UK Linux User Groups

The meeting agenda is already posted for tonight’s (Wednesday’s) SPI board IRC meeting which will be at 2000 UTC.

It’s another pretty lean meeting, with only some minutes to approve, so why not come along and let the board know what you think they should be doing to promote free and open source software?

This blog entry represents the views of me, myself and I, and does not represent the views of my employer (Canonical) or System 76. While I have decided to write a review of this specific machine, there are many vendors out there who ship Ubuntu on their machines and this review does not favor System76 over these other vendors. Heck, I am happy to review their machines too if they want.

Recently I got one of these new System 76 ultra-thin laptops, the Lemur:

System76 are well known in the Open Source community for shipping Ubuntu on their machines, being active community members and for helping LoCo teams with machines too. I have never owned a System76 box so I thought this was a good opportunity to give it a ride and share some feedback.

So first, the specs:

• Display: 14.0″ HD WXGA Super Clear Ultra-Bright LED backlit (1366 x 768)
• Graphics: Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics
• Audio Output: Intel High Definition Audio
• Networking: Gigabit LAN (10/100/1000), WiFi
• Wireless: 802.11 agn
• Expansion: Express Card 34 slot
• Ports: HDMI, VGA, 3 x USB 2.0, Headphone Jack, Microphone Jack, SD Reader
• Camera: Built-In 1.3 MP Webcam
• Security: Kensington® Lock
• Power Management: Suspend & Hibernate
• Battery: Lemur UltraThin Li-Polymer Battery Pack
• AC Adapter: includes one AC adapter
• Dimensions: 13.38″ x 9.09″ x 0.90″ (WxDxH)
• Weight: 3.5 lbs

The machine I got has an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 1.3 GHz 800 MHz FSB 3 MB L2 (10 Watt), 4GB RAM (DDR3 1066 MHz 1 DIMM) and a 80 GB Intel X25-M Solid State Drive.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure: I don’t really do reviews, so this is going to be a quick run through the details, not a 150-picture unboxing and War And Peace epic of every minor detail of the machine. I just wanted to get my experience down as quickly as possible so I could share my feedback with others.

The Machine

OK, let’s zip through the summary:

The machine is a really sleek looking bit of kit. The first thing that struck me is how well designed it feels: it doesn’t feel like a randomly thrown together collection of components. It is thin and incredibly light, and has a very Apple-ish feel to it. It passed what I am calling the Lost Test: that is, when laid in bed at night watching Lost on Hulu with said laptop rested on your chest (for that IMAX effect), how many episodes can you get though before you feel like your heart is about to overheat and stop working. It’s lightness and lack of heat helped it pass with flying colors.

The screen looks great, doesn’t seem to smudge easily and is nice and bright. I like the fact it is a widescreen, something I miss with my current Thinkpad.

The keyboard is pretty much ok: it ain’t no Thinkpad keyboard, but of all the laptops I have owned and that are buried in my laptop graveyard, the Lemur’s keyboard feels better than most. The keys are wide enough and I love the fact that there is no Windows key, but instead an Ubuntu key. I want to see more of that, yes I do.

The trackpad is long and feels pretty good, and the buttons don’t look like buttons but instead areas on the trackpad near the bottom where you can push down: this makes it look really sleek. Unfortunately at first the buttons are a little hard to press, but I have noticed that they are getting easier, so I think they just need breaking in a little.

With the current configuration of processor and RAM, this thing is shit off a shovel fast. It zips along like no-ones business, and Ubuntu is up and running in a matter of seconds. While I didn’t test any hardcore 3D games on there, it runs Compiz great with the extra effects switched on.

Sounds works great, the speakers sound surprisingly good and the built-in webcam works well too. Finally, the battery life seems fine in terms of life, but not outstanding. Then again, I am used to my extra-long-life Thinkpad batteries.

