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.

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.

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 though 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

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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

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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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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 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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Wed, 15 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

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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.

[ / software] Trackbacks (0) Comments (0) permanent link permanent link

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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Sat, 31 Dec 2005

Some days are better than others

I did my usual Friday night routine, went out, had some drinks, spoke to some people, had some food and some more drinks. I actually had a pretty great night even. About 3am I decided to head home. Unfortunately I missed my bus by about 10 minutes.

So I decided to see if anyone was interested in sharing a cab over the bridge (it is a $40 cab ride, and if I'm sober enough to catch the bus I'd rather save my money). Anyway this group of guys decide to have an argument about it.

First I was amazed that asking someone "Do you want to share a cab going North" could even something to argue about. Then I got annoyed as they harassed me firstly by name-calling and then by throwing things at me.

Mind you this is with 5 security guards around, none of whom are particularly interested in doing anything. Then one of the group decides to "get in my face" and start hitting me himself.

Well, he tried to. I just started to beat the crap out of him and ending up destroying his shirt. Oh, then the guards decided to pull us apart.

When I was getting on the bus, this guy, in an effort to at least hit me once launched himself past all the guards and tried to land a punch on my head. He missed and got the lady in front of me — unfortunately for her — the guards closing in around me managed to bruise my neck however.

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Tue, 27 Dec 2005

Packaging scripts

I use a lot of different things to help me package things for Debian. Sometimes I use revision control and sometimes not. I've recently been playing with both git and StGit to package rpm

Rather than go through the standard convolution of building the original tarball and then creating a diff and then using dpkg-buildpackage to do things as normal. I thought I'd try something else.

Instead I pulled about dpkg-source and created (an initial) cut of dpkg-gendsc and also git-buildpackage to do Do The Right Thing.

While they aren't finished they are usable, patches welcome

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Sun, 25 Dec 2005

Sommerfugleffekten (The Butterfly Effect)

I've been residing where I am now for about 9 years and was only peripherially aware that their was a local library. About a week ago, I stumbled upon it and decided to sign up.

Perusing the aisles of I found The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmions – the conclusion was okay and I finally understand how Rachel can live three time and what it means to be travelling in opposite timeline directions – and other book called The Butterfly Effect

Initially I thought this might have been the precursor to the very good movie of the same name. But I was wrong. It was better.

The book is written in Norweigan by Pernille Rygg and has been translated into English by Joan Tate. It is a relatively short book (~200 pages) so I had to take break otherwise I would have read it all in one sitting.

The Butterfly Effect is about a young researcher whose father is runover by a car. He happens to be a private detective and in the course of returning some items to an ex-client, she finds the client dead.

More coincidences ensue, such as driving past a church only to see it being set alight and another body discovered. Couple this with her transvestite husband and interludes into typically Scandanavian culture (sauna, skiing, swearing in Russian) and it is fairly gripping.

Best of all, though, is that because I've travelled close to the area where the book is set (sadly not to Oslo itself; the closest I've come to Norway is Christian Schaller) I could visualise the story really well.

And that made it a good Christmas. I hope you had an enjoyable time whatever you got up to.

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Wed, 07 Dec 2005

dead:cafe::6

Or, how to get thyself onto IPv6. A lot of people when I mention IPv6 say Yeah, but who else is using it?. As of last year (2004) there are roughly 200 million Windows XP (or better) machines with IPv6 defaulted on. [1] [2]

That doesn't include Linux, *BSDs, etc. If all these people have got IPv6 (oh, that is just those without NAT) then you've got to wonder just how many people in total have it enabled.

The next question I commonly hear is Yeah, but what can you do with it?. Of course you can run things as you were before and that's fine.

Actually it is more than fine. Here is me pinging my default gateway.

IPv4

eve:[~]% sudo ping -c 1000 -f 203.7.227.129
PING 203.7.227.129 (203.7.227.129) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- 203.7.227.129 ping statistics ---
1000 packets transmitted, 1000 received, 0% packet loss, time 415ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.209/0.237/0.720/0.076 ms, ipg/ewma 0.416/0.564 ms

IPv6

eve:[~]% sudo ping6 -c 1000 -f 2001:388:c0c5::1
PING 2001:388:c0c5::1(2001:388:c0c5::1) 56 data bytes

--- 2001:388:c0c5::1 ping statistics ---
1000 packets transmitted, 1000 received, 0% packet loss, time 263ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.174/0.195/0.577/0.016 ms, ipg/ewma 0.263/0.196 ms

IPv6 is faster to process on the same hardware. Gentoo ricers take note! Okay, so you can run all your same protocols on top (and get a speed benefit) but what else?

