Search Results: "spa"

5 January 2007

Thijs Kinkhorst: On Inconvenient Truths

Yesterday I went to see An Inconvenient Truth with Hieke at LHC: the documentary by Al Gore about global warming. Already a classic, and well worth a visit. Gore is an excellent, erudite speakererudite, has convincing arguments and is surprisingly humourous. The film consists mainly of a recording of a speech he's been giving for about twenty years on the topic of global warming. He supports his views with clear arguments. The film is not at all fatalistic: a good point was his emphasis that we need not "go from denial to despair" but that it's actually quite well possible to solve the problem. If there's policical will. The only downside is the distinctly "American" flavour that the film has: intermezzos about his family and some emotional personal events in his life. And every person that Gore quotes is "my friend". But these points are really minor. A must see.

Michael Janssen: Setup will complete in approximately: 39 minutes

Hardware evils

I've had quite the unfortunate week, hardware-wise, here. Nothing on my end is broken, but [lj user=ceilingsarecool]'s computer is screwed but good. It all started near the beginning of this week when I started to look into her machine. It had been loud for a while, and was being unreliable in regards to applications. Running memtest86+ on it via a handy System Rescue CD I always keep around discovered a couple of stuck bits on the memory that otherwise had been perfectly fine. However, I have had sticks die before, so I called Crucial and am having the memory replaced. (thank you Lifetime warranty). While I was taking the Memory out I noticed the couse of the loudness. Apparently there was ailing fan on the south bridge, which explained her issues with USB-connected devices. No problem - I'll just order a replacement motherboard. The old FIC AD11 was getting pretty bad anyway.

The new motherboard (a PCCHIPS M810LMR) arrived yesterday, so I went through the lengthy process of removing the old motherboard and moving the CPU from one to another. Just one problem: the new motherboard didn't start up. After checking that I had everything connected right, I thought the board was DOA. This would be my first DOA ever, but as usual the place I bought from has a DOA replacement policy so I thought I just wasted 2 hours and a bunch of time replacing. Unfortunately, this isn't even the end of this sad tale of brokenness. When I put the CPU back in the old motherboard, it didn't start either. So now I'm left with two motherboards for a processor that doesn't work, I assume. I don't really have another one that I can test it out on, and I can't test the motherboards with another CPU because I don't have one.

Luckily, I have some old towers sitting here that were about to be dragged out to the dumpster. I rescued them. They're ancient, even more than the machine that was in use was. I had to burn a Maxtor MaxBlast4 CD just to get them past the 65GB barrier, and of course I need to do a "repair" install of Windows because all the hardware changed since I installed it.

Lesson of this tale: Almost-broken computers are a delicate ecosystem. Just buy a new computer - you'll have to do that in the longrun anyway. Currently I'm looking at replacing the mainboard and CPU with this combo from newegg. It's got mixed reviews, but is reasonably priced, and if DOA I am sure that newegg will replace it. I'm debating between doing this and just saving up to get a decent new motherboard and CPU (generally around $150-$250, $300 easily with new memory) later in the year. I feel pretty bad because every computer that I've given [info]ceilingsarecool to use has had issues like this. She tells me that she doesn't really care that much, and she does have a laptop which works well when the desktop has issues like this, but it's still like a poison apple.

Windows XP Setup

It doesn't seem to matter what you are installing Windows XP on. It can be 500MHz or 1.2GHz or 3.0GHz, the first time estimate that you get for finishing the install is 39 minutes. When XP was first released, I never ever had a computer that would finish that fast - it consistently took an hour or more from that state, and then I jumped to fast computers that come under the mark most of the time (although not by much). At least the estimate is monotonic, not going up to an hour. I can at least assess the progress a little more. Installing a couple times in the last few weeks has got me wondering about the origin of that estimate, and if it was going to be so inaccurate as to just guess and be constant at the beginning of the install, why include a time estimate at all?

Benjamin Mako Hill: Who Owns <em>Free Culture</em>?

