Wed, 28 Oct 2009

Falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus.

Note: via Blog post (obviously different formatting) and sent by email

roughly: Lying in one, lying in all.

That is from Steve Waddington.

Please see the attached screenshot — I have obliterated service identifying information.

I find it telling that what I said in my original post, of all the things there the one you decided to fact-check was the number of emails between us.

And you got that wrong.

What was is you said again? Falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus? Do you still stand by that statement?

If you have looked at the original complaint, no one asked for anything but information on 'what went wrong'.

It simply noted that fact that payment occurred, and we were disconnected and went on to say "We find the above experience of diconnecting [sic] our service by EXETEL a very poor customer relationship experience."

The response to that could have been: "Yes, that is a poor customer experience. We will look into it and see if we can improve."

Instead we had an accusatory email back commenting, firstly, of the amount of time of the disconnection.

As if someone paying for something and not receiving it for only 1 minute is OK.

The point being missed – we paid for something and we did not receive it.

The point being missed -- this is a poor customer experience

The second email then, falsely, accused us of not actually paying in the first place! Later the individual concerned, after the TIO complaint, clarifies that 'yes', we did indeed pay.

Very telling indeed, then, when you were pointed to my blog entry and rather than pick up on the stratgeic ("we are getting feedback, for free, on how we can improve our processes") you looked at the tactical ("he is lying! How I prove it and thus be happy in ignoring what was said").

As I said, It is easier to hear when your fingers are not in your ears.

In light of your recent blog post, and the recently released TIO report, I find Exetels' behaviour all the more perplexing.

Complain to Exetel, get your service contract summarily terminated.

Complain about Exetel, and get libelled publicly.

But I guess when you have 1/6th (163 out of 620) of your complaints related to Customer Service (from the TIO report) and 3% of your own existing customers (from your blog post) complaining, you get the reputation you earn.

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Tue, 27 Oct 2009

Things I learnt on Sunday about Salsa

1. When I have had three rums, my ability to keep a Salsa beat is vastly more diminished than I expected
2. Hook turns, spins and handflicks are not easy for me to do
3. My face is a lot more readable than I expect

But my thanks to the ladies who helped me with both (1) and (2). Feedback is always appreciated.

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Sun, 25 Oct 2009

Policy-based routing in Linux

Just a quick note.

Most routing is done on the basis of the destination address, unless you have a BGP feed.

However occassionally you need to do routing on the basis of some other policy: in my case this weekend it was the source address.

I spent quite a few hours this weekend looking at various Google results, lartc.org, www.policyrouting.org (the latter has a fairly detailed book with some useful examples) before I came up with a solution that works for me.

ip rule add from <source addr> table 203
ip route add default via <new default> table 203

You can also use the ToS field and act upon fwmarks thus linking your routing with your iptables policy.

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Thu, 15 Oct 2009

It is easy to not hear when your fingers are in your ears.

I read this post by Steve Waddington of Exetel where he says that customers never seem to follow-up with him when he asks them about their poor customer experiences. I just had to laugh. I had actually just filled a complaint with the TIO about Exetel.

I have emailed Steve Waddington a number of times, generally outlining problems, but I am yet to ever receive a response.

Generally if you want to hear feedback from your customers, you have to take your fingers out of your ears.

Here is my (most recent) Exetel story.

To set the scene, I am synchronising a large backup of data. Think around 100Gb. In reality a small amount.

Towards the end of September, we receive an email indicating that we had used a large amount of service. Furthermore that we had 72 hours to pay an interim fee of AUD$100. The email was sent in the early hours of a Friday morning. Which effectively turned it into a single business day. Heaven help you if you had decided to take a long weekend.

At any rate, the fee was paid by that afternoon and a name and receipt were obtained. Everything should have be hunky-dorey.

Come Monday morning - the Internet service had mysteriously failed. After some remote, expensive AU to UK phones calls and diagnostics I determined that the problem was that Exetel's system had disconnected the service anyway.

I emailed them to see what the problem was, and contact was made from Australia. Around the middle of the day, service was restored.

A complaint was filed with them (reference: #1691636), that day, which was summarily responded too. I left things for a while since I was busy.

But on the 13th Oct night, I decided to file a complaint with the TIO (reference: 09/251856). Here is the full text:

Describe your complaint

On 25 Sep, roughly 07:30am, an email was received from Exetel that they required an interim payment as our usage had exceeded AUD$100. The email indicated that if payment was not received within 72 hours - the service may be suspended.

At roughly 3:15pm, on 25 Sep - i.e. the same day. A payment of AUD$100 was made and we were issued receipt number 346650646 by an employee who indicated that there name was Rukshani.

On 28 Sep at roughly 8am, the Internet ceased to function. After some investigation we determined that Exetel's automated systems believed that the payment had not occurred.

#1: I sent an email at 11am on 28 Sep to their billing department, along with their senior management, with payment and service details asking why this occurred.

#2: A complaint was sent by the payee at 11:30am on 28 Sep indicating that we were unhappy with the service -- having been customers of long standing (over 4 years) -- being disconnected for over 4 hours despite paying is annoying.

Particular when this was not through fault of our own. Nor a technical fault.

How did the service provider respond to your complaint

#1: On 30 Sep at 12:45 an email was received from James Lowe, who said "Your service is un block now [sic]". No explanation was provided for the outage and non-application of the payment made.

#2: 2 responses were received to this email.

#2a: At ~11:50am on 28 Sep we received an email from Larry Kaeto who said that the service was unavailable for 2hrs 31mins, not the 4hrs as we had claimed. Additionally he indicated that we had a residental service which is not to be relied upon for business/mission critical requirements and suggested we purchase a more expensive service which has "business grade type support".

#2b: At ~09:40am on 29 Sep we received a further email from Larry Kaeto who claimed that no payment had been received by Exetel on 25 Sep.

How would you like the service provider resolve your complaint

Exetel appears to pride itself on its automated systems. (c.f. http://johnl.blogs.exetel.com.au/index.php?/archives/2783-Automating-Key-Systems-Is-A-Never-Ending-Task.html)

However, in this case, the automated system issued a demand for money. The money was paid, but it suspended access to the service anyway.

Service should not have been disrupted for 1 minute nor 150 minutes nor 240 minutes.

I believe the charge of AUD$100 and the monthly charge should be credited back to us for the hassle.

I've put in the headings as they are on the TIO complaint form, and made the URL a link otherwise it is exactly as I submitted it — which is also why the text is not very lengthy, as the TIO restrict how much you can submit.

This morning, at 09:10 I received an email from Exetel acknowledging receipt of the TIO complaint and asking Please detail in a point by point manner your concerns. This email was from Larry Kaeto. It also contained a copy of the most recent LNS logs. I replied with a full copy of the complaint as I submitted it to the TIO (reference: #1770435) and also indicated I would speak with the TIO to confirm what they had sent to Exetel (Exetel reference: #1771491).

