There was a very strong earthquake in Niigata, second in twoyears.It's not too usual to have two consecutiveearthquakes this size.People in Tokyo are mostly fine, but we expect electricityproblems this summer. We rely on nuclear plants in thatregion to supply our electricity.

As if being hospitalised after crashing into a spectator wasn't enough, Patrick Sinkewitz has been told he's tested non-negative for testosterone. I think that is the same test that Floyd Landis failed, which I'm still unsure about. In an outrageous move, ARD/ZDF (visible at 19 and 13 east) have stopped live tour coverage "until clarification of the Patrik Sinkewitz case" whatever that means. Will they resume if it the second test is positive too? I doubt it. If I remember correctly, ARD/ZDF have been threatening to drop the Tour de France for at least a year and maybe more. Finally, they get an excuse to replace proper tour coverage with more cheap, bland daytime TV like Z-list interviews, soaps and cookery shows - or continuous criticism of the Tour de France, like they had today. In the Expatica report, ZDF chief producer Nikolaus Brender said:

"We can't screen an event involving some teams and riders under suspicion of doping."

(That's strange. Of course they can. They have before and I bet they'll still show motorsport, football, horse-racing, golf, wrestling, and so on if they get them. They just don't want to show cycling.)

"We want to show by this gesture that we're ready to support cycling only if it's clean, that's to say without banned doping sustances."

(That's actually quite a high standard: over 180 participants, none of them cheating. That's a lot harder than 20 drivers or 30 footballers all being clean - even then, they don't always manage it and I don't see ARD/ZDF dropping those sports every time one player is accused of doping. Never mind all the smaller cheating attempts which are easier in many other sports than cycling.)

"It's a warning to cycling and to every other sport,"

It's a warning that ARD/ZDF's TV producers are short-sighted and don't care about the viewers. At least Eurosport Germany continues with live coverage every day! Let's keep watching and see how the chips fall for Sinkewitz. Are ARD/ZDF fee-payers raising hell about this absurd decision? I hope so.

• Xen (domU) hits Linus' tree.
  Finally!
• Who cares about Microsoft v. Red Hat?
• Harry Potter, St. Augustine, and the Confrontation with Evil
  Two days until the release of the seventh installment of the series...

Two movies again this week: first we went to see "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" which was quite nice. For people who have read the book and know how things work: quite some parts got reduced/removed. Who am I kidding, I mean, the book is immensly long, noone was expecting to have everything in the movie, did they? If they did, they were fooling themself.
For those who haven't read it: the remaining parts were mostly consistent and well done. There was just one thing that iritated me a bit with respect to the Thestrals on which they flew which Hermione and Ron weren't able to see—I expected to have at least a small scene with their scared faces and/or when mounting them. But appart from that it was pretty nice. :) Second movie was "Live Free or Die Hard". I really was looking forward to it, being an longtime Bruce Willis fan—and I wasn't disappointed. At. All! Everything was great. The action was nice but not the sole part of the movie. The dialogues were more than just interesting, and the story had it's nice parts, too. And I liked that Kevin Smith was in the movie. His role was great. :D

The ABC reports that an oil shortage is predicted soon. The International Energy Agency predicts that oil supply problems will start within the next five years. Oil production has been dropping over the last two years (we have passed the “peak oil” point) and demand is steadily increasing. Regardless of wars oil prices will increase significantly in the near future. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the average age of Australian cars was 10.7 years at the end of 1998. So the vast majority of the current fuel-hungry cars on Australian roads will still be in use in five years time - if the owners can afford them. The government needs to start providing tax incentives for fuel efficient cars and to end tax incentives for inefficient cars. Currently 4WD vehicles have reduced taxes and the tax deduction for a business car is based on the engine size (get a less efficient car and get a bigger tax deduction). The government claims to be protecting the economy (at the expense of the environment). But with the way things currently work the economy will be destroyed in less than five years. Even though the government cares little for the environment (in spite of the effect that climate change is having on farmers) they need to do something if they want to fulfill their claims of protecting the economy! Thanks to Chris Samuel for informing me of this.

