(almost caught up on the blogging backlog) We had five days off over the Christmas period, from Christmas Eve on the Friday through to what we call Boxing Day (America doesn't do it, but Google gave us the day off). We spent the time in Las Vegas with our friends Craig and Sarah and their daughter Kes, in their "fifth wheel" trailer, as we had previously in Glamis. The drive was good. We stuffed around getting away on Friday, so didn't leave Mountain View until around 10am, so Craig and Sarah beat us there, when we were expecting to beat them (they couldn't leave until the end of business on Friday). It took us something like 9 hours to drive there. I think the thing I love the most about California is the diversity you get. We've seen snow, forests, beaches, desert. All without having to leave the state. One of the highlights of the trip was going through Bakersfield, which had heaps of oilwells all over the place. We also drove past one of the commercial aeroplane dumping grounds in the Mojave desert. Vegas itself was something to behold. It had a reality distortion field around it that made Google's pale into insignificance. The strip was great to walk up and down to just take in the architectural wonders that are the casinos on it. The adult industry is incredibly in your face. People are on the sidewalk handing out "calling cards" for what I thought were hookers, but I'm told are technically strippers, with catchlines such as "nude to your door in 15 minutes". What would normally dispense newspapers in any other city gave out free catalogues of what the adult industry had to offer. I thought all of that was a bit seedy. The casinos themselves where all much of a muchness inside. Far too smokey for my liking. I'm not a big gambler. I think blackjack is about the only game I can wrap my head around, and even then you can lose too much money too quickly on the tables, so I mainly played video blackjack with 25 cent bets. It's not a bad way to blow five bucks. The second hand smoke was a great deterrent against staying inside for too long. We caught Zumanity at New York New York, and had a humungous buffet lunch for Christmas Day at Mirage. We were staying in the trailer park attached to Circus Circus. It's pretty cool that there's a trailer park right on the strip. The one thing that I hadn't associated with Las Vegas was the shopping. Every one of the casinos on the strip had a massive shopping mall associated with it, and I mean massive. Paris' in particular took forever to escape from. The Forum Shops in Caesars Palace also felt like they went on forever. I initially thought how they painted the sky with clouds on the ceiling was quite clever, until I discovered that every mall did the same thing. Then it got a bit old. You could go to Vegas just for the shopping and the day spas, and never have to set foot in a casino gaming room. I'd like to make one more trip, and this time stay in a hotel, just for the hotel experience. I think Venice was my favourite looking casino (from the outside). Photos from the trip are here.

For the nearly last 3 years, I was investing all of my spare time into maintaining packages in Debian. I tried to do it as good as I can. However, since about half a year, I got constantly flamed purely for the fact of having about 150 packages in the archive. I never have expected to get any positive feedback or even something like a thank, we all are doing our Debian work on a volunteer basis, because we are able to do it and especially because we want to do it. I can even life with it, when people like to only point to the single two not good things I ever did, reducing me to them to make me look bad, and I also accept that some people are not able to forgive as I do, to forgive when others are making uniquely (unimportant) failures. Today, I decided that I do not longer have the energy to resist those people and to give up that struggle now. In the next few days, I am changing my commitment to Debian by orphaning about the half of my packages. I hope that at least those people who are constantly against me no matter what I do, are confident know: You are the winners and I have failed. Fortunately, I am completely unimportant for Debian and thus easy replaceable by any random other human beeing. I am looking forward to see better times now, having more time for Debian Live, where the fun is, and where the people all are friendly and respectful towards each other.

Probably one of my favorite things about the Internet (and high speed connections) is Internet Radio. My favorite stations are: Space Station, Secret Agent and Tag’s Trance Trip on soma fm out of SF, John in the (weekday) morning on kexp out of Seattle and the The Terrordome and
Asiko Africa Phantom Pyramid hosted by the simply amazing (really, check out his shows) Minister Faust out of Edmonton. But thanks to witless senators, all this awesomeness is under threat (and most of your probably already know). So support the effort to stop the shenanigans and let’s keep Internet Radio alive… And if you know of any other awesome radio shows or music, please do pass along. I am looking for a good salsa station, classical music and more dance music.

niq commented:

"FWIW, in the real westcountry (West Devon, near the cornish border) we've missed the storms. A bit of wind in the morning, and some drizzle, but nothing substantial."

