Kudos to Adam Kennedy, who explained more details on his very controversial Acme::Playmate talk and sort of apologized for his failed attempt at satire. He also writes about it here.

Food for thought:

• When you make a mistake, don t look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power. (Hugh White)
• Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from. (Al Franken, Oh, the Things I Know , 2002)
• Assert your right to make a few mistakes. If people can't accept your imperfections, that's their fault. -- Dr. David M. Burns

That would solve so many problems. LaTeX is still unbeaten in terms of print quality. It's really powerful. Since I've been using it, if started to really despise Writer and Impress. latex-beamer slides look just so much better than any PowerPoint presentation I've ever seen. However, it's far from easy to use. The syntax is a pain, and I don't think it's a feature that you can actuall program in this language. Similar things hold for BibTeX - there are so many things to do wrong there that will go a long way unnoticed. I've recently helped a friend to fix some BibTeX files. It was a pain, there was so much wrong in there... for example URLs. People noticed that they can't just always copy URLs in there, because some characters are special to LaTeX. But instead of using the \url macro, which would also have solved linewrap problem, they started doing the most obscure things (and of course they did not read the FAQ we wrote for them or asked how to do it right), for example adding whitespace to enforce line wraps, replace _ and & with whitespace etc., wrap uppercase chars in - an awful mess. The same thing with the author values. They just wrote "First author, second author" without considering that this might be interpreted according to the common "Last Name, First Name" scheme: e.g. "van Damme, Jean-Claude". (The correct syntax is "First Author and Second Author and Author, Third" - use "and" for separating even when you have more than two authors.) XML is better here. It's rules of escaping are generic and application-independant, and thus you'll have much more tools that know how to do it right, and you only have to learn it once, not for each application. The structuring also comes in handy:

  <authors>
    <author firstname="Foo" lastname="Bar" />
    <author firstname="Gnarf" lastname="Quux" />
  </authors>

is a bit more to write, but it avoids parsing errors. And with good utilies it's not particularly hard to write. Now don't point me to XML-FO. I know about formatting objects, the paper I submitted to the eXtreme Markup Languages conferences was done with FO. It's just that they don't come anywhere close to LaTeX in terms of print quality, the only OpenSource implementation I'm aware of didn't make much progress (but they seem to have released a rewrite in the meantime) and was lacking important features, and MathML has a horrible syntax mess (apart from Apache FOP not having MathML support). XSLT also has an annoying syntax. Too verbose and totally unreadable once you do things that are a bit more complex than the simplest examples. I wish we had something that gives a similar print quality to LaTeX, that uses some XML format (or something similar structured and easy to parse, like Xcerpt data terms, but thats basically equivalent to XML, just a bit more compact; Lisp S-expressions and OEM are other examples) that allows the easy creation of third party utilities and does away with all the black magic involved... Yeah, IMHO it's really time for a rewrite of LaTeX with a modern language design. And a large, unified standard library; plain LaTeX sucks, you can barely use it without extras such as url, hyperref, latex-beamer. [Update: yes, I'm aware of bibtexML, but it's just as bad, you still need hacks such as "the C language" or using "and" to separate multiple authors. I'm also aware of docbook and docbook to latex converters; that definitely is a workaround, but doesn't solve the real problems] (Comments in my blog are intentionally disabled. So if you want to voice your general dislike of anything with XML, abuse your own blog!)

Are comment-less blogs missing the spirit of blogging?

It seems to me that the most significant development about blogging is the idea that anyone can write. Prior to blogs news-papers were the only method of writing topical articles for a mass audience. To be able to write for a news-paper you had to be employed there or get a guest writing spot (not sure how you achieve this but examples are common).

Anyone can start a blog, if there is a community that you are part of which has a planet then it's not difficult to get your blog syndicated and have some reasonable readership. Even the most popular planets have less readers than most small papers, but that combined with the ease of forwarding articles gives a decent readership.

It seems to me that the major characteristic that separates a blog from an online newspaper is the low entry requirements, anyone can create one.