Well things that require peer-to-peer connectivity, like VoIP and filesharing can particularly benefit. For example, gtk-gnutella recently acquired IPv6 support. And most 3G phones also use IPv6.

At the moment, though, most people are expending effort actually getting connected. Within Australia there are two way

• the AARNet tunnel broker at http://broker.aarnet.net.au
• using 6to4 (RFC) addressing.

You can use either mechanism but if you have a dynamic IPv4 address the tunnel broker will be a better option as it will mean your IPv6 addresses will be fixed. If you are using Debian you will need to install the tspc package – let me know of any problems as I am the maintainer.

If you have a fixed IPv4 address you can use 6to4. 6to4 converts your IPv4 address (which is 32 bits) into hexadecimal and then adds '2002' to the front. Here is a quick example:

IPv4 address: 138.25.6.65 (decimal)
              8a.19.06.41 (hexadecimal)
IPv6 address: 2002:8a19:0641::/48

You would then set your default router to be the 6to4 anycast address of either 192.88.99.1 (IPv4) or 2002:c058:6301:: (IPv6) — 10 points if you worked out the IPv6 address in advance.. That will get you to the closest topological point of interconnection between you (IPv4 mongrol that you are) the pristine shinyness of IPv6. In theory.

In practise, there are closer points at AARNet (ipv6.aarnet.net.au, 192.231.212.5) and at Telstra (203.14.5.7) but they are not advertised by the routing system. Which is why I currently recommend that even with a static address you use the tunnel broker — it's faster.

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Thu, 24 Nov 2005

All webbrowsers suck...

eve:[~]% firefox
*** glibc detected *** free(): invalid next size (fast): 0x08bc9228 ***

eve:[~]% amaya
04:22:56: Deleted stale lock file '/home/anand/amaya-anand'.
*** glibc detected *** free(): invalid pointer: 0x0a47bb30 ***
*** Amaya: Irrecoverable error ***zsh: abort (core dumped)  amaya
eve:[~]% galeon
*** glibc detected *** malloc(): memory corruption: 0x081dcbf8 ***

eve:[~]% epiphany
*** glibc detected *** free(): invalid next size (fast): 0x08561540 ***

Fortunately I can still browse the web within Emacs but not Vi (or vim). For anyone else experiencing the same problem, MALLOC_CHECK_=1 might allow you to run some programs further (doesn't work for me though).

Update: It turns out my problems were related to SCIM and an upgrade solved my issues. One things I did learn is that firefox --debugger=gdb will give you a chance to get a decent backtrace, especially if you have the relevant -dbg libraries installed.

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Mon, 21 Nov 2005

Pointless EULA

I just bought a dual-CPU Dell and it actually bothered to display an EULA to me. I carefully inserted a CD, rebooted and formatted the disk.

When I buy a frigging machine with No OS installed then I'm not going to sign an EULA for no software.

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Sat, 12 Nov 2005

The wheels on the bus go round and round.

Taking, or attempting to take, the nightbus is an interesting experience. I've been back in Sydney for exactly six weeks and have taken the bus on Friday 5 times.

Once I met a gorgeous German girl who looked like Diane Kruger – and even though I got her phone number and email address, my phone did not save it, alias.

I met a lovely Finnish girl, who might turn out to be a great friend — this time I was totally aware of my phones limitations and I have her number.

The other night, I met a former sniper of the Australian army. We had a lengthy conversation about God and various politicians he'd like to shoot. Mainly Queenslanders as it turns out. Who can blame him?

Tonight I met a young women, 19, who mere presence is enough to cause most men to loose their minds. She was able to deal with and handle 8 different drunk guys (no, none were me) and then she had another guy step in and berate the other 8 for being crude, vulgar and unchivalrous.

She took the fact that this guy stood up for her in her stride. The bus is always interesting and nowadays, particularly as I'm not rich, it is always worth taking. Had I known the entertainment or hilarity to be had, I would have always taken it.

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Fri, 11 Nov 2005

yummy, yummy, yummy

Just a few days ago, yum entered Debian. Why is this interesting?

Well, if you happen to be using Xen on Debian then you can easily create yourself a Fedora installation.