Yes, seeing what happened further north - roofs ripped up in Manchester - and east - house collapse in King's Lynn (pic 9) - then it seems we got off lightly this time. I hear that Germany declared it a hurricane, but I haven't confirmed that online. Euronews coverage. As far as I can see, there's snapped aerials and all the windows look like someone has sneezed over them, but damage mostly stopped after the fences were ripped to bits. I heard that the sea overtopped the wall in Weston, but I can't find pictures. I'll see myself what town is like later today. Update: niq, you didn't get an email notice because your mailserver is cocked-up:

"550 Error: 23Your subject line looks like spam"

Damnit, it's your phrase in the subject line!

There's a storm outside, and people are securing everything they hold dear. This being Munich, and specifically a part of Munich that got parking meters just a week ago, the most valued possesion is parking space. At least that is the best explanation I can give.

Today I have released a significant new version of my mail server benchmark Postal! The list of changes is below:

• Added new program bhm to listen on port 25 and send mail to /dev/null. This allows testing mail relay systems.
• Fixed a minor bug in reporting when compiled without SSL.
• Made postal write the date header in correct RFC2822 format.
• Removed the name-expansion feature, it confused many people and is not needed now that desktop machines typically have 1G of RAM. Now postal and rabid can have the same user-list file.
• Moved postal-list into the bin directory.
• Changed the thread stack size to 32K (used to be the default of 10M) to save virtual memory size (not that this makes much difference to anything other than the maximum number of threads on i386).
• Added a minimum message size option to Postal (now you can use fixed sizes).
• Added a Postal option to specify a list of sender addresses separately to the list of recipient addresses.
• Removed some unnecessary error messages.
• Handle EINTR to allow ^Z and "bg" from the command line. I probably don't handle all cases, but now that I agree that failure to handle ^Z is an error I expect bug reports.
• Made the test programs display output on the minute, previously they displayed once per minute (EG 11:10:35) while now it will be 11:10:00. This also means that the first minute reported will have something less than 60 seconds of data - this does not matter as a mail server takes longer than that to get up to speed.
• Added support for GNUTLS and made the Debian package build with it. Note that BHM doesn't yet work correctly with TLS.
• Made the programs exit cleanly.

Thanks to Inumbers for sponsoring the development of Postal.

I presented a paper on mail server performance at OSDC 2006 that was based on the now-released version of Postal.

I've been replying to a number of email messages in my Postal backlog, some dating back to 2001. Some of the people had changed email address during that time so I'll answer their questions in my blog instead.

/usr/include/openssl/kssl.h:72:18: krb5.h: No such file or directory
In file included from /usr/include/openssl/ssl.h:179

One problem reported by a couple of people is having the above error when compiling on an older Red Hat release (RHL or RHEL3). Running ./configure --disable-ssl should work-around that problem (at the cost
of losing SSL support). As RHEL3 is still in support I plan to fix this bug eventually.

There was a question about how to get detailed information on what Postal does. All three programs support the options -z and -Z to log details of what they do. This isn't convenient if you only want a small portion of the data but can be used to obtain any information you desire.

One user reported that options such as -p5 were not accepted. Apparently their system had a broken implementation of the getopt(3) library call used to parse command-line parameters.

