The task: reliably synchronize my local MailDir with several remote IMAP mailboxes with IDLE support so that there is no need to poll with small time intervals to get new email immediately. Most graphical mail clients like icedove/thunderbird or evolution have IDLE support which means that their users get notified about new email as soon as it arrives. I prefer to handle email fetching/reading/sending using separate programs so after having used icedove for a long time, I switched to a offlineimap/mutt based setup a few years ago. Some while after that I discovered sup and later notmuch/alot which made me switch again. Now my only remaining problem is the synchronization between my local email and several remote IMAP servers. Using offlineimap worked fine in the beginning but soon I discovered some of its shortcomings. It would for example sometimes lock up or simply crash when I switched between different wireless networks or switched to ethernet or UMTS. Crashing was not a big problem as I just put it into a script which re-executed it every time it crashed. The problem was it locking up for one of its synchronizing email accounts while the others were kept in sync as usual. This once let to me missing five days of email because offlineimap was not crashing and I believed everything was fine (new messages from the other accounts were scrolling by as usual) while people were sending me worried emails whether I was okay or if something bad had happened. I nearly missed a paper submission deadline and another administrative deadline due to this. This was insanely annoying. It turned out that other mail synchronization programs suffered from the same lockup problem so I stuck with offlineimap and instead executed it as: Which would synchronize my email every five minutes and kill offlineimap if a synchronization took more than one minute. While I would've liked an email synchronizer which would not need this measure, this worked fine over the months. After some while it bugged me that icedove (which my girlfriend is using) was receiving email nearly instantaneously after they arrived and I couldnt have this feature with my setup. This instantaneous arrival of email works by using the IMAP IDLE command which allows the server to notify the client once new email arrives instead of the client having to poll for new email in small intervals. Unfortunately offlineimap (and any other email synchronizer I found) would not support the IDLE command. There is a fork of it which supports IDLE by using a newer python imap library but this is of little use to me as there is no possibility of a hook which executes when new email arrives so that I can execute notmuch new on the new email. At this point I could've used inotify to execute notmuch new upon arrival of new email but I went another way. Here is a short python script idle.py which connects to my IMAP servers and sends the IDLE command: It would create a connection to every directory I want to watch on every email account I want to synchronize. The select call will expire after 33 minutes as most email servers would drop the connection if nothing happens at around 30 minutes. If something happened within that time though, the script would output the arguments to offlineimap to do a quick check on just that mailbox on that account. If nothing happened, the script would output the arguments to offlineimap to do a full check on all my mailboxes. Every call which interacts with the network is wrapped in a timeout command to avoid any funny effects. Should the python script timeout, a full synchronization with offlineimap is triggered. Should offlineimap timeout, an error message is written to stderr and the script continues. The above naturally has the disadvantage of not immediately responding to new email which arrives during the time that idle.py is not running. But as this email will be fetched once the next message arrives on the same account, there is no much waiting time and so far, this problem didnt bite me. Is there a better way to synchronize my email and at a same time make use of IDLE? I'm surprised I didnt find software which would offer this feature.

I recently made a routine analysis of my kitchen. (Of course I make a routine analysis of my kitchen; don t you?) In it, I discovered these items, still usable, but approaching that magic throw it out date:

• Baby carrots
• Potatoes
• Lemons
• Green beans
• Corn

So, I thought, what can I make that would use all of these? And I realized I had some shrimp in the freezer, so: a shrimp boil! I tossed it all, plus some various seasonings and a few other veggies, into the Dutch oven, and boiled. Jacob and Oliver watched the activity with interest. Well, except for the potato-peeling part. For that, they went and played with their toy school buses. But the rest was good. They carefully observed me adding some spices, some vegetables, the shrimp, and watched it all simmer. Then it was time to eat. Excitement! Of course, it did take a few minutes to boil, so Jacob got down his whiteboard while Oliver looked on. They enjoyed learning how to peel the shell from the shrimp and devoured their food. And another night recently, Jacob unexpectedly showed up in the kitchen at 10PM. He said he was thirsty, so I got him some water. He asked, Dad, did you make ice cream? Earlier that day, I had prepared ice cream with Oliver, but it was a kind that had to be cooked (lemon with pureed strawberries and peaches) and it wasn t cool enough to finish before their bedtime. I did let them help add the ice and salt to the ice cream freezer just before they went to bed. So I told Jacob that yes, the ice cream was done. He stood there, tiredly, considering, with this oh he ll never say yes to ice cream at 10PM look on his face. So I said, would you like one bite right now? The look of delight on his face was amazing; a broad smile, a twinkle in his eyes, and a clap. So I got out the big bowl of ice cream and scooped up one big spoonful. He loved it. Then I said, should we go look at the stars? I carried Jacob outside to the porch. We stood there, looking up. I used to do this with him periodically, but it had been about a year. So he was thrilled. It was a partially overcast night, but there were still some stars visible. He had no idea there were some stars missing. To him, it was amazing and wonderful and infinite. Oh dad, there are way too many stars to count! He stayed there, arms around my neck, for a minute or two, then was ready to go back inside. I set him down, gave him a hug, said Goodnight, Jacob. And off he trotted, back upstairs, wearing a contented smile, and he fell asleep almost immediately. All it takes to delight children is a bit a shrimp or some stars. And those things delight me, too.

I like Drupal. It's a very, very flexible CMS that evolved into a full-fledged Web development framework. Mind you, it's written in PHP, and that makes it a nightmare to develop for (in ~6 years I have used it for all of my important websites I have only got around to develop a set of related modules for it once). PHP programming sucks and makes my eyes and fingers bleed, but happily there are people who disagree with me And they tend to write code. All the better! Minor upgrades with Drupal are quite easy to handle. Not as easy as I'd like (i.e. whenever I upgrade the core system or a module, I have to log in as root^Wadmin^WUser #1 to ~15 different sites and run http://someurl/update.php It very seldom causes any pain. The updates that have to be run via this URL are usually on the database's structures, so I understand they have to be started (and watched) by a human. And yes, I know I could do that with Drush, the Drupal shell, but it is not very friendly to Debian-packaged Drupal... But easy enoguh. But major updates are a royal pain, and they usually amount to quite a bit. First, disable all of the modules and revert to a known-safe theme. Ok, it makes sense. Second, check whether the modules exist for the newer version (as they won't work Drupal changes enough between major versions that not only it's API-incompatible, I'd classify it as API-unrecognizable). Ok, all set? Now for the live migration itself... It has to be triggered from the browser. So yes, I am now staring at a window making clever AJAX status updates. I am sitting at 46 of 199, but following the lovely ways of programmers, it's impossible to forsee whether update #47 will just be an UPDATE foo SET bar=0 WHERE bar IS NULL or a full-scale conversion between unspeakable serialized binary structures while rearranging the whole database structure. And yes, while the meter progresses I stand in fear that update #n+1 will bomb giving me an ugly red error. I must keep the magic AJAX running, or the update might be botched. And, of course, the update has sat at #69 all while I wrote the last two paragraphs. Sometimes the updates can progress after an interruption... And it seems I have no choice but to interrupt it. /me crosses fingers... [update] Wow... I am happy I got bored of looking at the meter and decided to write this blog post: After several minutes, and just as I was about to launch a second update session (130 updates to go), the meter advanced! I'm now sitting watching it at #75. Will it ever reach 199? [update] And so it had to be... At around 115, I now got: *sigh* The update process was aborted prematurely while running update #7000 in biblio.module...

