Daniel Burrows writes about the feature of some call centres whereas if all operators are busy, it gives the caller the option of being called back. He'd like the nice twist of being able to enter his phone number on a web page and then be called back so he doesn't actually have to call, then wait. I'm not sure where Daniel lives, but I'm happy to report that this practice is quite common here in Norway, so it might well be on its way to whatever companies are local to Daniel. Also, why does bloglines link to the completely wrong place on dburrow's posts? It links to http://planet.debian.org/tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-$blah rather than the real URL.

Recently, I added some photo related blogs to my reading list, amongst them strobist, and so I came across a post about the Open Source Wireless Trigger. Being interested in both electronics and free software, I read through most of the posts on the forum as well as the wiki. I also started experimenting a bit with an old Nikon SB-24 flash I had lying around since even if I managed to break it, it wouldn't be that bad. And it's old and robust. So far, I've played around with how to make the flash go off. For the hot shoe, it's just shorting the ground and center pin (I just used a big resistor). For the PC connector, I had to apply a bit of voltage; I used an AA/LR06 battery and that worked splendidly. (Oh, and PC in this context has nothing to do with computers, it's an abbreviation of Prontor-Compur, two shutter manufacturers who decided on the design of the connector back in the 1950s.)

Just like an infinite number of monkeys, given infinite time are likely to produce infinite copies of Hamlet, I knew that given an infinite number of blog postings by Clint, I had to find one which both made sense to me and which I agreed with. Somebody please write a free syndicate (or syndicate wars) clone.

I just read Sun's announcement of "Project Hamburg". I am not sure what it is about, but that is not very important in this context. I have worked a bit with Intel lately and gotten introduced into a whole new world of code names such as Mccaslin, Menlow and so on. Up until now, most of them were obscure enough that I thought they were just random names picked from somewhere, but they are, like Sun's names of geographical features, be it towns, cities, rivers or something else. The reason for this naming is, like Sun's, that geographical names can't be trademarked, though in this particular case, Sun supplied a short list of "why Hamburg" with some references to Hamburg's history.

Some people on Planet Debian seem to think that using oil for pancakes is a good idea. They really taste so much better if you use real butter (and preferably an iron pan, not a non-stick one). Oh, and a nice receipe, which almost matches another one is:

• 1l milk
• 4 eggs
• 5dl flour (I use a mix of coarser and finer flour, but you can use anything you want)

Mix milk and flour, then add eggs last (blends better that way).

Your lucky number is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. Watch for it everywhere.

Yves-Alexis Perez writes a bit about Debian and crypto-containers, comparing cryptsetup and encfs. The comparison is decent enough, except that it's fairly trivial to get cryptsetup to integrate into the whole gnome-volume-manager stack and have a dialogue pop up when you insert an encrypted USB stick or similar. Sure, it's mounted by a root process, but I wouldn't claim it's any kind of insecure because of that. What did really catch my eye was the line near the end:

[...] but this is a bruteforce attack against master password (1024 bits RSA key), not against 128bits aes key of the container.

Well, according to conventional research, a 1024 bit RSA key is about as strong as an 80 bit symmetric key. A semi-recent RSA paper confirms this too. And to the best of my knowledge, there has not been found weaknesses in AES which lower the effective key size.

• Plug all the power plugs back in. Not just almost all of them.

A small update of my contentless ping script has now been released. First, it's a bit more configurable, thanks to some patches sent to me by way of Martin F. Krafft. Secondly, it now rate limits, so you can't get people kicked off channels by pinging them repeatedly.

Russel Coker writes about using multiple Ethernet devices in Xen and wonders about if there is something similar to RFC1918 addresses, but for Ethernet. Apparently, there is, they're called "Locally Administered Addresses". To make a local address, just set the seventh bit to one. You probably want to make the eigth bit a zero too, unless it's a multicast address. Wikipedia has more, as usual.

At home, I have had a setup with a wireless router for quite a while. It's more or less a stock OpenWRT setup, but I have split the joined all the wired ports into one virtual interface (actually, I think they're just on one VLAN) and split off the wireless. The wireless is open to the world, but I have a fair amount of packet filters there so it doesn't get too annoying. Some people have no shame and run bittorrent and other file sharing utilities on other people's open wireless. Anyway, my setup is no longer so simple. I bought a WRT54GL to provide better reception in other parts of the flat and wanted to join those two. After a little bit of reading, I found what I wanted: WDS. Due to a previous misconfiguration of the WRT54GS, the WDS connection was joined onto the br0/LAN segment and not the wireless segment. That was easily enough fixed, but it's always a bit scary to change network settings on headless devices. (I did manage to lock myself out, but I could ssh through in from the wireless network, so I just used the WRT54GL to bounce through.) Once that bit was up, I could set up WDS, I did as the documentation told me and did it with lazywds (anyone can do WDS with you) enabled. It worked, so I turned it off and rebooted both routers (again..), and it still worked. Yay!

