…no, just kidding! But I almost feel like it, after spending the last few days backporting gtk+2.0 (and the relative dependencies) from sid to etch, in order to build the newest xchat… and now I could tackle gimp… :D (ok, maybe I should just switch my laptop to lenny or sid… but for now running etch plus a few backports has worked fine… we’ll just have to see how many is “a few”). BTW should I upload all this to bpo (now or when the packages hit lenny)? On one side it might be nice… On the other, it’s definitely *a lot* of packages and dependencies… Maybe it’s slightly out of their scope…

LISA’07 is over, and just concluded with a great talk about “Cooking at the Keyboard”, which of course I liked a lot, being this one of my favorite hobbies! This was my first LISA conference, and I had an all-round experience, giving an invited talk, hosting a BoF and speaking during the Hit The Ground Running track. Of those three the most fun has been the HTGR talk, in which I quickly summarized the Ganeti platform in 10′ and was able to answer a few questions in the last 5′. I definitely liked giving the invited talk, and I think the idea my teammates had to not just talk but actually give a live demo of our platform was very successful, even if it took some time and effort to prepare. The BoF was nice because it gave people chance to give more feedback and to talk about their ideas, it’s probably the session I learned more from. The slides for the talk are on the conference page, and the ones for HTGR will be soon! Globally it’s been a very intense week of talks, sessions, hallway chats, work and fun, and I definitely hope to be at LISA’08, next November in San Diego (it’s a bit like going back home, isnt it?)! I’m really glad to have come and want really to thank all the people who made this possible and all the people I met here, who made this event so good!

Just a couple of days ago we finally opensourced Ganeti, a cluster virtualization platform based on Xen. In the last few months I joined the Ganeti team, which is based in Zurich, and worked with them on the development of this software! I’m really happy now to be able to share the result of what we’ve been doing with the rest of the world! For more information you can have a look at the project page! Of course an ITP has been filled! (ok, actually two because I didn’t notice someone in my team had already done one!) PS I’m away for the weekend, forgot my charger and am running out of battery! I’ll be back online on monday, I guess! :)

It’s official: I will be representing my team at USENIX’s 21st Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA) in Dallas (TX), speaking about the project we’re working on! My talk will be on Thursday 15th November! Check out the program: http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa07/tech/#thursday Wow, I’m so happy! :)

Oggi mi e stato passato il link a questo raccontino di fantascienza catastrofica… E carino, scritto bene, tecnicamente preciso (cosa rara oggigiorno). E anche decisamente intenso, specie in alcuni punti… Mi ha lasciato un po’ sotto shock, devo dire… Se vi va provate a leggerlo! Today I received a link to this catastrophic sci-fi short novel story… It’s nice, well written, and technically precise (which doesn’t happen so often). It’s also a bit shocking at points, and has definitely hit me a bit… Try to read it, if you want! http://baens-universe.com/articles/When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth

Foto by conall, during last friday’s Eng Crawl! And this is the debian kilt, worn in the office! :)

When one studies Race Conditions in Operating Systems they tend to seem some weird computer problem, maybe even a hard one to understand… Yesterday I had the proof they’re actually a real life issue! Our office in zurich has a form to order dinner online, to be filled in before 5pm, which I did, just after my colleague, one minute before 5 or so. The system got my order and accepted it. It also sent me mails to remember to fetch the food except… there was none! It seems like my pizza got caught in a race condition between the actual ordering and the official closing of the web form. (My collegue’s food was delivered normally ) Race conditions seem to be much more real when what gets lost is your dinner! (Well, I managed to eat anyway, later, luckily!)

By reading Planet Debian through a feed reader (my choice is for liferea) I almost missed everybody being upside down… Luckily I noticed it in time! :)

At last, it’s graduation day! I hope everything will be ok! Going to defend my xen thesis in a hour and a half! :)

Pkg-xen-changes r79 - branches

Author: ultrotter
Date: 2006-03-07 09:45:36 +0000 (Tue, 07 Mar 2006)
New Revision: 79
Added:
  branches/20060307-fern/
Branch the latest compiling revision (r71) to a new area...
The name was proposed by Julien, who pointed us to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fern
I'm still a bit unsure about how it's xen related, but it sounded cool! ;)

You don't know but that the beginning of the world domination of ferns ! AHAHAHA ! ;)

After a lot of people blogged or talked about them in various places I decided, some months ago, to try the magic of

ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/ssh_control_%h_%p_%r

After a couple of months, however, I had to renounce to that setting, at least temporarily, because it broke my ability to work on svn.debian.org… here is what happens when I start working with the repository svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/pkg-xen/

ultrotter@tie:~/debian/xen/trunk$ svn up
At revision 61.
ultrotter@tie:~/debian/xen/trunk$ svn up
Control socket connect(/home/ultrotter/.ssh/ssh_control_svn.debian.org_22_ultrotter): Connection refused
ControlSocket /home/ultrotter/.ssh/ssh_control_svn.debian.org_22_ultrotter already exists
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly

As you can see the first svn operation goes through, but the control file is left behind, causing any other command that connects to the repository to fail, until I delete the file! Anyone has a solution for that? For now I just disabled the setting, even though I liked it for the rest of its effects! :) Guido

An interesting article on why watermarking tecniques for DRM are not likely to succeed!

Seeing the reports of kernels logging the addition of leap seconds and, along with others not seeing such messages on my system, I decided to read up. To my surprise I learned that POSIX systems do not represent Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), but only a variant of UTC without leap seconds. One consequence of this is that arithmetic done in POSIX time does not correspond to arithmetic done in UTC if one crosses a point where leap seconds were added. Another consequence is that if someone wants his POSIX system clock to display a time corresponding to UTC then the clock needs to be adjusted whenever UTC counts leap seconds. The log messages are the result of ntpd telling the kernel to skip one increment of the system seconds counter. So much for the smug comments about those broken OSes that don't handle time properly.

Although the recent Inner European quiz meme is currently much more popular on Planet Debian, the following quiz somehow shows how the result of such a quiz should look like and what the quiz system, which the Inner European quiz used, misses: Having more than only bit-like answers. With answers like this, neither I would have had to change answers to see how close I was to different answer nor would have Christian Perrier had to do the quiz with worst fitting answers.

You scored as Engineering. You should be an Engineering major! Engineering 100% Philosophy 92% Journalism 92% Art 83% Mathematics 75% English 75% Biology 75% Chemistry 75% Theater 75% Psychology 67% Sociology 67% Linguistics 50% Dance 42% Anthropology 25% What is your Perfect Major? created with QuizFarm.com

Since I always saw computer science more as an engineering discipline than a derivative of mathematics (at least the way I studied and like it ;-), I seem to have taken the right major. But also most of the other highscorers aren’t that unfamiliar:

Philosophy

Well, if you see how much philosophy is behind open source or politics, being engaged in open source software and interested in politics doesn’t seem to be that wrong. ;-)

Journalism

I like journalism somehow and I sometimes think about if this could have also been (or even be) a nice profession for me, especially since I managed to combine journalism and computer science in being an editor at Symlink.ch, a Swiss based and German written news and discussion site all around Open Source, IT politics and privacy. Sure, it’s no professional journalism and also not classical journalism, since it’s built on the same ideas (and software) as Slashdot.

Art

If I would have more time and leisure, I probably would also try to draw, paint or sculpture more again as I did during my school time. And since my brother and my mother are both active artists I expect that the results wouldn’t be that bad either. ;-) On the other hand, I also like to design CSS styles which IMHO can also satisfy my artistic bone…

Mathematics

Although I see more the engineering than the mathematics in computer science, mathematics still was one of my two majors in school (the other was physics) and in comparison to many other people I can say that I like maths.

English

That’s the only thing IMHO not fitting in here in such a high position since I’m neither good at foreign languages (see my English in the blog… ;-) nor do I like studying languages. And even if I should see that as “Literature” or “German” (my mother tongue) instead, it just doesn’t seem to fit. (Ok, journalism also has to do with language(s)…)

Biology

Biology was the voluntary science course at school I took until I finished school. At university it became my minor subject. I wonder why it’s that deep down in the statistics?

Chemistry

That was my second voluntary science course at school, but I dropped it before I finished school.

Theater

Well, no, I don’t think that actor would be good idea for me…

Psychology

I’m not sure, if sometimes being glad not to understand how my brain works is a good base for diving into psychology. (On the other hand: Would I write so much text about this quiz, if I’m not at least a little bit interested in psychology? ;-)

Sociology

That’s again more interesting.

Linguistics

If this can include computer linguistics, than it’s definitely something interesting for me, since it usually involves artifical intelligence and I wrote my diploma thesis about an AI subject and our research group did work a lot in the area of computer linguistics.