By 12:56, Larry Kaeto was able to responsd, quoted here and edited to occlude privacy information:

Exetel acknowledge payment 25/9/09 was manually processed 25/9/09 but the record to remove the timer to suspend in 72 hrs was not removed.

I did not see the manual payment of the 25/9/09. Sorry for my ''incompetence'' for saying payment was not made.

The duration of suspension was 2 hours and 28 minutes (or thereabouts) as the facts show below (our session logs and your usage time logged in and out) and nto 4 hours as is claimed.

As gesture of goodwill, Exetel will provide a refund of $100

Exetel has made a commercial decision to end the relationship with you. See e-mail sent separately titled ''Ticket #1771491: XXXXXXXX5X - Notice of Termination - XXXXX XXXXXX ''

So, as you can see from John Linton's post, if there is a problem with taking payment – your service is summarily disconnected.

And, as you can see here, even if they take payment, but their automated system fails, if you complain about it, your service is summarily disconnected.

It is much easier to listen to your customers when you take your fingers out of your ears.

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Fri, 18 Sep 2009

Firefox, Flash, FAIL!

(aside: I have a number of blog posts in draft – don't worry they won't spam the various planets – but this was timely so I pushed it out first)

The most recent version of Firefox 3.x will also prompt you to update your Flash plugin if it is out of date. According to Ken Kovash, the response has been phenomenal. Almost 10,000,000 click through.

That is 10,000,000 failures.

Like a lot of people, I provide technical support for my Windows using family (and some friends). So I get to see how badly Windows is in the 'update' space. It is pretty common to have: Windows, Anti-virus, Java and one / two other applications (e.g. Google apps, Skype, Yahoo IM, etc.) prompt you with little annoying notification bubbles.

Most of them have trained themselves to not look in the bottom right of the screen and to ignore requests to update.

Which means that whenever I see a big, important update, like the Firefox one — I end up having to remotely take over their machine and do it on their behalf.

The user experience was:

1. Update Firefox.

   So far, so good.

2. It prompts and say Flash is out of date.

   Excellent. Click on link.

3. Adobe site says "click to upgrade".

   Great. It also includes, checked by default, a download of McCafe's anti-virus tool something or other.

4. Realise that pointless download of McCafe is about to happen. Cancel. Uncheck. Download again.

   Why is Adobe offering me more than just an upgrade of the product I am after? Apparently this is very common in the Windows world (think Safari included with iTunes, etc.)

5. Adobe figures out I am using Firefox and sends, instead of Flash, a 'Download manager' plugin.

   It includes instructions on how to enable things so that this plugin is updated by Adobe all the time. I, rather pointlessly, ponder why Flash does not do this itself.

6. Once installed, you need to restart Firefox. I do so.
7. This time the "Your Flash is out of date page" does not appear.

   At this point a normal person would think that they are now secure. Nothing could be further from the truth. Adobe has stupidly decided that first you need to have their update plugin. Then you need to actually do the update. FAIL.

8. I manually go the the '3.5.3' release note page, where it detects, again, that Flash is out of date.

   I click through to Adobe's site (again), this time, it figures out that it needs to update Flash. It autoinvokes the autoupdate plugin and does the update.

9. Prompted to restart Firefox, again. I do so.
10. Everything is now perfectly fine.

That was a total user experience failure.

Not Mozilla's fault but Adobe's.

But Mozilla can make a difference in this area. And work around the stupidity of Adobe.

1. All plugins MUST register a https URL where their version can be checked.
2. Periodically Firefox does the version checky thing (like with Add-Ons) and ensures they are up to date

That implies that there is a, separate "Your plugins are out of date page" distinct from "You've installed an upgraded version of Firefox"

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Fri, 14 Aug 2009

Hospital Week, or why the NHS is actually OK

It is odd seeing various reports that implementing properly state-funded health care in the US will lead to problems with death panels, or poor service.

I can only really comment on my own experience of the NHS.

I've found that the system of registering yourself to a GP is fairly pointless, time-consuming and buearucratic. Actually seeing a GP requires it to be an emergency or you to "plan" your sick days, because you need to have an appointment or be willing to wait, many, many, hours.

However, once you have a referral to a specialist, and you see them, further appointments, tests other diagnostic stuff is amazingly fast.

I've been in and out of hospital all this week on various days and I've got at least another 3 - 4 appointments covering the next month already lined up.

I don't recommend visiting hospitals so frequently but if you have, the NHS is a nice way to do it

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Sun, 09 Aug 2009

Please answer a few security questions.

I just received an automated call from Santander.

Let's set aside the stupidity of calling me on a Sunday, when all banks are closed, as the parent organisation being in Spain and the call centre being in India and this being a case of cultural stupidity.

What really annoyed me is that they wanted me to answer a few security questions, like what my address is, my date of birth.

They called me.

There is no guarantee that the person who claims to be from Santander is actually from there. It could be any random person calling and pretender to be them.

But what mechanism could they use to validate themselves? What about using two-factor authentication?

They could have called me from a number that they print on the back of the card, which is would have at least been a good starting point. It is not impossible to spoof an originating number but does increase the burden of effort on someone trying to perform identity theft. Fail one.

After explaining this to the women on the other end, she kept asking me to fill in the questions and then hung up in a gruff. Fail two. I had a similar call from HSBC earlier in the week as well. After explaning that since they called me, they either have something to tell / sell to me or they don't. He agreed. HSBC wanted me to come in for an appointment to review some ways they can "help me".

So it was a marketing call. At least HSBC have someone who is able to independently reason. They only score a single fail for trying to have me authenticate to them.

Principals of outbound calling:

• If you make the call to me, the burden is on you to prove who you say you are. Not me.
• Not all calls require me to verify my identity to you. Particularly sales and marketing calls.
• There is no reason to disturb me on the weekend.

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Fri, 07 Aug 2009

Eating healthy.

I came across Graze, a few weeks back and thought that even though I try to eat healthy, it might be simpler for me if I just had the food delivered.

It can be a hassle buying for one and then finding out that you don't like the food — or that you have to buy it in bulk just to have a portain of it each day. Plus food is nicer when it is fresh.

The boxes are, apparently, custom designed to have three different foods in them. My first box contains, pineapple, apple strudel and cashews. It looked like this:

And about 2 minutes later it looked like

Pretty good but the pineapple was almost fermented — it had not kept very well. I dropped the guys at Graze an email saying that. I was not expecting much, as I am on a trial offer and the first box was free, after all. But I was pleasantly surprised when I received a response from Natalia apologising for the pineapple and indicating that my next box would also be free.

Sweet!

My second box, below, also disappeared pretty quickly. Although I was not a fan of the dried raspberries as compared to the grapes and nut mix.

