Search Results: "Andreas Schuldei"

13 March 2011

Lars Wirzenius: DPL elections: candidate counts

Out of curiosity, and because it is Sunday morning and I have a cold and can't get my brain to do anything tricky, I counted the number of candidates in each year's DPL elections.
Year Count Names
1999 4 Joseph Carter, Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Richard Braakman
2000 4 Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Joel Klecker, Matthew Vernon
2001 4 Branden Robinson, Anand Kumria, Ben Collins, Bdale Garbee
2002 3 Branden Robinson, Rapha l Hertzog, Bdale Garbee
2003 4 Moshe Zadka, Bdale Garbee, Branden Robinson, Martin Michlmayr
2004 3 Martin Michlmayr, Gergely Nagy, Branden Robinson
2005 6 Matthew Garrett, Andreas Schuldei, Angus Lees, Anthony Towns, Jonathan Walther, Branden Robinson
2006 7 Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Ari Pollak, Steve McIntyre, Anthony Towns, Andreas Schuldei, Jonathan (Ted) Walther, Bill Allombert
2007 8 Wouter Verhelst, Aigars Mahinovs, Gustavo Franco, Sam Hocevar, Steve McIntyre, Rapha l Hertzog, Anthony Towns, Simon Richter
2008 3 Marc Brockschmidt, Rapha l Hertzog, Steve McIntyre
2009 2 Stefano Zacchiroli, Steve McIntyre
2010 4 Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy, Margarita Manterola
2011 1 Stefano Zacchiroli (no vote yet)
Winner indicate by boldface. I expect Zack to win over "None Of The Above", so I went ahead and boldfaced him already, even if there has not been a vote for this year. Median number of candidates is 4.

12 July 2010

Andreas Schuldei: Spotify on Linux

After several years of only having Windows and Mac clients, we at Spotify are really excited to release a qt-based Linux desktop client. The port was quite smooth after all the work we ve done for other platforms that we ve developed (iPhone, Android, several set-top boxes with Linux, Symbian, etc).

Being the Debian shop we are, we packaged it right away and are now happy to provide the client as a deb. It is regularly auto-built and tested by all our developers working on debian (and even ubuntu) whenever they want to listen to one or more of our 8*10^6 tracks. (One lonely fedora college prepared a rpm, too! Its not up yet, though.)

Add this to your sources.list files and aptitude install spotify-client-qt to check it out:

deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free

There is some additional infrastructure in the package spotify-client-gnome-support (same repository) so that you can click on links to open tracks, interact with Facebook and other, useful websites etc.

As we haven t found a reliable way to display ads yet, this version is only available to Spotify Premium subscribers.

Additional information about the archive key etc can be found here: http://www.spotify.com/se/download/previews/.

