Planet #BitFolk

Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror): PET 2008

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:28:55 +0000

Mike and I spent an evening in Amsterdam, slept all day and then drove with Alex to Leuven for PET. I'm giving an invited talk on Friday, I'll probably also give a rump session or two.

Simon Watson (swat): Exercise!

noreply@blogger.com (swat) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:03:35 +0000

I recently found thanks to Lifehacker, onehundredpushups.com. This involves doing a fitness test on the number of pressups you can do at point 0 (now), and then suggests a program to build this up to 100 pressups over a number of weeks.

I have recently been using the gym and running a lot, as preparation for my next half marathon in Bristol.

My question is - for anyone out there with half a clue about these things, how should I combine these things? Currently I alternate running, and gym work daily. Should I try doing these pressups on a running day, or on a gym work day?

Martin Meredith (Mez): LugRadio Live - The Review

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:40:19 +0000

So, this weekend just gone was the weekend of LugRadio Live. Here’s how it went for me. Friday morning, I got up, finished packing my stuff into my suitcase and headed off to the airport to go and pick up Myrtti. After missing a couple of buses, eventually got there, just in time to meet her as she was coming out of Arrivals.

We then headed off to Wolverhampton, with Myrtti being amazed by English houses (don’t ask me - I don’t know either) arriving in Wolverhampton 20 minutes before we could check into the hotel. So we went for food. Well, actually, I went for food, and Myrtti came with me. Moon Under Water has nice food, as do most Wetherspoons.

Anyway, from there on, Myrtti and I went and checked into the hotel, and then had a bit of a chat (and checked on the CaveyCam) while waiting for the evening events to kick off.

The evening events… god. well… I don’t remember a lot of it. I remember coming in, sitting down, and sitting down with Daviey, ompaul, and a couple of other people (I can’t remember who!) and well - the night went on from there.

Left the Evening Events @ around midnight, and walked back with ompaul and Myrtti to the hotel. Couldn’t sleep, as there was a dry-riser next to my room, so at 4am, I gave up, and registered on flickr, uploading the photos from the night that I’d taken.

Then, at 6am, I went hunting for breakfast, had a little walk round Wolverhampton, and found that Spar had food, so bought a couple of sausage sandwiches from there (and a couple of cans of Relentless). Went back to the hotel room, answered the wake up call, and headed to the venue just before 7.

I was the second person there after Chris (Proctor) - am proud of that, and spent the morning setting up all those lovely banners that you people saw (and chasing after some that had gone missing).

Did anyone notice that the can of relentless I’d thrown in the bin had been used to help stick up the Main Stage schedule poster? No? Good… twas amusing though.

Thanks to Mrs Ron for providing the Bacon Sarnies though

Anyways, sat down and started to film the intro, then moved onto the first talk in the Atrium (I signed up for the morning sessions on crew - why oh why?). I had to try and keep myself from falling asleep due to no sleep in the first one, but towards the end, the caffeine kicked in, and I started to wake up.

Next up was Bruuuuunnoooooo’s talk… it was “tres amusant” … I enjoyed watching it, and am glad that the audio isn’t coming from the camera, or all you’d have heard was my laughing.

After that, It was lunch. Woo. Headed off to the Moon Under Water for what was meant to be an SBLUG gathering, but, couldn’t find them in the packed pub, so ended up sitting with Barbie and JJ and chatting to them while we had food.

Came back and scoped out the Exhibitors for a bit (and yes, played some TF2) before going to watch the gong-a-thong… mrben… raccoon pants… I won’t say anymore, or my mind will explode. Though I must say, I did love Matthew Garrett’s talk on how he hates the community.

After that, I went back and gamed for a bit, before heading to the Live and Unleashed recording. Found Myrtti again there, and gave her a bit of a shoulder rub while watching it (and laughing my ass off too!)

So. There brought an end to Day 1… except, it wasn’t over. By this time, I was feeling pretty crap… no sleep. So went and packed up, then headed back to the hotel, slept for a bit, then headed to Karaoke.

I didn’t stay long, and was on the soft drinks all night, but managed to fit in a rendition of “Summer Nights” - I do a mean Olivia Newton John. I’m kind of dissapointed that the guy I was singing it with (my Ex Boss) didn’t know the words, but I’ve had a promise from froodie that next year she’ll do the John Travolta, and I can do the Olivia Newton John. Speaking of froodie - great rendition of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” - I was singing along in the back of the venue (and drawing funny looks by air-drumming/air-guitaring)

Sunday morning. I was still tired, but due to exhaustion - I’d actually managed to sleep. Though - I think the fact that the following comment was made in IRC means that I didn’t look as fresh-faced as I’d have like to believe I was.

<+ompaul> Mez, on sunday you looked like someone had eaten enough of your brain not to kill you but to stop you from understanding there was sunday

So yeah. Once again, set up at a ridiculously early time (this time 8am though) - I managed to be one of the people on the Coffee Run to Starbucks, so that worked well for me. I didn’t have to do much.

Started off the morning upstairs in the Lightning talk room, watching Barbies talk (and getting told off for raising my hand to answer his questions). Was still a good talk the second time round. And some of the stuff I forgot the first time, I’ve now seen again. I must apologise to Barbie for laughing to myself towards the end of the talk though. When you have a crew radio on, and you can hear Jono telling everyone he’s in the toilet with a speaker, you can’t help but laugh (I so wish that the LCD display in the atrium was something we could send messages to - I would have sent “FlashHug Jono now - he’s in the loo!”)

Next was Agostino Russo’s talk about Wubi - which was quite interesting. I’ve not actually used wubi myself, but to see it working in situ, and to hear about the geekyness behind it was actually quite cool.

Lunchtime again, where I spent outside eating sandwhiches and munch provided by MrsRon again, before I came back in, scoped the exhibitors again, and generally mingled talking with people until it was time for Chris Jones’ (Ng) talk about terminator.

Next was the goodbyes… Sad to see them go - but - they WILL be back next year! (YAY!). Sad to see the podcast end, but it was a good ending to a good weekend.

Then we packed up, and found out that the bar we’d arranged to goto afterwards… was closed…. FAIL. Got it sorted out in the end, and after food, ended up at the Novotel bar, where there were quite a few people. Twas good talking to people there, a nice friendly relaxed atmosphere, and a nicely stocked bar. I must say though - I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in a long time than I did with standing outside smoking with Xalior, Daviey and a few others (failhat!). Xalior is an extremely funny guy.

Anyways, from there, it was time to head home, after another night in the hotel, and taking Myrtti on a whirlwind tour of Birmingham’s Music Stores

To me, it’ll be a weekend to remember. There were a lot of firsts for me, and a lot of fun.

I must say though, thumbs up to Tony Whitmore and Ron Wellsted for doing an amazing job at organising everything this year. And to all the rest of the crew who made everything run so smoothly (and Tig for the trousers! and barely leaving the sound desk!)

Tony Whitmore (tonytiger): Mixing a podcast in Ardour

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:01:05 +0000

Don’t worry, I’ll blog about LUG Radio Live as soon as I’ve recovered enough to do so. It was brilliant though. Now, on to business.

One of the things we’ve been trying to do with the Ubuntu UK Podcast is make it a collaborative effort. Both in terms of where the content comes from (the UK Ubuntu and Linux community, not just four presenters) and how the podcast is produced. For the first few shows I ran the mixing desk, edited the segments and mixed the show, but this was never the long term plan. More recently, Ciemon and Alan have both been editing away on segments, meaning that I don’t have to spend the equivalent of two days editing the podcast segments for each episode. The next step was to get other people mixing the show for release.* This involves inserting the music, fading, adding filters and generally trying to iron out the bumps which cause us to get so many e-mails in the first few releases.

This process is basically impossible to describe over a medium like IRC. We had talked about having some tutorial sessions after a recording session, but frankly at the end of a recording sessions we are all just about ready to collapse and it never happened. So I took a leaf out of Alan’s book and created some screencasts of how I mix the podcast. It was pretty easy to do, technically and Alan persuaded me to let him put them online for public consumption. Now, these screencasts were designed for internal consumption only, so I wasn’t worrying too much about fluidity and energy in the commentary. However, with that caveat stated, you can get the first part (of thirteen) of Mixing A Podcast In Ardour.

