It’s time for recommending five films again. I’ve also decided that I may reserve the last of the five for films I watched prior to starting these series. So here we go:

• Au revoir les enfants (Goodbye, Children): just watch it, really. (France, World War II, children in a school run by priests, but there’s a part I’m not telling you.)
• El bosque animado: a superb film that every Spanish person should watch. Magic comedy & drama set up in rural Galicia. Amazing Tito Valverde.
• eXistenZ: yet another one by David Cronenberg, involving futuristic video games this time. Quite a good see, but predictable ending?
• Billy Elliot: the kid who wants to dance ballet. Predictive and linear, but I just loved it, as I expected — maybe you will too. The scene where Billy says goodbye to Michael just completely and utterly broke my heart, probably because I identified so much with Michael.
• Now, Voyager: Bette Davis plays an ugly duckling, that obviously transforms into an awesome swan. Superb. Oh, and Bette Davis.

On my way home from New Zealand, I spent a (Friday) night in Melbourne. Peter, Donna, Andrew, and Mark, all of whom I knew from LCA 2008, came out and helped me get away from the after-work-craze that filled centre city. Thanks to them, I found (and refound) a couple of places worth noting:

• The staff of Joe Taylor, a cute bar at the corner of Victoria and Errol Streets, prepare a delicious cocktail they call Don Quixote : vodka, lime, basil, sugar, and ginger beer. They also have Mountain Goat on tap; their hightail beer instantly became my new Aussie favourite.
• The Hot Poppy right next door has all-day breakfast, including a fantastic housemade Bircher M esli. Both Joel, who joined me for brunch, and I enjoyed it, so you don t have to rely on just my judgement.
• The outdoor bar my brother and I found on our previous visit to Melbourne, fenced off from a small lane with crates and boxes to sit on, is called Section Eight Container Bar. It s on Tattersals Lane, which is off Lt. Bourke Street between Swanston and Russell. It took me three tries to find it again, but it was worth it. They also serve Mountain Goat beers! Issue 5 of the Melbourne Pixel magazine has a review of it in the right pane.
• The Somerset Gordon Place hotel at 19 Lt. Bourke Street is a splendid location within walking distance from the centre. It s a four star hotel, but you can get sweet last minute deals there via booking.com, it seems.
• Federation Square and Wharf next to Flinders Station are always worth a visit.

NP: The Phoenix Foundation: Happy Ending Update: Joel points out that the Australia on Collins shopping centre on 260 Collins street has free wireless

Yesterday when walking down Flinders St I noticed that a new store has opened up selling organic food. It’s Flinders Organics and the address is 260 Flinders St Melbourne VIC 3000 (just across the road from Flinders St Station, not far from the Swanston St intersection). I bought some fruit, some Green and Black organic hot-chocolate powder (recently I’ve been making hot chocolate with Green and Black dark chocolate - the milk needs to be heated a lot and some stirring is needed - it is easier with powder) and some fruit juice. The fruit juice was good, one litre for about $4.50 which is significantly cheaper than any of the juice-bars which offer freshly squeezed juice (but not organic). Being sold in a bottle that can be re-sealed meant that I could carry it around the city and drink some whenever I was thirsty. People who are attending LCA might want to keep this in mind, both for food that they want to prepare themselves (EG making sandwiches in their hotel room) and for take-away stuff such as bottled juice. The location is almost within walking distance of the conference.

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I have just stayed at the Victoria Hotel Melbourne. I booked it through www.WotIf.com and paid ~$110 per night instead of the list price of $186 per night. The location is great (little Collins St near Swanston St). It’s a short walk from most things that are in the central city area and the nearest tram stop has a tram that goes directly to Melbourne University which will be good for people attending LCA (although it’s close enough that you might want to walk and save a few dollars). The price is pretty good too (you don’t get much cheaper than that in the central city area). But there are some down-sides. The hotel is old and has an old design. It has small windows and air-conditioners are retro-fitted into the window (as opposed to the modern design of having huge windows and A/C in the ceiling). The air-conditioning is barely adequate and once the hotel walls heat up the room will be warm all night. The window-based air-conditioning also greatly diminishes the possibility of looking out the window, and for people who are tall enough to see over it they will probably find that the bed is too short for them (I stayed in a twin room, maybe a double bed would be longer - of course if I was alone in a double bed then I could probably sleep diagonally). The room lights are all halogen spotlights, that includes the reading lights over the beds. This is 90’s architectural fashion and not a functional design. If you want to lie on your bed to read a book or watch TV then you will be able to see at least three halogen lights from the corner of your eye. Seeing such a small intense light source in your peripheral vision is really unpleasant. The pool is about 5M*5M in size and approximately 1.1M deep (it seems deeper than a 1.0M pool I recently swam in but shallower than a 1.2M pool). In conclusion I think that the Oaks on Market [1] apartments are better value for money, altough Market street is less convenient. Update: I forgot to mention one last failing. For curtains my room had nothing other than a Venetian blind. As such a blind does not cover the entire window space I was woken by the sun rise. It’s bad enough seeing a sunrise after a hard night coding, I definitely don’t want to see one when I had planned to sleep in. Curtains that properly cover the window is not an expensive feature to add.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/01/07/oaks-on-market/