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I finally decided to publish the few hacks I am using to run Linux on SUN's LDOM.
They are not pretty but they do the job done for me.
I take 0 responsibility for them so use them at your own risk.
Use this HOWTO only if you are dealing to mess with your system. Do *NOT* use for production systems if you do not understand what you are doing Step 1: read all the possible LDOM documentation that SUN made available for you. Step 2: understand that this is all experimental software. Step 3: repeat 1 and 2 a few times. LDOM server in Solaris allows to export 3 kind of block devices (file, partition/slice, entire disk) to the guest and those are seen as virtual disks.
The guest cannot really feel the difference but it is important to understand the way in which the LDOM software plays with them.
I did *not* test the export for partition/slice and my hacks do not know how to cope with it. You have been warned. The problem: LDOM virtual disk daemon mangles partition tables In an attempt to make sure that the partition tables exported to the guests are sane, the daemon ends up trashing valid ones because the check it forces to the devices is too strict and it behaves differently if the device is a file, a partition/slice or an entire disk.
The ldm bind operation is the dangerous one to perform and that can kill your partition table for good.
How ldm bind operation work: - for entire disks: * check device partition table
* fix device partition table if check fails
* lock device
* export device to guest
* store status of device once it is validated and do not check it ever again
- for files: * check device partition table
* fix device partition table if check fails
* export device to guest
Remember that I did *not* test export of a slice and that my hack does not take it into account. You have been warned twice. Limitations of the workaround First of all I assume that you installed LDOM 1.0 in the standard path (/opt/SUNWldm/) otherwise you might need to change the script manually to match an alternate path.
Each guest is using the same kind of devices. The workaround does not yet how to cope with exports of files and partitions to the same guest.
You know how to use dd and some other basic tools.
If you start playing with bind/unbind operations manually and things break, you keep all pieces.
How to This list of operation sounds extremely complex, but it is not and it is required only at the first install time and possibly to update your partition table backups if you decide to change them. The changes to the ldom init script will take to restore the last known to work partion table on each reboot. NOTE: if you fail to follow these instruction and do not use valid configuration entries or backup partitions, LDOM might not start anymore or even core dump. TAKE EXTREME CARE (and learn how to reboot into factory-defaults at SC/ALOM)

1 - get the few files from here. This html file is there too for your convenience.
2 - ldmd_start is the newly modified init script for LDOM. It should be placed in /opt/SUNWldm/bin and made executable. Note that if there is no configuration file or the configuration file is empty nothing will happen and you will be running the exact same script as the original. ldmd_start.orig and .diff are there for your convenience to check that I did not add a root kit ;).
3 - ldom.linux is an example configuration file that you want to place in /etc.
4 - mkdir /.ldom.linux , we will use this directory to store the backup partition tables.
5 - decide what kind of device you want to export.
Follow steps 6 and 7 if you decided to use a full disk as device and skip to 8 if you are using a file 6 - Use the format command from Solaris and make sure to label and format the disk.
7 - Take a copy of the clean partition table.
Example: dd if=/path/to/device of=/.ldom.linux/$guestname-$(basename /path/to/device).format count=1 bs=512
So let say that your guest is called foo1 and you are exporting /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2 you will issue the following command:
dd if=/dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2 of=/.ldom.linux/foo1-c1t1d0s2.format count=1 bs=512
Continue from here if you are exporting a file 8 - Configure your LDOM guest following the LDOM administration guide.
9 - Netboot and install Linux in the guest.
10 - Before rebooting into the installation, halt the guest and unbind it. The unbind is required to unlock the exported device for read.
11 - Take a copy of the partition table that has been created by Linux.
Example: dd if=/path/to/device of=/.ldom.linux/$guestname-$(basename /path/to/device).backup
Following the above example: dd if=/dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2 of=/.ldom.linux/foo1-c1t1d0s2.backup count=1 bs=512
or
dd if=/path/to/file of=/.ldom.linux/foo1-file.backup count=1 bs=512
12 - Edit the configuration file in /etc that you installed at step 3.
Each line contains:
guest_name disk1 disk2 ...
NOTE: you do not need to add entries for Solaris guests. Only Linux guests are required! Empty lines are skipped, no comments are allowed in the file.
Follow steps 13 to 19 if you are exporting a disk 13 - Restore Solaris partition table:
Example: dd conv=notrunc if=/.ldom.linux/$guest-$(basename /path/to/device).format of=/path/to/device bs=512 count=1
14 - Bind the guest
15 - Unbind the guest again. HINT: this is the most important step here because LDOM disk server now has validated the partition table and it will not check it again.
16 - Restore Linux partition table:
Example: dd conv=notrunc if=/.ldom.linux/$guest-$(basename /path/to/device).backup of=/path/to/device bs=512 count=1
17 - Bind the guest again.
18 - Start the guest.
19 - Enjoy.
Follow steps 20 to 23 if you are using a file 20 - Bind the guest
21 - Restore Linux partition table:
Example: dd conv=notrunc if=/.ldom.linux/$guest-$(basename /path/to/file).backup of=/path/to/file bs=512 count=1
22 - Start the guest.
23 - Enjoy.
This said, the script will allow you to reboot the controller without having to worry about Linux guests and it should ensure that LDOM will always start properly. LDOM stores the status of a guests in the Machine Description and we will use this status to restore the partition tables too. If the guest is in either bind or active status, we will take proper actions to stop/unbind/restore/bind/start. If the guest is in unbind state, we will do nothing because we do not know why is in that state. The script also is not error prone. Failing to stop or unbind the domain, to perform restore partition table operation, might cause LDOM to abort and can require manual fixing but the above information should be enough for any experienced user to recover. Have fun

