Can you hear me now?

Pesky xulrunner

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Tue, 29 May 2012 16:21:00 +0000

Thanks to this forum entry I found a solution to xulrunner-1.9.2 complaining that,

/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.28/xulrunner-bin: /usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/cmov/libssl3.so: version `NSS_3.12.6' not found (required by /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.28/libxul.so)

sudo apt-get remove --purge  xulrunner-1.9.2

Baby Food why buy it?

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Fri, 25 May 2012 10:41:00 +0000

So that happened to turn up in conversation. I wanted to try some human cheese, but it turns out that just as some people are taller than others, some women produce milk for longer after giving birth than others. As one of the many helpful aspects of society, it is possible for one woman to donate milk to another, (in some countries.) It turns out that this is hardly new, with wet-nursing having happened for a while, and even in my family in the last generation. So if any humans had spare milk that could be turned into cheese, then they really ought to be donating it, as I do with blood, (my own, I don't just give away anyone's.)

So the meme seems to be "breast feed as long as you can, and if you have to stop then no one is judging you." Personally I am in favour of breast feeding, but I guess I can step aside and give the little ones a fair chance. Actually I would rather see a baby being breast fed in public than have to watch almost any adult eat. Babies have no compulsion about food going in or coming out; Adults seem to have given up the Roman communal crappers, "hey can you pass me the moss_stick? I'm in the middle of blogging." so why don't they eat in little windowless rooms?

Jokes and rant over. I've been making baby food. Is is organic? Don't get me started, (that rant lives in another blog.) I am not a nutritionist or an expert so this is "try at your own risk/ask a Medical Doctor" situation.

It is so simple, (once you try the "progressive" (it is not) GFCD-50 food prep machine, break it, throw it out and buy a small electric food processor.) I ended up using a "Universal Electric Chopper" from Bifinett, (but I would suggest buying the cheapest professional food processor that you can get.) I think that Bifinett designed the little red device to chop basil into pesto, but I have put the two blades through beef, salmon, potatoes, pasta, and various green vegetables. I thought that it was designed to just chop, and it does that very well, but if you want purée, (baby food paste/mash) then it just takes a few more seconds, (no really 20-30 seconds and you are done!)

So what is my secret ingredients?

50 g of what ever meat that I am eating,
50 g any green vegetable or well cooked orange vegetable,
50 g of potato or pasta,
If you have it then 1 table spoon of (powdered) milk can help
0-50g H²O yup, just tap water.

I was worried that my little machine wasn't up to the job because things on the inside seemed to be moving too slowly. After unplugging and poking with a tiny rubber spatula I found that nothing could hide.
[ That was when I realised that the two blades turn the mixture into a dynamic flattened spiralling torus, but that has nothing to do with my point.]

Why green vegetables? It is all going to be turned into mush so why not add some bell peppers? Because I find that the skin is a little tough on the digestion, (as seen later, like grape skins.)
Courgettes are a perfect example. Peal them, boil them, and drop them into the mix. The 50:50:50 ratio seems to work out well and if it turns out a little thick then just chuck in a little water and zap it again, (you might like to boil the water first unless you are going to cook the mush later and are lazy.)

I would like to take a break to thank our sponsors and recommend that you look at the Nisbets website, (like the toyshop for chefs). [...and if Nisbets get enough referrals maybe my sponsors joke could become reality - you guys are great.] I have been buying from them for years and have yet to have a problem with a single product. (See my "Best kitchen grater ever!" post for more info.)

So where was I? Oh yes, "Where do I find the time?" Simple - just find one evening a month when there isn't anything on TV and play at cooking! (This plan was so good that I got rid of the TV and do awesome every night; I am happily uniformed rather than misinformed.) Try mixing and matching what ever you have in the freezer/garden. Here are a few of my recommendations:

Fried beefburger patty : boiled, (and then skinned) potato : peeled and boiled courgette
Smoked salmon off cuts from the bargain section of the shop : more potato : frozen spinach
Cooked ham : left over pasta that no one finished : broccoli purée from the freezer

I even managed an English breakfast version with bacon, potato, mushrooms and plum-tomatoes.

I like to take the frozen things out a few hours before so that I don't have to waste time or energy defrosting - this is the thing that I'm worst at remembering, but when I do I feel illogically happy that I'm postponing the heat death of the Universe, (rather than just saving on the oil/gas/electricity bill.)

This might sound a big commitment, but with the miracle of small plastic bags, (or any small food box type thing that you have); a scales; and a freezer once a month is all you need, (though it is so much fun you might just do it each morning, if you have the time.)

If you want to get serious then you can collect jars that have screw on lids with that button in the middle that you can only press once they have been opened. put the jars and lids into boiling water and then dry the jars in a medium oven, (don't drop the hot jars; The only thing worse then picking up broken glass is picking up hot broken glass.) Fill, (and I really do mean fill) the cooling jars with you latest creation while it is still hot, (I don't mean trendy, above 90 degrees Celsius type hot); add the lid by hand and then turn them upside down. If you have done it right, as they cool the button will be sucked in and then you can just store them in a dark cupboard or room. Try to use them so that you aren't using anything that is more than a year old, (but I had one from my 2005 vintage - seven years old - two days ago, and it was fine.)

What if your audience has a broader pallet or needs food to match their silly name or the media expectations of their ludicrous parents. Just add one pitted olive. Or two slices of gherkin. A few grams of freshly fried onions. A teaspoon of Bisto gravy granules. A gram of honey and three drops of lemon juice on the salmon.
Don't go crazy - less is definitely more in this case, but search for flavours that you might not expect and add them in quantities so that your audience just can't quite tell what you have added.

If you happen to be a food processor designer, (processor professor?) then can I suggest that you always leave all of the metal in the blade spindle and none of it in the bowl - that way I can just chuck the bowl, (with or without its lit) straight into the microwave. Those of you that think that "microwaves are going to kill mankind by subtly altering our chi or energy body through the food that we eat until we are all sterile or something" can just put the mush into a pan or really show off by using a bain-marie.

So why the baby food? Have I recently been struck with the most human of afflictions? Nope - just needed something easy to eat when I had my wisdom teeth out and I've been making it every since for fun.
Over the years I have found lots of uses for it, (spread for toast or sandwich filler; people with delicate stomachs; "instant" soup; baby food; [your idea here].)

If you find a magic recipe that we all need to try then please report it in the comments below.

With just a little planning all your food can be fast and cheap and last.

Use http://convergence.io/

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Sat, 19 May 2012 11:56:00 +0000

I feel that I should port this Firefox add-on to Google Chrome, but I don't have time right now, (and secretly hope that someone else will do that... right... about...)

So, use http://convergence.io/

Hugs and kisses,

Just another Moxie-fan-boy

p.s. If you are an ISP then you should run a convergence server just as you would run a DNS server.

Mount .iso image on XP or Vista

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Sat, 19 May 2012 11:53:00 +0000

So you end up with an iso image on a USB falsh drive. You don't have any blank CDs, (remember those?) and you have a program that throws a tantrum if it can't see its parent disk, (even if all the data is now on your hard-disk.)

There are probably a few solutions, but for me ImDisk wins.

Given away by the very cool Olof Lagerkvist, (I have not had the pleasure of thanking him in person... yet.)
No corporate cruft, (no pop-ups, no "look at how cool I am" in fact that threw me for a few seconds when nothing turned up in the Programs Folder or the start menu: Just install and then right-click on your iso image to mount it.
Did I mention how attractive all the Swedish people, (that I've met) are?

It just feels like this guy knows what he is doing; does it well and does not look for the credit. What a balanced human, (compared to some needy software, yes Adobe, HP, ${all anti-virus other than ClanWin} I am looking at you.. but I don't want to and that is my point here - you should be there for me, not the other way round!)

Lockin vs locked in

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:20:00 +0000

I remember the first time, well before I was old enough to be invited, that someone explained the concept of a lock-in. This is where the locking of a door converts a licensed public drinking establishment into a private venue.
This seemed like a moment of heaven, to my imagination. Then I thought about being locked-in to software; Either because it has market share or because it has "tracksion", (where tracksion is that magical awareness that everyone has that "that one is better" - an example would be firefox. See, firefox has tracksion, but not being a vehicle is does not have traction.)
I've started to feel a little locked-in with Ubuntu. I though that I would give up... until I tried 12.04. I admit that it took me a day to get used to, and this post is a list of the things that I found that could have helped me get through that faster.