One of the student groups I’m involved in at MIT is the SIPB, the Student Information Processing Board. It’s a volunteer computer group so old that they called it “information processing” back then. They run a bunch of different servers and provide lots of cool services for the MIT community. One of the things that they do is teach classes about various things related to computing during IAP, MIT’s Independent Activities Period. So back when I had just gotten started with the group, one of the members was like, “Hey! You want to teach an IAP class!” and, being a frosh, I was like, “Er, I didn’t know that… but, um, okay.” So I taught one about Debian, of course. This year’s topic was Giving Back: Contributing to Debian and the New Maintainer Process. It was a three-day series, as described here. The lengths of the talks varied, with the first day being ~45 minutes, the second being ~1.5 hours, and the last being ~30 minutes. All of the lecture materials can be found here. The audience was on the high side of technical, and a lot of the slides were more to nudge me into what I was talking about rather than to be really awesome slides. Which probably should have involved less text. The packaging crash course definitely drew a much larger audience than the first or third parts, which mostly consisted of people I know who work on Debian-Athena, the unexpected appearance of my friend Aaron Swartz who’s in town for a couple weeks, and a few faces that I didn’t know. Maybe next year I’ll try to plan something that just involves a more intensive packaging course. Because, although I procrastinated, pushed the original lecture dates back a week from original plan, and made my lecture slides on the day they were presented, I actually did have fun. And it’s good practice.

Here's a mini-review of my new external storage arrangements for the Macbook Pro.Thanks to my music collection, an appetite for shooting photos in RAW format, and general untidiness I'm not exactly blessed with spare space. Something had to be done.
The solution I came up with was an IcyBox IB-360StUS-BL external SATA/USB2 enclosure, wired to a Sonnet Tempo Express 34 SATA adapter.
Icybox IB-360StUS-BL enclosureEnclosure The IcyBox is such an affordable little box that it seems silly not to have one to hand as a precaution, especially given the cheapness of hard drives these days. The enclosure is convection cooled, so has no noisy fan, and is an a reasonably attractive alumnium package that fits in with the look of the Macbook Pro quite well. The blue LED is switchable, just in case you don't want that bling look on your desktop.Inside the enclosure there's both PATA and SATA connectors. I chose to use a SATA drive, a Samsung HD400LJ. There are two headers for connecting a SATA drive. One goes to the USB 2 adapter, one straight to the outside of the enclosure for wiring to a SATA port on the computer.Four screws secure the hard drive in its tray. The tray then slides into the frame and is secured by four screws in the base. I didn't find it that easy to get these in, but they seemed secure enough once screwed in.The IcyBox comes with plenty of cables, including a SATA-SATA cable, a bracket to relocate an internal SATA port to the PCI card cover on a regular PC, and a USB cable. The power supply is of the external brick sort. SATA adapterThe other half of the equation is the Sonnet Tempo Express 34 SATA adapter. This fits into the Macbook Pro's Express Card port — you knew that something had to eventually, eh? The Tempo card features two eSATA ports, which are of a different design to the  SATA ports featured on the Icybox. This means you need to buy an eSATA-SATA cable. You can either spend $20 on one from Sonnet themselves, or get a cheaper unbranded one for about the tenth of the price: just make sure its reasonably well shielded.Once plugged in, the external drive shows up on the Mac as a SCSI device, and behaves like any removable media. As such, it needs to be unmounted from the desktop before you eject the Tempo card.The only bug with the Tempo card I've found is that things don't seem to work that well if you boot the machine with the card inserted. The very helpful people from Sonnet tell me this is an issue with the underlying Silicon Image chipset, and they're working on sorting it out. (I was very impressed with the technical knowledge, friendliness and speed of response from Sonnet's support department.)PerformanceI'm no benchmarking guru, but it's clear that the external Samsung HD400LJ outperforms my internal 7200rpm SATA drive on the Macbook Pro. Brief experiments with XBench suggested that this performance boost was probably between 20 and 40%. It's certainly vastly preferable to the performance hit you get when you use a USB or Firewire 400 drive with the MBP.ConclusionIt's early days yet, but I'm happy with my new setup. The extra port on the Tempo adapter allows for the connection of another drive, or if I use Sonnet's own products, up to 10 drives! I feel happier knowing the disk isn't competing for attention with all the other USB gadgets I have plugged in. The other big plus point for me is the quietness of the Icybox/Samsung combination.Links:

• Icybox 360
• Sonnet Tempo SATA Express 34
  

 

It appears that some people don't understand what right-wing means in terms of politics, apart from using it as a general term of abuse.

