Yaakov Nemoy

Back from Hiatus

2011-02-23T07:03:00.000+01:00

It's been a while, but there's been many things going on since i left the Netherlands. After leaving, i decided i needed something new that wasn't strictly F/OSS related and a good project to motivate me. About two months ago, i joined Tagged as a SiteOps Engineer. Tagged is a mixed shop of F/OSS and closed source, we use what works best, but i really spend most of my time working with F/OSS tools. (I don't like recruiting explicitely, but we are hiring, if you're curious.)

Aside from a constant churn of relocation since September, i've also been working on some personal projects in Haskell. I spoke before about putting together a desktop based on K.I.S.S designed tools, and that's still slowly underway. You might remember i was implementing GTD in my life using emacs org-mode, but 8 months later, i'm not so enamored. Carsten Dominik created org-mode originally to serve his needs as a document and publishing format with an integrated scheduling functionality, but i'm finding that a document based approach is dangerous when you need strictly a date planner. In the past few weeks, i've lost chunks of my planned schedule since emacs never saved the open buffers before crashing that contained newely organised entries. I decided that since i want a high level of data guarantee on such a planner, i've started working on a redo of my day planner using CouchDB, and it's been a fun tool to work with. I'll hopefully post more on what i'm planning later.

Since i'm out in California these days with year round good weather, i also expect to be biking a lot more than i was last winter. It's a safe bet that i might not actually post much here.

Resignation as Treasurer of Fedora EMEA e.V.

2010-10-05T04:19:00.000+02:00

About five minutes ago, i announced to the Board of Fedora EMEA e.V. that i resign as Treasurer. I've also decided that i will be bringing my activities under the Fedora Project umbrella to an end, as this is as good of a point as any to stop. Since i hate goodbyes, and hate making them even more, this definitely isn't it. In the time i've been involved with the Fedora Project, i've made a number of really good friends, learnt a great deal and had a really great time. Fedora has played a really important role in my own personal development and i know i'll run into a great deal of Fedora contributors in the future. I plan fully on contributing to Open Source projects still, but i think it's time to see my effort go in a different direction.

The situation with Fedora EMEA e.V. has been a tough one. To sum up what has been a trying year and half, we were asked by Red Hat to make some changes to the organisation, involving the use of the trademark, in order to continue supporting the European part of the community. Since then, we, the Board, has not done a single thing to remedy the situation. No matter what your opinion is on the issue, this is a failure, which as a Board member, i must take responsibility for. I recentely relocated back to the States for personal reasons, and this is an issue i can not personally sit around and wait on any longer. Personally, i feel that not handling the issue has burnt off any goodwill i may have had with the community at large. I don't feel it would be responsible to ask to show more leadership to the community.

The biggest regret i have is that i will not have the time nor energy to continue maintaining the xmonad packages. Working on them is the single most rewarding thing i've done for the Fedora Project and i'm happy to hear that Ben Boeckel has already picked them up.

So long and thanks for all the fish!

The KDE - Gnome Challenge: org-mode

2010-05-23T15:33:00.000+02:00

In this post, i'm going to digress a bit to comment a bit about what i've been working on most recently. A few days ago, Michel Salim posted to Fedora Planet that he was having some success implementing GTD in his life using org-mode. Lately, i've been doing exactly the same thing. In the coming posts, i'm going to start integrating more bits on org-mode and emacs into the desktop.

Last weekend, i took the time out to work on a really old idea i had been batting around for a while. I've reworked my xmonad config completely so that it no longer functions like a traditional static desktop with a static set of workspaces. The desktop now is a context based stack, where you shuffle in contexts when needed. When in a certain context, the right programs are available at your fingertips, and distractions relevant to other contexts are hidden. I've been slowly integrating this into working with the same contexts that i use in GTD.

Ironically, due to "getting things done", i've been piling on more and more tasks that have piled up in the past few years, that i simply haven't gotten the time to start getting around to. Using a different organization system for my todo lists has motivated me to get a start on them, including this desktop concept. So when it comes to getting things done, like this blog series, it's been getting tricky fitting it in. Hopefully i'll get together a batch of blog posts soon, and i can continue publishing regularly.

Why i quit facebook

2010-05-22T10:59:00.002+02:00

For those of you who perhaps just follow along Fedora Planet, or just don't do these sorts of things, quite a number of Fedora contributors all hang out on facebook. Between some of the more 'youthfully exuberant' contributors, we have a bit of the usual banter going on. Many of you followed along with my year of Monty Python quotes in my status, and some of you have probably tried to make Ryan Rix lose the game once or thrice. So some of you probably noticed that i deleted my facebook account a couple of weeks ago.

I refrained from commenting on it too much online, because it wasn't so much of a privacy issue as a social experiment on myself. If you go online (and you already are, i assume) you'll see pundits arguing against facebook for reasons ranging from how much of a waste of time it is, to how creepy it is to give random faceless company all this information to all the privacy concerns that go with a central network with poor security and designed to distribute rather than secure information. This was not the reason why i quit; i felt like facebook was taking the place of better things in my life. So, i gave it a couple of weeks to see how things changed, and to comment on it without the accusations of "you only left because you're a paranoid privacy freak".

If you compare how people communicated before Facebook came around and what people consider communication today, things have clearly changed. I'm not talking about the 140 character limits twitter imposes either. My facebook network had some several hundred people in it, many of whom i met randomly, and decided to keep very loose contact with. Instead of making a point to see them now and then, i got more and more focused to commenting and sharing random activities via the platform. When you consider how much mental overhead a single sarcastic facebook comment or post can take up, you have thirty light conversations all running in the background, and they come in via a torrential feed that bombards you with new messages all the time, it gets pretty hectic. It is nice to be able to interact with people you wouldn't otherwise get a chance to stay in contact with so easily, but that's the crux of the problem. All this mental overhead takes time away from staying in touch with the people closer to you. It's also much harder to shut off the flow when it becomes a habit. If i have things to do at home, as long as i don't nip over to the pub for a few beers, i won't be distracted by a constant flow of social information. But when i have a facebook account, it's habit to walk past my laptop, open up a new tab and kill another ten minutes replying to comments. Then when i try to talk to my family or close friends, i don't have the energy left to make a real conversation out of, especially one that doesn't resemble these shallow facebook conversations.

Now that i've gone for two weeks without a facebook account, somehow my life is more bearable. I reckon i'm still easy to find; i still have an Identi.ca and linkedin, and a simple duckduckgo (or google if you're still using that) of my name will tell you pretty much everything you need to know to get in contact with me. But now i have time to actually take things off my todo list, and i can be social without a guilty conscious that i've forgotten to do something, or i'm missing out on a conversation elsewhere.

If you're wondering if you should just never log in anymore or if you should go through the trouble to delete your account, take this into account. If the privacy does bother you at all, you might argue "Facebook has all your information anyways". But consider this, if you delete your account, they won't get any new information, and over time, the info they have on you becomes less and less valuable. I recommend deleting it, if you want to go down that route.

The KDE - Gnome Challenge: feh

2010-05-21T15:15:00.001+02:00

A bit delayed, but following with the thread you've probably decided that you would like to see something else besides the default wallpaper. In a traditional desktop environment, there is a program that has the responsibility of drawing the desktop, in KDE it's a very complex plasma, and in gnome it's a window provided by nautilus that runs on top of the desktop. Since we don't actually need much from a desktop per se, all we need to do is draw on the 'root window' which is the X Windows System way of saying 'desktop'.

To do so, we need to add a small command to your .xsession file. First install the program feh with yum install feh -y if it's not already installed. Feh is also a decent program for viewing images too, which is why i'm using it.

To have feh draw your desktop background, just add the following command to your .xsession file, before the line for xmonad (or which ever window manager you choose):


feh --bg-scale /path/to/wallpaper

It's really not more complicated than that.

Somethings you might want to explore, if you like that sort of thing is that there are a number of programs that can all draw to the root window. It's possible to use them to draw pictures, tile multiple pictures together, create a slideshow, or even draw video or goofy animations that follow the cursor. If you find something cool, be sure to leave a comment or blog it too.

Duck Duck Google^WGoose!

2010-05-14T12:02:00.002+02:00

Lately i've been taking a bit of time in my life to look at using other services than Google. Even if you still trust Google 100%, and don't get me wrong, i don't have anything against Google personally (well... not much), it's been a good experience. One of the hardest things to get away from though is Google's search. It's very easy to get in a habit of using it. It's everywhere, even on my phone. Google's worked very hard to make their search results very good. Even so, there's another search engine i've found that i quite like, Duck Duck Go.

Duck Duck Go is quite simple. It has a very clean layout, similar to the early days in Google, and it focuses on giving you some quick 'zero-click' meaning at the very top of the page. It also tries to sort links into topics that make sense to a human mind. More importantly, it's entirely anonymous, saves (almost) no private data, and is entirely accessible through SSL. (I've even provided the SSL link above.) This means that no one in between you and Duck Duck Go needs to know that you're looking for a new job, not even your current boss.

In 1997 when Google was started, it was fundamentally expensive for most people to start up a search engine that would provide meaningful results. Back in those prehistoric days powerful computers were expensive and so was the bandwidth. Nowadays, the chip in my phone is powerful enough to run a search engine, never mind the computer in my lap or my desktop at work. It's become much easier to democratise search; anyone can do it. In the days of Web 2.0, where anyone can put up a web page, Gabriel Weinberg, the creator of Duck Duck Go, wrote up a detailed blog post on how he uses commodity open source tools to put it together. You don't have to be a Google Engineer to do it.

Duck Duck Go is a pretty cool search engine to try out. It can be integrated into Firefox too, so you don't even know you're using it until you start searching. It's fast, it's simple, it provides you with good privacy from the start and is actually useful. It's even got a cool duck as a logo.

The KDE - Gnome Challenge: xinit and slock

2010-05-02T16:31:00.002+02:00

Continuing the theme from before, i would like to explain how to get started setting up your 'just give me what i need' desktop. Keep in mind that this will only cover a part of getting started, so if you need a fully working desktop and you're not able to figure it all out, you might want to wait a few days until everything's lined up. I'll put together a summary so anyone can get started.

So you want to make up a minimalist desktop. The rule is to use only what you need, nothing more. You also need something to glue it together. I've written before about using xmonad to be precisely that glue. I am assuming you are going to use xmonad, you know how to open up a terminal, use it to start up other programs and can go back to your classic desktop later if you want. We'll also cover one other necessary feature, locking the screen. Obviously you don't want to leave your machine vulnerable while playing around.

The first thing to do is to set up xinit. This will start up a shell script located in ~/.xsession and when the shell script ends, it will stop the graphical environment and logout. In order to make this work, open up a terminal and do the following.

Warning: This will destroy any prexisting file you have located at ~/.xsession, so back it up if you want to first.


sudo yum install xorg-x11-xinit-session xmonad slock -y
echo > ~/.xsession << EOS
#!/bin/sh

xmonad
EOS
chmod +x ~/.xsession

When you log out, you will see a new desktop option called User Session. Log in using that option. The login dialog will go away, and you'll most likely be left with the default background from the login manager. Don't expect any borders or pretty things to happen yet. We will set them up later. Remember, all that's running is xmonad, nothing else. Once xmonad stops, your session ends and you are logged out. That's it.

In order to call up programs, open up a terminal with <Alt>-t. From there, you can open up any other application using it's name. To log out, press <Alt>-q. At the bottom of this post will be a couple of links to xmonad's documentation for reference.

If you need to lock your screen, open a new terminal and run slock at the prompt. Your screen will blank, just type in your password, hit enter, and you can continue working. To suspend your machine, say a laptop, the command pm-suspend will do exactly that. If you want to suspend and lock the screen, the handy snippet pm-suspend; slock at the prompt will suspend and then lock the screen. We will come back to making this easier in a following post.

I've had some criticsm about having to write up your own .xsession file and doing everything by hand. Many of the arguments run along the lines of 'i use this panel, this media player, this browser, this widget, this toolkit, and it does everything for me automatically, so you'll have to pry it out of my cold dead hands'. If this is the case, i encourage you to continue using your tools of choice for the betterment of society. However, if you're left wondering why your computer uses 1GB of memory after logging in, and why there's a mysql instance running in the background that you didn't put there yourself, and all you want to do is get programs up and running and working, then doing this by hand is a very rewarding experience. Were it easier to get a useful minimalist experience without this trouble, life might be better, but we're not yet there.

If you need documentation, check out the following links.

Happy Hacking!

The KDE - Gnome Challenge: xmonad

2010-04-30T19:09:00.002+02:00

A couple of weeks ago, i wrote about a personal challenge to work on making a better desktop for myself, and use my computer more effectively. I meant to pick up the blog and start posting a regular series on taking advantage of your desktop for others to follow. So as unusual, here is the second installment to the series.

I want to begin with a tool that has really served me well for a very long time. I started using xmonad in the end of 2007. Since then, it has helped me be far more productive, because i spend alot less time getting swamped with windows that need to be managed. If you want to know exactly what problems i was facing that lead me to believing tiling WMs to be the one true way (for myself), i recommend you read my blog post from then. Since then xmonad has come along way, and through all that, i've been using more or less the same configuration with both Gnome and KDE.

The way i see it, xmonad is going to be the corner stone of any desktop i put together. There are two primary reasons why i have this perspective, and in this series, you will see many comments on how to integrate Foo (TM), Bar (TM), and Baz (TM) into xmonad for a complete workflow. After using xmonad for a few months, i stopped seeing my desktop as a collection of apart applications, and began to see the system as a complete system. By putting two programs next to each other, colouring the backgrounds the same, and using no border between the two, they would blend into each other, akin to panels in many IDEs. Suddenly, a file manager window and a simple music player could have the same functionality as the all in one integrated amarok. Instead of relying on kparts or whatever KDE uses these days, the OS already provided the components to integrate them together. When you consider that the end user doesn't understand 'programs' intuitively either, i decided that the most user friendly approach is to teach the user functionality rather than programs.

Window managers are also incredibly context sensitive. Of all programs running on your machine, your window manager has the best view on exactly what you're doing and where you're doing it. With a little bit more information, like a context, it can be very flexible to accommodate what you are really trying to do, and make your life much easier. More concretely, it can provide per desktop/workspace key bindings, the ability to organize your windows around tasks and so on. In this case, xmonad also takes nearly all priorities over keybindings in your X server, which in plain english means all your global hotkeys are very implement in xmonad. It's even got a few extensions that make it easy to make up new keybindings, and even use vi and/or emacs like bindings on your desktop.

xmonad can take up a number of blog posts itself, but it's not the only way to solve a number of problems i'm looking to solve. If you're looking to follow this series, the easiest thing to do is to try out xmonad and get used to it. Otherwise, you'll be on your own integrating it with your window manager of choice. That said, the next few blog posts will have very little to do with xmonad.