* Actually, I plan to do screencasts of the editing process too, it’s just that it’s a bit easier to play around and find out what works with editing than it is for mixing.

Robert Leverington (RobertL): So I have a break? Yeah right.

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:30:43 +0000

Yesterday marked the first day of the summer holidays. For quite a while I’ve been looking forward to them, while I used to enjoy school recently I’ve become highly demotivated and really wanted out (unfortunately that won’t be possible for another three years since there is really nowhere else to go other than sixth form); lessons are boring and slow, rules are enforced depending on how the teachers feel, and I’m seriously lacking any friends there - right now I just wish it could all be over and I could start working. The summer should be a break, where I can do what I like and stop worrying about homework for once; but, alas, this is not the case. Our English teacher is making us complete a piece of coursework and told us to e-mail it to her this Friday, one will also have to purchase and read To Kill a Mockingbird - also for English - and I have a tremendous amount of product design coursework to do because; via a majority decision between the product design teachers (our teacher disagreed, but the other two wanted to), the deadline was moved forward approximately five months meaning that a lot of the work will have to be done in my spare time. I never wanted to do product design anyway, I wanted to do electronics - but the system was confusing and all of the technology subjects were bundled into one “Product Design” class. Another factor is that I could probably spend all summer doing the product design, yet it will never be finished without teacher input, so another thing will be in the back of my mind.

I have plenty of other stuff to occupy myself with though, I’m working on a new computer program for password encryption and am going to Scotland and Ireland. So it’ll be fun, at least. Yesterday I and a couple of friends went up the hills near where we live and took some photographs (I’m trying to collect some photographs to use on my blog as a wallpaper), but only six were any good; I’ll need some more before being able to do it I suppose.

pidgin bloggg (taras): :|

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:43:57 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKPBtZ0Zzok

Gary Smith: Three letter domains and dead mans shoes

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:20:53 +0000

I've been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to get my domain portfolio (both my personal one and that used by my employers) all into one place, as they were spread across a mish mash of registrars and pointing at various different name servers and whatnot.

One thing that struck me whilst I was doing this is the scarcity now of three letter domains (and, indeed, "good" domains) under the most well known TLDs (.com, .net and .org) as well as, to some extent, .co.uk. Whilst a quick Google revealed no hard numbers, I'd suspect that the last of the three letter domains under .com were hoovered up some years ago by Domainers (those who purposefully register domains purely to resell them at a profit). Of those remaining, there's obviously a split between business, and personal users.

The only ways in which these domains might come back into circulation are someone forgetting to renew; a business going under; in the case of a domain registered by a person, that person dying.

This is what I'd been thinking about. In the case of the last two, we've been aware for a while now of the value of three letter domains, so, in the future are we likely to see these domains valued by administrators when a company goes under? What about the Government (in the UK) for inheritance tax reasons? Who would decide these values? With a house, it's relatively easy to do. But with a domain, surely the value is much more difficult to calculate.

Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror): HOPE

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:58:14 +0000

We've released the source code for the research utilities used in the Cold Boot Attacks. Slashdot, CNet and Boing Boing picked up the story. We're also up for a pwnie. There's no way that our research will win over Dowd's bug and full paper.

Robert Leverington (RobertL): I Heart Upgrades

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 19:25:12 +0000

So I just upgraded Wordpress to the latest version (as kindly prompted to do by my administration panel) and decided that this would be a good opportunity to talk about my experience with Wordpress and having a blog in general over the three months I’ve been posting for.

Contrary to my original thoughts it has not been difficult to find topics to write about, almost every single day I have something that I want to talk about - of course this isn’t always translated into posts. I haven’t got very much feedback, although it is difficult to judge my readership as it stands - aside from the one or two people who I personally know that subscribe. In fact the most difficult part of having a blog has been developing a theme, currently it is rather bland, and although I’m trying to design an improved one this isn’t exactly going to plan; design creativity isn’t my forte, apparently. I’d like to start taking photographs to brighten up my blog, need a decent camera first though.

Wordpress itself is a dream to work with, the dashboard is elegant and smooth, and behind the scenes it is easy to develop themes with. While there are still many features that would be great to have, it’s awesome as it stands (I’d love to develop some stuff for it, but learning another codebase is something I don’t have much time or will power for at the moment).

I also recently purchased a VPS and have been using it quite a lot in an effort to centralize my SSH and SFTP sessions and allow me to connect to an environment I am used to and can work with from nearly anywhere. Since I have full control over it I’ve been able to connect to it from school after configuring it to run the OpenSSH daemon on port 443 rather than the conventional 22; this also makes it more secure, of course. While I am currently using sshfs with FUSE so that I can access files across systems from a single filesystem it does have disadvantages and it occasionally refuses to delete certain files.

Another piece of software I’ve tried out is SftpDrive on my dekstop computer, and while I originally had some difficulties I’ve now created some symlinks and it works a treat. This may just be one of the software purchases I do decide to make for once. I like WinSCP, but it just isn’t integrated into the operating system enough (although it’s certainly the bees knees for using on systems other than my desktop).

Andy Loughran (andylockran): ex-MS Man in Charge of BBC Future Media and Technology

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 18:33:22 +0000

Huggers to head BBC technology

By Rob Minto

Published: July 19 2008 03:00

Erik Huggers has been appointed director of future media and technology at the BBC, replacing Ashley Highfield. Mr Huggers joined the BBC in May last year as group controller of future media and technology, launching the new version of the iPlayer, the on-demand internet service. Mr Huggers will be responsible for the BBC’s output on the internet, interactive TV, mobile, and other emerging platforms.

Before joining the BBC, Mr Huggers was at Microsoft, where he launched the MSN portal in the Benelux countries and was responsible for Windows Media in Europe. One of Mr Huggers’ tasks will be to resolve the row between the BBC and internet service providers, many of which feel the BBC should pay compensation for the extra demands the iPlayer demands makes on their networks.

Rob Minto

Tony Whitmore (tonytiger): The advantage of sensible copyright terms

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:26:33 +0000

This day is call’d the last of LUG Radio.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Jono.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Procter, Sweet, Langridge and Bacon’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on LUG Radio’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Ben the Hero, Bruno and Neuro,
Revell and Roger, Morley and Goodwin-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And July nineteenth shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of geeks;
For he to-day that spills his beer with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in Wolverhampton now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That drank with us upon LUG Radio’s end.

With apologies to, well, everyone.

Peter Brooks (theneb): The BBC still can't figure out how to stream MP3

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:37:46 +0000

It's something extremely easy to do, but the BBC still insist to only do prioperity media:

The new iplayer is better since it now includes all media and listening back to shows is in MP3, but navigation is now a bit worse.

Adam Sweet: LugRadio Live UK 2008 LAN Gaming Rig

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:40:40 +0000

Wooo, look at this. Bytemark have finished setting up the LAN gaming rig for LugRadio Live UK 2008. They are running twice daily fragging competitions with the winning teams getting prizes.

Come shoot other geeks in a team related frag-fest at LugRadio Live 2008. I will be joining you. Don’t forget that if you’ve never been to LugRadio Live before but you always meant to, then this is you last chance as there won’t be another one.

Many thanks to Matt Bloch of Bytemark Hosting.

Robert Leverington (RobertL): Oh, so maybe it wasn’t that bad.

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:51:46 +0000

Sports day yesterday wasn’t as bad as I originally expected, there was much waiting around - but that seamed to go quickly (and the day was more fun than lessons, contrary to my expectations). I took part in the form relay, since the girl who was original going to didn’t want to so they needed someone else, and I think I did fairly well helping the team to catch up even though we had fallen badly behind due to our first runner (we ended up coming fourth out of six teams in the race we did). Members of my form also took part in the shot putt (where we got full points) and the long jump. We then went on to do orienteering, this isn’t a traditional sport and wasn’t the most fun thing I’d done all day - needless to say, cheating was easy, and we lost due to our teacher prohibiting us from cheating like the other groups did. We also did badminton and football (although the format of both could have been improved).