Their website is pretty slick, and the sign-up process is lovely. My one complaint is that when you rate foods, you have to 'bin' them, or 'love' them. I don't mind cashews and dried raspberries — I'd still like them to be sent up, just not as as frequently as, say, apple strudel. I'd rather give it a thumbs up, thumbs down are wavy hand.

I think that at £2.99 / box, the service is a bit too expensive for an individual to have. But a company might be able to arrange a "bulk rate". However one thing I particularly like is that each box contains a different image inside the lide. If they included some kind of inspirational quote as well, it be even better.

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Tue, 30 Jun 2009

My last five girlfriends …

Going to see films has been, for me, usually a solitary exercise.

Either no one was interested in seeing what I wanted to, my tastes are somewhat elceltic. Or they wanted to see that right at the beginning or right at the end.

Fortunately there are film festivals where other people with eclectic tastes gather. And even more fortuitously there is one in Edinburgh.

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Wed, 13 May 2009

Broken TalkTalk

This is broken.

That basically sums up my interactions with TalkTalk, so far.

But, let's begin at the beginning.

Having moved to Edinburgh earlier in the year, and finding a place, the next most important thing is to get connected to the 'Net. I had a look around at various deals. The closest the UK has to broadbandchoice.com.au is SamKnows.

It basically told me that in my exchange area I could choose between BT, TalkTalk and Virginmedia. Despite the fact that LLU has been around for longer here than in Australia very few companies choose to put in their own equipment. That is because openreach, apparently, do not attempt to charge an arm and a leg for their service. Just an arm and a foot.

I quickly discovered my choices were:

1. Pay BT £213 to "activate" the line that already existed in my place
2. Use TalkTalk and pay them £50 to do the same

Obviously, this was a no brain-er. Particularly as the "activation" here is related to re-connecting the MDF(and/or street cabinet) back to the exchange — which is literally 10 metres walk away from me. I choose TalkTalk.

TalkTalk's offer was (at time of writing – 2009-05-12), £11.25 line rental and £6.49 for broadband. Yes, £17 / month. As offers go, it is not a bad one. I get unlimited (i.e. no longer than 60 mintues) call to any landline in the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.

The first catch is that whilst the offer is for 18 months, if you are a "new" customer, you have to sign up for 24 months.

That is because TalkTalk have no confidence in the quality of their product or it's continued competitiveness. There can be no other reason, since you are also obliged to pay more for a 'new' install.

I believe that is broken because it was never any specific persons' job to think about it.

The second catch that occurred is the wait time. I know this information after the fact, after having discussed it with a number of TalkTalk employees, but their systems impose a minimum 14 day (that is working days) delay before submitting an order to BT.

This means that from the time you order the Phone + Broadband service, it can be up to 6 — yes, six — weeks before you have network connectivity.

Catch 3 is not having any access / idea about your usage -- but being charged for it!!!

Again, you get unlimited usage (i.e. up until 40Gb) but there is no mechanism to see your existing usage for the month. Why bother to charge for something where there is no meter?

Catch 4 is having to specifically sign-up to new 'price plans' -- why not just make it automatic?

It is good that price changes are announced in the corporate blog but as it notes on TalkTalk price changes, you have to opt-in to every change which is beneficial to you. For every change (rental increase, etc.,) that is not; you are automagically opted in. Nice.

Catch 5 is discovering that the blog engine will take your comments but moderate them out the wazzo. My comment was about Catch 4 -- price increases you are automatically opt-ed in for, whereas price decreases you are not.

Catch 6 is finding out that whilst TalkTalk can email you, you can never respond to an email -- you either have to use their 'contact us' web form, or ring.

What is with arrogant companies who want to use email as a one-way tool? Why can't they tie the sending address to a ticketing system so that if/when a customer replies it can be looked at? This is trivial to do, and I've done it at a number of companies. Without exception, when customers realise they can use the existing tools -- rather than to find the number on the website, or work out some stupid 'contact us' form they are happier.

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Tue, 16 Dec 2008

You make a grown man ...

... cry.

In my prior entry, I noted that I resigned from Debian. I also upgraded my system to Ubuntu.

This is my story.

The good

• since the tools are based upon Debian, easy to upgrade to.
• much usage of dpkg -P --force-depends && apt-get -f install occurred
• most things Just Worked
• always had either suspend or hibernate working before. Now have both working. Cool.
• I like how Gnome has a 'personality', makes it even nicer.
• splash-y boot is nice. Makes other people go 'schweet'.
• Having the single-user mode option come up with a menu of options is good
  Unfortunately neither 'netroot' nor 'fsck' work correctly. The latter should NOT run the init scripts first.

The bad

• managed to futz video
• managed to futz networking
  Would be great if there was a command line network manager tool that connected to the network
• managed to break sounds
• stock Gnome, which I have been using for ages, sucks.
• hard to just update to packages in jaunty/main.
  
  I want to switch all the 'core' packages over to the Ubuntu versions. This is seemingly impossible unless I do: apt-get -du upgrade and note which packages came from 'jaunty/main' (but I bet there is some easy fix)
• why no OpenOffice 3.0?
  
  Odd that they are willing to break with Debian on: X, Gnome, Firefox, the kernel but not this.

The ugly

• found 2 bugs; one already reported, gave a work-around
• reporting bugs is painful (hello? why do I need a browser to do this?)
  
  I have found another 2 bugs but I do not have the time to interrupt my browser workflow to report them. Reportbug is basically perfect. Just re-use it. Whoever thought 'ubuntu-bug' using '-p' and '-P' is a good idea was ... not thinking clearly.
• ubuntu forums typically have the error message
  
  But then lots of (rather) useless bleating and uninformed suggestions -- avoid them at all costs
• the wiki is horribly outdated
  
  see KernelWiki e.g. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/Roadmap
• no way to 'reset' things easily
  
  system-clean is okay, but what about terminal 1? Should ctrl-alt-1 work?
• interesting, firefox has a 'ubuntu addon' that does specific stuff.
  
  Why not just use iceweaseal, and then add back in the branding and addon stuff if required? Would make for greater re-use.
• why does the user switch applet default to showing your name?
  
  Who is not always sure of their name? Why take up so many pixels? Not clear.

Something that I think would be very useful, would be a script that took a stable Debian release and updated you to the latest Ubuntu LTS. In the past I used be okay with the release cycle that Debian had but now-a-days, I think I would prefer knowing an upgrade is coming every 24 months and be able to plan for it.

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Leaving Las Vegas ...

... and Debian.

Today I resigned from Debian. It has been something I have been thinking about for quite a while but it was a recent post by Bastian Vethur that brought about a tipping point.

For me, Debian has always been about new, and shiny. I've always used unstable, and over the last few months had switched to experimental because the flow of updates had basically stopped. Bastian's graphic shows the issue dramatically.

