My personal email account was spammed by Jennifer Kirkham-Sandy (Phone 0800 6 121 151) of Total Language Solutions Limited, 3 The Courtyard, New North Road, Exeter EX4 4EP, Devon. Registered number (England and Wales) at the above address: 03933805. They seemed to be using a service called qwertywordmarketing. I've reported it to the hosting company, so we'll see what happens.

Postr 0.6 is here! What is new I hear you ask. Well:

• Really parse embedded IPTC data
• Sweet new look for the side bar (thanks Lucas Rocha)
• Ability to select a set to upload the pictures too
• New icon (thanks Andreas Nilsson)

The tarball is in the usual place, and I'll make Debian packages shortly. NP: Konfusion, Skalpel

Tasks 0.5 is now released. This release has features a port to OpenMoko and several bug fixes.

• Add an OpenMoko frontend (Rob Bradford)
• New icons from Andreas Nilsson to match the Pimlico style
• Use a SexyIconEntry for the URL entries if available (Diego Escalante Urrelo, #241)
• Fix layout of widgets in the task editor (Diego Escalante Urrelo, #236)
• Chain up focus events in the new task label fixing warnings and IM
• Add some padding around the editor dialog (#323)
• Improve messages for translation
• Translate the menu bar
• Fix license to refer to Tasks not Sound Juicer
• Remove Application from the desktop file

More information, screeenshots, and tarballs can be downloaded from the Pimlico site. There are no packages yet, but I hope to have those online shortly.

(Rapidly followed by 0.4.1) I’m very pleased to announce that Dates 0.4 has been released to the world, this release includes support for multiple local and remote calendars (including read-only access to Google Calendar.) It is available in three stunning flavours all guaranteed to be buzzing with energy but 100% fat free. N800 owners can use the Application Manager to install dates by using this install link. Packages for Debian/Ubuntu are being built now. Hopefully we should be able to get packages built for the Nokia 770 soon. Dates also has a cool new icon, courtesy of Andreas Nilsson. Andreas has also designed icons for the other components of, as well as the website for, the Pimlico Project which launches today. Pimlico is the umbrella project for all the OpenedHand PIM applications; Dates, Contacts, Tasks and Sync.
The funky new Dates icon.

Thanks to the icon master Andreas Nilsson, Postr now has an icon!