8 July 2010

Michael Prokop: Report from FAI developer workshop 07/2010

Last weekend (2010-07-02 2010-07-04) nine people met at the FAI developer workshop at Linuxhotel in Essen/Germany. If you can t remember: FAI is a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux systems and software configurations on computers as well as virtual machines and chroot environments, from small networks to large-scale infrastructures and clusters. The participants of the FAI meeting: picture of participants of the FAI developer workshop 2010 second row from left to right: Michael Goetze, Michael Prokop, Andreas Schuldei
first row from left to right: Sebastian Hetze, Manuel Hachtkemper, Thomas Lange, Mattias Jansson
missing on the picture: Thomas Neumann (left on sunday midday) and Stephan Hermann (only part-time) Friday afternoon started with getting to know each other, continuing with discussions all around FAI. On saturday we started to hack on FAI. * Between the hack sessions and discussions the attending people presented their FAI usage and approaches. Some notes from the presentations:
FAI Manager webfrontend / Stephan Hermann Stephan \sh Hermann presented his FAI web frontend which should be released under the GPL license in those days. The frontend uses qooxdoo whereas the backend is based on django, rpc4django and python-tftpy. Screenshot of FAI manager webfrontend A demo video is available at blip.tv. Currently Stephan is searching for a nice name for his FAI management tool please send suggestions either to him or to the linux-fai-devel mailinglist. Grml / Michael Prokop Grml is a Debian based Linux live system specially made for system administrators. Grml uses grml-live for building the ISOs, whereas grml-live itself uses FAI s dirinstall feature to build the live system. This provides the Grml team with a nice way to autobuild 18 ISOs per day, known as daily.grml.org. Mika also presented Grml s netscript bootoption and the ethdevice bootoption of live-initramfs which is useful for booting Grml/FAI via PXE. Host Europe / Michael Goetze Host Europe uses FAI for installing Debian and Ubuntu (32+64 bit) in the support center. They have ~20 FAI classes and use a Debian lenny NFSROOT as base for all deployed systems. Their main problems with FAI aren t related to FAI itself, but instead e.g. broadcom NICs with lack of support for it in Lenny s kernel. They are not using softupdate (yet) and currently use Kickstart for deploying CentOS but are working on deploying CentOS with FAI as well. LIS AG / Sebastian Hetze Linux Information Systems AG (LIS AG) are using FAI 3.2.17 and provide a luma and PyQt based GUI to their customers. They use DHCP, LDAP and DDNS for inventory, configuration and deployment. Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn / Manuel Hachtkemper The Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn uses FAI 3.1.8 and 3.3.5 for managing ~150 systems. They are automatically running softupdates every day, reporting how many hosts actually did run the softupdate and how many didn t run. The involved failogwatch tool supports two regex files, one for excluding specific hosts and the other one for grepping for known problems in the logs. Spotify / Andreas Schuldei + Mattias Jansson Spotify is a peer-to-peer music streaming service and the operating people at Spotify use FAI for deploying the systems. Currently they are using FAI 3.3.3 to deploy ~400 bare metal machines and ~150 virtualised machines. They have their class names in DNS using the txt/Text record entry. They are using a self written prepend_class script to manage dependencies between classes. University K ln / Thomas Lange Thomas uses FAI s trunk version (of course :) ), managing ~25 machines with less than 20 FAI classes. He s not using softupdates as Lenny s aptitude ignores the hold status of packages (this bug should be fixed for Squeeze). $COMPANY One of the big telecommunication providers in Germany uses FAI 3.3.3 for installing their bare-metal and virtual servers, providing Debian, Ubuntu and SLES. They are using Debian NFSROOT as a base for all systems as well and their main problems with FAI wasn t FAI itself but how to manage installation of virtual machines.
On Saturday evening we had a nice barbecue which included beer and K lsch *d&r*. ;) On Sunday we continued with discussions and development. Our work-log of the weekend: Important decisions made: We noticed that many FAI users implement their own way how to handle dependency management between classes, we will re-consider how we could provide such a mechanism through FAI s core. We also noted that it s important that any self-written scripts used within FAI are fully idempotent and users should be aware of this. Last but not least many thanks to the sponsors of the FAI developer workshop 07/2010! The workshop wouldn t have been possible without our generous sponsors, namely being:

10 December 2009

Andreas Schuldei: Dear Lazyweb: Datacenter in the US?

I look for a data center in the US for some servers with ~40kW cooling power. I plan to use those nice energy efficient double sided racks from SGI (formerly Rackable), so the place should allow that i bring my own racks. I don't need super-low latency to Europe, but rather to the USA and Canada. And it needs to be highly reliable, preferably tier 3 or better!

However, what is most important to me (living in Europe) is that the remote hands actually have a clue. At one place in London i got really lucky: They are able to patch up new servers, can install spare parts and mail broken stuff back to IBM, know about tcp/ip, link lights, switches and routers, debug bad hardware (where LOM is not good enough) and are generally really friendly and quick. As icing on the cake they can even spell debian! Good pricing would be nice, too, but less important then the clueful people.

Should you know such a place, please mail me!

11 February 2008

Andreas Schuldei: apt https transport for etch?

Over the weekend Michael Vogt (mvo) and I produced a backport of the apt https transport to etch. In lenny and sid that functionality is in a seperate package (apt-transport-https), but for etch it seemed easier to just put it into the existing apt package and rebuild that. The advantage of not backporting all of testing's apt is of course the horrible intrusiveness with all its reverse dependencies because of the apt abi changes.