There are also a whole bunch of other reasons but if I have not already discussed the political reasons with you in person they do not bear repeating again.

So, I changed my laptop over to Ubuntu (running Jaunty, and updating daily). The process was far from simple, but if you are used to living on the unstable (or, even, experimental) edge of the blade relatively uncomplicated.

I noted the issues I had upgrading in another entry.

Anyway, Debian is going through a growing phase. Whether it grows to be bigger, more relevant or more useful is what others will have to decide. It's been fun, and I hope the future brings success.

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Mon, 15 Dec 2008

I told you so Exetel.

I use exetel for a number of services in Sydney.

I have always found them to be the cheapest, even if their ability to support their service is sub-optimal.

An example is right now, they are currently totally offline.

a2@eve:~$ dig +trace exetel.com.au

; <<>> DiG 9.5.0-P2 <<>> +trace exetel.com.au
;; global options:  printcmd
.           338458  IN  NS  G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  H.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  K.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  D.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
;; Received 228 bytes from 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1) in 58 ms

au.         172800  IN  NS  ADNS2.BERKELEY.EDU.
au.         172800  IN  NS  AUDNS.OPTUS.NET.
au.         172800  IN  NS  NS1.AUDNS.NET.au.
au.         172800  IN  NS  NS2.AUDNS.NET.au.
au.         172800  IN  NS  DNS1.TELSTRA.NET.
au.         172800  IN  NS  SEC1.APNIC.NET.
au.         172800  IN  NS  SEC3.APNIC.NET.
au.         172800  IN  NS  ADNS1.BERKELEY.EDU.
;; Received 413 bytes from 2001:503:ba3e::2:30#53(A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) in 620 ms

com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns1.ausregistry.net.au.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns2.ausregistry.net.au.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns3.ausregistry.net.au.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns3.melbourneit.com.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns4.ausregistry.net.au.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  dns1.telstra.net.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  au2ld.CSIRO.au.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  audns.optus.net.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns1.audns.net.au.
;; Received 354 bytes from 2001:dc0:2001:a:4608::59#53(SEC1.APNIC.NET) in 1302 ms

exetel.com.au.      3600    IN  NS  ns2.exetel.com.au.
exetel.com.au.      3600    IN  NS  ns1.exetel.com.au.
;; Received 99 bytes from 128.242.113.189#53(ns3.ausregistry.net.au) in 193 ms

dig: couldn't get address for 'ns2.exetel.com.au': not found

This is something I reported (ticket #853640) to them around Oct 2008 (when they last had a failure), that the auDA has no in-balliwick glue for their DNS. I was told by their support supervisor, Dylan Friedewald, via email:

The DNS for helpdesk.exetel.com.au is operational and valid, I do not see the point in discussing that further.

It is interesting to note that Steve Waddington has blogged many times about customers being unable to identify issues, but it is even more interesting that when a customer does – it is explicitly denied as being a problem and then ignored.

Apart from no in-ballwick DNS glue, their nameservers are also open recursive ones. Great if you would like to perform a DoS attack against some unsuspecting person.

I have raised other issues with them that warrant further investigation and corrective action, lest they affect all their customers. But I no longer have the time to continually ping them about things.

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Mon, 08 Dec 2008

Coughing up blood

Normally, those would not be the search terms I would plug into Google, first thing in the morning. But they were appropriate, today.

Because that was what was happening.

When I was younger, I used to have asthma and, as part of that, I would invariably contract bronchitis periodicially.

Over the past years, even though my asthma has receeded, I would still get bronchitis at the interface between seasons. It did not matter if the season change was hot to cool, or cool to hot. Whatever the change, I would get it.

I've been used to this. It is, in it's own way, comforting. I can watch the seasons change, and notice that are changing earlier. It's like I have an in-built global warming detector!

This latest bout came on about 3 weeks ago. So, as usual, I thought nothing of it, bought my normal supply of strepsils and went about my life.

It was not until I was doing some training, and was left exhausted and wondering why that I decided to head to the doctor. He could not hear anything wrong with my lungs.

We did a few peak flow tests; my best of 3 being 250. Typical values for a health person are 600+.

His conclusion: ‘Your asthma has recurred.’.

A week later and I am still short of breath, but also coughing up blood. So after some searching on the interwebs, it appears that this can be normal with excessive coughing. And that the best ways to control excessive coughing are: codine¹ (paracetamol / panadol) and chocolate ²

So, I've been indulging myself in both.

I'm off to get a chest X-Ray just in case this is more serious and the blood re-appears tomorrow. But now you know that chocolate is good for you (and your cough).

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Sun, 19 Oct 2008

How to get more developers.

Christian worries about how to grow the desktop share in the free desktop.

Some recent events (Chromium, Geode) have led me to believe that … We've won … already.

For example let's look at the reactions to Chromium (which I believe was released way too early):

• Linux and Mac versions have not been launched
• Google announce ... Linux version ... delayed. Why do they do this by not considering ... Linux
• Chromium for Linux & Mac OS X

I've just picked three links but the trend is clear. The digirati want to use Linux and Mac OS X to evaluate new technologies NOT Windows. Sure, some of them still have those boxes around for “client work”. But that is not what they use day-to-day.

Now let's take a look at Mozillas' Geode. Here is the Introduction to Geode. Look at the comments:

• Why is it not compatible with Linux (first one)
• Ele é compativel com linux? (seventh one)
• 15th and 16th comments

In fact the outcry was enough for lack of Linux support that is merited a follow-up Common Geode Q&As:

Geode is meant as a temporary solution to allow websites to experiment with geolocation today. … Skyhook is built in. A side effect is that Linux isn't supported for the simple reason that Skyhook hasn't implemented Linux drivers. Although not ideal. …

A year ago this would not have happened. This amount of push-back from the digirati that the new technology they are supposed to look at and evaluate is not available on their platform would have been accepted as a matter of course.

Now, though, they all expect it on their platform of choice. We've won, already.

Whilst the largest user-base remains the Windows market, if you want the digirati to look at and evaluate what you have to offer it needs to work on Linux & Mac OS X. Another example, while I remember, is Adobe releasing Flash 10 for Linux on the same day as other platforms.

Unheard of.

So what does mean for Christian's question?

1. Within 12 months it will be inconcievable for software to NOT be released on Windows + Linux (and maybe Mac OS X)
2. Within 24 months we will have power users asking for Free Software (probably not Linux but more likely OpenOffice 3.x & Firefox) routinely
3. Within 36 months Linux will be 10% of the desktop market. Bigger than Mac OS X. That is a lot of people you can not afford to ignore if you are a company, it will mean that ‘web-based’ will be more and more common — integration between desktop and the web will be key.

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Sun, 05 Oct 2008

How to solve a credit crisis ...

Apologies to anyone bored of this topic but it is something I have been thinking about recently.

