If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might find these articles and papers interesting. They have formed how I think of when designing a storage system.

• USENIX :login; Redundancy Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance. Analysis of Distributed Storage Reactions to Single Errors and Corruptions by Aishwarya Ganesan, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
• ZDNet Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 by Robin Harris
• ZDNet Why RAID 6 stops working in 2019 by Robin Harris
• USENIX FAST'07 Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population by Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andre Barroso
• USENIX ;login: Data Integrity. Finding Truth in a World of Guesses and Lies by Doug Hughes
• USENIX FAST'08 An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack by L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau
• USENIX FAST'07 Disk failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? by B. Schroeder and G. A. Gibson.
• USENIX ;login: Are Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures? A Comprehensive Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics by Weihang Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Arkady Kanevsky
• SIGMETRICS 2007 An analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives by L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, S. Pasupathy, and J. Schindler

Several of these research papers are based on data collected from hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye opening. The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or redundant storage systems. Details matter. And unfortunately there are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues. Both ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and practical issues on their own. I wonder how cluster file systems like Ceph do in this regard. After all, there is an old saying, you know you have a distributed system when the crash of a compyter you have never heard of stops you from getting any work done. The same holds true if fault tolerance do not work. Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its status to detect and replace failed disks.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Ulrike Uhlig (ulrike)
• Hanno Wagner (wagner)
• Jose M Calhariz (calharis)
• Bastien Roucari s (rouca)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Dara Adib
• F lix Sipma
• Kunal Mehta
• Valentin Vidic
• Adrian Alves
• William Blough
• Jan Luca Naumann
• Mohanasundaram Devarajulu
• Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana
• Vincent Prat

Congratulations!

FTP assistant This month I only marked 146 packages for accept and rejected 25 packages. I only sent 3 emails to maintainers asking questions. Nevertheless I could pass a big mark. All in all I accepted more than 10000 packages now! Debian LTS This was my thirty-first month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 12.75h. During that time I did uploads of

• [DLA 805-1] bind9 security update for three CVEs
• [DLA 806-1] zoneminder security update for one CVE

Unfortunately the upload of jasper had to be postponed, as there is no upstream fix for most of the open CVEs yet.
I also suggested to mark th slum-llnl CVE as , as the patch would be too invasive. Further I did another week of frontdesk work. Last but not least I took care of about 140 items of the TODO list[1]. Ok, it was not that much work, but the enormous number is impressing :-). I also had a look at [2] and filed bugs against two packages. Within hours the maintainers responded to that bugs, clarified everything to mark the CVEs as not-affected and nobody has to care about them anymore. This is a good example of how the knowledge of the maintainer can help the security teams! So, if you have some time left, have a look at [3] and take care of something. [1] https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/todo
[2] https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/unreported
[3] https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker Other stuff This month I sponsored a new round of sidedoor and printrun. After advocating Dara Adib to become Debian Maintainer, I hope my activities as sponsor can be reduced again :-). Further I uploaded another version of setserial, but as you can see in #850762 it does not seem to satisfy everybody. I also uploaded new upstream versions of duktape and pipexec. As I didn t do any DOPOM in December I adopted two packages in January: pescetti and salliere. I dedicate those uploads to my aunt Birgit, who was a passionate bridge player. You will never be forgotten.

There's something brewing, moving in Jalisco (a state in Mexico's West, where our second largest city, Guadalajara, is located). And it seems we have an opportunity to participate, hopefully to be taken into account for the future. Ten days ago, I was contacted by phone by the staff of UDG Noticias, for an interview on the Universidad de Guadalajara radio station. The topic? Electronic voting. If you are interested in what I said there, you can get the interview from my webpage. I held some e-mail contact with the interviewer, and during the past few days, he sent me some links to notes in the La Jornada de Jalisco newspaper, and asked for my opinion on them: On September 23, a fellow UNAM researcher, C sar Astudillo, claims the experience in three municipalities in Jalisco prove that e-voting is viable in the state, and today (September 26), third generation of an electronic booth is appearingly invulnerable. Of course, I don't agree with the arguments presented (and I'll reproduce the mails I sent to UDG Noticias about it before my second interview just below They are in Spanish, though). However, what I liked here is that it does feel like a dialogue. Their successive texts seem to answer to my questioning. So, even though I cannot yet claim this is a real dialogue (it would be much better to be able to sit down face to face and have a fluid conversation), it feels very nice to actually be listened to from the other side! My answer to the first note:

