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One of the nice things about Linux is the ability to install apps (and dependencies) very easily using apt-get or similar. Windows users have been missing a similar tool for a long time. Never fear, the Scottish Alt.Net group have written Hornget, a tool for installing open source .NET projects.
Quite a few projects are supported, though most are of interest only to programmers. It would be nice to see a lot more user oriented tools like games and the like.
I find adding common tasks to the shell menu a great timesaver when I am running between stations. It is also easier to direct users to simply “right-click” on something rather than walk them through a maze of menus…or even have them find the “run” box.
You can also paste the following into Notepad and save it as: RightClickDefragment.reg or you can download the zipped RightClickDefragment.reg here. Double-click on the .reg file and click “yes” when asked to enter it into the registry.
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\runas]
@=”Defragment”
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\runas\command]
@=”defrag %1 -v”
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OpenShot Video Editor is a non-linear video editor. It is meant to be an easy-to-use, powerful, non-linear video editor, with a focus on user interface, work flow, and stability.
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Before I start, I just want you to know that I’m not whining, I just thought I’d give this as an example of some of the things that people who run small infrastructures are left out of…
Today I’m sitting in the office in NJ, doing work as normal. What I’d prefer to be doing is going to the IT Roadmap Conference & Expo in NYC. According to the website, it’s “designed for IT professionals who want to cover multiple industry topics in one day”. That sounds like something I’d be interested in!
Essentially, it’s a sales pitch, or a series of sales pitches. I don’t know if I’m in the market for what they’re selling, but I’d like to go find out what is being offered. All the same, I like to keep my eyes on the horizon, because things have a habit of coming up quick on us in IT, and if we don’t familiarize ourselves with the likely technology of the next few years, then we’ll be caught with our pants down. So I wanted to see what people were selling.
The conference is free. All you have to do is fill out the application for registration. Unfortunately, I don’t qualify:
Dear Matt,
Thank you for your interest in Network World Live’s IT Roadmap Conference & Expo in New York.
Unfortunately, after reviewing the information that you submitted, we determined that at this time, we are not able to confirm your seat on a complimentary basis.
As we noted on the registration form, this event is geared towards network and IT professionals in end-user type companies who actively purchase products and services – or – who will be doing so in the near future. We have a limited number of complimentary seats reserved for attendees who meet this criteria.
…
snip
…
Walk-ins or ineligible applicants arriving at the conference facility will NOT be admitted on the day of the event.
Thank you,IT Roadmap Team
Network World Events & Executive Forums
(emphasis theirs)
Well, I do actively purchase technologies and products, but not at the scale that they’re looking for, I suppose. I don’t have 50 data centers, or “20,000 or more” servers, so I don’t get to go to their party and look at the toys.
It’s unfortunate for them and me, but somehow I think I’ll live. I just wanted to give you a tangible example of…well…I won’t go so far as to say discrimination, but maybe exclusion, that we small admins deal with from vendors.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 10, 2010 02:22 PM
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 10, 2010 01:24 PM
I've finally finished recording part three of The Jungle Book, in which Mowgli hunts Shere Khan. Perhaps I'll get it edited some other morning this week.
Here's a preview - Mowgli's Song, That He Sang At The Council Rock When He Danced On Shere Khan's Hide
Listen HERE or subscribe to my podcast.
Now I'll have to find something else to record to keep the boy happy.
A ton of users are dissatisfied with the decision to change the buttons on the title bar, however, it’s incredibly easy to change back and forth between the old (Karmic) look, and the new (Lucid Alpha) look. You do not have to be on Lucid to test out the new look. These commands work fine on Karmic and (probably) older.
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Giggle is a graphical frontend for the git content tracker (think of gitk on GTK+).
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My appearance on OWASP Podcast 61 is available. 
by Richard Bejtlich (noreply@blogger.com) at March 10, 2010 10:01 AM
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 10, 2010 08:16 AM
Talking of Unix workstations, there's some mythology about them that seems to go around, or at least that may be going around and I feel like preemptively shooting down.
First, people who think that 1990s era Unix workstations were marvels of performance and features that have yet to be surpassed either have a very selective memory, were using very high end hardware from SGI, or never really used those workstations. I have used everything from Sun 3/50s onwards, and I can assure you that a modern PC that costs $500 smokes each and every one in terms of speed and features.
In fact, as I alluded to in passing in my original entry, old workstation hardware was actually rather terrible. It was not bad for the time (sometimes it was quite good), but it was not very good on an absolute scale and it was tolerable only because the software was equally limited so as not to exceed the hardware's capabilities. Let us not idolize the old days lest we be forced to live in them again, thanks.
The other piece of mythology is the idea that Unix workstation hardware was at least a marvel of niceness and good design compared to the hodgepodge and hacks of the current PC architecture. I am pretty sure that this was historically false; I certainly remember a whole stream of Usenix papers about what could basically be called 'the secret life of your hardware', where a number of kernel hackers wrote up bitter descriptions of exactly how bad various pieces of hardware were, such as Ethernet driver chipsets. Graphics were not exempt from this; for example, at the start of the 1990s, some DEC people wrote an entire paen about the advantages of an extremely simple framebuffer because its 2D performance beat the heck out of most of the then-current more complex graphics chipsets.
(Before you snort in disbelief at this, note that it was an 8-bit framebuffer. That was considered mainline or even advanced at the start of the 1990s, since at least you got 256 colours.)