Bruce Schneier writes about Correspondent Inference Theory which deals with situations when the motives of an individual or group are inferred by the results of their actions. Both his article and the MIT article on which it is based only consider the results of terrorist actions against the US and allied countries. I believe that this is a serious mistake by Bruce, the MIT people, and most people who write about terrorism. The most sensible writing about Terrorism is by Noam Chomsky. Noam considers the definition of Terrorism in both propaganda and literally. By the literal definition of terrorism the US government is responsible for more than it’s fair share of terrorist acts performed around the world. There is no reason to believe that people in the Middle-East are any less intelligent than people in the US and Europe. It seems obvious that some of the people who’s countries are destroyed by violence sponsored by the US government will believe that the US is entirely inhabited by blood-thirsty monsters. The number of US citizens who realise what their government does and approve is very low as is the number of Muslims who know what Al Quaeda does and approve of it. The US government claims that it wants democracy in the Middle-East, and Osama bin Laden claims to want the US military out of the Middle-East. If the US forces were withdrawn from Saudi Arabia then it would probably lead to a significant increase in democracy in the region (it couldn’t get any less democratic) - both sides could get what they claim to want. The discussion of the MIT paper seems to be largely based on the fact that Correspondent Inference causes the US government (and other governments) to decrease the probability of doing anything that might meet the terrorist goals. But no-one has mentioned the possibility that the same may apply to the probability of non-state organisations doing anything that might meet the goals of the US government. The wars in Iraq and Iran have significantly decreased the capabilities of the US military, they can’t recruit enough new soldiers and the current soldiers have reduced effectiveness due to long tours of duty with short breaks. The US economy is stagnating partly due to the direct effects of financing the wars, partly due to the way the airline security theatre has hurt trade and tourism, and partly because everyone has been concentrating on other things instead of fixing the economy. When two states have a war there is always the possibility of it being ended by a peace treaty or one side surrendering. With modern communications fighting can end in a matter of hours after a cease-fire has been arranged between states. But when non-state forces are involved things become much more difficult to manage. A state can make a deal with one non-state group only to discover that another non-state group (or a dissident faction within the original group) doesn’t like the treaty and continues fighting. With non-state terrorist acts connected to Al Quaeda in the US, the UK, Spain, and Indonesia (and more acts apparently planned in other countries) it’s obvious that we aren’t going to get a clean or quick solution to this problem. It seems to me that the only way the US and allied countries can escape from Correspondent Inference is to withdraw from the Middle-East entirely. If the people of Iran or Palestine want to elect a government that you don’t like then let it go (that’s what democracy is about anyway). If a dictator seizes control of Iraq then either leave him in control or provide air-support to any province that wants to rebel and establish a democratic government. Either make a stand on the principle of support for freedom and democracy or do nothing on the principle of letting people in other countries sort out their own problems. An invasion for the wrong reasons might fool people on the other side of the world but is unlikely to fool many people who live in the target country.