Every news-paper that is remotely worth reading has a letters column to publish feedback from readers. Of course it's heavily moderated and getting even 50% of your letters published is something to be proud of. But it does create a limited forum to discuss the articles that are published.

It seems to me that creating a blog and denying the readers the ability to comment on it is in some ways making the blog less open than a news-paper column. When such blogs are aggregated in a community planet feed it seems that they go against the community spirit. It also drives people to make one-line blog posts in response, which I regard as a bad thing.

The comments on my blog are generally of a high quality, I've had a few anonymous flame comments - but you have to learn to deal with a few flames if you are going to use the net, and people who are afraid to publish their real name to a flame don't deserve much attention. I've had one comment which might have been an attempt to advertise a product (so I deleted it just to be safe). But apart from that the comments are generally very good. I've learned quite a few useful things from blog comments, sometimes I mention having technical problems in blog posts and blog comments provide the solution. Other times they suggest topics for further writing.

There are facilities for moderated blog comments that some people use. If you have a really popular blog then it's probably a good idea to moderate the comments to avoid spam, but I'm not that popular yet and most people who blog will never be so popular. At this time blog moderation would be more trouble for me than it's worth.

In conclusion I believe that the web should be about interactive communication in all areas, it should provide a level playing field where the participation of all individuals is limited only by time and ability. Refusing comments on blogs is a small step away from that goal.

At OSDC Mary Gardiner gave a talk titled The Planet Feed Reader: Better Living Through Gravity. During the course of the presentation she expressed the opinion that short dialog based blog entries are a sign of a well running planet.

Certainly if blog posts respond to each other then there is a community interaction, and if that is what you desire from a planet then it can be considered a good thing. Mary seemed focussed on planets for internal use rather than for people outside the community which makes the interaction more important.

However I believe that planets are not a direct substitute for mailing lists. On a mailing list you can reply to a message agreeing with it and expect that the same people who saw the original message will see your reply. Blogs however are each syndicated separately so a blog post in response to someone else's blog should be readable on it's own. A one line post saying "John is right" provides little value to people who don't know who John is, especially if you don't provide a link to John's post that you agree with.

On Planet Debian there have been a few contentious issues discussed where multiple people posted one-line blog entries. I believe that the effective way to communicate their opinions would either be to write a short essay (maybe 2-3 paragraphs) explaining their opinion and the reasons for it, or if they have no new insight to contribute then they should summarise the discussion.

I believe that a planet such as Planet Debian or Planet Linux Australia should not only be a forum for people who are in the community but also an introduction to the community for people who are outside. AOL posts don't help in this regard.

One final thing to note is that blogs already do have a feature for allowing "me too" responses, it's the blog comment facility...

PS Above is a picture of day 59 of the beard, it was taken on the 5th of December (I've been a little slack with beard pictures).

