I like to add a reminder software with my system. I have tested
calendar and am not satisfied with it. now I have very sophisticated
reminder tool called remind . its tkremind front end adds special
weight to remind by making configuration as easy as Kalarm of KDE.
I am looking for a tool which can make the message (from remind) appear
on my desktop. could any one give any idea ?
[Thomas]
Assuming remind uses some transient form to store the reminder
somewhere, then you can use 'osd_cat' or some other utility to have it
"display" on the screen.
I have found another tool called xmessage -
[Thomas]
That has been around since the 80s.
like
xmessage -file <filename>
so you have to write your
message in a file (ascii) first.
[Thomas]
You don't even need to do that. xmessage can read from STDIN as well.
Security implications of root login over SSH
Mon, 12 Sep 2005 20:11:20 -0700 (PDT)
Riza Aziz (telefonixar from yahoo.com)
Answered By Kapil Hari Paranjape
Hi there,
I'm wondering if it's wise to allow a remote user within
the LAN to log in as root, by adding that user's public key
to root's "authorized_keys" for that machine.
[Kapil]
There is an "sudo"-like mechanism within SSH for doing this. In the
authorized_keys file you put a "command=...." entry which ensures
that this key can only be used to run that specific command.
All the usual warnings a la "sudo" apply regarding what commands
should be allowed. It is generally a good idea to also prevent
the agent forwarding, X11 forwarding and pty allocation.
Here is an entry that I use for "rsync" access. (I have wrapped the
line and AAAA.... is the ssh key which has been truncated).
I'm writing some scripts to back up data on our small
business network here. One option is to get each machine to
periodically dump its data on a specific machine using NFS.
The option I'm interested in is to get a designated machine
to remotely login to each machine and transfer the files
over a tar-ssh pipe.
The only reason to be using root access is because some
directories (/root, some in /var/lib) can only be read by
root. Would changing permissions (e.g. /var/lib/rpm) affect
anything, if I chgrp the directories to a "backup"
usergroup?
I'm concerned with one machine, a web server, that will be
included in the backup scheme. All machines here use Class
A private network addresses and are behind a NAT firewall,
but the web server can be accessed from the Internet. Will
allowing root login over ssh on that machine pose a huge
security risk, even by allowing ssh traffic from only the
local network?
[Rick]
I just happened to be reading the main discussion list at the Linux
Documentation Project, and saw this post that appears intended for the
Gazette, instead.
(Even though the script is credited to Mike Orr, I'm the author of it -
it just got misattributed. I don't expect him to answer for my sins.
The problem with the above is that you don't have a file called "foo";
as a result, 'stat "foo"' comes out empty, and the rest of the problem
follows from that. The above was never meant to be a complete script,
simply an example of the algorithm for Suramya (I seem to recall that's
who started the original discussion) to use.
I agree that changing "!=" to "ne" would "fix" the problem - but
it would be the wrong problem.
Pointing the script at an existing
file - perhaps by changing 'stat "foo"' to 'stat $ARGV[0]' and
specifying the filename on the commandline - would seem to me to be the
"right" solution. Of course, the rest of the script should be rewritten
to meet real-life conditions as well... but that's beyond the scope of
what we were talking about.
Outlook replacements
Tue, 30 Aug 2005 19:57:30 +0100
Jimmy O'Regan (The LG Answer Gang)
Answered By Mike Orr,
Heather Stern
Even with the KDE and GNOME graphical windowing interfaces, it's
possible -- not likely, but possible -- that you'll need to use a
command line now and again, or edit a configuration file.
Compare that with Windows where, it's possible -- not likely, but
possible -- that you'll need to use a command line now and again, or
edit the Windows registry, where, as they like to tell you, one wrong
move could destroy your system forever.
...............
[Sluggo]
When people say "Linux doesn't have enough applications", that usually
translates to, "Linux doesn't have certain specific applications, namely
MS Office, Photoshop, Yahoo Messenger with webcam, etc."
[Heather]
StarOffice, (ok photshop is a fair dig, we have lots of things like it, but
none are trying hard to be it), yahoo with webcam == ayttm but most
people don't know that.
In a particularly ahem lively discussion at the starport last week, it was
agreed that the problem is that menu interface standardization isn't. Not
even by Mr.Tanenbaum's broad definitions.
For example RH has been using Gnome for awhile, but has changed the menu
layout in every major revision and some of the minor ones.
K and Gnome fans alike can't decide whether to keep their menus top or
bottom. If they were hidden you'd have a flip a coin chance of even knowing
where to look.
To most newbs "click the root menu" may as well be hidden entirely, because
they won't really think that's useful if they have mswin experience (it
pulls up display settings) and if they don't have even that they're just
plain lost.
[Sluggo]
Interestingly, I was going to mention Outlook and Outlook Express, but I
haven't heard much about them recently. Has their popularity diminished?
[Heather]
Yes, and thunderbird's and eudora's have increased.
My friend Colleen is looking to start an article series on people starting
from zero* into Linux. I will of course be encouraging her
and helping
her out, too.
* yeah, absolute zero, Kelvin. The kind of people who think "my god, at
least something says where to start" when they look at Windows(tm), then
are stalled because they're afraid of the rest of the menu.
Much as I didn't find linspire groovy, not to my beat, daddy-O, it serves an
important duty for some.
Outlook Express comes as default with Windows, and it's not a particularly
good email client. Thunderbird is taking that market.
Outlook is another kettle of fish: it isn't about using Outlook, it's about
accessing an Exchange server. The big news back when Novell bought Ximian
was that they open sourced Ximian Connector, so Evolution could access Exchange
servers. I had a look through the code, and... it's a hack, basically.
Outlook and Exchange communicate with an extremely complicated protocol. Ximian
Connector just connects to the Exchange web interface, if it's available, and
basically acts as a screen scraper (not exactly: it works using a modified
version of WebDAV, but it also screen scrapes to get enough data to be useful).
People who run versions of Exchange that don't have a web interface still have
to stick to Windows. People who don't have to pull to get the web interface set
up are also out of luck.
On the server end, it's not too bad. There are several open source Exchange
alternatives that have equivalent features. The Outlook Connector Project
(http://openconnector.org) aims to provide an open source set of MAPI DLLs to
be used by open source projects (such as Kolab (http://kolab.org) or Open-Xchange
(http://www.openexchange.com)), so Outlook can connect to them. Once the server
end has been migrated away from Exchange, it's possible to bring in Linux at the
client end with little disruption.
The OpenChange (http://openchange.org) project is also working (slowly) towards
an Exchange replacement. They seem to be focusing more on reverse engineering
the database format used by Exchange, so there isn't too much overlap (so far).
Jabberd Installation Guide Comments
Tue, 06 Sep 2005 13:41:27 -0700
Adam Pilorz (adam from pilorz.net)
Answered By Suramya Tomar
[Suramya]
Tag,
Got the following feedback on my Jabber install guide. It has some
good advice for improvements so...
I've just installed Jabberd 2 server following your Guide
(http://linuxgazette.net/112/tomar.html), and I want to share some
experiences which could improve this guide.
[Suramya]
Thanks for taking the time to email me with your feedback. Would you
mind if I share this with the Linux Gazette so that they can publish it
in their next issue. That will help other people who are trying to
install a Jabber server.
No, of course I don't mind
. You can share it with everyone, I've
wrote it only to help others
.
1) Since Jabberd 2.0s3 or Jabberd 2.0s4 (the newest one is 2.0s9) the
Libidn library isn't installed automatically with Jabberd, so you
should
write it in your guide, that it must be installed BEFORE running
./configure in jabberd directory. It'll save time of people trying to
follow your Guide.
[Suramya]
Ok. I didn't know that. Thats a good thing to keep in mind for future
releases.
2) It would be easier if you wrote some information on installing
MySQL
libraries, because I had to use --disable-mysql option, as I couldn't
find right libraries (according to some mailing list mysql-client and
mysql-devel libraries) and/or write, that it isn't a must - user can
replace mysql by barkeley in c2s.xml configuration file.
[Suramya]
hmm. I didn't put instructions on how to install mysql because
http://mysql.com
had instructions on how to install the mysql libraries. But thats
something to keep in mind for the next version I guess.