My only real gripe believe it or not is the packaging the machine comes in: it visually looks cheap with a large generic “notebook” logo and doesn’t reflect the swishness of the machine encased inside it. I spoke to Carl Richell, founder of System76 about this and he has acknowledged it is an issue and they are keen to fix it: he said they really want every essence of the System76 experience to feel sleek. Good man.

The Default Install: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

It is just incredible driving back from picking up a computer from the UPS warehouse and knowing that it already has Ubuntu pre-installed. I have never bought a pre-installed Ubuntu computer before, so I was curious to see how it looked. I got it home, switched it on and it threw up the installer’s configuration settings: I entered my details and the system was ready to roll. I was left with pretty much a default installation of Ubuntu: there is not the horrible bundled collection of software you don’t want and ugly vendor wallpaper that you find if you buy a typical Windows pre-loaded machine. Good work System76 on shipping what I consider a great representation of Ubuntu.

Other than that, nothing much to say: everything just works as you would expect.

Running Lucid

Being part of the Ubuntu development team, I was keen to get Lucid on there. I used Update Manager to update to Lucid and installation was smooth. Once again everything works: any bugs that I have found have not been specific to this machine, but replicated on my other Lucid machine. What is really noticeable is boot speed on the SSD: it is bonkers fast.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I think the Lemur is a beautiful machine, and combined with what I consider a beautiful Operating System, particularly with the new fit and finish of Lucid. When running the Lemur it really feels like great design in hardware and software meeting well. I would happily recommend this machine to others.

…that this part of my desktop could feel so sleek:

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, we are ready for you.

By the time this blog entry goes live I'll be running upon my new machine. The migration process was mostly straightfoward and followed my plan:

• Using my existing desktop system as a PXE server to install Lenny over the network.
• Copied over important directories.
• Restored backups.
• Turned off old machine.

Of course it wasn't that simple in practise, as previously mentioned the whole reason I was looking for a new machine was because the software RAID upon my old desktop was failing - One of the two drives was completely dead.

As I'd feared the second drive failed partway through my migration. But thankfully I'd copied off the important stuff before then, and the backups I have off-site mostly covered everything else. (The things I lost were things I can find again such as ~/Music, ~/Videos. On the one hand they're too large to backup, on the other hand I should probably do it next time as they never change.)

Unfortunately the version of X in Lenny refused to work with the GeForce G210 video card I had. To be more correct using the Vesa driver I could get a picture and a smooth desktop, but when watching videos with xine I got maybe two frames a second. Both the open nv driver and the closed nvidia driver failed to support the card - so I swapped hardware, and I'm now running with the GeForce 7300 GS card from my previous desktop. This allows me to watch videos at full-screen with no issues. (Desktop size is 1600x1200 FWIW).

So now it's just a matter of tweaking the system. I've installed enough to be useful:

• miredo - So I have IPv6 connectivity despite Virgion.
• squid - So that I have a decent cache for surfing.
• pdnsd - So I have a caching nameserver and am not at the whim of Virgin.
• kvm - So I can setup scratch machines for play.

I've still got to setup pbuilder, but that'll be done shortly, and I've installed backported packages such that I can watch youtube videos. I'm currently running firefox from lenny but I expect that will change soon enough - not least because that version fails to support "adblockplus", only "adblock".

Two partitions md0 for /boot and md1 used as LVM, from which I've taken /, /home, etc:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/birthday--vol-root 9.9G 2.8G 6.6G 30% / /dev/mapper/birthday--vol-home 22G 4.3G 16G 22% /home /dev/mapper/birthday--vol-music 127G 43G 78G 36% /mnt/music /dev/md0 988M 38M 901M 4% /boot /dev/mapper/birthday--vol-kvm 22G 8.8G 12G 44% /mnt/kvm /dev/sdg1 163G 143G 12G 93% /media/disk skx@birthday:~/hg/blog/data$

 

skx@birthday:~/hg/blog/data$ sudo pvs [sudo] password for skx: PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree /dev/md1 birthday-vol lvm2 a- 464.82G 274.51G

Update: Three irritations with this machine:

1. As supplied the BIOS was set with "USB Mouse" and "USB Keyboard" set to "disabled". I had to beg the loan of a keyboard from a neighbour.
2. As supplied the BIOS had virtualisation set to "disabled". Not a huge shock, but it caught me out regardless.
3. As supplied the system had only a single SATA power connector. Annoying given that the motherboard is advertised as having "onboard RAID" and I'd purchased it with two hard drives. Happily I had a spare adaptor to hand.