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These questions came in as comments this week, but I think they're worth a whole post. Peter Swan asked:

"This may seem like a dumb question, but I have not seen anywhere the answer to it. Can a satellite dish be mounted in a loft space or must it be mounted outside?"

There are few dumb questions. DIY dish info is still rather hard to find. You can install a dish behind a window and I've read about special tiles which allow satellite frequencies through on analoguesat's pages about hiding dishes but I don't know anyone using them. A more usual solution is either a hidden location such as a flat roof with baffle boards (dishes only need to see the Clarke belt, which is an elevation of about 20 degrees in England) or to use a non-dish antenna like the digiglobe or the LX2000 pipe. I think it's a really good idea to put the dish somewhere that you can fix it easily. Even the best dish seems to age eventually. I suspect some "professional" installers put the dishes at tops of walls to encourage repair call-outs. Marcus asked:

"Is it possible to receive British satellite television in other countries? I am living in Finland and I was considering purchasing a sky system from the UK and installing it over here. Would it work? Also would I be able to connect a sky set-top box to a different dish?"

Yes, you can get British TV in other countries. Getting external TV like BBC World is easy, but BBC UK services are on Astra 2D, which is focused on the UK. Coverage maps are available on many sites and it looks like Finland isn't well-covered. You'd need a colossal dish. You can connect Sky boxes to other dishes. Sky dishes and Sky LNBs need to go together, sometimes called Skyware, but dishes and boxes are interchangeable. A Sky system will work in Finland, but will only receive services on the other beams like 2A and I doubt Sky will register you at a non-UK address (anyone know for sure?). Also, Sky boxes are horribly crippled for anything other than Sky services and hopefully BBC Freesat will make BBC UK services easier-to-use with standard boxes.

Thanks mostly to David Berry and Karl Fogel, there is a debate unfolding in the comment section of my post on whether it makes sense to open source books and in what ways the model of free software is transferable (or not) to book publishing. It is worth reading if you are interested in this debate as the back and forth volley is pretty illuminating. Somewhat independent of the content, Karl Fogel wrote something that I love, mostly because I often try to remind people of this, although I have not said is as eloquently and tersely as Karl:

I do not understand how you can have libre freedom without free as in beer freedom. While the latter does not necessarily imply the former, the former always implies the latter. If everyone can share X freely with others, than the cost will always be driven down to zero (hence X will have both freedoms); if people cannot so share, then X is, by definition, not libre free.

Much more there, so check it out.

Debconf is coming. And I fully agree with Amaya regarding the much needed battery recharge that brings to people (and me in particular.
And to the contrary to the information two posts ago, thanks to getting an unexpected side income from the nice folks of FFII, I did manage to buy myself a Canon 400D instead of my old camera that was stolen from me recently. Unfortunately, I do not earn well enough to also buy a good lens, so I will have to document this Debconf with the kit lens :P. If you want something better, then I beg you to lend me some better Canon (EF or EF-S) lens for the time of the Debconf. Canon EF 17-40 f/4 L (like the one that I took the last years group photos) would really be great!
This year I am thinking of doing both the group photo and the mugshots. Any other ideas for the paparazzi?

Jazz pianist/composer extraordinaire Andrew Hill died yesterday. He was 75 years old. I love his music. I even gave a lecture on his music several years ago. I have a great regard for someone who follows his own logic, challenges the mainstream mode AND achieve artistic excellence. In many cases, so-called "avan-garde" are hard trying to do things different, but their results are not impressive aesthetically. Hill achieved both. And boy, he swang hard when he wanted. I'll miss him.

Tag this post with del.icio.us!

