Had an afternoon of steak and science fiction. Elysium is only so-so, but look what we found in a bookstore that was half religious materials and half SF, local books, and carefully hidden romance novels:

Star Wars, Star Trek and the 21st Century Christians

Best part was at the end, when I finally found one of the local asian markets Tomoko tells us about when she casually pulls out the good stuff at family gatherings. I will be back for whole ducks, fresh fish, squid, 50 lb bags of rice, tamarind paste, fresh ginger that has not sat on the shelf for 2 months because only I buy it, etc. Only an hour from home in the woods! Between the garlic sprouts, bean sprouts, enoki mushrooms, etc that I got for $10 today and this week's CSA surprise of 18 inch snake beans and smoked pork knuckles, I have the epic stir fry potential..

Goodbye, old friend.

Jason Torchinsky at Jalopnik offers a wonderful goodbye to the faithful Volkswagen Microbus. This year marks the end of production, which continued in Brazil. The cab-over design that makes the Bus (and Vanagon) such a pleasure to drive resists meeting current safety standards.

So much of my driving experience has been rear engine, VW boxer designs. The Bus, the Beetle, the Vanagon, Porsche's 356 Speedster and 911. They are truly beautifully designed and a pleasure to drive, each within its limitations (or in the case of a modern 911, lack thereof.)

I've harbored the fantasy of buying a new Brazilian bus for years. I'm sorry to see it go.

Old-School VW Microbus Will Finally End Production This Year via Jalopnik

It isn't on the website yet, but the September meeting will have a special guest:

Title: Anatomy of a Supercomputer: The architecture of the IBM Blue Gene /P.

IBM refers to their Blue Gene family of super computers as 'solutions'. This talk will discuss the problems facing HPC that the Blue Gene architecture was designed to solve, focusing on the Blue Gene /P model. To help those unfamiliar with high-performance computing, the talk will begin with a brief explanation of high-performance computing that anyone should be able to understand.

Mini-Bio:

Prentice Bisbal first became interested in scientific computing while earning a BS in Chemical Engineering at Rutgers University. After about 2 years as a practicing Engineer, Prentice made the leap to scientific computing and has never looked back. He has been a Unix/Linux system administrator specializing in scientific/high performance computing ever since. In June 2012, he came full circle when he returned to Rutgers as the Manager of IT for the Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute (RDI2), where he is responsible for supporting Excalibur, a 2048-node (8192 cores) IBM Blue Gene/P Supercomputer.

I’ve been really quiet on the blogging front the last few months. There’s been a lot happening in my life. In short, I moved back to South Africa and started working for another company.  I have around 10 blog drafts that I will probably never finish, so I’m just declaring post bankruptcy and starting from scratch (who wants read my old notes from Ubuntu VUDS from March anyway?)

For what it’s worth, I’m still alive and doing very well, possibly better than ever. Over the next few months I want to focus my free software time on the Edubuntu project, my Debian ITPs (which I’ve neglected so badly they’ve been turned into RFPs) and Flashback. Once I’ve caught up there’s plenty of other projects where I’d like to focus some energy as well (LTSP, Debian-Edu, just to name a few).

Thanks for reading! More updates coming soon.

after a break, here's again a report about my work on RC bugs. in this case, all bugs either affect packages in the pkg-perl group and/or packages involved in the Perl 5.18 transition.

• #689899 – mgetty: "Ships a folder in /var/run or /var/lock (Policy Manual section 9.3.2)"
  raise severity, propose patch
• #693892 – src:libprelude: "prelude-manager: FTBFS with glibc 2.16"
  add some info to the bug report, later closed by maintainer
• #704784 – src:libogre-perl: "libogre-perl: Please upgrade OGRE dependency to 1.8 or greater"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #709680 – src:libcgi-application-plugin-stream-perl: "libcgi-application-plugin-stream-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failures"
  add patch from Niko Tyni (pkg-perl)
• #710979 – src:libperlio-via-symlink-perl: "libperlio-via-symlink-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: inc/Module/Install.pm"
  adopt for pkg-perl and work around ancient Module::Install
• #711434 – src:libconfig-std-perl: "libconfig-std-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failures"
  add patch from CPAN RT (pkg-perl)
• #713236 – src:libdbd-csv-perl: "libdbd-csv-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #713409 – src:license-reconcile: "license-reconcile: FTBFS: dh_auto_test: perl Build test returned exit code 255"
  add patch from Oleg Gashev (pkg-perl)
• #713580 – src:handlersocket: "handlersocket: FTBFS: config.status: error: cannot find input file: `handlersocket/Makefile.in'"
  add patch from upstream git, upload to DELAYED/2, then rescheduled to 0-day with maintainer's permission
• #718082 – src:libcatalyst-modules-perl: "libcatalyst-modules-perl: FTBFS: Tests failed"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #718120 – src:libbio-primerdesigner-perl: "libbio-primerdesigner-perl: FTBFS: Too early to specify a build action 'vendor'. Do 'Build vendor' instead."
  prepare a patch, upload after review (pkg-perl)
• #718161 – src:libgeo-ip-perl: "libgeo-ip-perl: FTBFS: Failed 1/5 test programs. 1/32 subtests failed."
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #718280 – libev-perl: "libev-perl: forcing of EV_EPOLL=1 leads to FTBFS on non-linux architectures"
  prepare possible patches, upload one after review (pkg-perl)
• #718743 – src:libyaml-syck-perl: "libyaml-syck-perl: FTBFS on arm* & more"
  add patch from CPAN RT (pkg-perl)
• #719380 – src:libwx-perl: "libwx-perl: FTBFS: dh_auto_test: make -j1 test returned exit code 2"
  update versioned (build) dependency (pkg-perl)
• #719397 – src:libsql-abstract-more-perl: "libsql-abstract-more-perl: FTBFS: dh_auto_test: perl Build test returned exit code 255"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #719414 – pkg-components: "Update to support updated Debian::Control API"
  upload package fixed by Olof Johansson (pkg-perl)
• #719500 – src:lire: "lire: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD errors"
  add patch to fix POD, upload to DELAYED/2
• #719501 – src:mgetty: "mgetty: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD errors"
  apply patch from brian m. carlson, upload to DELAYED/2, then rescheduled to 0-day with maintainer's permission, then ftpmaster-auto-rejected for other reasons (cf. #689899)
• #719503 – src:mp3burn: "mp3burn: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD errors"
  apply patch from brian m. carlson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #719504 – src:netsend: "netsend: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD errors"
  apply patch from brian m. carlson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #719505 – src:spampd: "spampd: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD errors"
  add patch to fix POD, upload to DELAYED/2
• #719596 – libmouse-perl: "libmouse-perl: FTBFS with Perl 5.18: t/030_roles/001_meta_role.t failure"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #719963 – src:grepmail: "grepmail: FTBFS with perl 5.18: 'Subroutine Scalar::Util::openhandle redefined"
  move away bundled module for tests, QA upload
• #719972 – src:libapache-authznetldap-perl: "libapache-authznetldap-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: syntax error at Makefile.PL"
  apply patch from brian m. carlson (pkg-perl)
• #720267 – src:libkiokudb-perl: "libkiokudb-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failures"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #720269 – src:libmoosex-attributehelpers-perl: "libmoosex-attributehelpers-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failures"
  add patch from CPAN RT (pkg-perl)
• #720429 – src:mail-spf-perl: "mail-spf-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD failure"
  add patch to fix POD (pkg-perl)
• #720430 – src:msva-perl: "msva-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD failure"
  send patch to bug report
• #720431 – src:oar: "oar: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD failure"
  send patch to bug report
• #720496 – src:primaxscan: "primaxscan: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD failure"
  send patch to bug report
• #720497 – src:profphd: "profphd: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD failure"
  send patch to bug report
• #720665 – src:libwww-shorten-perl: "libwww-shorten-perl: FTBFS: POD coverage test failure"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #720670 – src:aptitude-robot: "aptitude-robot: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failures"
  try to investigate
• #720776 – src:bioperl: "bioperl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failures"
  forward upstream
• #720787 – src:libconfig-model-lcdproc-perl: "libconfig-model-lcdproc-perl: FTBFS: Can't locate Config/Model/Tester.pm in @INC"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #720788 – src:libconfig-model-openssh-perl: "libconfig-model-openssh-perl: FTBFS: Can't locate Config/Model/Tester.pm in @INC"
  add missing build dependency in git (pkg-perl)

I’ve written before (here, here and here) on Nominet’s proposals for registrations in the second level domain. That means you can register example.uk rather than example.co.uk. Superficially that sounds a great idea, until you realise that if you have already registered example.co.uk you’ll either have to register example.uk (if you even get the chance) and pay Nominet and a registrar a fee for doing so, or be content with someone else registering it. This is a horse Nominet continues to flog, no doubt due to its obstinate refusal to die quite yet.

I encourage you to respond to Nominet’s second consultation on the matter (they’ve made that pretty easy to do).

My view is that this is not a good idea. You can find a PDF copy of my response here. If you prefer reading from web pages, I’ve put a version below.

 A.         Executive Summary of Response

This document is a response to the consultation document entitled “Consultation on a new .uk domain name service” published by Nominet in July 2013. It should be read in conjunction with my specific responses to the questions asked within the document. Numbering within section B of this document corresponds to the section numbering within Nominet’s own document.

The proposals to open up .uk for second level registration remain one of the least well thought-out proposals I have yet to read from Nominet. Whilst these proposal are less dreadful than their predecessors, they remain deeply flawed and should be abandoned. The proposals pay insufficient attention to the rights and legitimate expectations of existing registrants. They continue to conflate opening up domains at the second level with trust and security. They represent feedback to a one-sided consultation as if it were representative. And, most importantly, they fail to demonstrate that the proposals are in the interest of all stakeholders.

I hereby give permission to Nominet to republish this response in full, and encourage them to do so.

B.         Answers to specific questions

The following section gives answers to specific questions in Nominet’s second consultation paper. Areas of text in italics are Nominet’s.

Q1.             The proposal for second level domain registration

This proposal seeks to strike a better balance between the differing needs of our stakeholders and respond to the concerns and feedback raised to the initial consultation. We have ‘decoupled’ the security features from the proposal to address concerns regarding the potential creation of a ‘two tier’ domain space and compulsion to register in the second level. We have set out a more efficient registration process to enhance trust in the data and put forward an equitable, cost effective release mechanism. 

Q1.a             Do you agree with the proposal to enable second level domain registration in the way we have outlined?

No, I do not agree with the proposal to enable second level domain registration as outlined.

Q1.b             Please tell us your reasons why.

The reasons I do not agree with the proposal to enable second level domain registration as outlined are as follows:

In general, no persuasive case has been made to open up second level domain registrations at all, and the less than persuasive case that has been put fails to adequately weigh the perceived advantages of opening up second level domain registrations against the damage caused to existing registrants. In simple terms, the collateral damage outweighs the benefits.

Whilst it is agreed that domain names are not themselves property, in many ways they behave a little like property. Domain name registrants, whether they are commercial businesses, charities or speculators, invest in brands and other material connected with their domain names. The business models of some of these participants (be they arms companies, dubious charities or ‘domainers’) may or may not be popular with some, but a consultation purporting to deal with registration policy should not be the forum for addressing that. Like it or not, these are all people who have invested in their domain name and their brand around that domain name on the basis of the registration rules currently in place. Using the property analogy, they have  built their house upon land they believed they owned. Nominet here is government, planning authority and land registry rolled into one, and proposes telling the domain name owners that whilst they thought they had bought the land that they have, now others may be permitted to build on top of them – but no matter, Nominet will still ‘continue to support’ their now subterranean houses. And for the princely sum of about twice what they are paying Nominet already, they may buy the space above their existing home. Of course this is only an option, and living in the dark, below whatever neighbour might come along is an alternative. In any other setting, this would be called extortion.

Of course there are undoubtedly good reasons to open up second level domains; were we able to revisit the original decision made when commercial registrations were first allowed in .uk, second level domains would probably not exist. However the option to revisit that decision is not open to us. Therefore, to change those registration rules Nominet needs a very good reason indeed; a reason so strong, and so powerful that it trumps the rights and legitimate expectations of all those existing registrants. No such reason has yet been presented.

Nominet claims in the introduction to its second consultation paper “It was clear from this feedback [on its first consultation] that there was support for registrations at the second level”; it does not say whether this support outweighed the opposition, and the full consultation responses have never been published. In the background paper Nominet says “The feedback we received was mixed”. In the press release after the first consultation, Nominet said “It was clear from the feedback that there was not a consensus of support for the direct.uk proposals as presented”. Nominet’s initial consultation document only told side one of the story; it presented the advantages of opening registrations at the second level without putting forward any of the disadvantages. It is therefore completely unsurprising that it found favour with some respondents particularly those unfamiliar with domain names who would not be able to intuit the disadvantages themselves, rather like a politician asking voters whether they would like lower taxes without pointing out the consequences. The second consultation is little better – nowhere does it set out the disadvantages of the proposal as a whole to existing registrants. Given this, it is remarkable how much opposition the proposal has garnered. I have yet to find anyone not in the pay of Nominet that supports this proposal, and it has managed to unite parts of the industry not normally known for their agreement in a single voice against Nominet.

For over 20 years registrations have been made in subdomains of .uk, and since 1996 that process has been managed by Nominet. Nominet claims to be a ‘force for good’ that seeks to enhance trust in the internet. Turning its back on its existing registrants that have single-handedly funded its very existence seems to me the ultimate abrogation of that trust.

The remainder of my comments on this consultation should therefore be read in the context that the best course of action for Nominet would be to admit that in this instance it has made an error, and abandon this proposal in its entirety.

Q2.             Registration process for registering second level domains

We believe that validated address information and a UK address for service would promote a higher degree of consumer confidence as well as ensure that we are in a better position to enforce the terms of our Registrant Contract. We propose that registrant contact details of registrations in the second level would be validated and verified and we would also make this an option available in the third levels that we manage. 

2.a Please tell us whether you agree or disagree with the proposed registration requirements we have outlined, and your reasons why. In particular, we welcome views on whether the requirements represent a fair, simple, practical, approach that would help achieve our objective of enhancing trust in the registration process and the data on record.

Validation of address information and indeed any proportionate steps that increase the accuracy of the .uk registration database are desirable. However, this is ineffective for the desired purpose (increasing consumer confidence), and in any case there is no reason to link it only to registrations at the second level.

Nominet’s logic here is flawed. Would validation of address information and a compulsory UK address for service promote a higher degree of consumer confidence? I believe the answer to this is no, for the following reasons:

Firstly, the fact that a domain name has a UK service addresses (which presumably would include a PO Box or similar) does not, unfortunately, guarantee that the content of the web site attached is in some way to be trusted. All it guarantees is that the web site has a UK service address. Web sites can contain malicious code whether placed there by the owner or by infection. Web sites with UK service addresses can sell fraudulent goods. Web sites with UK service addresses can turn out not to be registered to the person the viewer thought that they might be (see Nominet’s DRS case list for hundreds upon hundreds of examples). Nominet has presented no evidence that domain name registrations with UK service addresses are any less likely to carry material that should be ‘distrusted’.

Secondly, the registration address for a domain name is not easily available to the non-technical user using a web browser. Nominet appears to be around 15 years out of date in this area. Consumers increasingly do not recognise domain names at all, but rather use search engines. The domain name is becoming increasingly less relevant (despite Nominet’s research) as consumers are educated to ‘look for the green bar’ or ‘padlock’. This is a far better way, with a far easier user interface, to determine whether the web site is registered to whom the user thought it was. It is by no means perfect, but is far more useful than Nominet’s proposal (not least as it has international support). Nominet’s proposal serves only to confuse users.

Thirdly, the concept that UK consumers would be sufficiently sophisticated to know that domain names ending .uk had been address-validated (but not subject to further validation) unless those domains ended with co.uk, org.uk etc. is laughable. The user would have to know that www.support.org.uk is not address validated, but that www.support.ibm.uk would be address validated, which would require the average internet user memorising the previous table of Nominet SLDs. If Nominet hopes to gain support for address validation, it should do it across the board.

Fourthly, this once again means that existing registrants would be disadvantaged. By presenting (probably falsely) registrations in the second level as more trustworthy, this implies registrations at the third level (i.e. all existing registrations) are somehow less trustworthy, or in some way ‘dodgy’.

Nominet presents two other rationales for this move. Nominet claims it can enforce its contract more easily if the address is validated. This is somewhat hard to understand. Firstly, is Nominet not concerned about enforcing its contracts for other domain names? Secondly Nominet should insist on a valid address for service (Nominet already pretty much does this under clauses 4.1 and 36 of its terms and conditions). If the service address is invalid, Nominet can simply terminate its contract. Thirdly, a UK service address seems a rather onerous responsibility in particular for personal registrations, such as UK citizens who have moved abroad.

Nominet also suggests such a process would ‘enhance trust in the data on record’. This is a fair point, but should apply equally to all domain names. It is also unclear why having a foreign company’s correct head office address (outside the UK) would not be acceptable, whereas a post office box to forward the mail would be acceptable.

Q3.             Release process for the launch of second level domain registration

The release process prioritises existing .uk registrations in the current space by offering a six month window where registrants could exercise a right of first refusal. We believe this approach would be, the most equitable way to release registrations at the second level. Where a domain string is not registered at the third level it would be available for registration on a first-come, first-served basis at the start of the six month period or at the end of this process, if the right of first refusal has not been taken up. 

Q3.a            Please tell us your views on the methodology we have proposed for the potential release of second level domains. We would be particularly interested in your suggestions as to whether this could be done in a fairer, more practical or more cost-effective way.

The release mechanism proposed is less invidious than the previous scheme in that it gives priority to existing registrants. This change is to be welcomed I suppose, though is not a substitute for the correct course of action (scrapping the idea of opening the second level up at all).

The remaining challenge is how to deal equitably with the situation where two different registrants have registrations in different SLDs. The peaceful coexistence of such registrants was facilitated by the SLD system, and opening up .uk negates that facilitation. The current proposals give priority to the first registrant. This has the virtue of simplicity.

I have heard arguments that this penalises co.uk owners, who are likely to have spent more building a brand. In particular, it is argued, this penalises owners of two letter co.uk owners, as these were released after two letter domains were released in other domains (handled under Q3.b below). To the first, the counter argument is that to prefer co.uk penalises org.uk owners (for instance); no doubt the minute there is speculation that Nominet might prefer co.uk owners, there will be an active market in registering names in co.uk that are only registered in org.uk.

Q3.b             Are there any categories of domain names already currently registered which should be released differently, e.g. domains registered on the same day, pre-Nominet domains (where the first registration date may not be identified with certainty) and domains released in the 2011 short domains project?

I see no merit in treating pre-Nominet domain names differently provided the domain name holder has accepted Nominet’s terms and conditions.

I see no merit in treating domain name registered on the same day as different, provided Nominet can still ascertain the order of registration.

If Nominet cannot ascertain the order of registration, I would inform each party of this and invite evidence. If after admitting evidence Nominet still could not determine which registration was first, I would either allow an auction or choose at random.

With respect to the short domains project, I would argue Nominet has dug its own grave. Just like all of its registrants before, Nominet did not predict it was to open up .uk. For consistency, it could re-auction two letter domains in .uk. However, a simpler, fairer, and more equitable result would be to not open up .uk at all.

Q3.c            We recognise that some businesses and consumers will want to consider carefully whether to take on any potential additional costs in relation to registering a second level domain. Therefore we are seeking views on: 

• Whether the registrant of a third level domain who registers the equivalent second level should receive a discount on the second level registration fee;
• Developing a discount structure for registrants of multiple second-level .uk domains;
• Offering registrants with a right of first refusal the option to reserve (for a reduced fee) the equivalent second level name for a period of time, during which the name would be registered but not delegated. 

Please tell us your views on these options, or whether there are any other steps we could take to minimise the financial impact on existing registrants who would wish to exercise their right of first refusal and register at the second level.

These proposals risk introducing excess complexity. The most equitable path would be not to open up registrations at the second level at all.

If, despite all objections, the second level is opened up, it is vital that the interests of existing registrants are protected. A simple and fair way of achieving this would be to allow any existing registrant (and only existing registrants) the registration of their .uk second level domain for free for four years (or failing that at a very substantial discount to the existing prices in third level domains). As this would be a single registration to an existing registrant for a single period the marginal costs would be low. This would be sufficient time for the registrant to change stationery, letterhead etc. in the normal course of events. This should be permitted through registrars other than the registrant’s existing registrar to encourage competition. Save for the altered price, this registration would be pari passu with any other.

Q4.            Reserved and protected names

We propose to restrict the registration of <uk.uk> and <.com.uk> in the second level to reflect the very limited restrictions currently in force in the second level registries administered by Nominet. In addition, we would propose to reserve for those bodies granted an exemption through the Government’s Digital Transformation programme, the matching domain string of their .gov.uk domain in the second level.

4.a            Please give us your views on whether our proposed approach strikes an appropriate balance between protecting internet users in the UK and the expectations of our stakeholders regarding domain name registration. Can you foresee any unintended complications arising from the policy we have proposed?

This is one of the stranger proposals from Nominet.

