debian Policy compilant packages have been produced and are uploaded to Debian sid non-free. Congrats to all involved! Now we only to move it to main somehow. Unfortunately I missed two BOF that I wanted to see due to scheduling changes that I did not follow at the time: i18n BOF and Debian representation BOF. I have been doing quite a bit of both during last years, so I wanted to be there, but missed it. Doh. In the afternoon I was twice recruited by the organizers to do the group photo. Last year there was a huge collection of dSLR's around Debconf5, but this year either the dSLR owners did not come or did not want to lug their cameras across half the globe, so I with my Canon 350D and a few (cheap) lenses have become the de-fact photographer of the Debconf6. It was only natural that the group photo also had to be taken by the best camera around. I, naturally, am very honored by the opportunity even if that would mean that I myself am not on the group photo. I could just gimp myself into the corner of it after the fact :) In any case the place to take the picture had to be found. The amphitheater where the Debconf5 group photo was taken was a perfect place, but lacking that a trick all the way back from Debconf3 could be employed - standing at a high place and take the picture at a sharp angle down. The best place for this that I found around here is the 10m diving tower - there is a platform aprx. 8 meters from the ground where one can clearly see to the back area of the tower where a large grass area is located. I still need to confirm whether I can take the group photo from there with my best lens (Canon 50mm f/1.8 II) and what amount of light will we have on time point when we have the ability to actually take the picture (18:00). There will still be a bit of a chance with the weather, so an alternate group photo time should also be planned. There will be an announcement mail that will probably go public before this email will. Oh and later in the evening I found a guy (sorry, names escape me is seconds) who has a Canon 17-40mm f/4 L lens which I will borrow from him for the group photo. That will make the photo a lot sharper and make us much more flexible to the group size which is very helpful. Just before the dinner I want to see the saunas that i was told long ago. Basically it was a headed room 3x1 meter with a temperature control outside that was set to 0. Nobody uses the sauna here and that is no wonder - the whole place is like a large sauna. In the same club (just above the restaurant where we have all the meals now) there was a ping-pong table, two pool tables and a gym. In the gym I found a Mexican Gentoo spy who's mom was born in Riga, Latvia. The world is truly small. After the dinner I sent out the group photo announcement email and then took a look at the Joey Hess's BOF about debian-installer. I snook into the talk to take a few photos and watched the rest via the webcast. Unfortunately all the people spoke very quietly there, so it was hard to distinguish their voices from the background noise. Please, do not do that! Speak up, people! The tango practice took place between hacklabs tonight. Looked fun, but I would rather take a lot of pictures of it :) On a final note I witnessed a Mao game in Spanish. That was only a bit more disturbing then the same game in English. Even while I do not speak any Spanish. P.S. If you really like what I do with photos in this blog, it would be very nice if you would sponsor me a Pro account at Flickr. Otherwise my monthly traffic limit there (20 Mb) is nearly up with only select photos of two days of Debconf uploaded. I have now almost 2 Gb of photos stored on my laptop and the conference is only starting.

14 May 2006

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Comcast: Human or Automaton?

