DEBIAN

This spring I read a course on Python in Vilnius University, Department of Mathematics and informatics. The course was not mandatory, which I suspect is one of the reasons why my students were quite a bright and motivated bunch. I began the course with a brief introduction to the Python language and the standard library, then dedicated a few lectures to Django and in the remainder I covered various libraries (GUI toolkits, Pygame) and techniques (testing, debugging, optimization).

One of the major tasks of the course (and the deciding factor in the final valuation) was to develop a project using Python. The students were given complete freedom over the topic of the project and the tools used, as long as Python was involved. The quality of the result varied, of course; had I given concrete tasks, the low bar would definitely have been higher. However, I am happy with how things turned out.

Probably the best-executed project was 1000 Online, an online multiplayer card game (see rules). It was developed by Vytautas Karpavičius. Vytautas apparently had prior experience with Python and Django, nevertheless, the quality of the app (and the code behind it) is impressive. Among the other projects, Gegute.lt, a Lithuanian clone of Reddit is still up and running. It's nothing too fancy, but looks quite clean for a university project. Other projects perhaps were not perfectly executed, but were very interesting conceptually. Jonas Keturka developed a bot (BitBucket) for the online strategy game Travian. Marius Damarackas developed a web-based guess-the-song game. He used YouTube for the song material and Last.fm (IIRC) to make you guess among similar songs, so that it would not be too easy. Andrius Chamentauskas developed a Puyo Pop clone (GitHub) with PyGame, complete with multiplayer and an AI. Paulius Budzinskas worked towards his course paper by developing a bacteria movement modelling and visualisation app (GitHub; Lithuanian only). David Abdurachmanov developed a spell-checker bot for WikiAnswers.com, with a really baroque and sophisticated architecture. I believe he has applied to Google Summer of Code with that project; I wonder how that is working out.

For reference, you can find links to all student repositories on GitHub/BitBucket in this list. Beware: some of them may be documented/commented in Lithuanian.

Another interesting effect of the course was that people started using Python in other related courses, for example in Mathematical Modelling and Numeric Methods. I even heard that the lecturer was impressed and expressed interest in learning Python. Another lecturer, this time a statistician, was interested in teaching and using SAGE at lab practice. Feeling such 'ripples' going through the department sure felt nice.

By the way, the university also offers lectures on Ruby, read by Saulius Grigaitis. I took some inspiration from him for the course form and content.

If you don’t want to install kbarcode try this:

apt-get install qrencode qrencode "http://www.debian.org/" -o - | display

I've started to build up to actually doing some development-related activities. Maybe. But first, we've got QR Codes dotted around the hacklab and on our namebadges if we're taking part in the keysigning - I persuaded zbarcam (from the zbar-tools package) to reveal their mysterious secrets.

I'm looking into packaging some Java libraries that use maven. Fun. I think I'll be attending some of the talks in the Java track, although I feel like I'm three years late to the party.

While trying to find a good example, I wanted to list all packages which reverse-build-depended on maven-debian-helper. This must be a common task? With some stuff stolen from lamby, I hacked together a shell alias:

rbuilddep() { grep-dctrl -sPackage -i -r -F Build-Depends,Build-Depends-Indep "\b$1\b" \ /var/lib/apt/lists/*_Sources \ | awk '{ print $2 }' \ | sort \ | uniq }

But this surely can't be the last word on this. For one thing, it might also be useful to recursively find these reverse dependencies. I hope I've missed some obvious way of doing this.

I reckon my attention span has got really poor over the last couple of years. More running tomorrow morning. But first, ice cream, I think.

I guess we all have the challenge of how to easily get a link or a phone number or some other strings of data from the computer to the mobile phone.

With the help of mobile barcodes and klipper, this is now possible in KDE Trunk to do easily. Place some data in clipboard, click on klipper and select Show barcode.

To read it, open the barcode app in your phone (mBarcode on n900 for example) and point it to your monitor.

Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l) BogoMIPS : 799.53 Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 7 CPU variant : 0x2 CPU part : 0xc08 CPU revision : 5 Hardware : Genesi Efika MX Revision : 51030 Serial : 0000000000000000` total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 482740 44836 437904 0 4672 21104 -/+ buffers/cache: 19060 463680 Swap: 0 0 0

I've just finished reading — and thoroughly enjoying — Transition by Iain Banks. Despite a terrible writeup in the Guardian, I found the book to concentrate just as strongly on character as world-building, but I wouldn't be surprised if a sequel was on the cards.