In essence a government programme (internal to the government) has removed the right of certain organisations to register within gov.uk. gov.uk is not administered by Nominet. I fail to see why those organisations that turned out to be on the wrong side of a government IT decision should have any special status whatsoever, especially when compared to registrants that have been Nominet’s customers for many years. I notice Nominet’s consultation does not even offer any rationale for this.

One example is independent.co.uk which is the site of The Independent (a UK newspaper). However, independent.gov.uk does not seem to be active. This is perhaps the most obvious example, but there are no doubt others. There is simply no reason why those ejected from gov.uk should have preferential treatment over domain name holders in .uk. At the very most, they should be given secondary status after existing domain name holders, but I fail to see why they can’t take their chances in the domain name market like any other organisation.

I am afraid this proposal smells like Nominet pandering for support from government for its otherwise unpopular proposal.

Q5.            General views

Q5.a            Are there any other points you would like to raise in relation to the proposal to allow second level domain registration?

1. Nominet should abandon its current proposals in their entirety. Nominet has failed to explain why the proposals in toto are in the interests of its stakeholders, in particular the registrant community (who after all will have this change inflicted on them). Unless there is a high degree of consensus amongst all stakeholder groups in favour of the proposal, it should be abandoned. I believe no such consensus exists.
    
2. Nominet should disaggregate the issue of registrations within .uk and the issue of how to help build trust in .uk in general. I said before that Nominet should run a separate consultation for opening up .uk, as a simple open domain with the same rules as co.uk, and Nominet has failed to do this having retained different rules for validation, address verification and price. Both consultations conflate the issue of opening up the second level domain with issues around consumer trust (although admittedly the second consultation does this less than the first). Whilst consumer trust and so forth are important, they are orthogonal to this issue.
    
3. Nominet should remember that a core constituency of its stakeholders are those who have registered domain names. If new registrations are introduced (permitting registration in .uk for instance), Nominet should be sensitive to the fact that these registrants will feel compelled to reregister if only to protect their intellectual property. Putting such pressure and expense on businesses to reregister is one thing (and a matter on which subject ICANN received much criticism in the new gTLD debate); pressurising them to reregister and rebrand by marketing their existing co.uk registration as somehow inferior is beyond the pale. Whilst the second proposal is less invidious than the first, it is still a slap in the face for existing .uk registrants.
    
4. Nominet should recognise that there is no silver bullet (save perhaps one used for shooting oneself in the foot) for the consumer trust problem, and hence it will have to be approached incrementally.
    
5. Nominet should be more imaginative and reacquaint itself with developments in technology and the domain market place. Nominet’s attempt to associate a particular aspect of consumer trust with a domain name is akin to attempting to reinvent the wheel, but this time with three sides. Rather, Nominet should be looking at how to work with existing technologies. For instance, if Nominet was really interested in providing enhanced security, it could issue wildcard domain validated SSL certificates for every registration to all registrants; given Nominet already has the technology to comprehensively validate who has a domain name, such certificates could be issued cheaply or for free (and automatically). This might make Nominet instantly the largest certificate issuer in the world. If Nominet wanted to further validate users, it could issue EV certificates. And it could work with emerging technologies such as DANE to free users from the grip of the current overpriced SSL market.
    
6. There is no explanation as to why these domains should cost £4.50 per year wholesale rather than £5 for two years as is the case at the moment. If the domain name validation process is abandoned (as it should be) these domains should cost no more to maintain than any other. Perhaps the additional cost is to endow a huge fund for potential legal action? The increased charges add to the perception that the reason for Nominet pursuing opening domains at the second level is simply financial self-interest, rather than acting in the interests of its stakeholders.

Q5.b            Are there any points you would like to raise in relation to this consultation? 

To reiterate the point I have made before, this consultation and its ill-fated predecessor fail to put their points across in an even handed manner. That is they expound the advantages of Nominet’s proposal, without considering its disadvantages. That is Nominet’s prerogative, but if that is the course Nominet takes then it should not attempt to present the results of such a ‘consultation’ as representative, as their consultees will have heard only one side of the story.

Why isnt Qmail been downloading from a version control system?

Above question of me is down voted and i think it is going to be closed

One year ago today
Switching to a straight razor: I think this method delivers an insanely close shave. The best part for me is that there is almost no irritation at all. No razor burn of any kind and my face doesn't feel on fire for the next 2 hours like it did when I used a disposable razor.

Five years ago today
Strange stuff from a computer recycler: Seen above is a wire recorder (circa 1945-1955) that stores audio by magnetizing a reel of fine wire.

Ten years ago today
Wired News: Burning Man never gets old: "A piece I wrote on this year's edition of Burning Man, which begins today in the Nevada desert. About 30,000 are expected to attend."

Can you identify all of the silhouettes in these new drawings that Daniel Clowes drew for the Modern Cartoonist exhibition murals and "Chicago Views" prints? If you can, you will have a chance to win fabulous prizes! Visit Daniel's website for details.

A co-conspirator emailed on Friday:

Yesterday, I found myself walking up the Gray’s Inn Road alongside Andy Coulson. He was talking on his mobile phone to someone about the fact that his trial date had been moved. It was raining and he was mumbling a lot. But I did catch this brilliant quote:

“Whatever you do, don’t share that with anyone. Be very careful.”

I couldn’t resist papping him as he ambled along the road.

A funny thing to hear from the man who stands accused of conspiracy to intercept mobile phone voicemails, among other things. Be more careful Andy…

This will be the new process, aiming to replace the current re approval process. It aims to be less formal, more interactive and above all still keep people motivated to be involved in the Ubuntu community.

Every team shall be known as a LoCoteam, teams that were previously known as an “Approved LoCoteam” shall be known as a “Verified LoCoteam”. New teams shall be a LoCoteam, teams do not have to be verified.  The term Verified means that a  Launchpad team has been created, the team name conforms to the correct naming standard and the team contact has signed the Code of Conduct.

Every two years a team will present itself for a HealthCheck – This is still beneficial to everyone involved, it gives the team a chance to show how they are doing and also the council can catch up with the team.

What is needed for a HealthCheck?

Create a Wiki with the activities of the period – Name the wiki page with Name of your team plus the YEAR example – LoCoTeamVerificationApplication20XX with the below details:

• Name of team
• How many people are in the team
• Link to your wiki page / Launchpad group page
• Social Networks (if they have any of them).
• Link to loco team portal page, Events page, Paste events page – this is a good reason to encourage teams to use the team portal as all of the information is there and saves duplication.
• Photo Galleries of past events.
• Tell us about your team, what you do, if you have Ubuntu members in your team, your current projects.
• Guideline of what you plan on doing in the future.
• Any meeting logs, if available.

Teams will still remain verified this is just to check in and see how things are doing,  If you can’t make a meeting, it can be done over email/Bugs.

In short, the overall process should remain pretty much the same as now.

If in case of any doubts/questions regarding the new process please dont hesitate to discuss or ask us

This is an idea that Keith Packard told me. It's a brilliant way to reduce GitHub's growing lockin, but I don't know how to implement it. And I almost forgot about it, until I had another annoying "how do I send you a patch with this amazing git technology?" experience and woke up with my memory refreshed.

The idea is to allow anyone to git push to any anonymous git:// repository. But the objects pushed are not stored in a public part of the repository (which could be abused). Instead the receiving repository emails them off to the repository owner, in a git-am-able format.

So this is like a github pull request except it can be made on any git repository, and you don't have to go look up the obfuscated contact email address and jump through git-format-patch hoops to make it. You just commit changes to your local repository, and git push to wherever you cloned from in the first place. If the push succeeds, you know your patch is on its way for review.

Keith may have also wanted to store the objects in the repository in some way that a simple git command run there could apply them without the git-am bother on the receiving end. I forget. I think git-am would be good enough -- and including the actual diffs in the email would actually make this far superior to github pull request emails, which are maximally annoying by not doing so.

Hmm, I said I didn't know how to implement this, but I do know one way. Make the git-daemon run an arbitrary script when receiving a push request. A daemon.pushscript config setting could enable this.

The script could be something like this:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
tmprepo="$(mktemp -d)"
# this shared clone is *really* fast even for huge repositories, and uses
# only a few 100 kb of disk space!
git clone --shared --bare "$GIT_DIR" "$tmprepo"
git-receive-pack "$tmprepo"
# XXX add email sending code here.
rm -rf "$tmprepo"

Of course, this functionality could be built into the git-daemon too. I suspect a script hook and an example script in contrib/ might be an easier patch to get accepted into git though.

That may be as far as I take this idea, at least for now..

So, last year I've switched to an OpenPGP smartcard setup for my whole personal/Debian PGP usage. When doing so, I've also switched to subkeys, since it's pretty natural when using a smartcard. I initially set up an expiration of one year for the subkeys, and everything seems to be running just fine for now.

The expiration date was set to october 27th, and I though it'd be a good idea to renew them quite in advance, considering there's my signing key in there, which in (for example) used to sign packages. If the Debian archive considers my signature subkey expired, that means I can't upload packages anymore, which is a bit of a problem (although I think I could still upload packages signed by the main key). dak (Debian Archive Kit, the software managing the Debian archive) uses keys from the debian-keyring package, which is usually updated every month or so, so pushing the expiration date two months before the due date seemed like a good idea.

I've just did that, and it was pretty easy, actually. For those who followed my setup last year, here's how I did it:

First, I needed my main smartcard (the one storing the main key), since it's the only one able to do operations on the subkeys. So I plug it, and then:

corsac@scapa: gpg --edit-key 71ef0ba8
gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.14; Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Secret key is available.

pub  4096R/71EF0BA8  created: 2009-05-06  expires: never       usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  4096g/36E31BD8  created: 2009-05-06  expires: never       usage: E   
sub  2048R/CC0E273D  created: 2012-10-17  expires: 2013-10-27  usage: A   
sub  2048R/A675C0A5  created: 2012-10-27  expires: 2013-10-27  usage: S   
sub  2048R/D98D0D9F  created: 2012-10-27  expires: 2013-10-27  usage: E   
[ultimate] (1). Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@corsac.net>
[ultimate] (2)  Yves-Alexis Perez (Debian) <corsac@debian.org>

gpg> key 2

pub  4096R/71EF0BA8  created: 2009-05-06  expires: never       usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  4096g/36E31BD8  created: 2009-05-06  expires: never       usage: E   
sub* 2048R/CC0E273D  created: 2012-10-17  expires: 2013-10-27  usage: A   
sub  2048R/A675C0A5  created: 2012-10-27  expires: 2013-10-27  usage: S   
sub  2048R/D98D0D9F  created: 2012-10-27  expires: 2013-10-27  usage: E   
[ultimate] (1). Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@corsac.net>
[ultimate] (2)  Yves-Alexis Perez (Debian) <corsac@debian.org>

gpg> expire
Changing expiration time for a subkey.
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
      <n>  = key expires in n days
      <n>w = key expires in n weeks
      <n>m = key expires in n months
      <n>y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 429d
Key expires at mar. 28 oct. 2014 12:43:35 CET
Is this correct? (y/N) y

At that point, a pinentry dialog should ask you the PIN, and the smartcard will sign the subkey. Repear for all the subkeys (in my case, 3 and 4). If you ask for PIN confirmation at every signature, the pinentry dialog should reappear each time.

When you're done, check that everything is ok, and save:

gpg> save
corsac@scapa: gpg --list-keys 71ef0ba8
gpg: checking the trustdb
gpg: public key of ultimately trusted key AF2195C9 not found
gpg: 3 marginal(s) needed, 1 complete(s) needed, PGP trust model
gpg: depth: 0  valid:   4  signed:   5  trust: 0-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 4u
gpg: depth: 1  valid:   5  signed:  53  trust: 5-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 0u
gpg: next trustdb check due at 2013-12-28
pub   4096R/71EF0BA8 2009-05-06
uid                  Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@corsac.net>
uid                  Yves-Alexis Perez (Debian) <corsac@debian.org>
sub   4096g/36E31BD8 2009-05-06 [expires: 2014-10-28]
sub   2048R/CC0E273D 2012-10-17 [expires: 2014-10-28]
sub   2048R/A675C0A5 2012-10-27 [expires: 2014-10-28]
sub   2048R/D98D0D9F 2012-10-27 [expires: 2014-10-28]

Now that we have the new subkeys definition locally, we need to push it to the keyservers so other people get it too. In my case, I also need to push it to Debian keyring keyserver so it gets picked at the next update:

corsac@scapa: gpg --send-keys 71ef0ba8
gpg: sending key 71EF0BA8 to hkp server subkeys.pgp.net
corsac@scapa: gpg --keyserver keyring.debian.org --send-keys 71ef0ba8
gpg: sending key 71EF0BA8 to hkp server keyring.debian.org

Main smartcard now back in safe place. As far as I can tell, there's no operation needed on the daily smartcard (which only holds the subkeys), but you will need to refresh your public key on any machine you use it on before it gets the updated expiration date.

When starting a new HTML project, a common base is to use HTML5 Boilerplate which helps by setting up the essential bits. Such a template is quite useful for both beginners and experienced developers as it is kept up-to-date with best practices and it avoids forgetting some of them.

Recently, I have started several little projects written in C for a customer. Each project was bootstrapped from the previous one. I thought it would be useful to start a template that I could reuse easily. Hence, bootstrap.c¹, a template for simple projects written in C with the autotools, was born.

Usage

A new project can be created from this template in three steps:

1. Run Cookiecutter, a command-line tool to create projects from project templates, and answer the questions.
2. Setup Git.
3. Complete the “todo list”.

Cookiecutter

Cookiecutter is a new tool to create projects from project templates. It uses Jinja2 as a template engine for file names and contents. It is language agnostic: you can use it for Python, HTML, Javascript or… C!

Cookiecutter is quite simple. You can read an introduction from Daniel Greenfeld. The Debian package is currently waiting in the NEW queue and should be available in a few weeks in Debian Sid. You can also install it with pip.

Bootstrapping a new project is super easy:

$ cookiecutter https://github.com/vincentbernat/bootstrap.c.git
Cloning into 'bootstrap.c'...
remote: Counting objects: 90, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (68/68), done.
remote: Total 90 (delta 48), reused 64 (delta 22)
Unpacking objects: 100% (90/90), done.
Checking connectivity... done

full_name (default is "Vincent Bernat")? Alfred Thirsty
email (default is "bernat@luffy.cx")? alfred@thirsty.eu
repo_name (default is "bootstrap")? secretproject
project_name (default is "bootstrap")? secretproject
project_description (default is "boilerplate for small C programs with autotools")? Super secret project for humans

Cookiecutter asks a few questions to instantiate the template correctly. The result has been stored in the supersecret directory:

.
├── autogen.sh
├── configure.ac
├── get-version
├── m4
│   ├── ax_cflags_gcc_option.m4
│   └── ax_ld_check_flag.m4
├── Makefile.am
├── README.md
└── src
    ├── log.c
    ├── log.h
    ├── Makefile.am
├── secretproject.8
├── secretproject.c
└── secretproject.h

2 directories, 13 files

Remaining steps

There are still some steps to be executed manually. You first need to initalize Git, as some features of this template rely on it:

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/bernat/tmp/secretproject/.git/
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Initial import"
[...]

Then, you need to extract the todo list built from the comments contained in source files:

$ git ls-tree -r --name-only HEAD | \
>   xargs grep -nH "T[O]DO:" | \
>   sed 's/\([^:]*:[^:]*\):\(.*\)T[O]DO:\(.*\)/\3 (\1)/' | \
>   sort -ns | \
>   awk '(last != $1) {print ""} {last=$1 ; print}'

2003 Add the dependencies of your project here. (configure.ac:52)
2003 The use of "Jansson" here is an example, you don't have (configure.ac:53)
2003 to keep it. (configure.ac:54)

2004 Each time you have used `PKG_CHECK_MODULES` macro (src/Makefile.am:12)
2004 in `configure.ac`, you get two variables that (src/Makefile.am:13)
2004 you can substitute like above. (src/Makefile.am:14)

3000 It's time for you program to do something. Add anything (src/secretproject.c:76)
3000 you want here. */ (src/secretproject.c:77)
[...]

Only a few minutes are needed to complete those steps.

What do you get?

Here are the main features:

• Minimal configure.ac and Makefile.am.
• Changelog based on Git logs and automatic version from Git tags².
• Manual page skeleton.
• Logging infrastructure with variadic functions like log_warn(), log_info().

About the use of the autotools

The autotools are a suite of tools to provide a build system for a project, including:

• autoconf to generate a configure script, and
• automake to generate makefiles using a similar but higher-level language.

Understanding the autotools can be a quite difficult task. There are a lot of bad documentations on the web and the manual does not help by describing corner-cases that would be useful if you wanted your project to compile for HP-UX. So, why do I use it?

1. I have invested a lot of time in the understanding of this build system. Once you grasp how it should be used, it works reasonably well and can cover most of your needs. Maybe CMake would be a better choice but I have yet to learn it. Moreover, the autotools are so widespread that you have to know how they work.
2. There are a lot of macros available for autoconf. Many of them are included in the GNU Autoconf Archive and ready to use. The quality of such macros are usually quite good. If you need to correctly detect the appropriate way to compile a program with GNU Readline or something compatible, there is a macro for that.

If you want to learn more about the autotools, do not read the manual. Instead, have a look at Autotools Mythbuster. Start with a minimal configure.ac and do not add useless macros: a macro should be used only if it solves a real problem.

Happy hacking!

• People from Argentina don't like to shake hands when you first met them: it's too formal (sorry, Marga!)

• Video team volunteering is extremely fun. Even directing is fun, except when the speaker decides to wander out of the talkroom just to make a point during a demo.

• I won't call names, but I'm not the only one in Debian to remember how to dance the Time Warp and not ashamed to do it in public.

• You can bribe a bloodthirsty deity with cheese, especially if the deity is a French one and you are in Switzerland.

• A zip line is also called: tirolina (in Spanish), tyrolienne (in French) and - my all time favourite - Tarzanbahn in German, or at least in the German spoken by A. when he was a kid.

• Given the number of talks about it this year, we - as a community - care a lot about newcomers, mentoring, creating a welcoming environment and community outreach in general. That's really great!

• Self tagging yourself on the badge with your main interests provides conversation starters and make easier to meet new people. Many thanks to Bremner for this brilliant idea.

• Cheese&Wine party is the perfect time to discuss pedagogical methods (and discover interesting projects like Sugar (desktop environment)).

• During a Mao game, an extremely simple rule by a newbie can result too difficult to guess even to seasoned players. Oh the irony and the inherent democracy of that! All hail the helicopter!

• Once in a while, to cook dinner for upstream and/or sit with them around a table and plan your next moves is a good idea and as well as a common practice in Community-supported agriculture.

• There are people out there brave enough to stand up and declame their poems or poems they love. As a shy person, I really am in awe of them. They make a sentence like "There will be poetry" sound less threatening.

• If you sleep in room 43, next door is the answer. Or the previous one, depending on the direction you're walking.

I love tabs, they’re so much easier to work with, but YAML doesn’t like them. I’m constantly adding them in accidentally, and puppet’s error message is a bit cryptic:

Error: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Error 400 on SERVER: malformed format string - %S at /etc/puppet/manifests/foo.pp:18 on node bar.example.com

This happens during a puppet run, which in my case loads up YAML files. The tricky part was that the error wasn’t at all related to the foo.pp file, it just happened to be the first time hiera was run. So where’s the real error?

$ cd /etc/puppet/hieradata/; for i in `find . -name '*.yaml'`; do echo $i; ruby -e "require 'yaml'; YAML.parse(File.open('$i'))"; done

Run this one liner on your puppetmaster, and hiera should quickly point out which files have errors, and exactly which lines (and columns) they’re on.

Happy hacking,

James

        ,;;;;,                                             
       ((/))))),                                           
      (((/\))))),      I'M A FEMALE BODY BUILDER           
      ((( ^.^ )))                                          
       `"\ = /"`                                           
        _/'-'\_                                            
      /`/'._.'\`\      I.E., I HAVE HUGE SELF-ESTEEM ISSUES
     / (   Y   ) \           ............... AND SMALL TITS
    / /`\-' '-/`\ \                                        
    \ \  )   (  / /                                        
     `\\/\   /\//`                                         
      (/  \_/  \)                                          
       |   |   |                                           
       \   |   /                                           
        \_ | _/                                            
        / / \ \                                            
        | | | |                                            
jgs     |/   \|                                            
       / \   / \                                           
       `-'   '-`                                           

Long time since I published the last update about Tanglu. So here is a short summary about what we did meanwhile (even if you don’t hear that much, there is lots of stuff going on!)

Better QA in the archive

We now use a modified version of Debian’s Britney tool to migrate packages from the newly-created “staging” suite to our current development branch “aequorea”. This ensures that all packages are completely built on all architectures and don’t break other packages.

New uploads and syncs/merges now happen through the staging area and can be tested there as well as being blocked on demand, so our current aequorea development branch stays installable and usable for development. People who want the *very* latest stuff, can embed the staging-sources into their sources.list (but we don’t encourage you to do that).

