Planet HantsLUG

How do I make NFSv4 talk Kerberos?

2008-07-23T21:19:00+00:00

Some time ago I switched to NFSv4 (RFC 3530) at home on my Lenny boxen. Everything seems to work okay, it seems stable enough, in theory it allows you to better take advantage of modern giggabit networking and if you configure the Kerberos bit up it's apparently quite secure - unlike NFSv3 (RFC 1813) and older.

I followed various recipes and set up a Kerberos domain on the NFSv4 server and followed set-up on the client, but so far I've not had any success in getting the client to talk to the server using Kerberos, only plain old security i.e. no security, seems to work.

Does anyone know how to get Kerberos and NFSv4 working on Debian Lenny?

Mixing a podcast in Ardour

2008-07-22T21:01:05+00:00

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.

Social Calendaring

2008-07-22T12:46:39+00:00

The current generation of social networks are based on an assumption that giving you reams of data about what other people are doing and have done really puts you in touch with other people. As a user, I do get the impression that I am in touch with people, even though I may not actually be communicating with them. So we don’t always bother to make stuff happens.

There are social networks that tell you where friends have been, some that tell you where they are, some that tell you what they are doing right now and some that tell you where they will be. But very few, it seems, that tell you where to be.

Taking Facebook as an example (as it’s the only social network I’m using heavily at the moment), it does not make it easy to set up things to do. Creating events is a very laboured process. It takes perhaps 15 minutes to set up an event. It’s an individual rather than a collaborative task. Invitations to events get ignored because of the way they are delivered. People get blanketed with invitations that they don’t want. And I can’t even set up an event until I’ve set up a group to arrange the event.

Social calendaring is not a new concept as the promise of electronic calendars has always included ease of scheduling, via e-mail invitations of some sort. Google Calendar and 30 Boxes represent the state of the art in this regard, which is simply calendar sharing and event invitations.

The thing social calendars really should address is scheduling of events, because I’m lazy and also busy and I always say things like “we really should …” but it never happens.

My ideal social calendar could fulfil these user stories:

Find me something to join in with on any given day.
Schedule things with the knowledge of when I’m most likely to be free or busy, even when nothing is scheduled.
Arrange online games with my brother in Australia (7 hours ahead in summer or 9 hours in the winter).
Pick a date and time to do a thing I want to do, with friends who want to and who may have to travel to do it.
Remind me to book the venue for an event.
Book out an event I’m hosting.
Nail down the fuzziness inherent in saying something like “Let’s have dinner on Thursday evening” so that we can say “Dinner at 8pm, and Alice will be joining us at around 10pm for drinks”.
Suggest when to actually go to bed so that I can get up next morning.
Pin-point exactly where an event is so that I can work out how to get there.
Don’t keep trying to schedule things my skint friends can’t afford to do.
Suggest things I might like to do.
Mildly favour a schedule where I can watch my favourite TV programmes.
Create entirely new groups of local people with similar tastes (say Buffy, or Linux) in such a way as to be actually kind of fun and neither awkward or annoying.

As is perhaps evident, I’m a strong believer in heuristic tools that do really innovative stuff. What are the chances that all of the above are possible in a calendar application that doesn’t automatically book me to go pole-dancing in Alaska moments before it has me watching Mork and Mindy with total strangers in my home on a Friday night? Hmm.

Vice Chancellor I present to you the following Bachelors of...

2008-07-21T19:20:00+00:00

I am sitting through graduations. For three hours a day. The Vice Chancellor has a new joke. It isn't as good as last years.

The Chancellor has played it safe with the one from this time in 2007,

Coming out of the ceremony for the Occupational Therapists one of the lecturers asked me how many I was doing. I said "3 a day",

"You want to be careful" she cautioned "all that clapping will put quite a strain on your hands."

After that it was on to the Electronics and Computer Science ceremony. On the way in no one spoke. Unless of course they were using a means of communication I do not yet understand.