Do not fear the changes: Unity integrates things. This means that while using firefox, (obviously) the <title> of the page is loaded into the top bar. This threw me more than I expected. The thing that I really missed was being able to right click on the bar and add things, (I like to have my system-load-indicator.) So I opened, "Ubuntu Software Centre", (which, along with Google Play seems far too frivilous and scary at the same time - I sort-of trusted yum and apt-get but my paranoid "something sinister" alarm goes off when something looks too inviting. I'm sure someone has taken the GP logo and changed it to "Google Pay".) That said, System Load Indicator was easy to install and complies with my own desire for as many things as possible to be optional.
The few things that have been dropped from 12.04 CAN still be installed - for example: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+package/aircrack-ng might be helpful. If you can only find an .rpm then grab that and run

sudo alien blah.rpm

to get the .deb that you need.

bonzini gave a very good walk-thu of how to resize the launcher icons, and along with ubuntu-tweak I was able to set up the OS how I wanted it, and

 gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.session suppress-logout-restart-shutdown true

Will disable the shutdown, restart or logout confirmation prompt.

I find the windows in Unity a real pain to resize, (the mouse pointer never seems to find the magic location in the corner), thankfully, while searching the blogs I found, (sorry, can't remember where) that:

"Alt + middle-click will resize windows"
which goes nicely with what I already new that,
"Alt + left-click will grab any window and let you move it." Which I use automatically now. This just goes to reinforce me belief that learning one short-cut a day will drastically improve your computing experience.

I had a bit of a problem getting wireless to work, but

  aptitude install miredo wpasupplicant 

seems to have fixed that for now. Once firefox sync had installed http://convergence.io/ for me and I got my backups down from the cloud everything was ready to get back to work... which is where I should be now.

[Update]
I noticed that tab completion of

ls ~alexx

produced

"ls /home/alexx " (notice the trailing space.)

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to find the solution via blog/forums.

"editing /etc/bash_completion line 1587, change default to filenames "

[Update]
I'm still having wireless network stability issues, (packet throughput drops to zero, even for icmp to the first hop, i.e. my base-station/router), even though:

watch "iwconfig wlan0; ifconfig wlan0"

still shows a connection:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"home"
          Mode:Managed Frequency:2.432 GHz Access Point: 00:1D:BA:06:37:64
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
          Retry long limit:7   RTS thr=2347 B   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=65/70 Signal level=-45 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:32111   Missed beacon:0

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:be:ef:be:ef:01
          inet addr:10.10.10.2 Bcast:10.10.10.255 Mask:255.255.0.0
          inet6 addr: 2001:DB8::1/32 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:1519072 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1566529 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:1520004007 (1.5 GB) TX bytes:299019413 (299.0 MB)

I'm trying:

sudo echo "net.core.rmem_max=4194304\nnet.core.wmem_max=1048576" >> /etc/sysctl.conf

in the hope that this might help.

Upgrade now!

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Sat, 12 May 2012 08:53:00 +0000

There is an old Unix saying: Do one thing and do it well.

I was at a friends house when they asked me, "Its asking me if I want to upgrade?" So I looked at the alert. It was a bittorrent client and it said something like:

New version 3.1.3, (you have 3.1.2):

Built-in HD media player
Stability improvements
Anti-virus

I expect that most people would think that this sounds like three good reasons to upgrade. I can see that it is two reasons NOT to "upgrade" and stability that is improved, (bug fixes) will probably pale in comparison to this client trying to muscle into two alien arenas.

Yes I can see why they are doing it. Yes I can even see the connections but they should NOT. If they have to justify their existence with "More! because MORE" then they should write optional Modules.

I do not care how good the HD media player is - VLC and mplayer have spent decades of man-hours creating really good products, (and they are free). ClamWin is a perfectly acceptable anti-virus. In both of these arenas there are lots of opensource groups that would be willing to let their program accept API calls from another program, (or already do.)

If you want to improve your product then fix the bugs. If you want to use your market position to offer other functions or services, then create optional modules. I still do not know why, the moment that a piece of software starts to be developed in a corporate way it becomes bloated with features that I DO NOT want.

So thanks to this there is another Transmission users.

Where do we go from here?

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:50:00 +0000

Additional legislation will only force the creation of dark-nets, (private encrypted virtual networks). The reason that all the legislation is futile is that, right now the cryptographers are winning in the fight against the cryptanalysts.
The UK blocks thepiratebay and within hours there are proxy portals all over the Internet. Even if all of those were blocked then it would be possible to tunnel, (openVPN, openSSH, freeSwan) using free software, and even if those are hard for the average user to apply, by passing laws that criminalise the average citizen/netizen it only encourages the more talented programmers to facilitate the use of these existing protocols.
Old media, just like the old post colonial societies are caught up in a revolution that is beyond their control, and thought we can not predict exactly how the future is going to be, I know that I want it to be a friendlier place to live with fewer laws and more sharing.

p.s. The next big thing will be centralised encrypted personal medical records. Locked using ssh keys and accessible through to a quorum of relatives using their own keys and Shamir's Secret Sharing.

Ubuntu update killed my laptop

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 15:41:00 +0000

[SOLVED] open a terminal and paste in the following lines, (works if you still have the 2.6.31-14 kernel)

sudo su -
kern_img=$(grep 2.6.31-14 /boot/grub/grub.cfg |grep menuentry|grep -v recovery|sed -e "s/' .*/'/" -e 's/menuentry //')
sed -i "s/GRUB_DEFAULT.*/GRUB_DEFAULT=$kern_img/" /etc/default/grub
grep 2.6.31-14 /etc/default/grub || sed -i "s/GRUB_DEFAULT.*/GRUB_DEFAULT=0/" /etc/default/grub
update-grub
reboot

[/SOLVED]

This entry seemed to be getting a lot of hits so I've added a very quick-n-dirty hack that solved the problem for me. If you do not have the 2.6.31-14 kernel installed then try booting into another kernel that isn't the 2.6.32-39-generic provided by Ubuntu

The story starts, (and ends) here:

It finally happened to me; my Ubuntu luck ran out: I noticed that the update-manager had turned up last night, so I set it going and went to sleep. The next morning it prompted me for a reboot, which I did and now my laptop is broken. (I'm deliberately being vague because this is how it would appear to a normal user.)

So what happened? synaptic tells me that the following happened:
adobe-flash-properties-gtk (11.1.102.62-0lucid1) to 11.1.102.63-0lucid1

adobe-flashplugin (11.1.102.62-0lucid1) to 11.1.102.63-0lucid1
chromium-browser (17.0.963.56~r121963-0ubuntu0.10.04.1) to 17.0.963.65~r124586-0ubuntu0.10.04.1
chromium-browser-l10n (17.0.963.56~r121963-0ubuntu0.10.04.1) to 17.0.963.65~r124586-0ubuntu0.10.04.1
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg (17.0.963.56~r121963-0ubuntu0.10.04.1) to 17.0.963.65~r124586-0ubuntu0.10.04.1
<consolekit (0.4.1-3ubuntu2) to 0.4.1-3ubuntu3
libc-bin (2.11.1-0ubuntu7.8) to 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.10
libc-dev-bin (2.11.1-0ubuntu7.8) to 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.10
libc6 (2.11.1-0ubuntu7.8) to 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.10
libc6-dev (2.11.1-0ubuntu7.8) to 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.10
libc6-i686 (2.11.1-0ubuntu7.8) to 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.10
libck-connector0 (0.4.1-3ubuntu2) to 0.4.1-3ubuntu3
libpam-ck-connector (0.4.1-3ubuntu2) to 0.4.1-3ubuntu3
<linux-generic (2.6.32.38.44) to 2.6.32.39.46
linux-headers-generic (2.6.32.38.44) to 2.6.32.39.46
linux-image-generic (2.6.32.38.44) to 2.6.32.39.46
linux-libc-dev (2.6.32-38.83) to 2.6.32-39.86
python-pam (0.4.2-12.1ubuntu1) to 0.4.2-12.1ubuntu1.10.04.1
tzdata (2011n-0ubuntu0.10.04) to 2012b-0ubuntu0.10.04
tzdata-java (2011n-0ubuntu0.10.04) to 2012b-0ubuntu0.10.04