Improved syncs from Debian

The Synchrotron toolset we use to sync packages with Debian recently gained the ability to sync packages using regular expressions. This makes it possible to sync many packages quickly which match a pattern.

Tons of infrastructure bugfixes

The infrastructure has been tweaked a lot to remove quirks, and it now works quite smoothly. Also, all Debian tools now work flawless in the Tanglu environment.

A few issues are remaining, but nothing really important is affected anymore (and some problems are merely cosmetic).

Long term we plan to replace the Jenkins build-infrastructure with the software which is running Paul Tagliamontes debuild.me (only the buildd service, the archive will still be managed by dak). This requires lots of work, but will result in software not only usable by Tanglu, but also by Debian itself and everyone who wants a build-service capable of building a Debian-distro.

KDE 4.8 and GNOME 3.8

Tanglu now offers KDE 4.8 by default, a sync of GNOME 3.8 is currently in progress. The packages will be updated depending on our resources and otherwise just be synced from Debian unstable/experimental (and made working for Tanglu).

systemd 204 & libudev1

Tanglu now offers systemd 204 as default init system, and we transitioned the whole distribution to the latest version of udev. This even highlighted a few issues which could be fixed before the latest systemd reached Debian experimental. The udev transition went nicely, and hopefully Debian will fix bug#717418 too, soon, so both distributions run with the same udev version (which obviously makes things easier for Tanglu ^^)

Artwork

We now have a plymouth-bootscreen and wallpapers and stuff is in progress

Alpha-release & Live-CD…?

This is what we are working on – we have some issues in creating a working live-cd, since live-build does have some issues with our stack. We are currently resolving issues, but because of the lack of manpower, this is progressing slowly (all contributors also work on other FLOSS projects and of course also have their work )

As soon as we have working live-media, we can do a first alpha release and offer installation media.

You!

Tanglu is a large task. And we need every help we can get, right now especially technical help from people who can build packages (Debian Developers/Maintainers, Ubuntu developers, etc.) We especially need someone to take care of the live-cd.

But also the website needs some help, and we need more artwork or improved artwork In general, if you have an idea how to make Tanglu better (of course, something which matches it’s goals ) and want to realize it, just come back to us! You can reach us on the mailiglists (tanglu-project for stuff related to the project, tanglu-devel for development of the distro) or in #tanglu / #tanglu-devel (on Freenode).

There’s much to quibble about in this Krugman post, but I’ll keep it short:

The Microsoft story is familiar. Back in the 80s, Microsoft and Apple both had operating systems to sell; Apple’s was clearly better. But Apple misunderstood the nature of the market: it said, “We have a better system, so we’re going to make it available only on our own beautiful machines, and charge premium prices.” Meanwhile Microsoft licensed its system to lots of people making cheap machines — and established a commanding position through network externalities. People used Windows because other people used Windows — there was more software available, corporate tech departments were prepared to provide support, etc.

Two things.

First, when we talk about the ’80s and ’90s and Apple, we’re talking about the Mac. And though the Mac suffered mightily in the late ’90s, dropping so low that it almost brought the entire company down, today, the Mac makes Apple the world’s most profitable PC maker. Even if you don’t count the iPad as a “PC”, no one makes more money selling personal computers than Apple. In the long run, Apple’s strategy paid off.

Second, Krugman is right about the fundamental difference between Windows’s success and iOS’s. The beauty of the Windows hegemony is that it wasn’t the best, and didn’t have to be the best. Once their OS monopoly was established, they just had to show up. Apple’s success today is predicated on iOS being the best. They have to stay at the top of the game, both design- and quality-wise, to maintain their success. That’s riskier.

"Klytus, I'm bored. What play thing can you offer me today?"

Last year Pesco shared the classic football fight from Sam J. Jones' epic title role in the 1980 version of Flash Gordon. I've just re-watched the film and never cease to be thrilled.

Flash is one of the most iconic scifi characters of all time. An American football player thrown into a galaxy spanning adventure to save the Earth. This Mike Hodges directed version of the story has an incredible cast. Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless, Timothy Dalton as Prince Barin and Brian Blessed playing Vultan the Hawkman are just a few of the fantastic performances.

Queen's soundtrack always gets my heart pumping and leaves me certain that Flash will save every one of us.

Flash Gordon (1980)

It’s a bank holiday weekend. What are you doing – perhaps some DIY or pottering around the garden? Well, if you’re disabled, chances are you won’t be able to shop at a B&Q because their dedicated blue badge parking bays are used to store stock from Spring to Autumn. And the company aren’t willing to change.

I’m physically disabled. I need to park as close to my destination as possible, and I need a wide parking bay with hatching either side, so I can open my doors fully in order to get in and out – if I use a regular bay and someone parks alongside me, I can’t get back into my car. Luckily, the number and sizes of these bays are specified by the Department for Transport (DfT), so I can rely on them being present when I need to shop. The specifications are detailed on their website (although this PDF is dated 1995, the DfT confirmed to me in June 2013 that this is still their current guidance). So it’s straightforward – a shopping area should provide dedicated, wide parking spaces for every disabled member of staff, plus 6% of all bays if there are under 200 spaces in total, or 4 bays plus an additional 4% if there are more than 200 spaces.

When a store doesn’t provide those bays, or if they are provided but not enforced, it’s easy to campaign, quoting the DfT’s guidance. But what happens when disabled parking bays are present, but it’s the store themself who abuses them?

B&Q is a repeat offender. Take my local store, Leyton Mills in East London. I won’t bore you with the numbers, but you can see the location of disabled bays – marked with blue splodges – on this trading estate. Whether you only count the parking bays in the B&Q area, or the entire trading estate, I’ve totted them up and the numbers are such that obstructing just a few bays will mean that the DfT minimums are not met. Every dedicated wide bay is important for me and the many disabled people who want to shop there.

Image from Google Maps – click for detail

Back in 2009 I raised the issue of the disabled bays having been turned into a garden centre:

The management didn’t seem to care – I spoke to them three times and then followed up with a letter, but nothing changed – so I contacted the local police team who patrol the trading estate. A lovely PC gave me the management company’s address but also confided that he’d already had words with B&Q on this topic and it was a source of frustration. The PC spoke to store management again and this time they removed plants from three bays, and promised to free up another two over the weekend (theoretically leaving just one disabled bay full of stock, and eleven available for parking).

Well, B&Q did indeed remove plants from some of the disabled parking bays… however, they replaced them with a gazebo containing a woman selling trampolines!

If it wasn’t so frustrating and ridiculous, I’d laugh. All I want is somewhere to park.

The problem is ongoing, every year the same. In May 2013 the disabled bays looked like this:

…yes, it’s another garden centre! I should point out that there are plenty of normal parking spaces that could be used instead of the dedicated wide ones, if they are unable to fit all their stock in the store. But not only do the disabled bays get used for plants, but they are spread out to provide space for people to browse around them! So it’s not just an emergency holding area, but a deliberate abuse of the space.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here are some examples from other stores…

Claire Brewer spotted this in Lea Bridge Road:

And my own image of the same store (I was unable to park there at all, and staff looked at me blankly when I called them over and asked them to clear a disabled bay for me) – click on the image to see more detail:

Su Smith visited Aylesbury, where they were displaying compost in the car park:

And Dr John Bullas saw this stack of trolleys at a Southampton store:

This problem has also been in the news, for example last October Harrow Times reported on B&Q’s Stanmore store: Anger at DIY store blocking disabled bays with stock. And I’ve heard reports of similar issues at B&Q stores across the UK. Clearly the company don’t care about the needs of their disabled customers. I won’t give you the full spiel about the business case for providing access, but suffice to say that 1 in 7 adults in the UK are disabled, with an annual spending power of around £80 billion. It’s clear that B&Q are not just frustrating and insulting disabled people, but are also turning away a lot of potential income.

So what do B&Q have to say?

Their website has an “Ethics FAQ”, which states:

“Q. What services do you provide for disabled customers?
A. All car parks have designated disabled parking bays, near the main store entrance.”

It would be nice if, having created these parking bays, B&Q would keep them free for the customers who need them.

This summer I tackled B&Q via twitter, hoping that the publicity would make them think twice. They responded to my photos of Leyton Mills, and asked their manager to move stock out of the bays. This was done in many cases, but several of the hatched areas (needed for disabled people to open their doors fully or to pull their wheelchairs alongside their car) remained blocked with stock. A quick poll of my disabled friends on twitter indicated that in order to be useful, the bay needs to have clear hatching on both sides of the bay. And indeed this clear hatching is specified in the DfT guidance. If stores are still blocking hatching they are still obstructing the bays.

Also, B&Q may have cleared some of the spaces in Leyton Mills. Stores in other locations remain just as bad. They might have responded to my tweets in fear of bad publicity but they haven’t made any kind of change to their general attitude or policy. In fact when I visited Leyton Mills this week I found another bay blocked by a sign inviting me to come and shop over the Bank Holiday weekend. This infuriated me enough to finally blog about it.

So it seems that B&Q just don’t care. Summer may be nearly over, and perhaps once colder weather comes and the bedding plants are sold out for another year, the demand for disabled bays (from both customers and the stores) will diminish.

But we know it will happen again.

Name and shame your local offenders, and perhaps head office will do something about it. If not, perhaps it’s time the issue was raised with the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

As their advert says – “B&Q: What could you do?”

I welcome readers’ comments on this blog. Please let me know whether this is something which has affected you.

Om Malik:

And forget the products — so far Yahoo has been unable to attract top quality talent to the company. Not one 20-something I have talked to in the past six months has wistfully talked about working for Yahoo. And even those who have joined Yahoo from Google are joining the company thanks to mega-million dollar contracts, not because they want to work there. When Yahoo becomes the desired job-spot for a fresh, new tech tinkerer — that will be the time I will lighten up on Yahoo.

This is the second time that's happened, so I guess it's an official part of the script, not just editorialization.

But... yesssssss. Yes it is. Please don't move here.

The X1 Carbon’s touchpad has been my nemesis in Linux for quite some time because of its high sensitivity. I’d often find the cursor jumping over a few pixels each time I tried to tap to click. This was aggravating at first, but then I found myself closing windows when I wanted them minimized or confirming something in a dialog that I didn’t want to confirm.

Last December, I wrote a post about some fixes. However, as I force myself to migrate to Linux (no turning back this time) again, my fixes didn’t work well enough. I stumbled upon a post about the X1′s touchpad and how an Ubuntu user found a configuration file that seemed to work well.

Just as a timesaver, I’ve reposted his configuration here:

# softlink this file into:
# /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d
 
# and prevent the settings app from overwriting our settings:
# gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.mouse active false
 
 
Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "nathan touchpad catchall"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Driver "synaptics"
 
    # three fingers for the middle button
    Option "TapButton3" "2"
    # drag lock
    Option "LockedDrags" "1"
    # accurate tap-to-click!
    Option "FingerLow" "50"
    Option "FingerHigh" "55"
 
    # prevents too many intentional clicks
    Option "PalmDetect" "0"
 
    # "natural" vertical and horizontal scrolling
    Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
    Option "VertScrollDelta" "-75"
    Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
    Option "HorizScrollDelta" "-75"
 
    Option "MinSpeed" "1"
    Option "MaxSpeed" "1"
 
    Option "AccelerationProfile" "2"
    Option "ConstantDeceleration" "4"
EndSection

Many many thanks to Nathan Hamblen for assembling this configuration and offering it out to the masses on his blog.

Get a rock-solid Linux touchpad configuration for the Lenovo X1 Carbon is a post from: Major Hayden's blog.

Thanks for following the blog via the RSS feed. Please don't copy my posts or quote portions of them without attribution.

2008 piece comparing and contrasting two company-wide memos, one from Steve Jobs, one from Steve Ballmer:

Apple employees may not always — or even often — agree with Jobs, but they do believe him. Apple tends to do and achieve exactly what Jobs says they will. (His declaration in January 2007 that Apple would be selling 10 million iPhone per year by 2008, for example.)

Ballmer’s promises, in contrast, defy belief, at least regarding where Microsoft stands against Apple in terms of “end-to-end experience” and against Google in terms of search and online advertising. He’s either ignorant or lying — neither of which is inspiring to the rank-and-file engineers.

My thanks to Shutterstock for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Shutterstock has over 27 million stock photos, illustrations, vectors, and videos. It’s incredible, and growing by 10,000 images every day. Shutterstock’s entire library of royalty-free images are available by subscription and a la carte.

Visitors can browse the entire library for free, and Shutterstock has a great app for iPhone and the iPad.

In my latest Guardian column, I talk about the digital versions of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the two most important lexicographic references to the English language. As a writer, my print copies of the OED and HTOED are to me what an anvil is to a blacksmith; but I was disturbed to learn that the digital editions of these books are only available as monthly rentals, services that come with expansive data-collecting policies and which cannot be owned. It's especially ironic that these books are published by Oxford University, home of the Bodleian, a deposit archive and library founded in the 14th century, a symbol of the importance of enduring ownership of books.

My discussions with OUP's execs convinced me that this wasn't the result of venality or greed, but rather the unfortunate consequence of a bunch of individually reasonable decisions that added up to something rather worrying. I hope that OUP and Oxford will continue to evolve its products in a way that honours the centuries-old traditions that Oxford embodies.

OUP – which has been selling dictionaries and thesauri since the 19th century – will not sell you a digital OED or HTOED. Not for any price.

Instead, these books are rented by the month, accessed via the internet by logged-in users. If you stop paying, your access to these books is terminated.

I mentioned this to some librarians at the American Library Association conference in Chicago this spring and they all said, effectively: "Welcome to the club. This is what we have to put up with all the time."

This article explains a little about how the timer system works in QEMU, and in particular the changes associated with the new timer system I’ve contributed to QEMU.

What to timers do?

Timers (more precisely QEMUTimers) provide a means of calling a giving routine (a callback) after a time interval has elapsed, passing an opaque pointer to the routine.

The measurement of time can be against one of three clocks:

• The realtime clock, which runs even when the VM is stopped, with a resolution of 1000 Hz;
• The virtual clock, which only runs when the VM is running, at a high resolution; and
• The host clock, which (like the realtime clock) runs even when the VM is stopped, but is sensitive to time changes to the system clock (e.g. NTP).

Timers are single shot, i.e. when they have elapsed, they call their callback and will do nothing further unless they are re-armed. The callback can rearm the timer to provide a repeating timer.

What’s changed in the implementation?

Prior to the timer API change, timers only existed in the main QEMU thread, and were only run from QEMU’s main loop. Expiry of timers was through a system-dependent system of secondary timers called alarm timers. These would call QemuNotify which caused a write to a notifier FD, and caused any poll() in progress to terminate. Throughout QEMU, poll() (or equivalent) would use infinite timeouts (rather than the timeout associated with any timer), and rely on the alarm timers (under POSIX running through signals) to terminate these system calls.

This approach caused a number of problems:

• Timers were only handled within the main loop. QEMU’s AioContext has an internal loop that runs during block operations and may run for a long time. Timers were not processed during this loop which made writing block device timers that would be guaranteed to run while the block layer was busy hard to do;
• Timers were fundamentally single threaded, and the existing system was incompatible with plans for additional threading and AioContexts;
• The system dependent code that implemented alarm timers was not pretty; and
• The API to call them was messy.

To fix this I contributed a 31 commit patch that:

• Refactored nearly all of the timer code;
• Switched to rely on timeouts from ppoll() rather than signals and alarm timers (thus allowing alarm timers to be deleted);
• Separated the clock sources (QEMUClock) from the lists of active timers (QEMUTimerList);
• Introduced timer list groups (QEMUTimerListGroup) to allow independent threads or other users of timers to have their own set of timers (each attached to any clock); and
• Tidied up the API.

You can find the patch set here.

How does the new implementation work?

The diagram below shows the relationship between the new objects (click to enlarge).

QEMU Timer Diagram

There is exactly one QEMUClock for each clock type, representing the clock source with that particular type. Currently there are three clock sources, as outlined above. In the previous implementation, each clock would have a list of timers running against it. However, now the list of running timers is kept in a QEMUTimerList. The clock needs to keep to track of all the QEMUTimerLists attached to that clock, and for that purposes maintains a list of them (purple line on the diagram).

Each user of timers maintains a QEMUTimerListGroup. This is a struct currently consisting solely of an array of QEMUTimerList pointers, one for each clock type. Hence each QEMUTimerListGroup is really a collection of three (currently) QEMUTimerLists (the red line in the diagram). There are two current QEMUTimerListGroup users. A global static, main_loop_tlg, represents the timer lists run from the main loop (i.e. all current timer users). I also added a QEMUTimerListGroup to each AioContext (there currently being just one), so the block layer can use timers that will run without relying on the aio system returning to the main loop; this also permits future threading. Any other subsystem could have its own QEMUTimerListGroup; it merely needs to call timerlistgroup_run_timers at an appropriate time to run any pending timers.

Each QEMUTimerList maintains a pointer to the clock to which it is connected (orange line). It is (as set out above) on a list of QEMUTimerLists for that QEMUClock (the list element). It contains a pointer to the first active timer. The active timers are not maintained through the normal QEMU linked list object, but are instead a simple singly linked list of timers, arranged in order of expiry, with the timer expiring soonest at the start of the list, linked to by the QEMUTimerList object (blue line).

Each QEMUTimer object contains a link back to its timer list (green line) for manipulation of the lists.

Under the hood, the call to g_poll within the AioContext’s poll loop has been replaced with ppoll (the nanosecond equivalent of poll). Unfortunately, glib only provides millisecond resolution, meaning that the main loop’s timing will only be at millisecond accuracy whilst this continues to use glib’s poll routines. Plans are afoot to remedy this.

What’s changed in the API?

The API had become somewhat messy.

Firstly, I’ve replaced the previous timer API (with function names like qemu_mod_timer) with a new API of the form timer_<action> where <action> is the action required, for instance timer_new, timer_mod, and so forth. The timer_new function and friends take an enum value being the clock type, rather than a pointer to a clock object. For instance this:

timer = qemu_new_timer_ns (vm_clock, cb, opaque);

becomes this:

timer = timer_new_ns(QEMU_CLOCK_VIRTUAL, cb, opaque);

Timers not using the main loop QEMUTimerListGroup can be created using timer_new_tl. There’s also timer_init available for use without malloc which takes a timer list. AioContext provides helper functions aio_timer_new and aio_timer_init.

Secondly, I’ve similarly rationalised the clock API. For instance this:

now = qemu_get_clock_ns (vm_clock);

becomes this:

now = qemu_clock_get_ns(QEMU_CLOCK_VIRTUAL);

Thirdly, I’ve added lots of documentation (see include/qemu/timer.h)

If you have out-of-tree code that needs converting to the new timer API, simply run

scripts/switch-timer-api [filename] ...

to convert them.

BrotherhoodWorkshop created a very ambitious LEGO version of Peter Jackson's teaser trailer for 'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug'-- "2 months in the making and countless man hours." Not to mention hobbit-hours. Spotted at Laughing Squid where you can view the original trailer. The motion picture is scheduled for release on December 13, 2013. I wish there were going to be a LEGO version of it, too.

Subscribe to BrotherhoodWorkshop's YouTube channel for more awesome stop-motion and fantasy videos. According to their "about" page, their "hope is to one day make feature films," so maybe it's possible.

Below, some stills, courtesy of the BrotherhoodWorkshop Facebook page. These guys are insane, and insanely talented.

From "My Daguerrotype Boyfriend," Captain Woodford M. Taylor, Company B, 26th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry, U.S.A, 1860 (via Kentucky Digital Library)

A tumblog of photographs of hot guys from days of yore: My Daguerrotype Boyfriend, by Michelle Legro. I'd have hit that, 140 years ago. [HT: Alexis Madrigal]

On codes of conduct

A criticism of the status quo, with a simple proposal: video and lyrics.

With compassion unyielding to grudge, mother, I learnt how to love.

One year ago today
Wombat and kangaroo love: An orphaned wombat and kangaroo are unlikely BFFs at the Wildabout Wildlife Rescue Centre in Kilmore, Victoria, Australia.

Five years ago today
Klingon knife scares the crap out of dumb British scandal-sheet: The Daily Mail has a hilariously breathless account of a giant stainless steel Klingon fighting-knife received by police during a knife-amnesty; to hear them tell of it hooded thugs are roaming the streets with Klingon duelling swords looking for little old ladies to terrorise.

Ten years ago today
How does the Pentagon spend its yearly $400 million?: The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General has reported that DOD has not and will not account for $1.1 trillion of "undocumentable adjustments."

From the Boing Boing Flickr Pool: "Missy," photographed and shared by Stuart Watson.

REUTERS/David Gray

Steve Westnedge plays his saxophone for a Leopard Seal known as "Casey" as part of a study on the animal's reactions to different sounds at Sydney's Taronga Zoo August 19, 2013. Westnedge, who is also the zoo's elephant keeper, plays his saxophone next to the underwater viewing window to assist the study by researchers from the Australian Marine Mammal Research Centre. The seal occasionally responds with his own sounds, depending on the time of year, which are normally used when wanting to attract mates or establish territories.