I don't think that this should surprise anyone. People make design mistakes at the start of anything, because it takes time for them to figure what really works and what just looks good on paper, and the Unix workstation era happened in the early times of people making (commodity) chipsets for most of the hardware capabilities that we now take for granted.
(The less said about various workstation vendor predecessors to SCSI the better, especially in the server space. I still remember our early 1990s decision to pass over this new, low-performing 'SCSI' stuff in favour of an advanced, fast IPI disk interface on our new Sun 4 server. This being a university, that server stayed in production long enough for our laughter to become rather hollow.)
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 10, 2010 07:02 AM
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 10, 2010 05:00 AM
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 10, 2010 04:00 AM
Thomas Hühn has graciously translated the caching tutorial into German. Thanks!
See also the Chinese, Czech and French translations. To help the translators keep up with changes, I've started hosting the raw document on Github, which can also be used to log issues.
Task Coach is a simple open source todo manager to keep track of personal tasks and todo lists. It grew out of a frustration that most task managers do not provide facilities for composite tasks. Often, tasks and other things todo consist of several activities. Task Coach is designed to deal with composite tasks. In addition, it offers effort tracking, categories, and notes. Task Coach is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and iPhone and iPod Touch.
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Steve Berczuk has a lovely discussion of Manage Your Project Portfolio. You can see his review here.
One point twenty one jiggawatts! Yesterday (March 8, 2010) the OpenSSH project released version 5.4 and naturally will start hitting the various distributions and platforms soon, and again there are some great things to be interested in:
ssh -W smtp.server.example.org:25 my.ssh.server.example.org That has pretty much bags of possibilities, ranging from simple connection tests to piping a file to a remote server that you can't get to directly.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 09, 2010 07:09 PM
The best way to rethink things is to be in the shoes of your users. Use your app how they use your app. Try to take a fresh look at your application like you’ve never seen it before. Would you change the location of the menu/navigation? Would you change the actual menus/navigation? Would you add a shortcut search box where there wasn’t one before? Maybe you remove the advertising or move the place that the ads are located so that they are less intrusive…
The idea is that every so often you need to take a step back. Looking at your application from your users perspective may well change how your entire application works. I’m not saying this from a statistical analysis of the way people click and heatmaps and all that good stuff (though they do have their applications), I’m saying just a pure usability test from another perspective. Where do the new users look? Where do they click? What’s the first thing they want to go to? Are you putting them through information overload?
So take a step back, change shoes and take a fresh look at your app. No statistics, no heatmaps, no preconceived notions about the problem you are trying to solve (I know this is easier said than done). Just remember why you wrote your app in the first place. Try the passion on for size again and see if that doesn’t stir things up a bit.
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by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 09, 2010 09:57 AM
Lyricue is free and open-source application that is used to edit/display song lyrics and passages of text along with images and videos on a second screen/projector. It was designed for use at live events such as church services, concerts and seminars.
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UDAV is a cross-platform program for data array visualization based on the MathGL library. It supports a wide spectrum of graphics, simple script language, and visual data handling and editing. It has a windowed interface for data viewing, changing, and plotting. It can execute MGL scripts, set up and rotate graphics, export to bitmap or vector (EPS or SVG) files, draw TeX-like formulas, and so on.
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enum ordering mistakeenum ordering mistakeSuppose that you are creating an API in C and that you have a return
value that is just right for an enum; for example, it communicates
either 'all is okay' or some range of errors and exceptional conditions.
Here's how not to write this API:
typedef enum { ERROR_1, ERROR_2, ERROR_3, ALL_OK } error_t;
You don't want to do this, because sooner or later you're going to want
to add another error condition, ERROR_4, and the end result of
putting it after ALL_OK is going to look somewhere between ugly and
stupid.
The rule of thumb with enums and similar objects is that the fixed point goes at the start of the range. You are unlikely to have more than one 'all is fine' return code, so it is the fixed point and goes at the start.
The extra special way not to design this API is to do this and then
just put ERROR_4 where it belongs, ie before ALL_OK. If you
do this, any number of people will throttle you because you have just
destroyed binary compatibility by renumbering ALL_OK's actual value.
Worse, the broken binary compatibility may be subtle, depending on where
and how people use the enum, since only one value has shifted.
(Admittedly this is only an issue in C and similar compiled languages
that turn enums into actual integers behind the scenes. In other
languages, this confusion can't happen; either ALL_OK is silently
renumbered in all code that's using it or ALL_OK is purely a symbol
with no numeric value attached to it as such.)
You would think that people wouldn't do this. Sadly, I have just seen this mistake made in software from a major vendor, assuming that it was a mistake instead of a deliberate decision to subtly punish people who counted on binary compatibility when it wasn't documented.
(PS: if you want to punish these people, it is much more productive and direct to spectacularly break your ABI so that people can't help but notice. People are kind of slow to notice subtle problems and they may not even realize what's going on for some time.)
by Nikesh Jauhari (njauhari@cybage.com) at March 09, 2010 05:27 AM
If you were waiting to register until the complete schedule was revealed, get that credit card out!
LOPSA PICC last night published the final slate of papers and speakers (if you didn't get your accept/sorry email, please let us know). http://picconf.org now contains the complete schedule.
You can attend for as little as $249, or $99 for students. The training program is extra.
If you aren't sure how to ask your boss for permission, we have some advice.