I'd still recommend Novatech, but the last point had me swearing for a few minutes until I realised I did have a spare adaptor in the house.

ObFilm: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

...Borg Queen assimilates ECS Drone.

And yes I'm so going to get slapped for that one tomorrow. Hard. And I'm going to deserve it!



Says it all really!



Speaking of facebook relationship status (as we were) this made me smile.

This week Dan’s podcast RatholeRadio hit it’s 21st episode and to be fair it seems to be going from strength to strength. It’s a really nice way to round off Sunday evening I’m not sure why but I don’t feel the ‘urgency’ that I sense when other podcasts do their ‘Live’ shows. Maybe its the smaller IRC audience but I think its more to do with the fact that Dan plays what he wants, while you could heckle him from the IRC channel “Dan I’m stabbing myself with a Biro” I doubt very much if he would change the playlist that he had set up for that particular shows performance.

This week I decided to listen on my main openSUSE box rather than my Ubuntu Dell mini the first problem I encountered was appalling sound level, level? there was no sound! Actually that was not strictly true I could hear a faint noise coming from the left headphone. I have two shuttle PC’s both of which have audio in/out on the front, now dear reader you would have thought ‘remove two jacks from top machine plug same into bottom machine’ right? Erm apparently not! The bottom machine has the two ports cunningly swapped! Arrrrgghh I am now deafened and sentenced to suffer from tinnitus for the next week or so as 50 billion decibels burst my not so young eardrums.

As per usual Dan started off with some demo music just to test out his sound systems and the icecast http://65.60.11.2:8216/live we all seem to enjoy this part heaps as its not included in the podcast so its sort of our little groups pre-show party so to speak.

Hold On To Your Structure by The Hoboscopes
This is a fun track, gypsy punk with a heavy accordion lead. This had us all jigging around like lunatics, I like the way Dan plays something lively to kick the show off, gypsy punk always seems to put a smile on my face I suppose the musicians take it seriously I just think its a sort of mickey take on main stream punk or is it a more palatable version? Thumbs up on this one.

These Days by Robin Grey
A guitar based semi folk type song nothing special in my opinion but was a pretty easy listening track so fitted in well with the ‘Sunday Evening’ theme that permeates throughout these reviews.  I would have thought Dan would have played a second lively song rather than hitting us with this mellow track? Over all it was a so so track gets a “Meh” on this one.

Loneliness Of The Shot Down Bomber by Paindonor
Now this is an interesting song a cool mellow techno start with a heavy violin influence slightly strange but pretty haunting. I’m not sure if you could “Get down and shake your bootee” to this one but ideal for chilling out to or maybe while driving to work. I really like the title of the song and you did sort of feel, I presume, the pain in the track. Thumbs up on this one.

Words Of Wisdom by George Carlin
This was one of those political ’message’ monologues Dan seems to favour I’m not a big fan of it myself I’m not sure how it fits into a music show although having said that music and political messages have been intertwined since time began. I suppose it was enjoyable if you’re into that sort of thing it sort of reminds me of those free concerts where you have to listen to Red Robbo after each song to justify getting in for free. Thumbs down on this one.

Sad Man by Dub Rebellion
A Ska, Dub, Reggae band Dan seems to think I’m a huge fan of reggae I like it but its not my sole interest. The cohesion of Ska and Reggea is defiantly right up my street I wonder what a Bob Marley song would have been like given a Ska makeover? I enjoyed this track even doing a few ‘skanking‘ moves which is perfectly acceptable in the privacy of your own home. Thumbs up on this one.