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Review: The Making of the Indebted Man, by Maurizio Lazzarato

Translator:	Joshua David Jordan
Publisher:	Semiotext(e)
Copyright:	2011, 2012
Printing:	2012
ISBN:	1-58435-115-2
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	199

This is a continuation of my effort to catch up on Marxist thought while pondering workplace governance, this time following the recommendations of a friend after a related conversation (about pension systems and basic income guarantee in a Usenet group Usenet isn't dead yet). As opposed to Democracy at Work, which is a popularization, The Making of the Indebted Man has more of the density of a scholarly text. The version I'm reading is also in translation, which I suspect makes it even harder going in places. The basic thesis, though, is clear: debt is far more central to the way that we construct not only economic systems but social systems and even internal models of our own nature than is often realized. We prefer to think of societies as structured around mutual exchange, but in practice they're more often constructed around concepts of debt and credit that have been fully internalized and used to construct a moral code for a responsible debtor. And this is not a neutral construction; rather, it is a key support mechanism of capitalism and of the financial and economic status quo, used (both intentionally and accidentally) to reduce uncertainty and to support exploitation and economic domination. This is one of those perspectives that didn't occur to me prior to reading this book but which is startlingly obvious in retrospect. Once Lazzarato starts pointing it out, the prevelance and universality of debt as a basic structure of social and economic life is striking. The creditor and debtor concept extends not just to obvious examples, such as consumer credit or mortgages, but also to education (via student loans), law enforcement ("pay one's debt to society"), employment (most employers, particularly during economic downturns, have successfully inverted the natural direction of the creditor relationship and have made employees feel in debt to the employer for having a job), and social services (unemployment and welfare benefits come with significant, if often unstated, debt-like requirements). Debt is also the great leveller. It now cuts across race, gender, and social class. Apart from a small handful of extremely rich individuals and corporations, Lazzarato claims, convincingly, that nearly everyone is enmeshed to some extent in a network of debt, or at least in in attitudes and moral pressures of a debtor. Nor is this a static situation. The role of debt in our social lives seems to be constantly increasing. The past fifteen years in particular have seen drastic increases in debt during a debt-funded economic boom combined with debt-funded asset bubbles. Even after the financial collapse, much of that growth of debt persists. Lazzarato, probably in part because he's Italian, focuses on national debt (more on that in a moment); as an American, I'd identify student loan debt as a more compelling example in the United States. Other countries probably have their own examples. For a system to be this widespread, it must serve some social purpose. Lazzarato sees it as an instrument of control. Debt has been very effectively built up as a moral obligation, and (unlike a society of mutual support) it's a very one-sided moral obligation that strongly favors existing power. The debtor is held to a tight moral standard of repayment of debts, and is morally condemned by all of society, including their peers, for a failure to repay. But there is little or no corresponding moral pressure on the creditor: perhaps a half-hearted dislike of high interest rates or occasional pressure to not change previously agreed terms, but nothing like the moral pressure applied to the debtor. To be a creditor is to have an agreed-upon, one-sided right to dictate to the debtor the terms on which they must conduct a portion of their life, and the larger the debt, the larger the portion. The debtor is expected to realign their life, at least in part, around paying off the debt, including choice of profession, decisions about when to quit a job, about how to prioritize personal spending, and so forth. This is all so automatic and so deeply ingrained that, even while writing this, I'm nodding along and thinking "well, of course." Lazzarato offers an opportunity to take a step back and think about the implications, particularly of the deeply one-sided web of obligations this creates. A Marxist analysis adds another level of consideration. One of the basic questions of Marxist thought is why workers put up with exploitation by capitalists. In a Marxist analysis, workers provide the productive output of society, which is then redirected and controlled by a relatively small capitalists. The workers massively outnumber the capitalists. Why would they be content for this situation to continue? Marx, of course, thought they wouldn't be, that the periodic crises of capitalism would eventually result in a socialist revolution by the workers. But by and large this hasn't happened. Why? Lazzarato offers debt as a partial explanation. The profits redirected by capitalists are returned to workers to some extent, but as debt rather than payment. This allows workers to participate to some extent in the growth of societal wealth from constantly increasing productivity, while simultaneously entangling workers in a system of moral control. Company stores, starvation wages, and other confiscatory practices are clear mechanisms of external control that provoke directed outrage. Debt is something that the debtor has nominally agreed to (however much the situation is manipulated to make that agreement almost inevitable), and to which attaches a deep tradition of moral responsibility. The worker has respected grounds on which to object to inequitable treatment; the debtor is wholly responsible for repayment, and is rarely considered to have grounds to complain about the debt. Most of the historical attempts to balance those scales, such as laws and religious rules against usury or the historical Jewish rule of Jubilee, have fallen by the wayside. This is a rather extended summary of what I got out of the book. I'm doing that in part because the book itself is somewhat heavy going. Lazzarato makes extensive use of specialized terms (often not defined) and fills the book with references to other works without much in the way of useful summary. It's the sort of book where, if you're not already well-versed in the field, you may need to just keep reading through some passages to find a point of reference that makes the argument retroactively make sense. I had a particular difficulty with "subjectivation," a term that Wikipedia tells me is from the writings of Michel Foucault (a major source for this book), which Lazzarato uses extensively but never adequately defines. Some external research indicates that this is a very difficult term to define, which explains why I was never quite comfortable with my understanding. I think Lazzarato is using it to get at the process of internalization of the morality of debt and the way that a debt society forces individuals into a mode of economic individualism in which many of their personal choices are bent towards making themselves better (more reliable, more trustworthy) debtors. But I'm not completely sure. There are also places in which I think Lazzarato takes his argument too far, although one of those, I think, reflects a difference in national economic status. He makes quite a lot of national debt in this book, placing it in the universal position of the overarching debt that turns every citizen into a debtor even if they've avoided other debts. This is possibly true in countries whose national debts are held in other currencies, or in countries like Italy that are part of the Euro (which, if one is not Germany or France, amounts to much the same thing). It's a dubious assertion for countries like the UK, Japan, or the United States, where the national debt is held in their own free-floating currency and is largely owed domestically, and partly plays into some frustratingly incorrect political rhetoric. One of the key dynamics of debt, namely the extreme power imbalance between debtor and creditor, is missing in countries with sovereign debt in their own currency, since those countries can always (if they're willing to pay the inflation price) simply print money to pay off national debt. Creditors know this, and therefore interest rates are much lower, the amount of leverage the creditor has is quite limited, and the sorts of debt crises seen in Italy and elsewhere in the Euro periphery are not seen. Lazzarato is understandably writing from the Italian perspective, but I think he weakens his argument by lumping national debt so completely into the same category as the other types of exploitative debt he discusses. The principle does feel universal to me, but the best examples of debt vary by country, so one has to be careful about generalizing specific examples. Another place where I simply disagree with his conclusions is around some of the more dramatic presentations of subjectivation. Lazzarato talks, at one point, about how debt reduces debtors to mechanical components, and uses as an example an ATM machine, which he portrays as uniquely dehumanizing through the mechanical process that someone has to follow to withdraw money. There may be some point here about the dehumanization of debt and its subsumption into the foundation of day-to-day social interaction, but he lost me entirely with the unwarranted technophobia of the specific example. The idea that machines and automation make us less human is an old argument that's orthogonal to the thrust of his argument. It reminded me of old contentions that human relationships made on-line aren't real, which is nonsense. Overall, this is a fascinating and insightful discussion hampered by a difficult and sometimes overly elliptical presentation, a bit too much drama and grand theorizing, and a few poor choices of examples. I found the basic idea extremely valuable, but the amount of work required to extract it occasionally irritating. (This could be partly due to the limits of translation, but I suspect most of the difficulty was present in the original.) I'm not sure that I would recommend the book, but I definitely recommend considering the underlying ideas. Debt now works alongside the employment relationship as a primary means of reinforcing economic and social control and hierarchy. This is likely via accidental development rather than any grand plan, but it's now being actively exploited by the creditors of society, large corporations most notably. Viewed in that light, the explosive growth of student loan debt in the United States is particularly frightening. After Lazzarato's extensive examination of the distortive effects of permanent debt, not just on economics and society but on our own conceptions of our selves and our duties and roles in life, the idea of trapping a generation in debt from the moment of their financial independence is deeply troubling, even nauseating. Rating: 6 out of 10