On the way back to the robing room I was fed up with the silent treatment so I said:

"I think Linux is ready for the desktop."

That started off a nice debate.

I'm not saying that academics are caricatures but sometimes they are.

I'm so offended

2008-07-21T15:00:44+00:00

Andrew:

I'm just sooooo offended

Sermon: Philippians 3.17-21 - Citizens of Heaven

2008-07-21T15:00:44+00:00

Recorded yesterday at St Paul's. 32 minutes long including reading and response. Available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

PDF of accompanying presentation and more information about the Vanity Fair story I mention.

The advantage of sensible copyright terms

2008-07-19T17:26:33+00:00

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.

You think we just work at a comic book store for our folks, huh?

2008-07-19T13:35:57+00:00

I'm only a minimal MySQL user, but I've got a problem with a large table full of data and I'm hoping for tips on how to improve it.

Right now I have a table which looks like this:

CREATE TABLE `books` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `owner` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `title` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  ....
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
  KEY( `owner`)
)  ;

This allows me to lookup all the BOOKS a USER has - because the user table has an ID and the books table has an owner attribute.

However I've got hundreds of users, and thousands of books. So I'm thinking I want to be able to find the list of books a user has.

Initially I thought I could use a view:

CREATE VIEW view_steve  AS select * FROM books WHERE owner=73

But that suffers from a problem - the table has discountinuous IDs coming from the books table, and I'd love to be able to work with them in steps of 1. (Also having to create a view for each user is an overhead I could live without. Perhaps some stored procedure magic is what I need?)

Is there a simple way that I can create a view/subtable which would allow me to return something like:

|id|book_id|owner | title      |....|
|0 | 17    | Steve| Pies       | ..|
|1 | 32    | Steve| Fly Fishing| ..|
|2 | 21    | Steve| Smiles     | ..|
|3 | 24    | Steve| Debian     | ..|

Where the "id" is a consecutive, incrementing number, such that "paging" becomes trivial?

ObQuote: The Lost Boys

Update: without going into details the requirement for known, static, and ideally consecutive identifiers is related to doing correct paging.

I don't know about you, but I am planning to scream and run

2008-07-18T16:13:05+00:00

Over the past few nights I've managed to successfully migrate the Debian Administration website to the jQuery javascript library

This means that my own javascript library code has been removed, replaced, and improved!

The site itself doesn't use very much javascript - there are a couple of places where focus is set to a couple of elements, but other than that we're only talking about:

Adding tags to articles, blog entrys, & polls
Looking at the tag cloud
Using the messaging system

Still there are a couple of enhancements that I've got planned which will make the site neater and more featureful for those users who've chosen to enable javascript in their browsers.

Here's my list of previous javascript usage - out of date now that I've basically chosen to use jQuery for everything.

ObQuote: Short Circuit.

And I didn’t even have to edit xorg.conf! (Part 1: Desktop Effects)

2008-07-18T09:14:31+00:00

Of course, just the thought of manually editing xorg.conf in this day and age shouldn’t even have crossed my mind. Especially on Ubuntu. But (as my Twitter followers might have observed) I recently acquired a new Lenovo Thinkpad at work–specifically, a T61p widescreen Thinkpad which, unfortunately, has an NVIDIA graphics card (really really bad open source support under Linux because NVIDIA won’t open up their drivers). NVIDIA, however, do provide proprietary Linux drivers which are far far better than the ATI drivers of my previous Thinkpad T41p (under either Linux or Windows).

Fortunately, while not a freedom-hater, I’m not averse to using proprietary drivers if I can’t make my laptop work any other way. And as this is my work machine, I need it to Just Work (or as close to as I can). So I installed EnvyNG (envyng-core, envyng-gtk) and ran that to install the proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers. Incidentally, enabling the NVIDIA proprietary drivers listed in System > Administration > Hardware Drivers screwed up my graphics - I assume the drivers that Ubuntu thinks are right for my graphics card aren’t actually the right ones. EnvyNG, however, got it spot on–the widescreen display resolution (1920×1200) was automatically detected and worked straight off.