Installed the following packages:
linux-headers-2.6.32-39 (2.6.32-39.86)
linux-headers-2.6.32-39-generic (2.6.32-39.86)
linux-image-2.6.32-39-generic (2.6.32-39.86)

So what are the symptoms? VLC has turned into a slide-show. smplayer has turned into an audio player and totem is even worse than normal. chromium-browser is slow, runs between 90 and 100% CPU. top tells me that 0k of swap is being used and I have 549880k free RAM. I'm having to use Epiphany and links, (text browser) to search for solutions. So the first thing that I wanted to rule out was chromium as the problem, (it didn't feel like the problem, and VLC developing problems after an upgrade that did not change any of the VLC files seems to confirm this.) So I tried Firefox (10.04.4) and sure enough that was much slower than yesterday and flash video was like watching a slide-show, (though I note that the audio was fine... until firefox crashed!) I uninstalled firefox 10.04.4 and tried to install firefox-3.6. That didn't seem to work so I tried Opera, (which I had installed.) It was a little better but still flash was unusable.

It is at this point where my heart sunk as I realised that I would be spending my weekend fixing my laptop, (and probably installing a new distro.) I feel that Ubuntu has let the side down enough that I should look for something else, (even though this time I think it is libc.) update-manager already knows how much disk space will be consumed by the update. It may take some work but it should be possible for update-manager to check the power of a computer and not upgrade if it is going to burn the CPU too hot. (This would require the beta testers to compare the CPU/RAM usage.) But the simplest solution would be a rollback button, (and for those pedantic-types you can call it an "undo-update" button.)

Before I do that I would like to find a faster solution, (apt-get rollback-upgrade would be perfect, but it does not exist.)

So lets reboot into an older linux-image (or "try an older kernel" as I would put it.) Still the same problems. So is it a problem with adobe-flashplugin or libc, (agh). Lets go for the soft option of:

aptitude remove adobe-flash-properties-gtk* adobe-flashplugin*

aptitude install flashplugin-installer

then see where we are... Firefox is still crashing and flash video is still a slide-show, (and I've noticed that NetworkManager has vanished from my Panels bar, rhythmbox no longer minimises to the bar, (or even has an icon on the bar when running), and the keyboard short-cut for terminal has been deleted, (what? I use that every day. Come ON ubuntu why remove that without any warning?)

[got the networkManager and rhythmbox icon back with: Right click bar > +Add to panel > Notification area]

Maybe preload and openbox can get me out of this mess: nice try but nope, (though I think I would like openbox were I not in the middle of fixing a broken laptop.)

So it feels like everything is burning CPU - so maybe libc has some sort of debug mode enabled. I still don't know if it is a problem with gnome 2.30.2 or ubuntu 10.04.4 or libc. Maybe it is a problem with apparmor:

aptitude remove apparmor-utils apparmor -y; reboot

we will see on the other side.. still nope

maybe ubuntu has broken cpu frequency scaling:

aptitude install cpufrequtils cpufreqd -y

and... we have a winner, (two hours later, after searching blogs and logs and checking the BIOS for speedstep (I have a Centrino Duo and SpeedStep was enabled)), I booted into 2.6.31-14 and I have a working laptop. (Still have to see if it was all the hacking about or the kernel before submitting a kernel bug report to launchpad.)

With all this time burnt on trying to fix CPU stepping I still don't know which distro to move to.. maybe back to Slackware?

Personal Currency

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Creating a virtual Currency

A few years ago I created a virtual currency. The unit of currency was the Favour, with 100 Favours to a Blessing. Each member of the community was issued with 10 Favours on the 20th of March, (this was actually for a company.) The company was growing, (number of staff) at about 10%, and the central bank was automated, but effectively was the board of directors.

So what was being traded? Shifts, holidays, cover, lunch, (so mostly time but also expertise.) This all seemed fine but controlling the supply of money was broken. Once someone had spent their Favours how did they acquire more. How were Favours used by those that amassed them. Those that ended up with the largest collection of Favours tended to be the same people that did not need to spend them.

Each shift had a value in Favours and could be traded. So who sets the price?

The money supply

If more Favours were issued then the value of the Favours in the market would drop.
The first solution was to enable any person, (not even members of staff but customers and suppliers) to be able to purchase Favours. The interesting thing was that being all digital it was possible for someone to individually price their Favours and even price them depending on who was buying. This meant that the central bank did not have to sell money for there to be a supply.

Why stop at one currency?

At the end of the day all money, after some exchange rate, is the value of a good or service. Many goods are fungible, (one apple is the same as another from the same tree.) Ever service has a skill level, and the higher the skill level the more specialised the server has to be. Even those with expert level can provide two very different services, (two master cooks can both provide a meal, but one may clean-as-they-go and the other may leave the kitchen a mess.) This leads to skill groups that collect or join associated skills. Each of us can learn more each day, but there are only 24 hours in a day. This means that our time has a value. If we work twenty hours a day for seven days then our service quality, (for most people) will drop as sleep has a value.

Personal Currency

This lead to Personal Currency. Each person could sell their currency at any price that they wanted, and link it to a service. The only egalitarian unit is the Babylonian second.
So my personal currency for general computer work would be 10 seconds per second. This gives a velocity. (10s/s). The greater the velocity the greater the rate at which I will accomplish the task. So my personal currency for interior decorating should be 0.01s/s, (because I have no talent for it) but is actually 100s/s because I have no interest in that work. (Everyone has a price; For everything!)

Skill compatibility

So imagine two people, (Alice and Bob) that can both walk-a-dog or baby-sit or write-a-computer program. Alice programs in Scala, c and Python. Bob programs in Scala, c++ and Perl. Bob likes dog-walking and does not like baby-sitting. Alice prefers baby-sitting but does not mind dog-walking.

So we want someone to walk our dog. Who do we pick? Alice or Bob can walk-a-dog and so mostly we go for the person that charges less, (lets leave out personal relationships because that gets complicated quickly.)

Now we want someone to debug a function to our existing company program. It is written in c. Bob charges less for c++ than Alice charges, and though they are not the same language, Bob can probably find the bug for us.

Now we need a new function writing in Scala. Who do we pick?

These examples show that each person needs to be able to enter a skill and those shopping need to be able to know what level they are at. This is where peer review comes in.

Bob enters his skill and the level that he thinks that he is at. Alice works in the same department and works with Bob for a few years. She can comment on Bob's Scala work, but really, as a potential customer I just want a number, but we need a fuzzy match against skills themselves.

Now we need something translating into Latin. Both Alice and Bob did Latin at school and Bob got grade A- and Alice for B+. That was ten years ago and since then Alice has become a member of a group that meets once a month and spends the whole evening only speaking in Latin. Bob has not used his Latin at all.

Is it written language or spoken language?

There are many variables to take into account and they change with time. Imagine searching for the right person in an open market. Either the system has to be very good at fuzzy matching needs to skills or the person searching has to know the equivalence of Scala and Java.

Customer review

If a customer gives Bob a bad review then how should that impact his score? It depends on the customers own skill level and interests. If the customer is Alice's half-sister Anne and Anne thinks that she is helping Alice by giving her "competitor" a negative review then we should reduce the impact of Anne's view. But Anne and Alice do not have the same last name so matching people to families is not automatic, (we don't have the computing power for DNA comparisons.)

Your desktop computer breaks. Everyone knows someone that is, "a whizz with computers." In my experience that can be anything from, better-than-the-person-making-the-claim all the way up to the likes of Moxie and Shevek.

