Planet Debian

Jeff Bailey: LJ Friends

2008-07-05T04:08:13+00:00

Wow, a pile of people seem to have friended me recently. I wish this thing sent me email when that happened.

Anyhow, I've friended those of you who:

1) I could figure out WTH you are; and
2) I don't mind you seeing the occasional either slightly personal rant, or information about where my travels.
3) From what I've seen on your journals, I won't gouge my eyes out reading them on my friends page.

I'll try to check there more often. And maybe I'll figure out who some of the rest of you are. =)

Gunnar Wolf: Wordle

2008-07-04T21:56:11+00:00

Via Planetalinux.mx, I read this post by César Espino refering to Wordle.
Quoting from Wordle's main page:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I could not resist it. I even went to a computer with a Java runtime installed.

The application is very nice and usable, although its startup time is frankly irritating (specially as there is no feedback on why it's not loading). Anyway, the results are quite beautiful!

Russell Coker: New Dell Server

2008-07-04T21:00:24+00:00

My Dell PowerEdge T105 server (as referenced in my previous post [1]) is now working. It has new memory (why replace just the broken DIMM when you can replace both) and a new BIOS (Dell released an “Urgent” update yesterday that fixes a problem with memory timing and Opteron CPUs). The BIOS update can be installed from a DOS executable (traditionally done from a floppy disk) or an i386 Linux executable. As I didn’t have a floppy drive in my new server I had to use Linux (not that I object to using Linux, but I’d rather have had the technician do it all for me). I used rescue mode from a Fedora 9 CD that was convenient, mounted a USB stick that I had used to store the BIOS update, and then ran it.

The Dell service was quite good, on-site service and the problem was fixed approximately 27 hours after I called them. Replacing a couple of DIMMs is hardly a test of skill for the repair-man (unlike the time in Amsterdam when a Dell repair-man swapped a motherboard in a server with only 20 minutes of down-time). So I haven’t seen evidence of them doing anything really great, but getting someone on-site close to 24 hours after the report is quite decent, especially considering that I paid for the cheapest support that they offer.

When I got it working I was a little surprised by the memory speed, I had hoped that a new 2GHz Opteron would perform similarly to an Intel E2160 and better than an old Pentium-D (see the results here [2]). Also the memtest86+ run took ages on the step of writing random numbers (I don’t recall ever seeing that step on previous runs, let alone having a system spend half an hour doing it). It seems that the CPU (Opteron 1212) doesn’t perform well for random number generation.

In terms of actual operation all I’ve done so far is to install Debian. The process of installing Debian packages was quite fast (even with a RAID-1 reconstruction occurring at the same time) and the boot time is also very quick.

The hard drive “rails” seemed a little flimsy. The way they attach to the drive is that they have screws that end in pins, so you screw them into plastic and the pins just sit in the holes in the drive where screws normally attach. I think that it would make more sense to have them not screw onto the plastic and instead screw onto the disk. Then if the plastic part that connects the two sides was to break it would still be usable. In fact they could just make the “rails” be separate rails as most other manufacturers do.

One thing that surprised me was the lack of PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. I had expected that such ports would last longer than serial ports and floppy drives. However my Dell has a power connector for a floppy drive and has a built-in serial port (with some BIOS support for management via a serial port - I have not investigated this because I always plan to use a keyboard and monitor). Of course I expect that most other machines will start shipping without PS/2 ports now and I will have to dispose of my stockpile of PS/2 keyboards and mouses. I generally like to keep a few on hand so that I can give friends and relatives a chance to try a selection and discover which type suits them the best. But I probably don’t need a dozen of them for that purpose.

While a comment on my previous post noted that the floppy drive bay can be used for another disk, it seems that a disk is not going to fit in there easily. It looks like I might be able to install a disk there from the front if I unscrew the face-plate - but that’s more effort than I’m prepared to exert for testing the system (for production I will only have two disks).

In terms of noise, the Dell seems considerably better than a NEC machine which was designed for desktop use. Of course it’s difficult to be certain as part of the noise is from hard disks and one of the disks I’ve installed in the Dell is a WD “Green” disk and the other may have newer technology to minimise noise. Also the mounting brackets for disks in a server may be better at damping vibrations than screwing a disk to the chassis of a desktop machine. Finally the NEC machine does seem to make more noise now than it used to, so maybe it would be best to compare after a few months use to allow for minor wear on the moving parts.

I was initially going to run Debian/Etch on the machine. But as Debian didn’t recognise the built-in Ethernet card and the Xen kernel crashed when doing intensive disk IO I was forced to use CentOS. CentOS 5.1 didn’t start my DomU’s for some reason (which I never diagnosed) but CentOS 5.2 worked perfectly.

Finally I was shocked when I realised that the Dell has no sound hardware! When the CentOS post-install program said that it couldn’t find a sound device I thought that meant that it didn’t support the hardware (it’s the sort of thing that sometimes happens when you get a new machine). But it actually has no sound support! It seems really strange that Dell design a desk-side server (which is quiet) and don’t include sound support. If nothing else then using something like randomsound to take input from the microphone line as a source of entropy is going to be useful on servers.

While the seven USB ports initially seemed like a lot, being forced to use them for keyboard, mouse, and sound (if I end up using it on a desktop) means that there would only be four left.

[1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/26/dell-poweredge-t105/

[2] http://doc.coker.com.au/computers/ram-speed-memtest86/

Daniel Burrows: CWidget tutoral 1: 'Hello, world!'

2008-07-04T20:03:00+00:00

Late last year, I spent some time disentangling aptitude's internal UI library and packaging it as a separate library, which I named cwidget. This article is the first in what will hopefully become a series describing the basic concepts and APIs of cwidget. It applies to the versions of cwidget currently available in Debian sid and lenny, 0.5.11-1 and 0.5.12-1. Autogenerated documentation of cwidget can be found here (but beware that as of this writing it is somewhat incomplete).

In this tutorial, I will walk through a simple program (hello.cc) that initializes cwidget, displays a simple message box, and then terminates the program when the user confirms the message. I assume a basic familiarity with C++.

The first thing to do is to include the portions of cwidget that our program will use. Most importantly, we need the top level cwidget routines. These are the global routines that initialize cwidget, shut it down, and control its main loop (among other things).

#include <cwidget/toplevel.h>

cwidget comes with a collection of stock dialog boxes for things like displaying messages to the user. To access the routines that build these dialogs, we write:

#include <cwidget/dialogs.h>

All the symbols provided by the cwidget library are in the cwidget namespace. Using the full library name means that there's a reasonable chance that its names will not conflict with the names provided by other libraries; however, it's a real pain to type cwidget over and over. Since this is the only namespaced library we are using in this program, it's handy to define cw as an alias for cwidget:

namespace cw = cwidget;

Now we're ready to write the main routine. The first interaction of client code with the cwidget library is to initialize it. This will initialize the ncurses library and put the terminal into a mode suitable for a full-screen curses program.

cw::toplevel::init();

Next, we create a dialog box that will be displayed to the user. There are two things to note about this code:

cwidget is Unicode-aware and the ok() routine expects the message string to be a wide-character string. In this case, that means that we need to pass in a wide-character string (indicated by typing L in front of the string).
The second argument tells cwidget what to do when the ok button is pressed. The expression
```
  sigc::ptr_fun(cw::toplevel::exitmain);
```
creates a slot using libsigc++. Briefly, a slot is a reference to a function or to a method of a class instance. When invoked, this particular slot will call cwidget::toplevel::exitmain(), which causes the main cwidget loop to exit. The slot is wrapped in cwidget::util::arg, a utility function that handles passing slots as optional arguments.

cw::widgets::widget_ref dialog =
    cw::dialogs::ok(L"Hello, world!",
                    cw::util::arg(sigc::ptr_fun(cw::toplevel::exitmain)));

Now that we have a widget, the next step is to arrange for it to appear on the terminal. In cwidget, control of the terminal is assigned to a single top-level widget: whatever it displays is what gets displayed on the terminal, and all user input is passed directly to it. In a real program this widget will typically manage a collection of sub-widgets and assign each one a screen region, but for now let's just display the dialog box we created:

cw::toplevel::settoplevel(dialog);

With everything initialized, we're ready to start the main loop. mainloop() will keep the display up-to-date and dispatch incoming events (for instance, keystrokes and mouse presses) until exitmain() is invoked.

cw::toplevel::mainloop();

When the user presses Enter or clicks on the Ok button in the dialog, exitmain() will be invoked by the binding that we set up earlier. Once this happens, we need to shut down cwidget in order to restore the terminal to its original state. If you skip this step, the terminal will be garbled and will not work properly when your program exits.

cw::toplevel::shutdown();

And that's it! To compile the program, change to the directory containing hello.cc and run:

$ g++ -o hello hello.cc $(pkg-config --cflags --libs cwidget)

Of course, you'll need to have the g++ and libcwidget-dev packages installed for this to work!