Ubuntu Desktop Effects (aka compiz)

This works pretty well. I had to look up how to enable, for example, the rotating cube (which is the ultimate desktop bling) which seemed to me to be a pretty bad Out of Box Experience (OoBE) - before installing Ubuntu on the Thinkpad, I’d booted once into Vista to check that the memory I’d installed was detected. In my brief visit, I noticed that things like the pretty semi-transparent sidebar and thought it’d be nice if Ubuntu did that without any effort on the user’s part (though, to be fair, someone else had installed Vista and, presumably, ensured it worked before shipping the Thinkpad - it would be possible to do the same for a pre-installed Ubuntu machine).

Rotating cube

My general opinion of the Desktop Effects is that while the effects themselves are amazing and a real step-up for Linux desktops, the Advanced Desktop Effects Manager, where you enable/disable the effects you want, is not incredibly easy to use. It’s often not clear what a given effect will do if you enable it. Nor is it clear what all the many many options for each effect will achieve. Really, we need a much simpler interface that has advanced options hidden away - something I’ll take a look at at some point…

The effects that I’ve enabled for now, and found useful/interesting/pointless-but-fun are:

Effect Name	Description	How to enable
Desktop Cube	Places each of your desktops on the side of a 3D cube.	See this very useful blog post about enabling the rotating cube
Rotate Cube	You can rotate the 3D cube in a very funky way.	See this very useful blog post about enabling the rotating cube
Scale	Apparently similar to Mac OS X - you can set up so that when you move your mouse pointer to an area of the screen (eg top-right corner), all the open application windows are displayed on-screen as thumbnails.	Scale > Bindings > Initiate Window Picker for All Windows then click the top-right corner of the little graphic to specify where you want the mouse point to trigger the effect.
Show Desktop	I configure it so that when I move my mouse pointer to the bottom-left corner of the screen, all visible windows minimise; repeat mouse movement to get them back.	Enable it. Then General Options > General > Show Desktop then click the bottom-left corner of the little graphic to specify where you want the mouse pointer to trigger the effect.
Water Effect	You can drag your mouse pointer around with CTRL+Windows key to make a water effect - at least, that’s what I think is the result of enabling that effect.	Just enable it.
Reflection	When you CTRL+ALT+Down, and all the desktops line up for you, you get a reflection of each desktop underneath.	Just enable it.
Cube Reflection	I think you just get a reflection of the cube while it’s rotating.	Just enable it.
3D Windows	When you rotate the cube, each window is arranged on its z-axis so that they stand away from the surface of the cube.	Just enable it.

By the way, Wobbly Windows are enabled by default. If you’re interested in knowing more about how Wobbly Windows came to be, here’s an interview with Red Hat’s Senior Interaction Designer (in 2005), Seth Nickell (PDF).

Enabling an external projector/monitor

Coming soon (as soon as I get round to taking some screenshots)…

Chapter 15

2008-07-17T17:19:00+00:00

Endings.

This year I worked my way through 1 Corinthians. I spoke on it at every service I took and I studied it in spare time. The main reason for this is that 1 Corinthians contains a considerable amount of 'how to advice' for Churches and I was, principally trying to grapple with the question of how much a chaplaincy should, in fact resemble a Church.

In the end it seemed that the answer was 'as much as possible'. The very fact that we didn't worship together on Sunday meant that we actually did more things together the rest of the week and then as a result we got a very special community. For my part I tried to shape that community with insights from 1 Corinthians. It wasn't perfect. For one thing sex kept getting in the way, a bit like for Paul when writing to Corinth. Unlike Paul it was not really immorality that caused difficulties as people constantly falling for one another. Which when it works it brilliant, when it doesn't it becomes quite hard for a community to absorb if it is to keep both participants within it. I suppose that reflected the sort of community we were.