The KDE - Gnome Challenge

2010-04-16T15:59:00.002+02:00

The past couple of years i've been experimenting with my desktop alot. When i started using Fedora, i stuck with Gnome until i found XMonad. Then i did alot of the initial work of getting it to integrate into Gnome. After watching my desktop break on updates and alot of the tools i was using at the time completely junk out on me, like hamster-applet, not to mention being plagued by evolution, i decided enough was enough, and i switched to KDE. Watching every component in the desktop get rewritten every six months with less features each time was making it hard to just get XMonad up and running.

After getting things up and going, and seeing how KDE 4.2 was stable enough to get some work done, i thought i could commit myself to using it. For a while, it seemed to work, but i realized i wasn't using half the features coming in. The incremental improvements were nice, and i saw the beginnings of a very interesting foundation that had alot of potential. But then since the past few months, lots of little issues started creeping up. Every time i would suspend my laptop, resuming it would take longer and longer before i got control of the keyboard back. Sometimes the only button that would be reactivated was the handy power button. Going into standby would take longer and longer. Leaving an X session running for more than a couple of days would get really slowly. The kicker panel that used to show up instantly started to take seconds and then minutes even to show up. It would also break the focus in weird ways. All the akonadi bits would start to get in the way. The panel would graphically glitch all the time making itself less than useless. I wanted my desktop back.

If i were a KDE or Gnome developer, i would have been thrilled to have the chance to be able to dogfood and fix alot of these bugs. My current role is a system administrator, though, and all of these things just get in the way of solving problems fast so i don't miss my deadlines. I don't mean this criticism as something bad about any of the decisions of the developers or the Fedora package maintainers, but simply, this is why it didn't work out for me.

Instead, i decided to set a different sort of challenge for myself. After watching the challenge between Ryan Rix and Mel Chua to use each other's favourite desktops, i challenge people to start with their own minimal desktop. This does not mean starting with XFCE or LXDE and calling it quits, though those are both two fine projects unto themselves. I mean, start from scratch with just your own .xinitrc file. Then put in everything you need. Figure it all out for yourself. Do this for a month and see if your survive. It's sort of like that intial Linux challenge. Can you use that for a month as a sole OS.

Over the next while, i think i'm going to post updates on some of the different components i'm using to build up my desktop. I've been using tools following the suckless principles as starters and exploring all the different options.

Starting my RHCA

2010-04-14T11:44:00.002+02:00

Next week i'll be starting on getting my RHCA certification. I've said it many times, and i'll say it again, i really see good high quality certifications replacing the diploma as a metric of skills in the 21st century. I highly recommend that everyone look at picking up a few, and i'll shamelessly plug Red Hat for providing one of the most rigorous programs out there.

I will be taking the RH436, the Red Hat Enterprise Clustering and Storage Management, course and accompanying exam. It might not have been the most number one choice, but it's an issue we're working with at the Genomics Center, that i felt it would be the most practical choice. I want to thank my employer for sponsoring the course.

I'm going to be taking it easy this weekend, and next week i'll most likely not be online at all. If you can't reach me, you'll know why.

LOADays: the follow up

2010-04-14T11:22:00.003+02:00

This weekend i was in Antwerpen for the Linux Open Administration Days. Or Handwerpen as Bert Desmet puts it so fondly. I was there to present puppetmanaged.org and some practical discussions on how to migrate to it's sometimes not so user friendly structure. For the rest, i went in with an open mind.

When Jeroen van Meeuwen and I arrived at the hotel, we ran into a small group of what were obviously sysadmins. It seemed there was also some kind of wedding or party going on because there were alot of people coming in with all sorts of musical instruments, dressed in a very middle eastern style, with robes and multicolor gowns and bustling all over the place. In contrast, four guys sitting in a circle with laptops out is not hard to spot.

We went downtown for some dinner, at a restaurant where a polylingual waiter served us in practically every language we wanted. After going around the table in three languages, English, French and Dutch, he finally looks at me and says, "oh good, at least we have one Belgian". So i said where i was from and that i'm living in the Netherlands, and that set off a 'oh, you poor thing.' Over dinner, we had a really great conversation about what we see as the future of configuration management and all sorts of other fun sysadmin-y topics.

My presentation went ok, though it was my first iteration of the slides and presentation. I think because of the unique way i positioned the presentation, i put too much information in and made the classic mistake of not having the perspective to see it. I'm hoping the next time i do this, i can do puppetmanaged.org better justice.

After my presentation, i spent the better part of an hour talking to Dan Bode from the newly minted PuppetLabs about some of the issues we are both trying to solve. The conversation went over how puppetmanaged.org deviates from the official recommendations from PuppetLabs and the differences is approach to our solutions. My big takeaway from the conversation is that it's very easy to make these things complex really fast. It's going to be an interesting challenge to keep these tools simple, which is what made them so attractive in the first place.

After the first day, the LOAD team treated us all to beer and pizza, first outside by the pavilion at the school where the event was held, and afterwards, we moved to a nearby pub for even more beer. Given my previous experiences in Belgium, namely Fosdem, i took it easy and left around 12, so i wouldn't regret it the next morning.

The second day was a little bit more relaxed. I started with two round table discussions, the first on "Open Core" vs. "Open Source" projects and companies. The second was on the general topic of configuration management. It was really good to be able to discuss the future of Configuration Management in general without it turning into a flamewar on who's tool was better.

After the lunch break i sat in on two more sessions, one on how to do configuration management entirely with RPMs, and the second was on the LSC project, the LDAP Synchronization Connector, which i'm pretty sure we will be using in the future internally.

I want to thank the LOAD team for putting together the event. It really went smoothly, there were no issues getting around and getting things done. It was a great pleasure to have the chance to meet many people from all over Europe and even a few from the US who are looking to solve almost all the same problems i am. I can see alot of potential for this event in the future.

Doing FOSS in your $dayjob

2010-04-09T13:31:00.002+02:00

Wednesday night, i gave a small lightening talk at OGD Utrecht about working with FOSS in the enterprise realm. This is a topic i've discussed with a number of people informally and i think i'm going to make into a proper talk in the future. It covers how to get the maximum benefit out of Free and Open Source Software and how to work with communities at the enterprise level.

It is structured around three phases that are meant to segue into a roundtable conversation. It begins with the use of FOSS inside your organisation, moves on to internal development and branches, and finishes with active development and hosting of projects. It's geared towards how FOSS is a good business decision and how to take said business decision and make the most out of it without compromising your values or the community.

Finally, it's the usual policy of mine that when you see this presentation, you should go out and present it yourself. I've licensed the slides as CC-by-sa, so feel free to go wild with them. They are structured around the bullet points you can talk about, but each line is meant to be a topic of discussion that can fill five or fifty minutes at a go. You can get the slides here http://ynemoy.fedorapeople.org/presentations/foss_in_enteprise/Open.Source.for.$dayjob.odp

Some Blogging Noise and Summer Coding

2010-04-09T11:22:00.002+02:00

I realize i've been mostly silent about some of the things going on regarding the summer of code style projects. Perhaps i should make a bit of noise, so get out your ear plugs, because i've got two pot lids and i'm not afraid to use them.

Most know at this point that Fedora was not approved by Google for the GSoC this summer. Rather than moping about it, i've seen a couple of trends, both quite interesting.. To start, from the moment Fedora was rejected, Karsten Wade and the rest of the crew got together and started putting together the Fedora Summer of Code project. For a project that had so little time to get its stuff together, it's working out pretty well so far.

Second, we've shared a really good relationship with kernel.org in the past, and last November, i met John 'warthog9' Hawley and we talked about a couple of ideas that would serve the linux communities better. A couple weeks ago, JH sent me an email asking about one of the projects, a statistics project for distribution mirrors. This will enable distros and mirrorers to better plan for resources. If a student proposal is accepted for this project, i will be comentoring under the kernel.org name. There is also another project, chasm, from our own Ben Boeckel on the list.

All in all, it's going to be an interesting summer.

Sorry for my English

2010-03-19T15:45:00.002+01:00

Every time i see someone post at the bottom of an email "sorry for my english", i always feel like this person is apologizing for speaking english on an english speaking list. It's a very strange way to say it.

CLT - Catering-Tage mit Linux-Vorträge

2010-03-16T22:37:00.002+01:00

After traveling 1300+ kilometers, running around for two days heavily caffeinated and pleasantly fed, and talking non stop, i'm finally caught up from the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. I have to say, the entire event was by far miles beyond the Linuxtag event in Berlin. I'm glad we made our choice to focus more on this event in the future.

To start, from the moment we arrived in Chemnitz, despite the drab post industrial post communist palor, the experience was nothing but friendly. The hotel staff at the Mercure hotel were genuinely cheerful and pleasant and the atmosphere at the event was incredibly relaxed and open. It was a bit more challenging to communicate because naturally English isn't spoken as well in Chemnitz as in Berlin, but sometimes a smile on your face is more important than your fluency of language.

Like i said, the atmosphere was great. It didn't feel in the slightest way commercialised or business oriented, although there were business present, of course. Instead it had more of that open fair feeling, with whole families wandering around, a place for the kids to play, areas to socialise in, and even a magician at the social event. Even the floor was open, with a minimum of security, even at 2 in the morning, rather than closing down exactly at 6pm. The staff provided constant food for the booth staff, volunteers, and everyone else involved; it almost felt like a lan party rather than a serious conference.

At the same time, the attitude there was very professional. It was a great opportunity to sit down and talk about all sorts of business with people i don't see that often. The entire setup was very well organised, down to the germanically precise tape and cabling on the floor between the booths, smooth working internet, and large screens announcing the current and upcoming presentations. It's only a shame i was busy with meetings that i didn't have a chance to see any lectures.

I really hope i will be able to go next year. This is not an event to miss. That, nor the giant 10 meter tall bust of Karl Marx around the corner from the hotel.

The four F's: Friends

2010-03-09T21:58:00.003+01:00

Did you know that we run a pretty sweet Asterisk server in Fedora Infrastructure? It's simple to connect to it via nearly any SIP client. When i mean nearly any, this means not just your computer, but your SIP phone, your Android, your Maemo, and pretty much any device with a speaker and microphone that lets you run your own software. There are also dial in numbers so you can reach the system from some countries, like the US. You can even use it to have friendly chats with other Fedora contributors without racking up expensive long distance phone bills. It's not just there to look pretty, but it's really part of the Friends bit of Fedora. (And well, it's also free, full of features, and i don't know of any other open source community offhand that has Asterisk set up.)

My thanks to Fedora Infrastructure for the great job they do and all the hard work.

GSoC is on

2010-02-24T14:20:00.004+01:00

With GSoC related things ramping up, i would like to announce once again that i am open to mentoring students this year. I am willing to begin talking to students to help them find their way around GSoC and Fedora in order to get proposals in.

I have a couple of ideas, but most importantly, my favourite projects to mentor are ideas that come completely from the student. So if you're interested in doing GSoC this summer, you are a student entering, currently in, or just leaving an institute of higher education, and are eligible, get in touch with me. You can find me via my Fedora Wiki profile page. Just use the email address there or join the IRC channel. I will not reply via comments on this post.

I'm willing to hear all ideas, so don't be afraid to submit them. If you don't know yet what you want to do, send me an email anyways, and we can talk over the possibilities. So bring it on.

In the end, i may not be your mentor, but we'll do the best to find you a mentor for your proposal.

#fedora-gsoc is online

2010-02-19T23:55:00.003+01:00

Given my penchant for IRC, i've set up #fedora-gsoc for the google summer of code activity for Fedora and JBoss. This is going to be a point of contact to get help, ask questions, discuss fine ways to cook and eat bacon (beef bacon if you're muslim, fake bacon if you're not a meat eater), and propogate silly memes until December 21, 2012, when the Fedora Project becomes nothing more than a source for new memes. In the meantime, if you like IRC and want to participate in GSoC in any ways this summer, this is the place to be.

EDIT: If you're an org admin or mentor, contact me, i'll add you to the autovoice list. Everyone with the voice mode is in a position to answer questions.

If you're a student or just looking to have some questions answered, look to the guys and gals with voice.

Linux Potty Training Moment

2010-02-18T23:39:00.003+01:00

If it hasn't been coined yet, there has to be some sort of term for it. I'm going to stick with the Linux Potty Training Moment. I definitely had on of those today.

Before i left the states last December, i set up an old box of mine with Fedora 12, and set it up for my family to use when the inevitable happens, the Windows machine breaks and no one can fix it anymore. Today my little brother asked me how he could get a java game going on the machine. Since the only way i know how to do it is via the command line, i started walking him through it, almost by default. Then it hit me. This is his first time using the command line. He's 10 years old. I'm sitting 6000 km away, and i'm walking him through the process. Over XMPP. This is Linux potty training, he's learning it the same way i learnt it.

In retrospect, i probably shouldn't have told him about sudo on day one.

Puppetmanaged.org and Load

2010-02-08T21:52:00.005+01:00

I'm barely back from Fosdem and i'm already planning for the next event. Bert Desmet has asked me to submit a paper for Linux Open Administration Days. Since "Handwerpen" is just a hop, skip and a swallows flight away from the Netherlands, i said yes. I submitted the following abstract for presentation. I plan on talking about Puppetmanaged.org.

Abstract

Puppet is a batteries-not-included tool for configuration management.
In order to implement it in your infrastructure, it requires the use
of pre developed modules that can enable all kinds of functionality.
Puppetmanaged.org is an upstream community of KISS oriented modules
that enable you to migrate from most any other structure with a
minimal amount of effort. It also enables the installation of multiple
working environments for the purpose of running a development and
integration testing laboratory inside your domain. This presentation
will cover Puppetmanaged.org, some of the more useful modules offered
and as a practical example how we customize it to our needs within the
DBG at the UMC Utrecht.

Android is the New Windows too

2010-02-04T11:02:00.002+01:00

We're on a roll with bad Android posts it seems. Today i got an update to an Android application, which will not be named to protect the innocent and stupid, that asked to put shortcuts on my desktop. Me not likey.

Android is the Ubuntu of the Mobile Linux market

2010-02-02T10:44:00.002+01:00

Open Source has been compared to living in a house where contractors can stop by any time and change anything they want at their whim. Granted, it won't charge you a dime, but you might find out one day that your living room and bathroom have been swapped. When it comes to Fedora systems, it's not too bad because i have a good grasp of what's going on, and i can prepare myself for it.

I can't say the same about the Android. Yesterday i updated the ROM on my phone from Cyanogen 4.2.13.1 to 4.2.14. To my not so pleasant surprise, all my alarms were disabled, and it's a very lucky thing that i happened to wake up at just the right time. I can't necessarily blame Google, HTC nor Vodafone for this, because i'm not running their "Enterprise" version of Android, but it's the haphazard way that Android works really gets me. Furthermore, the alarm clock program was working perfectly on the phone up until now, and suddenly Google feels the need to replace it with a media center like application that not only ignores the saved alarms i have but also ignores the lock command and is accessible even if my phone is supposed to be locked. For a Linux based phone, it defies all expectations of a Unix like system.