I've been slow lately in writing these up (and, for that matter, in doing most other things related to reading; things have been rather busy lately). This is a bunch of here-and-there purchases over the last few months, including Powell's Indiespensible shipments. Sandra Barret Face of the Enemy (sff)
Anne Bishop Written in Red (sff)
Lois McMaster Bujold Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (sff)
Cary Caffrey The Girls from Alcyone (sff)
Jenni Fagan The Panopticon (mainstream)
Niels Ferguson, et al. Cryptography Engineering (non-fiction)
Jen Kirchner The Fourth Channel (sff)
Anothony Marra A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (mainstream)
Steve McConnell Code Complete (non-fiction)
Seanan McGuire Velveteen vs. The Junior Super-Patriots (sff)
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, et al. (ed.) Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2012 (sff anthology)
Lisa O'Donnell The Death of Bees (mainstream)
Susan Palwich Flying in Place (sff)
Kim Stanley Robinson 2312 (sff)
John Scalzi Redshirts (sff)
Ian Tregillis Bitter Seeds (sff)
Leon Trotsky The History of the Russian Revolution (non-fiction)
Simon Van Booy The Illusion of Separateness (mainstream)
Chris Anne Wolfe Shadows of Aggar (sff)
Barbara Ann Wright The Pyramid Waltz (sff) That's a lot of stuff. It includes a couple of non-fiction O'Reilly books from sales, a few months of Powell's Indiespensible subscriptions, a variety of books I picked up after a discussion of good lesbian fiction on Tor.com (romance without the obnoxious gender tropes, or at least as many of them), and the rest of the Hugo nominees for the year. I got a ton of reading done earlier this month. I wish I could say the same thing about reviews, but I only wrote a few. That's something that I want to try to catch up on soon, so there will probably be a flurry of those posted soon. I've already read Blackout and Redshirts of this year's nominees (a review of the latter is coming), so at least I'm not too far behind on the reading. Throne of the Crescent Moon is in progress now.

The fifth internation R/Finance conference was held last weekend. As one of the founding co-organizers, I may well be accussed of a little bias, but we think we once again pulled off a very nice and successful weekend-long event. Participants had kind words to say during the conference, and a few first posts have appeared such as Joe Rickert's post over at the REvo blog. Some participants, myself included, had already posted on their personal websites (though had forgotten to mention it here). In any event, I just updated the website with links to the pdf (or ppt) slides of all presenters who shared their material with us. Supplemental material may be made available too at a later date. We hope you find these slides useful. Please do spread the word about the R/Finance conference as we expect to have a sixth edition in May 2014---and we do look forward to receiving even more outstanding submissions. Dates, details, call for papers, etc will be forthcoming over the next few months.

I had a look at the 3.0 source formats just now. I've never been very fond of that, mainly because of the fact that it wants to store individual patches for no particularly good reason¹. However, recently I found out about the --single-debian-patch option to dpkg-source, which makes the 3.0 (quilt) format behave somewhat more like the non-native 1.0 format, which is good. Unfortunately, "somewhat more" does not mean "entirely". For some weird reason, after converting the source to a 3.0 source package and running "dpkg-buildpackage", I find that suddenly my source tree is devoid of the patches that I'd applied to it. I'm sure there's another option hidden somewhere to make it not do that either, but I was quickly annoyed about it enough that I didn't care anymore. I just removed the debian/source directory entirely again, instead. Maybe I'll look into this again at some future point, but it's pretty unlikely. ¹I have all my packages stored in git with a proper Vcs-Git: header; if people really want to look at individual patches, they can just use debcheckout, kthxbye.

Some years ago I was working on a project that involved a database cluster of two Sun E6500 servers that were fairly well loaded. I believe that the overall price was several million pounds. It s the type of expensive system where it would make sense to spend adequately to do things properly in all ways. The first interesting thing was the data center where it was running. The front door had a uniformed security guard and a sign threatening immediate dismissal for anyone who left the security door open. The back door was wide open for the benefit of the electricians who were working there. Presumably anyone who had wanted to steal some servers could have gone to the back door and asked the electricians for assistance in removing them. The system was poorly tested. My colleagues thought that with big important servers you shouldn t risk damage by rebooting them. My opinion has always been that rebooting a cluster should be part of standard testing and that it s especially important with clusters which have more interesting boot sequences. But I lost the vote and there was no testing of rebooting. Along the way there were a number of WTFs in that project. One of which was when the web developers decided to force all users to install the latest beta release of Internet Explorer, a decision that was only revoked when the IE install process broke MS-Office on the PC of a senior manager. Another was putting systems with a default Solaris installation live on the Internet with all default services running, there s never a reason for a database server to be directly accessible over the Internet. No Backups At All But I think that the most significant failing was the decision not to make any backups. This wasn t merely forgetting to make backups, when I raised the issue I received a negative reaction from almost everyone. As an aside I find it particularly annoying when someone implies that I want backups because I am likely to stuff things up. There are many ways of proving that there s a general lack of competence in the computer industry. But I think that one of the best is the number of projects where the person who wants backups has their competence questioned instead of all the people who don t want backups. A decision to make no backups relies on one of two conditions, either the service has to be entirely unimportant or you need to have no bugs in the OS or hardware defects that can corrupt data, no application bugs, and a team of sysadmins who never make mistakes. The former condition raises the question of why the service is being run and the latter is impossible. As I m more persistent than most people I kept raising the issue via email and adding more people to the CC list until I got a positive reaction. Eventually I CC d someone who responded with What the fuck which I consider to be a reasonable response to a huge and expensive project with no backups. However the managers on the CC list regarded the use of profanity in email to be a much more serious problem. To the best of my knowledge there were never any backups of that system but the policy on email was strongly enforced. This is only a partial list of WTF incidents that assisted in my decision to leave the UK and migrate to the Netherlands. Not Doing Much About a year after leaving I returned to London for a holiday and had dinner with a former colleague. When I asked what he was working on he said Not much . It turned out that proximity to the nearest manager determined the amount of work that was assigned. As his desk was a long way from the nearest manager he had spent about 6 months getting paid to read Usenet. That wasn t really a surprise given my observations of the company in question.