Since this cant go into backports.org because it is not a straight backport from testing to etch i wonder if it is worthwhile to make it publicly accessable in an alternative way.

A https transport is usefull in settings where sensitive packages (e.g. from a private repository) need to be accessed from accross unsecure networks.

Please tell me if you want to use this so I (and mvo for ubuntu perhaps?) can put the package up somewhere. Is there a standard place for non-standard backports yet?

20 December 2007

Lucas Nussbaum: Re: Is it hard for new contributors to help Debian? Can we improve things a bit?

Andreas Schuldei writes about my blog post about making it easier to contribute to Debian:
It is much more gratifying for a contributor if his effords have
immediate effects.

[…]

So what can people who want to help Debian do to achive more imminent gratification? Pick projects that let you help directly with direct svn/git/whatnot access (Security team, Debian Edu, Debian-Installer…)
While I agree that Instant Gratification is very important, I don’t think that the proposed solutions solve anything. It’s easy to have things sleep in an SVN repository instead of the BTS (lots of teams do that, sometimes for good reasons, like the lack of sponsors - hint: Games team). It doesn’t make things any better. What we need is tasks whose results will be available without too much wait in Debian unstable, for everybody. Also, I must admit that I know very little about the inner workings of the Security Team. But I have the idea that it involves quite a lot of procedures (helping with bugs tagged security probably doesn’t, but going further than that probably does). Contributing to Debian already involves A LOT of procedures. A new contributor, even very good technically, can easily get lost in all the different ways to package stuff and solve common problems. So we should identify tasks that don’t have huge requirements. Ubuntu has the concept of bite-size bugs. I started working on a page explaining the different ways someone can contribute to Debian. The goal is to provide a good entry point (not something that replaces existing documentation) and keep it at a manageable size. Its focus is mainly to replace the emails we write to people asking “I’d like to contribute, but I don’t know what I can do or where I should start!”. The page is available on wiki.d.o/HelpDebian/Start. Don’t hesitate to improve it (see also wiki.d.o/HelpDebian for a TODO list). When it will be good enough, I plan to move it out of the wiki (the content shouldn’t change much anyway) to eg http://help.debian.net/, so we can improve the design (I really like the idea of adding pictures of past Debconfs like Christian Perrier did in his FOSS.in talk).

Andreas Schuldei: Helping Debian

Regarding Lucas' points that he makes about helping debian, I think there is an important factor for people that was only mentioned between the lines: "Instant Gratification". It is much more gratifying for a contributor if his effords have immediate effects. (I guess that is one reason for the success of Wikis.) Things that slow down the effect usually dimish this gratification.

So what can people who want to help Debian do to achive more imminent gratification? Pick projects that let you help directly with direct svn/git/whatnot access (Security team, Debian Edu, Debian-Installer...).

On the other hand we should try to come up with ways to cut down on delays as much as possible and make it easier to rollback and repair if an error occures. (That is almost allways a good thing anyways.)

3 November 2007

Andreas Schuldei: Dear Lazyweb: How to make less coding errors

I just read Daniel J. Bernstein's paper on how to write secure software. It basically boils down to "Don't make programming errors!". This reminded me of an article which I read roughly a decade ago in c't magazine about a technique to reduce the numbers of errors when coding. If i recall correctly it worked like this: Write code, then debug it and pay attention what kind of errors you made and in what part of the process you made them. Then figure out ways to avoid those errors in similar situations in the future.

Despite spending some quality time with google I could not find a trace of this technique, let alone a name. Can someone please help me?

29 October 2007

Andreas Schuldei: Random Acts of Kindness

Some time ago a friend of my sister in law contacted me and offered his services as a courier for gifts. I had told him that I knew someone in Israel and he was traveling to Sweden. So I contacted Lior with the strange proposal to give me a gift (and I promised to return the favour). A few days later I got a book about Israel from Lior, was very happy and started to ponder what kind of present could be fun and entertaining for him. I ended up going to the supermarket and bought all kinds of special swedish food (and obviously skipped some). I wrote some short notes with cooking instructions and explanations and sent the whole lot back to Israel.