let haskell' = succ haskell98 in
Announcing the Haskell' ("Haskell-Prime") process.  A short time ago,
I asked for volunteers to help with the next Haskell standard.  A
brave group has spoken up, and we've organized ourselves into a
committee in order to coordinate the community's work.  It will be the
committee's task to bring together the very best ideas and work of the
broader community in an "open-source" way, and to fill in any gaps in
order to make Haskell' as coherent and elegant as Haskell 98.
Our task is broadly defined by our mission statement:
    The Haskell programming language is more-or-less divided into two
    "branches".  The Haskell 98 standard is the "stable" branch of the
    language, and that has been a big success.  A lot of progress has been
    made over the last few years in the "research" branch of the Haskell
    language.  It is constantly advancing, and we feel that it is time for
    a new standard which reflects those advancements.
    Haskell' will be a conservative refinement of Haskell 98. It will
    be the work of this committee to adopt a set of language
    extensions and modifications and to standardize a new set of
    libraries.
    We will strive to only include tried-and-true language features,
    and to define them at least as rigorously as Haskell 98 was
    defined. This standard will reflect the realities of developing
    practical applications in the Haskell language. We will work closely
    with the rest of the Haskell community to create this standard.
Your Haskell' Committee is as follows (slightly munged email addresses
follow):
 * Manuel M T Chakravarty <chak at cse.unsw.edu.au>
 * John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org>
 * Bastiaan Heeren <bastiaan at cs.uu.nl>
 * Isaac Jones <ijones at galois.com>
 * John Launchbury <john at galois.com>
 * Andres Loeh <loeh at iai.uni-bonn.de>
 * Simon Marlow <simonmar at microsoft.com>
 * John Meacham <john at repetae.net>
 * Ravi Nanavati <ravi at bluespec.com>
 * Henrik Nilsson <nhn at cs.nott.ac.uk>
 * Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk>
 * Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>
 * Don Stewart <dons at cse.unsw.edu.au>
 * Audrey Tang <autrijus at gmail.com>
 * Simon J. Thompson <S.J.Thompson at kent.ac.uk>
 * Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace at cs.york.ac.uk>
 * Stephanie Weirich <sweirich at cis.upenn.edu>
The editors are Isaac Jones and John Launchbury.
Feel free to contact any of us with any concerns or questions.  If you
don't know who to direct your questions to, email Isaac Jones
ijones at syntaxpolice.org.
Community involvement is vital to our task, and there will be a way
for members of the community to make formal proposals.  In the opening
phases, please use these more informal resources to help us coordinate
Haskell':
 * The haskell-prime mailing list.  All technical discussion will take
   place here, or (if other meetings take place) be reported here.  Anyone
   can subscribe, and any subscriber can post questions and comments,
   and participate in discussions.  Anyone can read the list archives.
   http://haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
 * A wiki / issue tracking system to document consensus and to track
   ongoing tasks.  This system is publicly readable, but only
   committee writable so that we may present it as the "official"
   output of the committee.  If you ever feel that the wiki is not
   accurate as to the consensus, please alert the committee!
   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
 * A darcs code repository for experiments, proposed libraries,and
   complex examples.  darcs is a decentralized system, so anyone can use
   it, but patches should be sent to Isaac Jones:
   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/SourceCode
Please join us in making Haskell' a success.

Since security support for Woody ceased recently, and with Kazehakase I’ve found a reasonable successor in Sarge for Galeon 1.2.x, I’ve dist-upgraded my 10 years old Pentium I ThinkPad bijou to Sarge this weekend. Even the XFree86 4, which made so much hassles in Woody by not regcognising nor configuring the graphics card correctly, worked fine from scratch. Well, at least after installing xfonts-base and xfonts-75dpi — the -transcoded versions somehow gave only the error message “default font ‘fixed’ not found”. So goodbye Galeon, goodbye GNU Emacs 20, goodbye XFree86 3.3. I hope, I won’t miss you. Only my desktop gsa at home still runs Woody, but will be dist-upgraded soon, too. What though still stayed on my laptop from Woody is Siag Office, since there is no adequate replacement for such a nice office suite with such a low resource footprint. But it has also an impact on the talks I hold. I held all talks with a patched version of lynx (e.g. with LSS support) as presentation tool on that laptop because initially I didn’t get X running on that box. What started as a makeshift became my hallmark… But I didn’t manage to get Sarge’s lynx patched so that it gives me the same output as my old version did. So either I would have to reoptimise the layout of my talks for a new lynx version or just start with something new. Madduck recently showed me python-docutils, which he uses for presentations. Maybe I’ll use that although I have a severe aversion against Python. So it may also be that I’ll stick with WML, but get some new ideas from python-docutils how to use HTML for presentations. Update: Found out that the interesting part of his presentation technic wasn’t python-docutils but S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System which in entirely written in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. S5 is really cool stuff, one of the first cases of useful use of JavaScript, and will surely be used for my next presentation — with Debian Sarge and Kazehakase on a Pentium I ThinkPad. ;-)

Tenth day in Addis Procedure to check if all the services of Dream University are up and running If a machine blocks pings, use arping instead.