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Since I'm a member of the set of people "somebody better suited to explaining it" mentioned in Silvia Pfeiffer's "A Long Story of Logins", I suppose it falls to me to explain what the hell we actually did to make the thing work. A quick recap, for anyone who hasn't read Silvia's article: the Vquence website is a very AJAXy, Web 2.0 style video socialisation site. Since we want the site to be available to all as much as possible, we don't lock any part of the site away behind a "login required" page unless we absolutely have to. An unpleasant side effect of this is that, when it does does come time for you to login, pushing you off to a separate "please login" page is going to be, well, a pest. There's all sorts of state about what the user is up to (it's a web-based video mashup creator, after all) that we need to submit -- but only after the user has logged in. Enter the realm of the Web 2.0 Login. Instead of sending the user to a login page, getting them to login, and then redirecting them back to where they want to go, you just have some sort of popup form that, when submitted to, does a background request and logs the user in behind the scenes. This isn't a new concept by any means -- for example, try voting up or down a link on reddit when you're not logged in. However, most sites that implement this sort of thing (based on our brief informal survey around the office) don't protect the password information in any way -- it goes over the wire as a plaintext HTTP request. We don't like this, so we wanted to send the login form over HTTPS. And there began our problems. The trivial implementation of a Web 2.0 Login page is as you'd expect -- the AJAX stalwart, XmlHttpRequest, POSTing to a handler somewhere that validates the login, sets a session, and sends back some javascript to change the page layout a bit to show you're logged in. We had this working nicely, until we started testing on our staging environment, where HTTPS comes into play... You see, XmlHttpRequest doesn't like making a request to a domain other than the one that the main page comes from -- for security. It also thinks that the same hostname via a different protocol counts as a different domain, for the purposes of this security check. (I can see the theoretical reasoning for it, but it is a bit weird for HTTP to HTTPS transitions) So if you want to POST to https://www.vquence.com/something using XmlHttpRequest, you need to be doing it from a page which is retrieved from somewhere in https://www.vquence.com/ as well. We considered just turning on HTTPS across the board, but that would have all sorts of unpleasant ramifications, so we decided against that. But the problem remained, how do we get the user's credentials to our server in a secure manner with a minimum of unpleasantness? We came up with all sorts of options. This is where the infamy of "bug #93" started -- it's a monster of a bug log. Lots of it is me going "we could do this, but it'd suck, or we could do this, but it would suck". Finally, Silvia (I think) suggested we look at using an iframe. "Eeew" was the general response, but it might at least give us a way to set a part of the page to HTTPS, which we could use as a launching point for our XmlHttpRequest call. While researching how to make this all work (I had, to my great pride, never inflicted an iframe on the world before), I managed to come across a few articles on how you can use a hidden iframe to handle requests instead of using XmlHttpRequest. Basically, the trick is that you do a regular POST on your main page, but set the target of the form to a hidden iframe in your page. A general discussion of the principle is available At the Apple Developer site, and there's also a Rails plugin that implements the concept rather nicely. When I found these, I briefly danced for joy. My quest was over. POST to the iframe, the iframe get some JS back from the server, JS mangles the main page's layout to show the user is now logged in... aaaand profit. Like fun it was. My implementation was short and sweet -- a true work of genius (if I do say so myself). Everything worked like a charm. Until we got it back into staging. Then cross-domain security bit me again. Naturally, if you don't want XmlHttpRequest calls to perform cross-domain, you probably don't want iframes for different sites to be manipulating each other's content either. That's exactly what happened -- the iframe can't manipulate the main page's layout as we need it to. Why I didn't think of this before I charged mightily ahead I don't know. My only defence is that I've never claimed to be a web development guru. Sneaky tricks will defeat any security measure, though. For instance, we control both sites (http and https), so we can send the user back to the unsecured site after login and then that location (still in the hidden iframe) can manipulate the main page layout. Redirect to the rescue! That worked really well in Firefox, even with HTTPS in staging. We were saved. At least until IE came along. Bloody Microsoft, ruining all my cunning plans. IE complains when a HTTPS site redirects (using the Location HTTP header) to a HTTP site. You apparently can't turn this off. I was shocked that Microsoft cared so much about their user's data security -- it's certainly not the first thing I think of when I think "Microsoft". My faith in the world was restored when Silvia pointed me to a workaround for the problem -- if you send the redirect in a <meta http-equiv="refresh"> tag instead of a Location header, IE is more than happy to let it pass. Because obvously a chunk of HTML that says "HTTP equivalence" is completely different to a HTTP header. Sheesh. To snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, after all this brilliant hacking, I managed to make a newbie error with the contents of the http-equiv by setting the content to "0;http://www.vquence.com/blah" instead of "0;url=http://www.vquence.com/blah" (note the url=, because I sure didn't). IE complained by looping infinitely on the source URL, while Firefox just made sense of it and did the right thing. I managed to waste most of an hour of three of us over that little stuff-up. Go me! (Sorry about that guys, by the way) Feeling very chuffed, I went home for the evening. The next morning saw a browser compatibility defect in my queue -- Safari didn't like the new setup. Instead of doing the right thing, clicking on the login button would create a new tab instead of logging in. The fix? Changing the style of the hidden iframe from "display: none" to "width: 1px; height: 1px; border: 0" did the trick. Fark. So much for "hidden" iframes. What's particularly funny is that Apple's own tutorial on hidden iframes says to avoid "display: none" because NS6 doesn't like it, but doesn't mention it's own glaring deficiency in this area. So, what are the lessons learned?

• Firstly, IE is different. I knew this already, but living in an all-Linux, not-normally-a-web-frontend-developer world, I need to be reminded every now and then.
• Safari is differently different. Being a former Konqueror user, and wrangling with that browser's retardations in an earlier existence, I should have been ready for this one.
• "Code to the standards" is a crock of shit. That's not to say that we shouldn't encourage it, but I'm fairly sure that the HTML 4.01 standard is silent on whether or not an iframe with it's display property set to none is a valid target for a form submission (I had a quick look, and nothing jumped out at me). Anyone who dismisses the difficulties of web development with a hand wave and a casual "just code to the standards" will get a double-spaced, 24pt printed and bound copy of all of the W3C standards dropped on their head from a tall building.
• No matter what security measure you think has stopped you, there's always a workaround. Can't do a XmlHttpRequest to a different domain? POST to a hidden iframe (you can post to any domain you want, too -- so much for cookie security). Want to run JS you got back from POSTing to a different domain? Just redirect back to the first domain. Can't redirect from a HTTPS to a HTTP page? Don't use a HTTP redirect, use a meta refresh. Sigh.
• Hidden iframes are cool. While I'm firmly in the "frames are evil" camp, they're a nice freaky behind-the-scenes tool if you want to do something more than what a simple XmlHttpRequest gives you. It's like having a whole separate scratch-pad of a browser you can play with, and the user never has to see it.
• Web development is frustrating. I don't do a whole heap of it (I'm more a backend code / infrastructure guy), so when I do some web UI work, I have to re-learn exactly how much of a pain it is to have to cater to the needs of a bunch of different browsers, each with their own quirks and irritations. Suddenly supporting a bunch of different Linux distros seems so much less frustrating.

