Planet Linux Australia

This notice is a bit late. But, in case anybody has missed it, the calls for Papers, Miniconfs, Posters and Tutorials for linux.conf.au 2011 have been open for a while and proposals are due by Saturday, 7th August 2010.



And, if you didn't miss it but have been dithering, get moving! We are hoping for another excellent selection of presentations for this conference.



All you need to know is at the conference website.

Testing how much power the rope will pull off the generators

• Share this on Facebook
• Tweet This!
• Share this on del.icio.us
• Digg this!
• Post on Google Buzz

Can't quite remember who originally posted the bharti ad, but I've had it open in a tab in my web browser for a week or so now.

And this times ad was youtube's suggestion of related content...

These two ads pack an emotional double whammy.

Indeed - Imagine what a Billion Indians could do if they worked together. Imagine what any of us could do if we worked together.

It makes me think about a couple of competing organisations I've been involved with. For a long time I've believed they have much in common, and by working together could increase their reach and effectiveness. But honest rivalry, politics and historical grievances have prevented them from forming a truly effective bond to forge something new.

The enmity has made me uncomfortable.

The open source world is filled with competing interests, but we work together and strive side by side toward the same goals - as athletes do. We all win, we all have a personal best when we are inspired to achieve more than before. This is not the kind of competition where losers are lost and ignored. It is the kind that looks towards the next challenge, the next opportunity, the next problem to solve. It is the kind of competition where the winners acknowledge the critical support and inspiration of their peers, and the runners up see what's possible.

These videos proclaiming an Indian identity that is proud of working together and happy to follow a leader to achieve a goal, inspire me to put my shoulder to the wheel.

Sometimes we just need a little bit of a push.

Software Freedom Day, Saturday 18 September is an opportunity to work together toward a goal of sharing the power of the Open Source Software community with the world.

Trackback URL for this post: http://kattekrab.net/trackback/211

It’s not making the news at the moment, but the proposed scrapping of the Medicare rebate for access to social workers and occupational therapists is going to cause a lot of pain to a lot of people. We have friends with Autism and Aspergers Syndrome who benefit from the support these people provide, support that helps these people get into jobs, to live independently or to understand how the world is working. As my own wife puts it:

As a person with autism, learning disabilities and mental health issues from a background of abuse and homelessness, a lot of my skills took years to acquire. I had had a lifetime of labels, Psych and Guidance, medicated by age 9, psychiatry since my teens. But it was a social worker who liased with my psychiatrist to get me – relatively illiterate, innumerate, itinerant and at risk – back into education. The psychiatrist took the credit but it was there I understood the very different jobs these people had in the area of mental health. The psychiatrist could medicate me, but the Social Worker had a more powerful medicine – practical plans and support to change, to save, a life.

When her first husband left after isolating her:

I had spent two years without practicing my self help skills. Agoraphobic, isolated, disoriented, I didn’t need a psychiatrist or medication. I needed practical hands on help in the home and the community to pattern me back into my life skills. That help came in the form of an Occupational Therapist. She helped me get back my strategies and the life skills these supported, helped me get my confidence back and helped me put supports in place for the things I needed help with. Within three months I was running my life as an independent adult, able to commute from home out into the community, even joining in community activities and looking after a cat.

Mental health often flies under the radar of journalists, but it is a significant health issue in Australia. Professor John Mendoza says:

Today, mental ill-health is the leading cause of death for all Australians under 45. More than car accidents. More than binge drinking. More than anything else. It is the leading cause of disability in Australia across all demographics. It affects more than 4 million Australians every year and is estimated to cost the Australian economy about $30 billion each year.

This decision isn’t yet set in stone, it is apparently due to be reviewed later this year but don’t wait for the election, please write and tell the current Health Minister why it is important to keep these services eligible for the Medicare rebate.

Federal Health Minister, Nicola Roxon,

1 Thomas Holmes Street

Maribyrnong Vic 3032,

Phone: 9317 7077.

nicola@nicolaroxonmp.com

Thank you.