1. Test DHCP:

   $ sudo ifdown eth0
   $ sudo ifup eth0
   $ ifconfig
   

2. Test the DNS:

   # See if the DNS machine is on
   # The network
   $ ping -n 192.168.0.1
   # See if the DNS resolves names
   $ host www.dream.edu.et
   

3. Test the gateway:

   # Ping the gateway
   $ ping gateway
   # Ping an outside host
   $ ping -n 10.4.15.6
   

4. Test the proxy:

   # Ping the proxy
   $ ping proxy
   # Open a web page and see if it displays
   # See if it caches
   http_proxy=http://proxy.dream.edu.et:3030/ wget -S -O/dev/null http://www.enricozini.org  2>&1   grep X-Cache
   

5. Test the mail server:

   $ ping smtp
   $ nmap smtp -p 25  grep 25/tcp
   $ if nmap gateway -p 25  grep 25/tcp   grep -q open ; then echo "It works"; fi
   $ send a mail and see if you receive it
   

To do more advanced network and service monitoring, try nagios:

• http://www.nagios.org/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios

New useful tools seen today

wget - The non-interactive network downloader.

Special devices

• /dev/null:
  • On read, there is no data.
  • On write, discards data.
• /dev/zero:
  • On read, reads an infininte amount of zero bits.
  • On write, discards data.
• /dev/random, /dev/urandom
  • On read, reads random bits.
  • On write, discards data.
  • Difference: /dev/random is cryptographically secure, but it can hang waiting for system events

Example uses:

wget -O/dev/null http://www.example.org
dd if=/dev/zero of=testdisk bs=1M count=50
mke2fs testdisk
sudo mount -o loop testdisk  /mnt

Tiny little commands

• true - do nothing, successfully
• false - do nothing, unsuccessfully
• yes - output a string repeatedly until killed

Example uses:

• while /bin/true; do echo ciao; done
• Using /bin/false as a shell
• yes boring-tool-that-asks-lots-of-silly-questions

Some more shell syntax

• 2>&1 Redirects the standard error in the standard output
• 2> Redirects the standard error instead of the standard output

Some people run commands ignoring the standard error: command 2> /dev/null this causes unexpected error messages to go unnoticed: please do not do it. What to check if a machine is very slow

• See if the ram is full: $ free If it is, you see what are the fattest programs using top, pressing M to sort by memory usage.
• See if there are lots of programs competing for CPU: $ top
• Check if you have I/O bottlenecks: $ vmstat (but I don't know how to read it)
• For a desktop on older hardware, you can try xubuntu instead of ubuntu

More VIM command mode Command mode allows to perform various text editing functions. You work by performing operations on selected blocks of text. Some common operations:

• y: copy ("yank")
• p: paste
• P: paste before
• d: cut ("delete")
• c: change
• i: insert
• a: append
• .: repeat last operation

Some common blocks:

• w: word
• : paragraph
• left and right arrow: one character left or right
• up and down arrow: this line and the one on top or below
• f letter: from the cursor until the given letter
• v: selection
• V: line selection
• ^V: block selection

Examples:

• yw: copy word
• dw: cut word
• yy: copy line
• dd: cut line
• V (select lines) y: copy a selection of lines
• V (select lines) d: cut a selection of lines
• p: paste

The best way to learn more vim is always to run vimtutor. Installing squirrelmail To install squirrelmail:

1. apt-get install squirrelmail
2. /usr/sbin/squirrelmail-config and configure IMAP and SMTP. In our case, since we use IMAPS, the IMAP server is imap.dream.edu.et, port 993, secure IMAP enabled and SMTP is smtp.dream.edu.et.
3. Read /usr/share/doc/squirrelmail/README.Debian.gz (with zless) for how to proceed with setup. A short summary:
   • link /etc/squirrelmail/apache.conf into the apache conf.d directory
   • customise /etc/squirrelmail/apache.conf for example setting up the virtual hosts, or running it only on SSL

To have different virtual hosts over HTTPS, you need to have a different IP for every virtual host: name based virtual hosts do not work on HTTPS. You can configure multiple IP addresses on the same computer: use network interfaces named: eth0:1, eth0:2, eth0:3... These are called interface aliases. You cannot setup interface aliases using the graphical network configuration and you need to add them in /etc/network/interfaces:

    iface eth0:1 inet static
          address 192.168.0.201
          netmask 255.255.255.0
          gateway 192.168.0.3
    auto eth0:1