I’m not the first person with a story about the sad state of Comcast. Since I’m certain I’m never actually going to get a True Human to read my email at Comcast, I’ll just post my brief exchange regarding Comcast’s SMTP servers here. Maybe some future archaeologist of the Internet will point to this exchange as early evidence of the End of Email: I posted the following to Comcast’s website feedback form — apparently there is no publicly advertised email address for communicating with Comcast:
Please forward this email to an engineer responsible for Comcast’s SMTP service. I run an ISP. Email to @comcast.net addresses often bounces with a “556 null byte in data” rejection connecting to gateway-s.comcast. I use postfix from Debian Sarge. This is not a problem on my end. There are numerous reports of this problem in newsgroups (just google ‘556 null byte in data’ ‘comcast’). The problem is independent of mail user agent and ISP. Note that this is *not* an issue of my users attempting to connect to the Comcast SMTP server themselves—I understand there is some issue where Comcast only accepts SMTP/SSL/TLS now for its users. This is a *delivery* problem. I have seen some speculation that Comcast’s SMTP servers are rejecting email with this error because of either large attachments or attachments with long filenames. I have seen the problem occur where the attachments are very small (on the order of 10K), but I haven’t ruled out the latter explanation. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to fix this problem. My users would like to be able to email Comcast customers.
Comcast’s response:
Dear Adam KESSEL, Thank you for taking the time to write us. Comcast is aggressive about protecting its’ subscribers from unwanted and unauthorized emails. In keeping with industry standards and best practices some recent changes to our filters have been made.If you are attempting to send emails to legitimate recipients in the Comcast.net domain, and receive an error message there are 3 likely reasons: 1. Your mail server has been identified as a source of Spam. Our mail filters have been updated to reject all mail from your server until the administrator of your mail server contacts us to request the server be removed. 2. The source of your message has a dynamic email address. Anyone attempting to email into the Comcast domain directly from a Dynamic IP address will receive the following error message: Comcast does not support the direct connection to its mail servers from residential IPs. Your mail should be sent to comcast.net users through your ISP. Please contact your ISP or mail administrator for more information. 3. Your mail server has an invalid rDNS value. What this means is that our mail filters authenticate each message by checking the rDNS value to ensure its’ a legitimate domain and yours wasnot. The error or “bounce” message you receive will indicate which reason the message was rejected. Youwill either be given the address to request Blacklist removal or you will be directed to our rDNS FAQpage. If a domain administrator feels that their IP range has been blocked in error or they would like information on required steps to be removed from our black list, they can contact us at: blacklist_comcastnet@cable.comcast.com If you need assistance setting up email through your ISP?s mail servers please visit their support pages or contact their support group. If you need information on the rDNS block, please visit: http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=Email118405 Thank you for the opportunity to assist you. If you need further assistance with any of your Comcast services please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you again for choosing Comcast we appreciate your business. To visit our local support page including links to contact us via Live Chat, as well as many downloadable forms,and FAQ pages, please visit: http://www.comcast.com/nesupport/ Did you know that Comcast offers its customers a variety of free benefits? These include McAfee Antivirus, Firewall and Privacy software as well the Comcast tool bar that lets you take Comcast.net with you while you surf, and the Desktop Doctor to help you restore lost settings…plus much more, please visit http://www.comcast.net/downloads/ to see all of the extras that we provide. Sincerely,
Irene Comcast Electronic Customer Care - New England You can email us anytime by replying to this email or by clicking the “Contact Comcast” link found on the bottom of all www.Comcast.net and www.Comcast.com webpages. Our Electronic Customer Support teams are available to assist you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. **************************************************
The response contained in this message is intended for the addressee only and may vary from other ponses depending on geography, promotional campaigns or other factors. If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of the information contained in this message is prohibited.
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The last bit about “unauthorized use” is a nice touch. My follow-up:
The 556 null byte SMTP error is *not* a spam or blocking related rejection. My mail server is (1) not a source of spam (2) does not have a dynamic IP address (I assume below whenyou wrote “dynamic email address” you meant “dynamic IP address”); it is not a residential IP but rather a commercial ISP that I run; and (3) the mail server has a valid reverse DNS lookup. To clarify: not every email is being rejected from the ISP’s IP address. In fact, the same sender can send from my ISP multiple times to a Comcast subscriber, and most messages will get through. There appears to be a bug in your SMTP delivery server whereby certain triggering events cause a 556 null byte error. There is at least some evidence that one such triggering event is an email with an attachment with a long filename. This is not a spam filter issue. This is a Comcast SMTP configuration issue. As you will see if you google “‘556 null byte in data’ comcast” this is awidespread problem that is entirely unrelated to Comcast’s zealous efforts to block unsolicited email. Please forward my email to an engineer or technician. Thanks,
Adam
Finally, Comcast’s witty retort:
Dear Adam Rosi-Kessel, Thank you for taking the time to write us. Commercial Email Accounts We have to apologize, but at this time you must contact our Commercial Business support team by calling one of the following toll free numbers 888-824-8105 or 888-824-8155, 1-888-737-8361 Thank you for the opportunity to assist you. If you need further assistance with any of your Comcastservices please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you again for choosingComcast we appreciate your business. To visit our local support page including links to contact us via Live Chat, as well as many downloadable forms,and FAQ pages, please visit: http://www.comcast.com/nesupport/ Did you know that Comcast offers its customers a variety of free benefits? These include McAfee Antivirus, Firewall and Privacy software as well the Comcast tool bar that lets you take Comcast.net with you while you surf, and the Desktop Doctor to help you restore lost settings…plus much more, please visit http://www.comcast.net/downloads/ to see all of the extras that we provide. Sincerely,
Ivonne Comcast Electronic Customer Care - New England You can email us anytime by replying to this email or by clicking the “Contact Comcast” link found onthe bottom of all www.Comcast.net and www.Comcast.com webpages. Our Electronic Customer Support teams are available to assist you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. **************************************************
The response contained in this message is intended for the addressee only and may vary from other responses depending on geography, promotional campaigns or other factors. If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of the information contained in this message is prohibited.
**************************************************
If anyone has interesting ideas about how to get past Comcast’s front lines, I would like to know.