So haphazard updates that break the system, a chutzpah that enables marketing to think it's Linux, even if it's nothing like it, and a market that enables both closed and proprietary source on the device easily really sounds like another well known Linux distribution that we love to hate. Maybe it's not the most perfect analogy though, i don't know any of any Google employee who's been to outerspace yet. I'm still waiting on the Google Rocket Ship Beta.

Dell++

2010-01-29T16:19:00.003+01:00

Sometimes there's alot of negativity out there, especially against $big_company that manages to screw things up. I figure it's time to hilight some of the positives out there.

For a while, i've had some issues with my screen on my Dell Laptop. I guess it was one of those freak occurrences, but there was a single column of dead pixels that i was more or else able to ignore and procrastinate like usual. Recently though, several keys stopped working. More importantly, of those several keys, one is needed to unlock the encryption on the system, which makes getting good procrastination done very tricky without an external keyboard. Good thing i sprung for a three year warranty.

I set up an issue ticket with Dell's SMB unit in the US where i bought the laptop from two years ago. Their response was quick, within 24 hours. I'm guessing there must have been issues with the keyboard in the past, because there were no questions about it. The only thing i had to do was do an OS agnostic test of the screen, verify that the problems persisted, and then wait a week for the parts to ship from one depot to another. Once the help desk decided it was worth it to replace the parts, they sent a new motherboard, screen, and keyboard to one of their Dutch repair centers, as part of a separate business unit. They also arranged for a technician to come to my office and fix the laptop on site. Aside from a small hiccup in shipping, the entire process was as smooth as some of the ice we're having.

I really have to give the SMB BU at Dell lots of bonus points for just being able to take care of it. This is exactly how i feel companies should solve problems.

I'm going to FOSDEM

2010-01-24T22:51:00.002+01:00

I just booked the hotel for Fosdem, and i'm already excited. It's not every day that i get to stay at a five star hotel for under 80 euros a night, no matter how little it's actually worth it. Not to mention, Fosdem's always fun, and not just for the drinking.

I'm thinking of doing a couple of things differently this year. For starters, i'm debating forgoing the Fedora polo just to wear the the red hat around. We've set a trend for having not red hatters wear the fedora at Fosdem, not to mention its chick magnet powers. (You'll have to ask Andreas about that one though, i wasn't quite sure what he was talking about.) I'm also thinking of ditching the laptop. Every year there are more people, which is the obvious understatement of the year. What this implies is that there are more devices shaming the wireless network into realising how pathetic and weak it is. The good natured network admins do their best (or worst) to keep the network up and running each year, but it just never quite works 100%. This year, with the explosion of the iphone and android, i'm assuming that even if the admins managed to figure out something for everyone, it's still going to fail. Having a laptop just seems like it will be overkill.

I'll still bring my XO 1.0 for the booth.

I hope to see you all there.

Have we really outgrown Barcamp?

2010-01-16T11:41:00.003+01:00

Right now i'm at Eth-0 Winterlan, which i probably should have blogged more about, though the muse hasn't been striking much lately. Since it's a hacker event, we don't actually officially start until 12 anyways, so i had some time to check my email this morning before we begin. (It could be we're starting later because of the remoteness of the location. You can't get farther away from civilisation without going up north to stay with the Frys.)

I had a look through the preliminary survey results from the FUDCon we had in Toronto. I'll have more comments later about the future of FUDCon Live, but one things struck me as worth commenting on. Among the usual gripes and comments about the location, time of the year, and the colour of their wished for ponies, i saw a number of complaints and comments about the quality of the BarCamp planning. There were also gripes that FUDCon is not a planning event. I think this reflects a change in audience since the humble origins of FUDCon.

I will agree and say that it was chaotic and a bit tricky to manage. It's been this way for the past few FUDCons i've been too, owing to the sheer amount of people who have something to talk about. Furthermore, this is exactly the way a BarCamp should be, everyone should have something to contribute in one way or another. The question is, can this scale? My answer, yes it can.

At the GSoC Mentor Summit we had another BarCamp. With a few hundred people in attendance, i never felt like there was so much going on that i would miss something critical. I contribute this to a few factors. There were fewer pitches per attendant. The topics presented were far broader in scope than a FUDCon. We had two days of sessions, and finally, the true value of the Mentor Summit was being able to meet people face to face, and not focus on the BarCamp.

I think it's time to revisit the way we organise our BarCamp sessions. I'm going to start making propositions for changes on the FUDCon mailing list to see what we can do.

Wanted: A GSoC student

2009-12-07T18:47:00.003+01:00

Perhaps it's a bit early, but Toshio and i have been talking about a couple of crazy GSoC projects that will require a bit of a warmup cycle. I'm looking for a couple of highly motivated students who are looking for Summer Jobs and want to do something very crazy and awesome. If you're looking for something to do this summer, leave your email address in the comments, or use my contact information on the Fedora Wiki.

The first project is a content delivery project. Lately we've been bumping into issues with Fedora's No Content policy where people want to deliver wallpapers, themes, books, documentation, Gimp brushes, and so on that are essential to adding value to the packages we provide in Fedora. Alot of this content falls into a grey area that makes it really hard to decide if it should belong in Fedora. In most cases, however, it really doesn't belong there. Faced with the decision to turn down content submissions, we'd like to create a repository where we can point people to instead.

The aim of this project is to put together a content database system and some delivery mechanism and standard to get content to people's computers. What the database is going to look like, and what kind of frontend is completely open to the student working on the project. In the coming months, the goal is to sit down and discuss how you want to solve the problem, and how you plan to go about doing that. We'll plan out what standards already exist to solve part of the problem, who is using them, how to handle licensing questions, how to store data to make it friendly to the systems involved, and what's the best way to locally 'install' it to the computer. A project like this can become very complex, and the biggest challenge is refining it into a 12 week project.

The second project is a bit simpler. We want reliable download statistics from mirrors who mirror linux distributions in general. If you are familiar with Smolt, this will sound very familiar. We're looking for someone to write some tools mirror managers can use to gather statistics on their machines and a way for the stats to be gathered publicly. The details of the implementation are left to the student, but since we're looking for the right umbrella organisation and place to host the project, we are also recruiting now.

Both of these projects will most likely lean heavily on Fedora for support, since we plan on making heavy use of both of them once they are production ready. Both projects will be under a different organisation though, and you do not need to be a Fedora contributor to participate. The only requirement i have is a couple of years of experience with Linux.

T minus FUDCon: FUDCon Live, all systems ready to go

2009-12-05T12:58:00.003+01:00

After a pretty uneventful flight over the Atlantic, along with our EPIC FUDPLane-ness, i've safely arrived in Canadia, that silly place where all the government offices have two names. Immigration was a snap, even if i did it in French. Maybe next time i'll go over to one of those bilingual booths just to see how far i could take it.

After waiting for the Belg, we made our way to the hotel and then the Irish Pub nearby for lots of deep fried food and beer. I also had one of the carrot sticks Paul ordered, just to balance it out. After only two beers, jet lag set in and thanks to the stressed out wireless i decided to just go to sleep. The nice part of jet lag is now i'm awake to make full (ab)use of the internet while everyone else is still asleep.

I took the time to get everything setup for FUDCon Live. I'll be making a quick (very quick) presentation on how to do this, where to go and what to do. Just so that we have all the information in once place, you can figure out what to do by doing two things. Read this blog post or consult the landing page for FUDCon.

To start, each room lines up to an irc channel, #fudcon-room-X where x is a value between 1-8. I've also squatted a few breakout sessions channels, but there's no zodbot there, so we would have to log them individually. If you need a breakout IRC channel, let me know so i can join. I will be logging the entire affair as a backup.

Second, if you are recording a session, check out this page, which explains what you need to do to help record. Secondly, once you record a session, please fill in the nitty gritty details on the wiki. The log can be found here. You need to fill out this page to get credit for transcribing. Credit means getting a drink. And we all like drinks.

At this point, i have all the channels setup with hotkeys, so i can keep an eye on the process. I really can't tell what the schedule is going to look like yet, but if i get a chance, i'll try to transcribe a session during the first block of sessions. This way if you're not totally sure what a good transcription session looks like, you can follow this one.

PS. I'll be wearing my Red Hat, so i should be easy to find if you have questions.

FUDCon Live: Status

2009-11-29T20:49:00.002+01:00

A while back i posted a call for volunteers for a new concept for FUDCon, which i called FUDCon Live. Not surprisingly, i didn't get an overwhelming number of raised hands, since i think this is a new concept that not many people get. Instead, i think we should restructure the planning just a bit.

There are a couple elements to this idea. The first is having an organized #fudcon-room-* channel for each physical space we have, complete with a meetingbot instance and any other tools people might want to use. Depending on the kind of session, running gobby and other tools will also go along way to helping things along. I'm assuming the people on the ground can help out here because they know what the rooms are. Setting something up like this is pretty low level work.

The second element is the logger. This is someone in each session who is recording the conversation and taking notes via IRC. He's (or a she, but i think FUDCon is still mostly attended by guys) also taking comments from IRC and repeating them to the group. This requires making sure there are enough volunteers. This also means making sure someone is tracking who the volunteers are and are enforcing enough typing breaks. Having done this before, i can tell you it can be stressful to do this for an entire day. Yes, you're a nerd, yes, you type all day, but you don't type at this pace for long stretches. Finally free drinks are involved, anyone who volunteers gets a beer (or other beverage, or well any other reasonable consumable if you don't drink) from me, as a thank you.

The third element is you. To make this worthwhile, you will need to interact with it. If you're at home, use it to follow that session you really wanted to see. Ask questions. If you're at FUDCon, hang out in channels to follow two sessions at once. Find out if there's a session more interesting than yours. Use the extra information to decide where to be. Finally, provide feedback. Let us know how it worked out.

The last element is the organisation. Since i only got a couple of volunteers so far, i want to do things a bit differently. This should solve a few issues all at once. Let's take a page out of Google's playbook. At the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, as part of each presentation, the guy running the session was required to ask for a volunteer to log the session. Let's take this route. For everyone giving a session, before you begin, find a volunteer in the room. There's a good chance that someone in the room already has an emotional investment in the session and will be willing to document things. One of the organizers (the original volunteers) will make sure to monitor the channels and update the wiki after each session. This way we know who's been volunteering.

Feedback?

Apologies in advance

2009-11-26T22:54:00.002+01:00

Apparently Adam Williamson thinks my Glögg recipe should be nominated as the new QA drink. When Fedora 13 doesn't work as well as Fedora 12, you all have my apologies. It will have been my fault.

Glögg

2009-11-25T21:38:00.002+01:00

Since Nicu got us started with a meme about mulled wine, i bit the bait and decided to throw in my own recipe. Keep in mind, what Nicu said about coding after having one or two cups of this applies three fold for my recipe. Anyone who knows me knows not to drink my mulled wine unless they aren't planning on driving for the next three days. That's because my favourite technique is based on the Swedish variant of mulled wine known as Glögg. Anyone who knows a little drink called Glühwein, this is definitely not it. Glühwein is for kids in comparison. So without further ado.

I can't show this with the same fancy pictures nicu had, but the recipe is more or less the same. If nicu wants to make a cartoon version of me getting wasted off this stuff, that would be awesome, but if you need the ingredients, just follow his recipe and add the couple of things i throw in. If you don't know what an orange looks like, you'll have to use your imagination.

Ingredients:
1 Orange, washed, preferably locally grown or organic so you know it's not covered in pesticides, you need the rind.
Cinnamon sticks
Whole cloves
A couple of table spoons of brown sugar or even molasses to taste.
1 Bottle of whiskey or brandy, Wild Turkey won't cut it, get a bottle that costs more than 5 bucks.
1 Bottle of port, find the nicest port you can afford, go down one notch, and get that one instead.
1 Bottle of an adequate red table wine. Bum wine and Liebefraumilch just won't cut it.

For true glögg, you really need cardamom in the pods. I feel a bit rude calling this drink glögg, but i've never had any cardamom around to try it with. After a few sips, you won't care what it's called. Swedes also like to add sliced almonds and raisins to the drink. I like my drinks with as few things floating in them as possible. If you like bobbing things in your drink, i highly recommend it, because it tastes good.

You start by dumping the contents of the bottle of wine into a big pot, adding the cinnamon sticks, the cloves, and the orange rinds. Put it over a low heat and slowly bring up the temperature. At no point should it ever boil, and if you see bubbles forming, lower the heat a bit. While mulling over the wine, the universe, and the essential meaning of life, enjoy a nice orange. Once the wine is warm, add a bit of the sugar or molasses so it can loosen up in the heat. If you use sugar, the goal is to have it very slowly caramelize.

Then add the port and the brandy or whiskey. Add the rest of the sugar, do a taste test to make sure it's not too sweet. Continue to let it mull for a while over the flames. Make sure the flavor from the spices and orange peel are infused, but don't let the hard alcohol mix in too too much. It's a trick of timing where you know that the spices are infused enough to add the hard stuff. If you let the harder stuff infuse too far, then you won't taste the alcohol.

Finally, when the taste is just right, and half the pot is gone from taste tests, remove it from the flame and serve warm. [Insert cartoon of loupgaroublond completely off his rocker.]

Cheers!

Too many irc channels

2009-11-23T14:14:00.003+01:00

I'm going to be dropping a few IRC channels, since i've realized i rarely pay attention to them, and they are distracting during work hours. If you're looking for me, there's always a million and one ways to reach me. Just letting those people know, in case they wonder why tab completion on my name doesn't work anymore.

RPM Database Corruption issues

2009-11-23T13:29:00.003+01:00

Today i noticed that i was having issues with Yum and RPM on my work machine. It's running a fresh install of Fedora 12, so it's most likely something just weird and out of the ordinary happened. It probably had to do with yumex hanging and then killing it by hand. Fixing it was simple for me. I realized that the problem was most likely corruption, one google later, i knew which files to delete (and backup first) and what to do to rebuild the RPM database. Woot, everything back to normal.

This is a big fail whale. It has nothing to do with the coding skills of any of the RPM, Yum, or Yumex maintainers, and i'm pretty sure between them and the PackageKit guys, they've gotten more than a life's share of flames and trolls already. This is a failure, because if i were the average user, say my dad, after smacking the keyboard once or twice to get yumex to continue working, i would have restarted the machine. Then i would be just as stuck.

From where i see it, telling someone to try to rebuild their RPM database on the command line is error prone and coudl just make things worse. Fortunately, the process itself is pretty simple. You backup some files, delete them, and run rpm --rebuilddb. The entire process should just work, so long there aren't bigger failures. From the perspective as a sysadmin, i know that if the RPM database is broken on a server, then chances are other bits, like package headers could be missing or corrupted too. Running such an operation as a knee-jerk reaction would be wrong. On a desktop though, that chance is there, but there's also a better chance that the database got corrupted due to something such as a power outage, or a well placed boot up the computer's sphincter. Such a process, including said backup, would be relatively non destructive if presented in a 'recovery toolkit' of sorts for the end user. Especially, perhaps, if there was a way to verify that the package headers were intact from the last known good configuration.