[ I once had a boiler installed by a master-plumber and he had two men working with him. The master was clearly competent, but the attention to detail of the other two
even though they were sticking to tasks well within their skill set, was terrible. The next factor was the breaking of a verbal contract. I had negotiated with the salesman that the plumbers would install a new dishwasher at the same time. (I had the dishwasher delivered the day before so it was ready.) I explained that had it been simply a matter of connecting to existing pipes I would have done it myself, and he assured me that it would not be a problem - he said that it would be included in the original quote. Once the boiler was installed I was given the, "the dishwasher isn't on the docket" argument and
immediately a passable relationship went sour. I can clearly rate all four people and give another rating for the company as a whole, "Avoid!" and a sixth for the on-site team, "Shoddy." (I've since had two plumbers in to fix the job.)
This little anecdote is here to demonstrate that reviewing is a skill in itself. Had this happened to someone else, (as I'm sure it has) then one review could taint the skills of the master-plumber, who was perfectly good at joining two copper pipes. ]

The solution that I came up with was weighting the reviews based on the relative skill level of the reviewer. (Then the reviews needed to be weighted by a, "was this helpful" vote.)

This highlights what I have been arguing for years, that practical experience, (phronesis) is far more important than theoretical knowledge, (episteme). In the end the customer should not be interested in which school taught you the skill or the grade that you achieved at the time, but your present skill level, (techne) and the quality of your work, (arete-eunoia).

Skill Levels

We could define skill levels into some standard, but with two people both being competent we might need some greater granularity.

Ignorant
Know about, ("heard of" level.)
Novice
Beginner
Competent
- 4.1 Level I Bob 2001, Alice 1999
- 4.2 Level II Bob 2003, Alice 2010
Proficient
Expert

This is where an Elo rating system comes in. ERS is a relative ranking system invented for chess, (but used for any competitive sporting event from weichi-go to racing-car drivers.) How much better than me is the worlds top chess player? Easy: today Magnus Carlsen is 2835 and I am 1678. So 1157 Elo better. Now I could charge half as much as him for chess lessons, but he might be too busy with tournaments to teach, or you might be Swedish and he might, for Norwegian nationalistic reasons, refuse to teach you. If we were talking about painting your house then location and geographical factors come into play, (less so with chess which can be taught over the Internet via web-cam.)

The second half to this is wisdom vs knowledge vs smarts. Knowledge, as I see it, covers a subject, (e.g. trees.) You can know the names and germination and have read all sorts of things. Wisdom is more general, and could cover cultivation and farming. Smarts are much finer: Do you have extensive experience designing, planning, implementing and managing a commercial forest? These would not be the same smarts as a forest ranger even though the two may have broadly overlapping knowledge and roughly overlapping wisdom.

I am a computer professional

Probably not. A professional has to be accredited with a governing body. This would include medical doctors, accountants, lawyers, (obviously there are many more.)

(Certainly lawyers know that time == money with their billable hours.)

All of the people that I know that work in computing, (even if they are qualified professionals in other fields) are computer artisans. Even with qualifications, there is no guarantee of talent, beyond the ability to pass an exam.

A solution for Earth

This works on a small scale: Everyone one knows how good everyone else is at each task, or can estimate how good they would be at any given task. How do we

Scale this up to the whole planet
Ensure the security of the system cryptographically
Create it such that it is distributed, but seamlessly interlocking.
As portable as a mobile phone but without the risks

(A PGP key can have an image of the owner embedded in it. Want a new image? Create a new key, add the image and sign it using your old key. Then revoke the old key. All of this can be done publicly, and with no more computing power than is found in a mobile phone.)

Traditionally the system was word-of-mouth. Then it became curriculum vitae, anchored with references. This might have worked for an industrial age, but the future will require something a little better, (unless some form of telepathy is achieved.)

So it might be true that time = money, but as a potential customer I would like to know the probable quality of work before I look in my wallet or at my watch.

This post is dedicated to people with the smarts, like today's birthday boy.

Perl Interview questions

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:11:00 +0000

I had this one thrown at me:

What is the difference between -
perl -e '$n=1234; if($n=~m/^(\d)*$/){print $1;}'
and
perl -e '$n=1234; if($n=~m/^(\d+)$/){print $1;}'

Thankfully I got it right, (I leave marks when I kick myself.)

Comics as an entertainment medium

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:19:00 +0000

I think it was Neil Gaiman that absolved me of my guilt in reading comics.

He described a social encounter where someone asked him what he did for a living. He recounted that he said that he wrote comics. The recipient of this statement seemed nonplussed until they heard that he wrote The Sandman, at which point they lit up and branded Gaiman, (in a supportive way) a graphic novelist. I can see why it might seem funny that the same content bound differently could produce such a different attitude, but the dynamics of pigeonholing information and individuals is a natural part of how our brains process and map out information. (Though Neil probably knows this and was just providing amusing filler for interviews.)

After that moment I gleefully consumed Serenity Rose and Daniel Schaffer's dogwitch
right alongside Good Omens, (all of which are in my, "If I could un-remember them I would, just so that I could enjoy reading them for the first time again" list. )

I noticed, long after the fact, the Infinity crisis arc over in DC land. I bought a few of them, and though I can see a lot of work has gone into them, (I might even go as far as to say that as an event it is a worthy effort), but I did not connect with them. This feels more like a, "gather ye rose-buds while ye may" rather than a failing on the part of DC and the artistic talents of its staff. I think that I have finally grown out of comics, (with a few exceptions.)

Contact Lenses

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:44:00 +0000

Quick tip: If it feels like they are made of rubber or that they are catching on the inside of your eye-lid then they are probably backwards.

Adverts and crosswords

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:31:00 +0000

Near the start of the 1990ies B&H had a poster advert campaign in England, (possibly the UK,) that consisted of a crossword clue and an image that combined the clue with the answer. I had just started to try cryptic crosswords and found them rather easy. My driving instructor seemed to also enjoy them. (I don't recall anyone in my life liking the product.)

This entry is to collect all of them together, as I find them:

EASY TO CRACK? (6,4)
GOODBYE GRINGO? (7,4)
NIPPIN' PIPPINS? (4,6)
MUSIC TO SCOTTISH EARS? (8)
LEAN ON ME? (7,5)
DEFT THEFT? (5,8)
CITY SHRUBS? (8,6)
PERFORMING ON THE VILLAGE GREEN? (7,7)

A description of the image

A gorilla made of bolt fastenings holding a wrench
Hokusai's Great ocean picture with the water made from sombreros
A tree with non-lobster crustacean fruit.
A green valise with extraneous plumbing attached
A stick insect
A glowing hand taking an object from an overcoat
A white forest
A grasshopper playing the flute

Answer, (or so I think)

Monkey nuts
Mexican wave
Crab apples
Bagpipes
Walking stick
Light fingered
Concrete jungle
Playing cricket

Do you have a favourite cryptic crossword puzzle?
Mine would probably be:
hijklmno? (5)

Oranjeboom advert search

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:22:00 +0000

Most of my life I have detested beer, (though in the past few years my pallet has accepted Lindemans Faro Lambic and La Bécasse kriek cerise, (cherry).) So it might seem odd for me to be talking about beer.

I remember, many years ago, being on a red number 22 Routmaster double-decker bus in London. There were Oranjeboom adverts. At the time I thought that they were meant to sound like someone who had drunk too much of their product, but later I discovered that it was Dutch, (sorry my cloggies.)

This was all B.I. (Before Internet) and B.D.C. (before digital cameras) so an image search does not turn up useful hits for these adverts, that I seek.

I have found a few dark corners of the Internet where this topic is discussed, but the majority of the blag in the blogs is about the previous television ad-campaign, (the one with the song, "Oranjeboom, Oranjeboom, It’s a flavour not a tune"). The one I'm looking for was a print campaign on both the London Underground and the buses.

"Oer dier! U heeft juist mist de laatst trein reden dis postuur. Oranjeboom."

Is the closest that I have come to finding any quotes.

So the logical search, (after the Internet fails) is, find out who got paid, (Gibbs rule #0: Follow the money).

London Regional Transport, (the Tube and bus people, back then.)
The advertising agency that came up with the concept, and
the company that printed the adverts.
There is also the option of contacting the brewery.

Since then the brewery has been bought and sold and moved and bought some more. ( If you have ever moved house you will know how much you throw out and how much can be lost in the move.) I doubt that it would be easy to find their original records, (but still worth asking.) CBS Outdoor might have a record, (or have acquired the company that did) but again they are not a public library.

This leaves two options for comments, (there has to be someone who worked on the project that made a note of the phrases, or someone who has kept a copy.)