Julien Blache: Data recovery, or why I love XFS

So, here it is, the hard drive in my mother’s laptop (HP nx9105, 10 months old) just broke down this week, with some important data on it (I do have backups, but it broke down in between 2 backups with some important changes to the data - accounting and payroll). The laptop was running an AMD64 Sarge on an XFS filesystem. Fortunately, XFS shuts the filesystem down when the underlying block device fails, so the damages are quite limited. dd_rescue to the rescue, only 40 kB of the 40 GB partition couldn’t be recovered. An xfs_repair run later, the FS mounts with only 30 files in lost+found: 10 of them are device nodes, 10 are empty files, another 5 are sockets and the remaining 5 are mails from anacron. I just love this filesystem. SGI, you guys rock. All of this just went as planned when I installed the machine in July last year; I chose XFS for its ability to not screw up the FS when the underlying block device crashes and for the powerful and reliable set of maintenance tools that goes with it.

Gustavo Noronha Silva: 13 May 2006

So, I just finished the first "working draft" of the TurboGears 0.9 packaging. I've uploaded a tarball with all the source and binary packages involved. They should work on unstable; please send comments and error reports to my email (look at the maintainer of the turbogears package). The packaging for TurboGears 0.8.9 is also available, and in need of comments and testing. I'm hoping to be able to upload turbogears 0.8.9 and the modules I packaged to unstable this week, and TG 0.9 to experimental. You can see many of the packages are already available in the python-modules team subversion repository.

13 May 2006

Wouter Verhelst: Joining Debconf by remote

For those of you who don't read my blog through Planet Debian: at this very moment, people are gathering in Oaxtepec, Mexico, for DebConf6, the yearly Debian conference. While I joined it last year (when it was in Helsinki, Finland), for various reasons I was under the impression that I wouldn't be able to join this year (eventually it turned out that I would have been able to, but when I found that out it was too late to go ahead and organize things). This year they'll be doing something new for the first time: live Internet streaming of the talks that will be held. While it doesn't even remotely compare to actually being there—the talks are only part of the Debconf experience; far more important, at least IMHO, is the ability to meet people whom you otherwise only know as their IRC nick or email From: header— the ability to follow the talks as they are happening is something very nice indeed, and I'm sure going to try to attend some of them. However, there's one thing. Since Oaxtepec is in the -0500 timezone while I live in +0200, that means some of the talks will be very, very late at night. Since they'll undoubtedly all end up at the Meetings archive afterwards (and probably in much better quality at that), I don't really see any added value in following it live—unless I can actually join in while having a look at the live stream. So, I guess this is a question: is the network in Oaxtepec good enough to allow for IRC sessions in the rooms where the talks will be held? And if so, is there going to be a way for me to ask questions or provide feedback or anything through IRC? Because that would make it worthwile to stay up at night for me...

Andrew Pollock: [life] Dinner with The Reg

A while ago, I read an article on The Register, written by a journo based in Mountain View of all places, which had a tagline at the bottom that said to email him if you wanted to "drink like a vulture" on some sort of corporate drinkies or something. Being in Mountain View and all, I could hardly resist. Said journalist actually emailed me back, after Googling me, and it turned out he was half Australian himself, so what better excuse to catch up for dinner? Tonight we had dinner with Ashlee Vance and his wife Melinda, at the Cantankerous Fish in downtown Mountain View, and had a really great time. It's cool when you meet the sort of people you can just chat with for hours and get along with, and they're complete strangers you've never met before. It was a good night out.

Ben Hutchings

Today we got access to all the audio equipment and the remaining cables we needed in our main venue, the Parliamentary Tower. We've worked out locations of the various equipment (projectors, screens, speakers, microphones, camera, computers) and wired them all together. We were unable to get a sight-line for a wireless link from the tower to the rest of our network, but the centre finally agreed to let us use their house network for this purpose. We have to go through a 10 Mbps hub, but it should be sufficient. Finally this evening we were able to test streaming video and audio from the camera and mixer in the tower down to the rest of the network. The tower is now closed, but we will test from the hacklab to the outside world tonight. Fingers crossed, Debian Day should go live to the world tomorrow!

12 May 2006

Barry Hawkins: Debian Women s youngest recruit

Caslin in her Debian onesie This is my daughter, Caslin. We finally managed to get a picture of her in her Debian onesie before it has spit-up on it. This’ll be a great photo to hold on to in case she grows up and works for Microsoft or something equally ironic. Saturday I am scheduled to leave for DebConf, to be gone for 10 days. This will be the first time I have travelled away from home since she was born. At only 4.5 months, lots can happen in 10 days. That just hit me in the last couple of days. This reminds me once more why I took measures to change my work situation to all but eliminate travel. I look forward to meeting so many of those whom I only know via email, IRC, and DebConf5 videos.

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