LOVEINT is the NSA practice of stalking people you are romantically interested in, using the enormous, illegal spy apparatus that captures huge amounts of Americans' (and foreigners') Internet traffic. It is so widespread that it has its own slangy spook-name. The NSA says it fires the people it catches doing it (though apparently it doesn't prosecute them for their crimes), but given that the NSA missed Snowden's ambitious leak-gathering activity, it seems likely that they've also missed some creepy stalkers in their midst.

Unless, of course, you believe that being a creepy stalker is incompatible with wanting to be a lawless spy.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, said the NSA told her committee about a set of “isolated cases” that have occurred about once a year for the last 10 years, where NSA personnel have violated NSA procedures.

She said “in most instances” the violations didn’t involve an American’s personal information. She added that she’s seen no evidence that any of the violations involved the use of NSA’s domestic surveillance infrastructure, which is governed by a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“Clearly, any case of noncompliance is unacceptable, but these small numbers of cases do not change my view that NSA takes significant care to prevent any abuses and that there is a substantial oversight system in place,” she said. “When errors are identified, they are reported and corrected.”

NSA Officers Sometimes Spy on Love Interests [Siobhan Gorman/WSJ]

(via /.)

(Image: One Hour Photo)

Photo: Annette Sandburg

Last weekend, Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Bridge was yarn-bombed by volunteers. Pittsburgh Magazine offers 30 photos of the feat, which involved "more than 3,000 feet of colorful, hand-knit blankets in honor of the late pop artist’s 85th birthday."

A new bridge in Dresden, Germany, was deemed so hideous that the UNESCO has delisted the entire city from its World Heritage index. The removal, protesting the construction's marring of historical city views, makes Dresden the first city to exit the United Nations' tally of the world's beautiful and important places.

The film tells the story of Chronos, the personification of time and the inability to realize his desire to love for a mortal. The scenes blend a series of surreal paintings of Dali with dancing and metamorphosis. The target production began in 1945, 58 years before its completion and was a collaboration between Walt Disney and the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí. Salvador Dali and Walt Disney’s Destiny was produced by Dali and John Hench for 8 months between 1945 and 1946. Dali, at the time, Hench described as a “ghostly figure” who knew better than Dali or the secrets of the Disney film. For some time, the project remained a secret. The work of painter Salvador Dali was to prepare a six-minute sequence combining animation with live dancers and special effects for a movie in the same format of “Fantasia.” Dali in the studio working on The Disney characters are fighting against time, the giant sundial that emerges from the great stone face of Jupiter and that determines the fate of all human novels. Dalí and Hench were creating a new animation technique, the cinematic equivalent of “paranoid critique” of Dali. Method inspired by the work of Freud on the subconscious and the inclusion of hidden and double images.
Dalí said: “Entertainment highlights the art, its possibilities are endless.” The plot of the film was described by. Dalí as “A magical display of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time.”
Walt Disney said it was “A simple story about a young girl in search of true love.”

The truth behind many of YouTube's most famous embarrassing pratfalls. [via Kotaku]

On the latest episode of Bullseye with Jesse Thorn I recommended the iPad app Blocksworld and The Adventure Time Encyclopaedia.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing, which bills itself as a "directory of wonderful things." He joins us to share some of his recent finds.

This time, it's The Adventure Time Encyclopedia and the iPad game Blocksworld.

The Cartoon Network's show Adventure Time is ostensibly for children, but eagerly devoured by people of all ages. It follows the psychedelic adventures of a boy named Finn and his dog Jake. The new Adventure Time Encyclopedia, "translated" by comedy writer Martin Olson, features new original artwork and everything you ever wanted to know about the post-apocalyptic land of Oooo. Mark also suggests downloading the Blocksworld app for iPad, a virtual Lego-like world with huge creative possibilities.

Mike Adamick is the author of Dad's Book of Awesome Projects: From Stilts and Super-Hero Capes to Tinker Boxes and Seesaws. The projects include making a balance board, eggshell cupcakes, comic book shoes, a vintage modern silhouette, crayon shapes, a duct tape crayon wallet, friendship bracelets, homemade Play-Doh, a garden trolley, homemade ice cream, goo slime, superhero capes, popsicle stick bridges, a wooden sword, and more.

Here's an excerpt that shows how to make stilts (PDF)

I had cause to post text from http://serverfault.com/help/closed-questions in a comment today, and there's a section that reads

too broad - if your question could be answered by an entire book, or has many of valid answers, it's probably too broad for our format

You'll notice an extra of between many and valid. If someone with privilege could remove that, it'd probably be good.

                    .---.                        
       .--.     ___/     \                       
      /    `.-""   `-,    ;                      
     ;     /     O O  \  /	                      
     `.    \          /-'     THIS IS AN ELEPHANT
    _  J-.__;      _.'                           
   (" /      `.   -=:         AND IT IS CUTE     
    `:         `, -=|                            
     |  F\    i, ; -|         THAT IS ALL        
     |  | |   ||  \_J                            
fsc  mmm! `mmM Mmm'                              

Al Feldstein began working at EC comics, publishers of Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear in 1948. Soon he became editor of most of EC's titles. He typically wrote and illustrated a story in each title and drew many of the covers, a mind-bogglingly prolific output. Eventually he stopped doing the art for stories and stuck with editing, writing, and cover illustrations. According to Wikipedia, from "late 1950 through 1953, he edited and wrote stories for seven EC titles." I've always loved his signature, which features elongated horizontals on the F and the T, and an extended vertical on the N.

After MAD creator Harvey Kurtzman got in a fight with publisher William Gaines over ownership of the comic and left EC in 1956, Gaines put Feldstein in charge of the humor magazine, where he remained as editor until 1985.

Al Feldstein is retired from magazine work, but is an active painter of Western and wildlife scenes.

This week 99,387 visitors visited 303,638 times viewing 487,789 pages. The top stories in order of popularity were:

• Who Needs Sally Bercow When You Have Lily Allen?
• SamCam Gets Her Tat Out
• PHOTO: Caroline Lucas Arrested
• Guardian v Spooks: Key Questions
• James Delingpole Tells of Gay Experience
• Smacked Bottom For Press Gazette
• Gay Reporter Subverts Russian TV Propaganda Channel

Do You need heat sinks for the Pi?

Short answer would be: no, you don’t.

Long answer would be: Depends what you are doing with it.

My first Pi project was a media player and the Pi handles this incredibly without the need for overclocking and the temperature remains within an acceptable level. For the purpose of a media server I would have to say no you do not need heat sinks.

I had an idea lurking around in my head to try the Pi for arcade emulation and emulation needs more juice. In this use case I intended to get a second SD card, try some emulators and play some games to test the waters. For this test I also planned to over clock so if you intend to use your Pi in this manner then I would say yes.

I went around looking for heat sinks and what people recommended and I came across a kit that came with 3 small heat sinks and thermal paper to attach them to the Pi. It took about a week or so for the package to arrive and it was pretty plane, a small baggy containing 3 small heat sinks and a sheet of thermal paper.

I took the case off my Pi and cut appropriate sized squares of thermal paper for the heat sinks and began to apply them to the Pi. Once I was done I was impressed by the improved appearance. I know it sounds silly but the Pi did look cooler with the heat sinks on. You can even see them through my Pi bow case.

So after the heat sinks were attached I tested the Pi. The heat sinks provided about a 20 degree difference. I have experienced no issues going up to 950Mhz with my Pi. Some may also say you can do that without the sinks but when it comes to over clocking I’d rather err on the side of not constantly replacing cooked Pi’s.

The costs in question were incurred after a 2011 FISA court ruling.

Charlie Savage at the New York Times digs into the story here.

Fact NSA pays providers for cost of complying w/ orders unremarkable. But why cost millions to implement the extension of a certification?

— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) August 23, 2013

Link to "learn more" about a tag is unclickable in Google Chrome.

1. Open page to "Ask Question"
2. Start typing in the "Tags" field at the bottom
3. Mouse over any one of the tags
4. Try to click the link that says "learn more".

It's impossible to click this link in Google Chrome (Version 30.0.1599.14 beta-m) but it works just fine in Mozilla Firefox.

I noticed it here on SF first, but this seems to affect all sites on the Stack Exchange network. Is there a more appropriate meta site for this issue?

Cartoon Network covered this entire bullet train to try and advertise their network. The result is beyond awesome

Is there still no better iOS alternative to this bullshit?

Previously, previously.

The biggest problem with the NSA scandal is the lack of accountability.

Mei Xiang, the female panda who lives at the Smithsonian National Zoo, gave birth today. Above is a screen shot from the Zoo's Panda Cam, showing the baby shortly after birth.

Why should you care about this not-quite-yet-but-soon-to-be adorable baby animal more than you care about any other adorable baby animal? Because the scientific oddities of panda reproduction make its story very interesting.

First, it's incredibly difficult for pandas to get knocked up. They're only fertile once a year and have trouble successfully mating in captivity. Mei Xiang was artificially inseminated with the sperm of two different male pandas back in March. All of Mei Xiang's cubs have been conceived this way, but the artificial inseminations don't always work. She gave birth once in 2005 to Tai Shan who now lives in China. It was another 7 years before a second pregnancy took, but the unnamed cub only lived for six days.

Second, you can't tell whether or not pandas are pregnant until there either is or isn't a baby panda.

They go through the same symptoms and physical changes either way and nobody even knows exactly how long the panda gestation period is.

Plus, they're notoriously difficult to successfully ultrasound. In fact, Mei Xiang's last ultrasound on August 5 showed no sign of a fetus.

Basically, panda reproduction is weird.

So, break out the bubbly for this new, little cub with a bit more enthusiasm than might be applied to, say, a litter of rabbits.

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.

As with 12.04.2, 12.04.3 contains an updated kenrel and X stack for new installations on x86 architectures.

As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Kubuntu 12.04.3 LTS, Edubuntu 12.04.3 LTS, Xubuntu 12.04.3 LTS, Mythbuntu 12.04.3 LTS, and Ubuntu Studio 12.04.3 LTS are also now available. For some of these, more details can be found in their announcements:

• Kubuntu: http://www.kubuntu.org/news/12.04.3-release
• Edubuntu: http://www.edubuntu.org/news/12.04.3-release
• Mythbuntu: http://www.mythbuntu.org/home/news/12043released
• Ubuntu Studio: http://ubuntustudio.org/2013/08/ubuntu-studio-12-04-3-released/

To get Ubuntu 12.04.3

In order to download Ubuntu 12.04.3, visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download

Users of Ubuntu 10.04 will be offered an automatic upgrade to 12.04.3 via Update Manager. For further information about upgrading, see:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PreciseUpgrades

As always, upgrades to the latest version of Ubuntu are entirely free of charge.

We recommend that all users read the 12.04.3 release notes, which document caveats and workarounds for known issues, as well as more in-depth notes on the release itself. They are available at:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/12043

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but aren’t sure, you can try asking in any of the following places:

• #ubuntu on irc.freenode.net
• http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
• http://www.ubuntuforums.org
• http://askubuntu.com

Help Shape Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at:

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved

About Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, clouds and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional services including support are available from Canonical and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/support

More Information

You can learn more about Ubuntu and about this release on our website listed below:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

Originally posted to the ubuntu-announce mailing list on Fri Aug 23 23:31:31 UTC 2013 by Stéphane Graber

"My class recently created a song using nothing but objects and sounds found in the classroom or in school," Edgar says. And here's the resulting video.

"Any money made off of YouTube will be donated to my school," Edgar says.

He's on Facebook, and YouTube.

More about the video, below.

An Overeasy remix using audio and video samples of things that happen in my third grade classroom. The students wrote and performed all their own parts and even helped with filming, mic'ing, and some composition!

As part of my sell to the parents for letting me do this I decided it'd be a neat idea if I could give whatever sum -- even if nominal -- of money made from advertisements on YouTube to the school. The money would be used for this particular group of students' outdoor ed program. Our school is small and a lot of the funding for our field trips and activities come out of our parents' pockets or from fundraising.

In short: share, share, share! It gives me a chance to share my music and it helps out the kids a bit.

A few last things:

- Keep it civil in the comments. These are eight and nine year old kids. I really don't want to remove the comments section.

- Authorization forms were obtained for all of the students pictured in this video.

- Big shout out to our first grade teacher, Aly Pence, who helped the girls learn that chair dance (in one sitting!)

- Everything you hear is depicted in some shape or form in the video. I did edit the heck out of some sounds, but for the most part what you see is what you hear.

- It's tough having a day job and making these videos, but viewership makes it all worthwhile. Please like, comment, and subscribe.

- Feel free to leave ideas for remixes in the future. I'd love to take on some of your challenges!

Big thanks to all my students and their parents. Y'all gonna be rockstars this year in fourth. Go on and smash it!

FrOSCon is approaching, and all MirBSD developers will attend… but why’s there no MirBSD exhibit? The answer to that is a bit complex. First let’s state that of course we will participate in the event as well as the Open Source world. We’ll also be geocaching around the campus with other interested (mostly OSS) people (including those we won for this sport) and helping out other OSS projects we’ve become attached to.

MirOS BSD, the operating system, is a niche system. The conference on the other hand got “younger” and more mainstream. This means that almost all conference visitors do not belong to the target group of MirOS BSD which somewhat is an “ancient solution”: the most classical BSD around (NetBSD® loses because they have rc.d and PAM and lack sendmail(8), sorry guys, your attempt at being not reformable doesn’t count) and running on restricted hardware (such as my 486SLC with 12 MiB RAM) and exots (SPARCstation). It’s viable even as developer workstation (if your hardware is supported… otherwise just virtualise it) but its strength lies with SPARC support and “embedded x86”. And being run as virtual machine: we’re reportedly more stable and more performant than OpenBSD. MirBSD is not cut off from modern development and occasionally takes a questionable but justified choice (such as using 16-bit Unicode internally) or a weird-looking but beneficial one (such as OPTU encoding saving us locale(1) hassles) or even acts as technological pioneer (64-bit time_t on ILP32 platforms) or, at least, is faster than OpenBSD (newer GNU toolchain, things like that), but usually more conservatively, and yes, this is by design, not by lack of manpower, most of the time.

The MirPorts Framework, while technically superiour in enough places, is something that just cannot happen without manpower. I (tg@) am still using it exclusively, continuing to update ports I use and occasionally creating new ones (mupdf is in the works!), but it’s not something I’d recommend someone (other than an Mac OSX user) to use on a nōn-MirBSD system (Interix is not exactly thriving either, and the Interix support was only begun; other OSes are not widely tested).

The MirBSD Korn Shell is probably the one thing I will be remembered for. But I have absolutely no idea how one would present it on a booth at such an exhibition. A talk is much more likely. So no on that front too.

jupp, the editor which sucks less, is probably something that does deserve mainstream interest (especially considering Natureshadow is using it while teaching computing to kids) but probably more in a workshop setting. And booth space is precious enough in the FH so I think that’d be unfair.

All the other subprojects and side projects Benny and I have, such as mirₘᵢₙcⒺ, josef stalin, FreeWRT, Lunix Ewe, Shellsnippets, the fonts, etc. are interesting but share few, if any, common ground. Again, this does not match the vast majority of visitors. While we probably should push a number of these more, but a booth isn’t “it” here, either.

MirOS Linux (“MirLinux”) and MirOS Windows are, despite otherwise-saying rumours called W*k*p*d*a, only premature ideas that will not really be worked on (though MirLinux concepts are found in mirₘᵢₙcⒺ and stalin).

As you can see, despite all developers having full-time dayjobs, The MirOS Project is far from being obsolete. We hope that our website visitors understand our reasons to not have an exhibition booth of our own (even if the SPARCstation makes for a way cool one, it’s too heavy to lift all the time), and would like to point out that there are several other booths (commercial ones, as well as OSS ones such as AllBSD, Debian and (talking to) others) and other itineries we participate in. This year both Benny and I have been roped into helping out the conference itself, too (not exactly unvoluntarily though).

The best way to talk to us is IRC during regular European “geek” hours (i.e. until way too late into the night – which Americans should benefit from), semi-synchronously, or mailing lists. We sort of expect you to not be afraid to RTFM and look up acronyms you don’t understand; The MirOS Project is not unfriendly but definitely not suited for your proverbial Aunt Tilly, newbies, “desktop” users, and people who aren’t at least somewhat capable of using written English (this is by design).

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Why did Keynes' promised utopia -- still being eagerly awaited in the '60s -- never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn't figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we've collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment's reflection shows it can't really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the '20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers. [...]

It was a documentary, you know.

It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don't really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens. [...]

There's a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call "the market" reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting, will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one's job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.

Previously.

Another one on Ballmer from the archive:

The damning thing isn’t that Apple got there first; it’s that even after Apple revealed it, that Ballmer didn’t get it, that he didn’t see instantly that Apple had unveiled something amazing and transformative. All Ballmer could see was the near future, the next few months where the iPhone was indeed too expensive and where typing on a touchscreen was a novelty.

Officially he’s “retiring within the next 12 months”, but that’s just framing to allow Ballmer and Microsoft itself to save some face. This is the axe, and it was long overdue. Ballmer has been a successful steward growing profits from the franchises he inherited from the Gates era — Windows and Office. But he’s been an abject failure at developing anything new. Under his watch Windows has been supplanted by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Mobile is the industry’s growth area, and Microsoft is barely a player.

Here’s the hitch though: Ballmer has chased all potential successors out of the company — Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach, J Allard, and most recently, Steven Sinofsky.

I have made it to the final round of FOSSForce’s Top FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Blogger Contest and am happy to be among some amazing bloggers in Open Source two of which I have been fortunate enough to meet.

I was definitely an underdog in the last round but who knows maybe I can prevail as the Top FOSS Blogger with all of your support or perhaps Larry the CrunchBang Guy will win? Anyway, go ahead and go right here and get your vote in today!

The Huawei Tecal ES3000 is a family of full-height half-length enterprise application accelerators that leverage MLC NAND in capacities up to 2.4TB and PCIe interface (2.0 x8). On the surface the Huawei cards sound similar to many other products on the market, but a deeper look reveals a unique triple controller design that joins two PCBs together to form an impressive offering. On the top end of the performance scale this means 3.2GB/s max read bandwidth and 2.8GB/s write. From a latency angle, all thee capacities can drive 49µs and write latency of 8µs. The cards have a number of additional features as well including enhanced error checking, power fail protection and mechanisms to drive enhanced endurance over the course of their life. 

read more

Amir Efrati:

Google Inc., which has been working on software to help major automakers build self-driving cars, also is quietly going around them by designing and developing a full-fledged self-driving car, according to people familiar with the matter.

They’ve got to be eyeing Tesla, right?

Yesterday I took a few days off to fly out to Indianapolis to provide the keynote for the annual Start With Art event run by the Arts Council Of Indianapolis. Many thanks to Dave Lawrence for the kind invitation.

The event I spoke at was a luncheon attended by 1000 people which included awards given out to local artists and community leaders, a speech from the First Lady Of Indianapolis, and some musical performances. My keynote wrapped up the two hour event.

My presentation focused on the intersection between art and community, and the many similar driving forces behind both. Art is meant to be created, distributed, shared, and enjoyed, and communities are a wonderful way to infuse artists with opportunity. Likewise creativity is the backbone of great community.

My presentation touched on a number of experiences and take-aways from my experience as both an artist (citing examples of Severed Fifth and LugRadio) and a community manager (covering Ubuntu) and a set of general lessons and conclusions that I have learned over the years. Although I had never been to a Start With Art event before, and was a little nervous as I didn’t really know the audience, the presentation was well received.

I love speaking, and I love meeting new people at the events I speak at, but I have to admit, this event felt different to most.

I must confess that I didn’t have a particularly large scope of knowledge about what the Arts Council Of Indianapolis actually do, but the opening remarks included a range of announcements of new areas of focus and work that the organization are working on as well as updates about existing programs. The council highlights artists, provides funding campaigns, released a local crowd-funding portal to connect donors to artists, built a central arts website for ticket and performance information and more. The strong overriding message I got from all of this was that they are doing everything they can to make Indy a national example of a thriving arts eco-system.

The level of passion that I experienced today from the organizers, attendees, and sponsors was inspiring. They are clearly charting a course for Indianapolis to be to arts that Nashville is to music and Silicon Valley is to technology. The core takeaway from my presentation was that great communities succeed when united around a mission, and the organizers from the Arts Council Of Indianapolis and their community leaders are a thundering example of this sense of purpose. They are not just talking about how to improve the arts in Indianapolis, they are making it happen, and the event today was a strong testament to their efforts.

A truly inspiring trip, and many thanks to everyone at the Arts Council Of Indianapolis for taking such good care of me while I was in town. Indianapolis is an awesome city, and it is wonderful to know that the arts community is in such good hands.

[still no pictures here, feel free to go to gallery.debconf.org].

After my report about DebCamp, & after being home for 5 days now, here are some thoughts about DebConf13:

First of all, I really enjoyed being there, & this was one of the best DebConfs for me so far. An important reason for this was the place: Le Camp was in my opinion the best DebConf venue ever (I've been to), with everything & everyone in one place, & still enough space (especially outdoors space!) for work & relaxing. Kudos to the local team for finding this spot, & for sticking to it despite some criticism.