So in all seriousness, when these things go wrong, how can we offer an option to the user to try and recover the system?

Can haz Fedoar 12?

2009-11-17T21:24:00.003+01:00

Fedora 12 is out, and i'm already installing it. Once again, another release goes by and i'm wishing i could have done alot more to help out. There's alot of things i certainly could have been doing if only i made more time for it. Well, there's always Fedora 13 to focus on.

Since i always tell people that Fedora should be just as good as Debian when doing live upgrades, i think it's time to give it a test. At the moment, my system's installing the 2026 packages needed to upgrade my system. All that XZ goodness is definitely coming in handy. Even if Dutch internet is notoriously fast. At work i've contributed some serious bandwidth to seeding torrents. Unfortunately, my computer only has a 100mbit connection to the network so i cannot even try to saturate the network without some serious forethought. Still, if you're in the Netherlands, be sure to try using a torrent, because there's a good chance you'll get a damn fast connection from Utrecht. I just hope my computer isn't a smoking pile of rubble from all that torrenting when i go back to work on Thursday.

In a completely unrelated note, Jan Wildeboer wins the Silly Dutch Word of the Day Award. Rijksoctrooiwet. It's a national legal body.

Get to know a Fedora Contributor

2009-11-08T11:02:00.002+01:00

Name: Yaakov M. Nemoy

IRC Name: loupgaroublond

Channels: #fedora-ambassadors #fedora-haskell #fedora-nl #fedora-unity #fedora-devel #fedora-admin #fedora-science #fedora-bacon #fedora-social #smolt #haskell #xmonad #wplug #unixnl on freenode, #dyne #freej-devel on dyne, #eth0 on eth0, #piratenpartij on piratpartiet

About Me: Fedora Ambassador, Packager, Hang Arounder and No Good Doer.

Google Summer Of Code Mentor Summit

2009-10-25T02:49:00.002+02:00

So all i can say is that the Mentor Summit is pure awesome. A quick blog post using this qwerty keyboard won't cover it. (Damn you qwerty). There'll be a full write up in the future. Here are some impressions.

After all the issues we had with Fedora being an umbrella organisation for other projects, Toshio and i held a session about being such an org. Most notably was having KDE, ASF, and OSGEO present to share their experiences. They have had similar issues on a much larger scale.

I was surprised to see Mario Behling from LXDE here. We had a few good chats about doing deployments of LXDE on the XO 1.0 in Afghanistan and Vietnam, and using Freifunk to deliver internet. Hosting a school server in the "cloud" anyone?

Its nice and warm here, cant wait to go home to the Netherlands.

I'll write more when i have access to a real keyboard.

Doing Denyhosts a bit better

2009-10-20T13:47:00.004+02:00

At my $dayjob we have been using denyhosts to help protect our systems from potential bad guys and botnets trying to break into our systems. Apparently the latest craze has been trying to get rooted unix systems incorporated into botnets using some combination of iframes, nginx, and the usual array of normal hacking methods. One attack vector is to bruteforce ssh, which isn't new, but it's been an increasing threat. As proof of the increasing sophistication of attackers, yesterday i noticed that we had an incoming attack using common Dutch firstnames. The goal, obviously is to find a legitimate user with a weak password.

There are a few ways to protect yourself against this vector, some easier than others. Using a mix will help you further as well. The usual logic, such as making the usernames not obvious, enforcing strong password policies and all the usual niceties that manage to start flamewars so easily. You can also make sure to disable remote login as root with password authentication or block root completely unless you're already logged in. One step further is to enforce sudo only access.

One step we also take is using denyhosts to blacklist the IP addresses that are clearly showing behavior matching that of a hacker. Examples of this behavior is logging in with a non existant username, logging in with an obviously bad username such as 'www-data' or 'oracle', logging in as more than one or two users, too many bad password attempts, logging as root and so on. Denyhosts handles the heuristics for us nicely but we wanted to take this a step further. The admins before me put together a nice script where one server could convert the output from denyhosts, pass it along to our puppet configuration which would in turn deploy a blacklist across the entire network. This would in turn do two things, it would protect servers who have not yet been touched by a certain attacker, and denyhosts running on each machine would provide an initial level of blockage.

In this process, we discovered a few problems with how denyhosts works in terms of network performance. One problem we had is that processing the output from denyhosts can be pretty heavy on a system and can involved a huge number of DNS queries. When i tried to tweak script to block more things, it overloaded the system, took out our LDAP server, users couldn't authenticate, and denyhosts started systematically blocking our own network. While certain critical paths were whitelisted, we still ended up with a screwed up network for a few hours, and had one hell of a morning. One local best practice we have now is to run processes like these on a seperate VM dedicated to the task. The further we can offload the processing from critical network space, the lest likely we'll overload the network. The VMs are also running on a hypervisor that's dedicated to running our failover services that are only activated when the primary network goes down.

The second problem we had is that denyhosts will put hostnames as well as IP addresses in /etc/hosts.deny. We realized that network traffic was just a bit laggier than normal once we had the setup running for a bit. Ultimately doing both a firewall level blacklist and then running a nearly identical blacklist in /etc/hosts.deny will reduce traffic more than is necessary. Instead, i cleaned up the /etc/hosts.deny from what denyhosts did, and in the future we'll have to look at another low performance hitting method of having more computers protected faster.

One idea i have for the future is to make the system more event based rather than cron job based. When denyhosts decides it needs to block a hostname or server, it calls something that sends a message across the network to the server that will do all the processing, sanitizing, checking to make sure the host is not on a whitelist, and so on, so that computers can respond right away, but still protect the whole network. Realistically, what we should be doing is just blacklisting the entire intarwebz except for our external webservers, and having our users work from a VPN. But that's a story for another day. All in all it was a fun exercise in how to think practically about the actual load we're deploying to our servers before we do it.

Emotions Rising

2009-10-19T16:32:00.001+02:00

Dear Lazyweb,

Could someone please explain why people seem to get more emotional about what software handles their sound than they do about which distro they use or even which DE they use?

Thanks in advance.

FUDCon Live: Call for volunteers

2009-10-15T23:27:00.004+02:00

I've typed this paragraph three or four times tonight in different versions, so i'll just pass you all a link that summarizes it better than i ever could, even if i did. The basic idea is that i want to make it easier to get people not present at FUDCon involved. I want to see better live documentation of the upcoming FUDCon in Toronto. As an extra bonus, if this can be pulled off correctly, people can sit in more than one session at a time. It will make multitaskers happy, and make it easier to decide if you're really sitting in the room you want to be sitting in. I'm looking for a few good men or women to volunteer to help out.

I'm looking to document the entire event via IRC like we did at FAD EMEA. Each room will get a separate IRC channel, and if we can get it coordinated, there'll be a zodbot in each one to take notes. This will let people take advantage of zodbot features in person, provide more community at each session, make the entire process more accessible, and who knows what other creative ideas could come out of it.

In short, read this: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Toronto_2009#Documentation

Please sign up to volunteer! We need quite a few people to guarantee complete coverage.

(If you have a better idea how to do this, comments and improvements are always welcome :-) )

Moving Day

2009-10-15T21:31:00.002+02:00

Yesterday i took the day off from work in order to finish moving to a new flat across town. It's with great sadness that i won't be able to tell people i live in the Nude anymore. If i ever feel like being in the Nude though, it's not far away at all. It's almost literally across the street even.

I can honestly say i came out of the Nude on bike though.

Credits to Björn Lammers who took all the photos.

You can see more on Flickr and Facebook

I Had a Rant Brewing

2009-10-14T00:17:00.003+02:00

I had a pretty nasty headache all day, which led to a huge nasty ugly rant brewing. There's been alot going on that's just been bugging me badly about the community and communities which was just ending in some really bad nastiness. There's also been alot of certain kinds of whining in various channels that has been getting on my nerves. All in all, it's a good thing i was busy at work, and i never got the chance to sit and write it down, because the last thing the Fedora Planet needs is more fire and brimstone. A few minutes ago, Tatica announced in #fedora-ambassadors that she's reconsidered and will start posting her photoblog on the Fedora Planet again. Suddenly, the fire and brimstone seemed to melt away.

Lately there have been alot of issues with a few individuals in the greater community making sexist remarks with an insane back and forth about what is right or not in a community. I'll let the journalists and pundits slag that battle out, because on one is paying me enough for my opinions (anymore). It reaches a point where we cross a line in the community, though, and that's when we don't just make of colour comments, but we start excluding community members. This is a point where we're not discussing what's right or not, but we're actively hurting people.

Sometimes you have to have thick skin to trudge through all the muck there is in the extended community. But it's not all that easy for everyone. I'm not going to get into the details about an issue i don't know all the details about. What i do know is this: some persons' responses to one of our community members extracurricular activities convinced her to stop showing us her art. In my point of view, everything everyone does inside and outside of Fedora is their art. Even if you get paid for it. Your life revolves around it some way, and it's a massive multi participant creative project. But it's also the sort project that can include a bewilderingly wide array of people. When i say this, i don't mean every person who likes to stay up until ungodly hours of the morning, puts up black curtains to sleep during the day, and wears socks with sandals, yet living in different time zones. When i say wide, i mean from all walks of lifes, in all professions, with all sorts of hobbies. That's what makes up our community. Stopping people from displaying their art is counter-productive to what we fundamentally do. Think about that the next time, before you are about to push send on that flame.

It gets worse though. I can't for the life of me remember when i was reading this, but it was at least 4 or 5 years ago, when i was reading through the Linux HOWTOs for fun. There was one document on encouraging more women into the community. I don't really want to single out women with these comments, because i think there's a lesson for working with all kinds of people here, but here it goes. The point was that these new people we want joining our community aren't just going to chug ramen noodles every night. They are going to try new foods, and talk about it, with each other, and in public. Working with them means accepting and appreciating that these conversations, be it off topic, are going to occur in the community. The correct approach is to encourage people to tell you what they are doing in life. Who knows, it might even lead you to trying new things once or twice too.

In my mind, though, there isn't a good history here at all. When i first joined the community, i remember there was alot of debate about multiple languages on the Fedora Planet. I know that people were not made to feel welcome just because they blogged in a different language. While there were some good suggestions on how to filter what some people saw as noise, the whole conversation really seemed just as counter-productive. It seemed to me that the planet the represented our community as a whole. This is it, and people were expressing their art. Making rules about how to do this wouldn't help. It seems like everytime we have an identity crisis though, i feel like we're missing that crucial detail.

(I would think that the people involved in this latest incident are not the same as in other debates, but again, i don't know the details.)

That notwithstanding, i still have enough material for a rant of a slightly different nature, but at least the dark mood has calmed down quite a bit since there was some marginal amount of daylight out. At this point i'm just glad to see that we have a community that encourages our own to keep on doing what they do best. I'm also really happy to see Tatica post her photoblog to the planet too. It means alot when the community is free to talk about other things besides just Fedora. It's part of what makes it art.

Fedora at the Dutch HUG

2009-10-07T16:35:00.002+02:00

Unfortunately for myself, i've managed to land another speaking engagement, which means in between moving this weekend, i have to sit down and prepare a presentation. This coming Monday, the 12 of October, i'll be speaking at the Dutch HUG to talk about Fedora a bit. I will spend a bit of time discussing how to use Haskell in Fedora, what the status of things are, and how to build your own packages for Fedora. I'll explain how to use cabal2spec, a brief explanation of spec files, and a bit about the packaging process in Fedora itself. I will also cover what you'll need to do to run Haskell programs on enterprise distributions that are also RPM based. You won't need much Fedora experience to understand the presentation, though i'm assuming that you are already a Haskell programmer.

The presentation will be given at the monthly Dutch HUG meeting, which will be held at the Utrecht University Library in the Uithof. The presentations will start around 19.00 (7.00 PM for the Americans).

On Concerns about a Fork

2009-09-30T21:47:00.002+02:00

People have asked me about Bluetile because it essentially ships with its own branch of XMonad. The concern, of course, is that we don't want to ship a fork that's so closely aligned without good reason. The less code we need to ship and the fewer packages, the less room there is for error, less load on our servers, and less for the user to worry about. I asked myself the same thing, but in the chance that bluetile could turn out to be its own thing entirely, i originally started the package review as a kind of wait and see what could happen approach.

Even so, i had some of my own concerns. One of the patches Jan, the Bluetile developer, ships helps improve Gnome compatibility. Without it, XMonad is very hard to configure with Gnome. I repeated these concerns to him, but Jan's reaction is that he was intially unsure that all his patches would be accepted by upstream. I've noticed over the past couple of days on the XMonad mailing list, Jan has been pushing his patches one by one to upstream. So far, they are being accepted one by one, sometimes as is, sometimes with comments. Although i don't know exactly how far Jan has to go, it looks he's building a pretty good relationship with upstream, and i feel pretty confident the bluetile bits will all eventually find their way upstream.

Consider it another open source success story.

This might have been said before but...

2009-09-30T11:45:00.002+02:00

Yo dawg, i heard you like operating systems, so i installed emacs, so you can operate your system while you operate your system.

Git doesn't like absolute paths

2009-09-29T17:04:00.001+02:00

Note to self, while writing a script to do something on top of git, do not use absolute paths when passing things to git. Git doesn't like them. Especially when you're replacing some crusty insecure SVN code.

Fedora True Blue

2009-09-27T21:50:00.002+02:00

For FAD EMEA i brought a Fedora stickered blue lockbox with a few important Fedora EMEA things in it in case we needed them. On my way back through Basel airport, the security curtain is set up so you can actually see the security personnel scanning your bags in the scanner as they go past. I have to give the designer of the airport kudos for the transparency into the process. As i was putting things in my pockets, i saw my bag go past. For what ever reason, the false colouring added on the X ray gave the metal in the lockbox a nice blue colour pretty close to the actual colour of the box.

I won't write too much else about FAD EMEA, personally. According to ZodBot i already wrote a grand total of 645 lines in #fedora-fad, not counting the meeting we had with Pamela at Red Hat about a number of trademark issues. At the end of the day, i felt just a touch burnt out, trying to paraphrase everyone's thoughts into slightly more condense pieces and also trying to participate in the conversations. Please keep in mind, the transcript has the same value as an impression. In some cases i echoed the words people used, but in some cases i summarized paragraphs into sentences. THIS IS NOT AN EXACT TRANSCRIPT. If you're interested in reading up about the FAD, the minutes are here, and the full log was here.

The goal i had in mind was to act as a conduit for anyone who would be awake so early and would have liked to participate. I'm curious how we can do this in the future for FudCon, where we have volunteers monitoring IRC to take comments and questions from non present attendees, while they are listening or watching any streams we make available. If no stream is available, the volunteer could even transcribe and summarize like i did. It might also get interesting if present attendees use these IRC channels to be in more than one session at a time :P.