A coupld of glitches appeared lately during my sarge->etch upgrade for my home server:

• Non optimal upgrade of amavisd-new: the upgrade process is quite painful and there is no automated way to switch the old "all in one file" settings to the new layout. Pretty painful to reanalyse settings I made 2 years ago and never touched since then.
• No longer working VPN with my company. I was using Openswan and it no longer accepted to connect to my company's VPN server (a FortiNet router). After many fiddling with the infamous /etc/ipsec.conf file, I finally decided to move to StrongSwan which appears to be the next generation of such software. Using my old ipsec.conf file bringed my VPN back. As this is a big part of my work method, I'm getting reliefed..:)

There are probably a few others things to tweak, still. But I had no problem with the samba server, the squid cache, the postfix settings, IMAP server, which means that the entire family can still use their computers without hassle, which was the major challenge in this migration.

Today I discovered a very useful and nearly undocumented Openswan configuration parameter, which goes by the name of leftsourceip (and symmetrically rightsourceip). What it does is telling the Linux Openswan VPN gateway what address to send traffic from, which it generates itself, and is destined for the other side of the VPN connection. Apparently there are some caveats when using the KLIPS IPsec stack, but it works great when using NETKEY. Details available in the thread up to and following this message on the Openswan Users mailinglist.

The immediate advantage of using leftsourceip is that you can just reach machines on the far end of the connection, from either gateway where you've set it, without having to specify source interface or address on the internal network.

There's already a patch in the Openswan BTS; hopefully it will be integrated soon.

Yay! I have a VPN now set up at the office and tested with Linux and windows clients using OpenVPN. Interestingly I may have found my problem with Openswan while getting the OpenVPN server to work. But I now have a working solution and it impressed the management-types.

So I've been hitting my head over the last few days trying to set up an VPN at work. I'm using openswan on both ends. One side is the NAT gateway and I think that's where the problem lies. The tunnel does establish and I can ping both hosts.The layout is basically:

192.168.72.0/24 --- [ NAT / FW / VPNleft ] -- Internet -- [VPNright]


I'm sure many people have done this but I can't get access to the priavte subnet via the right side or access the right side from the subnet. If anybody has a similar setup and wouldn't mind sharing ( randy@khensu.org )their ipsec.conf and firewall script it would be appreciated.

Via Jesse, this strangely beautiful commercial for some sort of beverage I’ve never heard of. Featuring fruit. Update: apparently I’m out of touch with the zeitgeist. The fruit video is apparently a somewhat authorized parody of this Sony Bravia ad. In fact, I didn’t even know what a Sony Bravia was until now. Update 2: I guess I’m really behind the times. Wikipedia has known all about this Tango ad business since at least June 14, 2006. Now there’s some effective advertising.

We're still in wt:Copenhagen today, but we head out this afternoon for our tour of the Baltic Sea. We've had a great time in the city so far, mostly due to staying with longtime Wikitraveller wt:User:Elgaard, who generously offered us the extra room in his apartment for the time we're here. There's something about staying in an actual human being's home while you're travelling to really recharge the batteries. After a week in hotels and restaurants, a little time in a real house can make you feel a lot more human. We took our time getting to Copenhagen from wt:Odense at the end of the Wikisym conference, mostly because I was really hung over. I'd spent the last night of the event drinking at the Irish pub in the pedestrian area, and I probably had 1-5 pints too many. Paul Yount calls Irish pubs "the first Open Source franchise", and it's true: you can expect certain things at a pub no matter where it is in the world. Although we started out with about 30 people, the crowd thinned through the night. I had a good time talking with Brion Vibber and Chuck Smith about the state of Esperanto-language wikis on the Web -- in a mish-mash of English and Esperanto, of course. (In case you were wondering: the state is "fine".) I also chatted Wikimedia Foundation politics with Angela Beesley; we both think Erik Moeller is going to make a good addition to the WMF board. After the pub shut down, I headed to the deathly silent casino in the sub-basement of the Radisson of Odense. The bar was eerily silent, and the gaming tables were intense and serious; I don't think people could have been more somber if they were organ harvesters gambling for body parts. The last hangers-on were Andrea Forte of Georgia Tech, Alex Schroeder of CommunityWiki, Sunir Shah of MeatballWiki, and Eugene Eric Kim, of Blue Oxen and HyperCore. In other words, some of the smartest people in the wiki world today -- we talked wiki politics and theory until the wee hours of the morning. They all switched to mineral water while I was still slugging down pints of Carlsberg Special, which is probably where I went wrong. Wikisym, for me, was one of the best conferences I've been to this year, and I've been to a lot. It capped off a long summer of conference-going, and this fall should be relatively tranquil. Which is great: I have a lot of work to do, based on the ideas I've picked up this season. tags: wikisym2006 odense copenhagen wiki