The previous year saw far too much fighting over who gets to define and control the term free culture. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that these fights conflate a very important discussion about the goals of a set of nascent social movements -- or the lack thereof -- with much less important issues of semantics, definitions, and control over terms. The term is being used in a way that describes a whole lot of projects I support and participate in fully -- and a few I don't. And I think that's OK. When Erik M ller and I launched the Free Cultural Works Definition (at the time, the Free Content and Expression Definition), we struggled to find a good term for the works that we wanted to liberate. We thought about using the terms content, expression, knowledge, information, art, data and communication but each word seemed to exclude an important body of works or producers. Few musicians we knew thought of their productions as "content" while few encyclopedia writers did not. The term we liked most was culture: it defines a very broad set of practice and has very positive connotations. Of course, others had already been using the term free culture so we spent some reading up on the term and talking to the people most closely associated with it. Originally, the term seems to have its roots in the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I reread the book to get an idea for exactly what Lessig meant when he used the term but, upon reaching the end, I found myself without a good answer. The book's index included a promising entry for "Free culture, defined" which pointed to a short section in the preface:
A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. (emphasis mine)
Framed by a negative definition of what free culture is not, Lessig's definition describes the broad space between two unattainable extremes. This resulting ambiguity is fully intended: Lessig has not only spoken out against my particular suggestion but against any definition and the process of offering ex cathedra definitions or goals altogether [1]. In personal conversations about our definition, Lessig was initially very supportive. In fact, it was Lessig who introduced Erik and I to each other and suggested that we work together. What Lessig did disagree with us on however, was calling the definition the Free Culture Definition. I think that Lessig felt some sense of ownership of the term and felt that he and others had defined it and been using it in a way that was broader and incompatible with the definition we were proposing and with any definition of the type of we were suggesting. Early on, Lessig blessed a group of students to create a Free Culture student movement. Most active now in Harvard Free Culture and Free Culture NYU and but in a handful of other places as well, these groups have been involved in everything from the promotion of transgressive approaches to IP, to speech bubbles, to anti-DRM work, to protecting the right of cereal restaurants to operate. When Erik and I suggested to this group that they might benefit from adopting the Free Cultural Works Definition as a set of explicit ideals or goals for their movement, the larger part of the coalition soundly rejected the idea. Like Lessig, they wanted free culture to refer to wide variety of projects and did not feel good about describing any work by sympathetic parties as "non-ideal." Erik and I were faced with two choices: we could call our definition the Free Culture Definition and in effect engage in a power struggle with Lessig and with some portion of the free culture student movement or we could pick another term. While we don't like the alternatives as much as free culture, we didn't have a lot of trouble deciding that going with a term like free cultural work or free content and expression was the better choice. This is why I am a little worried about the recently announced UK-based Free Culture Foundation. I have nothing but respect for the founders (Matt Lee, Tom Chance, and Rob Myers) and trust them to create the type of free culture organization that I would like to see. I am very much looking forward to working closely with them on this project in the future. They seem likely to choose a set of goals and adopt a set of strategies in line with the ones I've argued for. But in that my goals and strategies have run into opposition among many of the most visible people using the term free culture in the past, that's also why I'm a little worried. SJ Klein and I were recently saying that its time to start naming organizations and projects in this area using only words in dead languages. That way, we can side-step the (unimportant) semantic arguments over who gets to control existing terms and focus on the real goal of building stronger social movements, setting goals that sound as unthreatening to each other as they actually are, and building better tools. Without semantic arguments in our way, we'll be able stronger to build coalitions and work together in all the ways we should be.
[1]

This is an important distinction because it is also possible to disagree with the first fully articulated definition but also feel that offering another set of goals -- for example, a set that allowed for commercial use or anything under current CC licenses -- was productive.

After all, I have been arguing for much longer in favor of any set of goals much longer and more strenuously than I have argued for any particular set of goals and I still feel that a set goals is much more important than any paritcular one.

Clint Adams: Grangers on a pane

Rudy told James that he was going to be in Tainbridge the following Saturday and asked if he would like to have dinner or drinks and catch up. James agreed to dinner and they met at a very mediocre Italian restaurant that incited a mild bit of regret in the both of them. Though they hadn't spoken in seven years, there was not much catching up. Rudy announced that he was moving to Tainbridge soon, and James's heart lept. Then somewhat abruptly, he asked if James had a boyfriend. James replied in the affirmative, and Rudy's heart sank. Somewhat upset, Rudy called Carlo, then asked James if he would like to have dessert with Carlo downtown. James did not particularly want to have dessert with Carlo, so he replied in the affirmative. Presently they came to be having dessert, and Carlo excitedly chattered about how he was getting Rudy a job at his firm and how everyone's lives were going to be fantastic. James developed a slight melancholy and went home to his boyfriend, Chaim. Rudy moved to Tainbridge, began working at Carlo's firm, and started spending as much time at Carlo's house as Carlo spent at Rudy's. After about a month, he began to lose hope that work began tolerable, and life started to wear him down. Carlo knew that Rudy did not want him very much, but swore to win him over, no matter what it took. Carlo was very devoted to him, but the constant doting did not make him happy. James called him to chat, and Rudy asked about his boyfriend again. James changed the subject, and Rudy jokingly suggested that James buy him a new phone. James laughed, and suggested that they get together. Rudy said that he was far too busy with work at the moment, but perhaps that would change in the future. Then a spark of hope ignited within Rudy's soul, and he began to fantasize. Rudy would leave Carlo and run to James when given the new phone which would be imbued with so much unspoken meaning. So too, a dream nagged at James's mind. Finally, in a moment of weakness, he bought a new phone which he imagined Rudy would like. Rudy was afraid, so he continued to say that he was too busy to spend any time with James. James continued to grow frustrated until at last Rudy was free for dinner. So they made a date, and James gift-wrapped the phone and brought it along. Just a few minutes before their scheduled rendezvous, Rudy called and asked if it would be acceptable if Carlo joined them for dinner. James did not want Carlo to join them, so he answered in the affirmative. Rudy avoided any opportunity for him to be alone with James, and James grew increasingly frustrated. When the bill arrived, everyone just stared at it contentiously until Carlo finally announced begrudgingly that he would pay for everyone. Carlo and Rudy returned to Rudy's house, and James retired to his. James became more downcast and berated himself for being pathetic enough to buy the phone. Rudy became even more impatient, finally losing control and calling James to scream at him for being so inconsiderate as to make Carlo pay for the dinner. James was very defensive, and their relationship grew very strained. One day, Rudy called James and invited him to dinner immediately after work. James accepted, and headed to the restaurant. When he got there, Rudy was alone. James groaned, for he did not have the phone with him. They had a very civil dinner, Rudy paid for both of them, and then they went home. Rudy gave up all hope that James would buy him a phone. They never saw each other again.