El tema de las urnas electr nicas sigue dando de qu hablar por ac en Jalisco... nosotros en Medios UDG hemos presentado distintas voces como la del Dr. Gabriel Corona Armenta, que est a favor del voto electr nico, del Dr. Luis Antonio Sobrado, magistrado presidente del tribunal supremo de elecciones de Costa Rica, quien nos habl sobre los 20 MDD que les cuesta implementar el sistema por lo que no lo han logrado hasta el momento, pudimos hablar hasta argentina con Federico Heinz y su rotunda oposici n al voto electr nico y por supuesto la entrevista que le realizamos a usted. Sin embargo este d a La Jornada Jalisco publica la siguiente nota http://www.lajornadajalisco.com.mx/2011/09/23/index.php?section=politica... nos gustar a saber cu l es su punto de vista al respecto, quedo a la espera de su respuesta

Hola, Pues... Bueno, s que el IFE hizo un desarrollo muy interesante y bien hecho hace un par de a os, dise ando desde cero las urnas que propon an emplear, pero no se instrumentaron fuera de pilotos (por cuesti n de costos, hasta donde entiendo). Se me hace triste y peligroso que el IEPC de Jalisco est proponiendo, teniendo ese antecedente, la compra de tecnolog a prefabricada, y confiando en lo que les ofrece un proveedor. Se me hace bastante iluso, directamente, lo que propone el t tulo: comicios en tres municipios prueban la viabilidad del voto electr nico en todo el estado . Pong moslo en estos t rminos: El que no se caiga una choza de l mina con estructura de madera demuestra que podemos construir rascacielos de l mina con estructura de madera? Ahora, un par de p rrafos que me llaman la atenci n de lo que publica esta nota de La Jornada:

la propuesta de realizar la elecci n en todo el estado con urnas electr nicas que desea llevar a cabo el Instituto Electoral y de Participaci n Ciudadana (IEPC) es viable, pues los comicios realizados en tres municipios son pruebas suficientes para demostrar que la urna es fiable

y algunos p rrafos m s adelante,

Cu ntas experiencias m s se necesitan para saber si es confiable, 20, 30, no lo s (...) Pero cuando se tiene un diagn stico real, efectivo y serio de cu ndo t cnicamente procede, se puede tomar la decisi n

Como lo menciono en mi art culo... No podemos confundir a la ausencia de evidencia con la evidencia de ausencia. Esto es, que en un despliegue menor no haya habido irregulares no significa que no pueda haberlas. Que haya pa ses que operan 100% con urnas electr nicas no significa que sea el camino a seguir. Hay algunas -y no pocas- experiencias de fallas en diversos sentidos de urnas electr nicas, y eso demuestra que no puede haber confianza en las implementaciones. Aunque el equipo nos saliera gratis (que no es el caso), hay que invertir recursos en su resguardo y mantenimiento. Aunque se generara un rastro impreso verificado por el votante (que s lo ha sido el caso en una peque a fracci n de las estacione de votaci n), nada asegura que los resultados reportados por el equipo sean siempre consistentes con la realidad. El potencial para mal uso que ofrecen es demasiado. Saludos,

And to September 26th:

Disculpe que lo molestemos otra vez, pero este d a fue publicada otra nota m s sobre el tema de las Urnas electr nicas en Jalisco donde se asegura que la urna es invulnerable. http://www.lajornadajalisco.com.mx/2011/09/26/index.php?section=politica... nos podr a conceder unos minutos para hablar con usted, como la vez pasada, v a telef nica sobre el caso espec fico de Jalisco, en referencia a estas notas publicadas recientemente? si es posible podr a llamarle este d a a las 2 pm? Quedo a la espera de su respuesta agradeci ndole su ayuda, apreciamos mucho esta colaboraci n que est haciendo con nosotros