You only need to perform Step 5 on the procedures listed here after doing an apt-get install yum. Note, you'll want to make sure that rpm is setup correctly (mkdir /var/lib/rpm; rpm --initdb) before you begin.

It is always interesting checking out the competition. Soon you be singing along to I've got love in my tummy

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Onella - Party People

Zeeshan Ali writes about Finnish women. Onella is actually one of the better bars in Helsinki, hopefully you discovered the two "secret" bars after the inital heavy-metal one. The first is your typical dance-floor, the other is a uniquely Finnish experience.

Basically it consists of drunk Finns, mainly drunk Finnish women, getting up on the table — dancing as best they can — and singing along to all the recent songs. Except it is all in Finnish!. Every song you know, and some you wish you didn't, will be sung, the audio will sound familiar but the words are Finnish. Distinctly odd.

Yes, Zeeshan, Finns are very weird. I can not imagine anything like this happening anywhere else. Even the BBC's Night out in Helsinki is fairly tame to my experience at Debconf5

Over the course of many nights, I saw

• Drunk women falling off tables (many times – and cute ones too!)
• People punching fists into windows
• Large brawls
• Pepper spray indiscriminately bandied about
• Bottles being thrown – by the bar staff at customers

It makes for lots of fun adventures — If you ever meet Simon Horman, he can fill you in far better than I can

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Thu, 10 Nov 2005

Plugins I have installed

Michael Still writes about Trackback pings.

I'm still not used to blosxom and how everything fits together but I thought I'd enumerate the plugins I've installed.

categorytree

I've actually got this named as 01categorytree, so it runs first, but it gives me the listing of topics I've posted too

extrensionless

I'm a big fan of Cool URIs, this helps me almost get there. Bonus points to those who can work out where I don't quite make the magic happen seemlessly. Oh, named 02extensionless.

atomfeed

As every good blogger knows, syndication is the name of the game. While you got use the deprecated RSS, Atom is where is it at. I've actually disabled RSS feeds in preference to atom

breadcrumbs

On permalink posts, you'll see a click-trail. All professional websites have them, so I figured I should too.

calendar

Presents a calendar with all the posts you've done on various days highlighted, so you can quickly determine when someone has been sleeping or has been an insomniac

config

Comes with the Debian blosxom package, and originates with the author. Allows you to customise configuration dependant on where the post is in your heirarchy and other magic.

directorybrowse

If you have deep category hierarchies this makes all the elements of the paths clickable. It's cool, you want it.

feedback

Part of the blogging scene is to allow other people to comment upon what you've written. This gives them comments and trackbacks. I've modified this somewhat and still need to fixup how comments are previewed but otherwise this plugin is gold

flavourdir

Also part of the blosxom package, this means you do not have to have your blog entries intermingled with the page templates (known as flavours) used to display them

interpolate_fancy

For large plugins, like feedback, you might end with some text on your template that you only want displayed some of the time. This enhances blosxom so your template (flavour) can have conditionals, comparisons and whatnot.

multcat

Not everything can be easily catagorised into one thing. This lets you put a post into multiple places. It'd be nice if all the categories a post was under was displayed as part of the category path

rendertime

Calculates the amount of time the page took to render

On my todo list is to convert from a table based layout to a fluid CSS one. It'll probably be a 3-columned look with fixed-width sidebars since negative margins looks are harder to get right.

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Wed, 09 Nov 2005

Blogging with a phone

Or 'mobloging' for short. Basically it is using your mobile phone to add content to your blog. All very interesting, except when you get to the details.

Stewart Smith gave it a whirl ([1], [2]) with fairly predictable results. This is because the message you might receive is dependent on the phone manufacturer and the MMC does to your message. And that is before it might be mangled along the way via email.

Basically most phones (or MMCs) will convert the content to either Base32 or, more commonly, Base64. Generally the MMS is composed of only two parts, and then sent to an email address. From there you'll have to write something that takes the email and converts it into a blog entry.

A while ago a friend of mine wanted to do the same, so I wrote some perl to do it for him. It seemed to work for him (with some tweaks) and it might be enough for you too. You can grab it here However you might find it simpler to use GNU Arch and register http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/arch/projects/ and then browse in wildfire@progsoc.org--projects/moblog.

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Thu, 03 Nov 2005

IPv4 Link Local addresses

James Henstridge notes that zeroconf can cause large amounts of network traffic. Yes, that was true back in July. A bug was filed and then fixed within 2 days.