Tom
Although this particular problem has been around for some time, I am surprised at how many times I am asked about the solution. Many programs use an HTML help system that requires Internet Explorer and ActiveX to run (CHM – Compiled HTML Help). After security updates 896358 and 890175, some HTML content outside of the “local machine” zone was disabled. This would affect many network based programs or programs that connect to an outside server for HELP files. When accessing the Help system, an error saying “Page Cannot Be Displayed” would show up. Luckily the fix is easy.
In Notepad, copy and paste the code you need and name it “htmlhelpfix.reg” Then double-click on the file and click “YES” when it asks if you want to enter it into the registry.
Enable Local Machine, Local Intranet and Trusted Site Zones to display ActiveX HTML Help. This is the most commonly referred to fix – this is probably the one you want. You can also download the zipped htmlhelpfix.reg file here.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000002
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000002
Enable Local Machine Zones to display ActiveX HTML Help. This is the default entry, you can use it to reset.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000000
Enable Local Machine and Local Intranet Zones to display ActiveX HTML Help.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000001
Enable Local Machine, Local Intranet, Trusted Site and Internet Zones to display ActiveX HTML Help.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000003
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000003
Enable Local Machine, Local Intranet, Trusted Site, Internet and Restricted Zones to display ActiveX HTML Help. NOT RECOMMENDED!
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000004
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000004
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I just noticed that my tenth edition of Traffic Talk, titled Pcapr.net -- where Web 2.0 meets network packet analysis, has been posted. From the article:
by Richard Bejtlich (noreply@blogger.com) at March 08, 2010 02:09 PM
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 08, 2010 01:41 PM
My wife and I picked up a couple of Droids yesterday. Her phone was broken and mine was up for the new in two. Since they are currently 2 for 1, we took the jump.
This is my first real smart phone. I like it so far. There are a ton of options. I can see why this platform as presented(the normal android interface), wouldn’t be ideal for every day users, and really pointed towards people who aren’t afraid to mess around with their phone.
I like the Gmail integration. The touch screen works better than I thought it would and I have no problems with the on screen keyboard. If I’m doing a bit more typing, I’ll slide the physical keyboard out. Wireless on a phone is great as I’m normally around a wireless AP when at work or at home. The 3G will work fine in between.
There are a couple of things that bug me a bit. Novell is still working on their sync tool for modern phone to replace the GroupWise Mobile server. Outside of the SMTP and IMAP combo, there’s no good way to get your GroupWise mail on the phone. The default GW8 webaccess interface doesn’t work with the default browser or the dolphin browser. You have to switch it to basic mode to open mail. Not that aesthetics are everything, but the basic mode in webaccess is just that, BASIC. For now, I’ll just be forwarding my Zenoss and other SMTP alerts to my gmail account.
I downloaded a task killer tool which I find myself using often. I’m not sure how much I really need to be using it, but to keep the battery from getting sucked down, I’m using it. That’s a bit annoying and takes me back to the old Mac operating system where you had to manage your RAM manually for each application. It’s not the end of the world, but I guess it’s the price you pay for multitasking.
by Jonathan Simon (noreply@blogger.com) at March 08, 2010 12:23 PM
Or as (ir)regular as they normally are. I really hope that you enjoyed the flashback week, and got something useful from it. I’m going to try to do it again next year on the first full week of March.
Now it’s just back to the daily grind for me. I’ve been rehashing some Nagios configuration and I’ve unearthed an ancient relic! How fun! Configuration archaeology is a hobby of mine, and to find a gem that hasn’t (as far as I can tell) been mentioned on the official site since 2002? That’s GREAT! I’ve still got to go through the source code to make sure that it doesn’t do anything interesting, but it’s out of my config now.
As it turns out, my recent attention to Nagios is multifaceted. I’m cleaning up the config and tightening up the alert rules, but also, I’m going to be giving a 45 minute talk at the Professional IT Community Conference in May. If you’re in the northeast US, you should definitely make it! And you should hurry and register while the early bird special is going!
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 08, 2010 10:58 AM
For more news, tips, and reviews on all things Linux, Open source and Free software, visit Linux Help blog.
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by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 08, 2010 08:25 AM
Python has two ways of signalling that a function has failed; you can raise an exception or return a special error value of some sort. I use both techniques in different circumstances; since I've recently been writing some Python code, I've been thinking about exactly what those circumstances are, as far as I can tell.
(Self-analysis is tricky given that I don't particularly think through the choice when I'm making it; I handle errors however seems right for the function I'm writing at the time.)
Generally, I tend to use error return values if I expect failure to be routine, especially if there is a natural return value that is easy for callers to use. For example, getting a list of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for a host; it's routine to look up nonexistent names (or at least names with no IP addresses), and returning an empty list is an easy return value for callers to use (since in many cases they will just iterate through the list of IPs anyways).
I use exceptions if I expect failure to be rare, especially if there is nothing that the direct caller of a function is going to do to handle the problem. If the only thing that I'll do on failure is abort the program with a pretty error message, there's no need to complicate all of the code between the program's main routine and the failing function with code to check for and immediately return the error. (The obvious exception is if there is cleanup work to be done on the way out, but I've come up with ways to handle that, similar to phase tracking.)
I'm pretty sure that I'd use exceptions even for common failures if they had to be handled by someone other than the function's direct caller; I don't like cluttering functions up with a bunch of 'if error: return error' code.
This view is not the common Python one. As we can see from the standard library, the Pythonic way uses exceptions a lot more often than I do.