For those who have asked youself sometimes, when watching any of the Spanish sucess in any kind of sports (but football), why when Spanish athem is sounding no one signs anything, or why, when sound system breaks, people sings "ti-to-ti-to-ta-ri-ro-ri-ro-rit-to-ti..." you have to learn that Spanish Athem has no lyrics. Of course, it had, but was removed when democracy imposed over other darker options 30 years ago. Today, I have seen that, from a mistake, the old lyrics were used by a Romanian ship in a competition at Barcelona. You can see (and listen to it) below.

I cannot understand why this can be considered fascist by reading the lyrics. But listening to it I have felt again that we need lyrics. We cannot go out at the world mumbling our athem, as we cannot sign it. Recently, Spanish Olimpic Comitee requested lyrics to be written. I strongly think that they will be some king of "flower power" lyrics, to avoid hurting anyone (which is impossible)

For those who have asked youself sometimes, when watching any of the Spanish sucess in any kind of sports (but football), why when Spanish athem is sounding no one signs anything, or why, when sound system breaks, people sings "ti-to-ti-to-ta-ri-ro-ri-ro-rit-to-ti..." you have to learn that Spanish Athem has no lyrics. Of course, it had, but was removed when democracy imposed over other darker options 30 years ago. Today, I have seen that, from a mistake, the old lyrics were used by a Romanian ship in a competition at Barcelona. You can see (and listen to it) below.

I cannot understand why this can be considered fascist by reading the lyrics. But listening to it I have felt again that we need lyrics. We cannot go out at the world mumbling our athem, as we cannot sign it. Recently, Spanish Olimpic Comitee requested lyrics to be written. I strongly think that they will be some king of "flower power" lyrics, to avoid hurting anyone (which is impossible)

I was still getting responses on my Joshua Bell in the subway article today, weeks after I posted that. This was unusual, so I started investigating. Turns out Fark.com links to it, and many people find their way from there. Hi! Anyway, the latest comment on that item contains this gem:

There is/was a street musician here in Boston who played the most amazing slide guitar I have ever heard. He is also filthy, unkempt, rude, and generally angry at the commuters who he clearly feels owe him more of their attention. It would be wrong to assume that his failure to draw crowds is due solely to the public's inability to appreciate music.

Right on! My point exactly.

I said I was going to upload the packages I don’t have time to finish for the moment, but that are in good shape, meaning they compile without problem in latest SID, and are just lacking man pages, icons and so, here’s the next round of them:

• JFS: Development environment for a fuzzy logic programming language.
• Pop’em: small and addictive puzzle game from Free Lunch Design featuring many different game modes and graphical themes. Your goal is to remove as many balls as possible by connecting locating groups of the same color. Source code downloadable here.
• Zombiepox: Throw brains at the zombies and turn them back into humans. As you progress
  you get help from your fellow humans in the fight against the zombies. Source code downloadable here.

Did you know that the cooperative movement has a strong presence in le Tour? Road cycling is a good sport to show off teamwork and cooperation, because no-one can win a three-week tour on their own. The following Tour de France teams seem to have cooperatives as their main sponsors:

• Credit Agricole - 3rd in Global 300, currently 12th in the tour
• Rabobank, 11. in Global 300, 1. in tour
• Caisse d'Epargne, 14. in Global 300, 2. in tour
• Milram (part of Nordmilch), 78. in Global 300, 19. in tour
• AG2R, not in the Global 300 but a member of France's AGMUT, 9. in tour

Top-placed cooperative rider is Rabobank's Michael Rasmussen, the General Classification leader! He's also currently King of the Mountains (polka dot jersey) and Most Aggressive Rider (red numbers). We've already seen C.A's Thor Hushovd win a stage, while Milram's Erik Zabel has led the points classification and now lurks in second in that contest for the green jersey. Both Caisse d'Epargne's Alejandro Valverde and Rabobank's Denis Menchov should have a chance of the overall win - or can Michael Rasmussen keep it despite the time trials to come?

• Debconf 7 was just awesome: It was great to meet up with hendry, daniel, otavio and marco from the Debian Live crew, as well as countless others.. I’m already putting some pennies aside for Argentina.
• I managed to graduate with a 2:1, which was enough to get accepted on my Masters course which starts in September. I still need to find somewhere to live though. Congratulations to everyone else who finished this year!
• Google SoC work is going okay. I was recently in that uncomfortable position where I had taken a wrong turn and was getting less and less motivated to correct myself. However, I now have much more Pythonistic interface around the configuration files, as well as a working wizard based on the gtk.Assistant widget. Now I just need to get the expert mode cleaned up pretty soon and then proceed in fixing up some issues in the underlying shell scripts. I’ll prepare a quick screencast and write about this in more detail again soon.
• LugRadio Live was pretty good. I was manning the Debian stall on the first day: David Watson brought along a TFT and a Debian mirror on a Linksys NSLU2, which was great when demoing Debian Live images as well as the experimental graphical builder. If I had a faster machine it would have been nice to provide some sort of ‘custom live CD service’ for passers by. The second day was interesting and I managed to get to a few talks, as well as meet up with some of the other Bongo guys.
• Yet more groupthink is underway with GUADEC just up the road in Birmingham. I will have to miss Wednesday due to my graduation ceremony and having my flat stripped bare by my parents — just sleeping bags for my brother and I until hometime on Saturday. GUADEC feels slightly different to the other events I’ve been to — I’m not a Gnome developer so there are a lot of unfamiliar faces, but maybe this will make me change my mind: Telepathy does look awesome, and I’ve had ideas about writing a decent mind-mapping tool for some time now…