The novel is, in part, an exploration of the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics. Or at least that's it's setting. In the UK, it has been published without the traditional 'M' infix denoting Science Fiction, although it is undeniably so: It's not even pretending to be anything else.

The book reminded me of Quarantine, and to a lesser extend Permutation City, both by Greg Egan; and another book I've read recently which I can't reveal without spoiling this one.

While I have made good progress on many of my Debian goals for this year, it’s not the case for the goal number #1: translating my Debian book into English. The picture on the left is the cover of the current French version based on Debian Lenny (450 pages). But the translation would be based on the next edition that we’re currently preparing and it’s based on Debian Squeeze of course! We have already translated the table of contents so that you can get an idea of what’s in the book. Note that many parts of the book apply to Ubuntu as well.

It’s quite difficult for Roland and me to allocate several months of our life to such a huge task without any income in that period and without knowing if our book will sell enough to cover for the time invested. For those reasons, we’re considering using a service like kickstarter.com or ulule.com or yooook.net to get this project funded.

If you don’t know those services, they allow you to present your project and to collect pledges so that you can safely complete your project. The money pledged is distributed only if the total amount pledged exceeds the minimal funding level (set by the project creator). Furthermore you can select nice rewards depending on the amount of money pledged.

To make things even more exciting we are ready to publish the book under a DFSG-compatible license at the sole condition that we reach 25 000€ of donations. That might look like a lot but in fact it’s only 5€ donated by 5000 persons and then everybody benefits! And for the authors, you have to remove ~10% of fees taken by the funding service (including card processing fees), 16.4% VAT, 9% social taxes and if you consider that the project represents a minimum of 6 months of work, that ends up to at most 2850 €/month. We believe this to be reasonable.

The next step for us is to pick the service to use and setup the fundraising. We need your input. Please answer a few questions by filling this form.

In all cases, we will have those rewards and probably more:

• the book in digital format (PDF, HTML, ePub) (between 5€ and 10€, price not fixed yet)
• the book as paperback (between 35€ and 50€, price not fixed yet)
• the paperback book with a dedication by (one of) the authors

A few considerations about the various services: Kickstarter.com is a great service but it’s restricted to US-residents so it’s complicated for us to use that service since we’re French (and live in France) and the supporters need to have an Amazon (payments) account. Ulule.com is open to anyone for project creation but uses a paypal API to deal with the pledge mechanism and thus imposes that all supporters have a paypal account. Is that requirement likely to scare you away? Yooook.net is specialized in liberation fundraising but the interface is not very polished, they don’t offer (many) social features nor do they give a public listing of the projects hosted.

The choice is difficult and thus we’re seeking your feedback to make the right one, take a few minutes and answer our questions: click here to go to the form.

Thank you for your help and please spread the word so that we get enough answers to have meaningful results.

Update: it has been brought to my attention that kickstarter requires an Amazon (payments) account. I fixed my article and the form to document this.

I have also been asked what license we’re going to use. It’s likely to be dual-licensed GPL2+ / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

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After months of delays due to pure laziness, I've released my Tiberian Sun IPv6 patch for public consumption—follow the link for the download, installation instructions, etc.. I doubt it will be a big public hit, but that's not the point :-) I'm open for play challenges over IPv6, though — drop me a line on IRC or something. I can't guarantee much resistance, but I can give you a chance to test your IPv6 connection :-P

It's been my intention to mention new Lintian and Debian Policy releases here as well, but I've not been doing very well with that (or with writing things here in general) for the last bit. But I'll see if I can change that up now.

I wanted to get a new Policy release out before DebConf10 and got that out Sunday night. This doesn't have anything as dramatic as the Breaks/Conflicts or architecture wildcard changes in 3.9.0, but there are a lot of interesting improvements and updates. There's even more coming in the next release, which I'm hoping will include a long-overdue improvement to the summary of maintainer scripts.

The Lintian release is mostly just adjustments for the new version of Policy, but I tried to take a quick pass through the open bugs and resolve as many as I could in a day as well. Major projects in Lintian are still on hold right now, since I just don't have enough time given the other things that I'm trying to do.

The Policy changes of note are summarized in the upgrading checklist included in the debian-policy package and were all listed in the debian-devel-announce message.