After lunch we went outside and sat on the bank of the field and watched the house track events, I ended up doing the tug of war since we had insufficient competitors and was pushed into doing it by some of the people in my house. We won the first go, but lost on the second one. I had a nice time overall, and lots of other people did too (except, of course, the kids who had a miserable outlook of the day and were unwilling to participate - but they were bound to still be unhappy no matter what).

Tony Whitmore (tonytiger): And no rollover bugs either.

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:48:50 +0000

The Ubuntu UK Podcast has actually gone and hit that watershed of reaching double figures! In one way it seems like we’ve been going much longer. Our presenting style is maturing and we’re spreading the load of editing and mixing the show through screencasts. In fact, I edited very little of the last two episodes, which was great! Highlights of the first ten episodes for me are (in no particular order):

The FOSDEM material and the Becky Hogge interview in particular. And Dave posing for a photo.
Dave’s pronunciation in the pronunciation segment.
Interviewing guests in the studio (i.e. my front room)
Interviewing guests on the phone thanks to the wonder of VoIP.
The Mark Shuttleworth special.
Interviewing all those people at UDS!
Piling up CDs in a pub car park.
Getting all sorts of stuff to give away.

Which brings us to what is in episode 10 itself:

In this episode:-

Discussion:
- Watching video content on Ubuntu
- Podcast now available in transcribed form!
- Sarcastic News
- Selling Ubuntu without using ‘Freedom’ in the sales pitch
Competition:
- We announce the winner of the Canonical Store Voucher this month
- We start a new competition where we give the Wraith PC from Efficient PC! Just answer the question set out in this weeks show, and you could be the proud owner of this PC!

Andy Loughran (andylockran): GNU/Linux

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:15:51 +0000

Linux.

——-

Gnu.

——-

Hurd.

Does it really matter, as long as people use it? People use Cars without understanding how an engine works, and without constantly referring to the efforts of their forefathers. Let’s just get on with promotion of the product, rather than wrangling about a name

pidgin bloggg (taras): No idea

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:53:02 +0000

I said cancel, but I don’t know whether to trust Firefox or Thawte. :(

UPDATE!

They said they received the details OK, even though I clicked cancel!!

(Yes, FF3)

Andy Loughran (andylockran): Using the Long Tail

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:49:40 +0000

Clay Shirky provides a fascinating insight into how a collaborative approach utilises more skills, and empowers more people than the old institutional model. Rather than coming from an Open Source background, he uses the example of Flickr to convey his point (and then takes a stab at Ballmer). It’s an interesting presentation, and shows how you can make the most of the information/data available in a field.

However, there’s an angle to his talk which isn’t covered in this short presentation; which I imagine is due to time constraints. That’s the opportunity for cross-discipline collaboration, and what that means for us.

One of the more interesting points made by Clay, is that he poses the current ‘$1 million question’ - Are Bloggers Journalists? - and then turns it on its head.

Journalists, and journalism came about to fulfil a societal need. How to communicate with the majority of the population. Gutenburgs’s printing press was a percursor to European journalism, and for the last 400 years or so, journalism has been an integral part of mass communication.

However, we now have a little something called the internet - which, as Gutenburg’s printing press did all those years ago, revolutionise access to information. The infrastructure required to become a ‘messenger to the people’ is in place for people to with it as they wish - create facebook pages, youtube videos, or wordpress blogs. Once the infrastructure becomes freely accessible, the applications of it become massively varied.

In Clay’s talk, he mentions a ratio. 80% of people do 20% of the work, and vice versa, using a lovely graph of the long tail:

An Example of the Long Tail Graph

Though a graph illustrating a different set of data, the concept can be re-applied to Open Source Project contribution. The Green area applies to the ‘core’ developers, who may even be employed by the project. The Orange applied to the people directly involved with the project, and perhaps some power users, and the Red section applied to everyone else.

The wonderful thing about the Red section, is that you get lots and lots of people contributing very little. However, it’s these people who can really add value to a project. With so many projects now existing across different distributions, each system becomes pretty unique. Where bugfixes and irrationailities can be spotted and reported on by end-users running their unique system - the value added is huge.

There’s also a question of expertise. The guys in the Red Section are the programming experts, who are commiting code. Those in the Orange Section are the users/implementers of the code - so will typically have a clear understanding of the direction of the project and the needs that the project needs to fulfil. Whereas in the Red Section are people who use the package, but often alongside other packages of greater interest/relevance to their line of work. It’s this cross-discipline collaboration that is unprecedencted.

Getting average non-geeky end users to use Open Projects is a massive challenge, but one that is going to bring massive benefits to Open Source Software. Some people talk of the digital tipping point from a technical standpoint - “Woo, when we get this critical mass we’ll overtake Microsoft within the next 5 years.” To be honest that doesn’t bother me. Judge MS as you wish, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because the potential contribution that end users can make to Global Knowledge, through Open Projects.

It’s going to be possible for a biological scientist and and engineer to be reviewing the same problem for different purposes. It’s unlikely that these two disciplines would ever communicate were it not be for this open project, and it’s also possible that only with the combined knowledge and expertise of these two disciplines, the problem can be solved.

This is what excites me most about free software, and to think we’re only just at the beginning.

Alan Pope (popey): Ubuntu UK Podcast reaches 10th Episode

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:31:46 +0000

Amazingly we've managed to crank out our 10th episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast. We give away a great PC in this episode, so get listening and enter the competition!

In this episode:-

Discussion:
- Watching video content on Ubuntu
- Podcast now available in transcribed form!
- Sarcastic News
- Selling Ubuntu without using 'Freedom' in the sales pitch
Competition:
- We announce the winner of the Canonical Store Voucher this month
- We start a new competition where we give the Wraith PC from Efficient PC!

Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc

ron: RIP Sheila

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:58:00 +0000

RIP Sheila

Gary Smith: Security of oral test audio

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:07:18 +0000

I found out yesterday that the exam board used in a project I'm involved with will accept the audio recording from an oral test (ie the speaking part of a test) as an mp3 file. This seems somewhat interesting as it's extremely easy to manipulate the files after they've been generated using freeware audio editing tools, such as Audacity. Obviously, though, this problem isn't a new one - certainly, it's possible to manipulate audio on tape or CD with as much ease.

The easiest way to prove that a file has been edited is to generate a hash of the original. If the hash doesn't match this file, then there's obviously been a change to the file. But how does one know that the has generated is that of the original file, and not one of the edited file? What's to stop someone just generating a hash based on the edited file?

Thinking about this a bit further, I hit on an idea. There's open source mp3 players/recorders out there such as the iRiver. This device runs an operating system which can be developed for applications such as this. It would be possible to create a custom operating system for devices such as this which could generate a hash based on the file that's just been recorded, along with the time, date, and a secret cipher. This hash could then be saved to an associated file.

From here, both the audio file and the file containing the hash would need to be sent to the exam board. As usual, if the hash matches the contents, all is good. It wouldn't be easy to create a new hash based on the edited file unless one knew the secret cipher and the other bits associated with the hash (ie method, and the date and time element). There's got to be something I've not considered here, though. What am I missing?

Robert Leverington (RobertL): Bias Towards Sports

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:14:03 +0000

Today we were told about the sports day being held this Wednesday, the format is drastically different to last years and I am disappointed to say the least. This year my school started using the vertical tutoring system where form groups had members from each year, designed to create a more cohesive atmosphere within the school (contradictorily split lunches were also introduced this year, so friends who are in separate years won’t necessarily have lunch together - I was also fairly annoyed regarding this change). Due to this change in the form pupil distribution houses were also introduced (these have not worked very well though, in my opinion), and this year play a fairly large role within sports day.

For the first four periods of the day forms will play as a team (just year nine and ten though, as year eleven are on study leave and sixth form cannot be made to participate) in four activities including dodgeball and football. They will be working to gain points for the house, used to generate a final ranking. I suspect that this will involve a fair amount of waiting around and generally be boring. In the afternoon there will then be one hour of individual and team events for those who want to participate (such as the 100m, relay and tug of war), if you do not want to take part the only other option is to sit and watch. There is no choice to just attend normal lessons, and if you do get a letter to say why you can’t participate one still has to where PE kit and watch. Another issue is that they want you to turn up to school in PE kit, this would be both uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing (especially for a number of other students who are not necessarily comfortable with their appearance).