4 January 2007

Russell Coker: monitors for developers

Michael Davies recently blogged that all developers should have big screens. This news has been around for a while, the most publicity for the idea came from Microsoft Research where they did a study showing that for certain tasks a 50% performance increase could be gained from a larger monitor.

If you consider that a good software developer will get paid about $100K and it's widely regarded that in a corporate environment the entire costs for a worker (including management, office space, etc) is double their base salary then you consider each developer to be worth $200K per annum. Therefore larger and more monitors could potentially give a benefit in excess of $100K per annum (we assume that the value provided by the developer is greater than their salary - apart from the dot-com boom that's usually the case).

It's quite obvious that you can get a really great monitor configuration for significantly less than $100K and that it will remain quite current for significantly more than a year (monitor technology advances comparatively slowly so a good monitor should last at least four years).

Some time ago I researched this matter for a client. I convinced all the managers in my area, I convinced a bunch of colleagues to buy bigger monitors for their homes (and bought one myself), but unfortunately senior management saw it as a waste of money. I was trying to convince them that people who were being paid >$100,000 should be each assigned a $400 monitor. Sadly they believed that spending the equivalent of less than a day's wages per employee was not justified.

If I was in a management position I would allocate an amount of money for each developer to spend on hardware or conferences at their own discretion. I would make that amont of money a percentage of the salary of each employee, and I would also allow them to assign some of their share to a colleague if they had a good reason for it (EG if a new hire needed something expensive that would exceed their budget for the first year). I think that people who are good programmers are in the best position to judge what can best be done to improve their own productivity, and that allowing them to make their own choices is good for morale.

On a more technical level I have a problem with getting a big monitor. I do most of my work on a laptop because I travel a lot. I don't travel as much as I did while living in Europe but still do a lot of coding in many strange places. I started writing my Postal benchmark in the hotel restaurant of a Bastion hotel in Utrecht during one of the worst recorded storms in Europe (the restaurant had huge windows and it was inspirational for coding). I wrote the first version of my ZCAV benchmark in Denver airport while waiting for a friend.

What I need is a good way of moving open windows from my laptop to a big external display and then back again. I don't want to logout before moving my machine. With a Macintosh this is quite possible (I'm using a OS/X machine while working for a client and the only thing that has impressed me is the monitor support). With Linux things aren't so easy, it's supposed to be possible but I haven't heard any unqualified success stories yet.

I guess I could try setting up XDMCP between my laptop and a desktop machine with some big displays and logout before moving.

Any suggestions?

Andrew Pollock: [life] 8 flights in 2 weeks (visiting Australia)

(and I'm still catching up on my blogging backlog) So Sarah and I returned to Australia for two weeks at the end of November/start of December. The reason for the timing was my grandmother's 90th birthday, but we decided to spend 5 days on Heron Island for a belated honeymoon as well. We flew back with Qantas, who are always a pleasure to fly with internationally, directly to Sydney. I'm getting better at sleeping on that long-haul. We then flew domestically up to Brisbane on Saturday, after spending Friday in Sydney, checking out the Sydney Google office and catching up with as many friends and family as time permitted. Saturday was a bit of an "open house" at my parent's place for my grandmother's birthday. She now lives in Toowoomba, but lived in the Sandgate/Bracken Ridge area for the majority of her life, so it was easier for her to come down to Bracken Ridge, and for everyone to come around to my parent's place than for everyone to go up to Toowoomba to see her. I didn't keep count of how many people dropped in through the course of the day, but I'd hazard a guess at about 40 or 50. It was really good to see some relatives on my Mum's side of the family that I probably hadn't seen in nearly 10 years. It was also good to see my Aunty and Uncle and one of my cousins from Vanuatu (who is now in New Zealand), who I haven't seen for a while either. On Sunday, we went out for dinner with just a bunch of the more immediate family. On Monday we flew up to Gladstone, and then had a helicopter transfer out to Heron Island, where we stayed until Friday. Heron is a fantastic little island, and I highly recommend it if you want to relax and disconnect from the world for a while. It feels very isolated, there's no telephones in the rooms, and there's only really slow Internet access via a couple of coin operated kiosks. It's a really tiny island as well. Only about three kilometres in circumference. The snorkeling is absolutely fantastic. You can see so much marine life from straight off the beach. We also saw turtles coming up the beach to lay eggs in the mornings. I certainly felt very relaxed afterwards. Photos from the week are here. We had more time to spare on the way back, so we took the launch back to the mainland and then flew back to Brisbane for four days. Sarah and my sister organised a bit of a surprise dinner for my 30th birthday with a bunch of family and friends, which was a total surprise for me, and very nice of them. On Tuesday night we flew down to Canberra and stayed with our old neighbours and caught up with friends down there. I also spent a day racking and installing the new mirror.linux.org.au server, but wasn't able to cut over to it at that time. On Thursday, we drove off into the outback to find Alli and Rusty's new property, a 1000 acres near Braidwood. They really are living remote, but it sounds like they've got some very exciting plans for the place, and I look forward to checking out what they've done when we're next able to visit. Then on Friday morning, we drove out at an ungodly hour, headed back for Sydney, to fly out for San Francisco (via Los Angeles, unfortunately) again. I'm not sure when we'll be visiting Australia again. We're intending to get our respective parents over here to visit us during the year, this year, and not return for Christmas. I'm unable to attend linux.conf.au this year, but would like to go to Melbourne for it next year.