In my previous post about the Yubikey I suggested that computer users’ groups should arrange bulk purchases to get the best prices [1]. I ran such a buying club for Linux users in Australia as well as members of SAGE-AU [2].

The keys have arrived and I now have to start posting them out. Above is a picture of two boxes that each contain 100 keys. Presumably if you buy a smaller number of keys then you get more fancy packing.

Thanks to Yubico for giving us a greater discount than the usual discount rate for boxes of 100 keys!

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/03/15/yubikey/
• [2] http://www.sage-au.org.au/

I had planned long for this Debconf and with the experience from the previous times I did all I could to reach one goal – minimise stress. I think I got it right this time.

First of all I got my company (Accenture) pay for the whole thing, so I did not have to worry about sponsorship queue (but instead I must gather and deliver them back some knowledge gained from the conference – should be easy). I also managed to get a direct flight – there is a weekly flight Tashkent-Riga-New York on Sundays and I got a ticket for that both ways. This took many hours off the travel time and reduced the stress a ton. Then I also did all the prudent travelling things: mostly reading the New York page on Wikitravel. This told me (among other things) what metro line to take to get the best view of the city. And for luggage I took a backpack (for the laptop and walking around) and a roller (for the clothes). I learned a lot from the “Up in the air” movie, it really teaches one how to take stress out of travel.

This went very well in the beginning – I took a bus to the airport early, checked in, breezed trough security and then waited and waited. The boarding only started half an hour after we were scheduled to depart. But I can not complain, because the flight attendant called my name (among a few others) just before boarding and changed my ticket – I was bumped up to business class . It has been many years since I’ve flown a regular (non-budget) airline and now first time ever in the business class! We got regular class meals, but at least we got to sit in the big chairs with lots of leg room. It was great! I bought a paper book (from Charles Stross) to read during the flight, because that is the only thing you can do during take-off and landing and I had some stuff to listen to in my iPhone. I tried sleeping and I think I managed to kill a couple hours that way too. It sure helped combat jet lag later on.

When I arrived, I had my immigration and customs forms filled out. Latvia is on the USA Visa Waiver program, so I just had to fill out a form online prior to the trip to get a permission to enter USA. I only had one printout of the Waiver confirmation page and my airline took that before giving me a boarding pass, so I had no paper copy to give to the guy at the USA border, but he did not even ask for it – he only took the two forms I filled out, scanned my passport, took my fingerprints (all fingers) and a photo. Then he gave me back the customs for (stamped) and I could go get my luggage. After that it was just a matter of walking trough customs and giving the customs official the pre-filled and stamped customs form. I was not stopped further.

The AirTrain was a bit confusing – you just get on the AirTrain and go where you need to go, you actually pay at the place where AirTrain connects to metro, so when you are coming from the airport you are actually paying ($5) when you are exiting the AirTrain system. There are plenty of AirTrain people that will give you an AirTrain ticked for $5 cash right there or you can use a machine to get it (where you can also pay with a card). The machines also take AmEx, but you must know the PIN code, if your don’t know the PIN of you AmEx card (like I don’t know the PIN of my corporate AmEx) you can only buy MetroCards at news stands, but there you will not find the unlimited ride tickets – only 5 or 10 ride tickets are available.

Next I screwed up a bit and thus got a bit lost in the New York metro system. The Wikitravel recommends to take the AirTrain to Jamaica station and from there take J or Z line into the city for the best views. I went to Jamaica and got into the first metro train that came on to the platform. Unfortunately, that was the E line train and it does not cross with J or Z lines after that, so I was stuck. To complicate the situation E line is under repair, so after a few stops the trains diverted to the F line and I had to scramble to figure out where to get out to get to the 1 line where Columbia University is. I ended up spending more than an hour in the metro, but I got there in the end.

So I emerge from the 116th street metro station directly in front of the campus entrance gate and … it starts raining. A thunderstorm swept across New York as soon as I stepped outside the metro station, so I took shelter a the side of the building. It kept raining. After a few minutes decided that I don’t want to wait any more, so I put all my electronics into my backpack and went towards the dorm where my room was. The rain was warm, people around me were playing and running around in the wet grass, it was fun.