On a different note the PE awards assembly recently took place, as expected the same people got all the awards. There is never an assembly to award the academically talented - not that I’d want one to take place - and it really feels as if the school doesn’t care about what happens in the classroom. The PE department is also allowed to punish you if you forget your kit, even though you took part in the activities anyway and were forced to wear old, dirty clothes instead; few other departments could get away with this.

Martin Meredith (Mez): LugRadio Live UK 2008

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:44:43 +0000

Is less than a week away

So, yes, am on crew, and am also on the Speakers List as I’m organising the Keysigning Party.

If you’ve got the weekend spare - and can make it to Wolverhampton - why not come along and meet some of the wonderful people that are the LugRadio community. It’s only £5 on the door (which is entry for both days) and well - Just look at the schedule to see the kind of talks that are going on.

Plus, It’s also going to be the LAST EVER LugRadio - so it’s really your last chance to see, plus you’ll be participating in a historic moment in FLOSS history (just wish it was the start of something rather than the end!)

So obligatory LRL advertising post over - hope to see you there!

Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror): New York

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 07:12:03 +0000

I made it safely to Connecticut, it took a while but I'm here. My flight to New York was pretty much the best I've ever had, I really like Virgin America. I suspect this will be a very productive week. I've almost finished the email part of 'gettor' that I've been hacking on. I refactored most of it to allow me to work with it offline. Useful. Hopefully I won't need to hack on it much after I deploy it.

pidgin bloggg (taras): pagefile.sys

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 01:23:12 +0000

After a fresh install of XP, C:\pagefile.sys was taking up 2GB - reflecting the size of my physical RAM - and I was already running out of space on my system partition, so I decided to check up on what I could do to it. Went to System -> Advanced -> Performance -> Advanced (yeah, doubly advanced!) and it says “Total paging size: 0 MB”… so I thought “fuck it” and deleted pagefile.sys.

It hasn’t returned… and I’m not having problems. Apparently, Windows creates it when installed, then doesn’t use it, if you have enough RAM.

Graham Bleach (gdb): Feature request: more tag set operations

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:45:27 +0000

I would like this MINUS this.

Robert Leverington (RobertL): On the Travelling Community

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:15:41 +0000

This past week I noticed a group of itinerants inhabiting a small green while travelling to and from my work experience placement. While the sight of several caravans and vehicles inhabiting this area was quite ugly, they weren’t causing any trouble (although I did expect them to quickly be removed by the local council). Yesterday, however, this all changed. On the way home they had gone, but left behind was the most disgusting mess; litter strewn everywhere, empty gas canisters, muddy dirt tracks, the list is endless.

The travelling community often receives a bad reputation, mainly due to news reports describing the disturbances they cause and vandalism often left behind - but seeing such vile treatment of our open spaces first hand really brings it to reality. Maybe this explains the dispisal often faced by travellers, people really notice them when stuff like this happens. If they cooperated and were less anti-social maybe society would be more accepting of them and perhaps provide more initiatives such as travellers sites, but as it stands the expectation is vandalism and disturbance - and this always occurs at some point.

On a happier note I was pleased at the response by the council, the next day all of the litter was cleared and - with the exception of the mud tracks - the place clean and tidy, at least council tax is being put to some good use, even if it is stupidly high in this day and age. It’s a shame that the mess was made in the first place, and that we have to put up with the dirt tracks; but the site is on a road to recovery and should be as good as new in no time.

Andy Loughran (andylockran): Web 2.0 - not what you’d expect.

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:21:26 +0000

Look, we’re here.. the internet faces massive policing by stupid governments intent on limiting our freedom.
Should the ideas expressed in a recent blog (that software that is used on the internet be registered to a certified authority) go through.. it basically means good-bye to freedoms on the internet.

How easy would it be to create a new internet. Get back to 56K modems and telnetting between people to pass round information? or would it simply be a massive ‘encrypted net’ - where legitimate and illegitimate activity get bundled together, hidden from prying eyes?

Edit - as grifferz pointed out.. this makes little sense; I’ll have to redress the issue in the future properly.

Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror): Passport woes

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:05:47 +0000

It's really sad that people who work for the US Passport agency do not understand the fundamental right to travel. I have been told at least five times that if I do not have enough pages in my passport, I will be denied exiting the US. Furthermore, I have been told that if there are no free appointments in the next n days, that's just too bad and I'll have to stay in the country.

Attempts to use their automated system were amazing. Every time I called, I would get kicked off the system and my appointment choices would become slimmer and slimmer when I called again. And again. And again. For hours. The entire system is totally broken. You have no way to reclaim your spot when the system hangs up and you have no recourse.

I was actually told that while it may seem bureaucratic - "these are the rules and we have to follow them" regardless of the situation. No, you cannot speak to a supervisor. No, you cannot have us help you directly. No, you need to use the automated system.

Do they seriously believe this nonsense? Are they really telling people that we (as US Citizens) have no constitutional right to travel freely? They actually tell people their their internal rules trump the Constitution (!) when directly asked about the right to leave the US. They also stated that if my passport is full (less than two empty pages according to more of their Kafkaesque rules ), I'll be denied re-entry into the USA. This is obviously illegal and complete nonsense.

Why is the concept of Freedom of movement unknown to these people?

I spent over three hours and fourteen calls to the US Passport agency before someone would transfer me to a supervisor. Finally, when it was clear that their automated system was broken for certain kinds of user input, they helped me to get an appointment in New York City where I might get extra pages before my scheduled flight. Or they may seize my passport because it might be too damaged and too full for them to let me leave with it.

Experiences like this make me feel a chill down my spine. Not only because of their completely daft understanding of my rights (and their own) but because it seems like foreshadowing in a very sad but slow nightmare.

Andy Loughran (andylockran): The Death of Quantitative Psychology - the birth of a Brave New World.

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:44:45 +0000

One of the first lectures in my first year entertained the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods in psychology. We had three lovely, but definately qualitatively biased lecturers. They spoke of the personal approach to psychology, and identifying individual differences, rather than group ‘norms’ - for they argues that norms did not exist across society, due to all the difference cultures and individual experiences.

However, our quantitative lecturers disagreed. They liked to analyse and draw lovely graphs showing difference behavioural patterns. Attach electrodes to heads to monitor electrical pulses in the brain, and quantify social experiments using hard statistics and probability algorithms.

Well, they’re now approaching the end of their careers in this field, as Google and the ‘database generation’ take over.

There’s so much information on the internet now, that we don’t need to know whether someone is going to do something or not - we can actually see records of what they do. Having the browsing habits of thousands, or millions of people is almost priceless data. It’s the stuff that quantititative psychologists can only dream of. Any psychologist will tell you how valuable that data is to them.

Well, today Alexander Hanff - fighting for our freedom - heads to the House of Lords in order to prevent Phorm from getting their hands on our data; and to question why BT haven’t yet been charged on any count for gross invasion of privacy in regards to their trials of the Phorm software last summer.

In order to understand what we’re dealing with, I offer the following analogy to those less technically minded.

The internet is an exchange of bags, each containing a little bit of information. Let’s say you pass one bag a second from your machine across the internet to an ‘internet server.’ It’s very easy for someone to look into any of these bags - but mainly due to volume (but also due to simple logistics) people tend not to bother looking in your bags. It’s not to say they can’t though.

Well, phorm contains software that looks through all your bags, and analyses them for ‘key-words’, from which they can then target adverts at you. If you’re communicating with someone, why do you want them looking through your bags - you don’t!

When you deal with your bank, you’d put a padlock on the bags, that only they and you have the key to unlock.. so your online banking details are safe..r. If you’d rather not have someone looking through all the information you exchange across the internet, charging you for the pleasure, and then holding more information on your browsing habits than you even do yourself.. say Yes to Phorm. else do the sensible thing and “JUST SAY NO!”

Adam Sweet: LugRadio Live UK 2008 Schedule Announced

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:15:17 +0000

In typical fashion I am clinging to others’ coat tails by not ever being first to announce something to do with LugRadio, however I am proud to announce that the LugRadio Live UK 2008 schedule has been published.

The event planning is almost complete, which is fortunate given that it’s about 11 days away. Certainly the speakers list is complete as is the exhibitor list, pending any late additions.