Those that can shed light on the campaign, (preferably verbatim copy or contacts that would be able to locate the words in the adverts.)
Dutch people that want to create new versions, (though I'm loathed to verbify it: Orangebooming anyone?) [I suppose you could try other languages as well.]

If you can add either a type 1 or type 2 comment then please do. It would be nice to get them all back together.

Numberphile

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:51:00 +0000

If you are like me then you will like http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart (squee! ♥)

and you will have seen Numberphile... which so far has not been as good as The Singing Banana, until today! (So I declare!)

For me today's episode of numberphile is as cool as I had been hoping they would be.
( I hope that they have just got into their stride.)

The previous episodes have been, for me, between so-so and hmmm, (so worth seeing, but not worth a thumbs up [0].)

If I had to do an episode then mine would be 15 and I would talk about black-hole numbers [1].

I wonder if they would let me pick 1234, but then talk about 1,2,3,4 and trying to create every number from [1..100] just using each of those digits once. i.e.

1+2+3+4 =10 (99 left to find),
(1+2)(3+4)=14 (98) left to find.

Many years ago my friend Shevek wrote, (in 3194 bytes of perl) a program that searched for all possibilities. Before that my friend Nico and I had found most of them by hand.

(If you get stuck then you can ask me for help.)

[0] It would be nice to have some granularity. Did I like the production; Did I like the relevance to what I was looking for? (Come on 'The Internet' not all of us are undergrads ;-)

[1] Recurse through { The sum of the divisors of a natural number } => 15

Monkey httpd

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:56:00 +0000

This weekend I tried monkey httpd. The short version: It rocks.
I had a little trouble getting it to server CGI (.php .pl .cgi .py .rb .bash) because the server that came with it, (written in python - bless their cotton socks) did not work for me.

If you want to use the script that I hacked together then feel free:

https://github.com/alexxroche/AIF/blob/master/scripts/perl/monkey-palm_0.1.pl

The big gotcha for me was "\r\n\r\n" rather than "\n\n". But once I tracked that down it was, (much like that reset of monkey-project) just as I expected, with everything where it should be and even painted the right colours!

I'm off to hack the auth plugin to make it read .htaccess and then I'm going to "uninstall", (yes, remove) apache.

(Then I'm going to port my little perl Net::Server script to native c.)

Buy my stuff

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:23:00 +0000

For those of you that would like to own an original design based on one of the many great quotes in my blog, (or my life): Now you can.

Munin about logarithmically

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:11:00 +0000

As you all know, I like to graph, (OK, being honest - I need to graph.) So when I create a nifty new plug-in to monitor the charge in my laptop battery, (acpi_volt) I was feeling rather smug. It uses

acpi -i

to find out two pieces of information. The first is how charged the batter is. (Somewhere between 0 and 100 percent.) The second, (and this is the science bit) is the design capacity in mAh, and the mAh at last full capacity. This is cool. We get two lines, one showing how much charge is left in the battery and another showing how much milk is left in the bottle. (I know that my laptop battery should not suffer from any memory effect or milk-bottle effect, but it does. I don't know what chemical fingers are responsible, but over the past three years the length of time that I can run it off the battery has dropped from about 90 minutes to about 20.)

So I click on the graph to see the day,week,month,year view and *gasp* no month graph.
I console myself that sometimes it takes a while for munin to have enough data in the rrd files to bother creating the month and year graphs. So I go to bed. The next day it has managed to create a year graph, but still no month graph.

I smile. I have been a sysadmin.

- this I know how to solve.

I start with the usual suspects, (file/dir permissions in /var/lib/munin and other munin locations specified in /etc/munin/munin.conf )

Nothing. I check that I can collect the data remotely, and that the acpi_volt.rrd files have valid data in them, (they do.)

hmm - I have never got this far with a munin problem. I guess we will have to go deeper.

su -s /bin/bash munin
munin@laptop:~$ /usr/share/munin/munin-graph --service acpi_volt --nolazy --list-images --month --noyear --noday --noweek

produces the expected output
/var/www/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-month.png

but it lies!

ls -la ls -la /var/www/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-month.png

ls: cannot access /var/www/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-month.png: No such file or directory

ok. how about adding --debug to the end of that

DEBUG: Expanding specials "volt0","volt1","".
DEBUG: Checking field lengths "volt0","volt1","".
DEBUG: Treating fields "volt0","volt1","".
DEBUG: Processing field "volt0".
DEBUG: single_value: Checking field "ARRAY(0x8a0ea38)".
DEBUG: Drawing field "volt0".
DEBUG: Processing field "volt1".
DEBUG: Drawing field "volt1".

rrdtool "graph" "--font"
"LEGEND:7:monospace"
"--font"
"UNIT:7:/usr/share/munin/VeraMono.ttf"
"--font"
"AXIS:7:/usr/share/munin/VeraMono.ttf"
"/var/www/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-month.png"
"--title"
"Voltages - by month"
"--start"
"-33d"
"--base"
"1000"
"--logarithmic"
"--vertical-label"
"Volt"
"--height"
"175"
"--width"
"400"
"--imgformat"
"PNG"
"DEF:gvolt0=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt0-g.rrd:42:AVERAGE"
"DEF:ivolt0=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt0-g.rrd:42:MIN"
"DEF:avolt0=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt0-g.rrd:42:MAX"
"CDEF:cvolt0=gvolt0"
"COMMENT: "
"COMMENT: Cur\:"
"COMMENT:Min\:"
"COMMENT:Avg\:"
"COMMENT:Max\: \j"
"LINE1.6:gvolt0#22ff22:Full "
"GPRINT:cvolt0:LAST:%6.2lf%s"
"GPRINT:ivolt0:MIN:%6.2lf%s"
"GPRINT:gvolt0:AVERAGE:%6.2lf%s"
"GPRINT:avolt0:MAX:%6.2lf%s\j"

"DEF:gvolt1=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt1-g.rrd:42:AVERAGE"
"DEF:ivolt1=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt1-g.rrd:42:MIN"
"DEF:avolt1=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt1-g.rrd:42:MAX"
"CDEF:cvolt1=gvolt1"
"LINE1.6:gvolt1#0022ff:capacity "
"GPRINT:cvolt1:LAST:%6.2lf%s"
"GPRINT:ivolt1:MIN:%6.2lf%s"
"GPRINT:gvolt1:AVERAGE:%6.2lf%s"
"GPRINT:avolt1:MAX:%6.2lf%s\j"
"COMMENT:Last update\: Fri Jan 27 16\:45\:03 2012\r"
"--end"
"1327672800"

hmm, that all looks ok. Lets take a closer look at the data:

rrdtool info /var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt0-g.rrd
rrdtool info /var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt1-g.rrd

rrd_version = "0003"
step = 300
last_update = 1327685404
ds[42].type = "GAUGE"
ds[42].minimal_heartbeat = 600
ds[42].min = NaN
ds[42].max = NaN
ds[42].last_ds = "100"
ds[42].value = 4.0290790000e+02
ds[42].unknown_sec = 0
rra[0].cf = "AVERAGE"
rra[0].rows = 576
rra[0].cur_row = 88
rra[0].pdp_per_row = 1
rra[0].xff = 5.0000000000e-01
rra[0].cdp_prep[0].value = NaN
rra[0].cdp_prep[0].unknown_datapoints = 0
rra[1].cf = "MIN"
rra[1].rows = 576
rra[1].cur_row = 197
rra[1].pdp_per_row = 1
rra[1].xff = 5.0000000000e-01
rra[1].cdp_prep[0].value = NaN
rra[1].cdp_prep[0].unknown_datapoints = 0
rra[2].cf = "MAX"
rra[2].rows = 576
rra[2].cur_row = 509
rra[2].pdp_per_row = 1
rra[2].xff = 5.0000000000e-01
rra[2].cdp_prep[0].value = NaN
rra[2].cdp_prep[0].unknown_datapoints = 0
...