Jeff Bailey: Ramblings

* The GE Soft White electric 60 bulbs are CFLs that are much more pleasant than the other's we've tried. Sometimes it's surprising that name-brand can be better. =) We've now got 6 of them in the house. We'll have more as soon as I find a brand that works in a dimmer. I've read that they exist, and this brand doesn't say "not for use in dimmers" like the other ones do. We'll see. =)

The weather in Montr al is supposed to be a high of 16 C on Saturday. In January. C'mon people, it's time to do more than we have been. I don't care if you don't believe using less electricity, less gas, eating less meat, etc. will help fix global warming. Doing nothing certainly *won't* help and until you have a better plan, put down your cheese burger, get out of your SUV and bloody well go for a walk to buy some CFLs.

* [info]auzure_skies is 33 weeks pregnant today! =)

* PHP 5 sucks far less than I thought it would. The object model seems to actually match what I expect for umpteen years of other programming. Further, the Eclipse PHP editor has already helped me catch some mistakes. I did wind up installing IBM's JDK for PPC in order to get the speed to where I needed it to be, though. Java 7 should rock. =) I've been hacking on a project for the church called 'ConnectUU', and the code had crufted pretty badly over a handful of maintainers and upgrades from what looks like early php3. One file in particular was special:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 jbailey users 623863 Dec 17 02:37 events.php

And that's been split nicely now into 37 classes.

* Various friends, family etc have asked to be notified when the child is born. The best I can say is 'well, alright'. If seeing it here on the LJ isn't good enough, let me know and I'll add you to the super-secret-mailing-list. But don't expect anything exciting. Probably something along the lines of 'Showtime, Synergy'.

* Oh: Happy New Year! For this year I've made no resolutions. I can't predict my future more than about 6 weeks out, and I'd be totally fooling myself if I claimed otherwise. But hey. =)

* We've totally finished moving now. Pictures are coming soon, but I'm trying to get ones without boxes and mess in the background. I've put a few up so far at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbailey/tags/4537/

3 January 2007

Andreas Schuldei: GTD software, Work meetings

Since I am on "maternity leave" now and basicly run the household and try to keep the children entertained, my time to get things done is randomly fragmented and I want to plan the things better that I have on the plate. Liw's blog post reminded me of GTD and today I was looking for planning tools. On Wikipedia's GTD page they mention two: A Firefox plugin to use with gmail (and therefor everywhere where I would have internet) and ThinkingRock, a java app which aparently would fit on a USB key. Of course i wonder which one might be better? The ThinkingRock one seems to be a heavy weight GTD tool. Does that spoil GTD's light weight character? I watched the demos and it seems to be pretty feature complete. I would like to hear from people who use GTD and am interested in their oppinions. Thanks!

Debian Work Meetings - Extremadura evaluation
8 people already managed to send in their evaluations or feedback mails to me regarding the Extremadura work meetings. That is surprisingly few, given the fact that we had 6 meetings with an average of 20 people. And so far I got only one reply from someone who could not attend eventhough she was very interested, explaining why (different continent, too far, too expensive) etc. I had expected more replies in that category, given that we had mostly europeans coming to Extremadura and I had intended to spread out future meetings over the globe more evenly. So I ask both those that attended and did not manage to send in some evaluation and also those that would have liked to come and could not to mail me!

Uwe Hermann: 23C3 - Day 2, 3, 4

Sputnik A bit late, but here are some more random notes from 23C3:

Russell Coker: Xen shared storage

disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1,hda,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1-swap,hdb,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1-drbd,hdc,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/san,hdd,w!' ]

For some work that I am doing I am trying to simulate a cluster that uses fiber channel SAN storage (among other things). The above is the disk line I'm using for one of my cluster nodes, hda and hdb are the root and swap disks for a cluster node, hdc is a DRBD store (DRBD allows a RAID-1 to be run across the cluster nodes via TCP), and hdd is a SAN volume. The important thing to note is the "w!" mode for the device, this means write access is granted even in situations whre Xen thinks it's unwise (IE it's being used by another Xen node or is mounted on the dom0). I've briefly tested this by making a filesystem on /dev/hdd on one node, copying data to it, then umounting it and mounting it on another node to read the data.