I'm currently in (the really lovely) Philadelphia airport again, waiting for my connecting flight to San Francisco. I'm rapidly arriving at the conclusion that it is easier to enter the US once you've landed on US soil, than it is to depart from the country bound for the US. I had the most harrowing experience of my life this morning, trying to check in for my return flight. Due to the way various people's itineraries worked out, I ended up having to share a taxi from Badajoz to Madrid Airport at 12:30am. My flight didn't depart until something like 12:20pm, but the bus with the bulk of the people on it wasn't going to get me to the airport with less than 2 hours before departure, and I didn't want to risk missing my flight, especially given I'm feeling under the weather. So I got to the airport at about 4am, having had little sleep in the taxi. Terminal 1 has a real dearth of seating for people waiting to check in. I spent 4 hours trying to make myself as comfortable as possible on the hard floor, and didn't get a lot of sleep then either. For the record, check-ins (at least for US Airways) seem to open around 4 hours before the scheduled departure time. So I went to check in, and the way they were working it was there was a bunch of podiums out the front of what I would consider a conventional check-in counter. The people at these podiums then proceeded to give you your first Spanish Inquisition. I'd previously remarked to myself at how trivial it was to get into Spain... I was asked the purpose of my trip to Spain. I told the woman it was for a business meeting. She then asked where I'd spent my time I Spain. I told her Badajoz. She asked if I had a hotel receipt to show for it. I told her the accommodation was paid for my someone else. She then asked if I had any business cards to show for the business meeting. Sheesh, I thought. Luckily I still had all the copies of people's keys leftover from the keysigning we did, and some of them were in a business card format, so I pulled out a fistful of them and gave them to her. Oh, and she wanted to see a copy of my itinerary, and seemed satisfied that the flights were a reversal of what got me there in the first place. She wandered off with my passport, itinerary and the fistful of "business cards" and came back, seemingly satisfied that everything was in order. She stuck little blue stickers on my luggage and passport (the size of an Australian convenience-store price tag) and I was allowed to wait for the next check-in person. The rest of the checking-in process was fairly normal. I can appreciate the airline wanting to avoid having to deal with passengers being refused entry to the US, but I had a valid US visa in my passport, so that should make all of that a moot point. I don't know why I had to prove my trip's legitimacy to the airline. So I thought that was the end of it. Hardly. Terminal 1 of Madrid Airport seems to have heaps of gates, with a letter/number combination. Mine was in the B series, and I went through the security screening, and it became apparent that I had to go through another guard post looking thing to get from the A series to the B series. The signage looked like it said "Police". Anyway, the guy there had so-so English, and he initially was a little unhappy that I had an Australian passport and was flying to the US and not Australia. I pointed out the US visa, and he seemed less concerned. Then he asked me to say something in Spanish. I don't know if he was trying to be conversational, or I had to be able to speak some Spanish to get past or what the story was, but by this stage I was pretty tired, and this caught me totally off guard. I think I stammered out a Buenos d as or something. He then wanted to know how many hours it took to fly from Australia to Spain. I told him I had no idea, because I'd only flown from the US to Spain. He then begrudgingly gave me an exit stamp in my passport, and I was allowed on my way. I think the whole thing was made the more harrowing by the fact I was deadly tired, the Police guy didn't speak terribly fantastic English, and I wasn't expecting a second Spanish Inquisition (let alone the first). Oh, and closer to boarding time, they chucked everyone out of the lounge area closest to the gate, and rechecked everyone's passports and boarding passes. That was fair enough, and not unlike what happens in Sydney going to the US, but they don't even let you into the lounge area in the first place. That departure process was more what I would have expected an entry process to be like, and has put me off returning to Spain a little bit. The entry process was a joke. The guy barely looked at my passport long enough to give me the entry stamp. Fortunately I slept for the bulk of the flight from Madrid to Philly, and now I'm feeling a bit more human.

A few weeks ago, some spammer sent out a spam wave abusing one of my domains (fortunately one I havn't been using much). I quickly reacted by rejecting all mail to this domain. However, I'm still seeing frequent mail delivery attempts. Apparently spammers have "discovered" the email address one of them invented, and are now spamming these addresses. Great... that's like... spammer masturbation? making up your own email addresses to spam to... And worse: apparently they're now trying to bypass greylisting. Looks like we've now hit the point where greylisting will lose much of it's effectiveness we all love it for. :-( thats really bad news. Here's an excerpt from my logs (addresses removed to protect the invented):

Dec 10 14:58:54 postfix/smtpd[25738]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[89.129.198.153]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<random@random.tld> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail.001sm.com>
Dec 10 15:00:25 postfix/smtpd[15969]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[89.129.198.153]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<random2@random2.tld> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<mx1.cnm.cn>
Dec 10 15:02:35 postfix/smtpd[15139]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[89.129.198.153]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<random3@random3.tld> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<mx2.fr.clara.net>
Dec 10 15:04:40 postfix/smtpd[10646]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[89.129.198.153]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<random4@random4.tld> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail.1-shops.com>
Dec 10 15:06:46 postfix/smtpd[20414]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[89.129.198.153]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<hisyn@0reality.com> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<aspmx2.googlemail.com>
Dec 10 15:09:48 postfix/smtpd[20608]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from efi235.internetdsl.tpnet.pl[83.14.242.235]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<random5@random5.tld> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<efi235.internetdsl.tpnet.pl>