Jordi Mallach: Marc Belzunces' conscience objection fight

2008-07-04T19:20:00+00:00

Yesterday, my friend Marc had to visit a court in Barcelona, after being accussed for an electoral penalty.

Marc has always had a strong Catalan sentiment, and fights for the independence of his country from the French and Spanish states in as many ways he finds convenient. In this direction, he's been involved in countless activities promoting independence, in the Internet and in the streets.

For now, he has to deal with living in the Spanish state, and recently this became a legal problem. Spain held parlamentary elections in March, and Marc was appointed to serve at one of the polling stations in Barcelona. Believing he had nothing to do with an election process to elect the Spanish parliament, he conciously refused to take his seat during that Sunday, infringing the Spanish electoral law.

He presented his allegations to the officer, and refused to declare anything else. He now faces a fine ranging from 180 to 1800€ or community work (which he would, again, object to perform). The officer told him that he's apparently the first Catalan to object like this, so what will happen next (besides he'll have to sit in court and see how it goes) is unprecedented.

While Marc and I don't share many of our political views, I admire his dedication and his solid defence of his ideals. If I had been called to serve in a polling station last March, I would most probably have had my own personal debate on what to do, but suspect I would have ended going there to avoid creating these kind of situations, and would have had to participate in a process that I consider broken, unfair and undemocratic. I admire and support Marc for being stubborn enough to get this far.

His case has had quite some echo in the Catalan blogsphere and some Catalan media like VilaWeb. Some people have started a campaign to collect money to help Marc pay the fine. The response so far has been surprisingly positive.

Marc, molta sort i una abraçada!

David Moreno Garza: Don't usually take the queen out too soon

2008-07-04T18:40:29+00:00

And this is the perfect example. While I had a wonderful position, my opponent failed by trying to checkmate me too soon, and it took me some time to figure out a way to mate him myself. I consider a bit disrespectful to take the queen out too soon. See the game here. No more PGNs for you.

Christian Perrier: postfix, quota, gridengine, smbind...

2008-07-04T17:58:00+00:00

...are the last remaining packages before I am happy (or before someone adds a package with templates or adds templates to a package)

udev, nut, flash-kernel, dtc, root-system are the additional missing ones before my German friends are happy.

Your package is listed there? Make us happy, upload with translation fixes and win a beer at Debconf8 (or 9, or 10...).

Your package is not listed there? Make us happy by NOT uploading with new or changed debconf templates without sending a call for translation update (hint: "man podebconf-report-po").

Anyway, this rush to 100% is much much more peaceful and easy than the same rush for Etch (where I think that French sustained 100% for about one week).

Robert Collins: 4 Jul 2008

2008-07-04T10:01:54+00:00

Well, the gauntlet is down (BTW - desktop power integration. Cool!). The use case Ted talks about is actually quite interesting - we were at UDS last month, waiting on a SVN server that was apparently so slow we could have walked to it and copied stuff onto harddisk more quickly. (Really. No kidding). bzr was idling and blocked on network IO the whole time... kudos for the plugin Ted!

For my response, may I present a new index format, (branch url) 70% smaller than bzr's current default, equally fast at most workloads, up to 20 times faster at others. I started this this week, and John jumped in in overlapping time periods, but I think it counts!

Note that the perfromance wins are a component improvement - other things we haven't addressed yet can make the index improvements less visible. But several early adopters have told me that they see a 25-30% reduction in 'time bzr log > /dev/null' or other commands.

To install:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~lifeless/+junk/bzr-index2 ~/.bazaar/plugins/index2

bzr branch https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jameinel/+junk/pybloom ~/.bazaar/plugins/pybloom

To use:

cd <repository you want to experiment on>

bzr upgrade --btree-plain

(or --btree-rich-root for bzr-svn users).

A version of this will be going to trunk soon, and it will be able to upgrade from any repository that you have that uses the plugin as long as you keep the plugin installed.

Alexis Sukrieh: One week of holydays

2008-07-04T09:28:05+00:00

It’s been a looong time since I blogged here. Perhaps I should write more frequently so you won’t start thinking I died silently ;).

I’m not dead. It’s just that I’ve started a company a couple of months ago and that does take a lot of my time. It’s pretty exciting, - as you can imagine - we’re using Debian everywhere and the team is great. I’ll write another blog-entry about that later.

In the meanwhile, I’m on holydays for a week, and I plan to squash my TODO list:

Backup Manager (a couple of bugs have to be fixed)
Electricsheep (a new upstream release is available)
My Perl modules deserve a couple of maintenance too, like Coat::Persistent

Andrew Pollock: [life] It's official: I am married to the crazy cat lady

2008-07-04T06:03:00+00:00

We currently have fifteen cats in the house. Only three of them are ours.

When Sarah was contracting at Google, she started an informal, but company-endorsed trap/neuter/release program, because the basement of buildings 40-43 had a bit of a stray/feral cat infestation.

Since she left Google, she's continued doing trappings on an on and off basis.

She got a call a couple of days ago about a litter of kittens behind one of the other buildings, so she headed off last night with one of her crazy cat lady friends, and they proceeded to catch one of the kittens. She brought that home, and I went back with her, and the mother, which seems fairly feral, had been caught in a trap. The rest of the kittens seemed to have managed to secrete themselves away inside a generator behind the building.

This morning, with some help from various facilities types, she managed to extract the other four kittens from the generator. So that put the mother plus five kittens in the spare room (in a large cage).

At more or less the same time, Sarah got news of a litter of six kittens that need rescuing from down Gilroy way (some woman in a trailer park didn't seem to realise that boy cat + girl cat = kittens), so after grabbing the other four kittens this morning, she headed off to Gilroy to grab them.

So the current plan is to get the mother cat of what we'll call the Google litter desexed on Tuesday and then release her back where she came from. Her five kittens are young enough (~8 weeks) that they can be socialised and won't be feral. The six Gilroy kittens are from non-feral parents, and are about 11 weeks old. All of the kittens are old enough to be desexed as well, but Sarah can't get them into Palo Alto Animal Services for desexing for a couple of weeks, so I suspect we're stuck with them in the interim, unless Sarah can find foster homes for them. To cap it off, we're going to Sacramento for the weekend, so we have to get one of our friends in the complex to take care of them all.

The sad thing is the Gilroy Six seem to be in worse condition than the Google Five. They've got pretty poor coats, and seem to have some diarrhoea. Hopefully with a better diet they'll pick up. They're all very cute. The first one of the Google Five that Sarah caught last night is particularly cute. I expect Sarah will get some photos of them all up soon.

If anyone is in the Bay Area is interested in a kitten, we've got them by the near-dozen.

Russell Coker: Shared Context and Blogging

2008-07-03T23:41:51+00:00

One interesting aspect of the TED conference [1] is the fact that they only run one stream. There is one lecture hall with one presentation and everyone sees the same thing. This is considerably different to what seems to be the standard practice for Linux conferences (as implemented by LCA, OLS, and Linux Kongress) where there are three or more lecture halls with talks in progress at any time. At a Linux conference you might meet someone for lunch and start a conversation by asking “did you attend the lecture on X“, as there are more than two lecture halls the answer is most likely to be “no“, which then means that you have to describe the talk in question before talking about what you might really want to discuss (such as how a point made in the lecture in question might impact the work of the people you are talking two). In the not uncommon situation where there is an interesting implication of combining the work described in two lectures it might be necessary to summarise both lectures before describing the implication of combining the work.

Now there are very good reasons for running multiple lecture rooms at Linux conferences. The range of topics is quite large and probably very few delegates will be interested in the majority of the talks. Usually the conference organisers attempt to schedule things to minimise the incidence of people missing talks that interest them, one common way of doing so is to have conference “streams”. Of course when you have for example a “networking” stream, a “security” stream, and a “virtualisation” stream then you will have problems when people are interested in the intersection of some of those areas (virtual servers do change things when you are working on network security).