Hola, ( ) Respecto a esta nota: Nuevamente, ausencia de evidencia no es evidencia de ausencia. Se le permite a un peque o segmento de personas jugar con una m quina. Significa eso que fue una prueba completa, exhaustiva? No, s lo que ante un jugueteo casual no pudieron encontrar fallos obvios y graves. Un verdadero proceso que brindara confianza consistir a en (como lo hicieron en Brasil - Y resultaron vulnerables) convocar a la comunidad de expertos en seguridad en c mputo a hacer las pruebas que juzguen necesarias teniendo un nivel razonable de acceso al equipo. Adem s, la seguridad va m s all de modificar los resultados guardados. Un par de ejemplos que se me ocurren sin darle muchas vueltas:

• Qu pasa si meto un chicle a la ranura lectora de tarjeta magn tica?
• Qu pasa si golpeo alguna de las teclas lo suficiente para hacerla un poquito menos sensible sin destruirla por completo? (o, ya entrados en gastos, si la destruyo)

La negaci n de servicio es otro tipo de ataque con el cual tenemos que estar familiarizados. No s lo es posible modificar el sentido de la votaci n, sino que es muy f cil impedir que la poblaci n ejerza su derecho. Qu har an en este caso? Bueno, podr an caer de vuelta a votaci n sobre papel - Sobre hojas de un block, probablemente firmadas por cada uno de los funcionarios, por ejemplo. Pero si un atacante bloque la lectura de la tarjeta magn tica, que es necesaria para que el presidente de casilla la marque como cerrada, despoj de su voto a los usuarios. S , se tienen los votos impresos (que, francamente, me da mucho gusto ver que esta urna los maneja de esta manera). El conteo es posible, aunque un poco m s inc modo que en una votaci n tradicional (porque hay que revisar cu les son los que est n marcados como invalidados - no me queda muy claro c mo es el escenario del elector que vot por una opci n, se imprimi otra, y el resultado fue corregido y marcado como tal)... Pero es posible. Sin embargo, y para cerrar con esta respuesta: Si hacemos una corrida de prueba, en circunstancias controladas, obviamente no se notar n los much simos fallos que una urna electr nica puede introducir cuando los "chicos malos" son sus programadores. Podemos estar seguro que este marcador Atlas-Chivas-Cruz Azul tenga el mismo ndice de fiabilidad como una elecci n de candidatos reales, uno de los cuales puede haberle pagado a la empresa desarrolladora para manipular la elecci n? Y a n si el proceso fuera perfecto, indican aqu que est n _intentando_ licitar estas urnas (y nuevamente, si lo que menciona esta nota es cierto, son de las mejores urnas disponibles, y han atendido a muchos de los se alamientos - Qu bueno!)... Para qu ? Qu nos van a dar estas urnas, qu va a ganar la sociedad? Mayor rapidez? Despreciable - Media hora de ganancia. A cambio de cu nto dinero? Mayor confiabilidad? Me queda claro que no, siendo que no s lo somos cuatro trasnochados los que ponemos su sistema en duda, sino que sus mismos proponentes apuntan a la duda generalizada. La frase con la que cierra la nota se me hace digna para colgar un ep logo: "en ese futuro quiz no tan distante la corrupci n tambi n ocurre y sta se debe siempre al factor humano". Y el factor humano sigue ah . Las urnas electr nicas son programadas por personas, por personas falibles. Sin importar del lado que est n, recordar n la pol mica cuando se hizo p blico que la agregaci n de votos en el 2006 fue supervisada por la empresa Hildebrando, propiedad del cu ado del entonces candidato a la presidencia Felipe Calder n. Qu evita que caigamos en un escenario similar, pero ampliamente distribu do? Y aqu hay que referirnos a la sentencia de la Suprema Corte de Alemania: En dicho pa s, las votaciones electr nicas fueron declaradas anticonstitucionales porque s lo un grupo de especialistas podr an auditarlas. Una caja llena de papeles con la evidencia clara del sentido del voto de cada participante puede ser comprendida por cualquier ciudadano. El c digo que controla a las urnas electr nicas, s lo por un peque o porcentaje de la poblaci n.