On the subject of conferences, I’m also planning to attend AngloHaskell, LinuxConf Europe amd PyCon UK. Let me know if you want to meet up or need a place to crash.

After getting to Amsterdam and spending some times with some of my friends for a couple of days, we decided it was time to get to Valencia to visit Jordi.
We ended up getting to the train station in Amsterdam about half an hour before the train left, and we found out we needed a reservation. Dave ran off to the ticket office, where there was a HUGE queue, but Dave being Dave, a polite englishman, didn’t push his way to the front to reserve before the train left, so we ended up jumping on the train without reservations.
In Belgium somewhere, I forget where, we were booted off the train. We ended up getting reservations for another train to Lille, where we also were stuck for a while trying to figure out how to get to Paris.
No seats left, so we had to buy fullprice ticket on some other ridiculous train.
After a long and uncomfortable trainride to Paris, we went to see a very nice French girl who was the daughter of Daves godmother. We spent the night, and decided to catch the early train to Valencia in the morning. Which ofcourse we missed having not slept properly for all too long.
We got to the train station a few hours before the train to Valencia left, but however, there were no seats left, so we could not reserve.. Ended up finding a different route through Port Bou (However you spell that), on a night train with beds. This was the first awesome train ride so far. We had an entire six-bed cabin to ourselves, and spent the night looking out on the starfilled sky through beautiful France. As we arrived Port Bou, there was a free train to Barcelona, which was filthy, crowded and hot.
But hey, free after all. We also reserved tickets fo Valencia. We spent the day on the beach of Barcelona getting REALLY sunburnt (I’m gonna be so tanned, totally worth it), and jumping in the waves of the sea. We finally got to Valencia at around 00:30, having to wake up poor Jordi for guidance on how to get to his place. And then again waking him up at around 01:00 because the taxi driver dropped us off at an
identical spot a few blocks down, confusing the hell out of everyone. But here we are! Now on Jordis
balcony, sitting here with our laptops. Finally an actual holiday.
Btw: I am FLYING back.

On several occasions I have watched part of a TV documentary on gifted children, but I have never been able to watch one completely because every one that I have seen has been offensively wrong. One thing that they always seem to do is say that gifted children have special needs and often claim that they have problems socialising. This sounds quite reasonable, but if that’s the case then why would you make such children perform tricks on TV? Putting the children on TV is a very poor example of journalism and often of parenting - the parents’ desire to boast about their children’s performance (and implicitly their own parenting skills) is apparently more important than protecting the children. I think that the only situation in which gifted children should have their talents demonstrated on TV is if their skill is related to the performing arts. Not that TV coverage is necessarily good for children who have abilities related to performing (a casual scan of the news regarding adults in Hollywood shows the problems that people have dealing with fame), but it’s something that they will be driven to anyway. Also if they are going to demonstrate the intelligence of a child on TV then they really should make sure that they don’t demonstrate a lack of intelligence (on the part of the child as well as the producers). Asking a child to provide a definition of a word is often used as an example of intelligence (when it’s really an example of vocabulary). In one documentary a child defined a philanthropist as “someone who has a lot of money” (according to dict on my system it is “Love to mankind; benevolence toward the whole human family; universal good will; desire and readiness to do good to all men“). In another a child defined a genius as “someone who knows a lot“, while the definition of genius is not clear and there is some disagreement about what it is, most people agree that it’s about ability not knowledge. Being able to recognise when you don’t know something and admit would surely be correlated with intelligence… Telling a child that they are a genius or telling them their IQ seems like a bad idea at the best of times, and doing so in front of a documentary camera crew isn’t the best of times. Children are able to determine how their skills compare to others, there are more than enough attitude problems in schools related to skill comparisons without encouragement from adults. When I was in high school a friend who studied a martial art refused to tell me which belt he wore - he had been taught that such things shouldn’t be discussed outside the dojo to avoid creating a hierarchy based on belt rating in the community. I think that the same thing could be applied to IQ ratings. The term genius is grossly overused generally, I believe that showing greater than average ability in one area is not enough to qualify. I think that the minimum criteria would be to produce dramatic new developments/inventions in one area of research (EG Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking) or to advance multiple fields of science or art (EG Leonardo da Vinci) would be the minimum criteria. I had people call me a genius when I was young because I won prizes in maths competitions, was good at programming computers, playing chess, etc. The main criteria for achieving such things is to avoid wasting time on sport - in a school run by idiots with a focus on sport this was more a tribute to being stubborn than being smart! The TV documentaries mention many things that gifted children supposedly require, but strangely I don’t recall any of them mentioning the need to meet adults who are significantly smarter than average! You might think that this is the most obvious thing. The Big Brother and Big Sister programs of mentoring children who are at risk of crime and drugs apparently provide significant benefits, something similar for gifted children might do some good, probably more based on meetings of a few intelligent adults with a small group of intelligent children instead of the BB-BS model of one-on-one meetings. Washingtonienne seems like a good example of the need for this. There are some useful print articles however, this article in The Age makes some good points, it’s particularly interesting to note that some schools lie about special programs to support gifted children to attract students (someone should name the schools that do this). But then you get awful ones like this, naming the child in such a situation is irresponsible journalism. The girl in question may be forced to change her name to escape google when she’s older. It’s strange that it’s illegal to name a child who is involved in a court case but it’s not illegal to name them in such an article (let’s hope that the journalist used pseudonyms). Also you might expect an organisation such as Mensa to have someone smart enough to realise that bringing such attention on a 2yo is not in the child’s best interests. Does anyone know of a good TV documentary about gifted children? I guess that it would be extremely difficult to make one without showing the children on TV so that would restrict the film maker to children who’s abilities are related to the performing arts.