You have people commenting on why Banks are special and need government funded bailouts. Others arguing that the Free market is not dead.

We have even have a few solutions from some people within the Free Software community.

I think the first thing is to identify who should lose, and who should win.

• Investors should lose.
• Customers should win.

Much of the annoyance about the rescue from ordinary people is that it seems that investors are not losing (enough). They took some risks, those gambles failed, and now everyone else is paying the price.

If IBM were to go bankrupt, would the government step in? Unlikely. Investors would lose (money), staff -- another word for investors -- would lose (jobs), but customers would win (their computers would keep working). Some customers would win more than others (especially those who had the equipment on lease); if no one is collecting, why pay?.

So let's apply the same set of outcomes to banks.

• Borrowers would win, since they are living in a mortgaged house.
• Investors lose, since no one will buy their shares (no matter how cheap they are)
• Tax payers win, since they are not rescuing a particular industry sector

But hang on, you rightly ask, - a bank has the title deed (a mortgage is a promise to pay amount X over Y year in return for the deed) - why would customers (depositors), realising a bank is no longer viable, since remove their funds

I think that those two issues can be addressed fairly simply. The government would guarantee all depositors money. Customers never lose. They never have to worry about their funds.

For banks, who enter into administration, the standard laws about possession should apply. If a borrower is utilising (living in) the asset to which the bank has title for over Z years (where Z equals 5 or 7), then the possesor now owns it outright. That is plenty of time for a bank to either be bought, have the underlying asset value recalibrated, or to completely go bust.

All without a detrimental effect.

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Fri, 03 Oct 2008

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Mon, 30 Jun 2008

Finding bogons. And then fixing them.

No, I'm not talking about Melbourians (besides I believe that it is actually bogan). I mean bogon which is a quantum on bogosity and as applied to IP packets.

I run a number of nameservers, someone of them are slaves for some high-profile sites (e.g. gnome.org, linux.conf.au, openmoko.org, etc.), and some zones the nameservers are (dynamic) primaries for.

I had someone send me an email but my various systems refused to receive -- this I tracked down to BIND not returning any data when an MX request was received. This was particularly perplexing as my laptop, also running BIND, and some of my other test systems all had no trouble.

After much faffing about, including running BIND in debug mode on a production machine, I found this gem in the debug log:

... ignoring blackholed / bogus server ...

Ah ha! Lights clicked and it all fell into place. The network was on the DNS bogon list.

In case you do not want to run the full bogon list, or keep it up to do, here are the IPv4 network you should filter out (from RFC3330).

acl "rfc3330" {
        // Filter out any IPv4 networks specified in RFC3330
        // These networks (IP addresses) should rarely be seen
        // in the wild on normal networks.
        0.0.0.0/8;
        10.0.0.0/8;
        169.254.0.0/16;
        172.16.0.0/12;
        192.0.2.0/24;
        192.168.0.0/16;
        198.18.0.0/15;
        224.0.0.0/3;
};

I've just updated from bogon list 5.9 to 6.3 across all my DNS machines. If you can remember if you have, or haven't, it might be worth checking too.

Oh, and if you require some assistance with DNS stuff, drop me a line.

Update: July 6th. Fixed URL for RFC3330.

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Fri, 13 Jun 2008

The fickleness of beauty.

I've just spent the the last two days in Ireland.

Obviously I went out. Lots.

Whilst I found lots of very attractive Irish lasses to chat with, it reminded me that a week ago I had been surfing the interwebs and stumbled over Shanalogic.

They / She sells "indie" stuff. What caught my eye was the girl on the front: more ...

Gorgeous!

But when I was in Ireland — completely different types of women appealed to me.

The fickleness of beauty. Not only is it in the eye of the beholder, but the date, time and place too.

Oh, and yes, older entries are appearing as well as newer ones. I'm sending them out slowly so that various tools, aggregators and other things are able to catch up sensibly.

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Mon, 28 Apr 2008

It's mine, not yours!

Information wants to be free.

That is a fairly common saying 'round the 'Net.

And, as I've grown up with it repeated enough, it is something that I think - more and more - is an good way to function. Not just at a country level but organisationally and interpersonally too.

When you release more information, you gain more trust.

So it is somewhat amusing to me that a parlimentry enquiry, ostensibly into the use of the word fuck and cunt on TV notes:

Submissions become committee documents and are made public only after a decision by the Committee. Persons making submissions must not release them without the approval of the Committee. Submissions are covered by parliamentary privilege but the unauthorised release of them is not.

So, if I were to put my submission up on as a blog entry I'm breaking the law. Stupid.

There might be some good reasons to keep a submission confidential (off the top of my head, refers to minors by name; commerically sensitive) but if the submitting party wants to make it public there should be nothing that prevents that.

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Mon, 17 Mar 2008

IPv6 continues to grow

Interesting report on how IPv4 was shut-off and everything continued to work.

Especially interesting was Google and the interesting logo effect.

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Mon, 03 Mar 2008

Finding (technical) people

At the Python Beer-up, I had a discussion with a few entrepreneurs who are looking for some people.

The problem:

• you have a vision
• you know nothing about (technical) matters

So, how would you find the appropriate person to implement your vision? What criteria do you use to determine competence and trustworthiness?

I've parenthesised technical but, I presume, the same applies to anyone really. No doubt I've presumed that because I am technically inclined.

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Tue, 12 Feb 2008

Hiss. Hiss.

Like most people I like good company. Good company and free booze is even better.

If you are in London, you missed out, as last week was when flag and bell was on. If you are going be around for their next event – 4th March 2008 – drop Megan a line.

Yes, people, it really is good company. And free beer.

Speaking of beer, those of you when a penchant for all things Python may want to come along to the London Python booze-up.

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Mon, 11 Feb 2008

GRUB disturbs me

Something else that bothers me about Jordi's GRUB2 screen shot is that it is all localised.

I've had to assist people using foreign versions of Windows which had no way to present the English version of the interface. Sometimes I've been lucky enough to figure out the text but, just as often, I've had to shrug my shoulders and give up.

Which leads me to suggest that there should be some mechanism — it need not be the default, it need not even be displayed until a specific keypress occurs (or something) — to get an English version of the boot loader screens so you can assist someone knowing there is a common baseline.

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No so grubby.

Wanting to help along GRUB2 adoption as per Jordi's suggestion. I tried out apt-get install grub-pc.