Go take a look at the schedule now.

Obviously I’m lacking in the boombasticity of others when it comes to announcing things, sadly today I’m a little deflated as my car was broken into, but one thing we haven’t mentioned a great deal so far is that we will be having LAN gaming tournaments at this years event, with a serious gaming rig supplied by Bytemark Hosting, one of our event sponsors. So, thanks to Matt Bloch of Bytemark, for sponsoring the event and also for putting the rig together. Not only will there be around 12 PCs clustered around the central gaming rig for attendees to walk up and frag each other on, but you will also be able to just rock up, plug in your laptop and join in at any time you choose.

There is no need to buy a ticket up front this year, the whole event is pay on the door, so show up with your 5 GBP and your laptop for some serious fragging, geeking, speaking, listening and drinking on the 19th and 20th July 2008 at the Light House Media Centre in Wolverhampton.

This show, as announced elsewhere, will be the last ever LugRadio episode and will include a pre-event pub meet-up on Friday 18th at around 8pm in the Hog’s Head pub in Wolverhampton city centre and a party at the LRL venue itself on the Saturday night. It’s the last ever LugRadio Live, so bring your drinking boots and your sense of humour. Sadly I don’t drink any more, so I’ll probably either be anxiously looking like I wished I still drank or will be so drunk I can only open one eye AGAIN. But come say hello in either case

See you there.

Adam Sweet: The End of LugRadio

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:55:12 +0000

Well I guess the cat has been out of the bag for over a week now but due to being to busy type that I am, I haven’t yet mentioned the fact that LugRadio will end after LugRadio Live UK 2008. It’s was a sad day when we took that decision but was one which we all agreed was the right choice. I always considered when I joined the show that at some point it would have to end and that I hoped it wouldn’t be on my watch, but unfortunately it is.

There were various factors which led us to this decision. Amongst them were the fact that it was getting pretty hard to sustain the show when we were all tied to being in Wolverhampton every 2 weeks and I personally found it hard to find the prep time in the days leading up to the recording. It was always a rush for me to get from work, then to the studio, record the show, get home late afterwards, then get up early for work the next day. I found myself struggling to get myself together for a day or so afterwards and I had been wondering how I was going to sustain that through another season or three. I had also been struggling to find the time to do anything other than my day job, LugRadio and real life, frequently one of those 3 suffered at any one time. I don’t know how Aq and Jono had managed to keep it up over the last 4 years.

Also in there was the fact that all of our jobs and private lives were becoming more demanding of our time and I think we all started to feel that we weren’t able to give LugRadio the amount of time it required to keep it fresh so we decided to call it a day at the end of the season rather than start another season and finish half way through, or string it out for another two or three seasons and have people notice the quality drop. I think a few people noticed that this last season contained more episodes released late than any other. I think one reference that has been made elsewhere was about Red Dwarf and how they should have quit after season V, because VI, VII and VIII were awful and the memory of an excellent show was tainted by the recollection of a decline in quality after they should have called it a day.

To quell some of the rumours, I will re-state what has been said elsewhere:

It is sadly not a hoax
We have not fallen out and in fact remain good friends
My business plans are not the reason for the show ending, in whole or in part. Frankly, as the show existed before I joined, I think it could probably survive my departure
Jono’s Severed Fifth project is not part of the reason for the show ending

Jono’s announcement is here and Aq’s is here. Theirs are both better written than mine.

Although I don’t personally pay for any of the hosting services used by LugRadio, I believe the website, forums, audio archive, IRC channel and so on will all remain up and running and I think a great deal of the forums and #lugradio IRC community are planning on staying around, as will I. While I don’t believe that I am the great draw that pehaps Aq and Jono might be, I plan on hanging around. As many have said, LugRadio was their LUG and my LUG, especially those who don’t have a local Linux User Group and so I hope to stay in touch with as many people as possible. The Linux community, in the UK, the USA, Australia and Serbia to name but a few I have been in contact with personally and through LugRadio and many other places around the world have some of the most friendly, intelligent and funny individuals I’ve come across in any field of endeavour. So, in the least condescending way I can muster, pat yourselves on the back, you’ve made every second worth it for all of us.

So that’s it really, bar the sweeping out of the room, which won’t actually ever happen in Jono’s house. All that remains is one further studio show, due out on 14th July 2008 and then on to LugRadio Live UK 2008 as the last ever show.

Gary Smith: Matshita DVD-R UJ-857E problems - dirty laser?

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:48:43 +0000

My Macbook Pro has been having some odd problems with the DVD writer for a few weeks now. I use Toast primarily for recording DVD-R and CD-R. Although the machine would read any media quite happily, I was having increasing problems with writing to CD-R and DVD-R. Out of a cake of 100 CD-R, I'd perhaps get a successful write with about 60, gradually decreasing over time to 20 or so. Not good. Googling suggested a dead drive.

Toast would give an error of "Sense Key=Medium Error 0x73, 0x03". Trying to record the disc from Finder would give me an error of "The device failed to calibrate the laser power for this media".

For reference, this is the device information:

MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-857E:

Firmware Revision: ZA0E
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipping Drive)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -R DL, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, DVD-DAO
Media: Insert media and refresh to show available burn speeds

What concerned me was after the drive failed to write to a disc, the cache line would change to:

Cache: 0kb

After trying the various fixes listed on forums (including Apple's support site) I only had one solution left - a lens cleaner. I've always been somewhat dubious about these things as they seem a little bit snake oil to me. Colour me surprised that it seems to have fixed it.

Dominic Cleal (Dominic): The devil's in the detail

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:49:22 +0000

A seemingly innocent refactor of a Java EE web application last week turned into a small nightmare due to a tiny detail in the servlet specification that I hadn't taken into account.

The webapp's main purpose is to proxy requests to a backend server using the jEasy Extensible Proxy (J2EP) project (from Google SoC). This allows us to create a custom implementation of the logic for choosing a backend server to route requests to (linked with user sessions, the user's given permissions etc) with very little effort.

J2EP is implemented as a filter, with a second rewriting filter layered on top of the proxying filter. Originally, the module for J2EP was performing session validation and contained more logic for handling the server choices - the refactor moved this validation procedure out into its own filter, layered on top of the rewriting filter.

Once this was done, after lots of puzzling debug output, that the data in POST requests to the server was simply missing after passing through the proxy server. The detail that caught me out was hidden in the JavaDoc for ServletRequest.getParameter(String name):

public java.lang.String getParameter(java.lang.String name)
Returns the value of a request parameter as a String, or null if the parameter does not exist. Request parameters are extra information sent with the request. For HTTP servlets, parameters are contained in the query string or posted form data.

[..]

If the parameter data was sent in the request body, such as occurs with an HTTP POST request, then reading the body directly via getInputStream() or getReader() can interfere with the execution of this method.

As it turns out, the code that was moved to the new, top layer filter called getParameter() in a couple of places. The J2EP proxy filter was later using getInputStream() to pass the request parameters into the new outbound request. Even though it was after the initial parameter read, the reverse of the situation mentioned in the specification caused getInputStream() to break and return an empty stream!

I wish an IllegalStateException had simply been thrown rather than returning useless streams... *sigh*

(note: this was under Apache Tomcat 5.5)

Andy Loughran (andylockran): I’m getting SPAM.. from myself (and why MS hotmail really needs to improve).

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:36:54 +0000

* To all my friends who have received the SPAM mails recently, I apologies profusely.

It’s quite annoying when you receive SPAM from one of your own email addresses. In my case, it was plum202@hotmail.com.

It’s an address I registered and used way-back-when - and hasn’t seen me using it for the last 5-6 years.

Anyhow, I logged onto it, and tried to close my account. However, I could not do so as there was a ‘billing account linked to your Live ID.’ I was advised to goto https://billing.microsoft.com to resolve this issue.

However, on landing at https://billing.microsoft.com - I was greeted with a message to say “This Live ID does not have a billing relationship with Microsoft. Please Click Here to join.

Silly Microsoft.

Anyhow, I phoned their customer support… three different numbers I was passed between til ending up with some Hotmail specific department. I spent over an hour on the phone in total, and finally ended up with the support guy passing an email onto someone else to take a look.