Fad EMEA Rheinfelden: Friday

2009-09-26T11:19:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I arrived in scenic Basel for the FAD EMEA and i was pretty impressed with the classy muted feel of the Basel airport. It was a pretty strong contrast from Schiphol, which is just as nice, but busy and noisy most of the time. For my second culture shock, i got interrogated by the French border control in German, and confused them thoroughly when they decided to rummage through my pockets and backpack. For better or worse, they let me through in the end. From there, Gerold picked me up on the French side, we crossed over into Germany to take care of some Fedora EMEA business at the bank, and finally stopped off at his place so i could check my email after the trip and say hello to Max, Jörg and Fabian who were already hard at work at Gerold's dining room table. Just to make sure i could be in four countries in one day, Gerold and I drove over to the Swiss border, walked across the Rhein into Switzerland so we could pick up Pierros from the train station and i could buy some chocolate. I love being able to pay in plastic, because for the few swiss francs i needed to by the chocolate, i didn't have to convert a metric tonne of currency just to do so.

When we came back, Gerold announced that he had to walk the dog, so we decided to join him so we can start discussing our plans for the following day. This was a great opportunity, because the entire area is gorgeous. Of course Gerold decided to show us his sadistic streak and sent us on a hike climbing up and down said beautiful mountainous landscape. In then this was a good thing, because we really had an appetite for dinner afterwards. For dinner, Gerold's very lovely wife put together a very traditional autumn dish for us. We had Zwiebelkuchen with Federweißer, which is a very potent way of getting you drunk if you don't watch out. The food was excellent, and for that i was grateful, because i was in a much better mood to handle the unfortunate conference we had to have with Red Hat legal. But i'll let other people discuss that.

1e Nerdavond in Wageningen

2009-09-18T14:44:00.002+02:00

Last night we held the first Nerdavond in Wageningen at the Dikke Draak.

The setup was pretty simple. We sat around the table with wifi, power, and lots of greasy junk food in the middle. You might note the halo over the fries. This may be a sign from the $deities that the food is sacrosanct, but i tell you it's probably just the light reflecting off the grease. The Dutch don't skimp when it comes to greasy foods, despite century old stereotypes about puritan behaviour.

I spent most of the time talking with Edwin who runs his own company Syn-3. He's been working on tools similar to devshell (which he calls dev's hell) to do the custom Red Hat and Debian builds they do for their customers. We went over how both our workflows go and comparing notes. It was definitely enlightening to see how devshell could be simplified to be more reliable.

Bluetile is packaged

2009-09-11T18:04:00.002+02:00

About a year and a half ago i discovered xmonad and i was instantly converted to the tiling manager way of life. It was the perfect excuse to start doing something practical with Haskell, which i had been wanting to experiment with for a couple of years. Then it was also a perfect excuse to get more involved with packaging, which sent me on a long twisty adventure. In order to give back to the community, i became more involved with Haskell packaging in order to make the experience much better in Fedora in general, and since then Haskell itself has come a long way too.

Tiling Window Management has many practical benefits to it, and can be useful even to 'non technically savy' users. What's important when starting out with a new WM is having a good way to explore it that fits your paradigm of exploration. At the time, xmonad fit mine perfectly; i needed better window management via the keyboard, and my then most recent configurations of compiz was heavily keyboard biased. For other people though, especially the aforementioned group, the initial mode of exploration is with the mouse cursor. This is why we have graphical file managers, (especially dolphin, seth), desktop environments full of widgets and glowey shiney things, and rich web pages full of javascript. As the user learns to be more productive, there is ultimately some kind of shift to the keyboard, especially when the mouse clicking exposes this clearly.

Recently, as part of a research project Jan Vornberger has put together a new tiling window manager on top of xmonad, called bluetile. Bluetile aims to close the gap between highly technical oriented tiling WMs and the everyday user who can benefit from such a design but is reliant on the mouse. His project looks to integrate a tiling WM into Gnome, provide both mouse and keyboard access for every feature, communicate clearly to the user what is going on, and provide a gentle introduction to the concept of tiling. As a new generation of users become more sophisticated, i'm sure either bluetile will grow with them, or they will eventually migrate to xmonad proper. Bluetile also ships with a bunch of patches, many of which will hopefully find their way upstream, so there will definitely be some good synergy between the two communities. I'm really looking forward to it.

I had a chance to play with bluetile in my free time, and i was really impressed at the quality and the ease of use already. It's the sort of program i would not hesitate to put on my family's computer to see what happens. I've put together some packages for bluetile, which are now sitting in the review queue. If you're morbidly curious, or just looking for some relatively easy packages to review, have a look here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=522819

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=522820

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=522821

In case anyone missed it....

2009-09-11T13:12:00.000+02:00

In my previous post, i was trolling. That is all.

Fedora Core?

2009-09-11T00:41:00.002+02:00

From now on, any time i see someone complaining about Fedora Core, especially on IRC, i could do so well as to remind them that Fedora Core is very much End Of Life and they could do so well as to upgrade to Fedora. There hasn't been a release since version 6.

Wageningen Nerdavond is a go

2009-09-10T13:52:00.002+02:00

Last night i had a quick chat with the staff at the Herberg de Dikke Draak (The lodge of the fat dragon), and we agreed that Thursday night is definitely our Nerd night at the Draak. Tonight there won't be any nerding, we'll start next week, though i'll there tonight anyways to meet some people.

The first session will be Thursday, September the 17th, (2009 if you can't figure that out) at Hoogstraat 9, Wageningen. There's be internet, electricity and beer, the three most essential things necessary. If anyone is interested in doing some kind of set project, we can always discuss it then.

In the future, this should be a weekly event, so if you can't make it next week, there'll definitely be another chance to come.

Hack / Nerd Avond in Wageningen

2009-09-07T22:56:00.003+02:00

I'm thinking of trying to put together a regular hack meet in Wageningen. The problem is that there isn't quite a unified hack culture in Wageningen yet, though there are plenty of individuals who are no stranger to spending hours behind the screen. Even the beloved Draak, the Rock / Metal bar in town is partly owned by a programmer. There have also been people talking about setting up a hackerspace in town, but then again, there's no sense in waiting on that to build up a community.

Currently the plans stand at doing a weekly meetup at the Draak thursdays and nerding. I'm aiming to find about ten people who are interested so that we have about 5 people there each week. Since four of the possible people already use Fedora, there'll definitely be alot of that. There will of course be electricity and internet, although because smoking is allowed there, don't bring your super sensitive electronics projects. I'll know more by the end of the week.

Haskell Platform

2009-08-28T16:28:00.002+02:00

Recently Bryan posted four reviews to get the Haskell Platform supported in Fedora, and i'm glad to say that i just finished the last one. This means that for Fedora 12, we'll be able to support the Haskell Platform in both 11 and 12. I'm left with a couple of questions though.

The Haskell Platform specifies a very specific version set of packages, which use a 4 digit version numbering scheme. Within reason, i presume we can provide certain higher versions of these packages that are ABI compatible, but realistically, it's going to be hard to provide the latest and greatest if we have to stick to the platform. We also don't have a mechanism for delivering more than one version of the same Haskell package in fedora (yet). So the question is, how do we manage to give the user the best of both worlds?

My two cents is that we start linking a particular release of the Haskell Platform with a particular release of Fedora. The logic being is that that version of Fedora was the state of the art at the time of the release of said platform. There's also the package cabal-install.

Another option is to provide out of line repositories that automatically have the latest and greatest, but then we don't have the scripts to do that yet. Something to think about for the future.

Reprovisioning a VM

2009-08-28T11:02:00.002+02:00

I've just discovered that if you reprovision a VM with koan, like baremetal, you do not need to rebuild up the VM in libvirt and xen. This should save a couple of steps in the future.

For reference, i'm talking about:

koan -r && reboot

on a running machine.

Exit Interview for GSoC

2009-08-25T11:06:00.003+02:00

A few days ago i sent Satya an exit interview for the human interest angle of things, that she can voluntarily answer publicly or privately. Since this interview, namely the questions, might be useful to someone else, i want to post them here:

What did you learn this summer? Tell me both about technology and
community, and about things you learnt because of GSoC and otherwise.
What motivated you to keep going for three months and not just stop
after the first week?
What kinds of frustrations and challenges did you come across this
summer? It doesn't have to be GSoC related either.
How did you overcome these challenges?
What else did you do during your free time in the summer?
What motivated you to do this in the beginning in the summer? What
need did you feel like you were filling?
Is this still important? Or perhaps you have other reasons for keeping up?
Given the chance, would you do this project again?
Given the chance, would you do another GSoC project again?
Did you make any good relationships with in the various FOSS or hacker
communities?
What are your future plans in life?

Facebook Casualties

2009-08-25T10:30:00.002+02:00

Maybe i'm turning into an old man, but i think there are probably better ways to communicate than Facebook.

Recently the ACLU has released a facebook app that demonstrates how much a single app can find out about your friends. If you're curious what i'm getting cranky about, and you use facebook, i suggest you try it out. (Either that really is the ACLU or a very clever social engineer impersonating the ACLU, but the point is the same.)

Since Facebook allows any app to see anything about anyone's friends, i've decided this is a severe privacy risk because i cannot control which applications i trust with my personal details. While Facebook is a great platform with alot of potential, Facebook's policies are not something i can live with. Rather than being a luddite and deleting my Facebook account, i've decided to start dropping people who use sensless applications without a reasonable privacy policy. These people i'm calling casualties.

I'm debating if i should start putting up a Wall of Shame, or if that would be an equal invasion of privacy. I guess for now i'll say i've already dropped a Fedora contributor. This is gonna get tricky once i start dropping family members.

FreeJ Release Party

2009-08-24T14:48:00.002+02:00

Last night i attended the FreeJ 1.0 release party at the Nederland Instituut voor Media Kunst, or in english, the Dutch Institute for Media Arts. The NIMK is an art gallery / studio / institute for multimedia arts and it really focuses on some avant garde work. As a bonus, most of the exhibits there run on free software, and it's very rare they host an exhibit using windows. Since one of the core developers works there, it make perfect sense to hold the release party there. Congratulations to all the developers for finally making it to 1.0.

As part of the release party, Jaromil surprised us with a panel on the future of media codecs, which i was invited to participate in. The history of FreeJ is heavily involved in activism and the arts, and the developers have been heavily invested in promoting Theora and other Free as in Freedom codecs. It's very hard to broadcast a controversial message when your message is 'jailed' in a proprietary codec that relies on patent encumbered software, not only to distribute it, but to receive and view it as well. While the patents on MP3 and MPEG are eventually going to expire, there will always be new codecs with new patents, or worse yet, other encumbrances that will make it an uphill battle.

On the panel sat Jaromil, Bastiaan "buZz", Chris "MrGoil", Pablo "caedes" and myself. Jaro opened up the conversation asking us about the future of codecs in general and where we're going. Obviously, there were some setbacks a few months ago with the lack of video standardization in the HTML 5 standard, and how there were conflicting needs for the (then) better but patent encumbered H.264 codec and Theora. We discussed the need for making sure the platform itself is open so the user can install any code wanted, even if free codecs aren't provided out of the box.

After explaining half the issues to a partly non technical audience, we transitioned to talking a bit about Pablo's work on Crystal Space. His latest projects is an open platform for people working on any visual media, including both 2d film and 3d objects. In short imagine Git for content that's not just one dimensional streams of text. Many graphics shops have issues where once one person checks out a model, it's a single binary blob that no one else can edit. These tools enable the content editors to work on different aspects of the same model simultaneously and intelligently handle merging. We got a bit 'psychedelic' explaining how we are going from a single one dimensional model to a 4 dimensional model. (That word was picked by one of the audience members ^_^). I think switching from a dubbel to a trippel help explained the paradigm shift too.

While it wasn't part of the panel, i also want to mention Tatiana's work "acracia". She has been working on a distributed platform for icecast and content browsing under the project GISS, Global Independent Streaming Support. The project works two fold. The first part is a distributed network for streaming content, where people can pool together private stream servers, and share each other's load when one particular stream suffers the slashdot effect. This significantly lowers the barrier to streaming any online media to a project with little resources. The second part is a frontend like youtube that can also be run on a local server and is far more customizable. Not including the workload involved in transcribing submissions, they are running the entire thing inside a single VM at the moment, so for a website hosting alot of video, it's pretty resource friendly.

All in all, it was a pretty enlightening evening.

The end of GSoC 2009

2009-08-21T11:39:00.003+02:00

Today i filled out my evaluation for Satya for the Google Summer of Code. I'm not sure if i'm allowed to discuss the grade yet, though i think everyone involved is smart enough to guess what it is. I just want to share some comments i put at the end of the form about what Satya has done:

I think the most important
qualifications of Satya's work are the
end results. The Fedora Project now has
a decent Docbook editor. The upstream
Beacon project has been motivated into
becoming a better upstream (read: a
better website) and the community there
has been revitalized. Fedora and Gentoo
now share a common project, which fits
in with Fedora's mission of working with
both upstream and the community at
large. Satya can definitely take credit
for being the catalyst for these
changes. Therefore, i give her a passing
grade.

If you're familiar with Red Hat culture, you'll understand that "catalyst" is a great Buzzword Bingo word there. I think Satya will fit in quite nicely there.

Some more HAR coverage

2009-08-19T17:36:00.002+02:00

I found a great blog post that describes nicely what HAR is like. Check it out.

Live as if you are already in the future at hacker camp

Saves me a bit of blogging trouble :)

Nerds fight like no other

2009-08-18T17:03:00.004+02:00

I remember seeing in the Dutch press an article about HAR commented that computer hackers fight the dirtiest. Well, a little friendly joking around can't hurt. One of the great things about hacker cons is it's not really important which distro you use, i even saw people running Windows 7 on the open network. Even so, there's always going to be a bit of goofing off:

Officially, the Ubuntu village was slightly better represented than Fedora, but i think we had alot of great word of mouth advertising. The people who needed Fedora CDs knew exactly where to come to.

You can definitely say we had better uptime and presence at the tent.

It's nice to know that some people know what people are really looking for ;).

Wanted: Web Designer

2009-08-18T15:32:00.003+02:00

Dear Lazyweb,

I've decided that i need a Hackers on a Bike website and logo for the future. I was thinking of starting off with a simple wordpress blog, but there's obviously alot of potential for what can be done with such a site, and no matter what happens, there's a definite need for some good design. I also need to come up with a logo, and since programming logo is the extent of my graphics skills, all help is appreciated. Anyone interested?

Hacking at Random: The Aftermath

2009-08-18T10:27:00.002+02:00

I think i'm getting old. I decided it would be a good idea to leave a day early to get some extra sleep, and be well rested when i got to work today. Hearing threats about the internet and power being cut off helped motivate things as well.