The first ever live Rathole Radio gig tickets go on sale
The first ever live Rathole Radio gig is happening in Liverpool on Friday April 30th at the Bad Format Social Club. It kicks things off nicely for the OggCamp10 weekend to follow. Dan is trying to promote Creative Commons artists and has some amazing acts playing live. There’ll be interactive message walls, many laughs and the bar is also very reasonably priced apparently. I have paid my measly £5.00 so maybe I’ll see you there?

Live Fast Lie Down by BeatSix
This was a fairly lively Rock ‘N’  Soul mix reasonably enjoyable but nothing to set my socks on fire to be honest. I had a quick read-up on their Jamendo profile where they state “Think, very early Duran, mid-era Echo and the Bunnymen, a touch of David Sylvian/Japan with a potent stabs of art-rock guitar stings over a chocolaty bass and drums groove”. which in my opinion translates as “I’m not too sure what we are?” it wasn’t a bad song just nothing special. Gets a “Meh”

Superhero by Lab7
We was back on track with this Electro Spanish group, the song does the classic quiet start building to a heavy typical electro beat, quick as a flash out came the glow sticks and we was pumping to the beat. Apparently they are “An alter ego of a normal someone who uses electronic music to express himself through a kidnapped mind” which is a little bit scary. I like this one a lot and would probably download it. This one gets a thumbs up.

Mr Weirdo by Fresh Body Shop
Dan then hit us with this indie group with a very good beat and guitar rhythm I tried to resist performing as a virtual drummer and made do with ‘foot tapping’ instead. The group hail from France and have a huge list of so called influences listed on their MySpace website I did like the first influence “My cat” which I thought was kinda funny but over all I liked the song so this one gets a thumbs up.

LIVE TRACK – Billy Bragg – “Waiting For The Great Leap Forward”
Within the first two or three chords I recognised this emotional song from my youth with that epic line which is the title of the song. Dan gave us what to date has been my favourite rendition of a song which he belted out with all the passion that Billy himself would have been proud of. I’ve always liked Billy Braggs stuff I wonder if Dan fancies having a crack at the Levi Stubbs cover Tears? Have a listen to some of Billy’s stuff he is a political musician but the words of his songs still have value today. Thumbs up on this one.

Weapons by Keep Cool Vibration
Billed as Reggae Live Dub Rastafari this would be the classic big band Bob Marley type presentation, yes you guessed it we was all doing that slow motion bottom thrusting dancing. Yet another good tune to take up the penultimate slot of the show, I did want to read a bit more about them but their profile on Jamedo is in French and Google translate usually gets French wrong or so I’m told. Some strong trumpet sections and pretty clear vocals all in all a pretty good song which would be well worth downloading in my opinion or at least have a listen on line. Thumbs up on this one.

The Horse & Cart by Kagnee
Yet another song from the catalogue of the band Dan was a member of, this one apparently is about Pamela Anderson who made a porn tape with her partner Tommy Lee Jones back in the days when I had hair. Now I do like some of the stuff on the album but this particular track turned me off  while it was probably a laugh making the song and it has some low level historical value, apparently Tommy Lee heard the song and sent a signed copy back to the band, I thought it was terrible just an excuse to say what a slapper she was. Thumbs down on this one.

With seven thumbs up it would seem this weeks show was better than I thought I had a feeling it was slightly down on the last two podcasts that I’d attended but I must be wrong? I obviously enjoyed myself more than I thought.

Last night was cold again, though unlike the south-east there was no snow. The sky was completely clear. On the way home from rehearsal I stopped the car in the vineyards and turned off the lights, to look at the mass of stars without getting frozen.

On Sunday Ginette went to Port Maubert (5 miles away) to see how the flood is receding. This stretch of coast didn't get into the tv reports because no-one died, but the water came right up into the houses. It wasn't so serious here, as there are no houses right on the sea's edge. The marsh was completely under water, and the roads to the ports were impassable: roads and ports are still being drained.