Deutsche Version dieses Postings read the English Version instead Der Leiter der Abteilung Systemadministration einer Firma, welche in diesem Artikel ungenannt bleiben soll, wo der Zufall es will, da ich f r sie arbeite, m chte uns Mitarbeiter dazu zwingen, das Feature der persistenten Historie (also einen niedergeschriebenen Verlauf der abgesetzten Befehle) der Shell (Kommandozeile) auf allen Systemen zu benutzen. Nun hat die mksh dies vern nftigerweise, w hrend immer noch verf gbar, standardm ig aus Gr nden der Privatsph re deaktiviert, und ich finde, dies sollte sich nicht ndern. Es kann ja nicht sein, da man mir beim Arbeiten ber die Schulter guckt; was kommt als n chstes, Video berwachung der B ros? (Seine Argumentation l uft darauf hinaus, da er nachvollziehen/verstehen kann, wie ich (ha! ich! nicht die anderen, nein, ich!) ein Problem das letzte Mal gel st habe; es ist aber nichts anderes als rekonstru eren zu k nnen, wer wann was eingetippt/gemacht hat. Naja, Argumentationen sind eh relativ, andere jagen Flugzeuge in ihre eigenen Verteidigungsministerien, welche gerade zuf llig umgebaut werden ) Ich habe dies nat rlich in die F hrungsetage eskaliert, und unser Gesch ftsf hrer versteht meine Bedenken und m chte nun ein Gespr ch anraunen, um eine L sung zu finden. Die meisten meiner Kollegen im Bereich Systemadministration denken leider nichtmals dr ber nach, obschon ich in anderen Bereichen Gleichgesinnte gefunden habe. Einen Betriebsrat haben wir auch gro er Fehler, ich wei nicht (aber ich s e eh nicht drin, ich hasse Politik jeder Art). Dies l t mich in dringender Not, Argumente wider diese Total berwachung aller (insbesondere auf der Kommandozeile arbeitenden also besonders mich) Kollegen zu finden, idealerweise solche, die durch deutsches Recht gest tzt sind. Wenn ihr solche habt, bitte mailt die schnell an meine eMail-Adresse, welche da nicht junk@mirbsd.org lautet, sondern mit einem tg vor dem Klammeraffen (dies dient der Abwehr unerw nschter Werbemails). Vielen Dank bereits im Voraus! Update 12.07.2011: Wir haben geredet, und wie viele kommentierten keine L sung auf rechtlicher Ebene gefunden, sondern stattdessen, nachdem wir festgestellt hatten, da mir dieses Problem sehr am Herzen liegt, nach anderen L sungen f r das eigentliche Ziel des Chefadmins gesucht; dies z hlt als ein Entgegenkommen auf Seiten der Firma. Ich habe zugestimmt, meine L sungen in kleine Skripte zu verpacken und ins VCS zu committen f r das Herausfinden, wann was auf einem Server ge ndert wurde, im Fehlerfall, denken wir uns gerade ohnehin was aus. Danke an alle, die kommentiert haben!

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar
• / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar li> / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

On the last weekend my team and I participated in the Mobile App Camp (link in Lithuanian) organized by Omnitel, which is one of the dominant mobile operators in Lithuania. The event seems to be part of Omnitel's push for increasing the share of smartphones in the Lithuanian market, which has been lagging behind the European trends.

Our team consisted of Povilas Kytra, who is behind the TV.LT project, Mantas Kanaporis from A-Gain and me. In the weekend we built an app that shows the TV programme for the coming day for all the Lithuanian TV channels. (The app is not yet available on the Android Market, but we are working on it.)