Yes, that is one host retrying for 8 minutes (usually enough to bypass a greylist), another one a few minutes later, and a third one 5 days later (not included in the log); hosts that didn't make it past the RBL are not included. All in all I count 148 email delivery attemts to this address. And all on a random email in my domain that never existed, and is not a dictionary address like sales@domain.tld; but this probably means I won't be able to enable a catchall for this domain ever again or face loads of spam. OTOH, my spam filter can probably learn that "agricolaapocalyptic" is a sure indicator for spam and just discard all of it. P.S. this effect makes it more plausible that spammers are grabbing the Outlook address books of Windows users to use for spam; it's plausible the spam-address was auto-collected by outlook and then in turn collected by the next spammer. Maybe we really need to create random addresses until they give up on having sane databases sometime? Or at least blacklist our domains for their email collectors...

The last few days I attended a Debian QA meeting in Badajoz in the Spanish region of Extremadura. I worked on a number of QA tasks, like cleaning out bug reports for removed packages and tidying up some WNPP bugs. I also started another compilation run of the archive using GCC 4.2. In general, I worked on a number of TODO items I had, such as updating my Debian on Cobalt pages for etch, and responded to some email. My inbox is actually empty right now and there are few specific things I need to do, even though there's a lot in general, just like always. Tomorrow I'll head back to Madrid to meet up with some friends. Apparently we'll go bowling. On Monday I'll briefly visit the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos where I stayed for three months earlier this year before catching a flight to Austria where I'll spend New Year.

On several occasions in discussions about life etc friends have mentioned the theory that quantum mechanics dictates the way our cells work. In the past I have not been convinced. However this site http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/Outline.htm has a very well written description of the theory which is very compelling.

I'm pretty happy to note that I've been invited to speak at South by Southwest Interactive in March on the subject of wikis and commercialization. I'm pretty psyched about the subject, as I think a rich and varied ecosphere of wikis -- from personal to informal clusters to formalized non-profits to formalized commercial ventures -- is a necessary step to the development of a read-write Web. OK, so, it wasn't like they invited me out of the blue -- I submitted an idea for a wiki panel a few months ago, and it got morphed into a one-person presentation instead. Which will be fun, since I'll be able to pontificate at length on this interesting subject. Maj booked us our hotel rooms in November -- I wanted to stay at the Austin Motel, but they have some kind of one-time callin system for the week of SxSW, and their rooms sell-out in an hour or so. We missed the callin time, which was no big deal. tags: austin wiki sxsw austin motel sxsw2007

Recidivista Bad Vista is a clumsy and confusing name. Who's running the Wordplay Department over at the FSF nowadays? I hope it's some wily Germans, and that "Bad Vista" is some sort of elaborate spa joke. But for some reason I doubt it. Offer to the FSF: I just registered recidivista.org today. It's an awesome name. It is yours for free if you promise to use it well and be funny instead of shrill. Deal? tags: fsf bad vista vista recidivista

Maptastic I'm pretty happy to note that I got around to developing a new MediaWiki plug-in that uses the Mapstraction library to switch between well-known-but-proprietary mapping services like Google Maps and unknown-but-open-and-cool services like OpenStreetMap. Each page on Wikitravel that's had some geo-data RDF magic added to it gets a link to the Mapstraction page, which will focus on that destination. Eventually it will have icons for each museum, restaurant, bar, hotel, or other feature of the city, and you could move them around or even edit their information through the map interface. But, for now, I'm starting small. More map-centrism will come with time. You can check out Montreal for an example of a mapped-up page right now. tags: mapstraction geohacking wikitravel RDF wiki maps