(I'd argue that this is a sensible tradeoff for a library, too. The advantage of exceptions is that they are unambiguous signals of failures that you can't possibly confuse with valid return values, and they force people using your library to explicitly deal with errors.)
by Nikesh Jauhari (njauhari@cybage.com) at March 08, 2010 05:28 AM
A utility to multiplex ssh dynamic tunnels. Frequently, for instance when proxying a torrent client through a tunnel established with ssh -D, the tunnel will be swamped by traffic. sshsplit spawns multiple instances and distributes the load among them.
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Tom will be the Saturday opening keynote, plus he will be teaching his two most popular half-day classes: Time Management for System Administrators, and "Help! Everyone hates our IT department!". LOPSA NJ PICC is in New Brunswick, NJ, May 7-8, 2010. It is a regional conference, everyone is invited. For more information: http://picconf.org
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by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 07, 2010 07:32 PM
One of the common reactions to Oracle's potentially ambivalent attitude towards providing OpenSolaris support is that since OpenSolaris is open source, third parties can spring up to provide support for it even if Oracle doesn't. However, I'm fairly pessimistic about the chances of this; even if OpenSolaris itself becomes reasonably popular, I don't think that we'll ever see an OpenSolaris equivalent of Red Hat or Canonical.
There's two reasons for this. One of them is the difference between forking code and merely supporting it, which comes down to your ability to get your bugfixes accepted upstream. My impression to date is that in practice there are relatively few outside contributors to OpenSolaris and that it is hard to get changes accepted upstream. This pushes anyone attempting to do OpenSolaris support towards de facto forking OpenSolaris, which is expensive and thus makes you unprofitable.
(Some casual searching didn't turn up any information about the rate of outside contributions to OpenSolaris that's more recent than 2008, when the news wasn't good. Certainly the OpenSolaris repository shows very little signs of contributions from outside developers, and there is no sign that the practices described in 2008 have changed much. Note that pushing changes upstream is hard at the best of time; you can imagine how much worse this gets if the upstream is not really interested in the whole business of outside contributions, especially if something is going to require significant amounts of effort and time from upstream developers.)
The other reason is more subtle. In order to really support code, you must have good programmers who understand it. With Sun not really being very enthusiastic about outside contributions, there are not many people like that outside of Sun (or, well, outside of Sun before Oracle took over and people started leaving). In addition, your good OpenSolaris programmers are probably going to face the constant temptation of taking a job with Oracle where they can actually work directly on OpenSolaris; the better they are and the more passionate about OpenSolaris they are, the higher the temptation. The less expert your programmers are the less attractive your support is, since you can't diagnose and fix people's problems as fast or as well.
(And if you can find good expert OpenSolaris programmers right now it's pretty likely that they're quite passionate, given the obstacles to acquiring that expertise.)
A simple and easy to use batch renaming utility
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In my Predictions for 2008 I wrote:
by Richard Bejtlich (noreply@blogger.com) at March 06, 2010 10:28 PM
I've missed FAST 2010 yet again.... but, good news! The complete FAST 2010 Proceedings (PDF) are available for free. USENIX members can also view the presentation videos online.
Uninstaller for Adobe AIR is an easy solution for uninstalling Adobe AIR applications. When installing an AIR application it is possible to first save the installation program file (. air). This file will then allow to install but also to uninstall the application, provided that the AIR engine is installed and functional. If you install an AIR application from its source without saving its installation program file, or if the AIR engine is not available, uninstalling an AIR application can be difficult on a GNU/Linux system because it requires the use of system commands via a shell. Thanks to Uninstaller for Adobe AIR it becomes very easy to uninstall an AIR application since it suffices to choose it from a list of installed applications and click on an Uninstall button. Uninstaller for Adobe AIR is a free software under GPL version 3 license, designed to compatible with the GNU/Linux Ubuntu distribution and with the GNOME and KDE window managers.
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Imagine you're a martial arts student. One day you have a guest instructor, accompanied by some of his black belts. They're experts in so-called "pressure point fighting." You've heard a little of this system, whereby practitioners can knock out adversaries with a series of precise strikes that lack the power of a brute-force approach. Until today you've had no direct experience. You may be skeptical, or maybe you believe such techniques are possible. 
by Richard Bejtlich (noreply@blogger.com) at March 06, 2010 05:06 PM
The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Lucid Lynx Alpha 3 is the third alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04, bringing with it the earliest new features for the next version of Ubuntu.
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Pay attention at the back. Reductive Labs just announced Puppet training dates for London:
There are two courses available: Becoming a Puppet Master (3 days) covers Puppet and Puppetmaster configuration, classes, modules, definitions, resource types, the resource abstraction layer, virtual resources, exported resources, stored configs, metaparameters, dependencies, events, tags, environments, Puppet language patterns and best practices. There'll be a mix of teaching and interactive class exercises using your own laptop and virtual machines. It costs £1595 for the 3 day course.
If you're a seasoned old Puppet hand and you know all that stuff by heart, then the Puppet Developer course (2 days) is probably for you. You'll get an introduction to Ruby for Puppet, as well as learning how to craft your own custom resource types and providers, develop custom functions and Facter facts. In addition there's a segment on testing practices and RSpec for Puppet. The cost is £995 for two days.
Register for the training (get £100 off each course if you register before March 15th) or contact Scott Campbell to find out more. And don't forget to bring an apple for the teacher.
It lists computers and services on the local network (Avahi) and hardware connected to your computer (HAL). When you click a device, it tells you properties of the device and lets you perform common actions for that device. For example, an ftp share has a button to open in Nautilus, a webcam has a button to open in Cheese and an inline preview of the webcam.