Something unknown was changing the labels on certain devices behind my back. We couldn’t find out what it was using ordinary diagnostics, so I decided to investigate if we could do this with SystemTap. I quickly found an existing script to monitor changes in ordinary file attributes. This won’t work for SELinux labels though because those are stored in ext2/3/4 extended attributes (xattrs).

Basically I had to modify that script to monitor calls to setxattr instead.

Using the LXR I found that the call is implemented in Linux in fs/xattr.c, function vfs_setxattr. I had to modify the script to probe that kernel function, and the parameters are slightly different too.

I also had to install the correct kernel-{,PAE-}debuginfo package corresponding to my installed kernel. This is how SystemTap is able to resolve symbols in the current kernel.

/* Watch changes to xattrs on an inode. * http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/tip-use-systemtap-to-monitor-selinux-changes-to-files/ */ probe kernel.function("vfs_setxattr") { dev_nr = $dentry->d_inode->i_sb->s_dev inode_nr = $dentry->d_inode->i_ino if (inode_nr == $1) printf ("%s(%d) %s 0x%x/%u %d %s %s\n", execname(), pid(), probefunc(), dev_nr, inode_nr, uid(), kernel_string ($name), kernel_string_n ($value, $size)) }

Then run it with:

# stap -v /tmp/inodewatchxattr.stp inodenum

The bug turned out to be udevd, which I don’t think anyone was expecting …

libvirtd(4338) vfs_setxattr 0x5/166267 0 security.selinux system_u:object_r:svirt_image_t:s0:c177,c272 udevd(28299) vfs_setxattr 0x5/166267 0 security.selinux system_u:object_r:fixed_disk_device_t:s0 udevd(28299) vfs_setxattr 0x5/166267 0 security.selinux system_u:object_r:fixed_disk_device_t:s0 udevd(28299) vfs_setxattr 0x5/166267 0 security.selinux system_u:object_r:fixed_disk_device_t:s0

All in all, I’m impressed with SystemTap. It’s a simple, strongly-typed, sane programming language with type inference. Thankfully Python was not an influence on it.

Yesterday we improved virt-inspector so it can now fetch information about Windows guests by reading their Registries. In the XML output, this provides the ProductName and Windows internal version:

$ virt-inspector --xml Win2003x32 [...] <name>windows</name> <product_name>Microsoft Windows Server 2003</product_name> <arch>i386</arch> <major_version>5</major_version> <minor_version>2</minor_version> [...]

In the raw output you get even more details from the Registry:

$ virt-inspector --perl Windows7x64 [...] 'arch' => 'x86_64', 'windows_registered_owner' => 'rjones', 'windows_current_type' => 'Multiprocessor Free', 'windows_system_hive' => '/Windows/System32/config/SYSTEM', 'windows_installation_type' => 'Client', 'os_major_version' => '6', 'os_minor_version' => '1', 'systemroot' => '/Windows', 'windows_software_hive' => '/Windows/System32/config/SOFTWARE', 'windows_software_type' => 'System', 'windows_registered_organization' => '', 'windows_current_build' => '7600', 'windows_edition_id' => 'Enterprise', 'product_name' => 'Windows 7 Enterprise', [...]

The patch I use against Z-Push is now on my wiki, here. It fixes several long standing bugs with Z-Push that haven’t yet made it in to SVN (will they ever?). It also adds the ability to turn debugging on/off, otherwise the debug.txt file grows beyond belief.

I’ve been using Z-Push+Dovecot with my iPhone for some time now and so far, so good. Only issue I sometimes get is when someone sends a stupidly large attachment and PHP dies as it exhausts the maximum allowed memory.

If you have any issues with my patch and need some support, best to direct it at the Z-Push forums and not me. Although feedback is always welcome.

Inspired by a conversation about interview coding tasks from a list I'm on, I present the following - I considered it too long to email there. It took me longer than I expected to write; my x86 assembly is quite rusty. I'm not claiming it's pretty, but it fits in a single sector and most of the overhead is actually ELF structures.