There are some filesystems that support having multiple nodes mounting the same device at the same time, these include CXFS, GFS, and probably some others. It would be possible to run one of those filesystems across nodes of a Xen cluster. However that isn't my aim at this time. I merely want to have one active node mount the filesystem while the others are on standby.

One thing that needs to be solved for Xen clusters is fencing. When a node of a cluster is misbehaving it needs to be denied access to the hardware in case it recovers some hours later and starts writing to a device that is now being used by another node. AFAIK the only way of doing this is via the xm destroy command. Probably the only way of doing this is to have a cluster node ssh to the dom0 and then run a setuid program that calls xm destroy.

Russell Coker: multiple ethernet devices in Xen

It seems that no-one has documented what needs to be done to correctly run multiple Ethernet devices (with one always being eth0 and the other always being eth1) in a Linux Xen configuration (or if it is documented then google wouldn't find it for me).

vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:00:01:01', 'mac=00:16:3e:00:02:01, bridge=xenbr1' ]

Firstly I use a vif line such as the above in the Xen configuration. This means that there is one ethernet device with the hardware address of 00:16:3e:00:01:01 and another with the address of 00:16:3e:00:02:01. I just updated this section, the 00:16:3e prefix has officially been allocated to the Xen project for virtual machines. Therefore on your Xen installation you can do whatever you like with MAC addresses in that range without risk of competing with real hardware. The Xen code uses random MAC addresses in that range if you let it.

I have two bridge devices, xenbr0 and xenbr1. I only need to specify one as Xen can figure the other out.

Now when my domU's boot they assign ethernet device names from the range eth0 to eth8. If there is only one virtual Ethernet device then it is always eth0 and things are easy. But for multiple devices I need to rename the interfaces.

eth0 mac 00:16:3e:00:01:01
eth1 mac 00:16:3e:00:02:01

This is done through the ifrename program (package name ifrename in Debian). I create a file named /etc/iftab with the above contents and then early in the boot process (before the interfaces are brought up) the devices will be renamed.

In the Red Hat model you edit the files such as /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0 and change the line that starts with HWADDR to cause a device rename on boot.

Update: the original version of this post used MAC addresses with a prefix of 00:00:00, the officially allocated prefix for Xen is 00:16:3e which I now use. Thanks to the person who commented about this.

Amaya Rodrigo: My health is back

After five weeks of medical leave, taking so many pills in the morning that it was scary, antibiotics, painkillers that made my sight blurry, pain, weakness, loosing 12 kilos... I am back at work! The dist-upgrade was absolutely wonderful :)

Even though I am feeling pretty well, I still sometimes feel that I am not yet 100% recovered, but my strenght is coming back and I am feelling full with energy and optimism. My slight OCD is also much much better, and and I am more focused, happier, and letting go of old grudges. 

After a nice meal on new year's luch, I even think my (otherwise non-existant) relationship with a good part of my family can be somewhat fixed. At least we were able to treat each other in a respectful manner for many hours, in a relaxed, smily climate. And I have a 15 year old cousin, Mar a, that I had not seen in ten years and that has turned out to be a real swetheart! How much I would like her to get involved with computers! ;)

It is still hard to adjust to the noise at my office, the human company, and I forgot all the root passwords! That's a cool one :)
Thank The Flying Spahetthi Monster (without the meatballs) for encrypted partitions on usb keys with ssh keys, and ssh-agent.

/me loads the old-transition-nmu-machine-gun and looks around.


Also note that Droidy was kind enough to update the TheDebianChoirOfComplaints, with the new performances: Hamburg and St. Petersburg. Both are really worth seeing, and I am working on getting the lyrics for both of them. Volunteers?

Eric Dorland: Digital Cable? Why?

I'm a simple guy. I don't necessarily need the latest technology, especially if it's more annoying than the previous tech. I also don't need a lot of TV channels. In Montr al I just had basic, analog cable. That was just fine, and I have a TV tuner card in my box and I could watch TV from the comfort of my chair.

Now I move to Brooklyn and my only choice for cable is Time Warner. Fine. So I'll just get Internet and super basic analog cable. But they don't offer analog cable anymore. In fact they're completely turning it off come January 15. The replacement is digital cable, which requires some sort of a set top box, which is just another large piece of hardware taking up space and I wouldn't be able to change channels using the computer, let alone PVR type applications. There seems to be a standard called CableCARD to allow you to not have a cable box, but there doesn't seem to be tuner cards out there that work under Linux and take these cards. I find this all really annoying. No wonder people turn to Bittorrent for their TV.

2 January 2007

Jorge Salamero Sanz: This blog is now colorized !