yup that all looks good, (to me). So lets graph by hand:

rrdtool graphv /var/www/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-month.png \
-W "Alexx Roche" --end now --start end-33d \
DEF:gvolt0=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt0-g.rrd:42:AVERAGE \
DEF:ivolt0=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt0-g.rrd:42:MIN \
DEF:avolt0=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt0-g.rrd:42:MAX \
CDEF:cvolt0=gvolt0 \
DEF:gvolt1=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt1-g.rrd:42:AVERAGE \
DEF:ivolt1=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt1-g.rrd:42:MIN \
DEF:avolt1=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt1-g.rrd:42:MAX \
LINE1.6:gvolt0#22ff22:Full LINE1.6:gvolt1#0022ff:capacity

yup, that works, (but does not look pretty.) So lets keep adding configurations.

rrdtool graphv /var/www/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-month.png \
--title "Voltages - by month" \
--end now --start end-33d \
DEF:gvolt0=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt0-g.rrd:42:AVERAGE \
DEF:ivolt0=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt0-g.rrd:42:MIN \
DEF:avolt0=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt0-g.rrd:42:MAX \
CDEF:cvolt0=gvolt0 \
DEF:gvolt1=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt1-g.rrd:42:AVERAGE \
DEF:ivolt1=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt1-g.rrd:42:MIN \
DEF:avolt1=/var/lib/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain-acpi_volt-volt1-g.rrd:42:MAX \
CDEF:cvolt1=gvolt1 \
--font LEGEND:7:monospace \
--font UNIT:7:/usr/share/munin/VeraMono.ttf \
--font AXIS:7:/usr/share/munin/VeraMono.ttf \
--base 1000 \
--vertical-label "Volt" \
--height 175 \
--width 400 \
--imgformat PNG \
COMMENT:" " \
COMMENT:" Cur\:" \
COMMENT:"Min\:" \
COMMENT:"Avg\:" \
COMMENT:"Max\: \j" \
LINE1.6:gvolt0#22ff22:Full \
GPRINT:cvolt0:LAST:%6.2lf%s \
GPRINT:ivolt0:MIN:%6.2lf%s \
GPRINT:gvolt0:AVERAGE:%6.2lf%s \
GPRINT:"avolt0:MAX:%6.2lf%s\j" \
LINE1.6:gvolt1#0022ff:capacity \
GPRINT:cvolt1:LAST:%6.2lf%s \
GPRINT:ivolt1:MIN:%6.2lf%s \
GPRINT:gvolt1:AVERAGE:%6.2lf%s \
GPRINT:"avolt1:MAX:%6.2lf%s\j" \
"COMMENT:Last update (by LxR)\: Fri Jan 27 16\:45\:03 2012\r"

ah ha! --logarithmic seems to break it. Just for the monthly graph? (Some may ask why I was graphic logarithmically rational numbers between 0..100 but that is not the point.)
I do not see why munin would not alert or at least log, (somewhere in /var/log/munin/) something to mention that the graphing did not happen, (and even more oddly, for just one of the four graphs.)

So I changed acpi_volt to graph_args => '-1 0' and now I have all four... but I still do not know why rrdtool refused to graph. (Part of me want to keep the .rrd so that others can test it, but I'm not sure how much help that would be.)

Grandma Nazi

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:21:00 +0000

I am not a grammar Nazi. That would be like Stephen Fry applying to join the SS in 1941's Germany.

Everyone is somewhere on the line from zero to Himmler when it come to various typographic and logical errors. The one I want to mention, (though I hear it more often than read it) is:

"Very unique"

Please stop trying to define degrees of uniqueness; Either something is unique or it isn't.

Match-making Age Ranges

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:00:00 +0000

Many years ago I was told that, "Half your age plus seven years is the girlfriend limit."

This immediately seemed both sexist and mathematically incompetent, but just as "Feed a cold, starve a fever" isn't medical advice, (it is reassurance for young mothers who are panicking that their feverish child isn't eating,) it is just a guide-line, ( or in that case - a throw-away anecdote at some debutante party in London.)

What about those looking to date someone older? This guide can easily be reversed as, "Your age minus seven, doubled."

Mathematically, (where x is your age),

   lower_limit = (x/2)+7
   upper_limit = 2(x-7)

Some time later I was looking for mathematically significant differences between two numbers. This is an area of statistics where arguments are had over tea.

I found, on one rather well written site: (I did not bookmark it, sorry.)

   ( ( x - y ) / 2 ) ^2

which might not look like much but I rather liked it. (Here y is "their age" for lower limit, and ^2 means "to the power of two" i.e. squared.)

It took a while, but eventually I made the connection between these two and the obvious next move was to graph them. I had already found, with a quick script, the intersection at 34 and 54 by hand, (once I noticed that the output of the two functions was not parallel, I had to search,) but somehow I had missed the one at 49, (see! this is why graphs are cool.)

(I was going to add a vertical line marking the age of consent, but that is a topic for another post.)

I have added some sudo-random labels on the graph, using gimp, so that I could refer to particular areas more easily, (see I'm thinking of you.)

The first thing that is worth noting is that the cougar limit, [yes, I typoed in the graph] and the sugar limit are not both straight lines. This is not due to some form of ageism or sexism, but is due to the use of an odd number in "half your age plus". If it was half your age plus six then they would both be straight.

We can see stepping in the two stats lines, (marked mathematically lower and upper). So the question there becomes, why are they stepping at 18, 24, 32, 40, 50, 60. [ I know that I have three errors in the graph: msl{18,32,50} should all be +1 ].
Are these square numbers? Is there something about their factors? How are they related?

The thing I like here is that when you take the output of the two simple equations that is nearest to x, (your age) you end up with a rectification of this old match-makers guide.
If you are a parent then you can explain to your daughter why, when she is sixteen, a twenty year-old boyfriend should only happen in porno-land, (and other fictitious realms.)

So who ends up in the perpetuity zone? If you imagine having a crush on an older film star, (say forty years-old) when you were younger, (e.g. twenty). By the time you are fifty they would be seventy. If you happened to be compatible when you meant thirty years later, they would be in the perpetuity zone, and in this case I could see people making exceptions, (humans being social creatures.)

Despite my choice of labels, I would recommend that everyone stay within the cradle-snatching:Tapping the Grave areas.

Technical details
Data generated using a bash script and bc.
Graph generated using cairo, Chart::Clicker and a perl script.

( The functionality of the bash script could be extended to calculate how long you would have to wait until someone entered the perpetuity zone. )

Email Archive; How do you do yours?

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:15:00 +0000

If you are anything like me, you have an ever growing pile of email. It sits on a server that does have IMAP4 access and you might even check it using a client like Thunderbird, but for the most part you just use the webmail interface. Since Roundcube and gmail the email client has rather had its day... or has it.

Why not install and fire up a copy of Thunderbird, (it is free). Well I'll tell you why not, (or rather why.) You can use the client to make a backup of all the messages that you received and sent. (If Google goes bust for trying to bind G+ into your searches, you will be thankful to have a backup! Remember: Nothing is forever.)
If you got a new computer in the last six months you will have oodles of disk space; Why not use some of it for something useful?

Remember than IMAP just "looks" at the messages on the server. You have to copy them into "Local Folders". Then you can safely go online and delete any of your old messages. Please make sure that you have a local copy, (heck, with the price of consumer disk-space make two!) before you delete any messages.

If this blog were a film, and you had been reading the subtitles, you will know that I'm a fan of fire-and-forget automation using scripting. So how do I do it?

If you are not using a computer that has UNIX or Linux installed then this may be as far as you need to go today, (if ~/backups/" is gibberish to you then you need to find a good UNIX / Linux Terminal Tutorial.)

In 2005 I used http://freshmeat.net/projects/imapsync (now called http://freecode.com/projects/imapsync). That was a great project, but now it is a great product.. so it is no longer free (though https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync seems free.) So you look for something else and find mbsync http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html - maybe a little harder to understand at first, so here is how I use it, (with a cut-n-paste example config):

Install mbsync:

aptitude install isync

(if you are on debian/Ubuntu)

cron + wrapper_script + mbsync (I used to use imapsync, as I mentioned).