In general, I'd like to say thanks to the local team for the perfect organisation of all aspects – you did a great job!

What else did I enjoy? As usual, meeting old friends & making new ones was an important part. It was great to see people I've worked together with on-line in person for the first time, & also to get to know new people. – Debian not only produces a great operating system, it also is an awesome community!

Speaking of which: I attended quite a few seesions from the Community and Team tracks, & it's good to see that lots of energy & thoughts are going into improving how we deal with new or existing contributors.

Like each year, we had the "use Perl;" BoF, the annual meeting of the Debian Perl Group, where we discussed various topics around our tasks, tools, & workflow. As each year, in a very friendly & collaborative atmosphere.

Besides that, I attended talks about systemd & upstart; the first one disappointed me, since it felt more like a sales pitch than a technical talk & the presenter come across alot like "I know better than you what's good for you", the latter was better but tried to avoid upstart's main issue, the infamous Canonical Contributor License Agreement; of course the audience raised this topic in the Q&A part afterwards. – Rock vs. hard place …

Other interesting topics were what Debian can learn from Ubuntu's QA processes for its own testing migration (mail from the Release Team pending, AFAIK); lots of git stuff, & especially the "birth" of dgit, a tool to treat the Debian archive as a git remote. If this gets traction, it could be a revolution in packaging!

The lintian BoF encouraged me further to try to create some pkg-perl specific checks, & then there was jenkins, piuparts, autopkgtest, etc.

On Friday we celebrated Debian's 20^th birthday with a huge Kremšnita/Crèmeschnitte/mille-feuille. & with the Poetry Night at the campfire.

Usually I'd close with "See you next year in Portland!"; but since it seems like the local team has decided to scratch DebCamp (which they only said after being asked in the Q&A after their presentation), I'm not sure how attractive this really is for me … We'll see.

Thanks again to everyone who made this DebConf possible!

Gram-negative stained culture of F. nucleatum. Image Courtesy of J. Michael Miller, Ph.D.,(D)ABMM of National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-borne, and Enteric Diseases. Picture submitted by him to American Society for Microbiology

[Age-Adjusted Invasive Cancer Incidence Rates and 95% Confidence Intervals by State (Table 5.4.1M) *†Rates are per 100,000 persons and are age-adjusted to the 2000 U.S. standard population (19 age groups - Census P25-1130). Rates are per 100,000 persons and are age-adjusted to the 2000 U.S. standard population (19 age groups - Census P25-1130).]

... which is probably a good thing. But here is the boot log you all have been waiting for:

start ext2fs: Hurd server bootstrap: ext2fs[device:hd0s1] exec init proc auth
INIT: version 2.88 booting
Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel S.
Activating swap...done.
Checking root file system...fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 0
/dev/hd0s1: clean, 44693/181056 files, 291766/723200 blocks
done.
Activating lvm and md swap...(default pager): Already paging to partition hd0s5!
done.
Checking file systems...fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 0
done.
Cleaning up temporary files... /tmp.
Mounting local filesystems...done.
Activating swapfile swap...(default pager): Already paging to partition hd0s5!
done.
df: Warning: cannot read table of mounted file systems: No such file or directory
Cleaning up temporary files....
Configuring network interfaces...Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.2.2
Copyright 2004-2011 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on Socket//dev/eth0
Sending on   Socket//dev/eth0
*** stack smashing detected ***: dhclient terminated
Aborted
Failed to bring up /dev/eth0.
done.
Cleaning up temporary files....
Setting up X socket directories... /tmp/.X11-unix /tmp/.ICE-unix.
INIT: Entering runlevel: 2
Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel 2.
Starting enhanced syslogd: rsyslogd.
Starting deferred execution scheduler: atd.
Starting periodic command scheduler: cron.
Starting system message bus: dbusFailed to set socket option"/var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket": Protocol not available.
Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server: sshd.
unexpected ACK from keyboard


GNU 0.3 (debian) (console)

login: root
[...]
root@debian:~# ifup /dev/eth0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.2.2
Copyright 2004-2011 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on Socket//dev/eth0
Sending on   Socket//dev/eth0
*** stack smashing detected ***: dhclient terminated
Aborted
Failed to bring up /dev/eth0.
root@debian:~# dhclient -v -pf /run/dhclient.-dev-eth0.pid -lf /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient.-dev-eth0.leases /dev/eth0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.2.2
Copyright 2004-2011 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on Socket//dev/eth0
Sending on   Socket//dev/eth0
*** stack smashing detected ***: dhclient terminated
Aborted
root@debian:~# dhclient -pf /run/dhclient.-dev-eth0.pid -lf /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient.-dev-eth0.leases /dev/eth0
root@debian:~# ifup /dev/eth0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.2.2
Copyright 2004-2011 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on Socket//dev/eth0
Sending on   Socket//dev/eth0
DHCPREQUEST on /dev/eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK from 10.0.2.2
bound to 10.0.2.15 -- renewal in 34108 seconds.
ps: comm: Unknown format spec
root@debian:~# halt

Broadcast message from root@debian (console) (Fri Aug 23 19:42:19 2013):

The system is going down for system halt NOW!
INIT: Switching to runlevel: 0root@debian:~#
INIT: Sending processes the TERM signal
INIT: Sending processes the KILL signal
Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel 0.
Stopping deferred execution scheduler: atd.
task c10f53f8 deallocating an invalid port 2098928, most probably a bug.
Asking all remaining processes to terminate...done.
All processes ended within 1 seconds...done.
Stopping enhanced syslogd: rsyslogd.
Deconfiguring network interfaces...Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.2.2
Copyright 2004-2011 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on Socket//dev/eth0
Sending on   Socket//dev/eth0
DHCPRELEASE on /dev/eth0 to 10.0.2.2 port 67
/dev/eth0 (2):
  inet address  0.0.0.0
  netmask       255.255.255.0
  broadcast     10.0.2.255
  flags         BROADCAST ALLMULTI MULTICAST
  mtu           1500
done.
Deactivating swap...swapoff: /dev/hd0s5: 177152k swap space
done.
Unmounting weak filesystems...umount: /etc/mtab: Warning: duplicate entry for device /dev/hd0s1 (/servers/socket/26)
umount: /etc/mtab: Warning: duplicate entry for device /dev/hd0s1 (/dev/cons)
umount: could not find entry for: /dev/cons
umount: could not find entry for: /servers/socket/26
done.
mount: cannot remount /: Device or resource busy
Will now halt.
store a new irq 11init: notifying pfinet of shutdown...init: notifying tmpfs swap of shutdown...init: notifying tmpfs swap of shutdown...init: notifying tmpfs swap of shutdown...init: notifying ext2fs device:hd0s1 of shutdown...init: halting Mach (flags 0x8)...
In tight loop: hit ctl-alt-del to reboot

With some tiny patches for ifupdown I've been able to resolve network related issues. All of them? Of course not, funny thing about developing for the Hurd is that once you fix one thing, then some other thing or code path is executed that has never been run on Hurd before, and therefore something else breaks. In this case I fixed ifupdown to generate valid names for the pid file and leases file and all of the sudden dhclient starts dying.

Funny thing about that is, if one drops the -v flag from the dhclient invocation as I did it above, the crash isn't triggered and once the lease file has been successfully written, it is safe to add the -v flag again. Not yet sure what goes on there, then again, looking at the source of isc-dhcp-client it is not so surprising that it crashes :/

When I first looked at ifupdown it was written in noweb, a literate programming tool. It is an interesting idea, even more so since (classic) c can be very verbose and cryptic. But it decouples the control flow from the structure of the program, which makes patching it quite a challenge since it is not as obvious where the changes have to go in. This is how ifupdown looked some weeks ago:

% wc --lines ifupdown.nw
6123 ifupdown.nw
% pdftk ifupdown.pdf dump_data | grep NumberOfPages
NumberOfPages: 113

The ifupdown.nw is the noweb source, from which seven .c, four .h, two .pl and one Makefile are generated. It also contains a redicioulus amount of documentation, to the point that the authors at several points did not now what to write and just drop some nonsensical lines into the file. The source also compiles to a 113 page pdf file, that contains all of the documentation and all of the code, not at all in the order that one would expect a program to be written, but in the order the authors chose to structure the documentation. Fortunately for me the maintainer decided to drop the noweb source and to add the generated files to the source control system. This made my job much easier :)

So here are the patches I published this week:

• Fixes for ifupdown: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2013-08/msg00063.html
• Fixes for fakeroot-hurd and remap: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2013-08/msg00064.html

I must admit that I do not know exactly what I will do next week. Obviously fixing the dhclient crash would be nice, I'll look into that. But I'm surely find some useful thing to do.

Long before Walter White was making meth and knocking on doors in Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston was pushing another kind of drug

Who wouldn’t want to volunteer to help a couple Baywatch lifeguards? These guys will soon find out that things aren’t always how they appear.

Continuity Software is announcing that it's expanding its risk management offerings by adding AvailabilityGuard/SAN, software which detects downtime and data loss risks across a SAN to ensure that data is protected and business continuity goals are met. As the modern SAN generally comprises several vendors' solutions and can be managed by multiple IT teams or individuals, configuration errors are bound to happen. Additionally, lots of organizations lack a universal management tool, meaning that changes in one sector of the SAN might not be completed in another region due to oversight or another IT admin being unaware. AvailabilityGuard/SAN utilizes a community-supported knowledgebase that compiles thousands of potential risks, and then it searches for and finds them. From there, it validates vendor best practices to ensure that the configuration is optimized.

read more

One of the coolest thing Juju does is deploy instances right on your laptop via LXC containers. This is nice because we reuse the same exact cloud image you’d use in Amazon, HP Cloud, Azure, or any other cloud, but configured on your local laptop so you can mirror what your production environment would look like. This also can save you quite a bit of money.

We had a tutorial charm school on how to use the local provider, hope you enjoy it!

Direct link

With Manning announcing that she'll spend her 35 years of incarceration as a self-assigned woman, the US is getting a brief look at a particularly nasty state of affairs that been there for years. The US Army does not provide any treatment services other than mental health for people with Gender Identity Disorder. Which means Manning will spend her 35 years in a men's prison with no access or hormones, surgery, or even simple hair-removal.

If you dig out the big coverage document that came with your (US-based) health-care plan (assuming you even have one) there is a section you probably never bothered to look at titled EXCEPTIONS. This is the list of things that the plan will NOT cover. This is the list that tells you that, no, they won't cover things like:

• Going to Aruba for your (otherwise covered) kidney transplant.
• Costs related to medical studies of pre-market drugs and treatments.
• Costs relating to anything the FDA labels as 'Experimental'.
• Purely cosmetic procedures.

There is something else that almost always shows up on this list that really, really gets in the way of treating people like me and Chelsea Manning.

• Costs related to treatment of Gender Identity Disorder.

Yep, even though the DSM recognizes GID as an actual treatable disorder, and there is even a widely accepted treatment protocol for it, it's explicitly not covered in most plans. It has been this way for decades. By the protocol, treatment of GID requires interaction with three different medical professionals:

1. Mental health professionals who guide the person through the whole process.
2. Endocrinologists for the administration of hormones.
3. Surgeons for any surgeries that may be needed.

My current plan covers only the first step. They'll happily talk me out of it, but won't cover any actual medical interventions. This is the same coverage that Manning will get.

My plan at WWU didn't cover any of it. This is progress of a sort, but only a grudging one. Hormones and Endocrinologist visits are thousands of dollars a year. Surgeries such as double mastectomies will be completely out of pocket and can easily end up close to $10K. Hair removal takes years and multiple treatments (hair grows in cycles, you see).

Employers have to specifically negotiate coverage, which some do. San Francisco made news several years ago when they started covering the full costs. Several large tech companies advertise that they do so as well. It can be done, the effort just has to be taken.

Why is this protocol treated so very differently than anything else?

Dicks, but I'll get to that.

The only other thing that got even close to the exclusions of GID coverage is:

• Ovariohysterectomies in women under 30

And even that has fallen off in recent years.

Way back in the 1960's when the male-to-female surgery first became generally available, people started doing it. It was very scandalous since men were cutting off their dicks. Unfortunately, some of those transitioners experienced buyers remorse and learned that the surgery is a one way street, and the results aren't as good as the imagination suggests. And some of those remorse sufferers suicided.

Cue the epic pearl-clutching.

Something had to be Done, and Something certainly Was Done. Regulation started to fall down on this elective surgery in a haphazard way. It was in light of this that the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care were created in the 1970's, as a way to provide a widely accepted protocol for treatment. It worked.

However, those suicides haunted the insurance actuaries. Wrongful death suits are really, really expensive. Treating GID can lead to death, therefore, we won't cover it. QED.

That was 40 years ago, though.

One of the big reasons those early transitioners suicided was regret over not being able to have kids. The BSC is big on making clear that sterility is one of the side effects of transition, and is a major component of the mental health requirement being satisfied before going on hormones.

However, we've gotten a lot better at reproductive technology in the last 40 years. Sperm donation is a lot easier than it used to be, and they're viable longer. Egg donation is a thing now. I've known transitioners who've done gamete donation before taking the sterilization steps because of plans for maybe-kids later on.

_{Numbers are illustrative, not scientific. Do not cite.}

40 years ago society was a lot more divided along gender lines and the concept of genderqueer wasn't really a thing. You were either male or you were not (things were also a weensy bit more sexist too), there was no between. It was a much more gender essentialist time. Men transitioning to women were told to always wear skirts, grow their hair out, and learn how to be demure (failure to comply could mean not getting access to hormones). Never mind that gender performance varies considerably even among those who never question their gender, that's a pointless detail; these people need to over-perform in order to pass at all.

Another reason those transitioners suicided was because they were crammed into a role they didn't want to fit into. Perhaps they didn't want to change their job from the one they spent 20 years in to one more in line with Women's Work like teaching, but that's what the therapists demanded... and ended up hating it. And wanting the old life back, just different. But that's impossible so...

Speaking from direct personal experience, having between be an option really takes the stress out of many people who are in the middle of the gender spectrum. Not having to be shoved into a -8 or +8 on the spectum in order to have the gatekeeper open the door for you takes a lot of the stress out of the process.

The assumptions of 40 years ago no longer hold true, and it's time for that needless exclusion to be dropped.

We're getting more people suiciding from untreated GID than we ever did for treated. The continued presence of this health-care exclusion is unexcusable discrimination.

We've got an aggressive feature list for the next milestone release and welcome any involvement from the community. A few of the big ticket items are the following:

Top priority items

• Python 3.3 and Python 2.7 support - yes we'd like to keep supporting older python versions if possible :)
• Sos object model archive (SOMA) - This feature is for allowing other applications interface with the data collected by sosreport.
• DBUS integration - We'd like to have this feature so that controlling the behavior of sosreport is easily integrated into other systems.

Additional high priority issues are also available.

Other important items to note:

• Plugins - As technologies evolve and new software rises we are always welcoming new plugins to capture the necessary data to aid in debugging those technologies. If you've got something in mind its just a simple pull request away to get it on the right track for inclusion.
• Tests - Our goal is to be at 100% (I think we're at about 69%) coverage with a wide range of unittests. So if you fancy quality assurance then this is an excellent opportunity for you :D

More info

For more information and other issues scheduled to be fixed for the next release visit sosreport issues

COMMIT / ROLLBACK in Oracle and PostgreSQL

David Edwards and Lucas Wagner

Introduction

The use of transactions in relational databases allows a database architect to logically group SQL into chunks of SQL code which can execute using an “all or nothing” strategy. In case of disaster, such as power loss or a network outage, grouping a selection of SQL statements into a transaction means that all of the statements execute – or none of them execute.

Without transactions, a simple network outage could mean that only half of the statements are executed, possibly corrupting the data inside the database. Some pieces of customer data could be inserted into the database whereas other pieces could be lost forever.

In contrast, while using transactions, if all statements are able to be successfully executed, a COMMIT is performed and those changes become permanent. If a failure should occur during the execution of these statements, all changes since the last commit can be undone through the use of a ROLLBACK.

When translating Oracle PL/SQL to PostgreSQL PL/pgSQL, there are some subtle, yet important, scoping differences in how each has implemented COMMIT and ROLLBACK that all database architects should be aware of.

Example Scenario

Consider the following possible scenario where an application program interacts with a database function. The architect would like to do the following things in the form of a transaction:

                - INSERT a new row into a table

                - If disaster strikes and the insertion does not complete, ROLLBACK

                - Otherwise, COMMIT

Oracle’s Way: Back to the Beginning

Oracle’s COMMIT or ROLLBACK statements scope back to the beginning of the transaction no matter where it is located.  When an exception occurs, everything between the BEGIN up to and including the failing insert will be undone by an implicit ROLLBACK. If a COMMIT occurs on return from a function, no row will be made permanent. The Oracle ROLLBACK undoes everything since the transaction began – even functions.

In the example code below, calling a ROLLBACK from a function within a function will roll back the rows containing both ‘1’ and ‘2’. It will return back to the very first BEGIN.

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE testProcedure AS

BEGIN

            INSERT INTO testTable(testColumn) VALUES ('1');

            nestedTestProcedure;

END testProcedure;

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE nestedTestProcedure AS

BEGIN

            INSERT INTO testTable(testColumn) VALUES ('2');

            COMMIT;

EXCEPTION

            WHEN others THEN

                 ROLLBACK;

END nestedTestProcedure;

The PostgreSQL Difference

While Oracle permits transactional statements inside a PL/SQL procedure or function, PostgreSQL does not. If we try to compile the PostgreSQL equivalent of the Oracle code above, it will not compile. It will throw an error:

            ERROR:  cannot begin/end transactions in PL/pgSQL

            HINT:  Use a BEGIN block with an EXCEPTION clause instead.

In short, a ROLLBACK cannot span functions, and will only work inside the current function. Everything prior to the invocation of the autonomous transaction is isolated and hence not impacted (i.e., it is neither committed nor rolled back).

In contrast with the Oracle sample code, instead of rolling back the rows containing ‘1’ and ‘2’, PostgreSQL would only roll back ‘2’.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION testFunction() RETURNS void

  AS $$

            BEGIN

              INSERT INTO testTable(testColumn) VALUES ('1');

              PERFORM nestedTestFunction();

            END;

  $$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION nestedTestFunction() RETURNS void

  AS $$

            BEGIN

                 INSERT INTO testTable(testColumn) VALUES ('2');

                 COMMIT;

                 RETURN;

            EXCEPTION

                 WHEN others THEN

                    ROLLBACK;

                    RETURN;

            END;

$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

However, when translating Oracle code to PostgreSQL where this behavior is expected, we can implement a workaround that can behave like an autonomous transaction. An architect would choose this solution as a workaround (versus re-writing the function to become more "PostgreSQL-like") while working with an existing or mature application in order to minimize impact to the application that would interact with the database.

The workaround involves rewriting the parent (testFunction) to become a wrapper function. We then create an autonomous, rollback child function (nestedTestFunction) which will be opened by using dblink(). In essence, we are opening another connection to the same database and running nestedTestFunction:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION testFunction() RETURNS integer

  AS $$

            DECLARE

                        randomNum      text := (random() * 9 + 1);

                        cnxName           text;

                        cnxString           text := 'hostaddr=127.0.0.1 port=5440 dbname=x user=y password=z';

                        success             integer;

                        status               text;

            BEGIN

                        SELECT concat('cnx', randomNum) INTO cnxName;

                        PERFORM dblink_connect(cnxName, cnxString);

                        PERFORM dblink_exec(cnxName, ‘BEGIN’);

                        SELECT * INTO success from dblink(cnxName, 'SELECT nestedTestFunction()')

                           AS (status text);

                        IF (success >= 1) THEN

                                    PERFORM dblink_exec(cnxName, 'COMMIT');

                                    PERFORM dblink_disconnect(cnxName);

                                    RETURN 1;     -- committed

                        ELSE

                                    PERFORM dblink_exec(cnxName, 'ROLLBACK');

                                    PERFORM dblink_disconnect(cnxName);

                                    RETURN 0;     -- rolled back

                        END IF;

            END;

$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION nestedTestFunction() RETURNS integer

   AS $$

            BEGIN

                        INSERT INTO testTable(testcolumn) VALUES (‘1’);

                        INSERT INTO testTable(testcolumn) VALUES (‘2’);

                        RETURN 1;    -- good status

            EXCEPTION

                        WHEN others THEN

                           RETURN 0;    -- error status

            END;

$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Inside the code, the INSERT contained inside another function will be either committed or rolled back based on the result of the function, but neither operation will impact testFunction().

Conclusion

When translating PL/SQL to PL/pgSQL which makes use of COMMITs and ROLLBACKs, there are subtle issues of scope that are greater than what is visible on the surface. It is imperative that the database architect give consideration as to whether any adaptations between the two are required to ensure data integrity.

I have moved and I haven’t built a new layout yet but I am still collecting Chessie gear when I can. My newest engine is a Bachmann GP7 Chessie 5606. This engine like my last 2 is also DCC and the detail is fairly exceptional giving that it is a low end brand.

Over the years I have noticed Bachmann has been improving their brand. When I was a kid it was just well known that Bachmann was cheap crap that barely represented anything that may have existed to match the roadnames and numbers they were using. This newest addition is fairly close to its prototype and if I felt led to add some ladder rails to the nose and some hoses to the front it could even rival the Athearn Genesis model of the same engine.