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2011

Editor:	Sheila Williams
Issue:	Volume 35, No. 7
ISSN:	1065-2698
Pages:	112

Williams's editorial is a mildly interesting piece about story titles. Silverberg's column is a more interesting (and rather convincing) rebuttal of the joke that fiction authors are "professional liars," combined with an examination of a fake and fantastic 14th travelogue that (at least in Silverberg's telling) was widely believed at the time. The precis of Silverberg's argument is that lying requires an intent to deceive, which is a property of deceptive memoir writers but not of fiction authors. Di Filippo's review column, as usual, is devoted almost entirely to esoterica, although I was moderately interested to hear of Stableford's continued work on translating early French SF. None of it seems compelling enough to go buy, but good translations of early works seem like a good thing to have in the world. "Day 29" by Chris Beckett: The conceit of this novelette is an interstellar travel system akin to a transporter that allows near-instantaneous travel between worlds. The drawback is that all memories from somewhere between 40 and 29 days before transit up until transit are wiped. The progatonist is a data analyst who is about to travel, and therefore by agency rule is required to stop doing work on day 40 before transmission since he can't be held legally liable for anything he has no recollection of doing. (I would like to say that I find this implausible, since one could always keep records, but it's exactly the sort of ass-covering regulation that a human resources department would come up with.) The premise is quite interesting: what do you do during that period that you're going to forget? Beckett wisely mixes Stephen's current waiting period on the colony world with his diary of his original waiting period on Earth the first time he went through the transmission process, and the latter adds greatly to the reader's appreciation of the weirdness of the forgotten interval. Unfortunately, this is a story more about psychological exploration than about plot, and Stephen just isn't very interesting. The telepathic but possibly nonsentient aliens add weirdness but not much else, and the ending of the story provided little sense of closure or conclusion for me. A good idea, but not the execution I wanted. (5) "Pug" by Theodora Goss: Since I grew up with a pug, I have a soft spot for a story featuring one; sadly, though, this story has insufficient pug in it. This is a quiet fantasy (Asimov's calls it SF, presumably on the basis of parallel worlds and a hypothesized scientific explanation, but it reads like fantasy to me) featuring Victorian girls, including one with a bad heart. They discover a hidden door to other versions of their world and do some minor exploration. There's little or nothing in the way of plot; the story is more of an attempt to capture a mood. It's mildly diverting, but I wish it had gone somewhere more substantial. (5) "Dunyon" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: A Rusch story is often the highlight of an issue, and this is no exception. The protagonist is the owner of a bar in a space station that's become a combination of a refugee camp and a slum. War and chaos have created desperate people, most of whom are attempting to find some way to resources and get out of the bottom of society. The story is about a rumor: a mythical system named Dunyon that's safe and far away. And it's about how people react to that rumor. There's nothing particularly surprising about the direction the story goes (it's fairly short), but Rusch is always a good storyteller. (7) "The Music of the Sphere" by Norman Spinrad: I've had mixed feelings about Spinrad's fiction (and some of his essays), but I liked this story, despite its implausibility. It's set in the near future, featuring an expert in cetaceans and dolphin perception and a composer obsessed with both loud music and classical musical style. Just from that description, you can probably predict much of the story, but I thought it had some neat ideas about dolphins, whales, and alternate perception and aesthetics. (Note: neat, not necessarily biologically plausible.) Enjoyable. (6) "Bring on the Rain" by Josh Roseman: In a change of pace from the rest of the issue, this is a post-apocalyptic story of caravans of wheeled ships traversing a scorched and ruined landscape in search of weather systems and rain. The feel is of an inverted Waterworld, but with more emphasis on military tactics and cooperating fleets. The transposition of fleet maneuvers to huge ground vehicles adds some extra fun. The plot has little to do with the background and is a fairly stock military adventure scenario, but it's reasonably well-told. The story feels like an excerpt from a larger military-SF-inspired adventure, but the length keeps the quantity of tactics and maneuvering below the threshold where I would get bored. (6) "Twelvers" by Leah Cypess: This is a sharp and occasionally mean story of adolescent cruelty and alienation. Darla is a "twelver," a child who was carried an extra three months in the womb using newly-invented medical technology because of a belief in the advantages this would bring in later life. Unfortunately for all those who used this technique, what it also brought was a preternatural calm and an unusual reaction to emotions. Darla finds it almost impossible to get upset at anything, and that, of course, prompts the cruelty and abuse of other children. Most of the story is a description of that abuse, leading up to Darla stumbling into a nasty solution to her immediate problem. It's all very believable (well, apart from the motivating biology), but I didn't enjoy reading about it, and I'm certainly not convinced that the ending will lead to anything good. (5) "The Messenger" by Bruce McAllister: This is a very short time travel story, where time travel is used to try to unwind old family pain. This world follows the unalterable history model: no changes to the past are possible, and anything you do in the past has already happened. The mechanics are mostly avoided. Instead, McAllister concentrates on his mother, his father, and their complex relationship. I would have needed a bit more background on the characters to care enough about them for the story to be fully effective, but while the heartstring-pulling is kind of obvious, it's still a solid story. (6) "The Copenhagen Interpretation" by Paul Cornell: This is the most ingenious of the stories in this issue. It's set in a future world that extends what seemed to me to be pre-World-War-I great power politics, although there may be a hint of the Cold War. Great nations have reached a careful balance of power, and spies and secret services work to sustain that balance. The progatonist is one of those agents, making use of advanced technology like space folds in the service of a cause that he doesn't entirely believe in. Cornell mixes in mental conditioning, artificial people, space travel, and even aliens (maybe) in a taut thriller plot that, for me, gained a great deal from the unexplained strangeness of its background. If you like diving into the deep end and following a fast-moving plot against a background of strangeness, this is the sort of SF you'll enjoy. (7) Rating: 6 out of 10

Most OpenPGP User IDs look like this:

Jane Q. Public <jane@example.org>

This is clean, clear, and unambiguous. However, some tools (gpg, enigmail among others) ask the user to provide a "Comment:" field when they are choosing a new User ID (e.g. when making a new key). These UI prompts are evil. The savvy user knows to avoid entering anything in this field, so that they can end up with a User ID like the one above. The user who provides something here (perhaps even something inconsequential like "I like strawberries", due to not being sure what should go in this little box) will instead end up with a User ID like:

Jane Q. Public (I like strawberries) <jane@example.org>

This is bad. This means that Jane is asking the people who certify her key+userid to certify whether she actually likes strawberries (how could they know? what if she changes her mind? should they revoke their certifications?) and anywhere that she is referred to by name will include this mention of strawberries. This is not Jane's identity, and it doesn't belong in an OpenPGP User ID packet. Furthermore, since User IDs are atomic, if Jane wants to change the comment field (but leave her name and e-mail address the same), she will instead need to create a new User ID, publish it, get everyone who has certified her old key+userid to certify the key+newuserid, and then revoke the old one. It is difficult already to help people understand and participate in the certification network that forms that backbone of OpenPGP's so-called "web of trust". These bogus comment fields make an already-difficult task harder. And all because of strawberries! Tools like enigmail and gpg should not expose the "Comment:" field to users who are generating keys or choosing new User IDs. If they feel it absolutely must be present for some weird corner case that 0.1% of their users will have, they could require that the user enters some sort of "expert mode" before prompting the user to do something that is likely to be a mistake. There is almost no legitimate reason for anyone to use this field. Let's go through some examples of this people use, taken from some examples i have lying around (identifying marks have been changed to protect the innocent who were duped by this bad UI choice, but you can probably find them on the public keyserver network if you want to hunt around):

domain repetition

John Q. Public (Debian) <johnqpublic@debian.org>

We know you're with debian already from the @debian.org address. If this is in contrast to your other address (johnqpublic@example.org) so that people know where to send you debian-related e-mail, this is still not necessary. Lest you think i'm just calling out debian developers, people with @ubuntu.com addresses and (Ubuntu) comments (as well as @example.edu addresses and (Example University) comments and @example.com addresses and (Example Corp) comments) are out there too.

nicknames already evident

John Q. Public (Johnny) <johnqpublic@example.net>
John Q. Public (wackydude) <wackydude@example.net>

Again, the information these comments are providing offers no clear disambiguation from the info already contained in the name and e-mail address, and just muddies the water about what the people who certify this identity should actually be trying to verify before they make their certification.

"Work"

John Q. Public (Work) <johnqpublic@example.com>

if John's correspondents know that he works for Example Corp, then "Work" isn't helpful to them, because they already know this as the address that they're writing to him with. If they don't know that, then they probably aren't writing to him at work, so they don't need this comment either. The same problem appears (for example) with literal comments of (School) next to their @example.edu address.

This is my nth try at this crazy system!

John Q. Public (This is my second key) <johnqpublic@example.com>
John Q. Public (This is my primary key) <johnqpublic@example.com>
John Q. Public (No wait really use this one) <johnqpublic@example.com>

OpenPGP is confusing, and it can be tricky to get it right. We all know :) This is still not part of John's identity. If you want to designate a key as your preferred key, keep it up-to-date, get people to certify it, and revoke or expire your old keys. People who care can look at the timestamps on your keys and tell which ones are the most recent ones. You do have a revocation certificate for your key handy just in case you lose it, right?

Don't use this key

John Q. Public (Old key, do not use) <johnqpublic@example.com>
John Q. Public (Please only use this through September 2004) <johnqpublic@example.com>

This kind of sentiment is better expressed by revoking the key in question or setting an expiration time on the key or User ID self-sig directly. This sentiment is not part of John's identity, and shouldn't be included as though it were.

"none"

John Q. Public (none) <johnqpublic@example.com>

sigh. This is clearly someone getting mixed up by the UI.

I use strong crypto!

John Q. Public (3092 bits of RSA) <johnqpublic@example.com>

This comment refers to the strength of the key material, or the algorithms preferred by the user. Since the User ID is associated with the key material already, people who care about this information can get it from the key directly. This is also not part of the user's actual identity.

"no comment"

John Q. Public (no comment) <johnqpublic@example.com>

This is actually not uncommon (some keyservers reply "too many matches!"). It shows that the user is witty and can think on their feet (at least once), but it is still not part of the user's identity.