For this example we are going to backup two gmail accounts into ~/backups/gmail/

Configure

Get certificates

We want an encrypted connection, (remember that (since 2008) SSL/TLS will only protect you against casual network snooping!) so we willl have to collect the remote servers certificates

mkdir -p ~/backups/gmail/;
openssl s_client -connect imap.gmail.com:993 -showcerts > ~/backups/gmail/certs.pem </dev/null

Then we have to write a config file called .mbsync and put it in the root of our home directory:

~/.mbsync

#example

MaildirStore local

# where do you want to keep the messages?

Path ~/backups/gmail/

# I think of this as the details for one remote account

IMAPStore just.a.label

Host imap.gmail.com

User test-example@gmail.com

Pass notVERYsecure

UseIMAPS yes

CertificateFile /usr/share/purple/ca-certs/thoughtcrime_CA.pem

CertificateFile ~/backups/gmail/certs.pem

# You can have the details for as many accounts as you like

IMAPStore work.email

Host imap.gmail.com

User test.work@gmail.com

Pass 4l50notVERYsecure

UseIMAPS yes

CertificateFile /usr/share/purple/ca-certs/Thawte_Premium_Server_CA.pem

CertificateFile ~/backups/gmail/certs.pem

# Now the "backup instructions"

Channel my.email

Master ":just.a.label:[Gmail]/All Mail"

Slave :local:test-example

Sync PullNew

Create Slave

SyncState *

# The "Channel" is used when invoking mbsync to tell it which Channel to "watch"

# Master tells it which IMAPStore to look at, (in this case look for the one called "just.a.label"

# Slave is where to put it, (this _can_ be a remote IMAP server! Cool for migrations)

# the last three are more example settings. Check the man for more.

# A Channel can pull from multiple accounts or server at the same time!

Channel both                                      # 
Master ":just.a.label:[Gmail]/All Mail"  # from
Master ":work.email:[Gmail]/All Mail"  # from
Slave :local:combined                        # to
Sync PullNew                                    # how
Create Slave                                      # do
SyncState *                                       # what

#End .mbsync config file

Add a crontab entry

58 */8 * * * echo 'yes'|mbsync -q both 2>/dev/null
#I know I should listen for errors but it warns about certs

The "echo 'yes'" hacks us past an ssl warning. There is probably a better way to solve this problem, but this worked for me.

But what of the wrapper_script that you mentioned?

Well by calling a wrapper script, (in my case perl) it is trivial to change the path based on the date:

s%^Path ~/backups/gmail/%Path ~/backups/gmail/`echo -n \$(date +%Y)`/%

that way each year get a separate backup. I do end up with some duplication while I delete the old messages on the server, but duplicates are better than lost data.

Recovery

There isn't much point in having a backup if you can't use it. I did used to just use grep to search but I found it faster to index ~/.backup/gmail using Thunderbird and then search for messages within that.. which brings me full circle back to Thunderbird. Thank you Mozilla. Keep up the good work.

[update] I've moved to balsa as a client and that can read the Maildir++ format without having to add an IMAP4 server. I tried claws but they no longer support Maildir.

The Year Without Winter

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:52:00 +0000

It is Friday the Thirteen, January 2012. I am looking out of the window and the sun is shining. It is 4 degrees Celsius, and I'm wounding where the delivery of winter is going to happen. 1816 may have been "the year without summer" but the end of 2011 is the year without winter. This may be 1947 all over again, but so far Autumn had, for me, a lower average temperature than winter. (I find myself, today, in France and to help the rest of this entry make sense I'm hangin' round Latitude 47 North.)

[ Now that I try to talk about winter and pin it into a year, as we can with a summer it seems that the New year should be moved to be located between winter and spring. Having it in the depth of winter, (which winter where? Did you see one? ) to celebrate the "returning of the light" seems a little antiquated. It may be a dull time in the farming world and an excuse for a party to help us drudge through the long dark nights is probably a good thing, but why should our calendar dictate when to party - take control people! You write on your calendar, don't let your calendar write your life. ]

So am I talking about winter 2011 or winter 2012? As November..December 2011 felt more like spring, in this case I'm talking about winter 2012.

Since the early eighties, (1983 to be exact) I've been noticing the winter seems to recede, (like my hair). I remember thinking, (and reading my diary from that time) that winter no longer included November. By the nineties December was leaving the party, and now January seems to be defecting to the Autumn camp, (or the mid-winter-spring as many of my plants seem to think.)

As October 2011 became November 2011 I was starting to get worried about seeds. Let me explain: Each year I like to have at least one basil plant on my window-sill. They are very easy to look after - I just water mine a little every other day, or when the soil start to turn a shade lighter brown. ( They can drip oils, so make sure, if you have them in pots, that they don't drip on anything that matters.) I usually stop picking the leaves as I start to think about Christmas presents. A few weeks later they produce little white flowers. I brush them with a small downy feather to transfer pollen, and then I collect the small dark brown seeds, ready to plant in the spring. So with no seeds there are no plants. With no flowers there are no seeds... so I was getting worried. I checked some other plants in the garden and noticed that the lemon-balm, (mine spreads like a weed) didn't have a single flower... even today, (hence the entry.)

My avocado plant has, over the last few weeks, put on a growth spurt as if it already received its invitation to spring.

So it feels fishy, like something is up. I have not been making detailed enough measurements to have any certainty beyond that. My feeling about the weather is probably some form of confirmation bias, (I hope it is), or just because I finally managed to, (in 2011) get round to reading The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, (ISBN 0-688-06971-1).
( I don't intend to review that here, but I did find it very interesting. I tried to maintain a suitable level of scepticism for a man investigating something that was outside of his field, but if his passion for research was anything like as compelling as his writing then it would mean that his voice was more valid than my internal detractor.)

I hope that the lack of seeds is because of something that I did, (or am doing) and that 2012 is not going to see a run on the seed-banks to rival the 2011, (oh you know where this analogy is going.)

Setting my paranoia aside for a moment, what would the lack of a winter mean for a temperate European climate? The first thing that comes to mind is, an excess of insects surviving to spring, (well for some the first thing would be a lack of good skiing, but I'm trying to think more generally.)
More insects would be good for those that predate upon them, but could devastate crops and aid in the spread of disease, (the mosquitoes will focus on malaria, the others can help spread the other nasties.) On a more positive note, the increase in temperature may reduce the general susceptibility of the population to contracting influenza.

I'm going to get back to work now. I hope that the seeds that I have left over from 2011 will germinate this spring.

SHA-1 countdown...

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:10:00 +0000

If you are into security then you will probably have already found, (or know) Valerie Aurora, and if you are not then this might not interest you. I was reading some of her stuff and loved this, (so much that I stole^wadapted it.) So, thank you Valerie for:

Life cycles of popular cryptographic hashes (the "Breakout" chart)

Function\Year

Snefru

MD4

MD5

MD2

RIPEMD

HAVAL-128

SHA-0

SHA-1

RIPEMD-128 [1]

RIPEMD-160

SHA-2 family

Key	Unbroken	Weakened	Broken

[1] Note that 128-bit hashes are at best 2^64 complexity to break;
using a 128-bit hash is irresponsible based on sheer digest length.

So this post may be more of a bookmark than information. Actually I found this wonderful representation through her blog.valerieaurora.org. I'm sure that there are others that would like to see an updated page with the addition of all of the entries from The Hash Function Lounge.

I remember when MD5 fell and we created our own x509 root certificate. I'm still waiting, like a child waiting for Christmas morning, for SHA-1 to publically fall.

So how many of you have noticed that in 1996 RIPEMD was being attacked and RIPEMD-160 was being created. This seems logical as the attack and development were neither secret. (What is he on about? I'll tell you ;-)

So let us look at the year that SHA-0 was publicly attacked... and the year that its replacement came out... 1995. Four years is a long time in the cryptographic hashes world, (MD4 and HAVAL-128 went from Unbroken to Broken in that time!)

Now I'm not a conspiracy nut (obviously) so I'm not suggesting that the NSA already knew about the vulnerability and did not announce it. The question is... when will the NSA files leak^wdeclasification reveal the time and date that they broke each hash function. (In the UK it is about 30 years for most files, which seems reasonable, but who knows for those over at Fort Meade.)

That reminds me - I must check on my bees.