Yeah, you can replace MySQL by Berkley DB, but I havn't set it up using
that so I don't know how...
About MySQL - well, I've asked for it, because I had a lot of trouble
with MySQL. At last I've menaged to install Jabberd 2 with MySQL after
writing last letter to you. I've configured it with options
It looks like Jabberd 2 can't find MySQL even if it's installed (I've installed
RPM's from my Red Hat install CD). So I think it would be a good idea to write
something about CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS options for those, who would have same
problems as I had. It would be also useful, if you put some info on how to create
SSL certificate for server (I've followed those instructions:
http://jabberd.jabberstudio.org/2/docs/app_sslkey.html to create SSL Certificate
and those: http://jabberd.jabberstudio.org/2/docs/section05.html#5_2 to set up
Jabberd2 to use them).
I think that's all I had to write for now. Thanks for your answer.
3) Also, it would be a useful suggestion to enable debugging (run
./configure --enable-debug), so everyone could see what's going
on, when
something goes wrong.
[Suramya]
Good suggestion. I will definitely add that in the next version.
By the way I want to thank you for such a good installing guide
OK, guys, this is a bit wacky. Somebody's going to have to telephone T.R.,
to advise him of a troublesome error in the genetikayos.com DNS, which in
turn is clobbering deliverability of e-mail to hostname "linuxgazette.net".
As a reminder, our primary DNS is at T.R.'s machine, and my nameserver
pulls down copies from there as our second of (only) two nameservers.
T.R. is at [snip]. I've been trying to call him, but his
line's been busy.
First thing I noticed, a few minutes ago, was bunch of SMTP error messages
like this:
----- Forwarded message from Mail Delivery System <[email protected]> -----
From: Mail Delivery System <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 21:42:52 -0700
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
ben@[snip]
all relevant MX records point to non-existent hosts
------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------
[Snip a copy of Jimmy's post to tag@, as addressed by my mailing list
software to Ben's subscription address of [snip] .]
OK, so next step was to remind myself of what are our MX records,
because I couldn't remember:
[rick@linuxmafia]
~ $ dig -t mx linuxgazette.net
; <<>> DiG 9.2.4 <<>> -t mx linuxgazette.net
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 38278
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 3
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;linuxgazette.net. IN MX
;; ANSWER SECTION:
linuxgazette.net. 41736 IN MX 10 genetikayos.com.
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
linuxgazette.net. 41720 IN NS ns1.linuxmafia.com.
linuxgazette.net. 41720 IN NS ns1.genetikayos.com.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
genetikayos.com. 1218 IN A 127.0.0.1
ns1.linuxmafia.com. 139310 IN A 198.144.195.186
ns1.genetikayos.com. 128120 IN A 64.246.26.120
;; Query time: 53 msec
;; SERVER: 198.144.192.2#53(198.144.192.2)
;; WHEN: Sun Sep 11 22:02:21 2005
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 160
Some of you will be really sharp-eyed and immediately spot something
eye-popping in the above (especially since I've called your attention to
the possibility) -- but put yourself in my shoes, and imagine that all
you saw, at first, is the single MX record, priority=10, pointing to
genetikayos.com .
Ah, that makes sense: Mail to our domain other than mail to our mailing
list subhost gets redirected to T.R.'s machine. So, I absent-mindedly
carry out the standard next step in diagnosing SMTP problems, which is
to attempt a manual SMTP session using /usr/bin/telnet -- and I got a
heck of a big surprise:
[rick@linuxmafia]
~ $ telnet genetikayos.com smtp
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain.
Escape character is '^]'.
220-linuxmafia.com ESMTP Exim 4.44 (EximConfig 2.0) Sun, 11 Sep 2005 22:02:53 -0700
220-.
220-WARNING: Unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE/SPAM), pornographic
220-material, viruses, and relaying are prohibited by this server and
220-any such messages will be rejected/filtered automatically,
220-depending on content.
220-.
220-By using this server, you agree not to send any messages of the
220-above nature. Please disconnect immediately, if you do not agree
220-to these terms and conditions.
220-.
220-Please contact [email protected] if you have any
220-enquiries about or problems with this server.
220-.
220-Find out more about EximConfig for the Exim mailer by visiting
220-the following URL: http://www.jcdigita.com/eximconfig
220 .
Er, what? That's my SMTP banner. Wait, didn't I just telnet into
_T.R.'s_ SMTP port?
At this point, I gazed a bit higher up, re-read the "dig" output, and
boggled:
; <<>> DiG 9.2.4 <<>> -t mx linuxgazette.net
[snip]
;; ANSWER SECTION:
linuxgazette.net. 41736 IN MX 10 genetikayos.com.
[snip]
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
genetikayos.com. 1218 IN A 127.0.0.1
^^^^^^^^^
Um, OK. That now gets appended to the Big Book of Things Not to Do with DNS.
Just to double-check:
[rick@linuxmafia]
~ $ host genetikayos.com
genetikayos.com has address 127.0.0.1
There are times when the loopback address is just not your friend.
Writing SMTP-related DNS RRs is one of those times.
I'll probably keep trying to reach T.R. by telephone for a while:
He's likely not very reachable by e-mail at the moment.
[Jimmy] Eight hours later...
T.R. has fixed his DNS
[rick@linuxmafia]
~ $ host genetikayos.com
genetikayos.com has address 64.246.26.120
(This came up elsewhere. I remember grinding my teeth about it at the
time, so I don't know why I didn't put it in the article.)
As well as having 10 different versions[1], RSS has two competing time
formats: RSS 0.91/2.0 use RFC 822 (date -R) format, RSS 1.0 uses
dc:date, which needs W3CDTF (a subset of ISO 8601: date --iso-8601, date
--iso-8601='minutes', date --iso-8601='seconds')
We'll be heading off to the UK this weekend. Jim reports that we've been
signed up for internet access at his hotel assignment, so I'll probably be
able to send in a blurb, but hopefully I will have enough things to do that
I won't be lurking in a hotel all that much.
[Ben]
[smile] Enjoy yourselves and don't let your vacation time be spoiled by
schedules. If you can get it in without stressing, cool; if not, there's
always next month.
[Thomas]
Indeed, although I am sure something can be arranged.
My poor mactop decided to have a fit when I tried to make it dual boot. One
of the LUG locals is a truly guru macintosh fella though, so he's done his
best to fix it up, and I'll have it back at the installfest. If it's not up
to speed I'll end up taking terra with me instead... er, as soon as I seal
her up. those lil bitty screws are kinda necessary after all if you don't
want people gettin' weird because your laptop's falling apart. To its
credit terra's hibernation works perfectly
Anyways there won't be cover art unless I'm taking the mac.
I've crosstrained Ben in using the g2 form of lgazmail to generate tips and
the mailbag parts, by way of showing him the generation-phase on issue 118's
data.
[Ben]
FSVO "trained".
You certainly gave it your best shot; the rest is up
to that gadget I carry around between my ears. Don't worry, if it all
falls down around my ears and everyone hates me and the government sends
in the black helicopters, I promise to not blame you with my last dying
breath.
Of course everyone won't hate you. We've got xteddy in the tag lounge.
In short, if ben would like to login to gemini he should be able to play
virtual Heather this month. Hopefully that should serve in case I happen to
be truly without 'net.
[Ben]
Yeesh, options. I feel my brain melting already...
Bye now! See you next month!
[Ben]
Enjoy the trip, both of you.
Oh yeah, someone tickle silentk; I think he got some more kudo letters
[Ben]
Presumably, there's a "someone" here who knows how to do that. I hope.
[Thomas]
You need a cattle-prod.
[Ben]
[blink] I usually find that a nice cup of coffee does it for me, but
I'll take your suggestion under advisement. (Now that I think about it,
I've had a few mornings when it would probably have been just the
thing...)
Kayos has just updated the SVN back-end to FSFS. Hopefully, this will
result in fewer deadlocks - I guess we'll find out as time goes on.
[Jimmy] Sure enough, there have been fewer problems (so far) this month. Hopefully
the trend will continue.