C-List So, I like this Are you an A-list Bloglebrity? tool on kineda.com. A simple re-packaging of some publicly-available data from Technorati, ranking blogs into lists by authority. Excellent hit-mongering. I'm sad to say that I'm still in the C-list on the blogging front, but that's really just dependent on longevity. I've only been doing this since last May -- errr, Flor al -- which is just 7 months (that's 49 months in blog years). If the A-list gets the Lear jets and the red-carpets, I don't know what kind of perks come along with the C-list. Free refills on your orange soda? tags: blogs c-list technorati

Parenthood One of the things that parents often notice is that they have a hard time relating to their non-parent friends. And, of course, single non-parents have a hard time relating to their friends who've bred. Why is it so hard for these two kinds of people to connect with each other? I think there are some superficial reasons, like having different schedules, different imperatives, different needs. But I also think there's something more fundamental about the split. Organisms who've survived long enough to successfully reproduce have realised one goal in life -- if you listen to Charles Darwin, the only goal in life. If you have children, you have found a purpose for yourself -- an answer to all those questions about who you are and what you're supposed to do with your time on earth. If you survive to breed, you have won the game. Now, it's not the only way of winning, and it's not really the most interesting game in town. But I know at least for myself, and for other parents I've talked to, there is an existential satisfaction in finding yourself almost accidentally filling this purpose. Having never felt before that I had a definite purpose, it's been a strange sensation. Non-parents don't get the same sensation -- or, at least, they don't get it in the same way. So they're still looking, thinking, questing, trying to find some answers. And that gives them a vibrant edge that fulfillment dulls. I doubt there are many non-parents who would be satisfied with the Darwinian answer to their questions -- spawning like crayfish isn't a very lofty goal in life. Or at least it doesn't seem so from the outside. I'm not sure how to tell my friends how my life's changed since we had a daughter -- how when I'm reflecting and summing up my life, I don't feel the same panic as I did before. It's a good feeling, though. tags: parents parenthood survival reproduction crayfish

Iraqi taxi This blog post with a graphic illustration of the process for a build-your-own Iraqi taxi cracked me up. It was also nice for giving me a link to Wrecked Exotics. No, it's not about drunk strippers, nor orchids that went unfed; it's crashed cars. tags: iraq blog wikitravel wreckedexotics

With policyd-weight you are able to reject mails before the body is received by your MTA, here postfix. No bounce mails, less wasted bandwidth and cpu time. policyd-weight scores characteristics of the mail positive or negative, is a defined value reached, it got rejected. The scores are currently:

- DNSBLs/RHSBLs
- HELO argument
- MAIL FROM: argument
- Client IP address
- DNS client/HELO/FROM entries (A/16 A/24 A/32), PTR/FQDN and Parent Domains (MX/16 MX/24 MX/32) for their correctness respectively whether they match.

It’s available in etch and bpo, installation is really easy:

aptitude install [-t sarge-backports] policyd-weight

Remove unnecessary reject_rbl_client and reject_rhsbl_client checks from main.cf and insert the check_policy_service:

smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
        permit_mynetworks,
        ...
        reject_unauth_destination,
        check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:12525
        ...

You can create a “/etc/policyd-weight.conf” if you would like to adjusting scores or other policyd-weight parameters. You can get the defaults with “policyd-weight defaults”. For more informations have a look at “/usr/share/doc/policyd-weight/documentation.txt.gz” or http://policyd-weight.org. A normal day on a backup MX with ~500 domain:

backup:~# zgrep -e "postfix.*: connect from" \
      /var/log/mail.info.0   wc -l
29936
backup:~# zgrep -e "policyd-weight.*decided action=5" \
      /var/log/mail.info.0   wc -l
22738
backup:~# zgrep -e "postfix.*status=sent" \
      /var/log/mail.info.0   wc -l
5570

backports, bpo, Debian, planet, policyd weight, Postfix, spam

On a mailing list some questions were asked about disk encryption, I decided to blog the answer for the benefit of others:

What type of encryption would be the strongest? the uncrackable if you will? im not interested in DES as this is a US govt recommendation - IDEA seems good but what kernel module implements this?