This item originally posted here:



Social Workers and Occupational Therapists Disappearing off the Medicare Radar

I have released version 1.19-rc3 of Perdition. This release fixes several problems. Perhaps most significantly, Thunderbird 3.1 can now re-connect to perdition SSL/TLS.

The code and related libraries are available as tarballs here. More information is available in the announcement email. More information about perdition here.

I have released version 2.0.2 of kexec-tools. the user-space portion of kexec a soft-reboot and crash-dump facility of Linux and Xen.

There are changes since 2.0.2-rc1.

The code is available as a tarball here and in git here. More information is available in the announcement email.

kexec-tools recently moved, so the URLs above are new.

My home page and blog have moved. The new locations are:

• Home: horms.org/
• Feed: horms.org/pleb_blossom/rss.xml

Due to tyre troubles with my other two bikes I was "forced" to ride my Cannondale road bike to work this morning. The first time I've ridden it since well before Hikari was born last November. Wow, that bike is light and voom it flies. (And I put the brakes back together correctly after shipping it from Sydney!)

In semi-related news, its really warm in Tokyo at the moment.

I have released version 2.0.2-rc2 of kexec-tools. the user-space portion of kexec a soft-reboot and crash-dump facility of Linux and Xen. The only change since 2.0.2-rc1 is to include a number of files that were missing from the tarball which caused build failures on x86_64, ppc, ppc64 and arm.

The code is available as a tarball here and in git here. More information is available in the announcement email.

I have released version 1.19-rc2 of Perdition. There is a single change since 1.19-rc1 to fix a crash-bug on invocation of perdition in managesieve mode. Merge madness on my part. Thanks to Filipe Carvalho for reporting it. The fix is here.

The code and related libraries are available as tarballs here. More information is available in the announcement email. More information about perdition here.

I have released version 1.19-rc1 of Perdition, a mail retrieval proxy. This release includes numerous bug fixes and support for the manage sieve protocol.

The code and related libraries are available as tarballs here. More information is available in the announcement email. More information about perdition here.

01:24: Mikal shared: A Mad Engineer at SciFoo

I'm helping out at SciFoo this weekend. Exciting!

01:26: Mikal shared: Amazon rolls out smaller, lighter, WiFi-only Kindle for $139

I love what's happening in the ebook market. These things get more tempting every day. I have a Sony PRS 505, which makes it hard to justify another ebook reader. Must be strong...

01:30: Mikal shared: Chevy Volt: No $5K rebate, carpool-lane access for CA buyers

There is an interesting general point buried in this article. Catalytic converters need to be hot to operate effectively. A hybrid kicks the engine in and out, which means the catalytic converter can cool down unless counter measures are implemented. This increases the amount of time the catalytic converter isn't operating, and therefore the amount of pollution produced by the engine when its on.

Tags for this post: blather Comment RSS with no blather

I recently upgraded my home server from Ubuntu Karmic to Lucid. It did not go well.

The actual apt-get dist-upgrade went fine, with only minor problems which were easy enough to fix. The problem came when I rebooted. The boot started fine, but then got

stuck at the purple boot page, which showed “Ubuntu 10.4″ and 5 dots which cycled

between white and red. It never got past that point.

The usual thing to do at this point is to reboot in single user mode and start debugging startup scripts. Unfortunately I found that single user mode with Ubuntu Lucid was not useful as it doesn’t start a shell until after a huge pile of other things are started. In my case a ’single’ boot got stuck at the same point. Getting rid of the quiet and splash options, and adding nomodeset also didn’t help.

I found that if I booted an older kernel (2.6.31-19) then the system came up OK. That pointed to a likely driver issue. I could have just settled for that older kernel, but part of the reason for going to Lucid was to get a newer ALSA with better support for HDMI audio, so I didn’t really want to stick to an older kernel. I also wanted to know why the problem was happening.