Project Management: Script everything; Test EVERYTHING; Graph everything

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 22:39:00 +0000

Last year I finished a two year project. I would love to tell, (brag) all about it but when I sign an NDA I mean it. The customer is a huge fan of opensource, and encouraged me to share as much as possible about my experience gained from the project, (while keeping an eye on the NDA.) I sent this entry to the client for approval and Q.E.D. they did.

So you have a project. You want to use reliable software, but spend no money on it and get the job done ahead of schedule. You are starting compleatly from scratch, with no support, (are you insane?)
I don't know what works for you, but my advice is as follows:

use dotProject

That is all I really wanted to share. If you are inside of a company, being nurtured with an existing support infrastructure, or if on day one you have an idea, a small laptop and no-money, my advice is the same. If you want a more wordy explanation for when starting with nothing, then read on, (you can delete the parts that you already have.)

Grab a copy of Linux, (I used Stackware and CentOS, but debian/ubuntu also works) and stick it on any computer, (I started out with a six year-old laptop and one aging 1U server - and I did not need the server for the first year!)
When I did need a server I looked at co-location options, (I build my own server in 1998 and hosted it on my office network until 2005, so that was what I was used to.) The result of the search was, as is often the case, when you go looking for something, but keep an open mind; I found that I rather liked the VPS from Bytemark, (but if you have a dedicated server you can create a virtual machine using KVM.)

Install dotProject, RT: Request Tracker, Notice, apache, exim, dovecot and munin to monitor the server. (This took me most of the first morning, but I was new to dotProject then.) Create, on the virtual machine, a new account for each of the developers and give them sudo access to exactly what they need. I like to add SELinux to the mix, lock down access with iptables, and create a pocket certificate-authority so that everything can be signed and where possible encrypted. (E.g. the ejabberd instance. The team used pidgin / finch / Adium to communicate more often than email.)

With dotProject you don't even need RT, (there is a simple ticketing system as a plug-in,) but when your project goes live you should have transitioned into RT for customer facing response. I use Notice as the glue that holds everything together, (so it is written in Perl.) Notice controls apache, exim, dovecot , NSD3, (and anything else like that) and manages all of my data: Which people are in each team; Project assets; CRM; reports; billing; general system administration, (though again, dotProject can manage all of the data for a project. The reason for Notice is "everything else".)

What did I learn from managing this project?

Script everything

# This project used
---
- 7zip
- bash
- C
- C++
- glusterFS
- HTML: CSS
- javascript: [DOM, jQuery, JSON]
- Keepalived
- mysql: master-master replication
- Perl: [DBIx::Class, Template::Toolkit, CPAN]

- svn: then later git

- windows-installer: NSIS
- wine
- x509
- XML
- XMPP
- other: probably, but this is all that comes to mind right now
# while consuming .ogg, C₈H₁₀N₄O_2, noodles and C₂H₅OH

So it was vital to be able to build the binaries with a single command. I looked at Apache Ant but in the end I was won over by Daniel Robbins (of Gentoo fame), and chose bash. This meant that at any moment it was possible to checkout a copy of the code and build it with a single command, (that involved extracting files from archives, applying changes, compressing, compiling more compressing and finally building the installer for each platform.)

Test EVERYTHING: not only the Chuck, but the bit and the whole drill!

(In joke - either you know it or you don't - its called a learning curve)

Thanks to the book, Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook I fell in love with testing, (I don't expect everyone to become a testing freak - just their code.) With the cross-pollination of python, (use phpcs to see how the indentation gestapo have already spread there,) and what seems like the inevitable convergence of scripting languages directly analogous to car design, I expect that perl style testing will become as ubiquitous as a 5 star Euro NCAP rating before very long. (Talking of which, if there was an Internet Software Security and Quality Assessment Programme, like html5test.com crossed with alternativeto.net, then both quality and security would probably go up, but that is a talk for another day.) If you have not already worked it out, "Script everything" still applies to testing.

Graph everything: If it moves - graph it
(I think I read this quote in an entry by either Paul Graham, (RTML) or Brad Fitzpatrick, (livejournal) but I could be wrong)

For many years I had used cacti, (MRTG) and loved it. It was sometimes tricky to install, and learning how to do custom pages took me longer than I expected, (I'm not saying that it is hard, just that it too me too long.) Then I found Munin.

It was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. I'm not saying that munin is better than cacti, I'm saying that munin does it for me; I fancy munin and I don't care who knows.
It just fit my needs exactly. I could easily write a new plugin, (if it did not already exist), and I can centralise multiple servers into one report, I can do it all from a bash prompt, (did I mention script everything?) Using ipmi I can even check the air-con in the data centre.

In conclusion, opensource software has matured to a level where it is practical to use it in a commercial environment. Just as any good version control system can contain its own development, any project can now be managed with free software, (and no amount of FUD or snake-oil-talk of ROI or TCO is going to save the proprietary dinosaurs now.)

Notice this?

noreply@blogger.com (alexx) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:46:00 +0000

If you are looking for a working example of CGI::Application combining the plug-ins:

CGI::Application::Plugin::ConfigAuto
CGI::Application::Plugin::DBH
CGI::Application::Plugin::Session

CGI::Application::Plugin::Authentication

CGI::Application::Plugin::Redirect
CGI::Application::Plugin::DBIC::Schema
CGI::Application::Plugin::Forward
CGI::Application::Plugin::TT

in a working MVC (DBIC,TT,CAS) framework, then Notice should help you. I use it as a Customer Resource and Account Manager; Asset management, but you can adapt it to your needs. Notice is the distillation of almost twenty years of Internet related solutions. Being a general outline of an idea to, "solve all of the Internet problems" it has a very expansive remit.

Although this example, on github, is from an earlier development branch, it certainly would have saved me some time if even this incarnation of Notice had already existed, when I was looking through the many good Perl frameworks for the one that met my needs.

(This incarnation of Notice is inspired by CGI::Application::Structured and a direct port of my previous, all-my-own-code-from-the-ground-up, version of of Notice.)

I hope that someone will find it useful. Being the outline of the Notice modular system, (that is using the CGI::Application framework), it is easy to create a custom module that stores your data in any way that you want, (or you can strip it down to the bones and build your own animal.)

Notice is interesting for at least two reasons, (possibly more).

First it is an example of a light MVC framework using DBIx ::Class and Template::Toolkit. I started out by looking at the largest most popular MVC framework in CPAN; it is great, but I needed something lighter, so I looking for the lightest, (CGI::). ( My previous version of Notice had started out using CGI_light, but eventually I stripped out all dependencies except DBI.)

I found a collection of tutorials, but never quite the full combination (of Authentication with dbic and TT) that I needed, (actually I wanted L18n as well but I did not have time when I was creating this third incarnation for Notice. xkcd.com/974/)

Second I was spending a weekend building a domain registry, (it really isn't that hard) and needed a whois server; I could find an almost endless collection of code to talk to/with a whois server, but not actually a whois daemon. So in the S of Model, View, Control, Sundries is a little RFC3912 compliant whois daemon. If you create a CDB file with a key of awesome.alexx.net and a value of "Why YOU are my friend, you are!" this daemon will serve it up for you. ( It is trivial to have the whois server pull live data from the database - your milage may vary with the level and volume of DDoS or /. directed at your server.)

The unsuspecting world should know that this version is NOT an example of perfect code. Feel free to improve it, laugh at it, (I do) or make a version with the features that you need, e.g. L18n. I'm extending the assets section to have hive-records for for the beehives that I now have listed in my assets table.

If you need an example of the features mentioned at the start of this post, (or a whois server), this may save you time. Also, there are many modules that have already been developed, that have not been included in this code. I will include a new README, (and possibly a blog entry) explaining the modules and how each instance of Notice can interact with all of the others, (or you can email me with questions about Notice.)

[I have published the whois server separately in CPAN, but with this you can automate the rebuilding, (and distribution) of the whois database from a central management system. I have not yet got permission to include all of the custom code that did the DNSSEC. That sat on a computer with no external access; pulled each zonefile; signed them; pushed them out to each DNS server. ]

This is not another framework; It is an example of CGI::Application. If you ask why?:
Catalyst seems like the daddy-bear of frame-works, (though Mojolicious will be 'The Daddy' for some) and all the others seemed like mummy-bear, so Notice is my baby-bear;

I hope that someone else will think that it is 'just right'.