The US government (which incidentally employs some of the best cryptologists in the world) recommends encryption methods for data that is important to US interests (US military and banking operations for starters). Why wouldn't you want to follow those recommendations? Do you think that they are putting back-doors in their own systems?

If they were putting in back-doors do you think that they would use them (and potentially reveal their methods) for something as unimportant as your data?

I think that if the US military wanted to apply a serious effort to breaking the encryption on your data then you would have an assortment of other things to worry about, most of which would be more important to you than the integrity of your data.

I've read some good things about keeping a usb key for system boot so that anything on the computer itself is unreadable without the key - but thats simply just a physical object - I'd like both the system to ask for the passphrase for the key as well as needing the usb key

I believe that can be done with LUKS, however it seemed broken last time I experimented with it so I've stuck with the older operation of cryptsetup.

What kind of overheads does something like this entangle? - will my system crawl because of the constant IO load of the disk?

My laptop has a Pentium-M 1.7GHz and a typical laptop drive. The ratio of CPU power to hard drive speed is reasonable. For most operations I don't notice the overhead of encryption, the only problem is when performing CPU intensive IO operations (such as bzip compression of large files). When an application and the kernel both want to use a lot of CPU time then things can get slow.

More recent machines have a much higher ratio of CPU power to disk IO as CPU technology has been advancing much faster than disk technology. A high-end desktop system might have 2-3x the IO capacity
of my machine, but a single core would have 2-3x the computer power of the CPU in my laptop and for any system you might desire nowadays 2 cores is the minimum. Single-core machines are still on sale and still work well for many people - I am still deploying Pentium-3 machines in new installations, but for machines that make people drool it's all dual-core in laptops and one or two dual-core CPUs in desktop systems (with quad core CPUs on sale soon).

If you want to encrypt data on a P3 system with a RAID array (EG a P3 server) then you should expect some performance loss. But for a typical modern desktop system you shouldn't expect to notice any overhead.

As anyone who follows my blog knows, I’m fond of linking to other sites with brief little quotes that either get me thinking or reinforce points I’m trying to make elsewhere. (Credit where credit is due: Dave Winer and Doc Searls both do this very effectively, and I’m just shamelessly copying them, down to the quoting style they typically use.) One of the quotes I’ve had queued up for a long time is this one from Jon Udell:

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, when I m trying out an unfamiliar open source component, I cheat. Even if the software I m working on will deploy to Linux, I ll sometimes develop it on Windows first. Why? Because on Windows, an open source component is likely to come with an installer that just works.