There seem some obvious comparisons between Planet installations (as aggregates of RSS feeds) and conferences (as aggregates of lectures). On Planet Debian [2] there has traditionally been a strong shared context with many blog posts referring to the same topics - where one person’s post has inspired others to write about similar topics. After some discussion (on blogs and by email) it was determined that there would be no policy for Planet Debian and that anyone who doesn’t want to read some of the content should filter the feed. Of course this means that the number of people who read (or at least skim) the entire feed will drop and therefore we lose the shared context.

Planet Linux Australia [3] currently has a discussion about the issue of what types of content to aggregate. Michael Davies has just blogged a survey about what types of content to include [4]. I think it’s unfortunate that he decided to name the post after one blogger who’s feed is aggregated on that Planet as that will encourage votes on the specific posts written by that person rather than the general issue. But I think it’s much better to tailor a Planet to the interests of the people who read it than to include everything and encourage readers to read a sub-set.

When similar issues were in discussion about Planet Debian I wrote about my ideas on the topic [5]. In summary I think that the Gentoo idea of having two Planet installations (one for the content which is most relevant and one for everything that is written by members) is a really good one. It’s also a good thing to have a semi-formal document about the type of content that is expected - this would be useful both for using a limited feed for people who go significantly off-topic and as a guideline for people who want to write posts that will be appreciated by the majority of the readers. Planet Ubuntu has a guideline, but it was not very formal last time I checked.

Finally in regard to short posts, they generally don’t interest me much. If I want to get a list of hot URLs then I could go to any social media site to find some. I write a list post at most once a month, and I generally don’t include a URL in the list unless I have a comment to make about it. I always try to describe each page that I link to in enough detail that if the reader can’t view it then they at least have some idea of what it is about (no “this is cool” or “this sucks” links).

[1] http://www.ted.com/

[2] http://planet.debian.org/

[3] http://planet.linux.org.au/

[4] http://www.michaeldavies.org/weblog/tech/linux-australia/mikal-blather-poll.html

[5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/04/21/purpose-of-planet-debian/

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: SF encyclopedic wiki?

2008-07-03T21:37:32+00:00

I sometime wish I had access to an encyclopedia, written in wiki style so that it could be updated by anybody, that had an article about every SF story and novel ever written, and every fictional concept (like ansible, hyperspace etc) ever used in an SF story, and which crosslinked these in a useful manner.

Often, once I’ve had a worldbuilding idea, I want to go read some of the key stories that use the same or a similar idea, so that I could see what others have already done with the idea. Only it turns out there are no indexes that tell me “antigravity has been used in these ways in SF stories, and it is a central concept in these stories” etc.

Anybody know of something like this?

Ingo Juergensmann: Xen and NFS performance

Ingo Jürgensmann — 2008-07-03T18:58:15+00:00

Today I discovered that one of my domUs at work is performing slow on its mounted NFS share. Bonnie++ and dd tests showed a network throughput of just 300 kB/s whereas the throughput was up to 110 MB/s from dom0 to NFS server. Some Google searches revealed that Xen has problems with NFS performance with non-standard rsize and wsize setting and especially with NFS over UDP.
Reducing rsize and wsize settings didn't help at all. The performance was still awful. After remounting the NFS share via TCP the performance was as expected. Such a huge difference in perfomance surprised me. Still, a strange bug in Xen, at least in Etch. Maybe it's already fixed in Sid?

Christine Spang: Summer Conferences

2008-07-03T18:57:00+00:00

The usual suspects apply: too expensive for me especially without a guarantee of sponsorship, etc. Maybe next year!

It turns out that due to a weird collision of circumstances I am going to GUADEC, however. I will probably be doing more Istanbul-exploring than talk-attending, but I will certainly be around for evening socialization.

I am also currently in Cambridge, UK, and will be here until mid-August.

This is the summer of last-minute plans, apparently.

Wouter Verhelst: Review: Samsung YP-T10

2008-07-03T18:47:00+00:00

About a month ago, I bought me a Samsung YP-T10 media player. I didn't want a device for which the Linux and/or Ogg Vorbis support was against the explicit wishes of the device's manufacturer, such as in the case of the iPod; because the more devices such manufacturers sell, the more they're encouraged to keep their systems closed. Definately not something I'd like to see.

In that regard, the YP-T10 is pretty okayish. It supports Ogg Vorbis out of the box, and it has a reasonable set of features for a portable media player. It's not perfect, but it goes a long way. The set of features on the device is simply astonishing; apart from the obvious music playback stuff, it sports an FM radio, a text file reader, a voice recorder, a picture viewer, and a movie player. Given the size and clarity of the screen, this is actually a useful way to view a movie clip, too, although not a very comfortable one. Apart from the obvious USB cable, the device also has bluetooth connectivity which can be used to send and receive files, or to connect a bluetooth headset—especially interesting if you consider the modern stereo headphones that sound just like 'normal' headphones. Once you upgrade the firmware, the device gains the ability to play a few games, and to store vCard files. Very impressive, for such a small device.

Unfortunately, not all is well. There's an RSS reader thingy on the device, which could be interesting; but it only works in companion with a Windows program, which obviously doesn't run on my (powerpc) laptop. There's only one way to charge the battery, and that's by connecting the device to a USB port. Unfortunately, that also means you cannot use the device while it's charging, since it switches to the MTP mode in which to receive files. That also goes for bluetooth, BTW -- if you're playing something, and the device receives bluetooth data, the playback is paused until receiving that data is finished.

The USB cable is a nonstandard one. Given my track record of losing cables and stuff, I'm sure I'll get in trouble at some point. Hopefully Samsung will still sell those at that point. If not, well, I guess I'll see what happens then. Another point of this cable is that it's impossible to remove it from the device while the headphones are connected; you have to push a button which is physically placed in the direction of the headphone connector, about a millimeter away from it—not very interesting if I just want to connect the device to store one or two media files on there...

The headphones that came with the device were not too bad, but the protective sleeves that came with it were too loose; after about a week or so, I'd lost both of them and had to buy me a new set of headphones. Luckily, that involves a simple standard headphone connector, so no problem there.

All these are just minor annoyances, however. I don't really need an RSS reader, anyway. What really is a problem is the lack of tag support in Ogg files; while I can at least play them, the display will show 'Unknown' for artist, album, or title for any Ogg file—which is a real PITA.

Altogether, however, I don't think the disadvantages of the device outweigh the advantages, and I've had quite some fun with it already. Having said that, given the lack of tag support in Ogg files, I don't feel I can really recommend it, at least not if you want to use it to play your Ogg Vorbis collection.

Ingo Juergensmann: UPS - it's always nice to have one!

Ingo Jürgensmann — 2008-07-03T18:36:53+00:00

After I arrived at home after work today I noticed that the machines at my parents home network were all down and just recovering from the outage. Two of my m68k autobuilders are located there. Nothing serious, I thought, because the machines are located behind DSL and maybe there was a short DSL outage.
Some minutes later I received two mails from my UPS that there was a power outage. Well, this explains the DSL outage as well, because the DSL is not attached to the USV (located in a different room).

Thu Jul 03 17:56:19 CEST 2008 Power is back. UPS running on mains.
Thu Jul 03 17:56:19 CEST 2008 Mains returned. No longer on UPS batteries.
Thu Jul 03 17:46:49 CEST 2008 Running on UPS batteries.
Thu Jul 03 17:46:43 CEST 2008 Power failure.

Ten minutes of power outage without machines being shutdown. It's a APC UPS BR800I with 3 machines (2x m68ks, 1x PIII@550), a SCSI hardware RAID with 7 disks and a 8 port switch hooked up to it. I'm really glad that I bought the UPS earlier this year - exactly for this purpose and to prevent filesystem errors on the buildds when there is a power outage. :-)

MJ Ray: End of LugRadio!

2008-07-03T12:57:21+00:00

Just read on Farewell LUGRadio? [theangryangel] and Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... Lugradio is at an end [sungate] that the most famous UK Free Software podcast is ending at the end of this year. I don't know the reasons yet, but it seems a shame.

I've been listening again since they proved me wrong and sorted out the dumb licensing terms so it's clearly legal to cut the shows up and only copy the bits that interest me, and Season 5 seems more interesting than previous ones. Then again, I enjoyed Red Dwarf VIII, so what do I know? (but VI and VII did drag a lot)

Maybe I will go to Lugradio Live 2008 in Wolverhampton on 19-20 July now I know when it is! (Why is the date only as a large slow graphic on the event page? D'oh! (Yeah I know I should have emailed them, but I had an unfun experience with the show , so I'd rather shout this in public. Wow. I guess I'm still unhappy about them regressing to school playground name-calling.))