This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/
Mike Orr (LG Contributing Editor)
Answered By Kapil Hari Paranjape,
Peter Knaggs,
Predrag Ivanovic,
Thomas Adam
While most people know to turn off any services they don't want to offer
the world, many do not realize this applies at the interface level as
well as the service level.
[Kapil]
Other than configuring this by editing the configuration files for
the individual daemons that open the listening sockets, you can also
use iptables/ipchains to block the (ir)relevant address/port pairs.
Here is the relevant portion of a file called "iptables.save" on a
machine that runs a public web server and also accepts ssh connections.
*filter
:INPUT DROP [0:0]
:FORWARD DROP [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
-A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -d 127.0.0.1 -i lo -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
COMMIT
You can enable this with
iptables-restore < iptables.save
You can add/remove ports according to what connections you wish to
accept. You should probably also accept some icmp connections in
order to avoid losing routing information.
A typical networked computer has two
interfaces: lo (the loopback) and eth0 (the Ethernet). Most daemons
listen on all interfaces unless you tell them otherwise. Obviously, your
web server, mail server, and CUPS (printer) server must listen on the
public interface if you want other computers to access them. But if
you're running mail or CUPS only for your own computer, you should make
them listen only on the localhost. This eliminates a bunch of security
vunerabilities because inaccessible programs can't be exploited.
There are several portscanners available but good ol' netstat works fine
if you're logged into the target computer.
# netstat -a --inet
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State
tcp 0 0 *:631 *:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *:https *:* LISTEN
udp 0 0 *:bootpc *:*
udp 0 0 *:631 *:*
Add the "-n" option to bypass domain-name resolution. Here we see the
secure web server listening on all interfaces (*:https), good. But CUPS
is also listening on all interfaces (*:631, both TCP and UDP), bad. (We
know port 631 is CUPS because that's what we type in our web browser to
access the admin interface.) To make CUPS listen only on the localhost, I
edited /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, commented the "Port 631" line and added
"Listen localhost:631". (I like Listen better than Port because it shows
in one line exactly which host:port combinations are in effect.) Note
that you can't specify an interface directly, you have to specify the
domain/IP attached to that interface.
Then I restarted the server and checked netstat again:
# /etc/init.d/cupsd restart
* Stopping cupsd...
[ ok ]
* Starting cupsd...
[ ok ]
# netstat -a --inet
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State
tcp 0 0 localhost:631 *:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *:https *:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 10.0.0.1:32775 example.com:imaps ESTABLISHED
udp 0 0 *:bootpc *:*
udp 0 0 *:631 *:*
Good, the TCP line changed to "localhost:631". The UDP line is still
"*:631". I searched the config file and "man cupsd" for "udp" but found
nothing. I guess that means you can't turn it off? I decided not to
worry about it.
There's a new line in netstat: "10.0.0.1:32775 to example.com:imaps". It
looks like Mozilla Thunderbird is automatically checking for mail.
10.0.0.1 happens to be my public IP. (IPs/domains changed to protect the
innocent.) It connected to the secure IMAP port on example.com. 32775
was a free port the kernel chose at random, as always happens when you
connect to an external server.
There's still one suspicious line, "*:bootpc". I'm not running a diskless
workstation or doing any exotic remote booting, so what is this? "lsof"
is a very nifty program that tells you which process has a file or socket
open.
# lsof -i :bootpc
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME
dhcpcd 3846 root 4u IPv4 5398 UDP *:bootpc
I am using DHCP, which runs this daemon while you're leasing an IP. I
ran "man dhcpcd" and searched for "bootpc" and "port". Nothing. I guess
it uses that port for some unknown reason. I decided not to worry about
it.
[Kapil]
Not quite. You shouldn't be running the dhcp-server (which is what
the dhcpd program is). You are using dhcp in client mode so you
should disable dhcpd from starting up.
[Peter]
True, but the program in question listening on the UDP port 68
(bootpc) is "dhcpcd",
not the dhcp-server which indeed has the name "dhcpd".
When a client requests a DHCP address, a proccess (either "dhclient"
or "dhcpcd")
listens on UDP port 68.
It's eleven o'clock. Do you know which services your computer is running?
[Pedja]
OK, what about this?
pedja@deus:~ ]$ netstat -a --inet
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State
tcp 0 0 *:6000 *:* LISTEN
That's X server, right?
root@deus:/home/pedja#lsof -i :6000
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME
X 3840 root 1u IPv6 9813 TCP *:6000 (LISTEN)
X 3840 root 3u IPv4 9814 TCP *:6000 (LISTEN)
I should add something like 'tcp -nolisten' to options that are passed
to X when it starts(I use startx to,well,start X
).
My question is where to?
[Thomas]
/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
Is the file you're looking for. By default (on most distros, anyway),
the '-tcp nolisten' are set already.
[Pedja]
There's no xserverrc in Crux, so I made one with
I am a starter in GNU/Linux. I am using Linux Kernel 2.4.20-8 Redhat Linux 9.
I have written a TFTP client and server. I have created a UDP socket and as per
the RFC i am sending a structure with the proper TFTP header and then data.
it is working fine and i am able to send and get files.
my problem is when i use ethereal and tell to capture the TFTP and specified
port it shows that the packets are UDP + data. I think i should get UDP header
, then TFTP header and then data. But this is not happening in my case. My TFTP
header is also coming as data.
How can I solve this problem...
[Breen]
You're not by chance using a non-standard port for your tftp server,
are you? If the traffic isn't on port 69/udp, ethereal won't know
to decode it as TFTP.
[Ben]
I think that your best bet would be to look at a standard TFTP
conversation and compare it to yours. There may be some subtle
difference that you're missing, or perhaps a part of the RFC that you're
misinterpreting.
I dont have any guide.. hope to get a reply and from you people.
[Ben]
I have not read it myself, but I understand that Richard Stevens' "UNIX
Network Programming" series is the classic reference for this kind of
work.
Hi Breen
you are right.. i had used a non std port. so it was not showing it as
TFTP.
[Breen]
Hi Deepak --
I've got two requests:
1) Please don't post html. Email is a text medium.
2) When you ask a question on a mailing list, you should follow
up on the mailing list. That allows all subscribers to benefit from
the answer you receive. I've added The Answer Gang back to the
recipients of this email.
Glad we were able to help you!
HTTPS question
Mike Orr (LG Contributing Editor)
Answered By Jay R. Ashworth,
Brian Bilbrey,
Ramon van Alteren
Is there any way to have multiple HTTPS domains on the same IP/port? The
mod_ssl FAQ says name-based virtual hosts are impossible with HTTPS [1].
I've got two sites currently on different servers. Each is distinguished
by a path prefix ("/a" and "/b"), so they aren't dependent on the domain
name and can be installed in the same virtual host. The boss wants them
consolidated on one server, and to plan for additional sites in the
future. The problem is the certificates. A certificate is
domain-specific, and it looks like you can have only one per virtual host.
So person A types https://a.example.com/a/ and it authenticates fine, but
person B types https://b.example.com/b/ and gets a "domain does not match
certificate" dialog. (I have seen this in some cases, but haven't gotten
it in my tests. But it may be because we're still using unofficial
certificates and getting the "unknown certificate authority" dialog
instead.) The only solutions seem to be using a general domain for all
the sites, getting a separate IP for each one, or running them on
nonstandard ports.
[Jay]
Correct. You can't have more than one SSL server per IP address,
because the certs are IP based, not domain name based.
They have to be, if you think about it, because you can't spoof IP [1]
the way you can spoof DNS.
[1] unless you manage a backbone.
[Brian]
I think, if your example is true, then [IIRC, you'll have to do more
research] you can spend the bucks to get a wildcard cert that will
handle [a-g].example.com/blah just fine. Alternatively, get extra IP
addresses, alias the eth as needed, and multiple single-host certs can
be applied. That works just fine. A separate set of SSL stanzas in each
virtual host section, virtual host by number, not by name.
You may, in that case, actually want to run a separate invocation of
apache for the SSL side of things, so that you can do IP-based virtual
hosts for SSL, and name-based virtual hosts for port 80.
[Ramon]
Because encryption is set up before any HTTP headers are sent, name
based vhosting with multiple certificates is not possible.