I'm not so sure that a bugreport entitled Installing grub-pc achieves nothing would be so useful. Here is what seemed to happen:

eve:[~]% diff -u /boot/grub/menu.lst_backup_by_grub2_postinst /boot/grub/menu.lst
--- /boot/grub/menu.lst_backup_by_grub2_postinst        2008-02-09 18:59:46.000000000 +0000
+++ /boot/grub/menu.lst 2008-02-09 18:59:47.000000000 +0000
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@
 #
 # You can specify 'saved' instead of a number. In this case, the default entry
 # is the entry saved with the command 'savedefault'.
-default                saved
+default         0saved

 ## timeout sec
 # Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
@@ -113,6 +113,11 @@

 ## ## End Default Options ##

+title		Chainload into GRUB 2
+root		(hd0,0)
+kernel		/boot/grub/core.img
+savedefault
+
 title		Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.24-1-686
 root		(hd0,0)
 kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-1-686 quiet root=/dev/hda1 ro resume=/dev/hda5 usbcore.autosuspend=1

Booting into the chain loaded GRUB2 and I get a nice prompt with no idea what to do next.

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Wed, 16 Jan 2008

We're back. And, we won.

Actually I never went away, yes 22 months is a long time between blog entries, I just got distracted by travelling and working at AwayPhone. I'm still there and we are looking for one or two developers, principally in the US (Washington state) — but as a global company, not necessarily — so let us know (ASCII only, spell-checked, coherent English, etc.) if you are interested.

I've been on (technically) holidays for the past few weeks, but I find myself awake, reviewing code at 02:45 (now 03:30) and trying to catch up on emails. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who always used to shout “RELAX!” whenever we went bar-hopping. I've been trying to apply that to a broader area of life than just bars but it appears that it just isn't how I'm wired to operate; for better or worse.

That means, that whilst in Australia, I'm also rebuilding my mothers' IT infrastructure at her publishing company. I want it all to survive without any intervention for at least 2 years. So, I've been evaluating various pieces of kit. My conclusions:

NetGear

Switches, Modems (ADSL) and Wireless access points

Western Digital

Linux NAS boxes (they have Samba, rsync and SSH on pre-installed. I'd expect a firmware update from the makers to incorporate iSCSI and allow you to join a domain shortly).

HP

Desktops and Servers. Although I wish Bdale has some influence within HP and I did not have to taint the kernel of my servers. Seriously, it is because of that I re-do a price/functionality check everything time I go to purchase a machine. HP only just get it right.

Linksys / Cisco - snom

VoIP handsets. To be honest, this category is still being evaluated; but I'm leaning towards snom.

I realise everyone has probably been burnt but some of the vendors mentioned above but this is my experience of them. You'll notice nothing about laptops. I'm looking around for a decent vendor, I'll let you know if I find one.

If you have been following along, you will notice that the Netgear ADSL modems (DM111P) runs Linux. The WD MyBook World Editions II's, run Linux (and I'd expect that they could be coaxed very easily into running generic Debian). The HP stuff (mostly) runs Linux. As does the Linksys and snom handsets.

We won.

Now, I've got to figure out how to setup Clonezilla so that the desktop Windows machines can be replaced when they fail. And I have less than 144 hours to do so. There is nothing like a deadline to concentrate your mind.

P.S. I do have some half-finished entries for the intervening 22 months, I will clean them up and post them under their original dates in the next few weeks

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Mon, 20 Aug 2007

Not even worth the electrons

Whilst checking one of my various mailserver logs, a site presented a certificate signed by VeriSign. It has an embedded URL, so I thought I should check out what it said.

It turned out to be a link to Versign's Relying Party Agreement. In it, it disclaims various liabilities related to Verisign primary function (authenticating identity and certifying trust) but also put monetary damages against things if they fail to do a good job.

Section 11.3 and 11.4 set out the damages. To wit (emphasis mine):

11.3 VERISIGN'S TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL DAMAGES SUSTAINED BY ALL RELYING PARTIES CONCERNING A SPECIFIC CERTIFICATE (OTHER THAN AN EXTENDED VALIDATION CERTIFICATE) SHALL BE DETERMINED ACCORDING TO THE CLASS OF THE CERTIFICATE RELIED UPON AND LIMITED, IN THE AGGREGATE, TO THE AMOUNT SET FORTH BELOW.

Class	Liability Cap
Class 1	One Hundred U.S. Dollars (US $100.00) (or the local currency equivalent thereof)
Class 2	Five Thousand U.S. Dollars (US $5,000.00) (or the local currency equivalent thereof)
Class 3	One Hundred Thousand U.S. Dollars (US $100,000.00) (or the local currency equivalent thereof)

THE LIABILITY LIMITATIONS PROVIDED IN THIS SUBSECTION 11.3 SHALL BE THE SAME REGARDLESS OF THE NUMBER OF DIGITAL SIGNATURES, TRANSACTIONS, OR CLAIMS RELATED TO SUCH CERTIFICATE.

11.4 THIS SUBSECTION 11.4 APPLIES TO VERISIGN SSL CERTIFICATES WITH EXTENDED VALIDATION ONLY: IF VERISIGN FAILED TO ISSUE THE EXTENDED VALIDATION CERTIFICATE IN COMPLETE COMPLIANCE WITH THE EXTENDED VALIDATION GUIDELINES, THEN VERISIGN’S LIABILITY FOR LEGALLY RECOGNIZED AND PROVEN CLAIMS SHALL BE LIMITED TO USD$2000 PER RELYING PARTY PER CERTIFICATE.

So, basically, an Extended Validation certificate is not even worth the electrons.

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Mon, 16 Jul 2007

Is the Google indexing all it is cracked up to be?

Like a lot of people, I've install Google Desktop for Linux.

First off, I've installed Beagle and Tracker before. So, I've played with a couple of these things. Obviously since I've installed GDL I felt that none of the existing Free Software solutions worked as well as I expected.

A while back I read Joe Shaw's note about how Beagle is tested with ~180K files. I considered this for a moment and realised that is why Beagle would turn my system into a pile of steaming dog poo.

My home directory has, normally, over 1,000,000 files (currently 893790 as I deleted some things before I fired up gtk-gnutella).

Considering Google handles web indexes significantly larger, you'd assume that their desktop search would be more than capable.

Alas.

I've had it installed for a week and it has achieved a 5% index. At least it does not chew up memory and only causes excessive CPU load. Oh, and the fact that it must have a browser (seemingly only Iceweasel will do) to use makes it even less useful. I'd let someone know but Google is also in on the whole "Let's make it as arduous as possible to report a problem" caper that seems to be common nowadays. Oh, well.

They went to all that time and effort to make a Debian package, why not put in the extra few minutes of work so that reportbug Just Works.

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Tue, 06 Mar 2007

postgresql forward / backward incompatibilities

Today I had "ERROR: column i.indisvalid does not exist" appear in both a client system and on the database backend. My initial searching lead me to a possible problem in pgpool but since I don't use that, that couldn't be it. I quickly jumped onto #postgresql on Freenode and the guys there (specifically Gavin Sherry) suggested it was either because I hadn't vacuum'd the database -- in my case I have autovacuum on -- OR there was a version mismatch between client and server. It turns out it was the later: client was 8.2 and server was 8.1 From time to error to solution was 15 mins -- that's what support is all about. Awesome. I'm just blogging this here so that in case anyway else gets the same error there is a chance a search engine might return a useful result.