After some comments on this post by Javier Candeira I've read more carefully Coloriuris license and I've revoked the license because I've some doubts that I should clear before anything. Also some statement are not as accurate as should be. I should not post anything when I've to study. Quick posts can be very dangerous :-/. Also I've closed comments because I've noticed that spam was hitting my blog. Sorry, I hope to fix this after exams. ... and I'm not talking about colors. Coloriuris is an organization that provides free licenses with the same spirit of Creative Commons. This well-known licenses are only applicable in the Common Law, countries like Spain, Portugal and the whole Latin America are based on the Roman Law where Coloriuris licenses should be used instead CC. For this blog I've choosen Coloriuris blue which allows comercial use and derivated works keeping the same license.

1 January 2007

Russell Coker: installing Xen domU on Debian Etch

I have just been installing a Xen domU on Debian Etch. I'll blog about installing dom0 later when I have a test system that I can re-install on (my production Xen machines have the dom0 set up already). The following documents a basic Xen domU (virtual machine) installation that has an IP address in the 10.0.0.0/8 private network address space and masquerades outbound network data. It is as general as possible.

lvcreate -n xen1 -L 2G /dev/vg

Firstly use the above command to create a block device for the domU, this can be a regular file but a LVM block device gives better performance. The above command is for a LV named xen1 on an LVM Volume Group named vg.

mke2fs -j /dev/vg/xen1

Then create the filesystem with the above command.

mount /dev/vg/xen1 /mnt/tmp
mount -o loop /tmp/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso /mnt/cd
cd /mnt/tmp
debootstrap etch . file:///mnt/cd/
chroot . bin/bash
vi /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/hosts /etc/hostname
apt-get update
apt-get install libc6-xen linux-image-xen-686 openssh-server
apt-get dist-upgrade

Then perform the basic Debian install with the above commands. Make sure that you change to the correct directory before running the debootstrap command. The /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname files need to be edited to have the correct contents for the Xen image (the default is an empty /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname has the name of the parent machine). The file /etc/apt/sources.list needs to have the appropriate configuration for the version of Debian you use and for your preferred mirror. libc6-xen is needed to stop a large number of kernel warning messages on boot. It's a little bit of work before you get the virtual machine working on the network so it's best to do these commands (and other package installs) before the following steps. After the above type exit to leave the chroot and run umount /mnt/tmp.

lvcreate -n xen1-swap -L 128M /dev/vg
mkswap /dev/vg/xen1-swap

Create a swap device with the above commands.

auto xenbr0
iface xenbr0 inet static
pre-up brctl addbr xenbr0
post-down brctl delbr xenbr0
post-up iptables -t nat -F
post-up iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -s 10.1.0.0/24 -j MASQUERADE
address 10.1.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
bridge_fd 0
bridge_hello 0
bridge_stp off

Add the above to /etc/network/interfaces and use the command ifup xenbr0 to enable it. Note that this masquerades all outbound data from the machine that has a source address in the 10.1.0.0/24 range.

net.ipv4.conf.default.forwarding=1

Put the above in /etc/sysctl.conf, run sysctl -p and echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/forwarding to enable it.

cp /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-3-xen-686 /boot/xen-initrd-18-3.gz

Set up an initial initrd (actually initramfs) for the domU with a command such as the above. Once the Xen domU is working you can create the initrd from within it which gives a smaller image.

kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-xen-686"
ramdisk = "/boot/xen-initrd-18-3.gz"
memory = 64
name = "xen1"
vif = [ '' ]
disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1,hda,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1-swap,hdb,w' ]
root = "/dev/hda ro"
extra = "2 selinux=1 enforcing=0"

The above is a sample Xen config file that can go in /etc/xen/xen1. Note that this will discover an appropriate bridge device by default, if you only plan to have one bridge then it's quite safe, if you want multiple bridges then things will be a little more complex. Also note that there are two block devices created as /dev/hda and /dev/hdb, obviously if we wanted to have a dozen block devices then we would want to make them separate partitions with a virtual partition table. But in most cases a domU will be a simple install and won't need more than two block devices.

xm create -c xen1

Now start the Xen domU with the above command. The -c option means to take the Xen console (use ^] to detach). After that you can login as root at the Xen console with no password, now is a good time to set the password.

Run the command apt-get install udev, this could not be done in the chroot before as it might mess up the dom0 environment. Edit /etc/inittab and disable gettys on tty2 to tty6, I don't know if it's possible to use them (the default and only option for xen console commands is tty1) and in any case you would not want 6, saving a few getty processes will save some memory.

Now you should have a basically functional Xen domU. Of course a pre-requisite for this is having a machine with a working dom0 installation. But the dom0 part is easier (and I will document it in a future blog post).