I recommend visiting the site http://www.politicalcompass.org/ to see your own political beliefs (as determined by a short questionnaire) graphed against some famous people. The unique aspect of the Political Compass is that they separate economic and authoritarian values. Stalinism is listed as extreme authoritarian-left and Thatcherism as medium authoritarian-right. Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama are listed as liberal-left.

I score -6.5 on the economic left/right index and -6.46 on the social libertarian/authoritarian index, this means that I am fairly strongly liberal-left. Previously the Political Compass site would graph resulta against famous people but they have since removed the combined graph feature and the scale from the separate graphs. Thus I can't determine whether their analysis of the politics of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama indicate that one of those men has beliefs that more closely match mine than the other. I guess that this is because the famous politicians did not take part in the survey and an analysis of their published material was used to assess their beliefs, this would lead to less accuracy.

The Wikipedia page on Right-Wing Politics provides some useful background information. Apparently before the French revolution in the Estates General the nobility sat on the right of the president's chair. The tradition of politically conservative representatives sitting on the right of the chamber started there, I believe that such seating order is still used in France while in the rest of the world the terms left and right are used independently of seating order.

Right-wing political views need not be associated with intolerance. If other Debian developers decide to publish their political score as determined by the Political Compass quiz then I'm sure that we'll find that most political beliefs are represented, and I'm sure that most people will discover that someone who they like has political ideas that differ significantly from their own.

I am keeping a close eye on the Wordpress 2.0.7 release. I am being cautious because:

1. no pings on their post. bit odd!
2. The mentioned vulnerability does not apply to Debian’s PHP
3. The diff between 2.0.6 and 2.0.7 has some considerable changes to the Akismet plugin which is not mentioned on the changelog/post
4. I would like to improve the Debian copyright file, though I would like to hear back from upstream first
5. There seems to be another minor security bug which I don’t think 2.0.7 addresses

I am also keeping an eye on Wordpress MU edition, to see how they handle these bugs, which has been version 1.0 for sometime. Update: Ryan informs me there will be a 2.0.8 fixing the last reported security bug.

Is this just me or do we see a highly increased rate of (important and interesting) stuff being released (or announced to be released soon) under the terms of the GPL lately? A few examples:

• VirtualBox — a VMware-like virtualisation solution
• Second Life — the client for now, but the server software might follow
• Fortress — Sun's Fortran replacement
• OpenSolaris — scheduled to be released under the GPLv3
• Java — this might have a huge impact...
• Sun UltraSPARC T1 — a complete, modern CPU

This is a great trend and good news for all of us. A special thanks to Sun for releasing more and more stuff under free licenses!

I've had a couple of silent phone calls from 01158507616. It seems that Jigsaw Insurance Marketing (UK) Ltd of 3rd floor, 16, King St, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire NG1 2AS are notorious nuisance callers. I've fed them to Ofcom's web-based silent call complaints system and with any luck, the next time I hear about them will be when they are fined. (I don't hear about them when they call. It's just silent.)

Even less surprisingly, my request that the Software in the Public Interest board try to repair SPI's member communications was postponed. The request was submitted before the December 2006 meeting and now won't be heard until February at soonest. SPI president Bdale Garbee apologised. At least the Spanish resolution was decided (referred to board 2005-11, resolved 2007-01). Meanwhile, on the mailing lists, SPI board member Ian Jackson flamed me again and proposed a resolution which adds lots of red tape, unnecessarily links submissions to announcements and ignores SPI's email and web problems. On the previous post, Bruce Byfield commented:

"I'm sure my bias creeps into many stories, no matter how fair I try to be, but I really don't have much of an opinion on the domain name issue. My main interest is that it's newsworthy. Under these circumstances, I have a hard time seeing how I could have much of a different view from anyone."

I agree. It's hard to see how the newsforge article could have been much different. Is it newsworthy that SPI's board continued voting without discussion at yesterday's (2007-01-16) meeting? No-one wants meetings to last hours, but it's essential that the board put something of their views into the official proceedings. Votes should not be totally set in advance. Otherwise, how can SPI members oversee? How can they make a well-informed decision whether or not to re-elect a member? Now members have to hope they are on the right mailing lists (open or closed) at the right time because the public record is so incomplete.