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The March 2010 BSD Magazine includes an article I wrote titled Keeping FreeBSD Applications Up-to-Date. 
by Richard Bejtlich (noreply@blogger.com) at March 06, 2010 09:22 AM
by Nikesh Jauhari (njauhari@cybage.com) at March 06, 2010 06:27 AM
This is a followup to SupportingVsForking, where I talked about the difference between supporting some open source code and forking it being whether you could get your changes accepted upstream. One thing that is not widely understood is that getting bugfix changes accepted upstream is hard work at the best of times, with a cooperative upstream.
(We can see this from how many private changes to the Linux kernel each Linux distribution maintains.)
The problems are many. Often there is a conflict between the expedient way for you to fix a problem now and the 'right' way to fix the problem, which the upstream is going to argue for and which may require quite a lot of development (and arguing with developers); sometimes the upstream won't even know what the right way is, but they'll know that your way is the wrong way. In some cases, you and the upstream may disagree about whether there is a bug and (if there is a bug) where it exists and what exactly it is. Some times the upstream may accept that there is a bug but feel that fixing it is too disruptive at the current time.
(And all of this assumes that your proposed change is good code. Sometimes it isn't; the most common case in Linux is new hardware drivers, which often contain code that varies from the merely bad to the outright wretched. A distribution often needs to support the new stuff soon and didn't write the drivers; the upstream needs to have code that can be maintained over the long term by people other than its original authors.)
All of these translate to 'thanks but no thanks' for your bug fix or change, which means that you get to maintain more code for a while.
It's worth noting that accepting downstream changes is work for the upstream too. Many of these problems require an investment of time from upstream developers to read code, debate approaches, investigate problems, and so on, and the time of upstream developers is in limited supply. Plus, things like code reviews and arguing with people about whether something is the right approach or is actually a bug are not very rewarding or fun activities, which makes it harder to persuade developers to do them.
(All of this goes even more so if you are adding features or removing limitations instead of fixing bugs, because those raise much larger questions of whether they should be done at all and if your approach is the right approach.)
Well the latest MacHeist bundle has been released, and for $19.95 you get 5 (and up to 7 if enough people buy the package) useful apps.
The apps included in this bundle are: MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout and Flow. Assuming the bundle reaches it’s “goal” (usually does) – you’ll also get a copy of Tales of Monkey Island and RapidWeaver. To sweeten the deal, you can also get 3 additional apps – Airburst Extreme, Tracks and Burning Monkey Solitaire if you ‘tweet’ about the bundle.
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kstat -p output works fine, but requires some changes so that you step through the data rather than continuously updating in time. (If you think about it for a moment, the class I mentioned above is one example of updating the time and then telling the world to update, so it's - albeit only tangentially - related.) These changes are likely to be a bit complex, so I also decided to cut a version before starting to make more significant changes to the code.
by Peter Tribble (noreply@blogger.com) at March 05, 2010 10:24 PM
Highlights from Planet Network Management for Week 9.
The research by the information visualization community show clearly that using a visual representation of data-sets enables faster analysis by the end users. Tulip, created by David AUBER, is a contribution of the area of information visualization, “InfoViz”. Even if the Tulip framework enables the visualization, the drawing and the edition of small graphs, all the parts of the framework have been built in order to be able to visualize graphs having to 1.000.000 elements. A visualization system must draw and display huge graphs, enables to navigate through geometric operations as well as extracts subgraphs of the data and allows to change the representation of the results obtained by filtering.
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The resolution in Congress branding the 1915 killing of Armenians as "genocide" has me very irritated with those turkeys in Congress. Our national attitude that we are the arbitrators of Good and Evil in the world would be comic if it wasn't so horribly hypocritical.
If Japan were to pass a resolution condemning Hiroshima as genocide, or Germany to condemn Dresden as genocide, or India to condemn the Jallianwala Bagh massacre as genocide (look that one up, kiddies!) there would be an immediate response, a breaking of political relations, and we'd probably do something absurd like call frankfurters "freedom sausages"
Presumably, to the folks in Congress, this is about Speaking The Truth, and that's the extent of it. For the folks at Boeing who will lose Turkey's contract, and for our young men and women in Iraq who will no longer have the support of Turkish soldiers, it's not about Making A Statement, and Sending A Message.
Something that I appreciate about President Obama is the way that he respects the sovereignty of other nations and treats them (well, mostly) as though they were equals. This resolution undermines that, and calls Turkey a small child that needs to be scolded. Our posture as the Great White Father is no longer convincing (if it ever was) and merely shows us up as ignorant, self-focused, and arrogant.
Furthermore, it was 95 years ago, and done under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, which was overthrown in 1923. That is, the Turkish people have *already* determined, as a nation, that the Ottomans were the Bad Guys, and tossed them out. What do we hope to accomplish that they haven't already done?
You are probably a human. At least, the statistical odds are in your favor. As a human, you experience stress, and how you react to it plays a large part in determining how happy you are. System administrators deal with stress particularly poorly, in general. We assume the role of hero and that’s that. Do what it takes, bask in whatever glory accompanies the successful completion of our task.
There is no downtime in that equation. Immediately following those emergencies, most of us drink depressants to bring ourselves down. On normal days, we require morning stimulants to bring ourselves up. I highly suspect that some of us are so called “adrenaline junkies” from the relative high that we get when there’s an immediate problem that no one can solve but ourselves.