There are some suggested alternatives on theangryangel, but most are more Ubuntu-centric (which wasn't a good thing about LR), non-Ogg and/or non-European, so it looks like I'll give LinuxOutlaws a try. Any other recommendations?

Bastian Venthur: Linux Action Show

2008-07-03T12:35:15+00:00

MJ Ray noticed that LugRadio is going to end soon and asks for alternatives. I’d recommend to give Linux Action Show a try. I’ve always preferred it over LugRadio. It is funny, informative and not quite as vulgar as LugRadio.

Sami Haahtinen: Overcommit, your personal friendly salesperson

2008-07-03T12:19:59+00:00

I just have to say it, memory management is utterly broken in Linux. Luckily it's not as broken as it used to be. Without going in to too much detail, there is a feature called overcommit in Linux. What this means is that it will over allocate memory to applications. At first thought it sounds insane. Why would one want to over allocate memory. It's like eating a cake and having it too.

Well, there is a reason why this is done. If you think about resource allocation in general, there are a lot of places where this is being done successfully. For example ISPs always over sell their capacity because most of the users use a fraction of the resources allocated to them. That is why guaranteed capacity is so much more expensive, they literally allocate it for you (most of the times). So in a way memory management is like your friendly sales person from Linux corp. who is happy to sell what over you want because he needs the deal for his own bonus.

So it is in fact reasonable to overcommit memory? Bzzt! Wrong! There are always problems with over allocating. ISPs, for example, monitor the usage of their resources and when certain limit is reached they get more resources. With memory it's not so easy, you have a finite amount of memory in your computer. Swap comes to the rescue to a certain degree, but it is critical for the applications to know their limits. If you have 1 MB of RAM available for the application let the application know. In most of the cases the application will crash because it doesn't know how to deal with the out of memory situation, but this is a side effect of the overcommit. Programmers don't run in to this kind of problems and they don't have to deal with them.

So what happens when you hit the limit? In Linux there is this thing called oom-killer. oom-killer has just one purpose, to kill processes. While oom-killer has some clever heuristics built in to it, it will most likely end up killing the wrong program. So it's like a big game of core wars on your computer.

Generating locales...
  en_AU.UTF-8... done
  en_BW.UTF-8... done
  en_CA.UTF-8... done
  en_DK.UTF-8... /usr/sbin/locale-gen: line 238:  1971 Killed                  localedef $no_archive --magic=$GLIBC_MAGIC -i $input -c -f $charset $locale_alias $locale
failed
  en_GB.UTF-8... done
  en_HK.UTF-8... done
  ...

This is what happens on one of my hosts, there are not that many services running on this host and for some reason the right process gets killed. After turning overcommit off:

Generating locales...
  en_AU.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_BW.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_CA.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_DK.UTF-8... done
  en_GB.UTF-8... done
  en_HK.UTF-8... done
  ...

Apparently locale generation is one of the things that is capable handling memory as it's supposed to be handled.

So how do you turn off overcommit? Sysctl is the way! Easiest way is to add the following to /etc/sysctl.conf and running "/etc/init.d/procps.sh force-reload":

vm.overcommit_ratio = 100
vm.overcommit_memory = 2

The second line is the magic line which turns off overcommit. Insanely enough the other options are 0 (Default) and 1 (Always overcommit), which just doesn't make any sense. If the default is to do overcommit why would I want to set it to always overcommit. The first line defines the maximum amount of memory a program can allocate. This is explained better on a post on fedora-devel.

Even with these changes, overcommit isn't completely disabled, but things are a lot better. While overcommit is built because it makes sense, it doesn't work. Lets hope things get even better in the future.

Update: Arthur de Jong pointed out that in certain situations overcommit is needed, like when there is a large application running on a server that prevents further memory allocations (thus disabling remote access and so on). That is true, I'm not trying to say that overcommit isn't useful in some cases. I'm just saying that it's just a disaster waiting to happen, unless you have finetuned the environment just right.

John Goerzen: Video uploading sites?

John Goerzen — 2008-07-03T11:38:55+00:00

I'm working on switching from using a Mac to using Linux for editing video. I have a mini-DV camcorder that a bought a few years back, and I've been looking at capture and editing software for Linux.

Along with that, I want to post some videos online for family to be able to see I want to preserve the original quality as much as possible, offer the option to download the video, and be able to share some videos with family only (not the entire Internet).

I've been looking at various reviews of video sites (such as this PCWorld one) and decided to look at blip.tv and Vimeo in more detail.

Blip seems to have lots of controls, options, etc. And, they seem to really care about end users, respond fast, and care about freedom. There's an impressive response from their support team concerning Ogg Theora out there. They offer FTP uploads (which are a huge improvement over HTTP POST uploading, in my opinion, and easily scriptable). They can also automatically post your video to archive.org or about a dozen other video or blogging sites.

But what I want to do is not really what they are aiming at. They are set up for "channels" (you can apparently only have one channel per user), and for more professional users. Most notably, you can't make videos private or restricted without paying for their $100/year or so "pro" account.

Vimeo looks very much like the Flickr of video. They do offer various options for restricting who can see a video. When they transcode video to Flash, they have the option of preserving it in HD, which blip.tv doesn't (both go 640x480 or so by default, and blip maximizes out that that). Though both offer the option to download the full, unmodified original. Vimeo has only one option for uploading, and it doesn't seem to work well with Firefox. They have little detail about anything in their docs. Maybe it's more the Photobucket of video than the Flickr of video. (Oh, who am I kidding -- that's Youtube).

Of course, there is Youtube. Maxes out at 320x240, doesn't offer the original for downloading. Doesn't make me think all that positively about them.

I could also use Flickr. I'm not sure if they offer the original, but there's a 90-second limit on uploads there.

Any other thoughts?

Craig Sanders: Introduction to Linux Signals 101

2008-07-03T11:14:40+00:00

^C doesn’t kill processes, SIGINT does

On the LUV mailing list recently, the perils of tty handling when booting with “init=/bin/bash” came up, and somebody asked why running ‘ping’ (without remembering to run stty or openvt first) will result in you having to reboot.

i.e. “why doesn’t ^C work in emergency mode”?

I wrote a fairly detailed, but comprehensible to a novice, answer and a friend suggested i should have written it as a blog post - which was the point of me setting up a blog in the first place.

So here’s a slightly edited version of it:

> Couldn’t you just open another console, run “top” and find the PID for
> ping and kill it? Or ps aux |grep ping and kill it? Is a reboot the
> only way to kill a ping where ^C is not available?

there’s nothing special about ^C except that by long convention it is mapped to the interrupt signal aka intr aka SIGINT. So, ^C itself doesn’t kill a program, the fact that it generates an interrupt signal does.

If you’ve rebooted for emergency maintenance (e.g. “init=/bin/bash” on the LILO or GRUB command line) then all you get is ONE instance of /bin/bash. Nothing else is running and nothing else has been run (because you’ve overriden the usual init with /bin/bash). No setup has been done on the terminal, and no other virtual terminals have been opened. The emergency environment is minimal (and deliberately so - you asked for it, you got it). It’s up to you to do whatever is needed to set up the environment so that you can do the required maintenance/repair work.

So if you run ping *before* remembering to set up the terminal (’stty sane’) then ^C doesn’t work because ^C doesn’t generate SIGINT so there’s no way of telling ping to quit, and if you haven’t opened another virtual terminal with openvt (aka “open” - it got renamed some time ago) then there is no other shell available to run top or ps or kill.

BTW, it’s not just ping. You’ll see the same problem in the same environment with ANY program that runs continuously until it gets a signal to terminate it. ping’s just the most obvious and common example.

Most programs, especially simple programs like ping, don’t have a ^C handler. They don’t need one. They have a signal handler which, amongst other things, handles SIGINT however it’s generated - it can be generated by pressing ^C in a normal tty environment, or by sending the program a SIGINT (e.g. “kill -2″).

That, BTW, is a core difference between a SIGTERM (just plain ‘kill’ or ‘kill -15′) and SIGKILL (’kill -9′).

SIGTERM is usually handled by the program by setting up a signal handler for it, and it voluntarily terminates when it receives the signal (usually cleaning up, closing files, etc before it does so). If the program hasn’t set up a handler for SIGTERM then the default action is to just terminate. A program can set up a handler which does nothing on SIGTERM, which effectively just ignores the signal.