He’s right. Unless an application is included with your Linux distribution of choice, installing that application on Linux is a nightmare compared to Windows. Here’s an example. To install Sun’s Java Studio Creator on Windows, I just click on the .exe on Sun’s web site, which downloads the file and places it on my desktop. I double click the .exe (after, of course, checking it for viruses) and am up and running in a few minutes. In contrast, on Linux, I click on the .bin, which downloads the file and.. up pops a text editor showing me a /bin/sh script. Nice. Fortunately, I know what that is, so I save the script to a file on my desktop. I double click the file, and.. up pops a dialog box telling me the file isn’t executable. Nice. Fortunately, I know what that means, so I drop into a shell and run chmod +x ./creator-2_1-linux-ml.bin. I double click the file again, and there’s a nice graphical installer now. Finally, it looks like everything is going my way. Halfway through, though, the installation fails, telling me I need to install the RPMs for compat-libstdc++ and compat-libstdc++-dev. Nice. Assuming I even know what an “RPM” is, I then realize: I’m running Debian, and Debian doesn’t use RPM. Maybe I know about alien, but even if I do, where do I go about getting the compat-libstdc++ and compat-libstdc++-dev RPMs? At this point, I’ll probably hit Google—that is, if I haven’t already thrown up my hands in disgust and gone back to Windows. After a bit of Googling, I find this page, which tells me on Debian what I really need is libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 and libstdc++2.10-dev. Of course! I should have known that. (Note: I’m being sarcastic.) After installing those two packages, I restart the installer (which, thankfully, knows how to deal with the fact that it’s already half installed, but that won’t always be true). The installation finishes this time, and the installer kindly offers to start the program for me. However, after poking around a bit and exiting back to the desktop, I don’t see a menu entry or a desktop icon, so I’m not sure how I’m going to find it again (and I hope I don’t have to explain why cd’ing to ~/sun/Creator2_1/bin is not an answer). Anyone who has ever installed software on Linux is familiar with this song and dance. If it’s in your distro of choice, you’re only an apt-get or a yum install away from running it. But if not, you’d better know what you’re doing, have a lot of patience, and understand how to construct effective Google search terms. (And, no, moving everything into the distribution is not a very good option. Remember that one of the key tenets of open source is decentralization, so if the only solution is to centralize everything, there’s something fundamentally wrong with this picture.) Oh, well. At least I didn’t have to check for viruses! Fortunately, some of the problems I experienced are bugs. The above was done on a pre-release Debian etch system over the summer, so it’s likely the problems have been fixed. I repeated the experiment on an Ubuntu edgy system, and it didn’t open the text editor, nor did it complain about an incompatible C++ environment. However, there were still no menu entries or desktop icons, and there was an additional problem too in that when I double clicked the file, it opened it in CrossOver Office, which I also have installed. Regardless, even if it works better on some distros than others, there’s still no usable solution until ISVs and end users alike can depend on things consistently working regardless of the distro being used. Again, fortunately, we have solutions to parts of the problem already. The LSB abstracts away the differences between the runtime environments of the various distros, so the Java Studio Creator installer could have simply said “you must install the LSB environment” rather than trying to deal with the hundreds of little variations in both the environments and the package namespaces that provide them (e.g., compat-libstdc++ vs. libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2). Better yet, on distros that provide the LSB environment in their default configuration, the installer doesn’t have to do anything. And Project Portland promises to give us a consistent interface for creating menu entries, desktop icons and such things. However, far too few applications take advantage of the LSB today (though that’s changing), and Project Portland isn’t in any of the distros yet (though we’re looking at bundling its primary deliverable, xdg-utils, with the LSB 3.2 SDK to work around that). Finally, even though the LSB provides ISVs with a consistent way to create an LSB compliant executable, there’s no consistent way to deliver an LSB compliant application that’s easy to install and that integrates well with the distribution’s package system. Yes, the LSB includes RPM today, but for a variety of reasons, ISVs don’t want to use RPM, and as already mentioned, not all distributions support RPM natively. Fortunately, once again, this isn’t just a rant. The LSB tackled these very issues at the LSB face to face and Packaging Summit last week in Berlin, Germany, and we think we have a way forward that’s acceptable to all involved: Linux distribution vendors who already have well established package systems and systems management tools built around them; ISVs who need to support multiple platforms and so don’t want to support the Linux specific RPM format or who otherwise want more control over the installation experience; and end users who want to use the software management facilities their distributions provide, whether that’s RPM or something higher level like APT and yum. More in part 2…

Dear Lazyweb, currently I am thinking about buying a new Laptop. Do you have any suggestion? What I want is (hopefully) simple: - Big display. Im used to two big TFTs at home, so I would want a big one in the Laptop too. (Update1 - no, the weight isnt that much of a problem) - Enough RAM and discspace, but that should be simple for everything today. :) - A long battery lifetime. Well, long. At least 2.5hours but anything more is better. - All the usual stuff a laptop has, from Gig-Ethernet, working wireless, etc. :) - Work fully under Linux. There is no excuse for anything that wont work. I am used to a G3 Ibook which works out of the box without any need to setup something special. I wont spend money on something that doesnt work… (But Im ok with setting up something if it needs a step or two more than usual, I wont do daily setups of the machine. :) ) Price? In the range of 2000 Euro sounds ok. Update2: No, I dont consider Apple anymore. They switched the CPU to something dumb and are now just way too expensive for the crap they sell… Update3: Thanks to those who already replied. Update4: Oh, it may be an Intel CPU thing. Just not in an Apple, as I dont want to pay extra for their logo and have no benefit from it, like it was with the Ibook - install and run, no problems. Now with their switch I dont believe it will be the same good experience, so Apple can die, IMO. :)

I just lent two 80G IDE drives to a friend, and he re-paid me with 160G drives. Generally I don't mind people repaying hardware loans with better gear (much better than repaying with the same gear after a long delay and depreciation), but this concerns me.