I enjoyed both getting the present, reading the book and picking a present for someone I regard highly. I would like to recomment this as a fun game within Debian: If you know someone traveling abroad find out if there is a DD (or Debian contributor) around at the destination and send a present to that person. This kind of love bombing is low cost and lots of fun and creates bonds parallel to those of the Web of Trust. Try It!

20 October 2007

Andreas Schuldei: Dear Lazyweb: Au-Pair wanted!

So we will move back from Sweden to Germany after 7.5 years. Besides swedish nature and working culture we will surely also miss swedish broadband. On the other hand we survived swedish health care without serious repercussions and look forward to the german alternative.
So after having found a really nice house in L beck's historic center we now look for an swedish Au-Pair. One of the main goals with that would be to help our children to keep their swedish language skills. If anyone reading this knows someone interested in working as an Au-Pair during 2008 please have them contact me.

This years first Extremadura work meeting with people from Debian Edu, FAI, Debian-Science and Debian-Med takes place at time of writing. The group is 20 people (with some locals included). There is a rich supply of good spanish food so I skipped dinner yesterday in order to let my digestive system recuperate and get work done at the same time. I feel tempted to do that again today. Having stared and poked at FAIs new partition framework makes me consider partman as an alternative.

10 October 2007

Andreas Schuldei: video survailance

Concerning Russels post about the pros and cons of video survailance i saw an interesting article about the evaluation of the berlin subway surveilance. According to that the system did not help to prevent crime, instead people seemed to have considered it when they e.g. created new graffity.

Aparently those results of the evaluation were not very welcome and there were effords to suppress them. This gives me the feeling that there is yet an other agenda to the growing and more and more pervasive survailance. I just wonder what it might be.

In unrelated news blogger.com seems to regard this text as written in swedish despite my selection in the preferences.

12 January 2007

Erich Schubert: DBus user hooks

Andreas Schuldei asked how to hook into gnome-power-manager. I'm assuming you want to do some user hooks, too; the solutions using the low level hooks in /etc won't help you then. Using a small user daemon that listens for DBus events is much nicer (though you won't be able to have the suspend process wait for you to finish...) - because every user can setup his own stuff. It would be cool to extend the following to a more general solution. I could imagine a combination of a dbus-monitor (logging incoming signals) and a general event handler. You could then either type in the signal you want to hook or choose one of the logged signals, setup some properties (e.g. the SSID you just connected to) and setup reactions (start VPN script etc.). I havn't hooked gnome power manager yet, but I've been doing this for NetworkManager. Here's a python script:
#!/usr/bin/python
import dbus, dbus.glib
 
def device_now_active(path, ssid=None):
  pass
 
def device_no_longer_active(path):
  pass
 
sysbus = dbus.SystemBus()
nm_obj = sysbus.get_object('org.freedesktop.NetworkManager', '/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager')
nm_if = dbus.Interface(nm_obj, 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager')
 
nm_if.connect_to_signal('DeviceNowActive', device_now_active)
nm_if.connect_to_signal('DeviceNoLongerActive', device_no_longer_active)
 
mainloop = gobject.MainLoop()
mainloop.run()
To hook to gnome-power-manager, use dbus-monitor to find out the appropriate signals to connect to. I've been using this to start a VPN client when connecting to some wireless networks, and to have gaim automatically logon when network is available:
sesbus = dbus.SessionBus()
gaim_obj = sesbus.get_object("net.sf.gaim.GaimService", "/net/sf/gaim/GaimObject")
gaim = dbus.Interface(gaim_obj, "net.sf.gaim.GaimInterface")
 
# then use
gaim.GaimConnectionsDisconnectAll()
# or
accounts = gaim.GaimAccountsGetAllActive()
for account in accounts:
  gaim.GaimAccountConnect(account)
Dynamic languages like python can be very sweet to use.