I blogged 5 days ago about the annoying beeper and different methods that were supposed to turn it off.

I asked for a clean solution, but I received suggestions for some hacks. Now I decided to make a new post since there was a comment added today and I remembered about a possible hack (dpkg-divert) I was thinking about.

Now here are some of those hacks and the reason behind rejecting them.

• I thought at some point of using dpkg-divert, as opposed to deleting the module, but this is suboptimal. And I am not sure dpkg-divert would work for such a whacked "use case"
  
• Using a hardware method is also suboptimal, for several reasons:
• I will hear the beep if I don't plug in the dummy jack
• the same goes when I am using a headset - the volume is loud and seems to not be affected by the general sound volume, so it would be disruptive and annoying while listening music and typing the wrong command;
• the Intel HDA sound driver lacks headset jack detection in the current Debian kernel. This means there is no effect if I plug such a jack
  
• The default beeping should be disabled by default, still, that would partly solve my problem. I could set that in my .inputrc file or system wide, still, that would mean a beep on some occasions (like gdm log in) - not sure if this would mean it would be more scarier, since it happens rarely or not :-)

Still, the question remains, why don't the originally proposed methods work, especially blacklisting?

Update: the headphones jack works with some small changes, bug submitted (#407252)

In his post “Ok, now we are getting somewhere! (Re: XML-based configurations)”, Gunnar Wolf writes that he doesn’t regard XML as a suitable standard for configuration files which need some sort of nesting (like, e.g. the apache configuration needs nesting while a config for a simple /usr/bin/sendmail replacement like nullmailer or msmtp won’t need nesting). He seems to like YAML, as you can see in his first post on the subject: Configuration files for humans and for computers. I looked into YAML a bit and to me, it doesn’t seem like a good replacement for XML in config files. Sure, the files look simpler, but I would have a heck of a problem to memorize the syntax. Sure, a colon (:) is intuitive for a direct mapping, but remembering that a pipe (” ”) marks a literal which preserves newline while the default is a scalar which maps newlines to spaces is harder. Folded style (”>”) is even harder to remember. It folds multiple lines with the same indentation into a single line unless there is a differently indented or empty line in between. More important is that I honestly hate syntaxes which rely on indentation. Indentation is dead useful when a nested config or source is read by a human, but it often causes problems when edited by a human, especially when tabs are used. A program could (and most often would) see a difference between “test” and “<8*space>test”, while a human would most probably not see a difference with default tabs. To sum it up: I see the problems with XML, most notably bad program outputs which don’t use indentation (some even put everything on a single line) and the sometimes overwhelming amount of whatever constructs, but YAML doesn’t seem to be the right solution to me neither, especially due to the indentation-used-as-syntax-element problem. What I really would like to see is a syntax that doesn’t use indentation as a syntax element and doesn’t need the name of the opening tag when closing it, but still allows to use it. In other words both of the following constructs (or an equivalent which looks less like XML) should be legal:

<x>
        whatever
</>

<x>
        whatever
</x>

While the following should raise an error:

<x>
        whatever
</y>

Firstly for smooth running of the presentations it would be ideal if laptops were provided for displaying all presentations (obviously this wouldn't work for live software demos but it would work well for the slide-show
presentations). Such laptops need to be tested with the presentation files that will be used for the talks (or pre-release versions that are produced in the same formats). It's a common problem that the laptops owned by the speakers will have problems connecting to the projectors used at the conference which can waste time and give a low quality display. Another common problem is that laptops owned by the conference often have different versions of the software used for the slides which renders them differently, the classic example of this is OpenOffice 1.x and 2.x which render presentations differently such that using the wrong one results in some text being off-screen.