This is unhealthy.
What we really need is to be able to step back and look at the pattern in our lives and say I don’t want to live with this stress.
When it first hit me that stress is probably the biggest single microproblem for admins, I wrote the following. I hope you find it relevant.
As sysadmins, we’re nearly always the go-to person for whatever happens. After a while, we start to get used to it, and lots of times, we can develop a hero complex, carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders, at least in our minds. This isn’t healthy for a lot of reasons, the most important of which is your health.
Here’s an example of what taking your job too seriously can do to you:
Not to ruin the ending, but the most disgusting part is that, while the guy was taking medical leave, his company fired him. To be completely honest, he’s much better off without a company like that, and if your company would do the same thing, then so are you.
To quote Peter Gibbons, “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth. We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day…”
Even one of the most preeminent Systems Administrators around, Tom Limoncelli advocates leaving the pressure at work when you head home. For those of us on call 24/7/365, that can be a little hard, but it’s important to try.
Finestly
Yin and Yang - Dark and Bright … My idea is that many peoples loves dark- or bright-themes … or they like to switch sometimes, depending the wallpaper they use. The Theme is adjusted to the Humanity-Icons and pointed to be a simple EyeCandy-theme. The used engine is murrine.
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FBReader is an e-book reader for various platforms. Currently FBReader works on
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Some time back we have posted about Deconstructing Nautilus and rebuilding it better and now you can see small video on this
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My entry about the end of Sun was posted on Hacker News and garnered a comment thread. In two comments that I'm condensing and excerpting here, HN user rbanffy wrote (in context):
There is a huge difference between a glorified PC and a Unix workstation.
[...]
Unix workstations were built to run Unix. A Mac pro is essentially a PC. [...]
The difference looks subtle now, when every desktop computer is essentially the same. For those who lived through this, like the writer of the original article, it was blatantly obvious.
Since my name is being invoked, I am going to speak up: I reject this view. A Unix workstation is no more and no less than a machine, dedicated to a single user, that runs Unix with a graphical environment. The idea that PCs cannot be Unix workstations is the same kind of elitism and mythology that people deride in Lisp fanatics, and it is clearly wrong. To argue otherwise is to use a very selective reading of the history of Unix workstations, one that ends the moment that Unix workstation companies started making products using PC components and PC companies started making 'Unix workstation' grade components usable on PCs.
It is also to use a selective reading of the history of the marketing of Unix workstations. Very few Unix workstations were sold as ultra high performance machines; most were sold as 'fast enough and cheap enough', and quite often this was not very fast and as cheap as possible to run Unix. In fact, at the height of the Unix workstation era you could routinely find workstations without floating point hardware.
Yes, the Unix workstations generally worked with less sweat and effort. This was for the same reason that Apple Macs just work, namely that the workstation vendor controlled both hardware and software and so could closely integrate them.
Yes, Unix workstations originally had better performance than PCs. This was because PC performance was terrible, in fact all performance was terrible, and people had to pay extra for the ability to run Unix at (marginally) acceptable speeds. Both parts changed over time; by the end of the era of dedicated Unix workstations, they were worse than PCs for the same (or more) cost (cf). One major reason that the march of the cheap slaughtered the dedicated Unix workstation vendors was that PCs got good enough to be good Unix workstations.
(Unix vendors could still build $10,000 machines that performed better, but it turned out that people by and large didn't need and weren't interested in that much performance; once they could get what they wanted and needed for less than $10,000, they stopped paying $10,000 for machines. Late-period Unix workstation vendor marketing tried desperately to persuade people that they really did need that performance, for obvious reasons.)
by Nikesh Jauhari (njauhari@cybage.com) at March 05, 2010 05:27 AM
Moore's Law, Disk Law, and Fiber Law have created an economic engine for growth, promising exponentially improving computing, storage, and networking performance for the foreseeable future. And yet according to a 2003 UNCTAD report, "there has been no Moore's Law for software," and indeed it is because of software that computer systems have become more expensive, more complex, and less reliable.
Previously, I had been pushing pings to blo.gs, blogrolling, technorati, and weblogs. I removed all of these, and added pubsubhubbub.appspot.com. This involved two steps.
Adding the following to my feed:
<link rel="hub" href="http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/"/>
And, adding the following to my publishing flow (based on pubsubhubbub_publish.py):
#!/usr/bin/python
import urllib, urllib2
hub = 'http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/'
feed = 'http://intertwingly.net/blog/index.atom'
try:
data = urllib.urlencode((('hub.mode','publish'), ('hub.url',feed)))
response = urllib2.urlopen(hub, data)
except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
if not hasattr(e, 'code') or e.code != 204: raiseJono Bacon, Alan Pope, and many others have written, yesterday we published a new visual story and style for Ubuntu. The core design work was lead by Marcus Haslam, Otto Greenslade and Dominic Edmunds, who are the three visual artists leading our efforts in the Canonical Design team. Once we had the base ideas in place we invited some anchor members of the Ubuntu Art community to a design sprint, to test that the concept had the legs to work with the full range of forums, websites, derivatives and other pieces of this huge and wonderful project. And apparently, it does!
Here are some additional thoughts.
Embracing both Ubuntu and Canonical
One of the real challenges for us has been to find a branding and design strategy which spans the spectrum of audiences, forums and dialogues that we cover. With Ubuntu, it’s my specific dream to find a constructive blend of commercial and community interests, not only for Canonical but for other companies. That has made our design and branding work difficult – the distinctive look of Ubuntu lent itself well to pure community messaging, but it was hard to do a brochure for Canonical data center services for Ubuntu on servers. We have not only Ubuntu, but also Kubuntu and an important range of derivatives that all have a role in our ecosystem.