I have been walking to and from work lately and have become increasingly restless over not having anything to listen to, so I bought a small media player, a Samsung Z5F. First impression is it's tiny. Really tiny and I used a little while to get used to touch-buttons. Upgrading the firmware is trivial, both from Linux and Windows: the firmware download is a zip file, inside there's .dat file which you place in the root directory. When you disconnect, the player says "new firmware detected. Upgrade?", I answered yes (who wouldn't? It gives me 30% better battery life and gapless MP3 playback), it rebooted, upgraded itself and rebooted again. After a long (probably 15-20 seconds) wait where it just displayed the Samsung logo, during which I was a bit scared it was bricked, it booted up fine. It works well, it plays music and podcasts, but I have run into one strange problem with it. I was about 1/3 through the latest episode of Lugradio when I wanted to go ten seconds back to catch something somebody said, but it entirely failed to seek backwards. It seems like it either doesn't support seeking in big .ogg files or doesn't support seeking in big files or doesn't support seeking in .ogg files. Anyway, annoying bug. I'm going to download the MP3 instead to see if it has the same problem or not. Apart from that, it's a lovely, tiny little player with 44 hours of battery life and 4GB storage. Nice little toy.

Live CD on a removable disk, the Debian way In [live-cd-on-removable-disk] at some point I wrote:

Enrico's note: do we have anything in Debian that we can install and just does that?

Here are the answers: Sven Mueller writes:

Well, Enrico, a tool I really grew fond of, which auto-configures X on Debian systems is xdebconfigurator, it lacks being auto-run on each system start, which I consider a feature on normal systems, but for your proposed usage (i.e. a portable USB-storage based Debian system), it would certainly be the right thing. Essentially, it never failed on me. Except for VMware virtual machines, where all it did wrong was that it proposed too high resolutions which resulted from my dual-screen Windows setup I ran VMware on. You might want to give it a try.

Tollef Fog Heen writes:

I added the support in casper for doing this almost a year ago and it has saved me lots of debugging time. Booting the live CD that way is almost as fast as booting an installed system. If you couple this with using the persistent storage support in casper, you can get the configure-on-boot support together with persistency. In a later update, slh is quited saying that xresprobe doesn't work on AMD64. This is wrong, I wrote that support based on code by Matthew Garret a little more than nine months ago. I wouldn't recommend incorporating it in new-written code, but rather use libx86

And finally, Marco Amadori writes:

Without needing to look for tools external to Debian, there is already the Debian Live software in sid: live-package, that creates a live system, and casper, that generates an initramfs that can configure a Debian system on the fly. So far there is no hard disk target for live-package, but the "Iso" target can already do the job quite well. At boot time, Casper's initramfs scans all the block devices, so it works also for USB keys and hard drives. To obtain a hard drive image, you just need to invoke "make-live" with the options to have the required software, then copy the content of the iso (or of the directory ./debian-live/binary) on a partition and install the boot loader. This is what the future "HD" target of live-package will do; so far it can only build ISO and Netboot images.

Enrico writes about putting a live CD on a removable disk. I added the support in casper for doing this almost a year ago and it has saved me lots of debugging time. Booting the live CD that way is almost as fast as booting an installed system. If you couple this with using the persistent storage support in casper, you can get the configure-on-boot support together with persistency. In a later update, slh is quited saying that xresprobe doesn't work on AMD64. This is wrong, I wrote that support based on code by Matthew Garret a little more than nine months ago. I wouldn't recommend incorporating it in new-written code, but rather use libx86.

Adrian von Bidder writes about retty, a tool to make processes reattach to your terminal. While useful, it seems mostly like a limited version of cryopid which seems even more insane and crackful, but quite cool nevertheless. I have not had a chance to actually try cryopid yet though, so if any of you have, please blog about your experiences with it. Oh, and please package it, somebody.

So, the Ubuntu release candidate was released today. As a release manager, it's a fascinating process. First the development where there is relativetly little central control: People work on their specs and my job as a relase manager is to roll new alpha/snapshot releases every couple of weeks. Those are lightly tested (does it boot and install on at least one machine?) and if a derivative or an architecture isn't ready, well, then it isn't ready. Beta, the release candidate and the release are completely different beasts. We have test plans, people are assigned tests and so on. In addition, we have a freeze which in total lasts about a week for beta, two weeks for release. Every upload has to be hand-checked and approved. As the release grows nearer, the bugs have to be more severe in order for an upload to be approved and in the end it's more or less a full commitment "we have this, we have tested this thoroughly and there is no way we can do a full test and still release on schedule". At some point, it gets scary. There is just one command left to run; sync-mirrors. No arguments, just the command. I pushed the button, and we are now live.

People tend to just ping me on IRC, which is annoying and useless. If people say something like tfheen: I have this problem with blah. Do you know a workaround? I can just respond later when I'm awake or around. Instead, people are going: tfheen: ping? and I pong five hours later and they're not around. Annoying for all parts. To counter this, I have now written a small irssi script which responds to contentless pings with "You sent me a contentless ping. This is a contentless pong. Please provide a bit of information about what you want and I'll respond when I am around." The script is available.

A bit surprising, really.

: tfheen@thosu ~ > history 1 awk ' print $2 ' awk 'BEGIN  FS=" "   print $1 ' sort uniq -c   sort -nr  head -n 10
  21477 ls
  18170 cd
  10640 ssh
   9257 sudo
   5559 less
   3015 grep
   2407 bzr
   2101 ps
   1980 man
   1980 debuild

For those of you wondering why there is no editor on the list; I use emacs and it's in the 11th place (with 1903 runs). I tend to let it run for a while and open more than one file, so it doesn't get that high on the list. I also cd and ls a lot.