sterbro All of which is to say that I was feeling pretty crufty the next morning as we got on the train. Kindly Maj got us a late checkout and let me sleep in late, which helped a lot; a falafel sandwich around 11AM also cleared my head a bit. The train ride from Odense to Copenhagen was great, and by the time we got to Niels Elgaard Larsen's house in sterbro (a neighborhood of Copenhagen) I was pretty refreshed. Niels took us out to an early dinner at a restaurant called Pixie in a square by his house. Copenhagen has some pretty strict traffic laws, and the number of cars on the street is possibly the least I've ever seen for a major metropolis, leaving a lot of room for sidewalks, bike paths, and open parks and plazas. We got to chat with Niels over a fresh pasta dinner, and thence home to his house for beers and more talk. One great thing about visiting Wikitravellers is that they tend to be a) very smart, b) well-travelled, and c) interested in Free Software and Free Culture. Niels is no exception; he's active in the Danish and European Free Software and information freedom communities, and he's extremely interesting to talk to on the subject. We shared travel stories and talked about Open Source and Open Content later than I would have thought, based on my earlier-morning hangover. Probably the high point of the evening, for me, was when Niels shared a brilliant idea for a way to distribute Wikitravel guides in digital form for a very wide array of users. We've had a hard time settling on a mobile document format for Wikitravel guides, since mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones support standards so poorly. It's one of the most requested features for Wikitravel, but it's going to take a huge amount of work to cover even a fraction of the mobile device owner community. Except Niels had a genius idea for how to distribute guides in a simple, standard format that works on a mobile digital device many if not most travellers carry with them every time they travel. The idea: make guides that are downloadable JPEG images which can be copied to a SD card or Compact Flash or Memory stick or whatever, then stuck into a digital camera. If the camera supports zooming on images, and has a decent screen for review, the guides might be useful and readable. I'm going to try to do some experiments with the idea -- I think it could be a real winner. Adding 30-40 images to a camera today is pretty cheap, and if they're just text I think some aggressive compression can work well. tag: jpeg sterbro niels copenhagen wikitravel mobile

Copenhagen on foot Yesterday we did a big tour of the city on our own. In the morning, we had some breakfast at the Laundromat Cafe right next door to Niels's house, and I took the opportunity to clean a week's worth of dirty laundry. Nothing like a stack of clean clothes to make you feel more like a decent citizen. I was down to a bathing suit and the ICANNWiki t-shirt Ray King gave me at Wikisym. Then we headed out on the town to do some sight-seeing. First we hit the Kastellet, a fortress in northeast Copenhagen that's the oldest operational military base in Europe. It's got the distinctive star-shaped outline typical of old fortifications, and is surrounded by a lovely park with ducks and swans. We had lunch at a nearby caf , with large beers. (Gee, I'm getting worried about the pattern here.) After lunch we made an unscheduled stop at den lille havfrue -- the famous Litle Mermaid statue in the harbour. It was miniscule and surrounded by perhaps 100 onlookers, crammed into a tiny swatch of sidewalk. We stopped about half a mile away, took some pictures of the crowd, and moved on. We then hoofed it down through the harbour and across Nyhavn and a bridge to Christianhavn and Christiania. We'd both heard about the city-within-a-city run on anarchist principles -- kind of like a giant squat -- but neither of us had been there before. It was an interesting place -- packed with people, lots of food cooking a beer-drinking, caf s and restaurants all over the place, interspersed with art installations and little gardens. But it had the unkempt scumminess of a big squat, too -- especially on the main drag -- and there were a few too many pitbulls and gutterpunks for my tastes. Overall a good experience but I don't know if I'll go back. After our long walk we took the metro back to Niels's, where we napped until he and wife Chiquita got home. Chiquita is an investment banker from wt:Toronto who does a lot of business in Europe, where she met Niels a few years ago. They were married last year and have had a long-distance relationship -- visiting each other a week or so out of each month -- for the whole time. She's moving here this year, which I think will be nice for both of them. We had a good dinner at a place called Thomas's -- a buffet, which seems to be very popular here -- and then back home for a nightcap and bed. Amita June was overtired by the time we got her to bed, and she let us know that we'd pushed her too hard with a quarter-hour of heavy crying. But we all got to sleep pretty well afterwards, and at least the parents know that we should take it easy in the future. tags: copenhagen kastellet christiania little mermaid

So last night my wife picks up my
Openswan: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks book and starts reading it aloud. She started with the Introduction which is about the need for cryptography and history of the Internet and found it fascinating. She like the line about "The Internet was, in fact, not invented by Al Gore." So, although I suspect the rest of the book may not be as interesting to her, kudos to Paul Wouters and Ken Bantoft for writing a good Introduction.