So we spent a lot of time trying to distill the requirements down into a set of three dimensions:
We found a set of ideas which each represent those spectrums, and which work together.
For example, we identified a palette which includes both a fresh, lively Orange, and a rich, mature Aubergine, which work together. The use of Aubergine indicates Commercial involvement of one form or another, while Orange is a signal of community engagement. The Forums will use the Orange elements more strongly, and a formal product brochure, with descriptions of supporting services, would use more of the Aubergine.
On the consumer/enterprise spectrum, we took inspiration from the aerospace industry, and identified a texture of closely spaced dots. When you see more of that, it means we’re signalling that the story is more about the enterprise, less of that, and it’s more about the consumer. Of course, there are cross-overs, for example when we are talking about the corporate desktop, where we’ll use that closely space dot texture as a boundary area, or separator. We also identified shades of Aubergine that are more consumer, or more enterprise – the darker shades mapping to a stronger emphasis on enterprise work.
And on the end-user / engineer spectrum, we took inspiration from graph paper and engineering blue prints. When you see widely spaced patterns of dots, or outline images and figures, that’s signalling that the content is more engineering-oriented than end-user oriented.
And finally, we found a number of themes which enhanced and echoed those ideas. We use a warm gray supporting colour to give shape to pages and documents, and we built on the dots and circles to create a whole style for figures, illustrations and pictograms.
The beauty of this is that we can now publish content that spans the full range, and we generally know when we start the design process what sorts of visual cues we want to be signalling. Instead of having these different mental domains fight with one another, we can now convey quite subtle collaboration between community and corporate, or work which is aimed at engineers and developers from enterprises as opposed to developers working with consumers. Time will tell how it shapes up, but for now I’m celebrating the milestone and the efforts of the team that pulled it together. There’s something there for everyone who wants to participate in the great hubbub of Ubuntuness that is our shared experience of free software.
So, for example, here’s a conference banner. The strong use of Aubergine suggests that it’s more corporate messaging (Canonical is heavily involved). Orange is used here more as a highlight. The Aubergine is darker, and there’s quite a lot of the fine dot pattern. Below the image is a set of scales showing where on those spectra this work is pitched.
As another example, here’s a brochure with an emphasis on end-users who are thinking about adopting Ubuntu’s cloud infrastructure. Again, the fine dot patterns suggests a more enterprise focus, as does the use of the dark aubergine. You can see the circle metaphor used in the quote callout.
And here’s a similar brochure, but with a more developer or engineering oriented focus: note the use of the graph-paper theme with wide spaced dots, and outline shapes.
Finally, here’s an example of a brochure and CD cover for Ubuntu:
As you can see the idea is to signal a mix of both community and Canonical involvement in the message, addressing consumer audiences with a mix of developers and end-users.
A new Ubuntu font
We have commissioned a new font to be developed both for the logo’s of Ubuntu and Canonical, and for use in the interface. The font will be called Ubuntu, and will be a modern humanist font that is optimised for screen legibility. It will be published under an open font license, and considered part of the trade dress of Ubuntu, which will limit its relevance for software interfaces outside of Ubuntu but leave it free for use across the web and in printed documents.
It will take a few months for the font to be finalised, initial elements will be final in the next week which will be sufficient for the logo and other bits and pieces, but I expect to see that font widely used in 10.10. The work has been commissioned from world-renowned fontographers Dalton Maag, who have expressed excitement at the opportunity to publish an open font and also a font that they know will be used daily by millions of people.
Initial coverage will be Western, Arabic, Hebrew and Cyrillic character sets, but over time we may be able to extend that to being a full Unicode font, with great kerning and hinting for print and screen usage globally. We are considering an internship program, to support aspiring fontographers from all corners of the world to visit London and work with Dalton Maag to extend the font to their own regional glyph set.
The critical test of the font is screen efficiency and legibility, and its character and personality are secondary to its fitness for that purpose. Nevertheless, our hope is that the font has a look that is elegant and expresses the full set of values for both Canonical and Ubuntu: adroitness, accountability, precision, reliability, freedom and collaboration. We’ll publish more as soon as we have it.
A good start
It’s been an exciting process, but I have the sense that we are just getting started. The language will get richer, we will find new things that we want to communicate, and new treatments and visual themes that resonate well with these starting points. We’ll find new ways to integrate this on the web, and on the desktop (look out for the two new themes, Radiance and Ambiance). I hope we’ll see the language being used to good effect across everything we do, both commercial and community oriented. There’s a range of expression here that should be useful to artists across the spectrum. Let me know how it works for you.
New wallpaper for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) was revealed
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Black Hat was kind enough to invite me back to teach multiple sessions of my 2-day course this year. 
by Richard Bejtlich (noreply@blogger.com) at March 04, 2010 05:49 PM
I'm happy to report that I will present Building a Fortune 5 CIRT Under Fire at FIRST 2010 on 16 Jun 10 in Miami, FL. I plan to attend the majority of the conference, since it is one of the few focused on incident detection and response. I hope to see you there!
by Richard Bejtlich (noreply@blogger.com) at March 04, 2010 05:16 PM
wineasio provides an ASIO to JACK driver for WINE. ASIO is the most common Windows low-latency driver, so is commonly used in audio workstation programs. (Wine’s built-in JACK transport isn’t a Windows ASIO driver.)