Andreas Schuldei: Dear Lazyweb: Gnome Power Management hooks for suspend

I am trying to figure out how to hook in a homegrown script into the gnome power management. I read the source to gnome-power-manager and it seems to make dbus calls to accomplish what it wants. This is where I get lost as i dont know the first thing about dbus. So: where can I add scripts for suspend or hibernate actions?

3 January 2007

Andreas Schuldei: GTD software, Work meetings

Since I am on "maternity leave" now and basicly run the household and try to keep the children entertained, my time to get things done is randomly fragmented and I want to plan the things better that I have on the plate. Liw's blog post reminded me of GTD and today I was looking for planning tools. On Wikipedia's GTD page they mention two: A Firefox plugin to use with gmail (and therefor everywhere where I would have internet) and ThinkingRock, a java app which aparently would fit on a USB key. Of course i wonder which one might be better? The ThinkingRock one seems to be a heavy weight GTD tool. Does that spoil GTD's light weight character? I watched the demos and it seems to be pretty feature complete. I would like to hear from people who use GTD and am interested in their oppinions. Thanks!

Debian Work Meetings - Extremadura evaluation
8 people already managed to send in their evaluations or feedback mails to me regarding the Extremadura work meetings. That is surprisingly few, given the fact that we had 6 meetings with an average of 20 people. And so far I got only one reply from someone who could not attend eventhough she was very interested, explaining why (different continent, too far, too expensive) etc. I had expected more replies in that category, given that we had mostly europeans coming to Extremadura and I had intended to spread out future meetings over the globe more evenly. So I ask both those that attended and did not manage to send in some evaluation and also those that would have liked to come and could not to mail me!

25 December 2006

Andreas Schuldei: Morbid interruptions to christmas

We had a short morbid (and funny) interruption to the usual general marry mood when we started to search for "darwin awards" on youtube. And then we read a christmas poem (german). Have fun!

19 December 2006

Andreas Schuldei: maildir housekeeping


Takatsugu had problems with his maildir and lost a bunch of mail. This reminded me of my little script that keeps my maildirs at a reasonable small size. I let run over my maildirs every night. It removes duplicate mails first and then moves all mails that are older then 30
days and not part of an active thread into a $maildirname.attic maildir.

I invoke it like this on my mail server in my user's crontab

@daily ~/src/pack_maildir.pl --maildir=~/Maildir --dir=. $(find ~/Maildir -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -not -name '*.attic' -not -name 'tmp' -not -name 'new' -not -name 'cur' -not -regex '.*Trash.*' -not -regex '.*Trash.*' -not -name '.SENT' -not -name '.Sent' -not -name '.DRAFTS' -not -name '.Drafts' -not -name '.virus' -not -name '.merkwurdiges' -name '.*' -printf "--dir=\%f ")

and duplicate the maildirs from there to my working machines with offlineimap.

This setup is orthogonal to spam protection, however. Apropos spam: According to my munin spamstats i get a magnitude more spam then ham nowerdays.

12 December 2006

Andreas Schuldei: Useful Improvements... any ideas?

I started a Wiki Page about what could be improved in Debian. There are a few ideas already on that page, but I am curious what people come up with. I do hope that this page can serve at some point to pick a few key points that we can work towards for the next release (after etch). Note that these does not need to be features or cool software, but also stuff like the ultimate spam defense for list traffic or so...