I was also able to get a shell using the latest kernel by using the init=/bin/bash trick, but that doesn’t help to actually debug the problem. To debug startup problems you need to be able to watch the startup process in action, to see what is waiting. This is much harder these days with the new upstart init system now used in Ubuntu, as startup is much more parallel than it used to be. Adding some echo lines to init scripts used to be a useful technique, but it is much harder to get anything sensible out of that when using upstart.

To try to debug the problem I initially had a look for any startup debugging options. I found some promising options in /etc/default/rcS, and tried setting VERBOSE=yes and SULOGIN=yes. I found that the VERBOSE=yes option was somewhat useful, as it gave me some information on what jobs were started/waiting, but it didn’t really allow me to pin down the problem. The parallelism in upstart again made interpreting the output hard. When it says that a job is waiting it doesn’t say what it is waiting on, so you have no idea what the underlying problem really is.

Despite the promising name, and the nice description in the rcS(5) manpage, the SULOGIN=yes option didn’t seem to do anything at all. A grep for SULOGIN in the startup scripts didn’t find any hits, so I suspect it isn’t actually implemented.

As usual, the real key to solving the problem was a hack. I added the following to /etc/default/rcS:

(

/bin/sleep 10

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 192.168.2.10 up

/usr/sbin/sshd

) > /dev/null 2>&1 &

The idea behind this hack was to allow me to login with ssh from my laptop during the startup process and watch what was going on. This worked really well and meant that I was finally able to debug the startup process with the most recent Lucid kernel.

I rebooted again, logged into the system with ssh from my laptop, and started poking around with ps and initctl to see what was going on. I had assumed that “initctl list” would give me the information I needed. It does show what jobs are waiting, but as with the VERBOSE=yes messages it doesn’t tell you what it is waiting on.

Poking around some more I saw 3 things that were suspicious:

1) cryptdisks-enable was shown as “waiting”. I don’t have any encrypted disks on this system, so why should it be waiting?

2) dmesg showed a segfault in plymouth, which is the process that asks for user input during startup (it also does splash screens). This could be linked to why cryptdisks was waiting, as its possible that cryptdisks wanted a passphrase (for what disk though? I don’t have any encrypted disks)

3) dmesg also showed a lot of warnings from the dvb-usb-cxusb driver

As I was running low on time I decided to try the triple whammy of removing the cryptsetup package, removing the dvb-usb and dvb-usb-cxusb drivers (by moving them out of /lib/modules and running depmod) and removing the plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text package to try to simplify plymouth. This did the trick and my system now boots fine.

I still have the puzzle as to what is really causing the problem (and thus which of the changes matter), but I can leave that for another day. I thought it would be worthwhile sharing the ssh debug hack in case other people are also trying to debug upstart startup problems.

The Melbourne Free Software Interest Group (a group of Melbourne computer folks with an interest in software freedom) have put together an open letter to Senator the Hon Kim Carr, the Minister for Innovation, to request that software be excluded from patenting as part of the Australian governments review of patents in general.

We are currently collecting signatures to the letter and if you are in Australia and of a like mind we would really appreciate it if you would contribute your signature too! Just click on the link, read the letter and the form to sign it is at the bottom of the page. Please also pass this on to others you know who may be interested.

This item originally posted here:



Soliciting Australian Signatories to an Open Letter Against Software Patents to Minister Kim Carr

Wow it’s been a busy year for me travelling. A few days ago I was helping out on the Serval project in then Flinders Ranges, about 700km north of where I live in Adelaide. This got me thinking about the travel I have been lucky enough to do this year: New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, East Timor, and China. They were all great trips but this post is about some off beat places that I haven’t blogged about yet.

Mount Hua

A few weeks ago I was climbing Mount Hua in China (thanks to the generosity of Atcom). Some photos of Mount Hua including the infamous “plank walk” from the China trip below:

It’s not quite as scary as it looks. Not quite. The adventurous young lady in the picture is Grace, one of my good friends from Atcom. The rest of the walk was tough but worth it with many spectacular views. It’s a 2200m climb to the mountain peaks via some very steep stairs. In fact one stair after another for about 6 hours.