Hacking at Random is definitely an experience. You never quite feel the same person after these hack camps as you did before you left home, and it's always for the best. If you feel like you missed out, and want to spend a couple of weekends catching up on the lectures, i believe the lectures and the radio feeds are being archived, and a bit of googling will help. A good hack camp isn't just about lectures though. It's about watching someone's FTP server going down, hopping on your bike to tell him in person, and getting side tracked along the way. By the time you've made it there, you're missing your shirt and shoes, and you're covered in paint and dyes. Sure this happens at any other festival, but not because someone's FTP server crashed.

I can't exactly say i was that productive at this event, but i wasn't planning on it. I spent most of my time off the computer, because there was so much going on. Overall, it was a great vacation. Now i'm looking forward to eth-0 and the CCC.

Internation House of Pancakes

2009-08-14T21:33:00.002+02:00

We just had an international pancake cookoff at the Fedora / CentOS / Dyne / FreeJ village, and i'm really starting to consider calling the village the International House of Pancakes. First i started off with proper American style pancakes, which are more like a fried pastry, using a very traditional farmhouse recipe. Then we followed up with Dutch style pannekoeken which have the bacon and cheese cooked in. There were also the German kind which skip the bacon and cheese and go for powdered sugar instead, like a crepe. Supposedly there are going to be Canadian and Italian style coming up, but i think everyone is getting pretty full already. Thanks to the Canadian crew who's come to hang out with us, we also have ourselves a nice can of Canadian Maple Syrup. I use capital letters because it's really that great and awesome.

Didi

2009-08-13T08:57:00.000+02:00

Didi just woke up and said: "I don't drink alcohol".

Hacking at Random: Day 1 Ochtend

2009-08-13T08:29:00.002+02:00

So after passing out fairly early last night, i woke up far to early, and now i'm taking advantage of the quietness to get my bearings organized. Unlike most conferences, this one doesn't start presentations until sometime in the afternoon. They know their crowd here.

To give you all an idea of what's going on, let me give you an overview. Hacking at Random is the once every four year Dutch hacking camping conference and lan party. This year, there is a stronger focus towards technology and society than there has been in the past, so much so that the MPAA and Brein have shown up.

As for Fedora, we've put together a conglomerated village between various groups and individuals Alex C. and i know, made up mostly of the people we want to sit around and drink beer with. On the Fedora and CentOS side, we have Andreas Thienemann, Didi and Chris Meyer, and on the other side we have a mix of all sorts of visual artists and DJs from FreeJ/Dynebolic and a group of other people Alex knows from all over. We're also situated right across from the lake and right across from the CCC dome. We also have a few spaces staked out for a couple more people who are coming, including Dag Wieers. True to form, when Jaromil arrived, he managed to squat a tent, which someone set up, but left empty. Being the good citizen that he is, he made sure that the tent didn't stay open for junkies to come in and destroy. Now there's an active community revolving around this tent. (House squatting is legal in the Netherlands.)

We had planned to put together something marketable as a tent, but unfortunately, the Fedora banners did not arrive in time for us to use. I may try to convince someone to drive me home on Friday to check to see if they might be there by then, but until then, we are sitting relatively anonymous. Despite that, we already have a reputation as "Fedora and CentOS" here, and with these sorts of things, word of mouth marketing can be very valuable. We're still trying to get all of our things together in the tent, and at the moment, Alex, Buzz, and Zmatt are setting up lighting in the tent, so we can put on a nice light show later. I really want to publically thank Alex C and give my kudos to him. He's put quite a bit of his time in organizing this tent, and it's come out quite nicely.

I think my next task is to go around and try to market our BarCamp as much as possible. Compared to the rest of the event, our setup is quite small, but we're looking to hold a few media workshops, hackfests, and demos / presentations, and especially if you're doing it on top of a Fedora or Fedora based system. (Or even a derivative of a Fedora derivative, like Jaro is using.) Since BarCamps are the preferred format by Fedora for things, i will be giving the BarCamp presentation to the birds, and then people will go ahead and do their thing. If you're on the terrain, you should definitely come check it out on Saturday.

Hackers on a Bike: Done

2009-08-13T01:29:00.003+02:00

So i'm alive at the Hacking at Random terrain. My GPS gave me a grand sum of 58km. Now i'm sitting in my tent about ready to go to sleep. I'll post more as events unfold.

EDIT: I should add that i'm right across from the CCC dome. Sleeping is going to be a challenge.

Extra HAR ticket available

2009-08-10T12:38:00.002+02:00

It seems that Bert has come down with the Taco Hoest, and now i have an extra ticket for Hacking at Random available. If you are a Fedora Ambassador and would like to go to Hacking at Random last minute, i can arrange it for free. If you are just looking for a ticket, i can sell it to you for the original discount price of 150 euros. If you're in some kind of financial straits, we can work out a better deal as well, as the ticket is already paid for.

If you're up for it, i also have some space in my tent for you, and as i've already gotten the flu that's going around, you stand very little chance to get infected from me. Also appreciated is if you can come to Wageningen Tuesday night to help out with Hackers on a Bike, though this isn't required.

So let me know via the usual methods, but do it quick, HAR starts this Thursday.

Off to Arnhem

2009-08-07T17:17:00.003+02:00

Because Jeroen was relocating his servers today, i got stuck with a two hour blocker at work due to stale DNS entries in the local server. Instead of doing nothing, i decided to go home to fix my bike to get ready for Hackers on a Bike. I was planning on finishing up at home later in the evening.

Of course, i love sudden changes in plans. On my way home, Alex C. sent me a message about going to Arnhem to pick up some saddle bags with him, also for HoaB. So now i'm off on a bike trip to Arnhem and back tonight. This should be fun.

Infra on a stick

2009-08-07T10:39:00.002+02:00

No sorry, that's not infrared but infrastructure. At work, i've been looking at switching our infrastructure over from our current puppet setup to a combined cobbler + puppet setup on top of puppetmanaged.org. The idea is to get our servers provisioned as quickly as possible with the right kernels, and just enough information to hook up to the network so we can remote connect to it. From there, everything can be managed via puppet, even puppet.

In order to get a feel for how this might work, i've been working on bootstrapping this from scratch. When you manage puppet via puppet, you need a base config to start from, and i've been trying to figure out the most minimal puppet config i can use to start up another puppet server. This got me thinking about a potential puppetmanaged.org live spin. This could be a CD or USB stick with either a barebones config, or respun for your local organisation with a git checkout of your internal configuration. There would be a running DHCP, DNS, Cobbler, Puppet and Func server on it. (Yeah, i know Func doesn't call it a server.) I'm assuming these are the basics you need to get your network up and running. The spin would also have a couple of scripts, where you can point it to up to five different servers, baremetal or virtual, get them up and running, deploy your local config if needed, and then via func, flip a switch so that they look at each other for updates, rather than at the computer running live.

I'm hoping i can get a good basic puppet bootstrap up and running before i run off to HAR.

Why Setuptools?

2009-07-29T16:28:00.002+02:00

I've been having alot of conversations with Jeroen (kanarip) lately about using setuptools instead of autotools for Python programs. He's not convinced, and to be honest, some of our projects in Fedora won't trannslate easily from an autotools setup to a setuptools setup. There's always room to improve, though it would be nice if autotools could automatically generate egg.info metadata and provide a convenient setup.py (or even a pavement.py).

Let me point out though why you might want to consider using setuptools instead of doing it wrong.

Part of the PEP 8 and PEP 328 is that absolute imports are used as often as possible. The idea is that you specify exactly which module needs to be imported to make the code work. Even if the code is relocated, it still works. It also means that the system can arrange the files any way it wants, so long the Python interpreter sees the same structure for the modules. This lets distro developers and operating system designers put Python modules wherever they feel necessary, as well as letting tools like virtualenv override the OS defaults on a per user or per application basis.

However, if you use an 'alternative' directory structure in your project, you might find yourself running into trouble. Say you have a module you're building called 'foo'. In your source directory, you have some directory /src/foo/some_code.py . There's also some script /run_foo.py at the top level of the source tree. If there is a line in run_foo.py that calls 'from foo import some_code', Python will raise an exception that the module foo cannot be found.

One common, although very wrong and messy solution is to catch said ImportError. In the corresponding catch block, there is alot of code to check to see where the code is being run. Then it digs into the internals of the module import system in Python so that it pretends it can really see the module foo and all its submodules. This is a rather unfortunate way of writing code, because it really limits what you can do in the source tree. For every script that you have, you may have to copy and paste this code. Furthermore, if you change the layout in the source tree, you may break all your scripts and have to change them manually. Finally, you have to question the sanity of putting file system specific code in a program. There are clear places where such code makes sense, but tinkering with the filesystem and path environment is not one of them.

Luckily, setuptools can do all this work for you. It can translate any on disk file system layout, such as /src/foo/some_code.py to foo.some_code for you. It can also direct installation to work properly. It can even modify your Python path environment so you can work directly out of your source tree. Any changes you make will show up automatically. Finally, we can isolate all the code into one place. The entire mapping is just a simple dictionary in one file, which is analogous to a configure.ac file.

I may post something later about where setuptools fails, and how we might be able to work around it.

Fedora == Debian ?

2009-07-25T00:44:00.002+02:00

Jeroen just told me that Fedora's Everything spin fits on 33 CDs (for the 64 bit version), which is just about as many CDs as Debian takes up. I guess we're the new debian.

I want a Fedora Everything on floppy. My work machine, despite having entirely new hardware inside right down to a complete lack of PATA controllers, has a floppy drive. I want to relive the experience of installing Debian via floppy, but this time in Fedora. For old times sake. I want a pony.

When is Presto not worth it?

2009-07-20T16:04:00.002+02:00

Living in the Netherlands means that you're one of the fraction of 1% of the people on this planet who have access to very high bandwidth internet connections. Working for a University means that you get even more access to said high bandwidth. Luckily, i don't need tools like Presto to update my system.

I went to update my system, and noticed something interesting. Yum, while rebuilding the rpms out of delta rpms, gives a bandwidth meter on how fast the operation is going, and as it turns out, yum is slower than just pulling random packages from the internet. In some ways, running Presto actually slows down updates when a fast connection to the mirror is available. It stands to reason that in any network running a local mirror, Presto is probably not needed either.

So do i keep Presto enabled? For the time being, i will. The extra CPU time costs my employer money, which i'd rather do than use up someone else's bandwidth. While we're probably talking fractions of pennies here, with the number of Fedora users, such things do add up.

Last chance for cheaper HAR tickets

2009-07-17T15:16:00.002+02:00

Since Hackers on a Bike got mentioned in a recent letter sent out to all the participants of HAR, i am extra motivated to remind everyone here that time is running short on HAR. The organizers posted the following announcement:

Pre-sale closing July 20th, HoaB, first-aid needs help

For those of you who still have not got their ticket for HAR2009: the
pre-sale discount of EUR 20,- only applies for less than 96 hours. With
the discount, a ticket sells for EUR 185,- (or EUR 180,- if you enter
the coupon code `FNLPPRCH'). After July 20th, without the discount, the
price will be EUR 205,-. In addition, if you plan to use direct
transfer (IBAN/BIC), this is really the last chance to buy a ticket in
advance. After July 20th, the tickets will sell for the door-price, and
only credit-card and iDeal transactions will be possible.

So, if you haven't already, [1]head over to the ticket shop now and
get your tickets for Hacking at Random. Not only does it give peace of
mind, knowing that you can get in regardless of whether the event is
sold out or not, you're also making sure that this will be the last
time I have to write a few paragraphs to implore you to get your
tickets :)

Hackers on a Bike

Some of the more sturdy hackers are planning to cycle over to Hacking
at Random: a smart, healthy and environmentally friendly way of
traveling to the camping grounds. Although the title may lead you to
believe this is some crazy scheme involving [2]one of those lethal
beer-bicycles, there will not be multiple hackers on a single bike. The
participants will each commandeer their own bicycle. To find out all
the details, check out [3]the wiki page.

The original plan included departure from Wageningen, NL (which is
actually not too far away from the event) but by now other routes are
being planned. A group will depart from Amsterdam, and there are even
people who start in Belgium or Germany. I tip my hat to your stamina!
Some of the Hackers on a Bike might break free of the regular
proceedings for a day trip cycling around the Veluwe, which (you might
have heard) is one of the better offerings nature has in the
neighborhood.

(Actually, Bert is taking the train to Wageningen, he's not actually biking all the way from Belgium ;) ).

Team:First-Aid looking for qualified volunteers

Do you have a first-aid diploma (Dutch EHBO or BHV certificate, or
something equivalent)? You speak English very goodly? Are not afraid of
blood? Capable of staying sober for a sustained period of time?
Prepared to miss some lectures to man the post?? Then you are what the
first-aid team is looking for! The nights are pretty much covered,
however during the day this team can certainly use your help.

The first-aid team is first in line when someone hurts himself. You do
not need to be a MD, however some basic training in first-aid (and
something that says you successfully completed the training) is
required. Serious medical problems will be for the official emergency
services, the team only has supplies and expertise for basic medical
care in case someone cuts her- or himself, burns her- or himself (not
unlikely with all the soldering going on) or sprains an ankle.

If you are interested, please check out this teams [4]wiki page.

References

1. https://tickets.har2009.org/
2. http://www.fietscafe.nl/images/fiets_amst.jpg
3. https://wiki.har2009.org/page/HackersonaBike
4. https://wiki.har2009.org/page/First-Aid

VirtualBox, SELinux, and FUDCon bracelets

2009-07-14T14:34:00.003+02:00

A couple of weeks back i deleted that spare Windows partition i had lying around. I decided that i had no regular need for it, and there was no reason to keep the bloated piece of garbage Vista is lying around. The only (dis)advantage is that i can no longer use it to play games. It never played them perfectly anyways. The advantage though, is that Microsoft can no longer install .Net plugins into my Firefox setup let my computer be infected with their shoddy business practices.

Well, i still would like to have access to a couple of programs that i just can't seem to get to work right on wine and/or other methods. Being the secular stallmanist i am, i don't mind using open source software on windows now and then, and there are a few programs i like to use. Hearing about the updated VirtualBox release that now does 3D acceleration pretty well, i decided to give it a try. Yes it works :D. Unfortunately it does not work with SELinux in enforcing mode, but i don't mind switching to Permissive for the few hours i need to do something with it.

On a completely unrelated note, the FUDCon bracelet i've been wearing for about a year now finally broke at work yesterday. I have another one, but i haven't decided if i want to start wearing that one now. Does anyone else wear them still, or even abuse them to hold doors open to overheating server rooms?