The only thing that does work is multiple vhosts with one certificate
that validates all of them.
I've done that successfully with a project vhost server on ssl for
multiple software development projects. You can get a wildcard
certificate from rapidssl http://www.rapidssl.com for $199.
They're a dirt cheap certificate provider BTW $69 for a two year
standard webserver certificate accepted in most (if not all) browsers
If it were a small organization that would be a possibility. But we're
part of a large organization and can't monopolize the entire domain
(*.example.com). At the same time the sites are for multiple
departments, and we haven't been able to come up with a
*.subdomain.example.com that would satisfy all of them.
Oh wait, you're talking about wildcard IPs rather than wildcard domains?
(checking rapidssl website) No, it is domains.
Hmm, getting a wildcard certificate would obviate the need for multiple
certificates but that's actually the lesser of our problems. The greater
problem is getting more IPs, justifying them, and putting in a new subnet
for them. But I guess I'll tell management that if they really want these
multiple domains on one computer, they'll have to factor a new block of
IPs
into the price.
Has anybody had experience with https://cert.startcom.org/ ? It appears
to be a nonprofit project geared toward free certificates.
"The StartCom Certification Authority is currently undergoing an initial
self and successive third party audit as required by various software
vendors, such as Microsoft and Mozilla. This will lead to the natural
support of the StartCom CA by the most popular browser and mail clients.
Right now you still have to import our CA certificate into your browser,
but chances are, that, during the life-time of your certificate (one
year), your certificate will be supported without the need of the CA
import."
Probably not an option for us yet, but it looks worth watching.
Duh, our netadmin pointed out that when the second site is moved over, we
can take the IP from that computer. And my other site will replace seven
other servers so we can take their IPs too. That'll last us past the
foreseeable future. Anybody got a few HTTPS sites they need hosting for a
year or two? (Just kidding.)
Mozilla has started hogging my screen. I can select other windows, but if
Mozilla is maximised it remains in front of them. There is presumably a
setting somewhere that is causing this behaviour, but the only setting I can
find I can't seem to change. FYI, this is in KDE.
If I right click the Mozilla title bar and select advanced->special window
settings->preferences, there is a checkbox either side of the "keep above"
setting. The checkbox on the right is checked and greyed out. With a little
fiddling I can get it unchecked, but if I click OK and then reopen the window
to check it, I find that it is selected again.
I don't know if that setting is the source of the problem, but the other
windows don't have it checked, so it's a good candidate.
Any ideas how to fix this one?
OK. Going down into the "special window settings" wasn't necessary. If I just
use "advanced->keep above others" it toggles that checkbox. It's annoying and
a little confusing that it can't be changed from "special window settings".
[Ben]
Hmm. Perhaps one or two - my Firefox started doing some ugly thing a
while back, so I whacked it over the head a couple of times, and will
happily relate what LART I used.
Mind you, this is in the nature of
shotgunning rather than troubleshooting (I can hear the sounds of
retching from the other techies here, but, hey, it works - and I didn't
feel like pulling down a hundred meg or so of code and wanking through
it.)
Move your ~/.mozilla to, say, /tmp/DOTmoz.
Start Mozilla.
If $UGLY_BEHAVIOR is still present, uninstall the mozilla package (making sure to blow away, or at least _move_ away all the stuff in "/usr/lib" and "/etc") and reinstall from scratch. If it's still there, curse life and file a bug.
Otherwise -
Make a copy of your new ~/.mozilla (as, say, /tmp/DOTmoz_default.) Start replacing the subdirectories in the one in $HOME, one at a time, from /tmp/DOTmoz until the problem reappears. Narrow it down to the specific file, then diff that file against the default one. The line causing the problem should be relatively obvious - since Mozilla uses more-or-less sensible, descriptive names for their config variables.
To (mis)quote the folks at the Mozilla Project, "it worked for me."
I'd say this was starting from the wrong end. Possibly my fault because I
flagged it as Mozilla hogging the screen. With window behaviours
like this, it's far more likely to be a window manager issue.
I have solved the problem now. You should have seen a followup email on the
list.
[Ben]
I've had similar problems (back in Netscape days, actually), and thought
that it was the WM originally - it just made sense. Turned out to be
that Netscape was doing some of its own craziness, at least in that
case; I can definitely see where it could just as easily be the WM.
Hi Everyone,
I have a couple of questions for the perl experts that seem to lurk
around the TAG mailing list.
[Ben]
Never heard of any around here.
However, I do play one on a center
stage once in a while, so I'll try to help.
I was playing around with the Yahoo Search API and decided to write a
program that uses it to search for images based on user input and
creates a collage from the results. I actually managed to get it to work
(http://scripts.suramya.com/CollageGenerator) but need some help in fine
tuning it.
The program consists of two parts: the frontend which is a php page and
the backend which is a perl script. The PHP frontend writes the user
input to a mysql DB which another perl script I call wrapper.pl checks
frequently, when it finds a new row it calls the collage.pl that creates
the collage.
[Jimmy]
Um... is there any reason why the information has to be in a database?
It seems like you're over complicating things: PHP is able to download
files (IIRC, fopen can open from URLs), and Perl is well able to do
CGI (use CGI
, and can be embedded in HTML like PHP using
HTML::Embperl (http://search.cpan.org/~grichter/HTML-Embperl-1.3.6/Embperl.pod).
This page (http://www.cs.wcupa.edu/~rkline/perl2php) has a Perl to
PHP 'translation', but it's also good for the other direction.
The original machine where my site was hosted was not a very powerful
machine so the collage creation took ages.
So I decided to use a client server model where I could run the backend
on multiple machines and have each of them process a small portion of
the requests which the system got. Thats why there's a DB involved so
that I can keep track of who's working on what query and the backend can
run on my home machine or a different more powerful system.
Right now I am running just one backend process but once I get most of
the bugs worked out I will prob put them on other systems I have. (Just
to decrease the wait time..)
Thanks for the links though, They will be useful in other programs I am
thinking about.
Now my first problem is that I am using the following function to
download the images to the local system for processing and I am not
comfortable with it.:
Is there a way I can download the images fast to my computer without
having to use wget? I download upto 10 images eachtime for creating a
collage. I don't like passing results I get from the net directly to a
shell but this is the only way I could get it to work. Another
disadvantage of wget is that if it can't download an image it takes
forever to timeout and goto the next url in the list.
[Ben]
Take a look at the LWP toolkit at http://cpan.org ; it contains support
for any kind of HTTP/FTP/NNTP/etc. usage you might want from within
Perl. The above can be done this way:
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;
# Create user agent
my $u = LWP::UserAgent -> new;
# Create request
my $r = HTTP::Request -> new( GET => "$url" );
# Configure the request however you want - e.g.,
$r -> timeout( 10 );
# Pass request to UA
my $ret = $u -> request( $r );
print "Error fetching $url" if $ret -> is_error();
does the whole thing in one shot - but it's not nearly as flexible as
the above approach, which allows tweaking any part of the interaction.
Thanks for the info. I will check out this package. It looks like it does
what I want. How is this package speed wise/resource usage wise?
[Ben]
Forgot to mention: this is untested code, just off the top of my head -
but stands a reasonably good chance of working. See 'perldoc
LWP::UserAgent' and 'perldoc HTTP::Request' for the exact public
interface/usage info.
Ha ha, don't worry I had guessed that this was the case. Afterall I
can't expect you to do all the work for me...
I will try out the code
and let you know how it went.
The second problem is that my mysql connection seems to drop at random
times during execution. What can I do to prevent the mysql server from
going away?
[Ben]
1) Stop shelling out. If in doubt, read "perldoc perlsec" (Perl security
considerations) - and then stop shelling out.
This includes
command substitution (backticks) as well as the 'system' call.
2) In any interaction involving file system calls the timing of which
could affect the Perl functions, force the buffers to autoflush by
setting the '$|' variable to non-zero. Oh, yeah - and stop shelling out.
Below is the code I use in wrapper.pl to check the DB for changes:
The script usually dies around the last $update->execute. What I think
might be happening is that the collage.pl is taking too long to run and
the DB connection times out, is that possible? Can I force the
connection to not timeout? (I did try searching on google but didn't
find any ways of changing the keep connection alive variable from a script).