Here's a screenshot of the main screen of the application:

This poem is only in German language, but I hope you can forgive me to run it in my English language feed nevertheless. I send you the best season greetings, have a nice time, use it well, relax and think about it. :)

Weihnachtsgedicht 2009

Vor ungef hr zweitausend Jahren
glaubt man, wurde ein Mann geboren
glaubt man, dass es Gottes Sohn gewesen ist
glaubt man, der uns alle erl sen sollte

Irgendwann sp ter
dachte man, das w re ein Grund, daran zu denken
dachte man, es w re ein Grund, in sich zu kehren
dachte man, es w re eine besinnliche Zeit

Heute jedoch
stresst man, um nur ja Geschenke f r alle zu finden
stresst man, weil jeder berall mit einem feiern will
stresst man, um sich besonders g tig zu zeigen

Ich w nsche mir, dass
wir helfen, uns zur ck zu erinnern
wir helfen, uns zur ck zu besinnen
wir helfen, wieder ruhiger zu werden

Ich w nsche euch ein erl stes, besinnliches,
g tiges und ruhiges Weihnachtsfest!

To all of my readers: I wish you a happy new year 2009!
Being late with new years greetings, because of family reasons like visiting, eating and such, I hope these images will compensate you:



More images can be found in my Gallery.


Auch meinen deutschsprachigen Lesern w nsche ich alles Gute und ein sch nes neues Jahr 2009!



Das gestrige Ereignes "Leuchtturm in Flammen" in Warnem nde war wieder sehr gut besucht. Nicht nur die Promenade war mehr als voll, sondern auch der Strand. Wir standen in H he des Kurhause am Strand, was vielleicht 100-200m zu weit weg f r mein Nikkor 18-105mm 1:3.5-5.6G ED Objektiv war, aber es gab ja trotzdem ganz gute Bilder.

Nach Beendigung der Veranstaltung str mten die Menschenmassen jedenfalls wieder zu ihren Autos, was in einem sch nem Verkehrschaos endete. Auf der Parkstra e ging es sicherlich fast eine Stunde nur in beiden Seiten mit Stop and Go voran. Auch die Nutzer von ffentlichen Verkehrsmitteln hatten wenig Freude daran, da der Bus ja genauso im Stau stand wie all die anderen Autos.

grml-live ist ein Framework, mit dessen Hilfe man mit nur 1 Kommando eine auf grml/Debian basierende Linux Live-CD bauen kann. grml-live baut auf FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) auf und nutzt dessen klassenbasiertes Konzept: In diesem Beispiel habe ich gerade ein gro es grml-ISO gebaut. Dabei habe ich einfach nur den Debian-Mirror in /etc/grml/grml-live.conf auf meinen lokalen Mirror gedreht (um Traffic und Zeit zu sparen) und dann folgendes Kommando aufgerufen:

# grml-live -t /grml/grml-live -c GRMLBASE,GRML_FULL,LATEX_CLEANUP,I386 -s sid

Ca. 50 Minuten sp ter habe ich im Ordner grml_isos unter /grml/grml-live/ (-t …) ein fertiges grml-ISO. Dieses wurde auf Basis der Klassen (-c …) GRMLBASE (da steckt alles essenzielle drin), GRML_FULL (Software-Auswahl wie auf der offiziellen gro en grml), LATEX_CLEANUP (ein paar sehr gro e LaTeX-Verzeichnisse aufr umen) und I386 (x86-spezifische Pakete wie z.B. der Kernel) gebaut. Als Debian-Suite (-s) wurde sid (unstable) ausgew hlt. Und das war es auch schon. Ein kleinere grml-Version auf Basis von Debian/stable gef llig? Kein Problem, machen wir es doch einfach mal im Shared-Memory (superschnell und mit genug RAM und den Mountoptionen rw,suid,dev auch kein Problem): Ein ‘grml-live -t /dev/shm -c GRMLBASE,I386 -s etch’ und keine 5(!) Minuten sp ter hab ich dann mein 135MB kleines grml: Mit grml-live kann man sich somit seine pers nlich angepasste Linux Live-CD erstellen, ohne sich erst mit Remastering im Detail besch ftigen zu m ssen. Auch muss man dabei nicht zwingend Debian/unstable nehmen, sondern kann auch Debian/stable als Basis ausw hlen. Durch das Erstellen einer neuen Klasse oder das Anpassen einer existierenden kann man auch spezielle Software-W nsche ganz einfach erf llen. Wird damit das offizielle grml-ISO etwa obsolet? Nein, auf keinen Fall. grml-live soll dem grml-Team als Buildsystem dienen (automatisierte Snapshots auf regelm iger Basis z.B. sind schon in Planung) und die langweilige Arbeit abnehmen, damit wir uns auf die wirklich wichtigen Sachen konzentrieren k nnen: Testen, Bugfixing, Implementieren von neuen Features, Arbeit am Kernel, Qualit tssicherung, Dokumentation,… grml-live hat den Anspruch, auf jedem Debian-basierten System zu funktionieren und wer Interesse daran gefunden hat, kann sich das Debian-Pakete aus dem grml-Repository holen. Den Quellcode gibt es nat rlich auf unserer Mercurial-Webseite. Wer jetzt noch Fragen hat oder mehr Details zu grml-live erfahren m chte, der m ge einfach auf die grml-live-Homepage schauen. Falls dort eine Frage noch nicht beantwortet sein sollte, jemand Feature-Requests, Bugreports oder Patches hat: meine Inbox freut sich ber Post!

I like coding, but I also like to meet up, share ideas, and exchange information with other programmers from time to time. So I "spammed" a few people I found via google, and met up with Sudara and Samo yesterday for a beer and chit chat about Rails, Austria and life in general. It was fun, so we went ahead and created an Innsbruck Ruby and Rails google group, and are thinking about doing a "real" meeting at some point in the future. Samo had a nice presentation in German introducing Rails that I bet people would find interesting. Should be fun! I enjoyed getting out of the house and talking with some interesting people.

Past weekend Warp had its first WARPtivity (which, as you may suspect, stands for WARP activity, you know, team building and that stuff). We (including all partners and almost all workers) spent a night and a day in the breathtaking Ordesa valley. I’m quite biased as I love the valley since I was a child and have enjoyed lots of weeks there, but it’s indeed one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately our regional government (PSOE and PAR, kick them out on the 27th May election) are spoiling most of the Pyrenees, I hope there is something left for the next generations. We arrived at Torla (a little village near Ordesa) on Friday evening, had a great dinner and some drinks and played table football. Next morning we woke up quite early and hiked through a nice forest path to the Horse Tail waterfall. After having lunch by the waterfall some of us decided to return by the Faja de Pelay, a higher path above the forest, with awesome sights. As it was still early May, there was some snow remaining in the path, making it a bit dangerous, as there is a 300 hundred meter cliff. Luckily enough we managed to survive and blog it

IBM has a nice article called UNIX productivity tips. The article mentions this one-liner, which shows the shell commands you use most often:

$ history awk ' print $2 ' awk 'BEGIN  FS=" "   print $1 ' sort uniq -c sort -rn head -10
    471 sl
    222 cd
    217 csl
    155 vi
    140 ..
    112 ls
    106 cls
     70 rm
     64 mv
     58 xpdf

Gee, I didn't know I'm that boring... Note how I mistype "ls" way more often than I type it correctly. Luckily my .bashrc fixes this for me :) Update 2006-09-25: When I posted this, I didn't intend to start a meme, but it seems I did: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. (via Lifehacker)

I agree with Destiny -- this letter from wp:Steely Dan to wp:Luke Wilson is just excellent. If only all creative property disputes were handled this way. tags: steely dan luke wilson destiny

Hot in the City tonight It's been a hot last couple of days in Montreal -- I mean, not hot like wt:California or wt:Europe but hot enough that it feels pretty bad. According to Sacr Blues -- one of my favorite books about wt:Quebec -- Montreal has the highest variation in temperature of any inhabited place on earth -- from highs of 40C in the summer to lows of -40C in the winter. We're at the high part now. Yesterday was my Primary Caregiver ("PCG") day, so I took the opportunity to take the baby for a long walk in Parc La Fontaine, under the gigantic poplars, where it's always cool and fresh. We also went for a nice dip in the baby pool. That kept things pretty nice.