This is the trick commonly used to put different virtual HTTPS hosts on the same computer. Links squid documentation:

• http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/
• http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/FAQ/
• http://www.deckle.co.za/squid-users-guide/Main_Page

Shell programming:

• http://www.freeos.com/guides/lsst/
• http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html
• http://www.tinker.ncsu.edu/LEGO/shell_help.html

Performance analysis:

• http://flaviostechnotalk.com/wordpress/index.php/2005/06/05/performance-analysis-on-linux/
• http://www.cyberciti.biz/faqs/2006/07/linux-performance-tools-to.php

Setting up mail services:

• http://wanderingbarque.com/howtos/mailserver/mailserver.html

I was at Berlinux 2005 this weekend and though the very chaotic — because understaffed — organisation it was interesting and also funny. Thursday I arrived around 20:15 in Berlin, met Klaus Knopper and others at the train station, headed to Sven Guckes’ appartment for dropping all my luggage, then going back to meet with Klaus and the others for a theremin concert with Dorit Chrysler. No wonder that it sounded sometimes like one of my favourite musicians, Jean Michel Jarre, since — according to the Wikipedia theremin article — he also plays this instrument. On Friday I held my talk about WML in front of a — for that topic — surprisingly high number of auditors (around 30, maybe 35). In comparision to my WML talk at OscomTag 2005 all people who asked questions had understood about what the talk was, so the questions were most time interesting and justified. As usual I held the talk using Lynx with LSS support (picture by Sven Guckes) on my nine year old Pentium 1 ThinkPad bijou running Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 aka Woody. Before and after the talk I helped out at Werner Heuser’s xtops booth (another picture by Sven) and the booth of the Debian Project (yet another picture by Sven :-) directly beside Frank Ronneburg’s Debian powered model railway. (picture by you-know-who ;-) In the evening I was at the social event, hanging around with alphascorpii, Tolimar and Joey and being surprised that Joey studies biology — as I did as minor to computer science. On Saturday I was on alphascorpii’s talk about why being a BOFH is not funny, hung around at the same booths as the day before, fixed the X configuration on my laptop after hints on a unknown Debian booth visitor. Before the exhibition closed I heard a very interesting talk about web accessibility held by Sebastian who is blind himself. Although or maybe because I’m interested in that subject, the talk opened my eyes regarding two things: First Captchas are evil and Blind HTML tables aren’t as evil as all the priests of web accessibility are always preaching . They are easier than frames for blinds and seem to have only little disadvantages against a CSS based layout for blinds nowadays if used the right way. Oh, and btw. — nested tables are still evil. :-) Saturday evening I had dinner together with Stefan Gerdelbracht, Frank Hofmann, Klaus Knopper and Manfred Krejcik. Later Thomas Winde joined us. It was very interesting evening, especially talking with Klaus and Manfred. On Sunday, after having brunch with Stefan and Manfred, we met with Sven (who was our host at Berlin, thanks again!) and shortly after that, Stefan left for visiting some other friends in Berlin. Sven, Manfred and I visited C-Base where Sven stumbled over a sound editing seminar while Manfred was preparing his zipFM show for Monday which mainly consisted of an interview with Klaus. After that we headed to a small but fine birthday party of a friend of Sven and were back home around 2:30. My train left Monday morning at 8:56 and I was at home around 14:30. And on Friday I’ll go to Dresden for the Linux-Info-Tag by train just to go back to Berlin afterwards, where I meet my parents for a two week baltic sea holiday in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania near Rügen. But due to the Systems fair at Munich and autumn holidays I have to stay at work this week. And yes, I wrote this and the other postings posted today offline, so they’re dated quite close together. :-)