As term ended we we got to the final chapter on 1 Corinthians. The bit about the resurrection. I 'did' this chapter at college.

It seems like the Corinthians believed that since they were now 'spiritual' beings that they did not need to die, they were already in heaven. The also did not feel a great desire to be moral either.

Paul states that the fact that Jesus died and then was raised is of first importance. (note that the belief in Jesus' death and resurrection is of first importance, not any beliefs we might have about gay sex...a fact I have pointed out, quite recently)

Paul wants to them to understand the reality of death, and then resurrection. Both Jesus' and their own. I think Paul wants them to understand that the two go together.

One of my tutors at college felt that no one understood why Christians believe in the resurrection. Most people did because they were told to and they didn't like the former Bishop of Durham and Bishop Spong going round telling people it never happened. Rather than just accepting resurrection we should allow it to inform our theology. We need to accept that we shall ultimately loose everything and God will not protect us from that but rather will reach across that loss and restore us to life. Resurrection is about acceptance of loss. We lay everything down before God and just when we have lost everything in the act of loss we are restored. Just like Abraham who gave up Isaac (Genesis 22) and somehow got him back through that process.

With so many significant people having left chaplaincy this year, it does feel a bit like the community has died. It feels it particularly at this time of year when no one is here anyway, but it feels like we have lost something fairly significant and yes in October we will start afresh but none of that has happened yet. More than that we face considerable uncertainty about the future of the building and the budget which only serves to heighten my sense of loss. There is, this year, a real risk that chaplaincy isn't going to come back in October.

Yet I believe in resurrection, which means that I have to let things go. I have to accept that everything dies and that through that process constantly we miraculously see new life.

Which is why I am not depressed....because today something happened that made me quite excited. I saw a glimpse of the future....

And it looked OK!

And no rollover bugs either.

2008-07-17T16:48:50+00:00

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!

Ubuntu UK Podcast reaches 10th Episode

2008-07-16T21:31:46+00:00

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

Java “Out of swap space” rubbish

2008-07-16T16:32:49+00:00

Occasionally we’ve had this during a tomcat restart at a customer site.

After a little while we rebooted. Next time it occurred on a test platform and I could check shared memory (using ipcs and ipcrm commands), all files (temporary files etc). Then I restorted to “strace” which allowed the app to start.

Next time I was watching top and saw that despite having “-Xmx1536M” it still ate 3GB of memory and then fell over (this is a 32-bit userspace box so that’s the most it can have without horrible performance draining 4+4 kernels). Even -Xmx1300M it still fell over.

Now I was fairly sure it was a race condition or timing issue - and indeed, I now have a nicer workaround than rebooting (which is an admission of failure). The workaround is to drop all the caches so that the box is just as slow as after a reboot:

sync
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

We’ll also be upgrading the JVM from 1.5.0-10 to 1.5.0-14 to see if that helps.

School IT education

2008-07-15T00:19:01+00:00

I’ll start this post off by stating that I’m not having a go at any specific school with my comments here, least of all the one that my son attends, and that I attended too many years ago to mention. My sons school is, in fact, a very good school, and I’m not just saying that because I am now a governor

That said, let’s move on…

The other day my son came home and asked if he could use the computer. Nothing spectacularly unusual there, but shortly after logging on he came back to me asking if we had “the big blue W” on it somewhere. After a brief to and fro I ascertained that what he meant was Microsoft Word and that he wanted to show me something that he had done at school.

There’s a few points here. Firstly there is the comparison with when I was his age (he is seven). Back then I still had around 6 years until the ZX81 was launched and I got my first taste of computers. Now they are not only everywhere, but interconnected to the point where it didn’t even occur to him that the work he had been doing at school wouldn’t be accessible from home - bless him.