Dance

No. I’m glad it’s that far down there. Just wonder how it got even 42%.

Anthropology

Well, that’s again an interesting subject, but probably not a subject I would work in. So being that far down is completely ok.

So in general, I think the quiz works mostly fine as well as I probably did choose the right subjects for me. *grin* Only thing I missed in this quiz was Physics as a possible result since I don’t think, it’s impossible (especially compared to the rest of the result) that I haven’t scored for anything typical for physicians.

Now Playing: Falco — Mutter, der Mann mit dem Koks ist da!

...Guido is Italian from head to toe (thanks Erinn). And, of course, I'm definitely French. Those who I've met with already know this. B r t and baguette, wine and cheese, and of course translate everything...as well as giving lessons to everybody. Another interesting way to use the meme is choosing the answers that one definitely would never choose, to discover which European you are definitely *not*. It then appear that I'm definitely not Spanish. Too bad for my many Spanish friends in this project..:-)

When I loaded Planet Debian today, the first story was «Pardon my French…ness?» by Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho. There seems to be a new meme going on, trying to find out «Who’s Your Inner European?» Antti-Juhani’s Inner European is French: «Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.» Well, since I’m quite francophile in many ways (cars, food, laissez-faire, etc.), I expected to get a similar result, but it was quite different:

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous! You drink everyone under the table. Who’s Your Inner European?

Well, I like what I read or saw of the Irish countryside in books or on tv, but drinking? Alcohol? Sorry, that’s just plain wrong. Doesn’t choosing the cute classic Citroën (They wrote it without diaeresis! Philistines!) suffice? Well, maybe I shouldn’t have chosen «Those damn British - they really get under your skin», but the newest idea of the British government to sponsor voyeurs with access to public surveillance cameras to enforce their Respect Action Plan (German written Telepolis article about — BTW: Has Telepolis no more english translations?) really really goes under my skin. (Although stories about implanted RFID chips even go deeper under my skin…) One annotator of the Symlink article (German, too) about that British government programme associated their ideas with the concept of the Blockwart (“block warden” or “wonk” in English according to the dict.leo.org forum, Wikipedia also mentions “block leader” and “block attendant”) during the Nazi régime in Germany: They were the lowest officials in the NSDAP and the local contact persons to SS and Gestapo. I wouldn’t wonder if the British government gets a Big Brother Award for giving this “respect” to privacy and human rights. But back to the quiz: Well, let’s see with which of the questions I wasn’t sure what to answer. If I change Tiramisu (yeah, I know, that there is alcohol in it, and I only like it with nearly no alcohol in) to Apple pie, nothing changed. Same after switching Pasta to Seafood and vegetables. Hmmm, well let’s try one of the obvious but not really wrong answers: Mousse au chocolat instead of Tiramisu. Et voilá! La France! :-) Oh, and yes, the ideas of the French government to make open source software, the web and other cultural achievements illegal aren’t my French favourites either… Update, 21:03: Christian Perrier suggested that the quiz could also be used to find out, which Inner European you’re definitely not. Well, somehow I hoped, it would tell me, I’m not German (I also marked Mercedes in that round ;-), but it told me, I’m not Russian, which is also fine since the quiz seems to focus the prejudices about Russians on alcohol consumption.

Now playing: Europe — The Final Countdown

Your Inner European is Italian!

Passionate and colorful.You show the world what culture really is.

I usually refrain from publishing test results, but this time I couldn’t resist, since the result was kind of interesting: it seems in fact that my inner european is Italian… Of course I’m actually Italian, so that may have something to do with it! ;) Update: It seems me and Christian are similar: Answering the european test with reverted answers as he does the result is the same: I’m definitely not spanish too… Probably because of my allergy to dances and too-loud parties! :)

On my ‘technology behaving weirdly’ series: As many other people I flooded planet debian with some old posts by upgrading to wordpress 2.0! The first strange thing is that of all my posts only the first two that ever appeared on the planet were showed again as new. The second one is that no flooding happened happened on QuaQuaPlanet, which is another installation of planet I use with some Italian friends…

Hi!
I’m finally on Planet Debian too! :)
Till now I didn’t have the possibility to post here, because I only had a blog in common with some friends! Now thanks to Planet and Wordpress I can have a personal blog, a shared feed with my italian friends, and posts syndicated in different feeds depending from the language and the subject… cool! :)