Day trip. Six busses full of Debian developers, maintainers, and supporters toured the area around Oaxtepec today. We clambered over several Mexican pyramids and a ruined mountain-top city. Walking in the main entrance I immediately felt that it was very familiar. I identified the pool where they purified themselves before entering the complex, and several altars. Some of the things the archaelogists called "altars" looked more like bed platforms. I told the guide maybe they were both; ancient religions were known for their homosexual sex rites. Then we saw the palace of Cortes in the city of Morelos. It is a very swank city, fun to walk around and shop. We got back at 10pm, tired but satisfied. Bought a t-shirt that says "100% GUAPO". The Hispanic contingent at Debconf went wild. They may give me some photos to post soon. Lisp redux. Kevin Mark read my summary of Peter van Eyndes presentation yesterday, and sent in this email:

Hi Ted, you seem to be having fun at Debconf! Saw your post about a book by Peter Seibel. Strangely enough I attended a meeting at lispnyc with him this week. They shot video which hopefully you can see. Checkout http://www.lispnyc.org/home.clp cheers, Kev

Well, thanks Kev! At lunch yesterday, a fellow developer, whose name I forget, told me that OCAML is far superior to Haskell in terms of performance because it is "statically typed at compile time" or something. I thought that was a characteristic of Haskell as well. I mentioned the benchmarks that Haskell is currently winning, and he brushed this aside. Which may be appropriate; optimizing for benchmarks isn't the same as optimizing for the general case. Food. We had lunch yesterday at a restaurant. I hate zucchini, but their zuchini stuffed with quesa (cheese) was delicious. I haven't found birria (shredded goat meat) in the market here yet, but the restaurant had some. At the end of the meal a vendor came into the restaurant with some crisp, deep fried confection called "churros", coiled like a big hose. Its cross section looks like a five point star. For P10 the vendor broke off four pieces, 5 inches long. Knut shared his with me; it was like a donut, only crunchy. John Sokol. John Sokol, part of the original 386BSD team, arrived late Tuesday night. Carrying 80 pounds of luggage, he not only took the Metro, but he walked up the mile longer hill from the resort entrance to the conference. The Metro is nice, but it has a lot of stairs. I was tired after traversing it; I could not have walked up the hill if I tried afterward. He brought a VOIP phone with him, but it gives an error saying his account has been compromised. It is probably looking at his Mexican IP address and blocking it. So John and I have no way of phoning the outside world.

I’ve been using OpenSWAN for a little while now, and have been quite unhappy w/ it. Aside from being poorly documented and a pain in the ass, we’ve run into kernel bugs and stability issues; the various SWAN implementations feel very cobbled together. I also firmly believe that network stacks should be implemented in userspace, and linux’s IPSec stack confirms that belief (Van Jocobson’s network channels display a nice example of how an efficient userspace tcp stack would work). Layering GRE tunnels and using OSPF over the tunnels simply adds to the complexity. Playing around w/ OpenVPN was such a pleasant experience. It has excellent documentation, and was a breeze to configure/set up. I was concerned with speed issues, however; OpenSWAN uses the kernel’s IPSec stack, while OpenVPN has to copy packets between kernelspace and userspace, and uses SSL + Linux’s tun device. I experimented w/ two machines; a dual opteron and a single processor 2.4GHz p4, both w/ Debian’s 2.6.15-1-686-smp kernel. Doing a straight netcat of /dev/zero between the two machines yielded 98mbit/s (according to iptraf). Using an OpenSWAN tunnel and a GRE tunnel [0], I got about 81mbit/s sustained between the two machines. The load on the slower machine hovered around 0.30 while this was happening. Using OpenVPN in UDP mode, I got about 15mbit/s, w/ a load avg of 1.84. Very disappointing results. I was curious if using OpenVPN in TCP mode made a difference; it did. With it, I got about 17mbit/s, w/ a load avg of 2.10. This wasn’t very satisfactory; replacing OpenSWAN w/ OpenVPN when it could only do 17mbit/s over a 100mbit connection, and drove the load way up while doing it was not going to work. Looking at the config, I tried another change; disabling compression [1]. This made all the difference. With OpenVPN in UDP mode and compression disabled, I got 98mbit/s between the two machines, w/ a load avg of about 1.90. This made me much happier; looks like I’ll be replacing OpenSWAN. No need for GRE tunnels over top of the OpenVPN tunnels, either; OSPF works just fine between the tun devices. [0] There are a number of reasons to use GRE tunnels over OpenSWAN IPSec tunnels; Ken Bantoft’s Linux Symposium paper on the subject summarizes them nicely. [1] Most of the traffic that goes across our tunnel links is compressed already, anyways. No sense recompressing it.