SIGKILL is handled by the kernel and it just kills the process immediately - it can not be blocked or intercepted by the program.

(By common convention, SIGHUP or ‘kill -1′ tells a long running daemon process to just reload it’s config files. It’s also generated when the tty that the program is running on is terminated - e.g. you log out or the modem hangs up or the ssh session dies, hence the name “HUP” aka “HANGUP”. That’s why you need to use something like nohup or screen if you want a program to continue running after you log out)

In a way, ‘kill’ is a bit of a misnomer. It’s actually a generic tool for sending signals to running processes, but the default action for most of those signals is to terminate the program. Here’s a list of the signals which can be sent.

$ kill -l
 1) SIGHUP	 2) SIGINT	 3) SIGQUIT	 4) SIGILL
 5) SIGTRAP	 6) SIGABRT	 7) SIGBUS	 8) SIGFPE
 9) SIGKILL	10) SIGUSR1	11) SIGSEGV	12) SIGUSR2
13) SIGPIPE	14) SIGALRM	15) SIGTERM	16) SIGSTKFLT
17) SIGCHLD	18) SIGCONT	19) SIGSTOP	20) SIGTSTP
21) SIGTTIN	22) SIGTTOU	23) SIGURG	24) SIGXCPU
25) SIGXFSZ	26) SIGVTALRM	27) SIGPROF	28) SIGWINCH
29) SIGIO	30) SIGPWR	31) SIGSYS	34) SIGRTMIN
35) SIGRTMIN+1	36) SIGRTMIN+2	37) SIGRTMIN+3	38) SIGRTMIN+4
39) SIGRTMIN+5	40) SIGRTMIN+6	41) SIGRTMIN+7	42) SIGRTMIN+8
43) SIGRTMIN+9	44) SIGRTMIN+10	45) SIGRTMIN+11	46) SIGRTMIN+12
47) SIGRTMIN+13	48) SIGRTMIN+14	49) SIGRTMIN+15	50) SIGRTMAX-14
51) SIGRTMAX-13	52) SIGRTMAX-12	53) SIGRTMAX-11	54) SIGRTMAX-10
55) SIGRTMAX-9	56) SIGRTMAX-8	57) SIGRTMAX-7	58) SIGRTMAX-6
59) SIGRTMAX-5	60) SIGRTMAX-4	61) SIGRTMAX-3	62) SIGRTMAX-2
63) SIGRTMAX-1	64) SIGRTMAX

See the man pages for init(8), kill(1), and especially signal(7) for more info on this topic.

Syndicated from Craig Sanders' Errata: Tech Notes and Miscellaneous Thoughts

Introduction to Linux Signals 101

Biella Coleman: Going going gone

2008-07-03T08:58:56+00:00

So, while you can still access this blog via the healthhacker address, you can only subsribe to one feed and this is it [http://gabriellacoleman.org/blog/?feed=rss] and the new blog address will be http://gabriellacoleman.org/blog/

Biella Coleman: New URL

2008-07-03T08:58:56+00:00

update This blog has moved to this address [http://www.gabriellacoleman.org/blog/] New RSS feed [http://gabriellacoleman.org/blog/?feed=rss2]

Biella Coleman: Nerdson

2008-07-03T08:58:56+00:00

A number of weeks ago, I asked for some help concerning good, geeky web comics and got some nice responses. While in Brazil, Pablo pointed me out to a home-grown strip, Nerdson. Makes me wonder about the other non-English geek comics out there.

Biella Coleman: Barista rants about stupid customers at Starbucks

2008-07-03T08:58:56+00:00

Who knew that rants at Starbucks could be the subject of a seemingly interesting lingustic article.

Biella Coleman: On Anthropology, Participant Observation, and Non-Places

2008-07-03T08:58:56+00:00

When you are in a foreign city, Dakar, Tunis, Tokyo, the spaces and sights are disorienting for they unfamiliar. But there are a few spots (hotels, supermarkets), that bring you back the familiar and these places have been theorized by French Anthropologist Marc Auge as non-spaces. Here is a ...

Biella Coleman: Dear lazy lazy lazy web

2008-07-03T08:58:56+00:00

I think it is time for me to upgrade my digital camera and while I would like a SLR, I think I am going to stick to a small non-SLR digital camera. I am looking for a high quality one, preferably with a wide-angle lens such as with this camera ...

Biella Coleman: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

2008-07-03T08:58:56+00:00

When it comes to research and writing, anthropologists are notorious for being slow as molasses. It takes, on average, 9 years to finish grad school and then another 3-6 years before you write and publish your first book. Such is the sometimes frustrating pace of academia. But sometimes it ...

Biella Coleman: Lost in Translation

2008-07-03T08:58:56+00:00

I bet this rings familiar to many readers of this blog.

Biella Coleman: Free Speech: A Comparative Perspective

2008-07-03T08:58:56+00:00

While free speech rights are valued and recognized in most liberal democracies, the degree and scope of these rights are by no means uniform. The United States, which has the most expansive free speech protections in the world, actually stands apart as this New York Times article on the subject ...

Biella Coleman: Silent Revolutions: The Ironic Rise of Free and Open Source Software and the Making of a Hacker Legal Consciousness

2008-07-03T08:58:56+00:00

So I am giving a talk this Friday at the University and here is the English introduction to my talk/paper and below is the Portuguese one. It starts at 9 am in Porto Alegre, Brazil and is being streamed. *O Departamento de Pós-Graduação da Antropologia e a Associação Software Livre.org ...

Reinhard Tartler: ffmpeg-uploaded

2008-07-03T08:01:51+00:00

Finally ffmpeg version 0.svn20080206-9 was uploaded to unstable and is currently waiting to get out of NEW . Special thanks go out to Fabian Greffrath, for testing, reviewing and pushing me, to Lïoc Minier, for his thoughts on the package renaming and handling of potential unstripped replacement packages and Darren Salt for his work on the debian/rules file. This upload is targeted lenny. Highlights of that upload include:

introduction of ffmpeg-doc 438369
build flavors (read more below)
renaming of the source package to ffmpeg-debian
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noopt now compiles the package with -O0 (and works!)
ffmpeg-config has been removed. please port your packages to use pkg-config instead, cf. 487917 and 487922.

As for the build flavors: The debian/rules file was refactored so that flavors can easily be added. The flavors are architecture specific. All architectures support a static and a dynamic flavor. The following architectures support the following flavors:

i386: cmov (an i686 optimized flavor using the cmov instruction)
powerpc: altivec (requires G4 or better)
sparc: vis (uses v9 instructions)

If you are interested how we manage these build flavors, have a look at our debian/rules file. I remember that this was recently discussed on debian-devel at some point.

Anyway, if you need/want additional flavors, please file wishlist bugs.

Andrew Pollock: [debian] Is autofs maintained upstream?

2008-07-03T06:40:00+00:00

The current autofs package in Debian unstable has twenty-nine patches applied to it.

The Ubuntu autofs package in Hardy Heron LTS has thirty patches applied to it (twenty-nine of them being the Debian ones).

We discovered a bug today in Hardy's autofs, which will undoubtedly also affect Debian's autofs as well, which is apparently fixed in the likes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for something like four years.

So either Red Hat is doing a shoddy job of feeding patches back upstream, or upstream is doing a shoddy job of accepting them.

The fact that Debian has to carry twenty-nine patches suggests something is similarly wrong in our camp.

We've been finding various problems in autofs in our environment recently, and have accumulated maybe half a dozen patches or so in the last month. I'll have to make sure that they get fed back into Debian and Ubuntu at the very least. Given the nature of one of the bugs we found today, I have grave doubts about the code quality of autofs. I have to wonder if it's worth rewriting from scratch in Python or something.

Enrico Zini: Using OpenStreetMap maps with gpsdrive

2008-07-02T23:23:25+00:00

Using OpenStreetMap maps with gpsdrive

Here's how I made it:

wget http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/europe/italy.osm.bz2
bunzip2 italy.osm.bz2 (this might not be needed)
setup mapnik; the instructions for sid worked on my lenny/testing system.
osm2pgsql -c /store/italy.osm (you should not use -m with gpsdrive)
start gpsdrive and turn on mapnik mode. Originally it did not work for me, until I deleted ~/.gpsdrive/osm.xml.