The guard showed me where to go to check in. It was really simple – sign here, here is you magnetic stripe key, have fun. And the room was just as spartan – bed, desk, chair, closet, bathroom and a large fan under the window. The first night I did not know that I could actually turn that fan down, so I slept to the sound of full fan blasting, much like on the airplane. The dorm looks ancient – it looks like it was build in the 60s and never changed since then. I mean, I’ve lived in worse places, but people would at least change wall sockets or faucets or ceiling paint every other decade or so. The newest things here were the magnetic locks on the doors and a TV and a mini fridge in the hallway.

After dropping my things I went off to the Mudd building across the campus to check in with people in the hacklab. It was just starting to take shape, but many great and familiar people were already there. It was like walking into a family home – same warm welcome smiles and that great feel of belonging to the group.

After I quick chat I went off downtown. The plan was that I left my old Canon 400D camera back at home and that I would buy a new Canon 550D here in New York on arrival. Unfortunately I underestimated the travel time on subway and by the time I got back downtown most shops where already closed. I got to checking out a Best Buy and was told there that they don’t have 550D in stock. Next morning I went for a full scale search – B&H Photo Video store, J&R Express, another BestBuy – none of them had the Canon 550D (aka T2i) in stock in a body-only configuration. BestBuy had a few sets with the kit lens, but I did not want paying 100$ extra for something I already have. The last option was Adorama and I got lucky – I nabbed the last 550D they had and it was body-only.

Now I was back, with a camera in my hands and the Debconf10 could really begin!

If Tim can report his movements around New York, so can I! ;-) Sadly, due to Nokia deprecating my still-quite-new N95 phone by not allowing me to use their service anymore, I won't be able to share my routes with you – But anyway…

This morning I decided to take a quick run to start off the day on Riverside Park (the park where we had dinner yesterday). I went South for about 3Km and headed back (for, you guessed right, a grand total of 6Km), and decided that 45 minutes of exercising are enough to declare my day started - As I started at ~8:15, it was getting warm (specially when running under the sun). I am quite heath-intolerant; it's not unpleasant at all, but I will try to run earlier on future days.

Riverside is a long and narrow park. I ran Southwards by the lower trail, in the park itself, but ran Northwards by the upper trail, in the wide sidewalk between the street and the park. The way South was also way flatter, while the way back goes up and down repeatedly.

I don't think I will run on a daily basis, but that will be determined by my mood when I open my eyes in the morning ;-) Anyway, riverside is a very nice run, and I expect to head North. I still am not back to running ~10Km, so I won't do the Central Park trail Tim did - But I'll surely go run there as well a bit. And rent a bike one of this days for a ~2hr morning ride, of course!

I discovered this while doing automated testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze. A few packages in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.

An example is from todays upgrade of KDE using aptitude. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase because its dependencies are unavailable.

In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules: perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however: Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2. dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already reported as a bug, and will hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one, and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because of dependency loops.

Thanks to the tireless effort by Bill Allombert, the number of circular dependencies left in Debian is dropping, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)

Todays testing also exposed a bug in update-notifier and different behaviour between apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at it.

So apparently the route I took round Central Park is 9.7km, which explains a lot. This morning I checked out Morningside Park, but it's really too small for running - there's a loop of about 400m at one end, and you can go down the long bit to 123rd St, but it gets boring very quickly. Most of the park is taken up with a big hill and stairs. I'll try Riverside Park on Thursday, or find a shorter loop at this end of Central Park.

This morning I had breakfast at Nussbaum & Wu, because it seemed like a good name. Then I went to Duane Reade down the road (a pharmacy open 24 hours a day, which is quite impressive), and picked up some hand soap for a couple of dollars - none is provided in the bathrooms (and I didn't read the checklist about what to bring). And if anyone forgets/loses their wherever-to-US power socket adaptor, the Best Buy in Union Square has four left.

So far I've missed about three sponsored meals. In related news, if you ask for all the salad at Subway in the US, you seem to end up with something much hotter than in the UK.

I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work with the next Debian Edu release. Not nearly done, but one major step completed.

This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this release is to test the user application selection. To have a look, install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know. Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your language of choice, please let us know too.

In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus, artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.

The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to much.

Changes compared to the lenny based version

• Everything from Debian Squeeze
  • Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in combination with some new artwork
  • Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
  • OpenOffice.org 3.2
  • Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
  • Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
  • Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
  • Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
  • Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
  • 3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
  • Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
• Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished). Enabled for:
  • PAM
  • LDAP
  • IMAP
  • SMTP (sender verification)
• New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.
• Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is fetched from LDAP.
• New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.
• General cleanup (not finished)

The following features are not working as they should

• No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used for testing.
• DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot, and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.
• The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.
• The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.
• The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.
• Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.
• The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.
• Some packages lack translations. See http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status, and help out with translations.