But wait (i hear you say)! I have a special case that actually is a legitimate use of the comment field that cannot be expressed in OpenPGP in any other way! I'm sure that such cases exist. I've even seen one or two of them. The fact that one or two cases exist does not excuse the fact that that overwhelming majority of these comments in OpenPGP User IDs are a mistake, caused only by bad UI design that prompts people to put something (anything!) in the empty box (or on the command prompt, depending on your preference). And this mistake is one of the thousand papercuts that inhibits the robust growth of the OpenPGP certification network that some people call the "web of trust". Let's avoid them so we can focus on the other 999 papercuts. Please don't use comments in your OpenPGP User ID. And if you make a user interface for OpenPGP that prompts the user to decide on a new User ID, please don't include a prompt for "Comment" unless the user has already certified that they are really and truly a special special snowflake. Thanks!Tags: openpgp, ui

A week after the Euro LLVM conference, I am glad to share the results I presented and discussed during the event. 1) Parallel building infrastructure using clang instead of gcc Based on the work that Alexander Pashaliyski and I did during the GSoC 2012, we are now able to automatically rebuild each package uploaded in Unstable transparently. Results are published here:
http://buildd-clang.debian.net/
This provides a quick and easy way to any Debian contributors or upstream packaged in Debian to check how the package behaves with clang.
For Debian Developer and maintainer, a per maintainer view is also provided. This will list all packages maintained by a Debian packager. My page as example Here is an example of the list of package:
And an example of package failing:
At time of writing, most of the packages in unstable have been rebuilt (16 % are remaining). However, due to resource constraints, only amd64 packages are built. Contact me if you have resources to share for other architectures. Thanks to Paul Wise, the PTS (Debian package tracking system) proposes a link to the clang build logs (failing or not). A repository will be automatically updated with the results of these builds (once I find the time to get into buildd). 2) clang-built repository
Thanks to the Amazon Cloud, with our new DPL (Debian Project Leader), Lucas Nussbaum, we rebuilt unstable last April and published it at the following address:

deb http://clang.debian.net/repository-2013-04-07/ unstable-clang main

This allows some cool stuff like:

$ echo "deb http://clang.debian.net/repository-2013-04-07/ unstable-clang main">>/etc/apt/sources.list
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install coreutils/unstable-clang
$ ls
$ awk

Note that this repository was only one-shoot and does not get updated. Quality of the binary produced (performance and size) can be tested thanks to this repository. Feedbacks are welcome!

A week after the Euro LLVM conference, I am glad to share the results I presented and discussed during the event. 1) Parallel building infrastructure using clang instead of gcc Based on the work that Alexander Pashaliyski and I did during the GSoC 2012, we are now able to automatically rebuild each package uploaded in Unstable transparently. Results are published here:
http://buildd-clang.debian.net/
This provides a quick and easy way to any Debian contributors or upstream packaged in Debian to check how the package behaves with clang.
For Debian Developer and maintainer, a per maintainer view is also provided. This will list all packages maintained by a Debian packager. My page as example Here is an example of the list of package:
And an example of package failing:
At time of writing, most of the packages in unstable have been rebuilt (16 % are remaining). However, due to resource constraints, only amd64 packages are built. Contact me if you have resources to share for other architectures. Thanks to Paul Wise, the PTS (Debian package tracking system) proposes a link to the clang build logs (failing or not). A repository will be automatically updated with the results of these builds (once I find the time to get into buildd). 2) clang-built repository
Thanks to the Amazon Cloud, with our new DPL (Debian Project Leader), Lucas Nussbaum, we rebuilt unstable last April and published it at the following address:

deb http://clang.debian.net/repository-2013-04-07/ unstable-clang main

This allows some cool stuff like:

$ echo "deb http://clang.debian.net/repository-2013-04-07/ unstable-clang main">>/etc/apt/sources.list
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install coreutils/unstable-clang
$ ls
$ awk

Note that this repository was only one-shoot and does not get updated. Quality of the binary produced (performance and size) can be tested thanks to this repository. Feedbacks are welcome!

Wheezy is finally out! Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

[Image from: http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/49640679398/debian-wheezy-released]

Review: Democracy at Work, by Richard Wolff

Publisher:	Haymarket
Copyright:	2012
ISBN:	1-60846-247-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	220

I've been reading (mostly on-line) and thinking quite a bit lately about workplace governance models, economic structure, and why the current organization of the US workplace bothers me so intensely, partly triggered by reading John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society. The economic monoculture has made that process particularly frustrating. It's rare to find a discussion, even in the context of organizational strategies that are considered radical, that avoids the standard frame of productivity and business value. Most discussion is long on tactics and short on strategy and examination of goals. Wolff's appearance on Moyers & Company was a rare breath of fresh air, enough so that I grabbed his book shortly afterwards. Wolff is a Marxian economist (meaning that he makes use of Marxist analysis of economics and capitalism while separating them from Marxist politics and Marx's advocacy of revolutionary socialism), which for me was part of the interest. Marxist thought of any branch is not common in the United States; we're regularly deprived of several sides in the international conversation on economic models. I was taught Marxist theory in elementary and high school (in retrospect, surprisingly even-handedly and well, despite the biases of my schooling), but none of the later developments of Marxist thought. I think that's a typical experience here; in the United States, Marxism culminated in Mao and Stalin, and no further development of the underlying theories is ever mentioned. Democracy at Work is subtitled A Cure for Capitalism and does indeed advocate a concrete alternative to capitalist business structures. But this is only the last third of the book (and in some ways the least useful, as I'll discuss in a moment). The first two-thirds of the book is basically a remedial education in modern, as opposed to historic, Marxian economics for US readers like myself who have never heard it before, cast in the context of the current financial crisis. This may well be old hat for Europeans, but if you've been wondering what (at least some) modern-day Marxists actually believe, or are saying to yourself "there are modern-day Marxists after the collapse of the Soviet Union?", I recommend this book to your attention. It's an excellent summary, which I read with the delightful feeling of an expanding viewpoint and the discovery of new directions from which to look at a problem. There's quite a bit in this section that's worth thinking about, including another take on the nature of the recent economic collapse and how that fits into a Marxian analysis of capitalist crises. But there was one point in Wolff's explanation that I found particularly helpful. He completely restructured my understanding of the Marxian analysis of worker exploitation and profit allocation. There are two angles of Marxist economic thought and socialist economics that get a great deal of attention, at least in the United States, in history and economics classes: the role (or lack thereof) of markets in price setting, and the ownership of the means of production. Defenders of capitalism like to focus on the former, since it's quite easy to identify the advantages of theoretical free markets in finding ideal prices and balancing supply and demand, whereas central planning of prices and production has resulted in some catastrophic and deadly failures. (Although I will note, with passing interest, that those failures predate large-scale computing, and there are now large corporations that manage budgets larger than some countries via centralized command-and-control economic practices.) Defenders of socialism are more likely to focus on the ownership of the means of production, since it's easy to show prima facie unfairness in owners of capital extracting vast profits without having to do any work themselves, only be lucky enough to start with large quantities of money. Wolff, however, argues that both of these focuses misses a core critique by Marx of the workplace structure in capitalism, and that, by ignoring that critique, supposedly Marxist countries did not create anything that was actually Marxist in implementation. The Soviet Union was just as much a capitalist country as the United States is. It was state capitalism rather than private capitalism, but the core capitalist structure was intact. Wolff arrives at this conclusion, which may be well-trodden ground in parts of the world that include active Marxist thought but which was quite startling to this American, by treating the ownership of capital as a partial distraction. He focuses on a more direct question and practical question: who determines what a worker does on a day-to-day basis and how that product is used? Who determines what profits are collected and how they are spent? In private capitalism, this is done by the owners of the capital: large shareholders, major investors, and the managerial class that they hire. In Soviet state capitalism, this is done by national politicians, bureaucrats, and the managerial class that they hire. In neither model is it done by the workers themselves. The Soviet model gives theoretical ownership of the capital to the workers, but that ownership is diffused, centralized, and politicized, redirected through the mechanisms of the state, and therefore is effectively ignored. Ownership and control is entirely captured by the political class. Both of these systems are capitalist in Wolff's view of Marx: there is a class of owners and managers, who control the terms and nature of work and who allocate the profits, and a class of workers, who have to do what they're told, are not paid full value for their labor, and don't have a say in how the profits their work generates are spent. At the most important level of day-to-day autonomy and empowerment, they are functionally identical. They are both equally hierarchical and exploitative; the only difference is in whether the system is controlled by rich individuals or by well-connected politicians. (And, as any study of modern politics quickly reveals, the distinction between those two groups in most countries is murky at best.) Wolff convincingly recasts modern economic history as a constant pendulum swing between private capitalism and state capitalism. Crises in one system push countries towards the other system; subsequent crises push the country back towards the first system. Regulation grows and shrinks, companies are nationalized and then privatized, but both systems are united in excluding the worker from any meaningful control over their work life. The first two-thirds of the book was full of insights like this for me. I didn't agree with all of it, but all of it was worthwhile and thought-provoking. But I was a bit leery of Wolff's proposed solution. My past experience with critics of capitalism is that the critique is often quite compelling, but the proposed solution is much less believable. And, sadly, that concern was warranted here as well. The core of Wolff's proposal is predictable but possibly sound: a restructuring of the workplace to be radically democratic. The business would be owned entirely and exclusively by the people who work for it, equally regardless of the job of the worker, and the workers would decide democratically or via elected repesentatives from among the workers how to allocate the profits of the business, what standards and business practices should be followed, and how the work is to be done. I was particularly interested to hear that this model (workers' self-directed enterprises) has apparently been successful in Spain in the form of the Mondragon Cooperative. Given all the tricky, small details that have to be resolved in an actual workplace, an existence proof is worth more than pounds of theory. Unfortunately, like a lot of proposed alternatives, Wolff's description of WSDEs is quite fuzzy and involves a lot of hand-waving. I was never able to build, from this book, a coherent and complete mental model of how such a workplace would function. Wolff tends to surround every specific in a halo of contingencies, possibilities, and alternative models, and is maddeningly nonspecific on such practical matters as how line management would work, how such a business would do financial planning or project approval, how competing interests in different parts of the organization would be balanced, and other practical governance matters that fill my work life. Maybe the answer to all of that is just "democracy," but I'm dubious. Democracy has a number of well-known flaws that I thought weren't adequately addressed. For example, democracies are often quite happy to further and reinforce existing prejudice (such as sexism or racism), and are prone to yielding control to the most charismatic. Democracies also have an informed voter problem, which seems like it would be particularly acute if democracy is going to make detailed business decisions. And, for larger organizations, control by pre-existing money could re-enter the equation via propaganda and campaigning around votes. Some of this gap in the book could be addressed via a more in-depth look at how Mondragon and any other real-life examples work, but that is sadly missing here. (I am interested enough now, though, that I'd read a good popular treatment of the history and methodology of Mondragon, although I don't think I'm up to working through an academic study.) The hierarchical, dictatorial management structure imposed by capitalism is so awful that WSDEs don't have a particularly high bar to meet to be fairer and more empowering than what we have today. The question, rather, is would they function sufficiently well that the business would be able to make effective decisions, and that's unclear to me from this book. This is, as Wolff spends some time discussing, particularly difficult when in direct competition with capitalist enterprises. This sort of endeavor will probably trade some degree of economic efficiency and raw marketplace power for improvements to fairness and empowerment, but that means it's going to require support from the surrounding society, which is a huge obstacle. I doubt there's a free lunch here: true fairness and equity also leading to improved economic efficiency in a capitalist context is a nice dream, but not horribly practical. Wolff also seems to suffer from something else I associate with Marxist thought: a preferential focus on a very narrowly-defined type of productive worker, apparently left over from Marx's original critique in the context of industrialization. Wolff inserts a very odd and quite awkward distinction in his WSDE model between workers who directly produce the product that's sold, and who in his model therefore produce the profits of the business, and all other workers in the business. He then gives special privileges to the former group to decide how much profit to return in worker compensation and how much to use for other purposes, thus making the supporting workers second-class citizens within this supposedly equal workplace. Speaking as someone who works in IT, and hence would be classified by Wolff into the supporting rather than directly productive category, I do not find this division at all convincing, and Wolff never provides a coherent explanation for why he introduced it. He only says that it's necessary for the governance of the business to not be exploitative, which seems to assume that there is a special economic role played by the workers who work directly on a saleable product. Maybe there is some analysis that could convince me of this, but, if so, it's not present in this book. It struck me as a recipe for continuing the exploitation of the most invisible and powerless workers in capitalism: janitors, groundskeepers, and other low-paid service jobs. I wish the whole book were as insightful and pointed as the first two-thirds, but alas I found the WSDE discussion to be somewhat muddled and utopian. "How do we get there from here" is always the hardest part of this type of discussion, and Wolff has no special skill in that department. But, despite that, I got a lot of fascinating ideas and new conceptual frameworks out of this book, and I'm tempted to read it again. I suspect some of this, similar to my discovery of promises and infinite streams in programming, is filling in of odd gaps in my personal education rather than a discovery of unusual, new ideas. But if you too have gotten your political education within the US capitalism ber alles bubble, this book may fill in similar gaps in your knowledge. If so, it's a very rewarding experience. If you're curious about a preview of Wolff's perspective without paying for the book, I recommend watching the first episode of Moyers & Company in which he appeared. Wolff is a clear and engaging speaker, and his interview provides a good feel for his discussion style and his general perspective. Rating: 8 out of 10