The best thing about it - the guy set a gmail.com address as the reply-to: address.

I thought I’d ask him a few questions and get him to give me some advice on hotmail versus gmail. He duly obliged, telling me to goto google.com and sign up there ‘or something like that.’

Yeah.. bear this in mind when you next choose a Webmail provider.

Andy Smith (grifferz): GLIBC NO U

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:58:30 +0000

Dammit, stop opening the bug.

pidgin bloggg (taras): Alpine Strawberries: WTF?

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:58:25 +0000

A strawberry is a strawberry, right? WRONG! Today I took receipt of a punnet of strawberries, grown by a neighbour. Real strawberries? Growing wild, here, in the frozen hinterland? Yes, they’re alpine strawberries!

They also taste amazing, in a “tastes like a strawberry but is the size of a blueberry” way. Treat size fun, direct from nature!!

Dominic Cleal (Dominic): Severe UDP packet loss

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:51:14 +0000

While looking after a UDP based service, it came to my attention that we were losing a significant number of inbound packets. The first place to start is with netstat(8) and you can use the -s option to check statistics for various protocols (or add -u for UDP only, or -t for TCP).

Example output of netstat -su:

$ netstat -su
Udp:
    2829651752 packets received
    27732564 packets to unknown port received.
    1629462811 packet receive errors
    179722143 packets sent

This is showing the total number of UDP packets received and sent, plus two extra metrics. The second line shows UDP packets that were sent to a port that doesn't have a listening socket, then the third line shows packets that were dropped by the kernel.

Sockets contain a couple of buffers between the kernel and the application, one for receiving and one for sending data which have a fixed size. When the application fails to read from the buffer fast enough, packets will be discarded, incrementing the receive error counter.

As no technical blog post is complete without a pretty graph, below is a graph generated using Munin, showing the UDP traffic flowing on one particular system:

In the above graph, you can see the dominant line being the received packets and the turquoise line lower down is showing the packet receive errors.

On Linux, the buffer sizes are controlled by a group of sysctl parameters with rmem* being receive buffers and w* being send buffers:

net.core.rmem_default
net.core.rmem_max
net.core.wmem_default
net.core.wmem_max

Checking a Debian Etch system, the default values for the max is about 128kB and the default size is 120kB. I've shown them here using the sysctl(8) tool.

$ sysctl net.core | grep [rw]mem
net.core.wmem_max = 131071
net.core.rmem_max = 131071
net.core.wmem_default = 122880
net.core.rmem_default = 122880

Using sysctl, you can update the values of these parameters with the -w option:

$ sudo sysctl -w net.core.rmem_max=1048576 net.core.rmem_default=1048576
net.core.rmem_max = 1048576
net.core.rmem_default = 1048576

This now causes any application to have increased buffer sizes on its sockets by default, which provided your application doesn't have other bottlenecks affecting its throughput, will give it a little more space. It's also possible to increase the maximum and then have the application alter the socket size - see socket(7) for more info.

In our case, you can clearly see on the graph that the problem has been solved for a few days. We had to apply two changes mentioned:

Increasing the buffer size, which was done using the application config (and increasing the net.core.rmem_max parameter, leaving rmem_default alone)
by tweaking the application to increase its throughput, using more controlled buffering internally, rather than relying on the kernel socket buffering

Only one packet has been lost since the changes were made, which is an acceptable error rate for this application given its throughput.

pidgin bloggg (taras): Switching Wordpress post order

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:26:00 +0000

I wrote this little bit of code (in three parts) which lets users choose which order they see your blog in. There are two orders (chronological or reverse): reverse is the standard blog order, with newest posts first, and chronological shows earliest posts first. If you’re creating a blog which documents your progress (for example, a travel blog or a ‘learning about something new’ blog) then you might want to provide this option for visitors, as new visitors would want to read it from the start, while returning visitors (you hope!) would want to see the latest instalment. Here’s the code:

1. Create a page in the root of your site called page.php:

<?php

    

       // Sets the pageorder cookie

    	$type = $_GET["o"];

    	setcookie("pageorder", $type, time()+(60*60*24*365));

    

    	header("Location: /");

    

?>

2. Edit your themes/yourtheme/index.php (aka Main Index Template in Theme Editor) so you have this after get_header();

$data="c";    // Change this to 'r' for blog-style as default

$cookieName = "pageorder";

 

     // Gets the pageorder cookie. c = chronological, r = reverse

    

    if (isset($_COOKIE[$cookieName]))

{ $data = $_COOKIE[$cookieName]; }

 

	if ( $data != "r" ) 

	{

		query_posts($query_string . "&order=ASC");

	}

3. Finally, this goes into sidebar.php, or wherever you want the ’switch’ to be:

<h3>View this blog...</h3>

    <ul>

        <li><a href="/page.php?o=c">From the beginning</a></li>

        <li><a href="/page.php?o=r">Newest first</a></li>

    </ul>

Alan Pope (popey): Is that a Paul Smith shirt?

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:10:40 +0000

Whilst standing in the back room at the ballet school that my daughter Sophie goes to, I had an interesting conversation. I was wearing my Ubuntu Hardy Heron T-shirt which I got from the Canonical Online Store.

One of the other parents (a mum) said to me "That's a nice T-shirt, where did you get it? Is it a Paul Smith?". This made me chuckle a little. I had to reply "No, it's not, it's 'just a promotional T-shirt to do with a product I use'". She was surprised. So was I.

There's something to be said for geek-wear that doesn't scream "I AM A GEEK T-SHIRT".

Don't forget that every month on the Ubuntu UK Podcast we are giving away discount codes for the Canonical store as competition prizes!

Update My family all just descended on my house for a Barbeque. My brother just said "Hey, nice t-shirt" :)

Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror): Fire in the sky

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 07:37:06 +0000

If you have the means, I highly recommend The Hunter 31, it's Optimized for Efficiency and Comfort.

It's also a great way to sail up to the fireworks barge on the San Francisco bay and watch the sky light up.

pidgin bloggg (taras): Why I Shall Consider Buying Chat This Month

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 18:50:27 +0000

Tony Whitmore (tonytiger): Who’d-a thunk it?

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 18:25:15 +0000

That’s right, the Ubuntu UK podcast episode count is almost in double figures! After a very late episode 8, due partly to me having a general anesthetic we’ve pulled out, well, a stop and got episode 9 out only very slightly late. Actually, this episode and the last one have mostly been edited by Alan, although I’ve still mixed both shows. It bodes well that we’re able to distribute the workload of producing the show across multiple people. Hopefully it will mean that everyone gets to relax occasionally. There’s still a way to go though, and to that end I’ve made a series of screencasts to educate my fellow Ubuntu UK Podcasters on how I go about mixing the show in Ardour. They’re not polished, but I wonder if there would be interest in releasing them to the wider community?

No Ciemon in this episode, so Laura deps. In this episode:-

Discussion:
- Efficient PC hardware review
  - We review the Wraith PC from Efficient PC. Listen in to our next episode (number 10) for a chance to win this great computer!
- Ubuntu mobile edition confusion
- Lugradio Live discussion
- Drobo disk storage robot and Drobo Share
Competition:
- The competition from Episode 8 is still open. It will end on the 12th July. (we have extended the competition due to the last episode being late).

Go and get it!

Dave Walker (Daviey): Ubuntu UK Podcast - Episode 9

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:02:08 +0000

Laura Cowen, Alan Pope, Dave Walker and Tony Whitmore present the ninth episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast.

This fun packed episode brings us:

Discussion:
- Efficient PC hardware review
  - We review the Wraith PC from E fficient PC. Listen in to our next episode (number 10) for a chance to win this great computer!
- Ubuntu mobile edition confusion
- Lugradio Live discussion
- Drobo disk storage robot and Drobo Share
Competition:
- The competition from Episode 8 is still open. It will end on the 12th July. (we have extended the competition due to the last episode being late).

Listen on http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org or subscribe below:

High quality feeds

Low quality feeds

Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror): Sparc help?

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:24:03 +0000

I'm looking for a Sun keyboard and 13w3 to VGA adapter. I'd only need it for a day. Does anyone have such a thing in the San Francisco bay area? I'd like to avoid purchasing one if possible. Though, I'm a pragmatist and realize it may be the only way.