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A few people commented on my last post asking for details about how I configured exim and dovecot to have the fake scott+canonical account and separate Maildir tree. exim4 router configuration The first key part of the configuration is to configure exim4 to split the local part into a user name and a suffix. This allows a local part such as “scott+canonical” to be split into the user name “scott” and the suffix “+canonical”. This is configured by adding the following two options to the appropriate routers in your exim4.conf:

local_part_suffix = +*
local_part_suffix_optional

The first option defines the suffix; normal practice appears to be to use both “+” and “-“, but since I’d previously used “-” with qmail I opted to use “+” only so that I didn’t confuse myself during the transition. The second option allows the suffix to be optional, so that mail to “scott” is still delivered normally. Now mail to “scott+canonical” will be delivered to the “scott” user. Forwarding configuration The next task is to ensure that mail is actually forwarded to this address; for me this was a configuration performed by the Canonical sysadmins to ensure that my work e-mail is actually delivered to scott+canonical on my own mail server. Filtering configuration Since both personal and work e-mail are now both being delivered to the same user account on my home mail server, I need to filter the mail into separate folders. This can be done by checking the $localpartsuffix variable in Exim filter .forward files, e.g.:

# Exim filter
if $local_part_suffix is "+canonical"
then
    save Maildir/Canonical/
endif

Now incoming work e-mail is filtered into a different mail folder, while personal mail is delivered into the primary one. I’ve used similar filter instructions for mailing lists, mailman messages, Launchpad mails, etc. to filter into appropriate folders. Where the mail is personal, it is filtered into (e.g.) Maildir/.Lists/upstart-devel/ Where the mail is for work, I add /Canonical/ to the path, (e.g.) Maildir/Canonical/.Lists/linux-hotplug-devel/ This means that the Maildir/ directory is my personal INBOX, with sub-folders immediately under that and beginning with a period; and the Maildir/Canonical/ directory is my work INBOX, with sub-folders immediately under that and beginning with a period. This defines two trees in a manner compatible with dovecot. There’s no particular reason that Maildir/Canonical/ has to be under Maildir/, it could have been Maildir-Canonical/ and this would still work. I simply wanted them in one place to ease backups. Dovecot configuration Now we need to configure dovecot to permit login by a fake (“virtual”) user, with a different Maildir tree, so that I can configure them as two separate accounts. The first set of changes is to dovecot.conf to add an additional authentication source. Modify the “auth default” block to add a new “passwd-file” passdb in addition to the “pam” passdb (or whatever your system is using).

passdb passwd-file  
  args = /etc/dovecot/passwd
 

This lets us authenticate virtual users, but we also want to set their attributes, so we can use the same file as a userdb in the same “auth” block.

userdb passwd-file  
  args = /etc/dovecot/passwd
 

Dovecot will now check both PAM and this file for user information. We now simply need to add a line to this file to specify the virtual user and set up the alternate Maildir tree.

scott+canonical:PASSWORD:1000:1000::/home/scott::userdb_mail=maildir:/home/scott/Maildir/Canonical

The format is that of an ordinary passwd file; the first two parts give the passdb authentication credentials and the rest give the userdb information. I’ve set this user to have the same uid, gid and home directory as my real “scott” user. The final part changes the mail environment for this virtual user, instead rooting it at Maildir/Canonical/ Client configuration The mail client will need two accounts adding; one for “scott” and the other for “scott+canonical”. It will see two separate folder trees for each account. An unexpected bonus is that the reply account is now automatically set for me, since I’m replying from the specific account rather than from a single general one.