To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use

• ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
• http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
• rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso

To download this multiarch dvd release you can use

• ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
• http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
• rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso

There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we get closer to the final release.

The MD5SUM of these images are

• 3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
• 22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso

The SHA1SUM of these images are

• c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
• 2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso

How to report bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla

Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org

About two weeks ago I got a Wifly-City G2000, the world's most powerful 802.11bg wireless network card. It features 2000mW which is 10 times more than the legally allowed limit of 200mW in Switzerland (or 2 times more than the allowed 1000mW in the USA, 5 times more than the allowed 400mW in Brazil, or 20 times more than the allowed 100mW in the EU).

Contents

The adapter is sold as a set named Wifly-City AVATAR-4PA with some accessories.

click on the images for full resolution

The box prominelty lists Linux compatibility and contains the following part:

• 1x Wireless Network Adapter with standard USB Type Mini-B
  (blue top face, black rear side)
• 1x 7dbi omnidirectional Antenna (black; SMA)
• 1x 10db directional Antenna (black; SMA)
• 1x 1m USB Cable (black; one Type A to Type Mini-B)
• 1x 5m USB Y Cable1 (transparent; two Type A in Y to Type Mini-B)
• 1x Suction Cup (black)
• 1x 8cm Mini-CD with drivers and a manual

The adapter has a Realtek 8187L chipset. This is particulary nice since there is no firmware needed for this chipset (therefore no questinable binary-only firmware blob). Also, it works out of the box with any Linux as of kernel version 2.6.30 and newer. I tested it on lenny with kernel backports, vanilla squeeze and vanilla sid. In all of these setups, it works out of the box without any configuration whatsoever - just plug it in and it works. I know that this is how it is supposed to be but still, I am always surprised again when things just work.

For those who care, this is the output of dmesg when plugging in the card...

[...] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6 usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8187 usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 usb 1-1: Product: RTL8187_Wireless_LAN_Adapter usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Manufacturer_Realtek_RTL8187_ usb 1-1: SerialNumber: xxxxxxxxxxxx usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice phy1: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel' phy1: hwaddr xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, RTL8187vB (default) V1 + rtl8225z2, rfkill mask 2 rtl8187: Customer ID is 0xFF Registered led device: rtl8187-phy1::tx Registered led device: rtl8187-phy1::rx rtl8187: wireless switch is on usbcore: registered new interface driver rtl8187 ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan1: link is not ready wlan1: direct probe to AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1) wlan1: direct probe responded wlan1: authenticate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1) wlan1: authenticated wlan1: associate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1) wlan1: RX AssocResp from xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=5) wlan1: associated ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan1: link becomes ready wlan1: no IPv6 routers present [...]

...and this is the output of lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0bda:8187 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187 Wireless Adapter Special Offer

I have played with the card for some time now and am really pleased with it. It works nicely with all the standard tools (aircrack-ng, kismet, etc.).

The only bummer is that the card is quite expensive. Fortunately, we could arrange a good deal for Free Software people where the store selling it does not make any money on it: instead of 89 USD you can get it for 68 USD (including everything).

If you are interested in getting one and you are comming to DebConf 10 in New York between 2010-07-25 and 2010-08-08, you can write an email to Ralph Amissah or speak to Ralph personally during the event.

1 I have no idea why they are shipping with a Y cable because the adapter does not need one. However, it does not disturb and in case I ever need an Y cable, I now have one :)

Sometimes I write things that are for myself, and later decide to release on the off-chance other people might be interested.

I've hated procmail for a long time, but it is extremely flexible, and for the longest time I figured since I'd got things working the way I wanted there was little point changing.

When it comes to procmail there are few alternatives:

• Exim filters.
• Maildrop.
• Email::Filter

Unfortunately both Exim and Email::Filter suffer from a lack of "pipe" support. To be more specific Exim filters and Email::Filter allow you to pipe an incoming message to an external program - but they regard that as the end of the delivery process.

So, for example, you cannot receive a message (on STDIN), pipe it through crm114, then process that updated message. (i.e. The output of crm114).

Maildrop does allow pipes, but suffers from other problems which makes me "not like it".