I have also collected some Chessie rolling stock in the last year and I am up to 6 Chessie branded cars.  My sons have also taken an interest in trains as many boys do thanks to things like Thomas the Tank engine. They have a wooden track set with the magnet couplers. I was able to find a Chessie Wooden Train kit and they loved it. The boys have a tendency now to call any train they see a “Chessie System” . Thinking ahead to when they are older I have collected many pieces of the Bachmann EZ track system so that they can partake in the hobby with dad. I have already let them play a couple times but right now since they are so young it always ends in some wheels being missing or a coupler broken. Still it is fun to share the hobby with them.

In other Chessie news, while taking the boys to see Thomas in St Thomas Ontario I saw some real still in existence Chessie System Box cars!  They are rusted and beat to hell but it was nice to see the Cat in person after all these years.

Yes, this is an actual thing that I'm having to post.

Reading a number of the recent opinion wars on meta, I really feel like it should be necessary to complete the following mental checklist before participating in a debate over how the topic matter can be better applied, unfair treatment of new users, or ego on the part of high rep users/moderators.

1. Have I recently refreshed myself on the first paragraph of about?
2. Do I agree with this?
3. Have I clicked on the professionalism link on the about page, and read that too?
4. Do I have feedback on how this definition can be improved, or how it can be better applied? (note that this allows for disagreement with the proposals of others)

If the answer is no to any of these questions, then there isn't much that can be constructively added to discussions about how this site can operate more effectively within the scope of the topic matter. Bluntly, that person isn't even participating in the same discussion. (and it's getting tiresome)

I challenge that those points of view are fundamentally off-topic for most meta discussions about how this site can be improved.

• If people want to make a question about why the stated goals of this site are misguided, that's perfectly acceptable. Some of us might disagree, but at least everything is kept topical within the question.
• If people agree with the subject matter of the site but disagree with the proposed changes and/or attitudes of others, that's what everyone expects and is business as usual.
• In all other contexts, this line of conversation is line noise. It's debating something that isn't up for debate.

Going forward, I'd like to ask that the moderators keep an eye out for this creeping into the threads about how to improve the site again and do what comes natural. Folks have had their opportunity to get it out of their system. It's just another form of the ongoing problem: people ignoring what the site is about and expecting everyone else to play ball with them. (albeit dressed in a wall of text)

On Tuesday, August 20, 2013  at 3:54 PM Kate and I welcomed a daughter into our family. Her name is Olive Scout McKay. Olive is for Kate’s Nana. Scout is for the character in one of our favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird. We’ll be calling her Scout.

Scout weighed in at 7 lbs 13 oz and measured 20 inches in length. She’s a real cutie and I’m already over the moon about her. Mom and baby are doing great. Gus is taking to being a big brother well. He’s giving Scout lots of hugs and kisses.

We’re taking the next two weeks off to get to know this little girl (and to adjust to her erratic newborn sleeping schedule), so we won’t be publishing anything new during that time.  To get your AoM fix while we’re away, check out our archives. We have nearly 2,000 articles on the site and you can spend hours browsing and reading the manly info we have there. If you’re not sure what to read first, use the “Visit a Random Post” button on the top right side of the homepage. Or check out our Library of Random Man Knowledge — full of 5,000 manly factoids and quotes. That should keep you busy while we’re gone! We look forward to seeing you back in September.

Kate, Gus, and I feel blessed and excited to have Scout in our family. Please give a warm AoM welcome to Scout McKay!

Related posts:

1. Welcome the Newest Member of the McKay Family and AoM Team: Augustus George McKay
2. Announcing the Launch of Manvotionals: Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues
3. The Best of Art of Manliness: March 2009
4. Announcing the Re-Launch of the AoM Barbershop Locator
5. Announcing the Launch of the Art of Manliness Book!

Sorry if this is not appropriated to be asked here, but I would like to now what is the best site to ask questions about booting hardware and IT support in general.

So I had been hearing about the Pi for some time before I finally decided to get one myself. I really couldn’t come up with what to do with it and now I have 2 Raspberry Pi’s and a plan to get at least 2 more in the future.

For those of you who are not aware of what the Raspberry Pi is it is a small credit card sized computer based on the ARM CPU with half a gig of RAM (model B) 2 USB ports an SD card slot and Ethernet (also model B). Now you’re probably going “What’s ARM?” sigh, any tiny gadget you have, be it a cell phone, tablet, Ouya are based off it. It is a low cost lower power (as in electricity not computing) architecture which is taking us all by storm!!! (and you didn’t even know it did you?)

Anyways back to topic, So I was looking at these and what people were doing with them and it just wasn’t striking a cord with me. The I came across Raspbmc, a Pi linux OS geared towards being the best XBMC a Pi could be. The software you will almost always find running a Pi is linux and to be more specific a Debian Linux offshoot “Raspbian” and that is the same case with Raspbmc. Raspbmc is a tailored Raspbian that is easy to set up and run as a media server immediately after install.

The reason this got my attention is because at my trailer the stereo system went last season and to replace it is a couple hundred bucks. With the Pi i could do it for less than $100 so I was off to work on my project! The first step of this is to of course order a PI.

The place I decided to go with was Newark/Element 14. Mainly because they come up first when you search for where to get one and secondly because they had distribution centers EVERYWHERE so I figured shipment wouldn’t be too terrible. When I went to order it said the backlog was 10k units and it would be a month so based off that I went to Deal extreme for all my cables.

Low and behold a week later my Pi arrives well before the month timeline so I am stuck with a cute little PCB and nothing to do with the damn thing.

Eventually the cables arrived and I could play around with the Pi. Installing Raspbmc was a breeze, there are automatic tools on all the main Operating Systems you can get that will do all the imaging for or if you are a man you can go to the CLI and use DD to directly image your card (Except Windows, where you can’t be a man without 3rd party modification).

Raspbmc has a minimal installer that downloads everything and asks you 100 pesky installer like questions OR you can download the standalone version and it skips all that and immediately give you a bootable OS (good if you are using Ethernet as your main connection). The first time I installed Rasbmc I did it the way they recommend but I have done the stand alone image since then as it is faster and less hassle. All you need to do with the standalone is select “update now” from the Rasbmc Program within XBMC’s “Programs” and then your standalone version is as up to date as the regular without the 100 questions.

Some things to note about the Pi as a media server is that it works best (s/best/at all/) with open standards like xvid, mp4. if you have DVD rips or DVD’s to play you need to pay a small fee for the codec from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Storage

I initially had a patriot brand SD card backing my Pi but after several corruptions and it finally refusing to be a bootable disk I have left that brand behind. I now use Lexar brand and I noticed the OS performance improved  but everyones experience may be different with different brands.

External Storage

I was originally just using a large SD card with what I wanted to watch that week on it but I have moved to external. My 3TB Mybook works excellent with the Pi and has never had any trouble being detected or playing files off it.

Case
Get a case of course, otherwise you just have a small PCB touching everything and you will eventually kill it. There are very simple and cheap cases to get but in my case I went for a more expensive PiBow. I went with the PiBow because the colour arrangement reminded me of the AppleII and the C64. It is a very smart looking case in my opinion.

Some things to consider

The Pi itself may only be $35 but keep in mind you need to buy cables, case, storage etc, it DOES add up but it is a fun platform to pursue. There seems to be endless documents on elaborate electronics projects to run with it and also simpler things like the media server like what I am using mine for.

Weekly Fedora kernel bug statistics – August 23rd 2013 is a post from: codemonkey.org.uk

The Ubuntu Women Project is happy to announce that we have put together an online scavenger hunt for women in our community to highlight facts about women in technology and help encourage the learning of interesting trivia about Ubuntu!

Participants will answer 15 questions that can be answered by searching online, see the end of this post for the link. All questions must be answered, winners will be selected randomly from the pool of completed surveys that have the most correct answers.

Prizes

Three winners will be chosen, and they will have their choice of ONE of the following:

Logitech Webcam C615

The new virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit is online and people participate via webcam on Google+, join in with this great new Logitech webcam!

Ubuntu Earrings and Necklace set from Boutique Academia

Made by Boutique Academia, show your love for Ubuntu with this beautiful necklace and earring set! The winner has a choice of gold or rhodium.

Rules

Submission rules are as follows:

• The person submitting the answers must identify as female
• Entrants certify that they looked for the answers themselves (it’s fine to ask for help, but the majority of the searching must be your own!)
• Only one submission per person (we will match up the name, city and country you provide with the location we send prizes to and only send to those which match)
• Only fully completed entries will be checked

Entries will be accepted until 23:59 UTC on September 13th.

Begin the Scavenger Hunt!

To get started with the scavenger hunt go to this form: Ubuntu Women 2013 Scavenger Hunt

If you have any questions, please contact Cheri Francis at cheri703@ubuntu.com

Updates to this competition will be tracked on the wiki page: http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/Events/Competitions/ScavengerHunt
Happy hunting!

Just to let you know. We’ve been celebrating 20th anniversary also in Poland.
We spent 4 days near Polish sea. And we had great time.
Here goes pictures of cakes



One is made by my girlfriend. Guess which one

Random notes from that other lightning talk session

YKINMKBYKIOK: "Your Kink Is Not My Kink But Your Kink Is Ok"

As far as I'm concerned, this puts the vim vs emacs quarrel to rest, for good.

• upstart-local-bridge: New bridge for starting jobs on local socket connections.
• upstart-dconf-bridge: New bridge for Session Inits to react to dconf/gsettings changes.
• upstart-dbus-bridge: New '--bus-name' option to allow bus name variable to be included in dbus-event(7).
• New "reload signal" stanza to allow jobs to specify a custom signal that will be sent to the main process (rather than the default SIGHUP).
• Inclusion of Session Init sample jobs.
• Re-exec fixes for handling chroot sessions.
• Shutdown fix for Session Inits.
• New python3 module and accompanying integration test suite for testing Upstart running as PID 1 and as a Session Init (privileged and non-privileged).

Spent a lot of time this week going over older bugs I’d hit to figure out what had fallen through the cracks. Mostly for my own tracking, but there’s a few on here that really ought to be fixed before 3.11 final. There might still be a few in the list below that have now been fixed, but there was no obvious commit, and reproducing was difficult.

Core:

• splice vs execve lockdep trace.
• soft lockups(). [2], [3]. Root caused to lock contention on inode_sb_list_lock.
• scheduling while atomic & hang.
• More soft lockups
• RCU stalls

memory management:

• mlockall/rcu_preempt stalls.
• Bad page map / swap_free warnings. again.
• Trying to vfree() bad address. 32-bit vmap exhaustion.
• hugepage related lockdep bug.

Filesystems/VFS:

• ext4_da_release_space:1333: ext4_da_release_space: ino 12, to_free 1 with only 0 reserved data blocks. Only happens on 1K block size fs’s. patch set sent to linux-ext4
• XFS: Assertion failed: xfs_dir2_sf_lookup(args) == ENOENT, file: fs/xfs/xfs_dir2_sf.c, line: 358
• btrfs oops during umount.
• btrfs triggered ‘MAX_LOCKDEP_CHAINS too low’.
• btrfs WARN_ON_ONCE(class->name != lock->name). Possible fix here

Drivers:

• i915 debug spew during boot
• T430s Lid events no longer put machine to sleep (old bug since 3.9-rc1, haven’t had time to bisect).
• EDAC i5000 locking warning during boot. (First reported here).
• Nouveau oopses kernel when cat /proc/dri/0/vma.
• nouveau oops in nouveau_bo_new.

Assorted perf / tracing bugs.

• __ftrace_hash_rec_update FTRACE_WARN_ON.
• arch/x86/include/asm/trace/irq_vectors.h:50 suspicious rcu_dereference_check() usage!. Fix is in linux-tip:urgent since July 4
• WARNING: at kernel/trace/ftrace.c:1605.
• __perf_event_overflow suspicious RCU usage.
• perf function tracing uses rcu_lock().

outstanding 3.11-rc6 bugs. is a post from: codemonkey.org.uk

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

(Parkour is to terrain as programming is to frameworks)

• 5x: AWS vs combined size of other cloud vendors; Every Second on The Internet: Why we need so many servers.
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @chaliy: Today I learned that I do not understand how #azure scaling works, instance scale does not affect requests/sec I can load.
  • @Lariar: Note how crazy this is. An international launch would have been a huge deal. Now it's just another thing you do.
  • smacktoward: The problem with relying on donations is that people don't make donations.
  • @toddhoffious: Programming is a tool built by logical positivists to solve the problems of idealists and pragmatists. We have a fundamental mismatch here.
  • @etherealmind: Me: "Weird, my phone data isn't working" Them: "They turned the 3G off at the tower because it  interferes with the particle accelerator"
  • John Carmack: In com­puter sci­ence, just about the only thing that’s really sci­ence is when you’re talk­ing about algo­rithms. And opti­miza­tion is an engi­neer­ing. But those don’t actu­ally occupy that much of the total time spent pro­gram­ming. 
  • @gappy3000: Ideas are assets. Code is a liability. So maximize ideas/code.
• How can spiders and flies walk up walls? See for yourself with a fun DYI on How to: test Galileo's scaling laws. An idea that is simple yet profound in its implications: "the width of an object is doubled, the surface area is squared and the volume is cubed." It means size matters. Elephants can't dance and jump and insects can walk on water. Why is because the ratio of area to volume governs everything we do. You get to drop stuff from great heights and watch things explode (or not). What could be better?

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...

I met Jeevitha Mahendiran at Usenix LISA last year. She is studying sysadmins and what we do. She writes:

I'm Jeevitha Mahendiran, Graduate Student/Research Assistant Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. Currently doing a research on "Understanding the Use of Models and Visualization Tools in System Administration Work". The information that the you share regarding your work will be very helpful for my research.

We are seeking participants to take part in a study about the tools used by system administrators. Participants will be asked to complete an anonymous and confidential survey that should take about 20-30 minutes to finish. The study is an online survey.

If you are interested in more information about the study, please contact Jeevitha Mahendiran by email at Jeevitha@cs.dal.ca or proceed to the survey website at https://surveys.dal.ca/opinio/s?s=19556

CentOS has updated Xen4CentOS kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

Fedora has updated kernel (F19; F18: two vulnerabilities) and python-django (F19: cross-site scripting).

Gentoo has updated acroread (many vulnerabilities) and dbus (denial of service).

Mageia has updated libtiff (two code execution flaws), perl-Proc-ProcessTable (symlink flaw from 2011), python-django (cross-site scripting), python3 (two vulnerabilities), rubygem-passenger (M3: insecure tmpfile usage), spice (denial of service), and znc (M3: denial of service).

Mandriva has updated perl-Proc-ProcessTable (symlink flaw from 2011), python-django (ES5: cross-site scripting), and spice (BS1: denial of service).

openSUSE has updated cacti (12.2, 12.3: two vulnerabilities) and strongswan (11.4: denial of service).

Oracle has updated kernel (OL5: multiple vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated firefox (multiple vulnerabilities).

Another phone in, another damning verdict on Ed Miliband. The Wright Stuff couldn’t find a single caller to stick up for Ed, despite it being aired in the middle of the day, prime time for Labour voters:

This is becoming a theme.

See also: Guy News: Public Have Their Say on Ed Miliband

Samsung’s new ad for an SSD. Which women apparently won’t understand, but they’ll love it nonetheless.

George Galloway’s performance on Iranian state television today deserves a wider audience:

Almost unbelievable that this man is a British MP.

Via Galloway Watch.

Via @alicebartlett.

Private Eye have self-confessed teen fondler’s Mike Hancock’s defence for his ongoing sexual harassment investigation. Apparently he considers the alleged victim allowing him into her home to amount to consent:

“In order for Hancock to have access to [her] home she would have had to have let him in. In other words, she clearly consented to any actions about which she now makes complaint.”

Good luck with that one. The full allegation is pretty dark:

“It is not a trivial complaint that Hancock attempted to force his tongue into her mouth, that he tried to part her legs with his foot or that he exposed his penis and invited her to masturbate him. Nor is it a trivial complaint that Mr Hancock used his position and status as both an MP and councillor to target, groom and exploit for his own purposes a vulnerable woman.”

Quite…

See, not that hard to give a credit.

Victim’s solicitors allege that Mike Hancock MP…

“…exposed his penis and invited her to masturbate him.”

In this article, I explain changes to the plugin loading mechanism in KDE Frameworks 5. The article is intended for a technical audience with some affinity to KDE development.

Over the past weeks, I’ve spent some time reworking the plugin system in KDE Frameworks 5. The original issue I started with is that we are shifting from a plugin system that is mostly KDE specific to making more use of Qt’s native plugin system. Qt’s plugin system has changed in a few ways that caused many of our more complex plugins to not work anymore. On the other side, moving closer to Qt’s plugins makes our code easier to use from a wider range of applications and reduces dependencies for those that just want to do plugin loading (or extending their app with plugins). A mostly complete, and I must say spiffy, solution is now in place, so here’s a good opportunity to tell a little about the technical background of this, what the implications for application developers are, and how you can use a few new features in your plugins.

Bye bye, K_EXPORT_PLUGIN

In the KDE Platform 4, the K_EXPORT_PLUGIN macro did two things. It provided an entry point (qt_plugin_instance()) function which loads the plugin. With Qt5, the need for the entry point is gone, since plugins are now QObject based, so the methods defined in Q_INTERFACE can be relied on as entry points. K_EXPORT_PLUGIN also provided PLUGIN_VERIFICATION_DATA, which can be used to coarsely identify if a plugin was built against the right version. In most cases, this wasn’t very useful, as it would only catch a relatively small class of errors. The plugin verification data is missing in the new implementation so far, but we plan to get it back in another form: being able to specify the version in the plugin, and checking against that. This part is not yet there, but it’s also not a problem for now, as it’s not required and won’t produce fatal errors.

K_PLUGIN_FACTORY

The heavy lifting is done by this macro, which is often used together with K_EXPORT_PLUGIN: You create a factory class using this macro, and then, in the old world, you’d use K_EXPORT_PLUGIN to create the necessary entry points. Since we’re already defining the plugin factory instance using Q_DECLARE_INTERFACE, Qt is happy about that, and the stuff in K_EXPORT_PLUGIN becomes useless. Basically, we’ve moved the interesting bits from K_EXPORT_PLUGIN to K_PLUGIN_FACTORY. For porting that means, in the vast majority of cases, you can just remove K_EXPORT_PLUGIN from your code, and be done. (If you don’t remove it, it’ll warn during build, but will still work, so it’s source-compatible. Mostly, in some cases, .moc can’t pick up the macro, in this case, either move it into the .h file, or include the corresponding .moc file in your .cpp code.)

K_PLUGIN_FACTORY, or rather its base class, KPluginFactory is pretty neat. It’s mostly assembled by macros and templates, which makes it a bit hard to read and understand, but once you realize what kind of effort is saved for you by that, you’ll happily go for it (you don’t have to care about its internals as it is well encapsulated, of course). The really interesting piece is this:

template
T *create(const QString &keyword, QObject *parent = 0, const QVariantList &args = QVariantList());

This is a method available in the factory (generated by K_PLUGIN_FACTORY) that is the base of your plugin, basically what you get from QPluginLoader::instance() from your plugin once you’ve loaded the .so file. You basically call (roughly)

MyFancyObject* obj = pluginLoader->instance()->create<MyFancyObject*>(this);

to load your code into the app hosting the plugin. (Of course, MyFancyObject can be either the class actually defined in the plugin, or, more commonly, the baseclass of it (you don’t want to include your plugin’s header in the app, as that defeats the point of the plugin in the first place). You only do the above if you go through QPluginLoader directly, KService and Plasma::PluginLoader can do most of this work for you (also, here the API didn’t change, so no worries).

K_PLUGIN_FACTORY_WITH_JSON or where is the metadata?

Qt5′s new plugin system allows you to bake metadata into the plugin binary itself. They’re specified as an extra argument to the Q_PLUGIN_METADATA macro, and basically point to a json file containing whatever info you want in the plugin. The metadata is compiled into the ELF section of the plugin, can be found very fast, and the plugin itself doesn’t need to be dlopened in order to read it. With Qt’s previous plugin system, the plugin shared object files would have to be loaded, which significantly impacts performance.

This mechanism is very useful for something we’ve been doing in KDE for a long time, namely the data included in the .desktop files. Those are being installed separately, into a services install dir, indexed by ksycoca for faster access and searching. These .desktop files (which really are the plugin’s metadata contain all the usual stuff, name, icon, author, etc., but also the plugin name, dependencies, and most importantly, the ServiceType (e.g. Plasma/DataEngine). KService uses them to find a plugin (often by service type) and load it from the plugin name.

Having the metadata baked into the plugin allows us to not use KServiceTypeTrader (which handles the searching through the sycoca cache) but to ask QPluginLoader directly. Right now, we’re still using sycoca for the lookup, but this mechanism allows us to move away from it in the future.