DebFile: Python Library for Inspecting .deb A couple of days ago Mike Hommey blogged about "coincidences" in free software development: more than one developers are likely to have the same crazy ideas. It happened to me and Filippo last Friday. While writing the script for maintaining the OCaml status page I faced, unsuccessfully, the need of a library for extracting meta-information and actual content out of .debs of incoming. While I was getting sad for the lack of such a (Python) library Filippo contacted me on Jabber stating something like you know what? ... a cool addition for python-debian would be a library for querying .deb files ... A few days later we have something working and fitting our (disjoint) needs (it's a branch of the python-debian package which includes two brand new modules: arfile.py and debfile.py):

$ bzr branch http://people.debian.org/~zack/bzr/pkg-python-debian/

Here are some examples to wet your appetite:

• changelog head.py
• dpkg-info.py
• extract cron.py
• ar.py

It is already a proposed addition to python-debian, feel free to comment about the API ... before it's too late

On Thursday I bought a $99 (discounted from $199) MP4 player from Aldi (a German supermarket chain that has recently opened up here). The player is a Tevion model M6. By a long way it’s the cheapest and nastiest piece of consumer electronics that I have ever owned. It has very flimsy construction (feels like it will crumple in my pocket - not like a solid iRiver) and poor design all around. The viewing angle of the LCD screen is very small, so if I hold it close to my face then the viewing angle will be wrong for at least one eye. There are two power switches, an electronic one on the top (which is also sometimes used as an escape key for menus that don’t recognise the key labelled as ESC) and a slide switch at the side. When I use the electronic switch to turn the power off the back-light will usually flicker - I guess that they wanted to have an electronic switch and then put a mechanical switch in the design when they couldn’t get it working. The menus are strange, they have a game menu that only has Tetris - why not have a Tetris menu instead? The FM radio function doesn’t seem to work and the option to select a European frequency range is lost when the power is cut, along with all saved station frequencies. I never got around to testing the voice-recording function (one of the reasons for purchasing the device) as it failed in too many other ways. The device has an AVI of Barbie Girl by Aqua and also a MP3 with a text file that has the lyrics for Karaoke, this is probably the only good feature of the device. Unfortunately it appears to have some sort of DRM as it gave a padlock icon and stopped working after I played it a few times (fortunately it’s unable to store settings so a power cycle solved that problem). When I connected it to my PC via USB it showed two devices, /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. /dev/sdb gave an IO error (apparently due to not having an SD memory card installed) and and /dev/sda was not in any format recognised by file -s /dev/sda. I’m going to have to return this, even $99 is too much for a device of such quality. Maybe I’ll buy an iRiver to do this if they sell one without DRM.

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Following Zack's and Lucas' posts regarding group maintenance of packages: Do I have to AOL with you guys? Yes, I also agree with Zack's both 1 and 2. And I also want to share the bit of experience we have got in this regard in the pkg-perl group. In our case, group maintainership has often saved our collective butts. We have also debated somewhat which way should our packages' maintainership be handled. In the end, our packages' maintainer will (most usually) be the pkg-perl group itself, subscribed through an alias that reaches all of us. Then, every group member that feels identified with the package lists himself as an uploader (note that this does not necessarily have a relation with the last uploads, at least not as strongly as in what the KDE and Gnome groups do, according to Lucas' post - it's closer to the pkg-ruby-extras handling). Of course, there are some packages which I have NMUed in the group's pool - packages I prefer not to have listed in my maintainer page, as I don't usually care too much about them, but I happened to be able to fix a bug with them.
Now, what about the roles of the different group members? Each of us has some skills that make him better for part of the task - i.e., we have an amazingly knowledgeable member, Niko Tyni. He just fixes all the bugs that baffle us. Honest, my best kudos to Niko, he is a good part of our team's success. And then, we have hard-working people as Gregor Hermann, who not only fixes also nice amounts of bugs, but also writes and runs general QA tests throughout our over 300 modules. Neither of them is a DD yet. And of course, many other hard-working folks. Some of us are DDs and try to upload promptly - and, of course, also try fixing bugs. So far, we are in good shape, and we tend not to lag too much. I have taken some vacation periods (both announced and unannounced - sorry :) ), but to my surprise and amazement, my packages tend not to be buggy - Why? Because there is a real team looking after them, and in the end, we keep an eye on each other.
For the pkg-perl group, group maintenance has really worked. We collectively maintain more packages than it would be reasonable for all of us added together as individuals, and they are in a better shape. There are several things we can make better, and we do try to address them - it is not yet heaven, but... :) I'll elaborate later, when I finish a text I'm preparing for presenting at YAPC (it's not that long, of course - During Debconf, I showed advances of it to several people... I just have left it aside). Right now... Well, I have 3hr of sleep left before we leave for a daytrip to the beautiful (but hot and humid!) Veracruz Huasteca. See you on Sunday/Monday!