Secondly there’s the annoyance that from such an early age the ‘big blue W’ and Microsoft Word are synonymous with word processing. I keep trying to tell myself that he is only seven and they need to keep things simple, but it is still irritating. The end result of this was that I sat down and explained what a word processor was, and that even though I didn’t have the one he used at school I did have another one. I was encouraged by the fact that, when presented with OpenOffice he set straight to work trying to reproduce the same sort of document he had at school, and did so with no help at all - beyond a brief grumble that there wasn’t much clipart! (actually I did show him where that was).

The next question baffled me a bit, “do we have the internet?”. My response was to tell him that we did, and that he used it regularly! Then we headed down a familiar road, “no I mean the big blue e” So off we went down the explanation of what a browser was and that he was already quite comfortable using both Opera and Firefox, as was his younger brother (who is 3). In fact they are both rather too good at some of the games on the CBeebies, Nick Jr and BBC Dr Who websites! Still, they are also quite happy playing with Frozen Bubble or Tux Paint

LugRadio put to bed

2008-07-14T22:11:48+00:00

Yesterday, Tony and I trekked to Wolverhampton, video kit on our backs, to video the recording of the last ever studio episode of LugRadio.

I feel somewhat privileged to have shared that small, sweaty studio at Jono’s house with the (current incarnation of) four large gents of LugRadio fame. And to have got on their final show (I said “Hello” a couple of times…before anyone gets too impressed! ;) ).

I’m by no means a serious fan-girl of the show (I’m not really part of the regular LR community - forums, IRC, etc) but I have listened to a lot of this season (Season 5) and several from previous seasons, and attended all LugRadio Live events except the first (but including LRL USA 08!). So I can tell them apart when they talk, at least.

I was sad to hear that they were quitting, though - not least because that means no more LugRadio Live! I gratuitously mentioned LugRadio Live in the editorial of the totally unrelated BCS-HCI Interfaces magazine after attending LRL 06 because it was such a good example of how a community can pull together such a great conference.

Every year I’ve been really impressed by the sheer number of people who turn up from all corners of the Earth (the furthest travelled gets a prize), including New Zealand and Hong Kong, to spend a weekend in Wolverhampton. Open Source and Linux conferences aren’t exactly a rare occurance these days but most choose to take place in a fairly glamourous or desirable location. My first LRL took place at the Wolverhampton Students’ Union…on a particularly hot weekend…without aircon. My memories include:

It was hot.
Mark Shuttleworth presenting about making Open Source Software more usable and attractive to normal users.
Drinking copious amounts of free water from the bar.
Ade getting a verbal pummelling from the female LR community members in the session about how to encourage more women into Open Source.
Cramming into a tiny, airless BoF room to discuss the vision of lug.org.uk.
The ‘Women in Open Source’ discussion continuing into the corridor while the next session got underway, and then in the car on the way home.
Meeting Josette from O’Reilly and buying books from her.
A packed room crying with laughter at Bruno’s epic talk: “This talk may contain swearing”
Stephen Lamb from Microsoft bravely and successfully giving a presentation about Security to a room of Linux and Open Source fans.
Being incredibly impressed by the range of speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors at this informal conference event that cost just £5 to attend.

So the following year, I went again (this time to the nicer Lighthouse venue); this time I joined The Crew - the yellow-t-shirted people who do all the ‘backstage’ stuff. Memories:

It was another hot weekend.
Getting up very early to stand outside The Lighthouse at 8am on the Saturday.
Ron’s wife providing bacon butties to all the volunteers.
Adam running down the aisle to the Rocky Theme in a dressing gown, then….in a thong….banging a gong…
Continuing my habit of buying O’Reilly books from Josette.
Changing a lot of video tapes.
Setting up a lot of chairs, putting them away again, setting them up again, putting them away again…
The low-tech wiki.
Big LRL banners.
Ted Haegar’s teeth.
Being impressed yet again at the range of speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors the team had rustled up on the back of a fortnightly podcast that contains a lot of swearing.