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (102.70 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Debian France Work on Galette. I spent quite some time on Debian France s galette installation (the web application handling its member database), first converting its Postgres database to UTF-8, then upgrading to 0.7.4 while working-around many known problems. I also created Debian packages of three Galette plugins that we have been using (galette-plugin-paypal, galette-plugin-admintools, galette-plugin-fullcard). But every time I use galette, I tend to find something to report. This month I filed 5 tickets:

• #588: galette should offer a way to send a test mail while setting up the mail notifications
• #589: CSV export page contains an invalid download link
• #590: confirmation page of a successful PayPal payment contains empty fields
• #591: problem with the selection of recipients of a mailing
• #595: galette should put a proper recipient in the To: field of automatically generated mails.

I tested quite some fixes prepared by the upstream author (3 of the above bugs are already fixed) and this lead to the 0.7.4.1 bugfix release. Preliminary work on new bylaws. I have setup a git repository to make it easier to collaborate on new versions of our bylaws and internal rules. The goal is to make Debian France a trusted organization of Debian and to update everything to be compliant with the association 1901 law (we currently have a special statute reserved to associations from Alsace/Moselle). Kali Linux Improve accessibility support in Debian Wheezy. Offensive Security wanted Kali Linux to be fully accessible to disabled people. Since Wheezy was suffering from some serious regressions in that area, we hired Emilio Pozuelo Monfort to fix #680636 and #689559 in gdm3. On my side, I updated debian-installer s finish-install to correctly pre-configure the system when you make an install with speech synthesis (patch submitted in #705599).
Thanks to accommodating release managers, this work has already been integrated in Wheezy and won t have to wait the first point release. Fix bugs in Debian s live desktop installer. We also wanted to enable the desktop installer in the Kali live DVD. While our first tries a few months ago failed, this time it worked almost out of the box (thanks to Ben Armstrong who fixed it). I still identified a few issues that I fixed in debian-installer-launcher s git repository. Packaging and misc Debian work

• I reviewed the work of Charles Plessy who drafted an important update of the Debian Policy to document dpkg triggers (see #582109)
• I reviewed the libwebsockets package prepared by Peter Pentchev (ITP 697671)
• I discovered Tanglu and joined their mailing list because I want to watch its evolution (and maybe use it as a test-bed for some future infrastructure developments).
• I reviewed and committed a patch of Robert Spencer on debian-cd (see #703431).
• I packaged version 3.3 of cpputest (in experimental). I tested a new upstream snapshot converted to autotools.

I also spent a significant number of hours to answer questions of students who want to participate in Google s summer of code and who are interested by the rewrite of the Package Tracking System with Python and Django. Some of the discussions happened on debian-qa@lists.debian.org. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Collabora recently had a problem with a project's ARM build farm. In a nice change of pace it was not that the kernel was crashing, nor indeed any of the software or hardware.
The ProblemInstead our problem was our build farm could best be described as "a pile of stuff" and we wanted to add more systems to it and have switched power control for automated testing.

Which is kinda where the Christopher Alexander quote comes into this. I suggested that I might be able to come up with a better, or at least cleaner, solution.
The IdeaPrevious experience had exposed me to the idea of using 19 inch subracks for mounting circuits inside submodules.

I originally envisaged the dev boards individually mounted inside these boxes. However preliminary investigation revealed that the enclosures were both expensive and used a lot of space which would greatly increase the rack space required to house these systems.

I decided to instead look at eurocard type subracks with carriers for the systems. Using my 3D printer I came up with a carrier design for the imx53 QSB and printed it. I used the basic eurocard size of 100mm x 160mm which would allow the cards to be used within a 3U subrack.