FAD At Random 2009

2009-07-05T23:21:00.002+02:00

I would like to formally introduce some plans I've been putting together to hold a proper Fedora Activity Day at Hacking At Random this summer. There has been alot of discussion over the past few months to have a formal Fedora presence there, to come hang out, enjoy the lovely Dutch summer weather, have a beer or two, and just show off how crazy we can be. I've also had talks with people from FreeJ/Dyne:bolic and from CentOS about sharing space, primarily because we all shared the same space last summer at Eth-0 and it worked out great. So without further ado:

The FAD at Random 2009 will be held near Vierhouten, August 15th at Hacking at Random. The topic of the FAD will be Media and Media arts using Open Source in general and Fedora in particular. The format will be pretty free form. There will be a few tents for hacking in and a tent with a projector to do presentations. We will hold a barcamp where people can do presentations or just show off demos. Some people from the village will also be VJing sporadically during the event, although the entire thing is ad-hoc.

We will also be forming a village between these four groups for the duration of HAR, so be there or be something not round.

Green Computing?

2009-07-02T21:10:00.002+02:00

The computer i have at work is haunted. The person who had it before me was frequently getting blue screens of doom. We tried to fix that by putting Fedora on it, but today, after loading up the latest updates, i get regular crashes trying to run 3d screen savers. (Seriously, who doesn't run Molecule while working for a genetics laboratory?).

I was given the choice, to run memtest tonight and let it run all the way through or to try with random sticks of RAM tomorrow. I opted for the latter because it means not keeping the machine on all night long. But is it really more green? Those sticks of RAM have a certain environmental load too. Is it better to run energy using tests on the currently existing hardware or check every point of failure with a backup known working set? Which is more green? Should we even worry about such decisions at all?

In Berlin You Can't Have a Pony

2009-07-01T23:07:00.004+02:00

We discovered that in Berlin, you can't have a pony. There was a sign on the subway warning us about this unfortunateness.

Flickr Link Here

Literally it means the seat is not a garbage dump, but Berlin is quite a liberal city, so i'm going to use quite a liberal translation.

BOFH

2009-07-01T21:17:00.002+02:00

Today i began my new job in Utrecht as a Systeembeheerder, which is just Dutch for Bastard Operator From Hell. I've been told that while we are in charge of a very wide variety of duties, the problems we have to solve tend to fall under two categories.

1) "Halp! I can't read my email!" - I'm clearly not responsible because that's handled by a central agency.

2) "The printer is broken." - I'm not a janitor, clean up your own mess.

I'm already loving this job.

My Run In with CentOS at LinuxTag

2009-06-25T14:41:00.002+02:00

As everyone can now see in Mo's post, my laptop cover is almost completely covered with stickers. Having no room left there, it's time to sticker up my laptop bag. I'm trying to start a new meme where i have Shadowman saying various things, and convincing people to use Fedora stickers. Hopefully there will be some pictures later, if i run into Mo.

On my quest to get some stickers, i decided that a CentOS sticker would also be appropriate. Although i was scheduled to start at the booth just then, i decided a quick jaunt over to the CentOS booth would only take a couple of minutes. The guys there were more than happy to help me sticker up my laptop bag further.

While i was there, i started talking with Didi and others about Hacking At Random. Well, the everyone there likes camping, so it seems we will have quite a bit of a CentOS presence there. They were planning on bringing a larger tent as well, so taking up the opportunity, we agreed to try to combine our tents a bit. Now it seems the FreeJ/Dyne/Fedora Village has just gotten a bit bigger.

For HAR, we're planning on starting an Event Box for EMEA and debuting it there. Hopefully if we get our hands on a projector and screen, we can do a combination of a Fedora/CentOS/FreeJ barcamp as well as VJing and running demos at night. If you want to participate in the process of putting together the Event Box, we'll be having a session at FUDCon on Saturday or Sunday to coordinate planning and hammer out a few details.

The New Treasurer of Fedora EMEA e.V.

2009-06-25T01:54:00.002+02:00

Three blog posts in one day. I hope this doesn't become a daily habit.

Today we had our yearly LinuxTag members meeting of Fedora EMEA. For those of you that don't know, Fedora EMEA is The Bikeshed of politics. Picture this, a bunch of computer hackers with access to a legal entity with legal bylaws and rules that run in parallel but outside of the standard Fedora processes. Put us all in one room, give us a two hour time limit, and i guarantee you we'll argue about how to vote for at least an hour. All in all, it's alot of fun.

At our meeting, Max had to unfortunately announce that he is resigning as treasurer. At the time he joined, it was wise to keep the treasurer position tied in with managing the EMEA budget in Fedora while things were being defined in EMEA over the past year. By now though, we have a bit of a rhythm set up when it comes to sponsoring and supporting events. Ultimately, this position should be entirely in the hands of the community.

I had been thinking that perhaps after a year in the Netherlands, where i can get my own routine and rhythm set up, i would run for a position on the Fedora EMEA board. As it turned out, the position opened up and there was only one other volunteer. We took a vote (with alot of debate), and the position fell to me. For now i'm accepting the position, and we'll see where it goes from there.

Why did i vote?

2009-06-24T15:23:00.003+02:00

I'm seeing the start of a new meme on Fedora Planet, so i figured i'd chip in a bit of useless information.

I voted because it's the thing to do. You grow up with a certain sense of civic responsibility to contribute where asked and to make sure that your personal views are in some way being represented. The reality about politics, though, is that if you really are so emotionally invested in your views, voting is not nearly enough. You join or form a political party, run for positions of power, write letters and communicate with the others involved, and simply put, make your voice heard. I simply did not feel emotionally involved enough, because i can do my work in Fedora regardless.

Perhaps when we look at the election model for various Fedora Boards, we have to look at voting as nothing more than a thumbs up or thumbs down. We really have to think about how to get people's views better represented and how to get people more emotionally involved.

Where are the trolls now?

2009-06-24T11:29:00.003+02:00

I've been seeing alot of nonsense and FUD about Mono, Fedora, Gnome and whatnot bloating the intertubes. In some ways it's really bizarre to consider Mono dangerous when one of the chief developers of GHC and Haskell works gladly for Microsoft.

You can see on Simon Peyton-Jones' Microsoft Research Profile page here that he gladly works for the great evil Microsoft. Despite that, the Haskell community has been relatively FUD free, and there has been very little suspicion of interference by Microsoft. Much of Simon's work in Microsoft has gone on to influence F#, which, yes, is a key part of the .Net/Mono offering.

Personally, i'm quite happy to see GHC and Haskell code in Fedora. I don't quite get what all the fuss is about.

Speaking German After a Hiatus

2009-06-22T21:17:00.002+02:00

I have to say, after spending a month speaking Dutch nearly all the time, my German is in a bit of a sorry state. I just got off the phone to reserve a shuttle to the hotel for tomorrow, and i can't say i was too proud of my German skills as much as i was last year at LinuxTag. I'm sure it'll come back in a couple of days, but now you can't say you haven't been warned ;).

See you all tomorrow.

Haskell Bindings to C from Start to Finish

2009-06-17T19:25:00.000+02:00

Out of curiosity i wanted to learn how to put together bindings from C to Haskell. The primary need for this on my radar is enabling X composition directly in Haskell, to enable 3D effects in XMonad. Haskell is a great language for doing graphics work, so there is definitely good sense in providing bindings for such things.

However, working with X can be a bit of a large project as the build systems and workflows for bindings are already relatively complex. I decided to familiarize myself with C2HS, which seems like the future of Haskell bindings, based on the brief bit of research i did. Another important set of bindings we may need in the future are good bindings to the RPM library. Problem here is that there is no good documentation on testing bindings with C2HS from start to finish. What follows is roughly a guide to the results i got, minus the swearing, crashing out in a nervous caffinated wreck for a few hours in between, and the tasty "Hollandse Nieuw" herring i had when i woke up.

(This year's herring is really tasty, if you get the chance to visit Holland, try one or two of them.)

The following is just bare metal work, in order to test the basic functionality of your bindings. There will hopefully be posts following this one on how to use autotools and cabal in order to build packages. (As soon as i figure it out myself.)

C2HS's workflow can be summed up as this. Write code in the C2HS format which is passed through C2HS as a preprocessor, which yields Haskell code. You run this code through ghc with extra command line flags to link the right libraries, and it yields a nice Haskell Library that you can link to later. Then just import your code in your program like normal, and you're good to go.

As a sane demo, i am starting with the sample code from the RPM documentation. This can be found here under Listing 16-1

First off, make your project directory. For me this is /rpm/. Since i want the library to be RedHat.Rpm.RpmLib i also need a directory /rpm/RedHat/Rpm/. (I'm debating if i want to keep the RedHat prefix.) Then create a file /rpm/RedHat/Rpm/RpmLib.chs, and immediately begin it with:


{-# LANGUAGE ForeignFunctionInterface #-}
{-# LANGUAGE TypeSynonymInstances #-}

#include <rpmlib.h>

{# context lib="rpmlib" #}

module RedHat.Rpm.RpmLib (
  rpmReadConfigFiles
  ) where

import C2HS
import Foreign.Ptr

rpmReadConfigFiles is the only function we need so far from RPM. The first two lines enable extensions to GHC. The first is for doing Foreign functions, the second will be used later. Then include a standard CPP include statement. Finally we declare the module and the tokens it exports and import two modules we need from Haskell. Some of these details can be put off into the build system later, but since we are working with the tools directly, we can just put them in our code.

The function we want to bind is defined in /usr/include/rpm/rpmlib.h as such:


/** \ingroup rpmrc
 * Read macro configuration file(s) for a target.
 * @param file  colon separated files to read (NULL uses default)
 * @param target target platform (NULL uses default)
 * @return  0 on success, -1 on error
 */
int rpmReadConfigFiles(const char * file,
  const char * target);

This presents a bit of a unique problem. Normally a C style string presents two possibilities we need to account for. Either it contains characters or it's an empty string. Haskell can handle this equally as well with the String type. However, here we have a third possibility, the two in parameters can be null pointers, which is not exactly the same as an empty string. Internally we can handle all three cases in Haskell as a Ptr CChar which lines up exactly to the C function. However, at the outer levels, we really need to create a function that can accept either a null pointer or a String. In order to handle this, we need a new class of RString, such that:


class RString t where
    withRString :: t -> (Ptr CChar -> IO a) -> IO a

instance RString String where
    withRString s m = withCString s m

instance RString CString where
    withRString cs m = m cs

One of the gotchas of programming C level code in Haskell is that all C level code, namely pointers, need to run inside the IO Monad. There simply isn't a (safe) way to convert something like a String to a Ptr CChar outside of IO. C2HS makes use of a withT function pattern to marshall pure Haskell data to pointers to objects in C.

In our case, if we get a String, whether containing data or empty, we need to marshal it into a CString. If we get a Ptr though, we can assume it's already been marshalled. Chances are, there are cases that can break this, but for our simple example, there's relatively little harm we can do. In any case, withCString first marshals the String into a CString and then does pretty much what the Ptr version of our code does.

With all this squared away, we can define our function pretty much as per the documentation for C2HS.


{#fun unsafe rpmReadConfigFiles
      `(RString s)' =>
      {withRString* `s'      ,
       withRString* `s'    } -> `Int'#}

This creates a new function that cannot call back into Haskell code, accepts anything of RString class, and marshals it with our code. This returns an IO Int. This is it for our binding.

The fun part is compiling it. The first step is to run c2hs on the .chs file. We need to include parameters to the C Preprocessor that tells c2hs where to find the C header files. We also use -l to copy C2HS.hs into the same directory, as it is needed by ghc later. The next step is to run GHC on the resulting .hs file.


/rpm/RedHat/Rpm/ $ c2hs --cppopts='-I/usr/include/rpm/' -l RpmLib.chs
ghc --make RpmLib.hs

Now that this is done, the next step is to build an executable that uses this binding in order to test it. This file, rpm1.hs goes in /rpm/


module Main
where

import RedHat.Rpm.RpmLib
import Foreign
import Foreign.C.String

nullP :: CString
nullP = nullPtr

main :: IO ()
main = do status <- rpmReadConfigFiles nullP nullP
          putStrLn (show status)

Since we defined our class only for Ptr CChar (aka CString) and not for the general Ptr a, we use a helper to type cast nullPtr. There's probably a more idiomatic way to do this, but all we need is a kludge. The rest pulls the integer result from the function and prints it on the screen. To compile this, we use the following ghc magic. It includes another call to link in the rpm library.


/rpm/ $ ghc -lrpm --make -debug rpm1.hs
/rpm/ $ ./rpm1
0

That is from start to finish how to write your own C bindings in Haskell. Hopefully i'll figure out how to get this to work via cabal, so i don't need to run so many commands to run tests.

Fedora 11 Release Party Wau Report

2009-06-16T23:25:00.000+02:00

I've been a bit remiss in reporting on our release party in a timely fashion, but better late than never.

Our plan was to have an outdoor hackfest following the tradition set by eth0:wau last summer. The rules are simple, grill meat, drink beer, and sit around with the computers outside as long as possible. Last year, it yielded this:

Perhaps we did better this year. I'll let you decide.

We started at a typically undutch time, an hour late. We had the fire up and going at around 6, but it wasn't till nearly seven when we started preparing food in the kitchen. People started showing up around then and kept coming as the night ran on until around 11. Our release party ran along side the birthday parties for two of Alex's housemates. Without that, it might have just been us nerds sitting around in the cold night weather hacking around. As it turns out, some of the guests are also a bit technically oriented, so a couple USB keys laters, we may have a couple switch overs to Linux.

Seeing it was a birthday party, and we had a bunch of extra I <3 Fedora shirts, gave the two guests of honour a very nice Fedora birthday present. Here's Piu, the cat, trying to get in on the action again.

The night ran on and it was the usual share nerdery, installing Fedora on a few machines and swapping files around via a sneakernet. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of DVDs. In the end i made it to around 3.30, where Alex said i was acting especially loupy, right before i fell asleep. A couple of people made it through all night long, though in the end pretty much everyone got a few hours of sleep at one point or another. As we all woke up at different times, we didn't get around to having a proper breakfast until close to 17:00 the next afternoon. As Alex keeps chickens in his backyard, we were treated to some very fresh eggs.

In the end we had the tents up until around 20:00, ate dinner, packed up and went home. All in all, i think we did it justice.

For more pictures see these links.
Fedora 11 Wageningen on Facebook
Fedora 11 Wageningen on Spacedout

I should be a better tester

2009-06-10T02:07:00.002+02:00

Kanarip is right, i should test rawhide more frequently. I've come across some SELinux denials on the livecd using the installer, which don't affect things too badly but can really scare the newbies. Well, in particular, the newbies that use Dvorak all the time.

(Don't worry, i've already reported the bug.)

For this go around i've done things a bit different. Normally i tend to fetch the DVD installer, hand pick all the packages in need a head of time, download them and install. This time, i've decided to go the route we should recommend to the pedestrians. I used the KDE Live CD and so far it's been pretty smooth. KDE 4.2 is pretty fast, KDE 4.3 is even faster. Getting Firefox installed literally took a matter of seconds. I don't know how you can't recommend this to even the most basic users around. The entire system is just plain snappy.

Coming up: Fedora 11 Release Party in Wageningen

More Snarkyness

2009-06-04T11:59:00.003+02:00

I've previously commented on how to redefine marketing to your advantage.