My own approach is to have a simple mail-sieve command which is configured thusly:

set maildir=/home/steve/Maildir set logfile=/home/.trash.d/mail-sieve.log # # Null-senders # Return-Path: /<>/ save .Automated.bounces/ # # Spam filter # filter /usr/bin/crm -u /home/steve/.crm /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm # # Spam? # X-CRM114-Status: /SPAM/ save .CRM.Spam/ X-CRM114-Status: /Unsure/ save .CRM.Unsure/ # # People / Lists # From: /foo@example.com/ save .people.foo/ From: /bar@example.com/ save .people.bar/ .. .. # # Domains # To: /steve.org.uk$/ save .steve.org.uk/ To: /debian-administration.org$/ save .debian-administration.org.personal/ # # All done. # save .inbox.unfiled/

On the one hand this is simple, readable, and complete enough for myself. On the other hand if I were going to make it releasable I think I'd probably want to add both conditionals and the ability to match upon multiple header values.

Getting there would probably involve something like this on the ~/.mail-filter side :

if ( ( From: /foo@example.com ) || ( From: /bar@example.com ) ) { save .people.example.com/ exit } # ps. remind me how much I hate parsers and lexers?

That starts to look very much like Exim's filter language, at which point I think "why should I bother". Pragmatically the simplest solution would be to add a "Filter" primitive to Email::Filter - and pretend I understood the nasty "Exit" settings.

ObQuote: Andre, we don't use profanity or double negatives here at True Directions. - "But I'm a Cheerleader".

Strange times... While I was quite productive recently I had a terrible start into this week. Maybe it's the weather change (we more or less dropped from sunny ~35°C down top rainy ~20°C), or that (nearly) everyone but me is on vacation at work, a boring project or maybe it's that I can't attend this years DebConf. Whatever it is, I don't feel that well and am quite grumpy (Hard to believe for those who know me, but at least I feel grumpy ;)

So, reading I spotted this topic in Debian Project News. from a user who actually joined a discussion on Debian's development list can actually make my day :)

“yeahhhh!!!”

— otavio

“Wow, it even works!”

— daniel

Daniel and Otavio releasing Debian live installer in Debconf 10

I just did some work on two NBD features: authentication and named exports.

The first was written by Brad Allen back in 2008. I'd been thinking about an authentication scheme back at DebConf 8, and discussed it on the nbd-general mailinglist. Brad picked it up and ran with it, but it never got finished. Basically, what I did today was forward-port the code so that it would compile (and work) with today's version of the NBD utilities.

I tested it and it works, but I'm not sure what to do with it. NBD is not encrypted; so there's no protection against TCP hijacking or some such. Oh well; I might still integrate it into nbd mainline.

The second feature is something way more interesting. It had been on my long-term TODO list for quite a while, but I never sat down to implement it. Until today, that is. This patch has been compile-tested, but I haven't functionally tested it yet; I'll do that tomorrow.

The main reason it took so long to implement, was that initial NBD handshake made that quite hard. Upon connecting, nbd-server as it currently exists will open the file or block device that it needs to export, and—before nbd-client has sent anything—sends information on that export (its size, whether or not it is read-only, etc) to the client. Unfortunately, this does mean that I cannot add new features to nbd-server while retaining full backwards compatibility if these features may involve changing what nbd-server sends during the initial handshake, as is the case here. This could be worked around by having the server first send information on a "default" export to the client, and then variate that if the client informs the server that it actually wants something else. But this would have been rather ugly, since it means that errors in open() or stat() calls for the initial "default" export would have to be non-fatal until the client actually tries to read or write to or from the device, at which point they would suddenly become fatal. This would open a can of worms near which I didn't want to tread.

The way I fixed it in the end, however, is fairly simple. If names are used to specify an export, nbd-server can live with just one port to export all block devices that it supports, rather than needing many. As such, I can "reserve" one port for the new-style named exports. On this port, nbd-server would expect that clients send a name, and would not function correctly with clients that don't understand names. At the same time, nbd-server could still export the same block devices on other ports as well, using the old-style protocol, for clients that do not support named devices.

This would of course require that both the client and the server know perfectly well what the port is, and that it does not change too easily. As such, I've just put in a request for an assigned port number over at IANA, so that I can be sure that the port will not change unexpectedly. This also means I won't make a public release with this change until the port number has been assigned, so that I don't need to support two 'default' nbd-server ports in the future (one "temporary" and one IANA-assigned port).

For now, however, I think I'll go grab some food.