Once assembled it became apparent that each carrier would be able to share resources like power supply, ethernet port and serial console via USB just as the existing setup did and that these would need to be housed within the subrack.
The PrototypeThe carrier prototype was enough to get enough interest to allow me to move on to the next phase of the project. I purchased a Schroff 24563-194 subrack kit and three packs of guide rails from Farnell and assembled it.

Initially I had envisaged acquiring additional horizontal rails from Schroff which would enable constructing an area suitable for mounting the shared components behind the card area.

Unfortunately Schroff have no suitable horizontal profiles in their catalog and are another of those companies who seem to not want to actually sell products to end users but rather deal with wholesalers who do not have their entire product range!

Undaunted by this I created my own horizontal rail profile and 3D printed some lengths. The profile is designed to allow a 3mm thick rear cover sheet attached with M2.5 mounting bolts and fit rack sides in the same way the other profiles do.

At this point I should introduce some information on how these subracks are dimensioned. A standard 19 inch rack (as defined in IEC 60297) has a width of 17.75 inches(450.85mm) between the vertical posts. The height is measured in U (1.75 inches)

A subrack must obviously fit in the horizontal gap while providing as much internal space as possible. A subrack is generally either 3 or 6 U high. The width within a subrack is defined in units called HP (Horizontal Pitch) which are 0.2 inches(5.08 mm) and subracks like the Schroff generally list 84 usable HP.

However we must be careful (or actually just learn from me stuffing this up ;-) as the usable HP is not the same thing as the actual length of the horizontal rails! The enclosures actually leave and additional 0.1 inch at either end giving a total internal width of 85HP (17 inches, 431.8 mm) which leaves 0.75 inches for the subrack sides and some clearance.

The Schroff subrack allows eurocards to be slotted into rails where the card centre line is on HP boundaries, hence we describe the width of a card in the slot in terms of HP
I cannot manufacture aluminium extrusions (I know it is a personal failing) nor produce more than 100 mm long length of the plastic profile on my printer.

Even if full lengths are purchased from a commercial service (120 euros for a pair including tax and shipping) the plastic does not have sufficient mechanical strength.

The solution I came up with was somewhat innovative, as an alternative a M5 bolt into a thread in the aluminium extrusion I used a 444mm long length of 4mm threaded rod with nuts at either end. This arrangement puts the extrusion under compression and gives it a great deal of additional mechanical strength as the steel threaded rod is very strong.

Additionally to avoid having to print enough extrusion for the entire length I used some 6mm aluminium tube as a spacer between 6HP(30.48mm) wide sections of the printed extrusion.

It was intended to use a standard modular PC power supply which is 150mm wide which is pretty close to 30HP (6 inches) so it was decided to have a 6HP section of rail at that point to allow a rear mounting plate for the PSU to be attached.

This gives 6HP of profile, 21HP(106.68mm) of tube spacer, 6HP of profile, 46HP(233.68 mm) of tube spacer and a final 6HP profile summing to our total of 85HP. Of course this would be unnecessary if a full continuous 85HP rail had been purchased, but 6 of 6 HP long profile is only 51 euro a saving of 70 euro.

To provide a flat area on which to mount the power switching, Ethernet switch and USB hubs I ordered a 170 x 431 mm sheet of 3mm thick aluminium from inspiredsteel who, while being an ebay company, were fast, cheap and the cutting was accurate.

Do be sure to mention you would prefer it if any error made the sheet smaller rather than larger or it might not fit, for me though they were accurate to the tenth of a mm! If you would prefer the rear section of the rack to be enclosed when you are finished, buy a second sheet for the top. For my prototype I only purchased a 170 x 280mm sheet as I was unsure if I wanted a surface under the PSU (you do, buy the longer sheet)

Mounting the PSU was a simple case of constructing a 3 mm thick plate with the correct cutouts and mounting holes for an ATX supply. Although the images show the PSU mounted on the left hand side of the rack this was later reversed to improve cable management.

The subrack needed to provide Ethernet switch ports to all the systems. A TP-Link TL-SF1016DS 16-Port 10/100Mbps Switch was acquired and the switch board removed from its enclosure. The switch selected has an easily removed board and is powered by a single 3.3V input which is readily available from the ATX PSU.

Attention now returned to the eurocard carriers for the systems, the boards to be housed were iMX53 QSB and iMX6 SABRE Lite and a Raspberry Pi control system to act as USB serial console etc.

The carriers for both main boards needed to be 8HP wide, comprised of:

• Combined USB and Ethernet Jack on both boards was 30 mm tall
• PCB width of 2mm
• underside components of 4mm
• clearance between boards of 2mm

A wiring loom was constructed for each board giving them a connector tail long enough to allow them to be removed. This was the wrong approach! if you implement this design (or when I do it again) the connector tails on the wiring loom should present all the connections to the rear at the same depth as the Ethernet connection.

The rack cables themselves should be long enough to allow the slides to be removed but importantly it is not desirable to have the trailing cable on the cards. I guess the original eurocard designers figured this out as they designed the cards around the standard fixed DIN connectors at the back of the card slots.

We will now briefly examine a misjudgement that caused the initially deployed solution to be reimplemented. As the design was going to use USB serial converters to access the serial console a USB connected relay board was selected to switch the power to each slot. I had previously used serial controlled relay boards with a USB serial convertor however these were no longer available.

All the available USB relay boards were HID controlled, this did not initially seem to be an issue and Linux software was written to provide a reasonable interface. However it soon became apparent that the firmware on the purchased board was very buggy and crashed the host computer's USB stack multiple times.

Deployed solutionOnce it became apparent that the USB controlled power board was not viable a new design was conceived. As the Ethernet switch had ports available Ethernet controlled relay boards were acquired.

It did prove necessary to design and print some PCB support posts with M3 nut traps to allow the relay boards to be easily mounted using double sided adhesive pads.

By stacking the relay boards face to face and the Ethernet switch on top separated using nylon spacers it was possible to reduce the cable clutter and provide adequate cable routing space.

A busbar for Ground (black) and unswitched 12V (yellow) was constructed from two lengths of 5A chock block.

An issue with power supply stability was noted so a load resistor was added to the 12V supply and an adhesive thermal pad used to attach it to the aluminium base plate.

It was most fortunate that the ethernet switch mounting holes lined up very well with the relay board mounting holes allowing for a neat stack.

This second edition is the one currently in use, it has proved reliable in operation and has been successfully updated with additional carriers.

The outstanding issues are mainly centered around the Raspberry Pi control board:

• Needs its carrier fitting. It is currently just stuck to the subrack end plate.
• Needs its Ethernet cable replacing. The existing one has developed a fault post installation.
• Needs the USB hub supply separating from the device cable. The current arrangement lets the hub power the Pi which means you cannot power cycle it.
• Connect its switched supply separately to the USB hub/devices.

Shopping listThe final bill of materials (excluding labour and workshop costs) which might be useful to anyone hoping to build their own version.

Prices are in GBP currency converted where appropriate and include tax at 20% and delivery to Cambridge UK and were correct as of April 2013.

The purchasing was not optimised and for example around 20GBP could be saved just by ordering all the shapeways parts in one order.