Something we do use the metadata for already, at least in Plasma::DataEngine is the creation of a KPluginInfo object. (This object basically exposes the metadata, and can be instantiated from a .desktop file. With the above changes, I also added a constructor to KPluginInfo that instantiates a KPluginInfo object from the json metadata baked into the plugin. This is one nail in the coffin of KServiceTypeTrader (and in extension KSyCoCa), but obviously not its death blow.

K_PLUGIN_FACTORY_WITH_METADATA simply takes an extra argument, the metadata file, and bakes that into the plugin (by inserting it, internally, into the Q_PLUGIN_METADATA macro which is included in the KPluginFactory implementation.

kservice_desktop_to_json

In order to ease the transition from .desktop files to baked-in metadata, we introduced a cmake macro to help you with that. It’s pretty simple, you just write (in your CMakeLists.txt):

kservice_desktop_to_json(mypluginmetadata.desktop)

and during build time, a file called mypluginmetadata.json will be generated. You can include this file using the K_PLUGIN_FACTORY_WITH_JSON macro in your code, and the metadata will be baked in. When the plugin is loaded, your ctor will have a QVariantList as argument, which you can just pass to KPluginInfo, and get a valid plugininfo object back. If you’re interested what the .json file looks like, either peak into your build directory, or use the command

$ desktoptojson -i mydesktopfile.desktop

to generate a json file. (You usually want to run this at build time, and not put it in your repo, since otherwise, changes to the .desktop file, for example translations, will not be picked up.)

So, tl;dr

• Changes are largely source-compatible (K_EXPORT_PLUGIN can just go away, you might have to include the .moc file explicitely)
• You can optionally use JSON metadata in your plugin to create KPluginInfo objects

If you want to create a plugin, do the following:

• In your CMakeLists.txt file, convert your old .desktop file at build-time using kservice_desktop_to_json() and use the resulting file (replace .desktop with .json) in the following step
• In your plugin .cpp file, add a K_PLUGIN_FACTORY macro, this does Q_DECLARE_INTERFACE and Q_PLUGIN_METADATA for you. Optionally pass a .json file
• Use QPluginLoader, KServiceTypeTrader or Plasma::PluginLoader to load your plugin.

These changes are documented in the API documentation of KPluginFactory and in our KDE5Porting document.

Personal thanks go out to kdelibs hacker extraordinaire David Faure, who has been patiently guiding me through making these changes to our plugin system.

@font-face is a very useful CSS rule that allows you to include fonts directly in your project, without the need to find them installed on the user’s machine. This greatly enlarges the number of fonts you can use in your projects and is very handy if all font styles are included in one single file. But what if every style is in a stand-alone file? At a first glance this could be a problem. Today we are going to find out how to use the @font-face rule to define a single font-family, while adding multiple files, one for every font style.

Roboto Condensed

We are going to use Roboto Condensed as an example. You can download the ttf files from Google Fonts. Be sure to check all styles!

Define the CSS @font-face property

Now that you’ve downloaded the font files, we’re ready to go ahead and write the CSS code necessary for our purpose. Create this file in the same directory where you put the font files and call it whatever you want.
First of all, let me make a note here: we could define different font-family names for every style, but then we’d have to apply those to every element like <em>, <i>, <strong>, <b>, and so on. Not very handy.

Let’s go deeper with our analysis. What we have here is three font weights (light, regular, bold), each one with two font styles (normal and italic). So we need six @font-face rules. This rules must differ in some properties. We already said that we want that all those fonts have the same font-family property and we’re going to call it “Roboto Condensed” (yeah, an original name). We’ll handle the weights with the font-weight property, which will have the three different values stated before, expressed in numbers: 300 (light), 400 (regular), 700 (bold). The styles are defined by the font-style property, which will have two values: normal and italic.

Now it’s time to write the CSS code for our Roboto Condensed Regular:

@font-face {
  font-family: "Roboto Condensed";
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
  src: local('Roboto Condensed Regular'), local('RobotoCondensed-Regular'), url("RobotoCondensed-Regular.ttf") format('truetype');
}

Let’s explain the last property: src. This property’s task is to load the font file, which is done by its url value (that defines the relative path to the file). I added the format value to inform the browser about the format of the font file to load.

What about those local values? They’re not required, but very useful: if the user’s machine has a font with the name written between the brackets, the browser will load it directly from the client computer instead of downloading it from the server. This obviously saves bandwidth and shortens the time needed to load the web page.

Now that we now how it works, it’s very easy to go through all the other font styles and weight simply by changing values to the corresponding properties. Obviously we have to change value to the src property too.

The result is as follows. Feel free to download the gist and customize it.

The post Use Roboto Condensed with @font-face CSS rule appeared first on deshack@web:~$.

UPDATE: Ed Balls himself gets involved: “I can’t believe they gave Ben Affleck the part”.

What is it with Hacked Off’s inability to be able to express a view on a single subject without a great whopping conflict of interest? Now it seems they have extended their remit from control of the press to what our children should be learning at school. This time they’ve been irked by the decline in students studying Media Studies, presumably a secret conspiracy organised by the state, newspapers and Rupert Murdoch to make children learn about science.

“Last week’s announcement of the ‘A’ level results provided an opportunity for sections of the press to indulge a pet obsession of bashing media studies as an academic discipline. The negativity is a particularly British obsession which you won’t find in the US where there is a much more healthy interchange between academics researching media issues and the media itself. The attitude found depressingly often in some British newsrooms, that studying the workings of the press in a systematic and critical way should be a bar to working in the business, would be greeted with incomprehension by most in the US.”

Of course Hacked Off fail to mention the massive conflict of interest in them bemoaning the decline of Media Studies: studying the media is exactly what their half-baked, third-rate academics like Brian Cathcart, Professor of Journalism at Kingston University, make a living out of teaching up and down the country. Of course they want children to study it, otherwise they’d be out of a job. Schoolboy stuff…

El Telegrapho readers want their Rock back. An armada of Spanish voters have brought a welcome traffic surge to this online poll after a Twitter campaign in Spain. Tu mama calata Gallagher…

Sometimes you want to compute values automatically at INSERT time, like for example a duration column out of a start and an end column, both timestamptz. It's easy enough to do with a BEFORE TRIGGER on your table. What's more complex is to come up with a parametrized spelling of the trigger, where you can attach the same stored procedure to any table even when the column names are different from one another.

The exact problem to solve here is how to code a dynamic trigger where the trigger's function code doesn't have to hard code the field names it will process. Basically, PLpgSQL is a static language and wants to know all about the function data types in use before it compiles it, so there's no easy way to do that.

That said, we now have hstore and it's empowering us a lot here.

The exemple

Let's start simple, with a table having a d_start and a d_end column where to store, as you might have already guessed, a start timestamp (with timezone) and an ending timezone. The goal will be to have a parametrized trigger able to maintain a duration for us automatically, something we should be able to reuse on other tables.

create table foo (
  id serial primary key,
  d_start timestamptz default now(),
  d_end timestamptz,
  duration interval
);

insert into foo(d_start, d_end)
     select now() - 10 * random() * interval '1 min',
            now() + 10 * random() * interval '1 min'
       from generate_series(1, 10);

So now I have a table with 10 lines containing random timestamps, but none of them of course has the duration field set. Let's see about that now.

Playing with hstore

The hstore extension is full of goodies, we will only have to discover a handful of them now.

First thing to do is make hstore available in our test database:

# create extension hstore;
CREATE EXTENSION

And now play with hstore in our table.

# select hstore(foo) from foo limit 1;

 "id"=>"1",
 "d_end"=>"2013-08-23 11:34:53.129109+01",
 "d_start"=>"2013-08-23 11:16:04.869424+01",
 "duration"=>NULL
(1 row)

I edited the result for it to be easier to read, splitting it on more than one line, so if you try that at home you will have a different result.

What's happening in that first example is that we are transforming a row type into a value of type hstore. A row type is the result of select foo from foo;. Each PostgreSQL relation defines a type of the same name, and you can use it as a composite type if you want to.

Now, hstore also provides the #= operator which will replace a given field in a row, look at that:

# select (foo #= hstore('duration', '10 mins')).* from foo limit 1;
 id |            d_start            |             d_end             | duration 
----+-------------------------------+-------------------------------+----------
  1 | 2013-08-23 11:16:04.869424+01 | 2013-08-23 11:34:53.129109+01 | 00:10:00
(1 row)

We just replaced the duration field with the value 10 mins, and to have a better grasp at what just happened, we then use the (...).* notation to expand the row type into its full definition.

We should be ready for the next step now...

The generic trigger, using hstore

Now let's code the trigger:

create or replace function tg_duration()
 -- (
 --  start_name    text,
 --  end_name      text,
 --  duration      interval
 -- )
 returns trigger
 language plpgsql
as $$
declare
   hash hstore := hstore(NEW);
   duration interval;
begin
   duration :=  (hash -> TG_ARGV[1])::timestamptz
              - (hash -> TG_ARGV[0])::timestamptz;

   NEW := NEW #= hstore(TG_ARGV[2], duration::text);

   RETURN NEW;
end;
$$;

And here's how to attach the trigger to our table. Don't forget the FOR EACH ROW part or you will have a hard time understanding why you can't accedd the details of the OLD and NEW records in your trigger: they default to being FOR EACH STATEMENT triggers.

The other important point is how we pass down the column names as argument to the stored procedure above.

create trigger compute_duration
     before insert on foo
          for each row
 execute procedure tg_duration('d_start', 'd_end', 'duration');

Equiped with the trigger properly attached to our table, we can truncate it and insert again some rows:

# truncate foo;
# insert into foo(d_start, d_end)
       select now() - 10 * random() * interval '1 min',
              now() + 10 * random() * interval '1 min'
         from generate_series(1, 10);

# select d_start, d_end, duration from foo;
            d_start            |             d_end             |    duration     
-------------------------------+-------------------------------+-----------------
 2013-08-23 11:56:20.185563+02 | 2013-08-23 12:00:08.188698+02 | 00:03:48.003135
 2013-08-23 11:51:10.933982+02 | 2013-08-23 12:02:08.661389+02 | 00:10:57.727407
 2013-08-23 11:59:44.214844+02 | 2013-08-23 12:00:57.852027+02 | 00:01:13.637183
 2013-08-23 11:50:18.931533+02 | 2013-08-23 12:00:52.752111+02 | 00:10:33.820578
 2013-08-23 11:53:18.811819+02 | 2013-08-23 12:06:30.419106+02 | 00:13:11.607287
 2013-08-23 11:56:33.933842+02 | 2013-08-23 12:01:15.158055+02 | 00:04:41.224213
 2013-08-23 11:57:26.881887+02 | 2013-08-23 12:05:53.724116+02 | 00:08:26.842229
 2013-08-23 11:54:10.897691+02 | 2013-08-23 12:06:27.528534+02 | 00:12:16.630843
 2013-08-23 11:52:17.22929+02  | 2013-08-23 12:02:08.647837+02 | 00:09:51.418547
 2013-08-23 11:58:18.20224+02  | 2013-08-23 12:07:11.170435+02 | 00:08:52.968195
(10 rows)

Conclusion

Thanks to the hstore extension we've been able to come up with a dynamic solution where you can give the name of the columns you want to work with at CREATE TRIGGER time rather than hard-code that in a series of stored procedure that will end up alike and a pain to maintain.

Like these? Check out the gallery

Voting for the Hong Kong OpenStack Summit is still open, and runs until this Sunday. Take a look at these hastexo presentations and rate them!

• Kickstack: Rapid OpenStack Deployment with Puppet
• High Availability Update: Havana and Icehouse
• Practical Lessons from Building a Highly Available OpenStack Private Cloud

read more

After Gove sat in the Speaker’s chair and impersonated him during the Tory parliamentary party photo shoot before recess, Bercow gets his revenge. Well sort of.

Cringe.

Via Guardian.

   /___/____/____/____/_____/_______/______                      
  /_/____/____/___/______/_____/_____/___                        
 /_____/____/______/___/____/___/______/___/                     
/__/_____/_o__o/____/____/___/_____/____/______                  
 |        o__O_\o                                                
 |       __o  \ o                                                
 |      __o| __) o           _______                             
 |      | || \_/  o o       |  ___  |     WELP IT'S LATE AUGUST  
      |_|_||/\_|      o     | |   |                              
     || | |/_/\_\      o    | |__         TIME TO START PUTTING  
     ||_|_/I/  \_\     o    |             UP THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS
     |___/_/    \_\   o     |()                                  
        /_/      \_\ o      |                                    
       /_/        \_\ o o   |                                    
      / /    ejm   \ \    o |_ o  o  o  o                        
                            o o            o                     
                                             o                   

One of the new features in PostgreSQL 9.3 is CREATE SCHEMA IF NOT EXISTS someschema;

Shot from the Pine Mountain Lake Marina earlier today (August 22nd).

The next photo is a picture of a plume that blew up east of Pine Mountain Lake Airport.

This comic is 100% factual. You deserve coffee.

Elephant by Shaun Tarlton

All they really wanted to do is log any query that takes over 10 seconds. Most of their queries are very simple and fast, but the application generates a few complicated queries for some actions. Recording anything that took longer than 10 seconds allowed them to concentrate on optimizing those. Thus, the following line was set in postgresql.conf:

log_min_duration_statement = 10

Log Everything

A little while back, Greg wrote about configuring Postgres to log everything, and the really good reasons to do so. That isn't what they intended to to here, but is effectively what happened. The integer in log_min_duration_statement represents milliseconds, not seconds. With a 10ms threshold it wasn't logging everything the database server was doing, but enough that this performance graph happened:

Reconstructed I/O Utilization

That is, admittedly, a fabricated performance plot. But it's pretty close to what we were seeing at the time. The blue is the fast SAS array where all the Postgres data resides, showing lower than normal utilization before recovering after the configuration change. The maroon behind it is the SATA disk where the OS (and /var/log) resides, not normally all that active, showing 100% utilization and dropping off sharply as soon as we fixed log_min_duration_statement.

It took a few minutes to track down, as we were originally alerted to application performance problems, but once we spotted the disk I/O metrics it didn't take long to track down the errant postgresql.conf setting. That the disk jumped to 100% with so much log activity isn't surprising, but the database resides entirely on separate disks. So why did it effect that so much?

syslog() and the surprise on the socket

If you're used to using syslog to send your log messages off to a separate server, you may be rather surprised by the above. At least I was; by default it'll use UDP to transmit the messages, so an overloaded log server will simply result in the messages being dropped. Not ideal from a logging perspective, but it keeps things running if there's a problem on that front. Locally, messages are submitted to a dgram UNIX socket at /dev/log for the syslog process to pick up and save to disk or relay off to an external system.

The AF_UNIX SOCK_DGRAM socket, it turns out, doesn't behave just like its AF_INET UDP counterpart. Ordering of the datagrams is preserved and, more importantly here, a full buffer will block rather than drop the messages. As a result in the case above, between syslog's file buffer and the log socket buffer, once the syslog() calls started blocking, each Postgres backend stopped handling traffic until its log messages made it out toward that slow SATA disk.

As of now, this system has the postgres logs on the faster array, to mitigate it if there's any logging problems in the future. But if you're looking at leaning on syslog to help manage high volumes of log entries, just be aware that it doesn't solve everything.

It seems like having several SSH keys on the same system starts giving issues with some SSH servers. The issue is that while connecting it returns:

Too many authentication failures for xxxxxx.

The fix for this is very simple and quick. Open up your ~/.ssh/config and put:

IdentitiesOnly yes

You can add that per-host or wide (without indents, even as the first line in the config file!).

As you very well know I develop/design the Moka icon set & it’s arbitrary announcement time!

Major Revisions

Just a quick list of the notable changes & additions to Moka:

1. Nearly all known folder icons have been completed.
2. Icons for applications now include most of the Unity web apps and many popular Google Chrome web apps
3. Inclusion of logos for most major popular distributions
4. Addition of many more toolbar/action icons
5. Revisions made to both the dark and light panel icons.
6. A few icons for Steam Linux games are included, many more to come.

Download & Install

As always: it’s available for Ubuntu and it’s kin from the PPA, which supports 12.04 and beyond.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:snwh/moka-icon-theme-daily

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install moka-icon-theme moka-icon-theme-dark

Or you can download either as a zip file:

And install by extracting and running the INSTALL script with or without root, depending on where you would like to have it install –/usr/share/icons or ~/.icons.

Also, if you’re reading this as a fan of Moka and like my work, please consider donating to support both myself and Moka’s development. :)

Can’t wait to see him win an improbable World Series title in two months.

Editor’s Note: We had such a great response to our Primer on Krav Maga article back in July, we thought many of you would be interested in learning more about this devastatingly effective martial art. To that end, each month we’ll publish a different krav maga technique explained by krav maga expert and author, David Kahn. Many of the techniques that David will share with us are featured in his latest book, Krav Maga Weapon Defenses.

The Israeli krav maga self-defense system has achieved global recognition for its efficiency, simplicity, and, when required, brutal efficiency. Krav maga’s world-renowned defense moves against weapons were developed for a modern army. Over the next few months, we’ll take a look at ways to defend against various attacks using impact weapons.

Impact weapon attacks can come in many forms — baton, hammer, crowbar, or any number of weapon-like objects. Impact weapons (along with edged weapons) are often referred to in krav maga parlance as “cold weapons.” Attacks can come from a myriad of directions, heights, and angles in single-swing attacks. The three fundamental principles of defense are either (1) to close the distance between you and the assailant while deflecting-redirecting the attack, (2) to disengage until you recognize the correct timing to then close the distance, or (3) to retreat straight away.

Close the distance. The end of the weapon generates the most force, as the assailant’s wrist is used as a fulcrum. Therefore, the most dangerous range of the attack is to be struck with the very end of the weapon. In other words, the object’s momentum decreases the closer you come to the assailant’s swinging wrist. That’s why it’s vital to close the distance between you and your attacker as quickly as possible. Optimally, the distance between the defender and the assailant can be closed before a weapon is deployed while debilitating the adversary with strong combatives, blocking access to the weapon, and achieving dominant control. If the weapon is successfully deployed and put into action, closing the distance will allow the defender to either deflect-redirect or block the weapon, the majority of the time in combination with body defenses, while delivering withering counterattacks. As with all krav maga defenses, the hand always leads the body to deflect-redirect in conjunction with simultaneous multiple counterattacks.

Time correctly. Another essential to a successful defense is precise timing; closing the distance and using the correct tactic at the correct time. Fight timing is best thought of as the fusion of instinct with simultaneous decision making to either pre-empt the attack, move off the line of attack/fire, deflect-redirect, control the weapon and strike, or retreat from harm’s way. In other words, fight timing is harnessing instinctive body movements while seizing or creating opportunities to defend both efficiently and intelligently. Defined yet another way, fight timing is your ability to capitalize on a window of opportunity offered by your opponent or to create your own opportunity to end the confrontation using whatever tactics come instinctively to you. In short, you’ll attack the attacker. Importantly, the tactics and techniques are designed to provide the defender with a pre-emption capability prior to a weapon being deployed. The goal is not to allow an assailant to get the drop on you. Your recognition of his intent and body language literally and figuratively will allow you to cut the legs out from under him.

Retreat straight away. As soon as you see that the threat has been neutralized, retreat as soon as possible to avoid future attacks.

Below, we take a look at how to defend against a common impact weapon attack: the overhand one-handed strike with a blunt object like a bat or crowbar.

Overhand Direct One-Handed Strike Defense

One of the most typical attacks with a blunt object is an overhead swing. In this technique we assume the assailant is using his right hand and the defender is squared up or face-to-face. You will execute the defense with your sameside (left) arm and counterpunches with your right arm while controlling the weapon with your left.

Your goal is to close the distance to intercept and deflect-redirect the impact weapon harmlessly over your shoulder while delivering a simultaneous punch to the throat, jaw, or nose, trapping the weapon arm to remove it from the assailant’s grip while delivering more retzev (continuous motion) combatives. One way to practice the deflecting-stabbing movement of the defense is to simulate diving into a pool with your arms in a “V” motion to pierce the water while keeping your legs straight. Keep the fingers together and simply touch both of your hands together at the fingertips, resembling the inverted “V.” Do not touch your palms together, only your fingertips. Now, drop one arm into a straight punch position. Continue building this defense by aligning your deflecting-redirecting hand with a forward body lean, burying your chin into your shoulder.

The forward combat lean achieves two purposes: it both defeats the attack and protects your head. Essentially, you are diving/bursting into your assailant with the sameside arm and leg to close the distance while deflecting-redirecting the strike and simultaneously counterstriking. Another way to think about aligning your deflecting-redirecting arm is to stand in a neutral stance and jettison your arm directly out to meet an imaginary incoming attack. Proper arm alignment requires a slight curve in your hand that will intercept the attack. Keep the fingers together and the thumb attached to the hand; do not allow the thumb to jut out because of the danger in breaking it. The deflecting-stabbing defense, when timed correctly and with proper interception alignment, will redirect the object harmlessly along your arm and over your head, glancing off your back.

Time the defense and counter-attack punch together. The next (literal) step forward is with your left leg, closing the distance to the attacker. Remember to lead with your hands!

Redirect the overhand blow with one hand, while simultaneously counterpunching.