And, bringing us right up to date: LugRadio Live USA 08:

Tony’s fantastic trailer for LRL USA 08.
An atypical heat wave in San Francisco (though, this being America, working aircon).
Watching (from a distance) Adam getting frisked of his water bottles by Heathrow’s Security after having been warned three times not to carry liquids through Security.
Jono commenting scathingly about Adam’s lack of travel experience, then thinking it a good idea to take a photo of Adam in Security….before disappearing under a swarm of Security staff supervising him deleting said photo.
Helping ward off The Doom that kept descending on the team in the couple of days before LRL.
Visiting Alcatraz and watching the team posing for more boy-band photos.
Sitting in Hard Rock Cafe all afternoon and coming up with the best spoof ever…which I still think should be their Christmas Special.
The view of Downtown SF from The Metreon’s balcony.
The empty vastness of the venue at The Metreon when we were allowed in on Friday morning.
Carrying (and dropping) far too many boxes of magazines and Nutsack goodies with Adam in the searing heat of the streets of San Francisco.
Meeting Kynan, who just never stopped working!
Being constantly amazed that Google (Google!) were bankrolling the entire event…and even bought us breakfast, live streamed to Google Video from a mobile phone!
Brilliant talks from Emma Jane Hogbin (Women in Open Source), Kristen Accardi and Val Henson (Linux device drivers in 30 minutes - while baking cookies on-stage), Matthew Garrett (Power management and anger)…
Stopping attendees sneaking into the building before the doors officially opened on the Saturday morning. The first group just sat down on the pavement and got their laptops out while they waited.
One Laptop Per Child laptops everywhere!
Small children - officially making this a (somewhat unlikely) family event!
Emma Jane getting progressively hoarser throughout the weekend.
Tedddd sprinting up and down the massive venue and videoing all the talks simultaneously.
Jono playing ‘Jack’s Playing Ball’ on the Frets on Fire (OSS version of Guitar Hero).
The MAKE kaleidoscope glasses.
A significant number of the last people standing on Sunday night wearing matching free Banshee t-shirts in the bar.
Massive Google beanbags.

And that’s just some of the things that I’ve enjoyed at LRL events. And why I’m going again this year. I’ll maybe see you there…

It's no use pretending it hasn't happened cause it has

2008-07-14T18:36:35+00:00

Yesterday I was forced to test my backup system in anger, on a large scale, for the first time in months.

A broken package upgrade meant that my anti-spam system lost the contents of all its MySQL databases.

That was a little traumatic, to say the least. But happily I have a good scheme of backups in place, and only a single MX machine was affected.

So, whilst there was approximately an hour of downtime on the primary MX the service as a whole continued to run, and the secondary (+ trial tertiary) MX machines managed to handle the load between them.

I'm almost pleased I had to suffer this downtime, because it did convince me that my split-architecture is stable - and that the loss of the primary MX machine isn't a catastrophic failure.

The main reason for panicing was that I was late for a night in the pub. Thankfully the people I were due to meet believe in flexible approaches to start times - something I personally don't really believe in.

Anyway the mail service is running well, and I've setup "instant activation now", combined with a full month of free service which is helping attract more users.

Apart from that I've continued my plan of migrating away from Xen, and toward KVM. That is going well.

I've got a few guests up and running, and I'm impressed at how stable, fast, and simple the whole process is. :)

ObQuote: Brief Encounter

(That is a great film; and a true classic. Recommended.)

Locum

2008-07-13T21:28:00+00:00

The Vicar up the road is on holiday so I was called in.

I forgot how to write sermons and went to bed last night with it unfinished, Got up early this morning and polished it off.It was hard work. Took me right back to my school days.

Despite the work I got very little reaction. The teenagers looked bored, so did quite a few of the congregation.

Honestly I'd love to be heckled.