One interesting difference for me was all the people. When I have done similar mountain walks in Australia or the US there are very few people. On Mount Hua there were people everywhere, and little kiosks every 500m where you can buy hot food and cold drinks, and even hotels at the top of the mountain.

I can thoroughly recommend visiting China – the Xian area I visited was great. Xian has lots of wonderful history and was once the capital of China. Compared to Westerners the Chinese take a very long view of history – 1500 years is like yesterday for them as their culture has been continuous for thousands of years. I’m still absorbing exactly what that means to your outlook on the world – I live in a country that is just over 100 years old.

Squatter Life in Berlin

In March I visited Germany to attend Cebit. It was nice to meet some of you there! After Cebit I visited Elektra who lives in a squatter community in Berlin. This is a really different way of living and fascinating for me. Rather than buy or rent homes, they live in modified commercial trailers or trucks. These have been insulated and converted into small, comfortable homes. They use solar power for electricity and small amounts of gas or wood for heating. As it’s squatted land, they pay just the small capital cost (e.g. a few thousand Euro) for the homes, rather than rent or a large mortgage. People there come from all walks of life, and have jobs just as varied as people living in conventional homes. They use mesh Wifi for Internet access (indeed many Wifi developers like Elektra live in these communities).

In the first photo you can see Elektra working on her electric recumbent bike – I took this for a fun ride while in Berlin. It cruises happily at 30 km/hr with just a little it of peddling.

An Open Source Life

The “open source” life I have been living over the past few years has taken me on all sorts of adventures to wonderful places. I have met many great people and made some wonderful friendships. I can trace this all back to a decision in late 2005 to open source the hardware designs I was working on. I remember at the time thinking long and hard about this decision. But there is no way I would have had these travel experiences, met these people, or built great hardware and software had I stayed in a cubicle. Open source equals a good and fortunate life.

Ideally, if I was going to get a netbook, I’d want one no bigger than an A4 sheet of paper, so that I could carry it around with my other stuff – (ie 210 x 297 mm (8.27 x 11.7 inches)).  However, while there seem to be a lot of netbooks smaller (10.1″ = about 168mmx268mm total size) and larger (13″+ – 15.6″ seems particularly popular for some reason)  than this, there don’t seem to be many (if any) which are roughly an A4 size.  The 10.1″ model have a good 30mm of room in the long axis.  Only one (the comparatively expensive Acer Ferrari One is a reasonable fit to A4 with dimensions of 204mm x 285mm).  There were apparently a number of 12″ models from various manufacturers which were discontinued last year.

Ideas why?

Determined by pixel dimensions?

Microsoft’s licensing restrictions?

Use of letter format in the US?

Some weird ergonomic issue?

No one thought about it?

Bad sampling on my part?

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

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

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

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

First up, if you’re not sure how, Lifehacker has a great reference on where to find your userChrome.css file.

One of the things I love about Google Chrome is that it shows all the tabs at once – even if it has to get really squishy. By default, Firefox limits them to 100px wide, then starts scrolling. Since Firefox 2.0, you’ve been able to use browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to disable this. As of Firefox 4.0b2, however, this functionality has been moved to userChrome.css. Add the following CSS to your userChrome.css to make it act the same as Chrome:

.tabbrowser-tab[fadein]:not([pinned]) { min-width: 1px !important; }

Another great feature of Chrome is having the tabs in the title bar, as it reduces wasted space. Again, you can get the same functionality very easily with Firefox 4, by adding the following to your userChrome.css:

#appmenu-button-container { position: fixed !important; }   #appmenu-button { padding: 3px 18px 3px 18px !important; margin-left:3px !important; background-color: rgba(54, 121, 166, 0.2) !important; }   #navigator-toolbox[tabsontop="true"] #TabsToolbar { padding-left: 95px !important; }   #navigator-toolbox[tabsontop="true"] #TabsToolbar { padding-left: 105px !important; padding-right:110px !important; }   #main-menubar{ margin-left: 108px !important; }

Note that I’ve tweaked this for Windows 7 – you may need to alter the values for other platforms. Feel free to post your tweaks in the comments!