Today, i would like to introduce you to a bit more snarkyness at the expense of a direct competitor. We're familiar with the standard IRC conversation:

<luser> ping
<user> pong

In IRC channels, we also see this form (that conveniently lines up):

<luser> user: ping
<user> luser: pong

I propose we change the aspirated voiceless bilabial stop to an unaspirated voiced bilabial stop. To foreigners whose native languages do not include the aspirated distinction between voiced and voiceless variants, this change will be even less noticeable. This will discourage people from referring to a certain biased marketing play by a certain company.

<luser> bing
<user> bong

That is all for today.

Is Microsoft really clumsy and stupid, or a malcious beast?

2009-05-31T23:22:00.002+02:00

There have been reports of Microsoft forcing Firefox extensions on users without their permission. If you're too lazy to click on that link, it all boils down to this. Windows Update, the automatic update tool will install an extension in Firefox without asking, one that will enable running .Net applications in Firefox. The problem is the uninstall button is disabled. Never mind the afront to the user, to install plugins for other programs they may never want, but the real chutzpah is to take away the user's choice to remove it.

(Supposedly there are removal instructions that involve editing the registry, which may or may not protect them legally, but from all practical points of view, it's not removable by the user.)

What's also really troubling is that this opens up the browser to all sorts of new vulnerabilities there used to not be. Up until now, if malware managed to get itself installed in Firefox, it was the fault of Mozilla, for not securing Firefox enough. Now, any bug in Microsoft's crapware is yet another vector to get junk into the browser and honestly, Microsoft's track record is far from stellar. Now, the only way to get a secure Firefox experience is to use any OS but Windows. This includes OS X, Linux, *BSD, Haiku, and many others.

Microsoft did this sort of thing once before, but to their own browser. They had this piece of technology, which even got them lawsuits, called ActiveX. If the very name doesn't have you shaking and crying for mommy, then congratulations, you must have been using Linux since 1991. For everyone else, we all know what kind of a failure that was, and Microsoft had no one to blame but themselves. This time around, if something goes wrong, they can just blame Mozilla. You might almost think that Microsoft is doing this on purpose.

Jet Lag is a %^%$^#$#@%$

2009-05-26T04:47:00.002+02:00

Just when you think your body has adjusted to jet lag, and you're on a relatively normal schedule, albeit in need of some extra sleep, your body decides it's randomly a good idea to wake up at 4am and not go back to sleep.

That said, i've moved to Holland. For the next month, i'll be taking care of paperwork, bumming around until work starts, and then going to Linuxtag. Hopefully between there and now, there'll be some quality Devshell work going on.

As for the move, it's been pretty simple. The airline schedule a zig zag trip from Pittsburgh to Detroit to Boston to Schiphol that no sane human being could make, even if the plane was on time. Instead i got upgraded to business class in Detroit. Because of the switch, the airline managed to lose my luggage. All in all though, if i ignore the fact that i didn't shower or change my clothes for two days, it wasn't really so bad, because in the end, the airline delivered my luggage all the way here. Saved me the trouble of having to haul twice my body weight in baggage. I even got a discount on my next flight. In otherwords, the airline paid me to deliver my luggage here.

As for my house, it's unfortunately only temporary. I can say, though, that if you want to live like an American with a large house in the Netherlands, you have to live as far away from civilization as possible, which is really only 10 minutes away from town.

What are functional languages?

2009-05-20T15:03:00.003+02:00

Yesterday, Conal Elliott wrote on his blog that C is really a pure functional language called cpp that can be reduced to a monadic construct called C. Fortunately for us, there is alot of prior knowledge in reducing C into highly optimized machine code.

I would like to add that Make is also a pure functional language. It is a set of rules that can be reduced to a set of shell scripts, which unfortunately do not share the same optimizations. Fortunately, shell scripting lets you insert code in the form of a variable with some amazing metaprogramming consequences.

If you're on the fence about FP, it's really more pervasive than that silly academic language, Haskell.

Building blocks for world domination

2009-05-20T01:31:00.002+02:00

I've been throwing around an idea for a few days that might be useful for the python ecosystem.

It's really easy to praise the bazaar way of doing things. Because of it, i can find four different libraries for manipulating pathnames in Python. There's the built in os.path which comes with every python distribution. There's pathtool which provides a nice api for walking a file system, which can replace the function 'walk' that's ordinarily provided by the Python Standard Library. There's Unipath which replaces paths as strings with paths as objects, to avoid a certain class of type based bugs. It also overrides standard behavior with what the author presumes is more logical behavior. There's path.py which provides the same but is 2 years old, and as far as i can tell, dead upstream. There's a fork of path.py which is in paver, which provides an interesting feature available to Python 2.5 and up, 'pathd'. This is a context manager that works in a different directory than the surrounding code. (No, i won't translate that for non Python users.) I've also had to do something similar in devshell, for the obviously similar reasons.

The end result is that there are so many good ideas out there that we really don't know what to do with them. An intermediate Python developer looking to put together a large application doesn't quite know what to do with all these different options. Does he pick path.py which appropriately follows the os.path behavior? Is Unipath better with it's object oriented behavior? Should he use the fork in Paver and require Paver to be installed with the application? Is doing this kind of research even a good use of time that would be better off spent just writing the tools in a util module on the side? Without prior knowledge or experience, this can muddy up the ecosystem.

This is of course not unique to manipulating pathnames. I'm finding that i'm looking for a wide range of reusable components in my Python work. It is hard for me to decide if i want to build my own parts or work with prior ones. Browsing the Python Cheese shop can be a daunting experience sometimes, although great when looking for brilliant ideas.

I think there is alot of room for a reusable component library. The goal of this library would to pick the best of the breed components and collect them all in one repository. As new ideas spring up in other libraries, we could cherry pick them and port them to the upstreams where necessary. It would exist outside other large projects like Zope and Twisted which provide other large building blocks for certain domains of problems.

Potential types of building blocks could include:

Pathname manipulation
Configuration file and runtime options management
A unified set of functional programming inspired functions (I see way too many implementations of them)
Implementations of more advanced functionality than provided by the Python Standard Library
Add your own itch here.

I think the end goal would be to provide a platform of libraries that are blessed by the community at large, but don't necessarily have to be included in a default Python distribution. It'll hopefully let systems programmers and application developers do their jobs with one place to find all the information they need.

Anyone interested?

New Slogan?

2009-05-09T08:48:00.003+02:00

I was thinking that sometimes when a Linux distribution claims to have a target audience, it can be a bit discriminatory. For example, Exherbo claims it is not for you. Perhaps we need a new slogan to show how inclusive Fedora is. For example:

Fedora - Linux for Humans and Space Aliens.

Fedora 11 Presentation at WPLUG

2009-05-07T00:17:00.001+02:00

As seen on the WPLUG Mailing List:

Hello WPLUG! (and other wplug-announce subscribers)

It's that time again! This Saturday, at the Wilkins School Community
Center, there will be a General User Meeting and presentation on
Fedora 11 by Yaakov Nemoy from Red Hat.

Doors open at 10:30, meeting starts at 11:00, presentation at 11:30,
lunch at 12:30.

"Yaakov Nemoy will talk about what features are new in the upcoming
Fedora 11 release. Many of these features are upstream contributions
and are also showing up in many other distributions. Come find out
what the next six months have in store for Linux. "

Yaakov is obviously a big fan of Fedora. But if you're not a Fedora
user, you will still probably find his presentation interesting.
Yaakov doesn't hate Ubuntu - in fact he has a picture of Ubuntu
founder Mark Shuttleworth on his wall* (though the picture is in front
of his dart board.)

http://www.wplug.org/wiki/Meeting-20090509

Sign up to help out by adding your name to the "Meeting Staff" section
of the page listed above. Don't expect someone else to help if you
are able, though they probably will.

Best,

Mike Semcheski
WPLUG Chair

*OK, I made that up.

Fedora Devshell is now packaged in Fedora

2009-05-04T06:37:00.001+02:00

Tonight, Fenzi filled my cvs request to put Fedora Devshell in Fedora, so for all those of you who have been waiting so long to use it, (all three of you), there are builds available in koji.

Pick your poison^Wrelease here

Are all Fedora developers Contributors?

2009-05-02T01:04:00.004+02:00

I'm watching this video hosted by the Linux Foundation of a panel at the LF Collaboration Summit on why we want to measure community contribution. One of the issues that gets discussed is the need for better testing. In some ways, this is as important as code contributions itself.

I was thinking about how Fedora tends to take the more experimental route. Every Fedora release really pushes what we can do with Linux each time, in order to get the widest use of it possible. PackageKit, Pulseaudio, KMS, Ext4 and Btrfs are all perfect examples of this. Here's an open ended question. Does using Fedora in some way automatically make you a contributor? Obviously you need to report on it, even if everything does just work. But when you consciously make the decision to use Fedora in order to make sure the latest and greatest technology works for you, does that count as a de facto contribution?

(Better yet, if you do use Fedora, participate in a Test Day. It's simple, and it gives you a good heads up about future versions of Fedora.)

You can watch the video here.

Fedora Devshell packages

2009-04-30T08:12:00.002+02:00

After learning my way around setuptools making packages for EKG, i decided the tool that deals with packaging should be packaged. I've spent the past couple of hours making some broad changes to Devshell in order to work better with setuptools. I used to not really get entry points that well, but now having worked with them a bit more in depth, i can really see how they can be useful. If nothing else, i'm going to have to fix my module importing and detection code sometime in the future. Alot of the base code needs some massive overhauls, so it's almost time to say goodbye to the original code Luke Macken wrote.

In order to work with the new and improved Devshell, i've updated the wiki documentation. The usage guide is roughly the same. Installation and usage has been simplified though. Technically you have to run a few more steps, but they are very standard in the Python world, so anyone familiar with Python programs will have little trouble working with them. You can check them out here.

There is also convenient API Documentation if you want to know something about the internals and how things are organized.

There is an RPM waiting for review, so hopefully there will be a package you can just install in the future. If anyone wants to have a look, the review is here.

Recently one of our very own, Christoph Wickert, mentioned Devshell in an interview he gave on the upcoming LinuxTag and FUDCon Berlin. It was an inspiration to focus on making it available to the masses and i'm hoping that we can ramp up Devshell development a bit more before the upcoming 'Messe' and 'Konferrenz'. The interview is in German, so you've been warned. I guess someone in the community will provide a translation in the next couple of days, it's an excellent interview. If not, i might have to have a stab at it myself, to make up emotionally for getting such a poor grade in German this semester.

Something i might miss

2009-04-28T22:22:00.002+02:00

I've said it before, and i'll say it again. One thing i won't miss about Pittsburgh is the hills. One thing i will miss though is the way the wind rolls into these hills right before it rains. First the sky gets dark and cloudy, and the air picks up this electric energy. The wind comes bursting in little puffs which send pretty much every piece of debris around the neighbourhood at least once or twice. Then it builds up further pushing you and the trees around, and you can see it just in the way everything around you is moving. You feel all these drops hitting you from nowhere, even though the rain's not really falling.

Then it stops, the heavens crack open, and it starts raining.

Then you're just in time to watch people get caught on the main road get caught in the rain while you sip an espresso from the comfort of a cafe.

Packaging EKG

2009-04-28T21:10:00.001+02:00

Today i packaged my first python egg, or what ever they are called. I reorganized EKG to be a bit more like a module, and less like a bunch of scripts, and packaged it up. The SRPM is available for review if anyone wants it here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498073

Ubuntu Pittsburgh Release Party

2009-04-24T05:06:00.002+02:00

Tonight i associated with the brown traitors and associated with the scourge of great brownness, and it wasn't actually that bad. The number one theme of conversation was members of the WPLUG (Western PA LUG) asking people why they don't go to LUG meetings. There were of course Folding of the Arms and the Glaring. This of course lead to Explanations and Reasoning, which tends to drift to Meaningful Conversation. Maybe it was some kind of geeky ice breaker.

(Or maybe i'm just reading too much Terry Pratchett lately.)

Honestly, most of the meeting was really more an excuse for people to have a couple of beers, eat bar food, and recruit for the LUG. I also had one talk with a guy from SGI who may actually try to show up at Hacking at Random. I love being able to plug random things at random events.

Next up, presenting Fedora 11 and all it's new features at the next LUG meeting.

Actually, i got another nice plug here; one person, whose name i didn't catch, was bemoaning the fact he missed out on a LUG presentation on VMWare. I mentioned that Fedora 11 has quite alot to do with virtualization. As a note to Ambassadors, there are key items that have a certain cult following amongst teenagers and young 20-somethings. VMWare as far back as i can remember has been pretty popular, because they tended to give out licenses like candy at conferences and shows. Virt-Manager competes quite nicely. Make sure to push it heavily.

He's a free man, folks

2009-04-23T21:32:00.002+02:00

Today i just took the last final exam i will probably ever take in my academic career. It's really not as big of a deal as it sounds; i'm only getting a certificate in German language skills, which is nothing more than a nice resume filler. The real highlight of my 'academic' career is not this, but having gotten RHCE certification last summer, thanks to Red Hat. Still, i'm glad that i'm not stuck between two very different competing demands in my life anymore. I could have spent another year and a half working towards a bona fide diploma, but i decided in the end that's not what i wanted to focus on. I decided that i didn't want to spend the rest of my life paying off student loans.

Here's what's in store for the Future. Some of you probably noticed, but this past February, i spent two weeks in the Netherlands 'hanging out'. The time i spent there was pretty productive though. My primary reason was to go job hunting and sit for interviews. While i was there, i also got a chance to go to Fosdem again, which i've written about (i think), and just see some friends again, that i made last summer when i was living there. I would like to thank Jeroen, publicly, for both hosting me at his place for a few days and helping me find a job there.

Now that my academic career is over, my internship at Red Hat will naturally be over soon too. Starting in June, i will begin working for the Genetics Institute in Utrecht, which has a long history of Fedora and other Red Hat based product use. I'm really looking forward to it. This of course also means i'll be moving to the Netherlands in less than a month. It's going to be a busy time.

For the summer, i have two big things lined up. Currently, i have LinuxTag and Hacking at Random on the agenda. At LinuxTag, i'll be giving a presentation on Git on practical day to day usage. I plan on covering some advanced tricks with a live demonstration. As part of the presentation, i hope to show a number of best practices people should use while working with Git, particularly on various Fedora projects. I hope that in the future, others are also willing to pick up the presentation, add their workflows and present it themselves. It will be nice to have people in the Fedora community better informed and able to use Git more consistently. I won't be presenting at Hacking at Random, though. Think of it more as 'vacation time'. (Who doesn't bring their laptop when they go camping anymore?)

I'll also be mentoring this summer in the Google Summer of Code.

In the next month, i'll be mostly hacking on EKG. And packing. And going to an Ubuntu release party tonight to hand out Fedora stickers. I have to put them to use somehow, how i ever ended up with 100 sheets of them, i don't know....