The easy solution to this is for the conference organizers to provide laptops that have multiple boot options for different distributions. Any laptop manufactured in the last 8 years will have enough disk space for the
latest release of Debian and the last few Fedora releases. As such machines won't be on a public network there's no need to apply security updates and therefore a machine can be used at conferences in successive years, a 400MHz laptop with 384M of RAM is quite adequate for this purpose while also being so small that it will sell cheaply.

A slightly better solution would be to have laptops running Xen. It's not difficult to set up Xephyr in fullscreen mode to connect to a Xen image, you could have several Xen instances running with NFS file sharing so that the speaker could quickly test out several distributions to determine which one gives the best display of their notes. This would also allow speakers to bring their own Xen images.

This is especially important if you want to run lightning talks, when there is only 5 minutes allocated for a talk you can't afford to waste 2 minutes in setting up a presentation!

In other news Dean Wilson gave my talk yesterday a positive review.

Ok, at least Erich states something I agree with (and, lets be fair, its also told by Marius on a comment to my previous post): XML should not be pushed where the data to be represented is flat (or flattish - Say, a INI-style configuration is enough with a not-exactly-flat-but-still-unnested configuration).
Still, I do not buy XML as adequate. Erich insists on the Apache configuration file as an example of how not to do things - And I agree wholeheartedly: It sucks and makes no sense. However, it's just too easy to break proper XML nesting (for the love of the FSM, why is it necessary to repeat the element name we are closing?!) to be something I want to deal with when in a hurry. XML might be great as a data interchange language, but -in my always humble opinion- not more than that.
PS- Erich, your blog is broken as well ;-) The generated RSS has URLs which repeat the '/en' part. Oh, and about my blog complaining about XML: Yes, I was syndicating another site - And the XML parsing engine I use was somehow b0rked as well. Nah, I don't feel like changing my blog's software, it's mostly fine as it is ;-)

I have several servers around the Internet, and one of my need is to have VPN between them to access various data and services, like SNMP or NFS. I used to build VPN with OpenVPN between some of them. My main problem was that I had to set up IP interfaces at each end, build multiple tunnels or make some routing, and... that was not what I wanted, too complicated. I took a deeper look in OpenVPN and found a solution: I created a FLAN No, not a cake, a Faked LAN! This is so easy and powerful that I beat myself to not have though about that before. I did it with 3 servers for now, this is how it works: on each server I create an interface named if-remote hostname which is a tap (Ethernet) interfaces connected to the remote host. On server1, I have two interfaces, if-server2 and if-server3 which are like direct wired connection to the remote host, and I can do Ethernet on them. When each server has its link up, I create an Ethernet bridge. In this bridge, I put the two interfaces connected to the remote servers. This finally build something like that for each server:

server1 -- eth0
  \ 
 if-bridge 192.168.4.88
    \  \_ if-server2 -- VPN -- if-server1 -- if-bridge 192.168.4.89 -- server2
     \_ if-server3 -- VPN -- if-server-1 -- if-bridge 192.168.4.90 -- server3

Obviously, you will have a loop in your faked Ethernet LAN, so you'll have to active STP in order to have a working LAN. And it works. The main advantage with this solution is that each server has only one IP on this virtual network, and there's no connection problem if one of your host is down: STP will rebuild the network in a transparent way. The main problem is that you may have to set up a lot of link if you want a full redundancy. I think I'll setup only two links between each server, because it maybe too painfull otherwise. You can also do some optimization if you need, because the current bridge implementation in Linux is so powerful that you can put cost on interfaces for your bridge, or define which bridge should be the root of your tree. Have fun!

Gunnar, the apache configuration files for example are a mess, and certainly wouldn't become harder to edit if they were some real XML. Similar things apply to other applications. And if you reread my first post, I never suggested to use XML for all configuration files, but just for those who need some nesting structures. If you don't need nesting, some other format with proper character encoding information is fine with me. It should just be standardized e.g. with respect to quote handling, whitespace handling etc.

key = value

and

key="value"

are already sufficiently different that most applications can only read one or the other. P.S. I couldn't reach your blog the last few days; today it worked after a long time and with some error message on top: "not well-formed (invalid token)" seems like you're having some problems with the XML for your blog? :-)