As you move into the assailant with your redirection and counterpunch, without breaking contact with the attacker’s arm, loop your deflecting-stabbing arm over the assailant’s impact weapon arm to secure the impact weapon arm.

Continue your counterattack with a foreleg kick or multiple knee strikes to the groin depending on distance.

The most popular method to remove the impact weapon is to use a 180-degree step (tsai-bake) with your right foot to break or rip the impact weapon away from his hand without taking your eyes off the assailant.

Once you feel comfortable with the initial defense, add a simultaneous punch with your other arm, thrusting both arms out together. I recommend a palm down punch or keeping the palm of the hand parallel to the ground, targeting the nose, chin, or throat.

Next time we take a look defending a two-handed overhead attack with chair or stool. Until then, train hard and always remember retzev.

Related posts:

1. A Primer on Krav Maga: The Combative System of the Israeli Defense Forces
2. Don Draper Judo: Unarmed Self-Defense from the Mad Men Era
3. How To Survive a Bear Attack
4. How To Throw a Dynamite Overhand Punch
5. The Best Guns for Home Defense

In previous posts (1 2), I have presented how to implement a Turing Machine (TM) with the tape stored as an ARRAY or in a separate TABLE accessed through SQL functions. In this post the solution is more cleanly relational, with the tape contents stored in a column of the recursive query, very like Andrew Gierth’s CTS implementation.

Turing Machine with a window function

In this post the TM is built from the following SQL features: WITH RECURSIVE to iterate till the machine stops, INNER JOIN to get transition and state informations, WINDOW functions and CASE expression to extract the next symbol from the recursive table, two sub-SELECTs to initialize the recursion, another CASE expression to copy, update and extend the tape, a CROSS JOIN to append blanks at the end of the tape.

An ARRAY and ORDER is also used to record the tape state, but is not strictly necessary, it is just there for displaying the TM execution summary at the end.

Turing Machine execution

Let us now execute a run with a recursive query:

WITH RECURSIVE running(iter, sid, len, pos, psym, tid, tsym) AS (
  -- set first iteration at state 0, position 1
    SELECT
      -- first, common part is repeated over and over
      0, 0,
      -- tape length needed to know where to insert blanks
      (SELECT COUNT(*)::INTEGER FROM Tape),
      -- position and next symbol to consider
      1, (SELECT symbol FROM Tape WHERE tid=1),
      -- then the tape contents
      tid, symbol
    FROM Tape
  UNION
  -- compute next iteration
    SELECT
       pr.iter + 1,
       tr.new_state,
       pr.len, -- the initial length could also be recomputed with a sub-query
       pr.pos + tr.move,
       -- recover next iteration symbol
       -- this "hack" because 'running' cannot be used twice in the query
       MAX(CASE WHEN pr.pos+tr.move=pr.tid THEN pr.tsym ELSE NULL END) OVER (),
       CASE
         WHEN hack.keep THEN pr.tid   -- tape index
         ELSE pr.len + pr.iter + 1    -- append a new index
        END,
       CASE
         WHEN hack.keep AND pr.tid=pr.pos THEN tr.new_symbol    -- update symbol
         WHEN hack.keep THEN pr.tsym                  -- or keep previous symbol
         ELSE 0                                      -- or append a blank symbol
       END
    FROM running AS pr
    JOIN -- corresponding transition
         Transition AS tr ON (pr.sid=tr.sid AND pr.psym=tr.symbol)
    JOIN -- state information, necessary to know whether to stop
         State AS st ON (tr.sid=st.sid)
    CROSS JOIN -- hack to append a 0 at the end of the tape
         (VALUES (TRUE), (FALSE)) AS hack(keep)
    WHERE -- stop on a final state
          NOT st.isFinal
)
-- just stores the computed iterations
INSERT INTO Run(rid, sid, pos, tape)
  SELECT
    -- iteration, current state, tape head position
    iter, sid, pos,
    -- build an array from tape symbols for easier display
    ARRAY_AGG(tsym ORDER BY tid ASC)
  FROM running
  GROUP BY iter, sid, pos
  ORDER BY iter;

Some comments about this query:

The motivation for the WINDOW function is that PostgreSQL forbids using the recursive table twice in the query, so this function allows to hide the additional reference needed to extract the next symbol. I do not really understand the motivation for this restriction, which seems a little bit artificial. Possibly it allows some optimisation when iterating on the query, but is also impairs what can be done with the WITH RECURSIVE construct.

There is also a CROSS JOIN hack for appending a blank symbol to the tape at each iteration, so that a tape symbol is always found when moving the TM head.

This query basically uses the same tricks as the CTS one, but for the OUTER JOIN or other NULL handling which are avoided. ISTM that they are needed for CTS because of the specifics of CTS, namely that a rule must only be applied when a tape contains 1, or ignored otherwise.

You can try this self-contained SQL script which implements a Turing Machine for accepting the AnBnCn language using the above method.

In the next post, I’ll show how to get rid of both WITH RECURSIVE and WINDOW functions…

This article is part of a series of blog posts covering the many different areas of work going on in Ubuntu right now. See the introduction post here that links to all the articles.

In my last article I talked about the new app upload process, but today I am going to talk about how developers write apps in the first place.

For a long time our app developer story in Ubuntu has been quite fragmented. This has been due to a number of reasons:

• We have not had a single consistent platform that we ask developers to write to. We have traditionally supported GTK, Qt, and anything else that lives in the archive. This not only presents a inconsistent developer experience, but also an inconsistent user experience too.
• We lacked app design guidelines around how developers should build apps that look consistent on the platform.
• We didn’t have a single consistent developer portal and support network to provide the support and guidance app developers need to build awesome apps and get them into the platform.
• We also didn’t have a good answer for writing an app that can work across multiple form factors.
• Finally, we didn’t have a single consistent SDK that developers could use to write apps: they had to pick from a plethora of tools, with varying degrees of quality.

We tried to rectify some of these issues by recommending people write apps with Python and GTK, and we wrote a tool called Quickly to optimize this process. Quickly would generate a project and help with tasks such as editing, creating your UI, and generating a package, but quickly was a somewhat primitive and incomplete solution to the problem.

The work on Quickly also showcased some limitations in our tooling. At the time we recommended people write apps using GEdit, Glade, and GTK. Unfortunately, this collection of tools just didn’t compare favorably to the developer experience on Apple and Google’s platforms, despite the best efforts of the respective upstreams. We needed to provide an end-to-end SDK for developers that would take a developer from a new project through to submitting the app into the Ubuntu Software Center.

Choosing a Technology

We set out to resolve these issues and build a consistent Ubuntu SDK.

The first decision we made was around which frameworks we wanted to support when developers write their apps. These frameworks needed to be highly efficient and able to converge across multiple devices. We finalized this list as:

• Qt/QML – native applications that can be run on any of the devices and adapt to the screen size.
• HTML5 – web applications that can also adapt to the device with deep integration into the system services (e.g. messaging menu, launcher etc).
• Online Services – integration of web apps into the system services (e.g. messaging menu and unity integration).
• OpenGL – full OpenGL support for games.

Some time ago we decided to focus on Qt as a platform for not only building our SDK but building our convergence story too. Qt has many benefits:

• It provides a fast C++ library and toolkit as well as a neat higher-level declarative technology in the form of QML. This means that we have the power of C++ for system software (e.g. writing Unity) but app devs can write apps using a high-performance higher level technology that is easier to learn and faster to write apps with.
• Qt provides an awesome set of tools – an integrated IDE, debugger, designer and more.
• The Qt Creator IDE is very pluggable which means we could use it for our main IDE and use it for writing apps in HTML5 and OpenGL.
• Qt and QML documentation is fantastic.
• Qt has a strong eco-system surrounding it and lots of companies in that eco-system. This makes contracting out work and hiring much easier.
• Qt is a healthy upstream and very keen to work with those who consume it.

We also started looking into the best way in which we could support HTML5 developers. While the IDE decision had been made (Qt Creator) we also decided to invest in building Apache Cordova support into our SDK to make writing HTML5 as flexible as possible. This way you can either write a stock HTML5 app or use the cordova functionality…all accessible within the same IDE.

The Ubuntu SDK

We formed the SDK team and started work. This work was broken into two areas.

Firstly, we started work on the app developer platform. This is largely identifying the needs of app developers for writing apps for Ubuntu devices, and ensuring we have support for those needs (which largely requires integrating that support and creating APIs). This has included:

• Building the Ubuntu Component set – a set of widgets that are usable in QML and HTML5 that developers can use to construct their apps.
• Application lifecycle (suspending apps to preserve battery life).
• Location Services.
• Multimedia and Music.
• Alarms.
• Calendar Integration (using Evolution Data Server).
• Sensor services (e.g. accelerometer).

This work is currently on-going and in various stages of completeness, but all of these platform APIs will be ready by the end of August and many apps are already consuming them. Remember, these services will be made available across all form factors.

The second piece was the SDK itself. This is tuning the Qt Creator IDE for our needs and ensuring it can be used to create QML, HTML5, and OpenGL apps. This work has touched on a number of different areas and has resulted in the following features:

• We have project templates for QML, HTML5 (Cordova), HTML5 (Stock), and Scopes – here you can easily generate a project to get started with.
• Source control integration for Bazaar and Git – this makes collaboration around an app easier.
• Device integration – with just a click of a button you can run your app on an Ubuntu device to test that it works correctly.
• Click package generation – generate a click package that you can use to upload to the Ubuntu Software Center.
• Ubuntu Component Showcase – browse all the different Ubuntu components and see the code for how to use them.
• Integrated documentation, IRC, design guidelines, and Ask Ubuntu support.

We rolled all of these features into the first Beta of the SDK which was released about a month ago and you can get started with it on developer.ubuntu.com.

developer.ubuntu.com

Speaking of developer.ubuntu.com, we have invested significantly in making the site a central resource for all of your development needs.

Currently the site provides tutorials for building apps, API documentation, and a cookbook that brings together the top rated questions from Ask Ubuntu. The site provides a good spring-board for getting started.

We are however in the process of making a number of improvements to developer.ubuntu.com. This will include:

• Revised site navigation and structure to make it easier to use.
• Better and more clearly integrated API documentation.
• Wider API coverage.
• Cookbooks for all of the different app templates.
• Full integration of Juju Charm documentation and API.

We are expecting to have many of these improvements in place in the coming weeks.

Are We There yet?

As we stand today we now have a powerful Ubuntu SDK with support for writing convergent apps in Qt/QML, HTML5, OpenGL, and writing Scopes that fit into the dash. You can go to developer.ubuntu.com to find out more, install the SDK, and fine tutorials for getting started.

We are only just gettin started though. The 1.0 of the SDK will be released in October and expect to find more refinements, better integration, and more features as we understand the needs of our developers better and expand the platform.

"A concept vehicle or show vehicle is a car made to showcase new styling and/or new technology. They are often shown at motor shows to gauge customer reaction to new and radical designs which may or may not be mass-produced. General Motors designer Harley Earl is generally credited with inventing the concept car, and did much to popularize it through its traveling Motorama shows of the 1950s.Concept cars never go into production directly. In modern times all would have to undergo many changes before the design is finalized for the sake of practicality, safety, the meeting the burden of regulatory compliance, and cost. A "production-intent" vehicle, as opposed to a concept vehicle, serves this purpose.^[1]"

It's probably not good to encourage users to ask questions that are wildly off-topic for the site.

Not sure when this got changed/borked, but it was working correctly a week or so ago when I looked last.

Brent Simmons:

I don’t have any business relationship with Glassboard (or with NewsGator or Sepia Labs), and so the only benefit I get from helping find Glassboard a new home is the selfish one: I use Glassboard every day and want to keep using it. (Q Branch uses it; my podcast uses it; my family uses it; the Seattle Xcoders group uses it.)

The problem of persistent, private, and trustworthy group sharing is still an open problem. Glassboard represents a couple years of work by a six-person team, and it’s a great start. I believe that it can be very successful, given the right home, given resources and commitment.

Great opportunity here for someone; Glassboard is a great product.

Keep it klassy, Sgt. Ernst.

San Francisco Police Sergeant Richard Ernst apparently decided that the best way to make Folsom Street safer was to purposefully park his car in the bike lane this morning and force bicycle commuters into motor traffic.

Staff from the SF Bicycle Coalition were out at Folsom and Sixth Streets, handing out flyers calling for safety improvements on SoMa's freeway-like streets in the wake of the death of Amelie Le Moullac, who was run over at the intersection last week by a truck driver who appeared to have made an illegal right-turn across the bike lane on to Sixth.

When Ernst arrived on the scene, he didn't express sympathy for Le Moullac and other victims, or show support for safety improvements. Instead, he illegally parked his cruiser in the bike lane next to an empty parking space for up to 10 minutes, stating that he wanted to send a message to people on bicycles that the onus was on them to pass to the left of right-turning cars. He reportedly made no mention of widespread violations by drivers who turn across bike lanes instead of merging fully into them.

He said it was his "right" to be there.

According to SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum, Ernst blamed all three victims who were killed by truck drivers in SoMa and the Mission this year, and refused to leave until she "understood that it was the bicyclist's fault."

"This was shocking to hear, as I was told just a day ago by [SFPD Traffic] Commander [Mikail] Ali that the case was still under investigation and no cause had yet been determined," Shahum said in a written account of the incident. While Ernst's car was in the bike lane, "a steady stream of people biking on Folsom St. were blocked and forced to make sudden and sometimes-dangerous veers into the travel lane, which was busy with fast-moving car traffic during the peak of morning rush hour." [...]

"There was literally an open, available parking spot next to the bike lane, which he could have pulled into," added Shahum. "Sgt. Ernst again said he did not need to move his car. He said it was his 'right' to be there."

You can see San Francisco's Finest hard at work at 1:04 in this video.

Previously, previously, previously.

SFBC: Open Letter to Mayor Lee: Take Action on SoMa Streets

Dear Mayor Lee:

Last week, a 24-year-old woman named Amelie Le Moullac was killed while bicycling on Folsom Street near 6th Street when she was hit by a truck driver. Amelie was the third resident to be killed on a bike in San Francisco this year, all in or near SoMa. Each victim was killed by the driver of a large truck, none of whom have been cited or charged yet.

SoMa regularly ranks as one of San Francisco's most dangerous neighborhoods for people bicycling and walking. [...]

We ask you to commit to implement the City's long-overdue, long-delayed redesign of Folsom Street. Folsom is one of the city's few designated bike routes to downtown -- yet it is still an intimidating street, with no separation between bike riders and fast-moving auto traffic. Other cities have taken action to tame their deadlier streets by adding bikeways that are physically-separated from motor vehicle traffic. In fact, separated bikeways on 9th Avenue in New York City have reduced injuries to all street users by 58% and could do the same here.

The City studied and recommended a redesign of Folsom Street, which includes separated bikeways, years ago through multiple planning processes and is now in the process of environmental analysis through the Central Corridor EIR. The City is scheduled to repave Folsom Street from the Embarcadero to 10th Street in November 2014. Please expedite approval and funding for this long-overdue Folsom St. plan so that the new, safe design, vetted through extensive community outreach, can be implemented with this scheduled repaving next year.

I spend a lot of time nearly-dying on Folsom Street. It's about time they actually implement these already-approved changes. Send an email!

We’re back with the twenty-sixth episode of Season Six of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo Team! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson, Tony Whitmore, and (sort of) Laura Cowen are back in Studio A with carrot cake, tea, and an interview.

You can also watch the video on Youtube!

In this week’s show:-

• We interview Zane Swafford about what happened when he sold an application through the Ubuntu Software Centre.
• We share some Command Line Lurve:

  • uprecords

• We chat about trying bitmessage and torchat buying an Arduino starter kit, and climbing a mountain in Malawi for charity (please sponsor!).
• And we go over your marvellous feedback, including finding out about the Julian Day

Please send your comments and suggestions to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Join us on IRC in #ubuntu-uk-podcast on Freenode
Leave a voicemail via phone: +44 (0) 203 298 1600, sip: podcast@sip.ubuntu-uk.org and skype: ubuntuukpodcast
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc
Find our Facebook Fan Page
Follow us on Google Plus

New drug mimics the beneficial effects of exercise

A drug known as SR9009, which is currently under development at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), increases the level of metabolic activity in skeletal muscles of mice. Treated mice become lean, develop larger muscles and can run much longer distances simply by taking SR9009, which mimics the effects of aerobic exercise. [...]

When Burris' group administered SR9009 to these mice to activate the Rev-Erbα protein, the results were remarkable. The metabolic rate in the skeletal muscles of the mice increased significantly. The treated mice were not allowed to exercise, but despite this they developed the ability to run about 50 percent further before being stopped by exhaustion.

"The animals actually get muscles like an athlete who has been training," said Burris. "The pattern of gene expression after treatment with SR9009 is that of an oxidative-type muscle -- again, just like an athlete."

Previously.

Corsair is announcing the Force Series LS SSD line which is available in 60GB, 120GB and 240GB capacities and is engineered as a cost-effective upgrade for desktops and notebooks to replace HDDs. The Force Series LS is a 7mm height SSD, and can thus easily be installed in any standard 2.5" drive bay, or even a 3.5" drive bay with an optional adapter. The drive also features 6Gb/s SATA support to allow the maximum amount of throughput. Internally, the Force Series LS SSD features a Phison 6Gb/s SSD controller and Toshiba NAND to provide solid SSD performance at up to 10x faster than standard HDDs.

read more

John Lumea, the fellow behind the petition, brings some interesting news:

It turns out that the resolution, within the California State Legislature, to name the Western span of the Bay Bridge for Willie Brown is in direct violation of the naming policy adopted in April by the State Senate Transportation and Housing Committee --- which has to approve the resolution in order for it to move forward.

I won't tax you with the details of that here, other than to note that two of the three violated conditions of the naming policy are that (1) "the person being honored must be deceased" (which Willie Brown decidedly is not) and that (2) "the author or co-author of the measure must represent the district in which the facility is located" (which, in this case, none does).

12-1 in favor? I am horrified.

In Sacramento on Monday, the state Assembly Committee on Transportation met to consider ACR65, a bill that would designate the western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge the Willie L. Brown Jr. Bridge. The vote was 12-1 with three abstentions. The "no" came from committee Chair Bonnie Lowenthal, D-Long Beach; the abstainers were Tom Ammiano, D-S.F., Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo; and Jim Frazier, D-Oakley. The bill moves to the floor of the Assembly.

Meanwhile, in a surprise move, Willie Brown does something cool!

Meanwhile, Brown himself told Lee Houskeeper that he isn't interested in the half-a-bridge honor. He's in favor, he said, of naming the whole thing after Emperor Norton, who 141 years ago had proposed such a span. (The anniversary of that proposal will be celebrated at the Gold Dust Lounge - a client of Houskeeper's, and the reason he and Brown were discussing the subject - on Sept. 17.)

Previously.

Cowabunga dudes! Dustin and Homemade Movies travel back to 1990 to deliver the original trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Completely made from household products, these homemade heroes-in-a-halfshell pack a punch that would make Jim Henson proud

1. If you find yourself fighting to shut someone up, you’re wrong.
2. If you think “Who does he think he is” the answer is “an imperfect human being.”
3. I will never apologize for asking questions or saying what I think.
4. The term mansplaining is sexist.
5. Fact: Women do their share of mansplaining.

Not even going to bother engaging with this level of stubborn ignorance—just skip down to (Whoops! Winer has deleted all the good comments. Luckily, Faruk Ateş preserved both his and @zenlan’s—which is especially brilliant—and has put them up here.)

Poornima Gupta and Peter Henderson, reporting for Reuters, on retention problems:

Some Silicon Valley recruiters and former Apple employees at rival companies say they are seeing more Apple resumes than ever before, especially from hardware engineers, though the depth and breadth of any brain-drain remains difficult to quantify, especially given the recent expansion in staff numbers.

“I am being inundated by LinkedIn messages and emails both by people who I never imagined would leave Apple and by people who have been at Apple for a year, and who joined expecting something different than what they encountered,” said one recruiter with ties to Apple.

Still, the Cook regime is also seen as kinder and gentler, and that’s been a welcome change for many.

“It is not as crazy as it used to be. It is not as draconian,” said Beth Fox, a recruiting consultant and former Apple employee, adding that the people she knows are staying put. “They like Tim. They tend to err on the optimistic side.”

So engineers are leaving in droves because Apple is a nicer place to work now?

No doubt about it, retention is a key concern for Apple, but they do not have a retention problem. I’d wager Apple has a higher retention rate than any of its Valley competitors. There may well be more Apple resumes in circulation than ever before, but there are more Apple employees than ever before — Apple has never been bigger than it is now, and Apple employees have never been in higher demand.

Still, employees report some grumbling, and Apple seems to have taken note, conducting a survey of morale in the critical hardware engineering unit earlier this year.

“As our business continues to grow and face new challenges, it becomes increasingly important to get feedback about your perceptions and experiences working in hardware engineering,” Dan Riccio, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, wrote to his team in February in an email seen by Reuters.

Apple does these surveys among employees every two or three years, and has done so throughout the modern era. I don’t think the survey cited above was in response to a rise in discontent.