Any idea's/suggestions? Thanks in advance for the help.
PS: Any suggestions on improving the script would be most welcome as I
am using this to try to learn perl.
I'm trying to get rsync access to an OS X server with a paranoid sysadmin
who doesn't know much about Unix progams. (He's a GUI kind of guy.) He's
offered me FTP access to one directory but I'd really like to use rsync
due to its low-bandwidth nature and auto-delete feature (delete any file
at the destination that's been deleted at the source). His main desire is
not to grant a general-purpose account on the server, so if I can convince
him that rsync+ssh can be configured to grant access only for rsync in
that directory, I may have a chance. But since they're two separate
programs (as opposed to *ftpd and mysqld, which can have private password
lists for only their program), I'm not sure how to enforce that. Would I
have to use rsyncd alone, which I guess means no encryption? (Granted,
ftp has no encryption either, but I think he's just using that due to lack
of knowledge of alternatives.)
(And when is ssync going to arrive, to avoid this dual-program problem?)
However, access to a single directory would probably require a user jail
- - all is explained in the rssh and scponly docs, but it's not really for
your "GUI" types.
[Kapil]
I suppose you mean something that combines ssh and rsync. In any case
your particular problem might be solved by means of an authorized_keys
file entry that looks like (this is all in one line one line)
Here you must put the appropriate source directory in $SRCDIR.
The authorized key file can be put in a dummy users directory. This
dummy user should have appropriate read/write permissions for the
directory in question.
As an alternative you can use a configuration file "--config=$FILE"
in place of $SRCDIR.
Once this is done, the owner of the SSH private key associated with
the public-key (which is the bit that starts ssh-dss AAA....) can
connect to the ssh server and start the above command and only the
above command.
I'm not a TAG subscriber, so I can't see the list archives to verify,
but hopefully this mail isn't repeating something that you've already
had a dozen times this month.
[Thomas]
So far, you're the first.
From September's gazette: "my machine only boots from floppy, and I
want it to boot from cd" might be addressed with a smart boot manager,
such as sbm. The debian (sarge) one credits James Su and Lonius as
authors, and says it was downloaded from
http://www.gnuchina.org/~suzhe , but it looks like the useful content
can now be found at http://btmgr.sourceforge.net
[Thomas]
Indeed. It has been mentioned in the LG in the past (twice by me, and
once by Ben, I believe.)
[Ben]
Wasn't me; I hadn't run across SBM until now.
[Thomas]
It's OK, and provides a lot of elaborate
features that can be quite interesting on certain types of hardware, it
has to be said.
[Ben]
As is often the case, Debian already has it as a package (pretty amazing
folks, those Debian maintainers!) -
ben@Fenrir:~$ apt-cache search smart boot
bmconf - The installer and configurator of the Smart Boot Manager
sbm - Smart Boot Manager (SBM) is a full-featured boot manager
As Francis has already mentioned, though, it won't boot USB devices. Too
bad; that would make it quite useful, especially given that modern
kernels are too big to fit on a floppy anymore.
By the way - the fact that they are too big annoys the hell out of me.
There are plenty of folks out there who need floppy-based booting -
troubleshooting and booting weird hardware configurations are two
situations where that capability can be critical - and "new systems all
come with a CD-ROM" is NOT equivalent to "all existing systems have a
CD-ROM". Yeah, older kernels, whatever; as time goes on, those become
less and less useful - and support less and less common hardware. I'll
admit that I'm coming from ignorance here, but - there should have been
a way to make the kernel modular enough to provide the "compile small
kernel" option instead of just losing this important capability.
Thanks for the reply. Oops -- I hadn't spotted that. I did try
searching for "sbm", and all I found was a (presumably) mis-spelled
samba config file. But now that I try again, searching for "smart boot
manager", I see that it does appear in the archives.
No harm done.
"sbminst" it to a floppy to confirm that it can use your hardware,
then consider putting it in your primary disk mbr, consigning lilo or
other boot loader to a partition or secondary disk. Of course this
last bit presumes that "my machine only boots from floppy" really
means "my machine only boots from floppy or one hard disk", but that's
probably a reasonable assumption.
Worked for me with an ATAPI cd drive that the BIOS didn't like. I
suspect it won't work with the SCSI cd in the original problem, sadly.
And am almost certain that it also won't work with the USB stick in
the original original problem. So it isn't a full solution -- or even
a useful solution in these specific cases -- but it might help someone
with a slightly different problem.
I'm wondering if it's wise to allow a remote user within
the LAN to log in as root, by adding that user's public key
to root's "authorized_keys" for that machine.
[Kapil]
There is an "sudo"-like mechanism within SSH for doing this. In the
authorized_keys file you put a "command=...." entry which ensures
that this key can only be used to run that specific command.
All the usual warnings a la "sudo" apply regarding what commands
should be allowed. It is generally a good idea to also prevent
the agent forwarding, X11 forwarding and pty allocation.
Here is an entry that I use for "rsync" access. (I have wrapped the
line and AAAA.... is the ssh key which has been truncated).
I'm writing some scripts to back up data on our small
business network here. One option is to get each machine to
periodically dump its data on a specific machine using NFS.
The option I'm interested in is to get a designated machine
to remotely login to each machine and transfer the files
over a tar-ssh pipe.
The only reason to be using root access is because some
directories (/root, some in /var/lib) can only be read by
root. Would changing permissions (e.g. /var/lib/rpm) affect
anything, if I chgrp the directories to a "backup"
usergroup?
I'm concerned with one machine, a web server, that will be
included in the backup scheme. All machines here use Class
A private network addresses and are behind a NAT firewall,
but the web server can be accessed from the Internet. Will
allowing root login over ssh on that machine pose a huge
security risk, even by allowing ssh traffic from only the
local network?
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Does anyone know of a script or program that can convert a bitmap image
to binary code and print the line(s) of ones and zeros to standard
output?
[Ben]
Adam, if I didn't know you, my "homework detector" sense would be
tingling. As it is, I'm still a bit boggled as to why you'd want to do
such a thing, but - all the standard tools that I can think of, off the
top of my head, do octal and hex. Binary, well... heck, I'd do what I
always do when it takes me more than a few seconds to think of an
answer to that kind of question: reach for Perl.
perl -wne'printf "%08b ", ord $_ for split //' foobar.bmp
That'll give you a line of space-separated, 8-bit binary numbers
representing the ASCII value of each character in the file. Just to play
with the idea, converting it back wouldn't be any harder:
perl -wne'print chr eval "0b$_" for split' foobar.binary
The netbpm tools are a standard part of Linux distributions
everywhere. Image Magick and The Gimp are able to write it too.
[Ben]
I just tried converting some text to PBM format (using 'convert' from
ImageMagick), and it's not doing anything like the above; in fact, it
created a file that's mostly full of nulls - which displays a white page
with the word "hello" in the center when looked at with an image viewer.
Looking at a 1k chunk at the top of it, I get the following ("^@" is how
'less' displays a null):
[Jimmy]
Whoops. I meant the 'Plain PBM' format, which you get using the
pnmtoplainpbm program.
[Ben]
[grin] One more time, with gusto...
I think you mean "pnmtoplainpnm" (I checked the Debian file list as well
as doing a Google search - which found nothing but rebuked me with "Did
you mean: pnmtoplainpnm"; there's no 'pnmtoplainpbm' in sight.) That,
however, doesn't seem to do it either:
According to the NetPBM project page/"pbm" man page, "Plain PBM" is
created by the "pnmtoplainpnm" utility - although they do state that it
only works with monochrome images.
Ah-HA! I've got it - sorta. "pnmtoplainpnm" takes either a PNM or a
PBM file, and applies a /reductio ad absurdum/ algorithm
to produce
the "simplest" version of the input format is. This does indeed do...
something similar to what the manpage described:
I don't know that it actually matches the question that was asked, though. :)
[Raj]
Not sure if it might help you, but you can have a look at aalib
ASCII-art library http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib . It
converts jpegs to ascii.
Or do you want to see the raw binary as it is stored in the bmp file ?