Bonne F te Speaking of hotness, last night was the 30th birthday party for my friend Niko Ritoux. Maj and I took the opportunity to do our first evening out as a couple without the baby -- our great babysitter Julia came by with her boyfriend Antoine and took Amita June to a jazz concert at the Theatre de Verdure in Parc La Fontaine. How great is that? Anyways, we had a good night with Niko. We went to Le 2, the teensy but uber-cool bistro-bar our friend Daran co-owns. It's in possibly the most valuable real estate in all Montreal -- the corner of St. Laurent and Sherbrooke -- but it's unassuming and doesn't have that Lower Main clubbed-out fake tan feel. We had a great dinner of "international tapas" -- the little appetizers that remind me a lot of Toqu -style gourmet micro-meals -- and lots of liquor and good fun. I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in a while -- P.E. and his girlfriend Ode, who were living in Taiwan for a long time; Fred; Daran and his new friend Annie; Joannie; and our own lovely Italian princess the Other Annie. After dinner (11:30PM!) we hustled up to Bily Kun on Mont Royal and then Plan B across the street. Nicely, for a Friday night, everything was open and airy -- Montreal bars can get so damn crowded, but in the summer everyone's in Cottage Country and there's plenty of room for dedicated barflies. I'm not sure when I got home, but I think Niko had a good time. tags: birthday niko jf joannie le 2 bily kun plan b

And more time Today I spent my time creating data feeds of Wikitravel content for researchers at the University of Zurich who are doing some sort of work on the reliability and development of online travel information. I can't wait to find out how their research comes out. Maj, Amita June and I went up on the Pont Jacques-Cartier tonight to watch the last event in the International des feux at La Ronde. One of the great things about being in Mtl for the summer is this months-long fireworks festival, in which national teams compete every Saturday and Wednesday night. This is the first time I've been on the bridge for the event, and it was amazing -- much louder and bigger than when we've watched from home. Amita June, of course, was dumbfounded by the fireworks -- she gawked open-mouthed through the whole thing. I thought she'd be scared by the lights and noise and the crowd, but she loved it -- reached out and pointed for each explosion, and even said ooooooooh for the big finale. She conked out on the 8-block walk home, which gave Mama and Papa a little extra rest. tags: amitajune fireworks montreal la ronde maj

GPLv3 and license compatibility According to this article on Linuxworld.com, compatibility with other licenses like the Apache 2.0 is going to be a major focus of the GPLv3 development process. I say huzzah to that. Trivial differences between licenses are a shameful waste of time and energy for hackers who have better things to do. The world needs too much good Open Source software for us to waste time with license incompatibilities. Hopefully this same philosophy will bleed over into the FDL. Creative Commons made an overture for unilateral compatibility between the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses and the FDL, which got stony silence from the FSF. It's time to start thinking of the users and playing nice with each other. tags: gplv3 licenses open source compatibility

Put one foot in front of the other I nearly forgot to mention: Amita June took her first step today. She's been "cruising" (walking around holding onto furniture) for about 6-8 weeks now, and she loves walking around holding onto Mama or Papa's fingers. And she's been spending longer and longer periods standing on her own -- up to about 20-30 seconds. Today, she was standing up, and she wanted to walk so I held out my finger just a little out of her reach. She extended her arm for it, then took two little steps to get to me. Ta-da! Maj and I took turns getting her to stand up on her own then walk to us. She's only got about 3-4 steps in her right now before she freaks out and sits down, but it's still pretty amazing. tags: amitajune first steps maj baby