6 November 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Fascists in the air and on the ground

The EU has published the new guidelines for hand luggage on flights, following the foiled, alleged "terrorist" attacks at Heathrow airport in August of this year. Let's all raise our hands and cheer to the great authorities with their far-sighted wisdom for making flying so much safer. As of today, you're not allowed to transport any liquids in your regular hand luggage, because, as we all know, it's trivial to blow up a plane with liquid explosives. Previously, only the UK, as the little brother of the Excited States of America, bought this obvious security enhancing measure; today all of the EU followed. I am not claiming they had to or were forced, I think our "leaders" in Brussels are stupid enough to make the move themselves. From now on, liquid containers have to be transported in zip-lock bags, which you're expected to bring yourself. Every container holding less than 100ml has to be placed into that bag; if the bag is full, that's it, you can only take one (I wonder how long it'll be until you can buy zip-lock bags big enough to hold, say, 20 litres...). And of course, the bags have to be scanned separately, at participating airports only, of course. Just like some airports don't care about your laptops while others make you switch the thing on, I am sure those bags will be scrutinised differently depending on where you are. Containers of more than 100ml are simply not allowed anymore, including drinking liquids, unless purchased at the overpriced airport stores (which account for roughly 30% of an airports revenue), of course. Our ladies will be able to bring lip stick in their pockets, but the "softer" chap sticks (Labello etc.) are considered dangerous and thus must go into the bag. Confusing? Expect even longer delays! Ample time to think about it all! All this is obviously only being done for our safety, and to shield us from the mean "terrorists". Thank you, you smart decision makers. If it weren't for you, we might all live freely and die happily. NP: Amplifier / The Astronaut Dismantles HAL Update: Kevin Fullerton points out that at least in the UK, the bags are limited in capacity to one litre, and that "verified" prescription medicine and baby food are exempt. I shall now go to my doctor and get a recipe for a two litre water bottle. I doubt I'll pass as baby any longer. In spirit maybe, but I don't think they'll care. Update: Andreas Schuldei points out that a friend of his with a Ph.D. in chemistry tells the opposite from what Perry Metzger claims in the article linked above. I'd be interested to hear more about that. But I agree with you: you don't need liquid explosives or bombs at all to wreak some havoc in the skies. All this security theatre hardly improves security there will always be a hole, and someone will find it. On the other hand, with the publicity around "heightened security" (and related fairy tales), the average passenger is more likely to feel safe when s/he is not. Similar to the story of the boy who cried wolf, I wonder whether the authorities are not making it easier for the "terrorists". Note that I am playing their game, the game in which our authorities are trying to win, the battle long lost before it even started. I don't think the threat is airplanes crashing into football stadiums, important landmarks, or buildins with many people; I think the real threat is terror, and I am not the only one to claim that on this front, the terrorists have long won. Our politicians either don't get it, or they do and are now furiously attempting to piggy-back intelligence measures for greater "internal control", while using the public excitement as a platform for their policitical campaigns. For a leader to be able to push his/her own agenda, s/he can do a whole lot of talking and fail, or instill fear among the people and boldly forge ahead, for them to follow. I don't recall who said that which I freely quoted. Update: Wouter van Heyst pointed me to this film, which is a three part documentary. screened by the BBC in January 2005 (see Wikipedia). IMDb user ratings of 9.2/10 with 675 votes... just means I'll have to get that film. You can download it for free from archive.org, see it at Google Video, or just read the argument summary.

Andreas Schuldei: Explosivs

Martin, please dont quote this anymore on plausibility of bombs with liquid explosivs. I know a guy who *finished* his Ph.D. in chemistry and works in the military devision developing detectors for explosivs (while the author of that pice of fiction just *starts* studing chemistry). The guy i know told me pretty much the opposite of what the article says and sounds much more convincing and knowledgable. Of course, dont take my word for it but educate yourself.

That said, I dont know why people worry about liquid explosives so much as long as you are allowed to bring notebooks (and notbook batteries) into the plane. Those can be abused much easier, I hear.

1 November 2006

Andreas Schuldei: scandinavia's radar map for gnome weather applet

Here is how to download the scandinavian radar map for rain and snow from the swedish meterologic institute and put it into your gnome weather applet:

put this into your $HOME/bin
#!/bin/sh

codeblob=$(wget "https://xout.smhi.se/natvader/gateway/getmodule.php?module_request=radarsekvens_norden&images=1&user_id=21" --output-document=-)

url=$(echo $codeblob sed -e "s/.*\(https[^\']*\).*/\1/")

wget $url --output-document=/tmp/smhi-radar.png


and this into your user's crontab:

30 */2 * * * $HOME/bin/smhi-radar.sh >/dev/null 2>&1


and this into your gnome weather applet's radar url:

file:///tmp/smhi-radar.png


Here you see the area covered:

Next.