As a bonus, here’s a screenshot of these tweaks in action – lets play “guess which websites Gary has open”.

Josh Berkus gave a great talk at linux.conf.au 2010 (the CFP for linux.conf.au 2011 is open until August 7th) entitled “How to destroy your community” (lwn coverage). It was a simple, patented, 10 step program, finely homed over time to have maximum effect. Each step is simple and we can all name a dozen companies that have done at least three of them.

Simon Phipps this past week at OSCON talked about Open Source Continuity in practice – specifically mentioning some open source software projects that were at Sun but have since been abandoned by Oracle and different strategies you can put in place to ensure your software survives, and check lists for software you use to see if it will survive.

So what can you do to not destroy your community, but ensure you never get one to begin with?

Similar to destroying your community, you can just make it hard: “#1 is to make the project depend as much as possible on difficult tools.”

#1 A Contributor License Agreement and Copyright Assignment.

If you happen to be in the unfortunate situation of being employed, this means you get to talk to lawyers. While your employer may well have an excellent Open Source Contribution Policy that lets you hack on GPL software on nights and weekends without a problem – if you’re handing over all the rights to another company – there gets to be lawyer time.

Your 1hr of contribution has now just ballooned. You’re going to use up resources of your employer (hey, lawyers are not cheap), it’s going to suck up your work time talking to them, and if you can get away from this in under several hours over a few weeks, you’re doing amazingly well – especially if you work for a large company.

If you are the kind of person with strong moral convictions, this is a non-starter. It is completely valid to not want to waste your employers’ time and money for a weekend project.

People scratching their own itch, however small is how free software gets to be so awesome.

I think we got this almost right with OpenStack. If you compare the agreement to the Apache License, there’s so much common wording it ends up pretty much saying that you agree you are able to submit things to the project under the Apache license.  This (of course) makes the entire thing pretty redundant as if people are going to be dishonest about submitting things under the Apache licnese there’s no reason they’re not going to be dishonest and sign this too.

You could also never make it about people – just make it about your company.

#2 Make it all about the company, and never about the project

People are not going to show up, do free work for you to make your company big, huge and yourself rich.

People are self serving. They see software they want only a few patches away, they see software that serves their company only a few patches away. They see software that is an excellent starting point for something totally different.

I’m not sure why this is down at number three… it’s possibly the biggest one for danger signs that you’re going to destroy something that doesn’t even yet exist…

#3 Open Core

This pretty much automatically means that you’re not going to accept certain patches for reasons of increasing your own company’s short term profit. i.e. software is no longer judged on technical merits, but rather political ones.

There is enough politics in free software as it is, creating more is not a feature.

So when people ask me about how I think the OpenStack launch went, I really want people to know how amazing it can be to just not fuck it up to begin with. Initial damage is very, very hard to ever undo. The number of Open Source software projects originally coming out of a company that are long running, have a wide variety of contributors and survive the original company are much smaller than you think.

PostgreSQL has survived many companies coming and going around it, and is stronger than ever. MySQL only has a developer community around it almost in spite of the companies that have shepherded the project. With Drizzle I think we’ve been doing okay – I think we need to work on some things, but they’re more generic to teams of people working on software in general rather than anything to do with a company.

• Share this on Facebook
• Tweet This!
• Share this on del.icio.us
• Digg this!
• Post on Google Buzz

16:10: Mikal shared: Experts: Ansel Adams photos found at garage sale worth $200 million - CNN.com

I knew garage sailing to pay off.

17:52: Mikal shared: Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I am a teapot

20:34: Mikal shared: First Drive: 2011 Nissan Leaf doesn't change the game, just the players Autoblog

Want.

23:31: Mikal shared: Sniper Jesus

Sniper jesus

Tags for this post: blather Comment RSS with no blather