Todays PhD comic is very funny. Another spam fun I like a lot is Make p*nis fast - combining the usual enlargement stuff with pyramid schemes. On a completely unrelated note, a german bird flu joke:

Treffen sich ein B r, ein L we und ein Huhn.
Sagt der B r: "Wenn ich br lle, zittert der ganze Wald." Meint der L we: "Das ist garnichts, wenn ich br lle, zittert die ganze Savanne!"
Daraufhin das Huhn: "Wenn ich huste, zittert die ganze Welt."

Translation:

A bear, a lion and a chicken meet.
The bear says: "When I bellow, the whole forest is afraid.". The lion tops: "When I roar, the whole savannah goes into cover."
The chicken: "When I cough, the whole world panics."

Diesen Abend war in meinem Wohnheim, der Insterburg, ein kleines Festivalchen, mit drei Lifebands. Und da ich gerade eh warte, bis die ~150 Bilder skaliert und hochgeladen sind, kann ich auch gleich dar ber bloggen.Die erste Band, die aufgetreten ist, wurde von mir vermittelt: Peer Pressure kenn ich noch aus Herrenberger Zeiten, fand sie damals schon toll, und sponsere nicht umsonst auch deren Webseite (Domain/Hosting). Man merkt deutlich, dass die vier Jungs inzwischen doch schon einie Routine haben, und die neuen Songs sind wirklich h renswert. Besonders gefiel mir “On the inside”. Leider hatten sie das undankbare Los des ersten Auftritts, und so kam das Publikum nur schleppend in Schwung - ein wenig mehr B hnenshow w rde hier nicht schaden.Das konnte daf r die n chste Band sehr gut: Los Elektrodomestikos ist eine Ska-Band in Anz gen (naja, zumindest am Anfang) und komplett mit Trompete und Posaune und war das Highlight des Abends: Nicht nur die Musik war gut, sondern vor allem lieferten die Jungs eine klasse B hnenshow, was unter anderem dazu f hrte, dass die meisten der Bilder, die ich von dem Abend gemacht habe, von den Jungs sind. Auch die Ausdauer war ausgezeichnet, was wohl auch daran lag, dass sie regelm ig die Positionen durchgewechselt haben, und so bekamen wir f nf Zugaben.Und es w hren vielleicht noch mehr geworten, h tten wir nicht die Zeit f r die dritte Band gebraucht: Brehon, eine in Karlsruhe wohl nicht unbekannte Irish-Folkrock-Band, die (ger chteweise) schon auf “Dem Fest” gespielt hat. Leider war die Musik nach der Ska-Band etwas unpassend und die Masste tobte nicht mehr. Vielleicht h tte man die Reihenfolge der Bands anders w hlen sollen, aber das ist wohl vorher schwer abzusch tzen.Insgesamt ein gelunges Fest (und die Konserven-Musik f r hinterher h re ich immernoch in den siebten Stock), das erste Lifekonzert bei mir zuhause (und ich mit Hausschuhen mitten drin) und die, die wegen einem Heizungsleck nicht kommen konnten haben leider wirklich was verpasst.

Vor einigen Wochen schrieb ich das Programm Tapu, eine Implementation von Tabu f r das Handy. Leider wurde mir kurz darauf mein Handy geklaut, so konnte ich es selbst nie spielen. Nun hat Andreas Zwinkau das ganze im Z10 in Karlsruhe getestet, und auf seinem Blog dar ber berichtet. Im Fazit: Spielbar, nur einige Knopfbeschriftungen sind nicht klar genug. Und es sind nicht genug W rter drin, uns so ruft Andreas auch auf, W rterlisten einzuschicken. Viel Arbeit werde ich momentan mangels eigenem Handy nicht reinstecken, aber W rterlisten-Zusendungen stecke ich ins SVN und baue dann bei bedarf auch entsprechende Pakete.