Base subrack
Item	Supplier	Quantity	Line Price
Schroff 24563-194 subrack kit	Farnell	1	41.28
Schroff 24560-351 guide rails	Farnell	3	13.65
Schroff rack rear horizontal rail	Shapeways	2	100.00
1000mm length of 4mm threaded rod	B and Q	1	1.48
170mm x 431mm x 3mm Aluminium sheet	inspired steel	2	40.00
PSU mounting plate	Shapeways	1	35.42
PCB standoff	Shapeways	4	22.30
160mm Deep Modular PC supply	CCL	1	55.76
TP-Link TL-SF1016DS 16-Port 10/100Mbps-Switch	CCL	1	23.77
8 Channel 16A Relay Board Controlled Via Ethernet	Rapid	2	126.00
Raspberry Pi	Farnell	1	26.48
USB Serial converters	CCL	10	37.40
10 port strip style USB HUB	Ebay	1	7.00
Parts for custom Ethernet cables	RS	13	26.00
Parts for custom molex power cables (salvaged from scrap ATX PSU)	Workshop	11	11.00
33R 10W wirewound resistor for dummy load	RS	1	1.26
24pin ATX female connector pre-wired	Maplin	1	2.99
Akasa double sided thermal pad	Maplin	1	5.00
Small cable tie bases	Maplin	1	6.49
Miscellaneous cable, connectors, nylon standoffs, solder, heatshrink, zip ties, nuts, washers etc.	Workshop	1	20.00
Total for subrack			603.28

The carriers are similarly not optimally priced as over five GBP each can be saved by combining shipping on orders alone. Also the SSD drive selection was made some time ago and a newer model may be more suitable.

i.MX53 QSB carrier
Item	Supplier	Quantity	Line Price
i.MX53 QSB	Farnell	1	105.52
Intel 320 SSD 80G	CCL	1	111.83
Carrier board	Shapeways	1	30.00
combined sata data and power (15 to 20cm version)	EBay	1	5.00
Low profile right angle 5.5mm x 2.1mm barrel jack	EBay	1	0.25
Parts for 9pin serial cable extension	RS	1	5.00
Miscellaneous solder, heatshrink, nylon nuts, bolts and washers	Workshop	1	5.00
Total for carrier			262.60

i.MX6 SABRE Lite carrier
Item	Supplier	Quantity	Line Price
i.MX6 SABRE Lite	Farnell	1	128.06
Intel 320 SSD 80G	CCL	1	111.83
Carrier board	Shapeways	1	35.00
combined sata data and power (15 to 20cm version)	EBay	1	5.00
Low profile right angle 5.5mm x 2.1mm barrel jack	EBay	1	0.25
Parts for 9pin serial cable modification	RS	1	2.00
Miscellaneous solder, heatshrink, nylon nuts, bolts and washers	Workshop	1	5.00
Total for carrier			287.14

ConclusionThe solution works and in a 3U high 355mm deep subrack ten ARM development boards can be racked complete with local ethernet switching, power control and serial consoles.

The solution is neat and provides flexibility, density and reproducibility the "pile of stuff" solution failed to do.

For current prototype with nine filled slots the total cost was around 3000GBP or around 330GBP per slot which indicates a 100GBP per slot overhead over the "pile of stuff" solution. These figures omit the costs of the engineer and workshop time, which are estimated at an additional 1500GBP. Therefore a completed rack, fully filled with i.MX6 carriers costs around 5000GBP

Density could be increased if boards with lower height requirements were used however above twelve units there issues with Ethernet switch, power switch and USB port availability become a factor. For Example the 16 port Ethernet switch requires a port for uplink, one for each relay board and one for the console server which leaves only 12 ports for systems.

Addressing the outstanding issues would result in a much more user friendly solution. As the existing unit is in full time use and downtime is not easily scheduled for all ten systems, the issues are not likely to be fixed on the prototype and would have to be solved on a new build.

The solution is probably not suitable for turning into a product but that was not really the original aim. A commercial ARM blade server using this format would almost certainly use standard DIN connectors and a custom PCB design rather than adapting existing boards.

Online tech news site Ars Technica (which I recommend, by the way) recently reviewed the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition. Its unique feature: it ships with Ubuntu Linux as the default operating system. This preload deal had a few unique properties:

• It s from a major system vendor, not a no-name or third-party integrator.
• It s a desktop-oriented product, not a server.
• Most notably, the vendor actually put effort into making it work well.

That last point deserves some explanation. A few vendors have grabbed a Windows computer they sell and allowed the option to preload Linux on it, but without support; you re on your own if it doesn t work in some way, which is likely. Essentially, they save you the time of wiping Windows off the box and doing a fresh install, but not much more. But this laptop comes out of Dell s Project Sputnik, a project to put out Linux machines for developers with a DevOps flavor, and they felt the machine had to work as well as their regular products. So they actually put effort and testing into getting the laptop to run Ubuntu well, with all the drivers configured properly and tweaked to support the machine s quirks, just like they do for Windows. And so, the review is surprised to learn that Ubuntu on the XPS 13, well, just works! It s even in the title of the review. Here s reviewer Lee Hutchinson s observations:

I ve struggled before with using Linux as my full-time operating environment both at work and at home. I did it for years at work, but it was never quite as easy as I wanted it to be on an older Dell laptop, keeping dual monitor support working correctly across updates required endless fiddling with xorg.conf, and whether or not it was Nvidia s fault was totally irrelevant to swearing, cursing Past Lee, trying desperately to get his monitors to display images so he could make his 10am conference call without having to resort to running the meeting on the small laptop screen.

And thence comes the astonishment: on this Linux laptop, everything just works. Most of the review is spent on the kinds of hardware features that distinguish this from other laptops: the keyboard is like this, the screen is that resolution, it has this CPU and this much RAM and so on. Some space is devoted to impressions of the default Ubuntu 12.04 install, and some space is given to the special DevOps software, which helps the developer reproduce the software environment on the laptop when deploying apps. But before all that, Hutchinson has to put in a dig:

It s an impressive achievement, and it s also a sad comment on the overall viability of Linux as a consumer-facing operating system for normal people. I don t think anyone is arguing that Linux hasn t earned its place in the data center it most certainly has but there s no way I d feel comfy installing even newbie-friendly Ubuntu or Mint on my parents computers. The XPS 13 DE shows the level of functionality and polish possible with extra effort, and that effort and polish together means this kind of Linux integration is something we won t see very often outside of boutique OEMs.

Of course, Windows is actually worse than Linux on the hardware front when you don t get it pre-installed. Imagine if more vendors put as much effort into preinstalled Linux as they did into preinstalled Windows. In that alternate reality, I imagine people would react more like this:

Isn t that what you re looking for in a mainstream product? Rick chided. In 1996 it was: Wow look at this, I got Linux running on xxxxxxxx. Even in 2006 that was at times an accomplishment When was the last time you turned on an Apple or Windows machine and marveled that it just worked? It should be boring.

Which was, of course, the reaction Hutchinson got when discussing the review with a Linux-using friend. With Microsoft being less of a friend to the hardware vendors every day, here s a case study more of them should be paying attention to.

(actually, please set your calendars to the day before yesterday I had a mental tab on this, but it seems watching mental tabs is a low-priority task for brain.sched) Ten years ago today, I got that long awaited mail telling me I had passed all of the needed hurdles and was accepted as a Debian Developer. We were at the first third of a very long release cycle, and the general spirit of the project was clearly younger both as in "things moved easier" and "we were much more immature" Try to follow the mailing list discussions we had back then, and even with all the vitriol that's every now and then spilled on debian-whatever@lists.debian.org, it's clear we have more experience working together. And yes, the main change that ten years bring to a group of people is social. I was at DebConf in Oslo when the now-historic presentation that prompted the birth of the Debian-Women group was given Surely, Debian (and Free Software) still is by far predominantly male and white But I fel it's no longer a hostile group, much to the contrary. Over the years, I was first active (as was the norm by then) as a "solo" maintainer. When Joachim Breitner started the pkg-perl group in 2004, I joined, and was part of the group while an important part of my work was based in Perl. I joined pkg-ruby-extras, and slowly migrated my technical work from one to the other. For several years, I also maintained the Cherokee webserver. I started getting involved in DebConf organization in 2005, and (except for 2008, as I took a vacation from many topics due to personal issues). Back in 2009, I became an official delegate! I joined Jonathan McDowell handling keyring maintenance. One year later, another delegation: With Moray Allan and Holger Levsen, the three of us became the DebConf chairs. This last couple of months, I have been quite inactive in most of my Debian work. I took up teaching at the univerity, and have been devoting what amounts to basically a full time job to prepare material. I expect (hope!) this craze to reach back a "workable" level by late May, when the course finishes, and I can retake some of my usual Debian tasks. Anyway 10 years. Wow. This project is one of the longest commitments in my life. I am still very happy I joined, it still thrills me to say I am part fo this great project, it still makes me proud to be accepted as a peer by so many highly skilled and intelligent people But, as I have repeatedly stated, I see Debian more as a social project (with a technological product) than as a technical one. And as such, I am really happy to have made so many good, close friends in this project, to have the opportunity to work and exchange points of view about anything, and have this large, highly disfunctional but very closely regarded family of friends. So, guys, see you this August in Switzerland. I will be among the group celebrating we have been there for half of the project's history!