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Mon, 27 Mar 2006

What comes around, comes around again.

Craige, it might be the first time that the exhibition has run under the Linux World Expo banner, but I recall an earlier one after the last linux.conf.au in Sydney.

Indeed, a bit of Yahoo!ing reveals this from the Internet Archive, linuxexpo.com.au and the front page. It looks like I might have been there too at the Debian stand. Ah, memories.

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Sun, 26 Mar 2006

DNS Entries in the debian.net zone

I spent 45 minutes searching around for this, so this is mainly just so I don't have to spend a lot of time searching for it again.

You can add/update entries in debian.net by doing:

echo "<host> in a <ip>" | gpg --clearsign | mail changes@db.debian.org

All the commands are documented on db.debian.org, look for 'DNS Zone entry'.

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Fri, 24 Mar 2006

Some random odds and sods as well as some ACID

Horms, why not use gworldclock?

Martin, I think you are after tra.

Andrew, you do realise that you could do that with yum – which has been in Debian for a while now. You'd have probably heard about it earlier if Mako could be bothered to get Atom 1.0 support working on Planet Debian.

Rodney, Nokia phones generally use Netfront as their default. If you want to use Opera you have to specify it. I'd be highly skepticle of KHTML being used anywhere memory footprint mattered.

It looks like it might be WebCore (dervied from KHTML) instead. But that is only on very recent phones (first half of 2006).

Oh, and that is likely to be Yahoo merchant crawler. Yahoo probably thinks you are a corporate whore or something ;-).

Finally is it just me or does it strike anyone else as odd that the Mozilla Corporation, with all of its' money, is not able to get a crack group of hackers together so that Firefox 2.0 can render ACID2? At least two of the competitors can already do it, so, what's the go, Joe? (or in this case Mitchell).

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Thu, 16 Mar 2006

Back down on the (VCS) farm

Interesting how Sun have also come to the same conclusion[1] as I have with respect to Distributed SCMs. Only bazaar, git and mercurial matter.

Also interesting is that for immediate targets they also recommend Subversion. Maybe I've been channeling Bill Joy or something? Anyway, earlier I couldn't decide which of the three to use.

Now I know that git is the way forward. The (multiple) interfaces help enourmously (cogito, git, StGit, P(atchy)g, etc.). It means if you have some funky interface, you can migrate slowly by reimplementing what you use with git plumbing.

Just as Carl Worth talks about reimplementing Hg using git. Another major factor is the culture on the mailing list(s). List culture encourages/discourages other participants. And the git list culture encourages lots of people to share very small changes.

Which has meant that git has caught up very quickly and eclipsed everything out there[2]. It really is odd reading that email and seeing just how far git has come.

Anyway it looks like what Sun are considering doing is that they might reimplement the interface of their internal tool (teamware) on top of git. If they can make that available, it'll advance things for everyone (again).

1. http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/program-team/2006-March/000172.html
2. http://mail.off.net/pipermail/codeville-devel/2005-April/000013.html

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Tue, 14 Mar 2006

Here a VoIP, there a VoIP, everywhere a VoIP.

I've been using VoIP for many years. Some thoughts.

Asterisk has never really appealed to me. I can't put a definite finger on why this is so but it feels like having email printed. A half-step along the way. It is a good halfway point but doesn't feel like a full solution.

What does is something which turns PSTN into SIP; then you can use a SIP router (SER, OpenSER, partysip, sipXrouter and many others) to do what you need.

That kind of device is something like a Sipura 3000. Very easy to setup to register to your own SIP router, where you can do the heavy lifting. Of course, you don't need to interface to the PSTN to take advantage of VoIP.

I have SIP accounts at bbpglobal, ekiga, fwd, iptel, openwengo, sipme, sipgate and voipuser. As well as few other, more private, networks.

NOTE: openwengo requires some work to retrieve the SIP id.

I've also been playing with gaim2 recently. It is the reason I'm only vaguely online – gaim2 breaks sound on my laptop – and that interferes with the VoIP stuff I do.

Anyway, one interesting feature of gaim2 is that it supports SIP IM extensions (presence basically). I was trying to debug why this wasn't working which meant I was doing some tcpdumping and noticed some SIP messages go past — I normally have twinkle (currently the best SIP softphone on Linux) running, so this wasn't unusual.

What was, is that the originating machine wasn't my own. It was my mothers computer. I decided to investigate.

It turns out that Yahoo Messenger (which my mother has signed up for so she could speak to her nephew) can actually speak SIP. This could also be part of the impending MSN / Yahoo IM networks interop. that is being completed.

I'm not sure how they will achieve that but from looking through the packet traces of Yahoo's "PC-to-PC" calling, some kind of negociation takes place of the YMessenger channel and a SIP channel is established between the client and a seperate set of (Akamai-sed) media servers. It also seems like they have some kind of SIP proxy which normal/old clients can speak to and which speaks back SIP.

From the network traces I've done, one side sends a cookie down the YMessenger protocol pipe, and the other side responds via the SIP pipe. From further traces no Linux client can (currently) interoperate with Yahoo's service until the client supports SIP over TCP, SIPS, RTP and RTCP, not to mention Yahoo's special cookie scheme.

Now both networks, Yahoo and MSN need to open themselves up so that they provide presence information externally (via SIP) and allow users to talk to anyone with a SIP address anywhere. You know, just like you can with email.

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Thu, 16 Feb 2006

So what is love, anyway?

I'm actually supposed to be in India. At my cousin's wedding. Unfortunately the Indian bureacracy caught me and despite promises and assurances that it'd only take 4 weeks (i.e. plenty of time) to get my visa things sorted out, it took 6 — so I couldn't make it.

Whenever I go over to India, the first question I always get asked is "So, when are you going to get married?". Marriage in India is a Big Deal. Anyone my age, and unmarried, is probably deeply invested in their career, extremely ugly and/or foreign.

The second question I normally get asked is "Are you looking for a love match?". Arranged marriages are still the norm. Rahul, my cousin - like my other cousins before him - has had a 'modern-day match'.

What happens is that your parents (or uncles, aunts and grandparents all together) will place various ads describing you and what they would consider "suitable". They'll get a bunch of responses and you'll be asked to pick amongst the candidates.

You normally get around 10 - 15 'meetings' and most families are willing to put up with you doing this around 3 times; then you'll have one selected on your behalf.

In my parents day, things were slightly different. My parents met practically on their wedding night (it's more common for the ceremony to take place during the night in India). My grandmothers happened to be riding on a train from Delhi to Mumbai (neé Bombay).