; nasm -f elf fizzbuzz.asm ; ld -melf_i386 -s -o fizzbuzz fizzbuzz.o ; ./fizzbuzz section .data fizz db " fizz" fizzlen equ $ - fizz buzz db " buzz" buzzlen equ $ - buzz num db " " numend equ $ - 1 numlen equ $ - num nl db 0xa nllen equ $ - nl curnum db 1 section .text global _start _start: mov ax, [curnum] call printnum mov ax, [curnum] mov cx, 3 xor dx, dx div cx cmp dx, 0 jnz notfizz mov edx, fizzlen mov ecx, fizz call printstr notfizz: mov ax, [curnum] mov cx, 5 xor dx, dx div cx cmp dx, 0 jnz notbuzz mov edx, buzzlen mov ecx, buzz call printstr notbuzz: mov edx, nllen mov ecx, nl call printstr inc BYTE [curnum] cmp BYTE [curnum], 100 jle _start xor ebx, ebx mov eax, 1 int 0x80 printnum: mov edi, numend mov cx, 10 p1: xor edx, edx div cx add dx, '0' mov [edi], dl dec edi cmp ax, 0 jne p1 mov ecx, num mov edx, numlen printstr: mov ebx, 1 mov eax, 4 int 0x80 ret

My home server, where this is all served from, was running Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (Sarge). Sarge was first released on 6th of June, 2005. Almost a 5 year run without a reinstall. Pretty good going. Unfortunately the time had come to upgrade as I needed access to MySQL 5.1 and PHP5. I did try an upgrade from Debian 3.1 to 5.0.1 (Lenny) but this didn’t go too well. I over-looked running a hand rolled 2.4 kernel with grsecurity enable. I got in to a situation where I couldn’t run any commands at all. As I didn’t have a CDROM drive connected to the server and couldn’t be bothered taken things apart, I accepted that the installation was horribly broken and decided to bite the bullet.

To cut a long story short, I put in two new hard drives, TFTP booted Ubuntu 9.04 and started a clean install of my server. I took the opportunity to configure everything from scratch again. I didn’t fancy trying to re-use old configs and fixing them up to work with the much newer software packages that had jumped a major version or two. It’s now almost complete. Just a few things to finish off, like a hand rolled kernel with grsecurity etc.

As mentioned, one of the main reasons for the upgrade was to gain access to MySQL 5.1 and PHP5 so I could run webapps such as Wordpress. My old blog which I wrote from the ground up was too cumbersome and why reinvent the wheel? I just don’t have the time anymore. So here it is.

I’ve also got DokuWiki on the go, so I can easily document specific configs. Mainly so I remember what was done and why and also to help others out there. For example, at the moment I’m writing up my Postfix+Dovecot+dspam notes as the documention I found was bitty and not very well explained.

Also to be wikified will be my High Availability Linux iSCSI cluster notes and a patch for z-push to make it work properly (specifically with the iPhone).

Some time ago I bought a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. At the time it was the fastest thing I could buy. It was also the heaviest! With a 17″ 1920×1200 screen and all the toys, it’s a bit of a dead weight. It was always intended to be a desktop replacement, so it mostly sat on my desk all of its life so the weight wasn’t an issue. Having nice big screen was lovely for desktop use and playing the odd game.

It has a 1.8GHz Pentium CPU and an nVidia 6800Go video card. Not long after I bought it, the video card failed. I blogged about the issue and the rubbish Dell Support.

Well, it happened again just after the warranty ran out. Convenient, huh? Exactly the same problem as previously happened – corruption on the screen indicating hardware failure. I contacted Dell and they basically said they couldn’t help, but if I wanted they would sell me a new video card for £200. I was torn and frustrated. I could get a cheap entire laptop for not much more than that, but not one with a decent 3D card and 17″ 1920×1200 display. I was irritated that they couldn’t see that this was a recurrent issue with the machine which made me less inclined to pay more money to them.