This was because I was at DebConf and able to see how zeroconf performed in a large environment. Basically there are two tests you do to determine whether an ARP packet is destined for you. And at the time, zeroconf, was only doing one of them.

Davyd asks why would you use zeroconf over NetworkManager. I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly why, but I feel the design is wrong.

I do believe there should be an overall co-ordinating process looking after networking on the user-space side of the fence though. I've been thinking about writing something which would do it too; but I haven't fleshed out my ideas enough to commit my editor to coding.

Oh, one bug that NetworkManager does have is that it only allocates IPv4LL addresses when it fails to acquire one from the DHCP server. This is wrong and goes against RFC3927.

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Wed, 02 Nov 2005

A walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge

I woke, not for the first time today, and there were people all around. Dressed up and talking. And drinking.

Ahh! I'd fallen asleep at a bar. Again. Fortunately that is enough off a clue for me to realise that I should go home. Getting home, is where this adventure starts.

I started off at Cruise Bar, which has a great view of the Opera House [1], [2], [3] and (somehow) staggered my way to the Ship Inn. Unable to flag down a cab in this area – lots of people going home around 23:00 – I resolved to get myself to North Sydney, where lots of cabs are.

For those of you unaware, Sydney Harbour Bridge now has security personnel stationed at all pedestrian entrances and across its length. At least six of them "patrol" the bridge.

By "patrol", I mean of course you'll be queried as to why you wish to cross the bridge. Mate [sic], you can't cross the bridge. You aren't allowed here. Mate, are you fucking deaf?. (on radio, to pals)Yeah the fucking wog is crossing, shall I intercept him and hold him?

Followed while crossing the bridge. In my case I had (at one stage 3 security personnel behind and adjacent to me and 3 policemen ahead of me). And abused (I was repeatedly cursed at, racially slurred against, by the people from IVS Security) during your walk over the bridge. It amazes me that they even had police waiting to talk to me. Fortunately I know that the best thing you can do when confronted by the police is not to say anything.

In this case there is nothing they could do -- since crossing the Harbour Bridge, and not responding to the security guards who harass you is not (yet) a crime. Today, 2 Nov 2005, though the Parliament of Australia is rushing through laws which might mean that I can be "detained" and held incommunicendo indefinitely.

These laws – part of the War on Freedom – would make the rest of this entry illegal.

I've been thinking about terrorism and Australia. How would you get access to restricted locations, determine sensitive areas and generally get information not available to the ordinary public? Become a security guard.

In Australia, things like this are not uncommon. (c.f. David Hooks killed by a security guard; a female security guard shooting someone, etc.). Worse is that security guards often enjoy a fairly close relationship with the Police. Meaning that if you join up, you also get to know some of the procedures that might be applied to deter you. Bottom line: every security guard is a potential terrorist.

Terrorists, like modern-day Politicians, seek to curtail the liberty of others for their own purposes. The best way to do this is by planting fear and doubt into the hearts and mind of the general populace. In America, this was done via the September 11 plane hi-jacking; in the UK, by exploding bombs on the mass-transit system there.

How, or where, should Australia be targetted? Australians are renowned world-travellers (I believe the figure is that 10% of Australians are outside the country at any one time), so attacking transportation isn't the way to go. You need to go after the life-style.

Large community events, like Melbourne Cup day, the various Grand Finals and, of course, Cricket would be the perfect targets. High visibility (the media are already at these venues!), high impact (you are talking 30,000+ people in these stadiums), for minimal cost (a stadium has few seating area – probably 6 to 8 attackers could bring down most stadiums).

Another good location would be to pick your local Westfield shopping centre / mall. Lots of people, lots of fear instilled. Plus we'd be rid of the stupid things.

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Yay!

First post. I too have decided to get into the whole blogging scene.

I looked around at various pieces of software and only blosxom and pyblosxom fitted my criteria.

My criteria was pretty simple:

• Plenty of features (comments, calendar, categories)
• No database (even though I prefer Postgresql, I didn't want to have to learn a schema if I decided to migrate or it all went cactus
• Vibrant community

Both blosxom and pyblosxom have those but I found it easier to get blosxom setup and running. Eventually I'll write up a colophon about what I have and how it is configured. However, please excuse the very rudimentary setup I have — it'll get better in time.

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