My paternal grandmother mentioned she had a suitable boy and my maternal grandmother mentioned she had a suitable girl. Over thirty years later they are still together and in the intervening time I know they have grown to love each other.

So, what is love anyway? For some it is the all-consuming passion for someone you've just met. For others it is a slow awaking / realisation of what you have right under your nose. Well, those are the extremes; I've been lucky enough to swing between both of them all the while knowing I'm somewhat spoony.

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Mon, 30 Jan 2006

The best hostel

I've stayed in many hostels around the world, and there is a minimum set of things that can make the difference from a place to sleep, to a place to stay, to a place to hang-out and to one you enjoy.

First off, you have to have the basics right, otherwise you'll get nowhere fast.

• Have a comfortable bed
• At most 8 people per room
• One bathroom per 8 people
• Provide linen for beds
• Provide a daypack sized locker

• Individual reading lights
• Provide a towel on check-in
• Provide soap in the bathroom
• Have a common area
• Have free maps / brouchures of the local area
• Be able to point out museums, nightspots and other activities
• Have Internet access
• Be friendly and smile
• Have either a backpack sized wardrobe or locker (not everyone likes their stuff on the floor)
• Free washing powder and/or fabric softener

• Provide free breakfast
  It doesn't cost much, only about half the people will be up in time for it anyway
• Have a TV area
  Sometimes you don't want to go out and get drunk
• Have a reading area
  See above
• Have a kitchen, for guests to use
  Not cooking is fun! But cheap kebabs and pizza can get boring fast.
• Provide wireless Internet for free (they are bringing their laptop, so aren't occupying any of your own seating space)
• Assistance with booking other hostels in the same, or other, places
• Assistance with booking further travel stuff (where to go, or actually doing it)
• Have payphones and/or phonecards available
• Laundry area

• Provide dinner, either free or at a price
• Free Internet access
• Free Laundry Area
• Have an attached (or closely associated) bar
• Free pickup from common, large travel points
• Providing complimentary shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste

• Free phonecalls around the world
• Free glass of Champagne or Beer or drink on arrival

Everything on this list is something I've experienced at one hostel or another when I've been travelling – so far not all at the same place.

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Tue, 17 Jan 2006

Old McDonald had a version control system …

The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from

The same, of course, goes for VCS. I've used RCS, CVS, Subversion (svn), Arch (larch, tla and baz), Mercurial (hg), git, Bazaar-NG (bzr), svk and no doubt a few others I've forgotten, or wished I had.

The current state of the art in Free Software is Subversion IF you have to interoperate with developers who use Windows. That's it. Don't read further if you have Windows-based colleagues.

If, though, you get to choose the technology, then based on my experience with all of the above you then you should pick between: git, hg and/or bzr.

None of RCS, CVS nor svn are useful in the long-term since they do not allow for distributed development and branching. Yes, it can be done — a good example is svk — but not without difficulty and lots of gnashing of teeth. In svk's case, you need to be careful when merging since svn (which is what svk uses underneath) does not keep history or context.

I hit onto Arch and was lucky enough to stumble upon Robert Collins who guided my understanding of it and changesets. Unfortunately Arch was led by Tom Lord, who has real issues with generating a community of people around him. His first effort (larch), stagnated was re-written (by Robert) in C++, and called barch, while he wrote tla.

tla development also stagnated and, eventually, Canonical forked it and called it baz. I was very skeptical about a company like Canonical sticking to their promise ("we'll develop it until version 1.5 where it should be a good transition point to our next system"). I wasn't surprised when they renegged on that committment. It is their right of course, but it is a shame. Right now, if you have to use Arch — and you haven't used it before — use tla. If you have run into the limitations of tla, then use baz but bear in mind that baz is stone-cold dead as far as development is concerned. tla, is only cold dead.

Which brings us to bzr, hg and git. All three of these systems are very similiar.
Distributed development? Check.
Portable to everything (but Windows, and that is changing too)? Check.
Implement the same generic object-based filesystem? Check.

I've stayed away from bzr since Canonical is supporting it; that isn't bad but it does mean it'll forever be tied to what they want. It also means the community around it is extremely small. bzr is interesting in that it classifies everything as an object (directory, file, etc.) and stores them in pre-classified directories. In particular it stores file data in a 'weave' format (similiar to SCCS).

hg has a small, vibrant community around it but the problem is the community is small. And, like bzr, it also stores object in pre-classified direcoties – although in a delta-compressed format for space reasons. Both are written in Python (more about that latter) and have nice graphical tools to do things like quilt and three-way merges as well as visualising development history.

In the end I've chosen git as my future revision system; it has a development leader who encourages rather than discourages. The documentation overshadows everything except CVS and svns – and is on par with them. It is fast. it has a large community behind it. You can use it at a number of levels (git,cogito, stgit, etc.).

It has great support for importing to everything except bzr and I'm yet to find any particular issue with it. Plus it merging is very good. In fact, as Linus points out you can have any merging startegy you like. So, any theoretical advantages of hg and bzr are just that, theoretical.

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Sat, 14 Jan 2006

Crappy service and poor support

In contrast to Dell, Seagate has really poor support.

I have 5 Seagate disks (all 60GiB or over) which have failed 3 months after their warranty ran out. That is their extended warranty since each of them shipped with only a single year and it was latter upgraded to 5 years by Seagate.

However I have had a 120GiB Seagate drive fail, and it was under warranty. So I went about trying to get it replaced. Unfortunately I've had to deal with Synnex who claim to have never received the unit. This, of course, after me spending a week attempting to get anyone to respond to either my phone calls or emails.

While that battle is still on-going (and I've vowed to never buy Seagate for the hassle their warranty replacement provider is), remeber that you should always send material with a return receipt or delivery confirmation.

From what I know, people in the industry seem to take quite a lot of joy in lifting hardware when they don't need to sign for it. Fortunately I did this and now the guys there are squirming because they can't find it.

Unfortunately I have a feeling this is one battle where I'm going to be the loser. <sigh>

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Wed, 11 Jan 2006

My kingdom for a motherboard

I bought a Dell 700m in late March. It is basically a pretty good machine with everything except the SD card reader slot working.

Now, that is. With 2.6.15 everything does work out of the box. With earlier kernels things didn't. So I happened to recall that people wanted Dell to recall the 700m because of the poor audio.

I have a worldwide international 3 year warranty on this thing, so I decided to call it in. Sure enough I got someone who indicated said that they would replace the motherboard. We had some back and forth and it appears Dell have solved the problem.

So I get my motherboard replaced and now

• Audio input works on the hardware tests but under Linux
• I've had three thermal shutdowns since the replacement

Let's see how things pan out. At least they've been kind and corteous so far.

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Sat, 07 Jan 2006

In the end

[redacted]-silvia

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About

ॐ (aum) - what was, what is and what will be, wildfire's musing

Anand Kumria
wildfire@progsoc.org

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