Whilst on the phone the guy asked me at the end if I was ’satisfied’ with the support. I said ‘no’ of course which he was surprised at and after trying to argue that I should change my mind, he forwarded me on to his manager. The manager then proceeded to argue that I should change my answer to ‘yes’ because the agent had provided me with the correct answer – which was that he couldn’t help me. I was pretty peeved by this point that someone asked for my opinion of whether the transaction was a success and when I voiced displeasure, was badgered for a further 20 minutes to change my mind. I didn’t.

So since then (October last year) my dell laptop has sat in a drawer, unused, wasted. I have jumped on ebay now and then to try and get hold of a 2nd hand video card – it’s a modular MXM 6800Go – but never bought one. They’re quite rare and command similar prices to what Dell quoted me.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a co-worker about his broken Playstation 3. He’d read threads online about how the fault he has may be a common one, where many online suggest slamming the motherboard in the oven for a bit to ‘reflow’ the solder. Many reports online say this works.

I was in one of those moods yesterday, and dug out the laptop and managed to figure out how to take the thing apart and get the video card out. I wound the oven up to 200 degrees C and put the card in for 9 minutes. I figured I had nothing else to lose. If all those posts online were a massive conspiracy to get thick people such as me to put delicate electronics into a hot oven then they succeeded!

30 minutes later the card was cool enough for me to put it back in the machine. I carefully put it all back together and booted it up. It worked! The video corruption had gone. Well, almost. I was left with one vertical purple line about 3 pixels in from the left, which I can totally live with. In the drive was an old Crunchbang CD which booted up just fine.

So now, have I joined the ranks of the internet crazies who say putting electronics in the oven might cure it? Yup. Don’t do it though, because it might all go horribly wrong and I wouldn’t want you to blame me would I?

                          

Tomorrow, all being well, I'll receive a new computer.

I've always run Debian unstable upon my desktop in the past, partly because I wanted to have "new stuff" and partly because I needed a Debian unstable system for building Debian packages with.

However I'm strongly tempted to just install Lenny. I use that upon my work desktop and it does me just fine for surfing, building tools, and similar.

I can use pbuilder, sbuildd, or similar to build packages for upload to Debian, and if I want to experiment with new-hotness I can use a KVM guest or two.

Providing the hardware works with Lenny (and I have no reason to believe it won't) then there's no obvious downside I can think of.

The only potential complication will be restoring my backups, it is possible that my firefox databases, and similar things, might not work on older version. Still we shall see.

I plan to install software RAID, and run the system on LVM because quite frankly it rocks. Unless my current system fails in the next 24 hours I can use that to do the installation (My current desktop acts as a TFTP/DHCP/NFS server so I can use it to PXE-boot).

Anyway now I need to go eat food, tidy my desk, and decide what to call the machine .. At the moment the choice is between "march.my.flat" and birthday.my.flat, as my 34th birthday is on March 10th.

ObFilm: 300

Following my original review of the first Assassin's Creed game, I was dearly looking forward to reviewing the new episode in the series. Alas Ubisoft have taken the skull-smackingly stupid decision of making a single-player game need access to the Internet to work.

Don't buy this game, you will be funding idiocy if you do.

What next, Ubisoft, will you be making me not buy the upcoming Splinter Cell, too?

Today is International Women’s Day, and it provides an opportunity for the world to focus on women’s rights, and society’s attitudes towards women. International Women’s Day has been celebrated since the early 1900’s and has been a key milestone through many key events that have affected women’s rights and is now recognized as a national holiday in China, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

When I first heard of International Women’s Day, I was unsure of how I can contribute to celebrating the day and raising awareness of women’s rights. On the website one approach it advises is:

The tradition sees men honouring their mothers, wives, girlfriends, colleagues, etc with flowers and small gifts. In some countries IWD has the equivalent status of Mother’s Day where children give small presents to their mothers and grandmothers.

I think this is wonderful opportunity inside our global communities to do exactly this: to not only celebrate the contributions of women in our projects, campaigns and passions, but to also talk about ways in which we can break down the barriers and attitudinal prejudices that some women still face, particularly in largely male dominated software communities. Today is a great day for equality: let’s all make the most of it.