This makes gpsdrive not only more useful, but also completely Free.

Biella Coleman: Going going gone

2008-07-02T21:40:47+00:00

Jon Dowland: My site is (slowly) moving

2008-07-02T20:23:39+00:00

I've decided to give my website a spring-clean. One of the things that is overdue a change is my domain name.

You can find out more about the history of the "alcopop" name at /about/ if you are so inclined. I've been using it for a long time and haven't really thought about what people might presume about me from the name.

Over the next few months, the site will be moving to the more neutral jmtd.net (my initials). From this point forward, any new content will go there only. This log will probably stay where it is for a while, however.

I'm taking this opportunity to migrate to ikiwiki which is a really useful bit of software and has managed to scratch an itch that I thought nothing would quite manage.

Lior Kaplan: To separate or not to separate (the file systems)?

2008-07-02T20:12:19+00:00

I have to handle some machines of commercial places which has a different standards about thier installations. The main difference is about creating a lot of file system instread of the normal few familiar in most distributions (/, /usr, /var, /tmp, /home).

While they create a FS for each product installed on the machine (a habit taken from UNIX when they didn’t have any meaning of installation other than copying files), they also separate the variale files (e.g. logs or other very active files) of each product.

I’m trying to change these standards to be more close to the FHS (and use the advantenges of RPM/DEB), but one of the main questions I get is what will happen when the FS reach 100%. When everything is separated one product can’t affect another, but that costs with a lot of sysadmin overhead. Leaving everhing variale in /var makes things easy, but hold some risk.

I’d be happy to hear what other sysadmins chose to do…

Romain Francoise: Musings on the FriendFeed API

Romain Francoise — 2008-07-02T20:42:20+00:00

I use the FriendFeed API (launched in March) to build the blog widget mentioned in my previous post, and I'm rather disappointed to see that the data it exports is not the same as the data FriendFeed shows on my profile page (which is collected from the various services linked to my account). The Flickr service data in particular has two problems:

There is no obvious way to distinguish between photos I've added to my favorites and my own photos, other than looking at the URL of the photo and extracting the username. On my profile page the photos are correctly labeled, so FriendFeed does have the information.
When I add several photos to my favorites in a row, if FriendFeed notices them in the same update batch then they're exported in the JSON feed as a single entry with multiple thumbnails. Which means that I can't add links on each image to the corresponding photo page on Flickr as per Flickr's Community Guidelines; the entry's link property points to the photo page of the first photo in the batch.

Annoying. Now, I can't think of a good technical reason that would prevent FriendFeed from exporting my data properly over their API. Are they doing this for anti-competitive purposes? It's weird. I'm a big fan of data aggregation, but not if it's lossy like that!

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: A reader’s meme

2008-07-02T17:46:52+00:00

From Tuesday thingers, via Jules Jones:

Here is the Top 100 Most Popular Books on LibraryThing. Bold what you own, italicize what you’ve read. Star what you liked. Star multiple times what you loved!

(more…)

Wouter Verhelst: No more OpenCT

2008-07-02T17:16:00+00:00

I just uploaded belpic 2.6.0-4, with a few minor changes, and one major one.

The minor changes are, first, a fix to beid-register-pkcs11.html so that it tries to install libbeidpkcs11.so.2, rather than just the .so file, into iceweasel; otherwise you have to install the -dev package (or manually install the library, or change the .html file) to be able to use beid in your browser. Second, there were some typo fixes of which a bugreport had been open embarrasingly long. Oops.

The major change, however, is the fact that the debian packages now no longer have support for OpenCT as an alternative to PC/SC Lite. This isn't actually supported by the belpic upstream; and while the Debian packages did include support for such cardreaders, I do have a feeling that it was causing some problems.

So why did I include it in the first place, you ask? Well, because my very own cardreader wasn't supported by PC/SC Lite. You see, when I originally packaged the eID software back in 2004, most people didn't have an eID yet, let alone a cardreader; and the fairly common ACR38U-based smartcard readers that are thrown to people's heads these days were nowhere to be found yet. So, I googled for a smartcard manufacturer, found Gemplus who claimed Linux support for (at least some of) their models, found the distributor for Belgium, and ordered a smartcardreader. It did work with Linux allright—but OpenCT, only. Only later on did I find that belpic expects PC/SC Lite.

In itself, this was no problem; the first versions of belpic (up to and including 2.3.13) did have the OpenCT and other reader drivers still compiled in, anyway; only with 2.5 and later did Zetes choose to remove them. That's when I started patching, and that's when I discovered that problems began...

So, anyway. No more ~~mr nice guy~~ OpenCT. I needed to do my tax declaration, and since it'd been a while since I last tried to do some belpic stuff (since before the move, actually), I discovered that I couldn't find my cardreader anymore. So, I bought me a proper ACR38U-based one, and did my tax declarations before doing the upload. How's that for testing?

In any case, if anyone beside me was using the OpenCT bits in belpic, they're now out of luck. Go get yourself an ACR38U-based reader—they're only €15ish, anyway...

Holger Levsen: Liberated and migrated

2008-07-02T17:14:01+00:00

An hour ago the ttf-liberation package finally migrated to Lenny, yay! In case this doesn't ring a bell for you, check out wikipedia or the original announcement. Those are free fonts with the same metrics as Times, Arial and Courier.

My thanks go to Alan Baghumian, the Debian maintainer, and Max Spevack, Tom Callaway and some unnamed lawyers from RedHat, for helping resolving some licence questions, plus the unnamed artist(s) at RedHat, who made the fonts.

Andrew Pollock: [tech] On microblogging

2008-07-02T15:43:00+00:00

Now that Tim Connors has taken the lid off it, I feel I should opine on the matter.

Microblogging is just not terribly exciting for the reader. I don't see the point in aggregating it.

I don't particularly find Mikal's blatherings terribly exciting reading. I don't find Stewart's twitterings much fun either. I think Facebook's status updates are a better way to poll such things, myself, and it's where I confine my "microblogging" to.

I think one of the things that used to make reading blogs more worthwhile than reading mailing lists was the high signal-to-noise ratio. Back in the day, there was a bit of a "cost" or barrier to entry for writing a blog post. For most blogs, it wasn't as easy as writing an email. I still hand-craft my blog posts in HTML, so for me to write something, I have to have enough inclination to fire up an editor and write the words. Often I run out of motivation half way through a blog post, and just end up scrapping it. I'm sitting on a few more lengthy posts that I haven't managed to summon up the energy to write at all yet.

I think some of the "push-button publishing" out there is rapidly commoditising blogging, to the point where it becomes as easy or easier than writing an email. And we all know what happened to email...

Blogging for me is essentially a journal. I like to use it to refer back to. To share what I'm doing with others. Occasionally it can be cathartic. Often it's a substitute for going to work and telling my co-workers about what crazy geeky thing I've done in my spare time. Mostly it's for me. The fact that I choose to share it with the world is not really a primary motivating factor for me, it just makes it more accessible for me, and sometimes helpful for others.

Clint Adams: Meiosis

2008-07-02T15:02:57+00:00

Word on the street is that there will be a Mini Purse in about seven months. That could mean Procter & Gamble stock is undervalued. Contact Manish for more details.

Evan Prodromou: 14 Messidor CCXVI

2008-07-02T14:18:53+00:00

I've been working hard on a new project for the last couple of months, which I'm glad to be able to share with you now. For the impatient: today my company Control Yourself, Inc. is launching Identi.ca, a new microblogging service. (There's a press release on the Control Yourself site). Users can post short messages about themselves to Identi.ca, which are then broadcast to friends in their social network using instant messages (IM), RSS feeds, and the Web.

The difference between Identi.ca and other services like Twitter, Jaiku, or Pownce is that it is Open Source software. I tried to meet the requirements of the Open Service Definition -- Free Software and Free Data. In the same spirit, Identi.ca supports open standards like OpenID and OpenMicroBlogging, to integrate with other Web sites and services.

A little background: in March of this year, I was privileged to take part in a summit at the Free Software Foundation about open network services. The summit brought together a number of people involved in Open Source and Open Content to discuss problems with "software as a service" and how to solve them.

More and more, people are depending on Web sites and other network services "in the cloud" to do much of their computing tasks. Examples: using Yahoo! Maps instead of a desktop mapping application, or using Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word. Software-as-a-service can be extremely convenient -- data on remote servers stays up-to-date, software gets updated regularly, and you can use different computers or mobile devices to get at the same data.