[Ben]
Well, sorta. Very sorta. Unless you're a C programmer with time enough
to write a converter that uses aa-lib.
I've always thought that their
demo ('bb') was fantastic, but... it's not something that ever really
caught on, and I'm a sort of a Luddite in Linux clothing, so my opinion
doesn't count.
What you might be thinking about is "aview/asciiview" - which is what
comes closest to "converting" JPG to ASCII; the latter displays JPGs, as
well as any other format recognized by the NetPBM kit, in an extremely
rough ASCII approximation. However, "aview", which can only read
PNM-formatted images, is capable of surprising image quality on a
terminal with a tiny font:
xterm -fn 5x7 -geometry 1000x1000
# Enter this command in the new xterm
convert logo: pnm:-|aview -driver slang
All good fun, but - still doesn't answer the question as posed. Unless
I've totally misread it.
Actually, I just recently downloaded NetPBM for another application
for JPEG conversion. As far as the "GUI" tools like Imagemagick and
The Gimp go, I being a gui-phobe and graphically challenged to boot, I
rarely use them except to demonstrate that there is "another way" to
people who have thrown away several hundred dollars a year on Adobe
Photoshop. There is no "practical" use for my question. It came out
of my recent study of "sed" and the movie "Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory" (in which Johnny Depp transforms a giant chocolate bar into a
"TV" -sized package with an imaginary contraption). The "real"
exorcize,
[Jimmy]
Come come. It doesn't sound particularly difficult, let alone demonic.
in Chapter Six of O'Reilly's "Sed & Awk" concerns a
bit-mapped file that is represented in binary format. Beyond the scope
of the exorcize/sed script, I've been trying to "translate" bitmap
images to binary code and vice versa to see if -- I know, I know, this
is STUPID, but I never pretended to be a Guru, just a GoTTO -- one can
send images as text-files to be "rebuilt" upon receipt so people with
low-bandwidth connections wouldn't have to wait forever to download
images.
[Jimmy]
Erm... I think you have things backwards here. Getting images in a
binary format takes less bandwidth than getting the same thing encoded
as text.
I chose "binary" merely because that was the code used in the
exorcise. My excuse for tardiness handing in my homework is part
medical -- had to spend a few days off-line in every sense of the word,
and part rational: I finally asked myself, "wouldn't people have
thought of this before?
[Jimmy]
Yep. uuencode, base64, etc. etc.
If it makes you feel any better, it is possible to use a text
representation of binary data with the data: URI
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2397), which Mozilla and Opera support.
Here's a simple example:
data:text/plain;charset=utf8,Ksi%C4%85%C5%BCka%20kucharska
That just gives you a simple text page with some Polish text.
That was it exactly. All that hullaballoo for "Dan and James'
going-away present." But thanks. After ten years of sending images
back and forth, it just occurred to me that I had no idea what was
under the hood.
Hence, it made "sense" that plain text would be "lighter" than gifs,
jpegs, xml images etc. Thanks again for the explanation and the demo.
[Jimmy]
Heh. I already had that example made up: it made sense to the original
recipient :)
Hence, it must be doable and I merely can't
figure out how to do it, or it's doable but not worth the time/effort
and was a silly idea in the first place." On the other hand, if the
numbers can be deconstructed in Perl, and reconstructed, why not? They
laughed at Willy wonka, and look at him NOW.
freeshell.org service outage
From Rick Moen
Answered By: Jay R. Ashworth,
Ben Okopnik,
Sindi Keesan
I've been paying a little closer attention to SMTP errors, since the
migration of LG's public mailing lists. Here's one for TAG subscriber
Sindi Keesan. (I just received one each of these following Deepak and
Ben's posts to the "TFTP problem" thread, and undoubtedly will get
another for this one.)
From MAILER-DAEMON Thu Jun 02 11:19:23 2005
From: Mail Delivery System <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2005 11:19:22 -0700
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
[email protected]
Unrouteable address
[goes on to provide a copy of the undeliverable list post]
A lot of us have become accustomed to calling these "bounces" and
disregarding them because they're so often cryptic and impenetrable.
(My SMTP server, in general , gives pretty clear diagnostic messages,
and yet this one was obscure to me, too.) Sometimes, the pedants among
us distinguish Delivery Status Notifications (DSNs) from "bounces",
where the former are three-digit SMTP-standard error codes and matching
explanatory text, generated by the remote SMTP host (MTA process) during
an SMTP conversation.
In this case, there's none of that "550 User unknown" or similar DSN
stuff, and I was left curious what "Unroutable address" means, here --
especially since Ben and others have a pretty high opinion of
Stephen M. Jones's "SDF Public Access UNIX System, INC." operation at
freeshell.{org|net}.
I was intending to attempt a manual SMTP session with that system (by
telneting into its mail exchanger (MX). The first step, then, is to ask
the public DNS where freeshell.org's MXes are:
[rick@linuxmafia]
~ $ dig -t mx freeshell.org +short
; <<>> DiG 9.2.4 <<>> -t mx freeshell.org +short
;; global options: printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
[rick@linuxmafia]
Hmm. Can that be right? No nameservers can be reached that are
authoritative for the domain? First, let's cross-check to make sure
I'm getting meaningful results for similar queries on other domains
(i.e., that I don't just have network or DNS-access problems of my own):
Er, I might be missing something, but having all of one's nameservers be
in-domain seems like a bit of a hazard. Sure, the top-level nameservers
will also have their IPs as part of the DNS's "glue records", but the
rest of us won't. And having only two nameservers is a bit thin.
[Ben]
Indeed, it is a hazard; the few times that SDF has gone down, it was
like being shifted sideway into an alternate universe in which it had
never existed. The response from web browser, fetchmail, etc. amounted
to "Freeshell? What's a Freeshell? Go away, you silly man - we have no
time for psychotics with an overactive imagination."
As I've found out while researching my response to Jay, I think we've
now found part of the reason for Stephen's problem: His third
nameserver is getting ignored (not used), because of obsolete glue
records in his parent zone. He needs to fix that.
It would be nice if Sindi Keesan or someone else whose domain name
doesn't have "linux" in it would advise Stephen of that, and gently lead
him by the hand to the www.dnsreport.com test CGI -- as that gives a
nice overview of his problems (and, basically, a checklist).
[Sindi]
I would be happy to send along a message to him from my address here if
you tell me exactly what to say and where to address it to.
This reminds me of when someone knowledgeable at my local bbs figured out
why the electric company's online billing site went in little circles, but
they did not want to hear about it. (Nor were they interested in the fact
that Spamassassin was dumping their enormous emailed bills for five
different reasons, including green fonts, too many images, odd looking
subject line or from, too much HTML, and 'porn', and the mails were too
large to receive at my address without Spamassassin).
OK, try this:
According to the report on
http://www.dnsreport.com/tools/dnsreport.ch?domain=freeshell.org ,
your third nameserver (ns-c.freeshell.org) isn't in the authoritative
list in the .org records, even if you have it in the zonefile. Because
of that, it probably won't get DNS queries about freeshell.org, which
may partially explain the outage we had recently.
Also (as mentioned in that report), "freeshell.org." in your zonefile's
SOA record is wrong, and probably should be "ns-a.freeshell.org."
That report also make some sensible-sounding suggestions about timeouts
to tweak in the SOA record, which you might consider.
[Sindi]
Who do I send this to? I am not very familiar with sdf, just use it for
email and website.
The indicated e-mail address appears to be that of Stephen M. Jones,
proprietor.
Suggestion: "whois" is your friend.
[Sindi]
I sent it to the address below with a short preface stating that a
'friend' suggested I pass along this information. Thanks. This
situation reminds me of that of a friend whose daughter will not accept
email from him if it is properly spelled - she knows he is dyslexic and
insists that he write it himself, so when I write it for him we have to
send it from his address not mine, and make sure to introduce some
spelling errors. (And then her 8 year old mysteriously sends perfectly
spelled emails 'all by himself'.)
[Jay]
Two nameservers is indeed a bit thin... but on the other point, unless
my understand of DNS is also thin, the parent nameserver is always
going to hand you the glue, is it not?