Martin Meredith (Mez): COMPRESSED AIR!

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:30:15 +0000

Yes, that toything. Hehe.

Ok, so after one of my Flatmates decided to tread on my wireless dongle (which I had trailing on a long USB cable down the stairs outside my room so I could actually pick up the signal!) and break it, I haven’t used my Desktop machine in a good few months. It was pretty much of a case of without internet access, it was pretty useless other than for watching DVDs on (which is when I’d boot it up) - so I used my eeePC instead.

Anyway, I went out and bought a nice new PCI Wireless card today - no chance of it being trodden on. And I got a nice one with 2 aerials, for connectivity purposes (and I can say - it’s boosted my signal from what was on average 15% on the wireless dongle to on average 65%!)

I’m happy and actually surprised that Ubuntu picked it up straight away, and even used the settings from my old Wireless dongle to connect straight away!

Anyway, after a while, I hardlocked…. I hate hardlocking… tis so annoying. So I rebooted into the Hardy Installer CD (This still has Gutsy on) and tried an install… Another hardlock…

Uh-Oh I thought …. and ran memtest86+ - no problems… Try again.. another hardlock.

Ok, reopen PC to see if wiggling the wires does something…. OW! I burnt my hand…

My PC was seriously overheating.. So - I had a look - MY PSU and CPU fans were clogged up with orange dust. :’( damnit.

So I took a walk down to Maplin and went and got myself some compressed air… Something I’d learnt from my IT Technician days was a godsend for cleaning CPU Fans.

Anyway, My PC is now sparkly and shiny inside, and on a plus, I’ve gotten rid of the annoying rattle it’s had for the past year… I thought it was the CD drive… as it would always stop when I whacked the CD drive (another trick I learnt as an IT Technician!)

So yeah - I’d suggest that any geek out there goes and invests in a can of compressed air (or ‘airduster‘ as it seems to be branded these days) - It is the magic computer fixing tool… if it can’t be fixed with compressed air, (and/or wiggling the cables) you might as well replace it - it’ll save you time and stop you banging your head against the wall

I just wish I’d thought and taken photos of how dusty it was (It was orange dust too - which was strange… I think the dust puppy’s are becoming Ubuntu themed)

Andy Loughran (andylockran): Load Balancing Services on CentOS

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:09:45 +0000

This documentation shows how to us ipvsadm to create load-balanced services on CentOS that are capable of handling over 8 million concurrent connections in 1GB of memory. It’s possible to use this to load-balance any service. However, this doesn’t take into account data-syncronisation issues you may incur. For this you’ll need to set up Networked File Systems and Database replication (maybe coming soon).

Instructions for CentOS 5 (with ip_vs loaded in kernel as module).

Load ip_vs module

modprove ip_vs

Install ipvsadm

yum install ipvsadm

Run the following commands on the commandline and test them by visiting the $(external_ip) address in your browser.

ipvsadm -A -t $(external_ip):$(port) -s rr -p $(timeout_in_seconds)
ipvsadm -a -t $(external_ip):$(port) -r $(nat_ip_real_server1):$(port)
-m -w $(weight) [ example = 1 ]
ipvsadm -a -t $(external_ip):$(port) -r $(nat_ip_real_server2):$(port)
-m -w $(weight) [ example = 1 ]

Once you’re confident they’re set right. run:

ipvsadm –save

This will output the config file to the screen. Copy that into /etc/sysconfig/ipvsadm.

nano /etc/sysconfig/ipvsadm

Restart ipvsadm

/etc/init.d/ipvsadm restart

Test the sites.

Make module & config persistent @ boot time:

echo modprobe ip_vs >> /etc/rc.modules
chmod +x /etc/rc.modules
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!! /etc/rc.modules is used instead !!
!! of rc.local as it loads earlier !!!!!!!!!
!! in the boot process.!! !!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

chkconfig –add ipvsadm

Done

Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror): Portable audio player

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:20:58 +0000

I need to get a new audio player. I'd like it to serve as a generic USB disk, something without the need for any software on my computer (it should scan the files on the device itself), it should be reasonable in price and reasonable in capacity. Something around 60GB is pretty good, small and black is also nice. Not an iPod is pretty much a requirement, I'd even like to be able to replace the firmware with Rockbox. Ideally, I don't have to mess with the firmware for it to be useful but it would be nice if I ever get really attached to the device.

I really liked the X5 when I played with it last year. Ideally, the nice people that made the X5 will come out with a replacement. However, it doesn't appear that my patient waiting is paying off.

What do you use for an audio player? Can it also play FLAC and OGG, in addition to mp3? I don't really need AAC, I can transcode if I ever encounter such a file.

ron: Referee Cortez disgraces boxing on Pacquiao Undercard

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:14:00 +0000

Referee Cortez disgraces boxing on Pacquiao Undercard

Tony Whitmore (tonytiger): LUG Radio Ga-ga

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:01:50 +0000

I was going to write a post about this, but I discovered that the brilliant Bruno had said it all already. All I can add is that I’ll miss the show, it’s been a big part of my spare time for the last four years, it’s taken me to Wolverhampton and San Francisco, given me some of the most random experiences of my life and above all it’s introduced me to a lot of people I now regard as friends. And that now the news is out I haven’t got to stop myself from saying something stupid and accidentally letting it slip early!

Discussions in #lugradio suggest that I’m a member of a pretty exclusive club of people who have been to all the LUG Radio Live events (including the US event earlier this year and the one coming up in the next couple of weeks). The list seems to be: Jono, Aq, Adam, Chris, Matthew Walster and me. Or have we missed someone?

[Update] The ever angry Matthew Garrett is also on the list.

Matthew Walster (dotwaffle): National Health Service

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:38:23 +0000

Once again, the BBC has taken it upon themselves to open up "Have Your Say" which contains a lot of people putting not-thought-through ideas on there with such a low signal-to-noise ratio that you might as well just not read it.

Common themes are:

Stop giving foreigners free medical care, and no free translation.
The NHS should have a blanket exemption on all patents so that drugs can be genericised and made freely available.
Doctors are paid too much.
Nurses are paid too little.
Sick people get refused medication, but drug addicts get methodone.
The elderly should get preferential treatment, as they've "paid their dues".
Matrons fix MRSA et al.
If you pay for private healthcare, you shouldn't have to pay for the NHS.
Too much management.

My responses are:

In an emergency, they should be given free care. At other times, a contribution should be asked for.
Why just the NHS? Get rid of *all* patents - copyright should do the job well enough in the modern age. The NHS should have an over-ride option though, if the drug is a life-saving drug (as opposed to a comfort drug such as a painkiller or cosmetic product)
SOME doctors are paid silly money - while high, they do work incredibly hard, and for the seniority they have, I think they do an excellent job...
I've met a lot of nurses. MANY of them are worse than a waste of space, some of them are downright rude, inefficient, ineffective and should be sacked immediately - regardless of cost to the NHS. However, many nurses are also fantastic, friendly, lively, caring and clever. The split between the two very much depends on the environment. Performance related pay? Not based on cleanliness, but maybe after-hospital report cards, to be filled in by the patient?
Drug addicts NEED help, or your window is going to be broken to steal your radio, so they can buy drugs. In the overwhelming majority of cases, if you NEED a drug, you get it on the NHS. If you WANT a drug, you pay for it yourself (or so it should be). (and whoever sent me that anonymous email about the NHS being nasty for not giving a second round of IVF, you shouldn't have had the first one)
Everyone gets the same treatment, and priorities are based on necessity and urgency, not age. Plus, if by elderly you mean "retired", my opinion is that you shouldn't be able to retire until you're unable to do your job. Be that at 65 or 85. Or, indeed, if you're incapacitated at 35.
Nope. Matrons would help, but the NHS has better things to spend their money on.
Everyone pays into the tax fund, not everyone gets benefits - we decide on a basic standard of living, and those who can't get to that basic standard are assisted to that level. Otherwise, if those who didn't get benefits didn't pay, the system wouldn't work.
Not too much management. Too many management consultants and admin staff - the NHS can fix itself, it just needs some guidance.