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What's the biggest problem facing system administrators? Is it the vendors? The managers? The tools? Is it us? (nah, it couldn't be us! Must be the tools). Scaling? The inconsistant syntax of Perl? It probably isn't any one thing.
I will be facilitating group discussion. Hopefully we'll learn something about our technology and ourselves.
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I gave a number of talks this spring on jQuery and especially on some of the recent additions made in jQuery 1.4. Below are all the slides and demos that I've given.
The conferences / meetups that I spoke at (or will speak at, in the case of MIX), and the talks that I gave, are as follows:
This workshop starts with an introduction to the fundamentals of jQuery (1 hour) and continues on with two pieces of hands-on coding (Todo list, 30 min, Social Networking Site, 1.5 hours).
In the workshop I also had two pieces of hands-on coding. The first was an ajax-y todo list the second was converting a functional social networking site into a one page application (making significant use of jQuery UI).
A variety of things that people don't know about in jQuery - including new things added in jQuery 1.4 (and newer), data bindings, custom events, and special events.
For the first jQuery Boston Meetup I built a game using the avatars of everyone in attendance. Sort of a space shooter style game you need to kick and kill the advancing hordes of users. I used this game as a way of demonstrating constructing an application that makes use of custom events, data binding, and building applications in an event-centric manner.
A different restructuring of the previous talk that emphasizes a more holistic approach to improving your web applications with jQuery
I've been messing around with a new piece of presentation software that I wrote for these talks. It's still terribly crude and buggy (pretty much just got it working enough in order to run my talks in Firefox 3.6 and Chrome) - you've been warned. I hope to refine it at some point and release it for general consumption.
When you are using a framework, they typically set your VARCHAR size automatically to 255. This is normally fine since you are letting the framework abstract you away from most of the SQL. But if you interact with your SQL, there is a way to get a decent speed increase on your SELECTs and ORDER BYs when you are working with VARCHARs.
The VARCHAR data type is only variable character size for storage, not for sorting and buffering. In fact, since the MySQL optimizer doesn’t know how big the data in that column can be, it has to allocate the maximum size possible for that column. So for sorting and buffering of the name and email columns below would take up 310 bytes per row.
To fix that you should alter the size of your columns. Imagine having the optimizer have to go through an additional 310 bytes for every row. If there are 500k rows in the table time 310 bytes for each row, that can add up in the amount of memory that the optimizer has to use to perform the sorting/buffering.
Consider the following table of businesses:
You can change the name to column sizes to 75 (name), 50 (email), and 100 (url). But realistically you don’t want to chance things getting cut off, so it may be better off to settle on each column here being a VARCHAR(100). Even that would save drastically on the space required to perform a sort and buffer the results.
No related posts.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at March 04, 2010 11:30 AM
Klavaro is a simple tutor to teach correct typing, almost independently of language and very flexible regarding to new or unknown keyboard layouts.
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by Nikesh Jauhari (njauhari@cybage.com) at March 04, 2010 07:27 AM
I've previously written about how we use a different source IP address when forwarding spam-tagged email than when forwarding other email, so that users who forward all their email can still get some of it. If you do this, it turns out that you really want to use an entire separate machine for this, not just an IP alias on your main mail machine.
(We used a relatively small virtual machine for the purpose, rather than dedicating physical hardware to the job. If you really wanted to, I suppose you could run two instances of the MTA on the same physical machine.)
The problem that pushed us into doing this was queueing and retries. As you might expect, it turns out that spam email gets delayed in very different ways than regular email. Thus, if you send both regular email and spam-tagged email from the same machine you effectively have two mostly separate retry queues, with quite different characteristics, except that your mailer doesn't know this and you probably can't teach it about the real situation. Things get confused from there, in a couple of ways.
First, it makes monitoring and management harder unless you write fairly intricate custom tools; if your mail server has an unusual backlog, is that a real problem or is it just another site that's decided to stop accepting forwarded spam? If it is, can you easily tell which new site has decided to choke on your spam email?
Second, retries for the two different sorts of email get tangled together, both for actual retry times and for writing rules. Most MTAs try to notice when hosts or addresses aren't working and not pointlessly try delivering every piece of email to them only to have it stall. This works when all of the messages for one domain or user run into the same sort of delays, but spam email and regular email can be very different; it's routine for spam to stall when regular email gets through. Since your MTA can't tell the two apart, it's likely to get very confused about what it should do, whether it should back off on delivery attempts, and so on. Equally, you may want to have different retry timings and timeout periods and so on for spam email than for regular mail, but your MTA's retry rules probably can't tell them apart.
(Even when everything was on one machine we were able to make spam email get deleted from our MTA queue faster than the normal timeouts, which is very important for Exim-specific reasons.)
All of these issues went away when we moved spam email to a separate machine and thus a separate queue and mailer configuration. Monitoring became much easier and simpler, the MTA's retry handling was once again sensible, and we could apply different (and slower) retry timings to spam email.
Your separate spam forwarding machine does not need to be very big and fast, since spam forwarding is not a very important job (at least in my opinion) and delivery of such email is not likely to be very rapid in the first place.
In some ways, life would be simpler if you could tell your MTA to put spam email into a separate queue from regular mail (and then keep separate retry information for it, apply separate retry rules, and so on), but I don't know of any current MTA that allows things like that. I may be out of touch with the features of non-Exim mailers here.
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