My friend gave me the 160G drives because he can't purchase new 80G drives any more, his supplier has nothing smaller than 160G. I have some very reliable machines that I don't want to discard which won't support 160G drives - I'm not even sure that they would boot with them! Now I'm going to have to stock-pile 40G disks.

The machines I am most concerned about are my Cobalt machines. They are nice little servers that are quiet and use only 20W of electricity!

It's a pity that there aren't any cheap flash storage devices that connect to an IDE bus. If I could get my Cobalt machines running with flash storage they would be even more quiet and energy efficient while not being at risk of mechanical damage, and I doubt that flash storage will exceed 40G of capacity for a while.

Update: I've set a new personal record for rapid comments on a blog entry, all telling me that it is possible to get CF to IDE adapters. Thanks for the information, I appreciate it and will consider it for some machines. The problem however is that the price of a CF to IDE adapter plus the cost of a CF card of suitable size is moderately high (more than the cheaper hard drives), while CF capacity generally is only just usable for a mainstream Linux distribution.

These factors combine to make CF-IDE devices an option for only certain corner cases, not really an option to replace all the hard drives in machines that matter to me. I will probably use it for at least one of my Cobalt machines though.

Update2: Julien just informed me of the new Samsung flash-based laptop drives that will have capacities up to 16G (or 32G according to other web sites). I'm now trying to discover where to buy them.

So, phone call today went something like this

• Hello Robert [voice I dont recognise]
• Hi, who is this.
• This is a courtesy call from Telstra mobile, is that ok?
• Maybe, what do you want?
• Are you aware that Telstra a running a special right now - 400 dollars credit and a BRAND NEW PHONE absolutely FREE if you bring your number over to Telstra today?
• Are, so you are calling me unsolicted even though I'm not a customer of yours?
• <starts to say something>
• Let me make this clear, <shouting>FUCK OFF</shouting>
• dead phone..

Yeah, I was seriously cranky - after the amount of email spam I cleaned out this morning, it was -not- a good day to be spamming my mobile phone number. I feel somewhat guilty about the abusive (its not my normal persona!) language to the poor shmuck (who sounded like they come from an Indian call centre by accent) whose job it is to spam people, but not very: they are willing to do so - so I dont feel guilty. I do feel quite a sense of satisfaction though : imagine having one of the pharma spammers on the phone - what would you choose to say to them ?

Dear Lazyweb, currently I am thinking about buying a new Laptop. Do you have any suggestion? What I want is (hopefully) simple: - Big screen. Im used to two big TFTs at home, so I would want a big one in the Laptop too. - Enough RAM and discspace, but that should be simple for everything today. :) - A long battery lifetime. Well, long. At least 2.5hours but anything more is better. - All the usual stuff a laptop has, from Gig-Ethernet, working wireless, etc. :) - Work fully under Linux. There is no excuse for anything that wont work. I am used to a G3 ibook which works out of the box without any need to setup something special. I wont spend money on something that doesnt work… (But Im ok with setting up something if it needs a step or two more than usual, I wont do daily setups of the machine. :) ) Price? In the range of 2000 Euro sounds ok.

Interesting article by everyone’s hero Bruce Schneier on real-world passwords. Schneier analyzed the spoils of a phishing attack on MySpace that resulted in the collection of 34,000 usernames and passwords:

We used to quip that “password” is the most common password. Now it’s “password1.” Who said users haven’t learned anything about security?