The sacrifice, however, is user autonomy. If you decide that Google Docs doesn't work the way you want, you can't tinker with the software and fix it. If you want to share a map on your Web site, you need Yahoo!'s permission. If you want to use a new social networking site, you have to re-enter all your personal data and re-invite all your friends. The data and code belong to someone else, and they're hidden behind servers that you, the user, aren't allowed to touch.

There aren't a lot of clear answers to this. But our loosely-organized summit group is moving forward to promote and support Free/Open Network Services. These are Web sites (or other services) that use Free/Open Source software (with the source available) and provide Open Content data (except for data that users mark as private). There are a lot of them popping up -- like OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. Others are close on the software side, although the data side is a little less clear -- like Wordpress.com, Reddit, or LiveJournal.

After the summit, I wanted to try to see what I could do personally to further this mission. I think several of the sites I work on now -- like Vinismo and Keiki -- would qualify. But I also wanted to break some new ground and challenge people's assumptions about software services. And the services I was using, and getting invited to, the most were microblogging sites. Clearly that was the area to dig into further.

To do it, I started Laconica, the software underlying Identi.ca. It's AGPL'd PHP using MySQL as a backend -- probably the most accessible platform on the planet right now. I used lots of existing libraries to make development easier, and I hired a great designer (Montreal's Marie-Claude Doyon) to give the site a professional look.

Almost as important as the Open Source and Open Content is the distributed nature of Identi.ca. I designed an open protocol called OpenMicroBlogging, based on OAuth, to make it easy for users on one Laconica server to subscribe to notices by users on another server. I hope this will make the service more robust, develop a rich and diverse social network, and stimulate innovation.

Because in the end, that's the Internet that we all want to be part of. As a society we rejected "walled gardens" like AOL, Compuserve, and MSN in the early 90s in favor of the distributed, open nature of the World Wide Web. And I think that the new walled gardens like Facebook and Google, need to be replaced with open protocols and standards. Will Open Network Services be the basis of "Web 3.0", the next stage of Web culture? I truly think so, but that's still an open question.

People have been using Identi.ca for a few weeks now, although I've asked that folks wait until the software was more mature before posting public links. Today I'm lifting that embargo and asking friends and colleagues to join and participate in the conversation.

I hope that people who are sympathetic with the ideals of Identi.ca will take the time to blog about it, invite their friends, and start using the site regularly. And of course I'd love to get feedback on bugs, requested features, and ideas for the future. Please also subscribe to me on the site -- see http://identi.ca/evan -- so I can see who's out there.

There are still so many standard services on the Web that I'd like to see open sourced, open content, and distributed -- advertising, storage, image and file sharing, comments, portal pages, social news, social bookmarks, search engines. There's a real business potential for taking the lead in these areas, and I hope more people jump in.

Jon Dowland: Introducing debgtd

2008-07-02T14:13:00+00:00

debgtd in action

Recently the number of open bugs that I had submitted hit 100. I had completely lost track of which bugs I was interested in, which ones needed my attention, etc. so I started developing a prototype tool to try and help me keep track of it all. I've called it "debgtd", after getting things done, the self-improvement method which has proven very popular in IT culture.

The current prototype will import the list of bugs that you have submitted from the BTS and let you display them sorted either by severity or package name. You can "sleep" a bug if it does not require your attention at present (e.g. awaiting maintainer feedback), or "ignore" it if you no longer want to keep track of it (e.g. you've stopped using the package in question). Double-clicking a row invokes your system's default X web browser on the bug page.

This is enough at the moment to help me work through my backlog, although once I've done that I have ambitious plans for encoding more workflow into it (such as waking sleeping bugs up on events etc.).

Try it out and see what you think: : code and a more rambling explanation of plans for the tool are available here. It's written in python and uses pygtk for the UI.

Russell Coker: LUV Meeting July 2008

2008-07-02T13:18:05+00:00

At the last two meetings of LUV [1] I’ve given away old hardware. This month I gave away a bunch of old PCI and AGP video cards, a heap of PC power cables, and some magnets (which I received for free because they were in defective toys that could seriously injure or kill children). One new member was particularly happy that at the first meeting he attended he received some free hardware (I hope it works - most of that stuff hasn’t been tested for over a year and I expect that some would fail). Also there was another guy giving away hardware, so I might have started a trend of giving away unused hardware at meetings (he was giving away some new stuff in the original boxes, mostly USB and firewire cables).

For a long time (many years) at LUV meetings there have been free text books given away. One member reviews books and then gives them away after he has read them.

At the meeting Ralph Becket gave a presentation on the Mercury functional language. It was interesting to note that Mercury can give performance that is close to C (within 80%) on LZW compression (which is apparently used as a benchmark for comparing languages). Given the number of reasonably popular languages which don’t give nearly that level of performance I think that this is quite a good result.

After the meeting Richard Keech demonstrated his electric car. It’s a Hyundai Getz which has had the engine replaced by an electric motor but which still uses the manual gearbox. Richard did a bit of driving around with various LUV members as passengers to demonstrate what the car can do. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to be involved in that, so I’ll have to do so next time I meet him. One thing to note is that Richard’s car was not built that way by Hyundai, it was a custom conversion job. The down-side to this of course is that it would have cost significantly more than a vehicle with the same technology that was manufactured. One design trade-off is that Richard had batteries installed in the place for a spare tire. Last year the RACV magazine published a letter I wrote suggesting that small cars should be designed without a spare tire and that owners of such cars should rely on the RACV to support them if they get a flat tire [2], my option has not changed in the last year, I still think that cars which are driven in urban areas don’t really need spare tires so I don’t think that Richard is losing anything in this regard.

The motor driving Richard’s car runs on three-phase AC and a solid-state inverter is used to convert 185V DC to about the same voltage at three phase AC (I didn’t write notes so I’m running from memory). Apparently on long drives the inverter gets cooler rather than hotter - I had expected that there would be enough inefficiency in the process of converting DC to AC that it would get hot.

In a previous conversation Richard told me that he can drive his car 75Km on one charge and that it takes him 8 hours to charge when using an Australian mains (240V) plug rated at 10A. When designing such a vehicle it would be trivial to make it use a 20A plug for a 4 hour charge or even a two-phase plug for even shorter charging (I’m sure that Richard could have requested these options if he wanted them). But an 8 hour charge allows the vehicle to be completely charged during a working day and the use of the most common type of plug (the type used in every home and office) means that it can be charged almost anywhere (the standard mains circuit used in Australia is rated at 15A so special wiring is needed for a 20A socket). There is such a power point mounted on the outside of my house not too far from where a visitor could park their car. I anticipate that in a few years time it will not be uncommon for people who visit me to charge their car during their visit. Richard’s ratio of an hour of charge to almost 10Km of driving means that someone who visits for dinner could get enough charge into their car to allow for 30Km of driving before they leave. 30Km is about the driving distance to go from my house to a location on the other side of the city that is just outside the main urban area, so probably at least half of Melbourne’s population lives within a 30Km driving distance from my house. Not that I expect friends to arrive at my house with their car battery almost flat, but it does make it easier to plan a journey if you know that at point A you will be able to get enough charge to get you to point B.

I think it’s a good thing to have members of LUGs give things away to other people and to demonstrate technology that is of wide interest. I hope to see more of it.

[1] http://www.luv.asn.au/

[2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/03/02/spare-tires/

Simon Richter: hjkl

2008-07-02T12:58:30+00:00

Decklin,

hjkl has saved my butt several times when I was sitting at a thoroughly broken terminal. While I don't generally use it in daily life, it is good to have a fallback that works really everywhere.

(Email? Who needs email?)

Paul van Tilburg: Preparing for GUADEC

2008-07-02T10:38:17+00:00

I am in the process of packing my stuff for my holidays. Tomorrow, I will fly to Istanbul to attend GUADEC 2008. Because GUADEC does not start before the 7th, it will give me some time to roam around Istanbul itself and do some sightseeing, probably with some of the Collabora guys.

I’m flying on July 3 at 12:00 (+0200) from Schiphol with KLM (flight KL 1615) and arrive at Istanbul Atatürk International Airport at 16:20 (+0300). I’ll return on July 13 at 17:15 (+0300), again with KLM (flight KL 1616), and land on Schiphol at 19:55 (+0200). In Istanbul I will be staying in the Saint Sophia Hotel in Sultanahmet.