Nizlopi Girls

2008-07-13T01:26:14+00:00

I must admit I find her signing sexy don’t you think?

Feature request: more tag set operations

2008-07-11T21:45:27+00:00

I would like this MINUS this.

He'll save every one of us!

2008-07-10T21:35:23+00:00

So recently there have been a few posts by people discussing the idea of distributed bug reporting systems. This is topical, becuse I've been working on something vaguely related - a support system.

Why is a support system, or ticketing system, related to a bug tracker? To answer that you must first clarify what you mean by a support system (or a bug tracker for that matter). There are two distinct types of support systems:

"Full"

This is a system which does "everything". Each submitted support, or bug, request has an associated status, severity, priority and work log. It might be assigned to multiple people through its lifetime, and it might be moved around various internal queues.

Example: Request Tracker.

"Minimal"

A reported ticket is an email submission.

A "ticket" from start to finish is nothing more than a collection of mails upon a particular topic - there is no assigned "owner", no "priority", no object-specific attributes at all.

I've neither the time, patience, or desire to create any system like the first one. But I've become increasingly dissatisfied with my current support system, roundup, for various reasons. So I need something new.

Previously I ruled out several support systems and most of my objections still stand, although I admit I've not really looked again. I will certainly do so shortly.

So what have I done? Well I figure I care very little about queues, priorities, reports, and all that stuff. (On the basis that priority is mostly in the ticket itself, and that I'm the sole recipient of the submissions. Previously I had a partner to share them, but these days just me.)

I want something that is basically e-mail centric. That reduces the functionality of my support system to two distinct parts:

Ticket Submission

An email to sumbit@example.com should result in three actions:

A message being sent back to the submitter. "Hey got your ticket. We'll fix it. Love you long time.". (Set the reply-to address appropriately!)
A message to the site admin(s) saying "Hey, you've got a new ticket submission. Deal."
A new ticket being created/stored somewhere.

(There are additional nice things to have - such as SMS alerts outside 10:00-17:00, etc, but those are trivial bolt-ons.)

Ticket Updates

When a mail comes in to "ticket-XXXX@example.org" - which was setup in the submission process, or when a mail arrives with subject "[issueXXXX]" we need to append the correspondance to the existing ticket.

If that ticket doesn't exist we report an error. If the ticket is closed we re-open it.

So, what do we have? A script that is conceptually simple, and can be invoked via a pipe transport of Exim4. A script that just reads the submitted email from STDIN and only has to decide a couple of things based pretty much on the contents of the "To:" and "Subject:" headers.

Simple, no?

OK it was actually amazingly simple once broken down. The amazing part is that it all works. I figured that I'd manage new tickets by writing them to mbox files - simple to do. Simple to understand.

So the process goes:

New email arrives to "submit@example.org"
/home/steve/tickets/1 is created with the received message written to it.
I get a mail to steve@steve.example.org.uk saying "new ticket!!!".
I reply to the ticket by opening /home/steve/tickets/1 in mutt - where my muttrc ensures that when I reply the from address is the ticket address, and there is an automatic CC.
The cycle turns, and more discussion happens until we're all happy the ticket is "done"..
A mail to ticket-xxxx-done@example.org" closes the ticket by moving it from ~/tickets/ to ~/tickets/archived/.

There are a couple of helper scripts:

ticket-close - close a ticket manually.
ticket-list - show all open tickets
ticket-view - open a ticket in mutt

But basically one script and mutt does it all.

So far it's been tested and it is rockin'! (Look at me, hangin' with the cool kids!)

Obviously it is pretty Steve-specific, and there is only a toy CGI process for viewing history online, but I'm actually feeling pretty good about it.

Once I've closed all my existing tickets I will probably migrate over to it. At least this handles (read: ignores) MIME - which makes it a clear winner of roundup, which just eats, bounces, or corrupts submitted multipart messages.

ObQuote: Flash Gordon