It's going to hand you the glue records if it has them. One of the
reasons I like the "DNS Report" test at http://www.dnsreport.com is
that it shows you, by implication, the immense variety of ways to screw
up one's DNS -- and one of them is to have missing or incorrect glue
records in the parent zone. Recommended facility, anyway.
[Jay]
And in return, nice tip. :-)
Very cool site. I wonder if he has a version that returns something
more easily parseable, by, say, Nagios. Or, alternatively, will make
his script available. Must look closer.
In fact, if you look closely at
http://www.dnsreport.com/tools/dnsreport.ch?domain=freeshell.org , it is
evident that Stephen M. Jones did at some point deploy a third
nameserver, but that it's missing from the parent records, which
explains some of his fragility problems. (He also has some minor SOA
errors.)
[Jay]
I was a touch surprised, though that you didn't demonstrate the
handy-dandy "+trace+ option to dig, which I fell in love with the
minute I found it:
I haven't done nearly enough playing around with new DNS tools: I'm one
of those codgers who've been hanging onto nslookup and sulking about its
ongoing demise. Thank you for pointing out that trick!
[Jay]
I'm trying to figure out a reasonable way to automate running it and
looking for changes; it's not quite tuned for that. Perhaps the
dnsreport code would be easier to use that way.
[Jay]
It automatically traces the domain down from the root, showing you
the salient information at each step of the way; the important bit in
this case was:
> freeshell.net. 172800 IN NS ns-a.freeshell.org.
> freeshell.net. 172800 IN NS ns-b.freeshell.org.
> ;; Received 82 bytes from 192.12.94.30#53(E.GTLD-SERVERS.net) in 81 ms
>
> ;; reply from unexpected source: 65.32.1.80#53, expected
> 192.94.73.20#53
> ;; Warning: ID mismatch: expected ID 31090, got 36862
> ;; reply from unexpected source: 65.32.1.80#53, expected
> 192.94.73.20#53
> ;; Warning: ID mismatch: expected ID 31090, got 36862
> ;; Received 31 bytes from 192.67.63.37#53(ns-b.freeshell.org) in 45 ms
Note that a) it thinks those servers are in freeshell.org, not
.net, and b) that it appears that neither of them are answering the
phone.
You can see that it did get an answer, though I'm a touch irked at
dig that it didn't tell us what that answer was. The 65.32 servers are
the customer resolver servers for Road Runner TampaBay, which is my
uplink; why it saw fit to answer for itself I don't know -- clearly,
since I did this from a Linux box, it should not have even been being
asked...
But it appears still not to be running; perhaps the gent gave up?
Looks like he had a one-day outage, and is back.
[Jay]
Well, good. We don't need that sort of service much anymore, but
those that need it... need it.
For some reason, my Tucows / OpenSRS registration lists the
authoritative nameservers' IP addresses in the public DNS, while Stephen
M. Jones's doesn't. I'm not clear on why this is.
Anyhow, that's at least something to go on. Let's find out what IP
addresses the authoritative nameservers have:
[rick@linuxmafia]
~ $ host NS-A.FREESHELL.ORG
NS-A.FREESHELL.ORG has address 192.94.73.20
[rick@linuxmafia]
~ $ host NS-B.FREESHELL.ORG
NS-B.FREESHELL.ORG has address 192.67.63.37
[rick@linuxmafia]
Well, at least that much of his DNS is working.
[Ben]
Wouldn't that be your DNS that's working? Unless I'm mistaken, "host"
uses your /etc/resolv.conf to look up hosts - unless you specify another
DNS server explicitly.
Well, DNS being the distributed system that it is, you're always using
some client piece and some server piece. But what I meant is that at
least that much of his DNS information is working (accessible and
useful). It might very well have been cached in my or some other
non-authoritative nameserver's records, yes. But I was wanting to fetch
his authoritative nameservers' IPs from somewhere -- anywhere -- so that
I could ask them questions directly, as the next step. Nothing like
getting DNS answers straight from the horse's mouth, if you don't mind
the rather unsanitary metaphor.
Let's ask the
nameservers explicitly by their IP addresses, to make double-sure the
query's going to the right place:
How odd. Looks to me like the first nameserver doesn't respond, and the
second returns some sort of null result. Just out of old-fogydom, and
as a cross-check on "dig", let's do the same query using nslookup (a
tool that's now deprecated, in general):
[rick@linuxmafia]
~ $ nslookup -query=mx freeshell.org 192.94.73.20
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
[rick@linuxmafia]
~ $ nslookup -query=mx freeshell.org 192.67.63.37
Server: 192.67.63.37
Address: 192.67.63.37#53
** server can't find freeshell.org: SERVFAIL
[rick@linuxmafia]
~ $
[Ben]
I believe that "host" is the recommended replacement for "nslookup"
these days; I groused a bit about having to learn its syntax, but it's
quite nice once you do. It's a sort of a cross between "dig" and
"nslookup":
Ah, it appears that I've underestimated the thing. Thanks.
In DNS lingo, SERVFAIL means that the domain does exist and that the
root name servers have information on it, but that its authoritative
name servers are not answering queries about it. So, basically Stephen
M. Jones has one of his two nameservers offline, and the other
misconfigured to the point that it stutters and faints when you ask it
questions.
I hope it's a temporary glitch, but this (among other things) points out
why continuity of DNS service is so important, and why two nameservers
really aren't quite enough.
Ben mentioned on a private mailing list that Stephen's a good guy and
performs a generous service to the public but for reasons of personal
experience loathes Linux. I vaguely remembered when that came about,
and have re-found the rant he posted at the time, which still makes
interesting reading:
[Ben]
Yeah, that was what I'd based my statement on; that, and the dance of
boundless joy that he performed on the Freeshell list after the move was
done (it's archived there, but it's not web-accessible AFAIK.)
I'll drop Stephen a brief, polite heads-up e-mail. I hope he won't mind
my address. ;->
Stephen goes into a little more detail about his circa-2001
disenchantment with Linux, here:
Oh, what the heck, I might as well just quote it, because it's still
relevant:
From [email protected] Sun, 15 Jul 2001 13:59:04 -0700
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 13:59:04 -0700
From: Rick Moen [email protected]
Subject: [CrackMonkey] How come I am just hearing about this?
begin Bob Bernstein quotation:
> Found on the netbsd-advocacy list:
> http://www.lonestar.org/sdf/
It's got to really suck, being sysadmin of a public-access Unix system:
You'll have an ungodly number of careless users, plus you have to worry
about attacks both from arbitrary remote locations and attacks both by
your users and by outsiders masquerading as legitimate users. When the
day comes of you suddenly realising that your site has for some time
been massively compromised, more often than not, you have only surmises
about how entry and compromise occurred.
Numerous of Stephen Jones's statements suggest that such was the case
with freeshell.org (aka "SDF"):
> I'm even thinking of just removing telnet/ftp/pop3 all together...
Plaintext-authentication network access to shell accounts: check.
> ...we might as well had our passwords in plain text as LINUX's use of
> encryption is about twice as good as Microsoft's.
Unless I misremember very badly how the login process works, passwords
are not processed in kernelspace. Some Unixes introduce a PAM layer,
while others do not. Some support MD5; others do not. But the irony is
that Stephen's users did have their passwords in plaintext -- every
time they did telnet/ftp/pop3!
In fact, it's obvious that Steven's brand new to security-mindedness:
> I've never felt security was important because I sincerely thought
> that a public system would be sacred ground to anyone be they a
> cracker or just normal user.
Poor bastard. I'd say he's had a rude awakening, except that I think
it's not even begun, yet.
His July 11 note suggests that he was still running Linux kernel
2.2.18, which has been security-obsolete for a dog's age. (Note
exception: Some distribution provide kernels with nominally earlier
version numbers that have been patched to have the fixes introduced in
nominally later kernels.)
Stephen writes:
> I blame LINUX due to the recent unveiling of the "oh, if root wasn't
^^^^^^
> already easy to get, here is an easy way" bug in the execve() system
> call...
But that ptrace/execve() race condition (note: a local-user exploit)
was not recent at all: It was a long while back. Wojciech
Purczynski reported it to BugTraq on 2001-03-27:
> ...where malicious code an be executed via almost any binary.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
As Purczynski says, any SUID binary. But the point is that all this
is very old news, 3+ months old. And extremely well known (as the
"ptrace exploit").