I’m looking forward to it, although it doesn’t feel like holidays to me yet. I should have an Internet connection over there, and probably Jaiku via cell phone will work fine too. So I will keep you up-to-date.

It is also clear that I will be skipping DebConf this year. This is unfortunate, because I wanted to work with the Debian/Ruby team to advance some of our goals. However, I’m happy to catch at least one free software conference.

Julien Blache: Looking for a job

2008-07-02T08:59:14+00:00

As of 09:53am CEST today, I am officially available for hire starting mid-August, and looking for a job.

I’m going to enjoy some time off in the nice, sunny weather we’ve got here these days and I’ll have some time again to try and add proper support for the Intel Macs to d-i. Not that bad after all.

Jan Wagner: Bayreuth Festival - Online streaming of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”

2008-07-02T08:00:31+00:00

Actual I’m involved into a project which maybe of interest for you if you like opera particular when you are a Richard Wagner enthusiast.
Since long time, the waiting period for obtaining tickets increases a lot. At the moment I think you have to wait around 8 years, which is a worse.
Time changes also at Bayreuth Festival, they seems to refocus their audience. Looks like the aspects of huge waiting list and new medias influenced that process.

This year the opera “Die Meistersinger” is broadcasted online under the slogan “live dabei” (live there) via the great thing called “Internet” and to a public viewing area in Bayreuth, which is a premiere in both cases. So if you don’t have a ticket for the Festspielhaus and not in a position to make use of the public viewing but interested to have a look at the opera, you may want to check if your system matches the technical requirements and give it a try.

Decklin Foster: Did you see what he was wearing? Oh. My. God.

2008-07-01T20:25:21+00:00

Debian shall soon have a Conkeror package, thanks to Axel Beckert who takes a minute to break down the current keymap. Naturally, you have to poke fun at vi users here. But wait! I am a vi user!

What can I say, except maybe

Emacs (the rudiments, anyway) is like riding a bicycle

When I say vi, i mean vile, not vim. vim gives me hives. vile is teh awesome.

I am working on a set of vile-ish bindings, and I can't say I feel any pressing need to stick hjkl in. You could start from there, but that's missing the point, I think.

(You know what's also awesome? My email is still down, so I won't even have to delete flames from people who take their choice of editor/browser Very Seriously until sometime tomorrow.)

Stefano Zacchiroli: python-debian w dependency parsing

2008-07-01T19:43:13+00:00

New python-debian feature: Dependency Parsing

Since my merge commit of this afternoon python-debian has grown dependency parsing support.

(But first things first: you know about python-debian, don't you? If you don't, and you always wanted to program with Debian-related files with Python, then shame on you!)

Thus far, playing with Packages-like files using dictionary-like objects was already as simple as (quoting from /usr/share/doc/python-debian/examples/deb822/grep-maintainer):

for pkg in deb822.Packages.iter_paragraphs(file('/var/lib/dpkg/status')):
    if pkg.has_key('Maintainer') and maint_RE.search(pkg['maintainer']):
        print pkg['package']

However, it was a bit unfortunate that Depends-like fields were only returned as strings. Now each package (as iterated upon in the above snippet) is equipped with a .relations property returning a dictionary of inter-package relationship fields. Looking up keys like "depends" you will get back a conjunctive normal form (CNF) representation of dependencies, together with parsed constraints on version or architectures, if any.

A simple example is shipped as /usr/share/doc/python-debian/examples/deb822/depgraph, which outputs a labeled Graphviz script of all inter-package dependencies extracted from a Packages file. Here is its most relevant snippet:

name = pkg['package']
rels = pkg.relations
for deps in rels['depends']:
    if len(deps) == 1:
        emit_arc(name, deps[0]['name'])
    else:   # output an OR node
        or_node = get_id()
        emit_arc(name, or_node)
        emit_node(or_node, 'OR')
        for dep in deps:
            emit_arc(or_node, dep['name'].lower())

The appropriate sub-classes of Deb822 have been customized with the knowledge of which inter-package relationship fields are supported in their stanzas (e.g. Build-Depends are supported by Sources, but not by Packages; the other way around for Recommends).

Testing from the git repo is more than welcome.

Axel Beckert: Conkeror in the Debian NEW queue

Axel Beckert — 2008-07-01T19:39:11+00:00

I already mentioned a few times in the blog that I’m working on a Debian package of the Conkeror web browser. And now, after a lot of fine-tuning (and I still further new ideas how to improve the package ;-) Conkeror is finally in the NEW queue and hopefully will hit unstable in a few days. (Update Thursday, 03-Jul-2008, 18:13 CEST: The package has been accepted by Jörg and should be included on most architectures in tonight’s updates.)

Those who could hardly await it can fetch Conkeror .debs from http://noone.org/debian/. The conkeror package itself is a non-architecture specific package (but needs xulrunner-1.9 to be available), and its small C-written helper program spawn-process-helper is available as package conkeror-spawn-process-helper for i386, amd64, sparc, alpha, powerpc, kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. There are no backported packages for Etch available, though, since I don’t know of anyone yet, who has successfully backported xulrunner-1.9 to Etch.

Interestingly the interest in Conkeror seems to have risen in the Debian community independently of its Debian packaging. Luca Capello, who sponsored the upload of my Conkeror package, pointed me to two blog post on Planet Debian, written by people being fed up with Firefox 3 already and are looking for a more lean, but still Gecko based web browser: Decklin Foster is fed up with Firefox’ -eh- Iceweasel’s arrogance and MJ Ray is fed up with Firefox 3 and its SSL problems.

Since my previously favourited Gecko based web browser Kazehakase never became really stable but instead became slow and leaking memory (and therefore not much better than Firefox 2), I can imagine that it’s no more an candidate for people seaking for a lean and fast web browser.

Conkeror has some “strange” concepts of which the primary one is that it looks and feels like Emacs:

The current location is shown in a status bar below the website, where Emacs usually shows buffer names. All input, even entering new URLs to go to, is done via the mini-buffer, an input line below the status bar.
Instead of tabs it uses Emacs’ concept of buffers. So no tab bar clutter and though easy access to all currently open pages.
It has no buttons, menu-bar or such. And except the status bar and mini-buffer, it uses the whole size of the window for the displayed web page. This is the main reason why I prefer Conkeror on the 7” EeePC: I don’t want to waste any pixels for buttons or menu bars and still have a fully functional web browser.
It of course has Emacs alike keybindings (with a slight touch of Lynx). While this may seem awkward for the vi world (Hey, they have the vimperator^*, also in Debian since a few days!), as an Emacs user you just have to remember that you web browser now also expects to be treated like an Emacs. It just works:

C-x C-c
Exit Emacs -eh- Conkeror

C-x C-f
Open File -eh- web page in new buffer

C-x C-b
Change to some other tab -eh- buffer

C-x C-v
Replace web page in this buffer and use the current URL as start for entering the new one

C-x 5 2
Open new frame -eh- window

C-x 5 0
Close current frame -eh- window

C-x k
Close tab, -eh- kill buffer

C-h i
Documentation

C-s
Incremental search forward

C-r
Incremental search backward

C-g
Stop

l
Go back (Think info-mode)

g
Go to (Open web page in this buffer)

(Hehe, I like the faces of vi users having read these keybindings and now wondering how to remember them. SCNR. Well, sometimes vi key bindings are a mystery to me, too. :-)
There are of course many more and nearly all are the same as in Emacs, even the universal argument C-u and the M-x command-line are there. E.g. C-u g lets you open a web page in a new buffer, too.
Conkeror also has very promising concept for following and copying links with the keyboard only. Opera is very inefficient here since you have to jump from link to link to get to the one you want. In Conkeror you just press f for following or c for copying links and then all links on the currently shown part of the page show a small number attached to it. Then you just enter the number (and additionally press enter if the number is ambigous) and the link is either opened or copied to the clipboard.
A funny anecdote about how this concept grew over the time: Early versions of Conkeror (back in the days when it just was a Firefox externsion as vimperator) numbered all links on the page, not only the visible ones. On large pages with many links or buttons (e.g. my blog ;-), this took minutes to complete. The idea to just number the visible links is so simple and important – but someone first needed to have it. :-)

Footnotes

*) I just noticed that there is now also muttator, making Thunderbird look and behave like vim (and probably also mutt), too. Wonder into which e-mail client the Emacs community will convert Thunderbird. GNUS? RMAIL? VM? Wanderslust? What will it be called? Wunderbird? Thunderslust? (SCNRE ;-)