My idea would be that you get 1% off your income tax if you volunteer to work for the Government for a certain number of days a year. Think how useful it would be to have someone like Alan Sugar giving management advice to the NHS and helping out for 5 days a year in return for 1% of his tax back. Or a city banker getting money back in return for helping the homeless on the streets for a few nights? Mostly, it would be people on large salaries who would take it up, but they are generally more successful, and can really help out.

Some countries have military service, maybe we should consider community service - in return for 6-12 months training as a nurse or being a social/care worker or whatever, you either get a tax break or your student loan turns into a student grant, completely optional. I like the idea. Of course, wouldn't work in practice, but a nice idea none-the-less.

Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror): IM bot programming to automatically send files?

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:57:57 +0000

In an effort to aid the spread of Tor to people who would like it, I've been thinking of and implementing ways to get a copy of Tor, source code and other interesting things.

I spent most of yesterday messing around with IRC bots for file transfer. I have a reasonably stable set of bots running on a few specific irc servers. If you're on freenode, oftc, indymedia or 2600, you can poke the bot for a copy of Tor. An example is documented on our website. It's sorta useful. I guess. I always knew that those DCC chatbots were useful for something legitimate. Who knew?

With that said, I find IRC to be of limited usefulness. DCC is fast and the bot Just Works (TM). However, it seems that almost anyone on IRC can probably find a way to get a copy of Tor. So it's largely uninteresting that someone might get a copy of Tor with DCC. Perhaps I am mistaken. It does look like over two dozen people have gotten a copy, many of them in countries of interest.

Moving on from IRC, there are many people who use different instant messaging networks. Usually these people have no idea of how to use IRC. So I started working on a small OSCAR (AIM) bot in Python that sends information that is useful to current Tor users. I haven't really done much with it other than having it send me bridge descriptors. As I said, this is useful to people who already have Tor and but somehow can't get access to the network directly. It isn't nearly as useful as a copy of Tor itself but it may be required as part of the bootstrap process at some point. I haven't figured out entirely how to implement file transfers but I'm sure that it can be done.

At some point, I think about twelve hours into looking at bots of various types, someone simply suggested that I hack pidgin to do what I want with a plugin. I hadn't really considered this and I'm not sure why. It has no current Python API (perl works) as far as I can tell. I am not too overjoyed to write perl (or C) plugins for Pidgin. It does appear that it may be better than using twisted because twisted currently only supports a small number of protocols.

I'm unclear on which path to take, I will probably make a simple python bot with Twisted, prototype out what I'd like it to do in Pidigin and then see if I can get Pidigin to give me useful features with other protocols.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'm keen to hear them.

Robert Leverington (RobertL): “We’re in another endless field…”

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:37:38 +0000

Today me and seven others completed our Duke of Edinborough Award bronze assessment expedition, to say the least I’m knackered and sun burnt.

While there should have been about fourteen of us, several had dropped out leaving just eight participants (so we went in a single group, rather than two or three); this made the experience more enjoyable as the two teachers supervising the event could spend more time with us rather than rushing between groups. In principal the activities we had to undertake should not have been difficult, but it is inevitable that on occasions some groups might get lost - this proved the case for us, and was very tiring. Firstly we encountered a very overgrown woods, this was virtually impossible to navigate and set us back about an hour (as well as causing quite a few stings and cuts); we also ended up in a farm and could not find our way out. On the first day we ended up spending a whopping nine hours walking (although this included breaks), rather than the six we were meant to; this was mainly attributed to not having a clear goal (we were walking a circuit, rather than a linear point-to-point route), this became evident when on the second day we had a much clearer destination (heading back to the school, from the campsite), so travelled far faster than expected.

Certain aspects of the trek were enjoyable - mostly the bits where we weren’t walking, such as cooking our food and sitting around the camp fire together - but overall I found the weekend fairly melancholic, perhaps attributed to the sheer amount of time spent walking. The practise was much more fun in terms of the activities we did, but this time the two supervising teachers were limited as to how involved they could get. Another factor was the landscape, on both days it felt as if we were travelling through field after field, and the views themselves weren’t remarkable.

The award has been quite a mission for me, I found it difficult to find things to do for my skill and service, and in the end my chronic hayfever got the better of me. It would be nice to do the silver award, but I’m not strong enough emotionally to undertake such a long and draining task again. I enjoy camping, but clearly this is not for me.

Tomalak Geret'kal (tomalak): Unhelpful Snub

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:22:47 +0000

So according to this story, a Swedish school kid invited everyone bar two classmates to his birthday party, and the parents of the omitted children complained to the national parliament, citing "discrimination". Eh?!

As far as I know there isn't a law against not inviting people to one's birthday party, and if there is there shouldn't be. I thought Sweden was supposed to be good with legal common sensibilities?

Yes, it must be difficult for the two children who were the only ones in the class not to receive an invitation, but they might have thought about that before doing the same to start with (in the case of the first child) and having a fight with the birthday boy to be (in the case of the second).

Being left out and seeing ramnifications of one's arguments is part and parcel of life, and school ought to be teaching this. Instead, this Swedish school seems more interested in teaching children to abuse the claim of "rights" and to cry foul whenever life rolls them the hard six.

A sorry state of affairs to be sure.

Tomalak Geret'kal (tomalak): Neutral Media Please

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 03:31:48 +0000

The BBC has published a few striking images of people with the oft-mentioned disease known as leprosy. See, in particular, the comment on picture 4.

The majority of those living in Mutemwa today contracted leprosy before treatment existed, though many cultures still mistakenly view leprosy as a punishment from a god or evil spirit.

My own personal views aside, what right does the BBC have to call this view "mistaken"? Neutral public media my ass…

Alan Pope (popey): Ubuntu UK Podcast Episode 8 Out Now

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:14:32 +0000

Alan Pope, Dave Walker, Tony Whitmore and Ciemon Dunville present the eighth episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast.

In this episode:-

The last of our interviews from the Ubuntu Developer Summit:
- Matt Oquist talks about Software Freedom Day
- KDE contributor Celeste Lyn Paul talks in depth about human-computer interaction (HCI) and enlightens us on the (KDE) human interface guidelines.
- Utahs best export, Mike Basinger talks about his passion for the Ubuntu Forums, and his calming influence on the Ubuntu Community Council.
- A very informative interview with Kurt von Finck about the Canonical Support operation, where to get the best deal on Ubuntu support and some stories from the trenches.
- An interview with the "King of Bling", Mirco "MacSlow" Müller talks about lowfat, GDM, face browser, cheese, memaker, clutter, avant window navigator, mpx in xorg.
Competition
- We set a new competition, which will end on the 12th July. (we have extended the competition due to this episode being late).

Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc

Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror): Aikido

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 05:39:54 +0000

I've finally returned to Aikido, I've found a great dojo with really friendly people. I've trained about 8 hours this week. I'd forgotten how alive I felt after class, hopefully I won't let myself forget again.

Robert Leverington (RobertL): I would like to apologise

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:03:59 +0000

A while ago I posted about the Apple iPhone 3G and how disappointed I was with it. Well, it seams that various facts were overlooked by me. It turns out that O₂ will be releasing a “Pay and Go” package for the iPhone, this means that many of the issues are no longer true. One thing that I will be looking forward to hearing about are the costs, while I am aware of the prices being dramatically reduced in the US, I wonder if such a price drop will be experienced here in the UK - and if it will be equally great.

Once again, my sincerest apologies for coming to an opinion without knowing all the facts; thank you Apple and O₂ for making this wise decision.

Andy Loughran (andylockran): GPG as Identity Management

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:34:22 +0000

It’s quite nice how people can see that all my different email addresses can be linked via a gpg key. If you deal with me through this blog, you can see the companies I work for, and vice versa.

I like that.

pidgin bloggg (taras): Scratched discs

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:34:40 +0000

If you sent a scratched DVD back to the manufacturer, asking for a replacement, would they give it to you? They should do, perhaps offering it for a nominal charge (the cost of copying or pressing it). If they refuse to, you could say “I thought that by buying the disc, I was leasing the right to watch the contents?” - they couldn’t say “no, you were buying the contents”, because then you could claim ownership of the material. But if they didn’t replace the disc, they’d be denying you the right to watch what you paid for. It’s a dilemma within a mystery.