As part of International Women’s Day, the Ubuntu Women team have been running a competition to gather a collection of stories that share how women discovered Ubuntu and their experiences of joining our community. I thought this was a wonderful initiative: it really speaks to strong experiences of how Ubuntu can enable women to join a collaborative community, and how technology can be a true enabler.

Of the many stories submitted, there were to be two winners: one picked by the community, and I was given the honor of picking the second. Thankyou to the Ubuntu Women team for involving me in the unveiling of the winners, and this morning I announced both winners, read out their stories, and also read out a third that I thought was excellent too. Congratulations to Elvira Martinez and Karen Y. Perez for winning, and to Jen Phillips for getting read out too.

The video from this morning is below:

Can’t see it? Click here!

With today being International Women’s Day, I just want to share a few quick words on the women in my life. I have the privilege of having some incredible women as part of my life. In my family there is my wife, my mum, auntie’s, cousins and other relatives, the many wonderful female friends both online and offline, and every day I have the pleasure of working with some truly remarkable women in the Open Source world, throughout the various communities I am part of. There has been much discussion, particularly in the Open Source community, about how we can encourage more women into our communities, and there has been some friction between different approaches. I don’t see today as a day in which those debates should flourish, but as a day in which we should celebrate the women in our lives who help us flourish. Everyone single one of us has women who contribute so much to our lives and empower us every day, and I am thankful for all the women who bring color to my life, and give me the strength and energy to be who I am.

I asked last week if anyone knew of any cool podcasts I should subscribe to. I had a few suggested, one of which I’m now hooked on. Hacker Medley is a fairly new podcast started by Alex Graveley and Nat Friedman.

So far they’ve cranked out 3 episodes and in my opinion they’re all great. They’re all quite short but nicely packed with useful geeky information. Many Supreme Overlord geeks will probably say the content isn’t geeky enough, but it’s pitched at the right level for me. I learned plenty from all three episodes which covered quite different subject matters.

The first went into a little detail about the GSM vulnerability that’s been talked about recently, and how one might exploit it in practice with some amusing and alarming suggestions. The second episode gave an introduction to NoSQL which I’d heard about and roughly knew the basics, but didn’t appreciate why they existed or how widely they were used. In the third Nat and Alex talked about Web Sockets which again I had a slim passing knowledge of, but nothing I’d put on my CV.

I listened to all three episodes on the way to work this morning, and was left ‘wanting more’ which is always a good position for a podcaster to be in. The short duration (10-15 mins) and conversational style make for easy listening. The sound quality is great and the content is nicely paced. The presenters clearly know their stuff so can speak authoritatively on the subjects they discuss, which makes for a refreshing change from some podcasts.

I hope they can find time to crank out more episodes and sustain the quality. I’ll certainly be looking out for more of these and prioritise them accordingly in my player queue.

                          

From the spam folder of this blog today:

The layout for %BLOGURL% is a bit off in iCab. However I like your site. I may have to install a “normal” browser just to enjoy it.

I usually don’t usually post on many Blogs, yet I just has to say thank you for %BLOGTITLE%… keep up the amazing work. Ok regrettably its time to get to school.

Even more incompetently, neither of the spammy URLs they were trying to add actually worked (checked using ‘wget’, not a real browser of course).

$ wget http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/asm/asm/3.1/asm-3.1.jar [...] HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden $ wget -U "Pointless arseholes" http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/asm/asm/3.1/asm-3.1.jar [...] HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK

Was there some purpose to this minor irritation?

I am adamant that DIASER is still maintained (and without it wouldn’t even exist) due to the fact that my company, Interlinux Ltd, has been able to develop and look after the software. If hope this can eventually be understood by certain critics. The old attitudes held by some are counter-productive  as the concept of a free market is sadly taken for granted.

I will continue to build a capitalist, democratic community around DIASER and the minority far-left in academia who have pressured me will have to change their views or continue to self-marginalise at their own personal expense.

Damian