David Welton: One Year of Rails, on_idle plugin

I've been using Rails for about a year, and I am, in general, quite satisfied. It really is a big step forward in terms of web programming, and I've found the whole experience very enjoyable. In a year I've managed to crank out a number of sites in my spare time (in between various other activities such as the occasional bike ride and Hecl hacking): As promised, one of my goals is to shift a bit towards producing open source software as a side effect of revenue generating work. The first small result of that is the on_idle plugin I packaged up for Rails. It's the code that Stuff To Do uses to tell whether people are active or not. Installing it should be as simple as: 
./script/plugin install http://svn.dedasys.com/public/on_idle
It's just a few lines of Javascript code that are wrapped up in a way that makes it trivial to use from Rails views: 
def on_idle(timeout, options, wakeoptions)
<%= on_idle(600,  :url =>   :action => 'notify_idle'  ,
                  :url =>   :action => 'notify_wake'  ) %>
Let me know if there is anything I should fix/change/improve. If this plugin works out, I will post, in short order, a plugin that improves the default Rails drag and drop functionality.

Jaldhar Vyas: Should Auld Acquaintence Be Forgot?

I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice. I am worried about Debian. Are you worried often? Yes! I see... Well, why do you say this is so? The Debian project seems to be quite dysfunctional. What makes you believe the debian project seems to be quite dysfunctional? We keep having these massive flame wars. Earlier you said you felt worried? What causes you to be worried? It doesn't seem right that a group of people who ostensibly have the same goal should bicker so much. And its the same topics over and over again. Is it because a group of people who ostensibly have the same goal should bicker so much that you came to me? Yes. You are a very cheap^wgood therapist. It has been suggested that Debian could profit from therapy. Does it bother you that debian could profit from therapy? I would hope that a group of mature, intelligent, professionals could settle their differences on their own. Maybe your plans have something to do with this? I have no plans really. I just want to work on a great Linux distribution. How does it feel to want? What we have built is so great but sometimes it seems that Debian doesn't get taken seriously when outsiders see all this infighting. What happens when outsiders see all this infighting? They think we are just amateurs and they wonder why they should make their future endeavors dependant on a bunch of flighty narcissists. Do you really think that?

No of course I don't. Debian is just as good if not better than most "serious" operating systems and most of the time Debian developers do work together well and settle their differences amicably. But there are a few people who can't and they really hurt our image. I see... Tell me more.

There are some people who just can't work with each other and our current way of dealing with such conflicts is at a dead end. As long as issues are left unresolved and they are forced together, these negative people will just keep bickering and bringing the rest of us down. What are your feelings towards bickering and bringing the rest of us down? I feel that at this point only answer is for the people who can't alter their behavior to be asked to leave or to remove themselves. What do you think? Speaking as a trained psychiatrist I think you are all bonkers and I'm switching to gNewSense.

31 December 2006

Russell Coker: memes that damage debian

The Debian project is afflicted with several damaging memes. One that is causing problems at the moment is the idea that life should be fair. Unfortunately life is inherently unfair, it's not fair that those of us who were born in first-world countries (the majority of Debian developers) have so many more opportunities than most people who are born in "developing" countries, and things just continue to be unfair as you go through life. Unfair things will happen to you, deal with it and do what is necessary to have a productive life!

When one developer has regular long-term disputes with many other developers the conclusion is that the one person who can't get along is at fault. We can debate about whether one or two significant disputes are a criteria for this or whether having a dozen developers disagreeing with them is the final point. But the fact is that if there is a large group of people who work together well and an individual who can't work with any of them then there is only one realistic option, the individual needs to go find some people that they can work with - they can resign or be expelled. The fact that something slightly unfair might have happened a year ago is no reason for pandering to an anti-social developer. The fact that expelling a developer for being anti-social is unfair to them is no reason for damaging the productivity of all Debian developers.

Another problemmatic meme is the idea that we have to tolerate everyone - even those who are intolerant (known as the Limp Liberal meme). When someone has no tolerance for others (EG being racist or practicing sexual discrimination) then they have no place in a community such as Debian. They need to be removed sooner rather than later. All Debian developers know the problems caused by deferring such expulsion.

The final damaging meme that I have observed is you can't force a volunteer to do any work. On it's own that statement is OK, but the interpretation commonly used in Debian is you can't take their job away from them either. The most common example of this is when a developer is not maintaining a package and someone else does an NMU (non-maintainer upload) to fix a bug, the developer then flames the person who did this (usually to fix a severe bug). It seems to be believed that a Debian developer owns their packages and has a right to prevent other people from working on them. This attitude also extends to all other aspects of Debian, there are many positions of responsibility in Debian that are not being adequately performed and for which volunteers are offering to help out but being refused.

The idea of the GPL is that when a program is not being developed adequately it can be taken over by another person. However when that program is in a Debian package the developer who owns it can refuse to allow this.

30 December 2006

Russell Coker: more about vista security

While reading the discussion of Vista security on Bruce Schneier's blog it occurred to me that comparing the issues of DRM that face MS with the issues faced by SE Linux developers provides some benefits.

SE Linux is designed to enable the owner of a computer to effectively enforce security policies to protect their system integrity and the confidentiality of their data. Some of the SE Linux users (military users) use all the available features, but most people only use the targeted policy which provides a sub-set of the system integrity and data confidentiality protections that are available to give a greater ease of use.

Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux ship with the SE Linux targeted policy enabled by default. This policy is not something that most users notice. The main program that is commonly used which might have an issue with the default SE Linux policy is Apache. Fedora and RHEL systems that do not run Apache (which is most of them) can run SE Linux with almost no costs.
setsebool -P httpd_disable_trans 1
/etc/init.d/httpd restart
It seems clear to me that there is no good reason for disabling SE Linux by default. There are reasons for running a particular daemon in the unconfined_t domain via the FOO_disable_trans boolean. EG to run Apache without restrictions you would type the above commands.

In spite of the SE Linux targeted policy being so easy to use, the fact that it prevents certain daemon compromises from allowing immediate control of the system, and also prevents some kernel exploits from working, there are still some people who turn it off when installing Fedora and RHEL systems and advise others to do so.

Given this great fear of some people to use a technology that is specifically designed for their own benefit I find it difficult to imagine that any users will be inclined to accept the MS DRM technology that is specifically designed to go against their interests.

ESR claims that the 64bit transition is the critical period for Linux to move on the desktop. While he makes many interesting observations I don't find his argument convincing. Firstly current P4 CPUs with PAE can handle significantly more than 4G of RAM (64G is possible now). Secondly it's quite possible to run a 64bit kernel with 32bit applications, this means that you can use a 64bit kernel to access >64G of RAM with each 32bit application getting direct access to something slightly less than 4G of virtual memory. As ESR's point seems based on total system memory the 4G per application doesn't seem to be an issue. As an aside the only applications I've used which could benefit from >4G are database servers (in the broadest interpretation - consider an LDAP server as a database) and JVM environments. Again it would not be difficult to ship an OS with mostly 32bit code that has a 64bit kernel, JVM, and database servers.

I hope that Vista will be a good opportunity for mass transition to Linux. Vista offers little that users desire, many things that will hurt them, and is expensive too!

With Vista you pay more for the OS and more for the hardware (Vista has the usual excessive Windows hardware requirements plus the extra hardware for TPM encryption) without providing anything substantial in return.

What I want to see next is support for Security Enhanced X to protect desktop environments against hostile X clients. This will make a significant difference to the security of Linux desktop environments and provide another significant benefit for choosing Linux over Windows. While MS is spending their effort in making their OS act against the best interests of the users we will keep making Linux enforce the access controls that users need to protect their systems. Hopefully Linux users will choose to use SE-X, but if they don't they are given the freedom to make that choice - unlike the poor sods who use Windows.

Wouter Verhelst: f-spot vs digiKam

Since I have been having a digital camera since a few weeks now, I've had a need for an application to manage my pictures. The two applications that people have pointed me to are f-spot and digiKam, which also seem to be the most popular applications in this category for Linux. Since I use neither KDE nor GNOME as my user interface, it doesn't matter much to me which I install; so I've tried them both. Their feature set is quite different; unfortunately, though, they both have some features which the other doesn't, which makes choosing for one or the other rather hard. Since their on-disk format is rather different, it's impossible to use them both at the same time—at least not if I don't want to enter commentary and tags each and every time; so I'll have to choose one or the other based on their features. Since that requires me to actually compare them, I thought I might as well make a blog post out of that. Note, though, that this comparison is in no way intended to be complete; it only compares those features which I really care about. Features digiKam F-spot My opinion After having used f-spot for a few weeks before I tried digiKam, I have to be honest and say that I don't like the concept of albums. They do not add value; everything they allow you to express can equally well be expressed with tags. Additionally, one can categorize a picture in only one album, whereas it's possible to categorize pictures in as many tags as you would want. Just creating one album which contains all my pictures, with tagging used for categorizing, doesn't help either; that way, digiKam would store all my pictures in a single flat directory, which would become problematic when the number in the picture filenames wraps around. I do love the scoring thing in digiKam. A favourites tag just doesn't cut it; and creating five tags for scoring would make things like find all pictures that have a score of three or above rather cumbersome, and sort by score outright impossible. However, the fact that it's not possible to filter by score makes it all rather useless. The export to gallery function in digiKam is horrible. I have to select my pictures blindly; none of the metadata which I tack on them can be used to help select which pictures I want. Workaround: use whatever filtering is available to select the right pictures and add them to a temporary album from which I then upload all pictures, but that's silly (and requires disk space for no good reason). Additionally, there seems to be a bug in the interface, which means that I have to babysit an upload (with no workaround). And I can't even view my pictures to spend the time waiting. Bah. F-spot isn't without problems of its own. Due to a bug in mono, it crashes rather often on my PowerPC laptop. When that happens, it can't be restarted until the X server is restarted. Workaround: use Xnest, but that makes it impossible to view pictures in full-screen mode. Also, since f-spot is a GNOME application, its options dialog is as helpful as a pair of soccer shoes when you're out swimming. No surprises there. Conclusion Which one do I prefer? I'm not sure. The digiKam upload interface is positively annoying, especially the bug which requires me to click continue after every picture. For that alone, I might ditch it. On the other hand, it has a slew of interesting features (the scoring, to name one) that f-spot lacks, and that pull me more towards digiKam. I guess I'll have to give it a few days of thought. But hey, at least I know where I stand now.

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