Now, it seems likely that Stephen was still running an
non-ptrace-patched 2.2.18 (or earlier) Linux kernel when the shit hit
the fan, proving if nothing else did that he was asleep at the wheel --
but it's also clear that his system was security-exposed in a multitude
of other ways, AND that he still is. (Example: He hasn't yet firmly
deep-sixed telnet, POP3, and ftp inbound access mechanisms exposing
shell passwords to the Net. He will.)
Let's do a taxonomy of root-compromise attacks (as opposed to DoS
attacks and other categories): Rarely, these might be compromises of
daemon processes or kernel network stacks from remote -- e.g., against
vulnerable releases of BIND v. 8.x, lpr, or wu-ftpd. If the attack is
not one of those, it must involve acquiring user-level access first, and
then attacking the host from inside, impersonating a legitimate user.
(In other words, the compromise of root authority is either from outside
the host, or inside. Inside is much easier.)
The latter category breaks down further, according to how the attacker
arranges to impersonate a legitimate user, into sniffing versus other.
Sniffed passwords are, of course, what you get with standard deployments
of telnet, non-anonymous ftp, and POP3 daemons -- and are a particularly
ignominious way to get compromised. Stephen is only now thinking of
shutting off this possibility -- so I fear he has other hard lessons yet
to come.
The other ways of compromising shell-account passwords all trace back to
the fact that users are pretty much always the weak element. If you let
them, they'll use the same weak password everywhere. If you assign
passwords yourself, change them at intervals, and remove the SUID bit
from /usr/bin/passwd -- and sternly admonish the users not to expose
their passwords through re-use on other systems -- they'll still do the
latter, because they can, and because you can't stop them. Switch to
one-time pad authentication, and they'll store the pads or seeds on
vulnerable systems. And of course they'll ssh in, thinking that's
unconditionally secure -- from compromised systems where attackers are
logging all keyboard activity. And, remember, it takes only one
user's shell access getting compromised. (Or, of course, the attacker
might just sign up for a user account.)
You might be able to prevent system security from being shot in the
foot by your users by requiring them all to use physical security
dongles (e.g., SecureID) plus one-time pads. Maybe. But not on a
public-access Unix system. In that sense, Stephen is screwed.
How so? Because he's doomed to having attackers occasionally get
user-level access -- and protecting root against local users is much
more difficult. While the remote attacker can fruitfully attack only
running your network daemons and network stacks, as a local user he
can attack any security-sensitive binary on your system -- a much
wider field of targets. Stephen can try to keep installed software
current, remove some, remove SUID/SGID from others, recompile using
StackGuard, implement a capabilities model / ACLs, keep selected
subtrees on write-protected media, and so on.
And he'll still get clobbered, from time to time. Odds are, he won't
even be aware of compromise for quite a long time (as he probably
wasn't, this time). Does he have IDSes set up? Of course not! He's
"still against security". But that will change. Papa Darwin is a good,
if ungentle, teacher.
NetBSD 1.5.1 on Alpha is going to be an eminently suitable system for
him (even though the Alpha is doomed over the longer term). And Nick
used to deliberately keep an Alpha on-line with a very vulnerable,
antique OS load, just for the amusement value of watching x86-oriented
kiddies' canned attacks crash and burn on it.
But Stephen has a longer-term problem, and it has nothing to do with
kernel vulnerabilities -- let alone old ones that he should have long
ago patched.
[Sindi]
Thanks for pointing out to me that this thread has something to do with
why sdf was gone yesterday, but it is way beyond my ability to understand.
Could you summarize in a few sentences what this all means, for a
beginning linux user with no computer training since Fortran IV?
As The Doctor says, "Ah, that takes me back -- or is it forward? That's
the problem with time travel; you can never tell." ;->
(I likewise cut my teeth on FORTRAN, in my case playing around on
university mainframes.)
If my post seemed a little bit meandering, it was because I was chasing
down several things:
What on earth the cryptic SMTP error "Unrouteable address" means.
Why (rather unusually) that error wasn't accompanied by Delivery
What's going on with freeshell.org and its DNS.
The first question fascinated me because, of late, I've taken a
particular interest in understanding SMTP-protocol mutterings -- and
have improved my own machine's articulateness in that area -- and yet
the quoted advisory ( issued by my machine's MTA) was about as clear as
mud.
So, the answer to turned to be: "I, the lists.linuxgazette.net SMTP
process, couldn't even attempt delivery at all, because the destination
domain's DNS is completely non-functional.
That also furnishes the answer to question #2: There was no DSN
conversation because my MTA couldn't even look up the detination IP, let
alone talk to freeshell.org's SMTP host.
And answer #3 was: "It's unclear whether SDF's main services themselves
went down, because SDF's nameservice outage made those unreachable by
name, even if they were still running."
So, as I was saying, continuity of DNS service is really, really
important to Internet services, and Stephen M. Jones's DNS for
freeshell.org (as presently configured) has proven to be fragile. And
thus your (recent) problem.
I sent a short, polite head-up advisory to Jones, about his DNS outage.
He didn't respond, but I gather from your post that he must have fixed
it!
[Sindi]
Thanks for you explanation which I hope I understood.
I had Fortran in high school, back before our high school even owned a
computer. We typed out our programs on yellow paper tape which was sent
to the other high school to run. In college our physical chemistry
professor decided to teach us some useful skills, so in addition to
learning to solder together a crystal radio, we ran programs on
punch cards also in Fortran. In grad school it was still punch cards
(one audited course on Pascal). The rest is self taught.
I think time actually goes in circles so that everything is new every once
netnews access
From Rick Moen
Answered By: Raj Shekhar
I wrote:
> I was thinking TAG might be able to include or excerpt from this Usenet
> thread?
This is how big a newsgroup/newreader fan I am: If you check headers,
you'll notice that I'm posting this with the "tin" newsreader to
newsgroup "lg.tag".
[Jimmy]
Quoting Rick's headers:
Newsgroups: lg.tag
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.
User-Agent: tin/1.7.6-20040906 ("Baleshare") (UNIX) (Linux/2.4.27-2-686 (i686))
Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 19:50:14 -0700
XRef: linuxmafia.com lg.tag:8
What's up with that, you might wonder? Well, Mailman has a feature,
unused by most listadmins, to bidirectionally (or otherwise) gate any
mailing list with an NNTP newsgroup. Once set up, any mailing list post
shows up (across the gateway) within a few minutes, as an article in the
relevant group's news spool -- and, conversely, any article posted to
the newsgroup's spool likewise gets hustled the other direction across
the gateway within a few minutes, and mailed out by Mailman to mailing
list subscribers.
Please note distinction: I did not say the mailing list goes out on
Usenet. Usenet is a (very) large system of NNTP newsgroups, but
many people also operate private newsgroups that have nothing to do with
Usenet (other than also relying on NetNews Transport Protocol).
In my case, I use leafnode's 2.x betas to support local newsgroups,
which I don't offer to other news servers. (At this date, you have to
compile 2.0 betas, as local groups are a prerelease feature not included
in the 1.x release series.)
For example, my local LUG, CABAL, has a mailing list called "conspire"
-- [email protected]. At the time I set that up, I also compiled
leafnode 2.0b7, configured it to run under inetd, and added this line to
/etc/leafnode/local.groups:
cabal.conspire y Local newsgroup for the CABAL Linux user group.
Then, I enabled Mailman's gateway feature for [email protected],
et voila.
Basically, all I needed to do, today, was enable the gateway function
for [email protected], and add this second line to
/etc/leafnode/local.groups:
lg.tag y Linux Gazette's The Answer Gang
For a very long time, I had open posting to anyone who wished to connect
to my machine using NNTP. That came to an end a few months ago on
account of... guess what? NNTP spammers. So, at that point I locked
down access using /etc/hosts.deny (using Wiese Venema's TCP Wrappers
library): Anyone wanting remote NNTP access can still get it, but you
have to send me your fixed IP address (if you have one) -- and I then
add a permission line to /etc/hosts.allow.
What's so great about newsgroups, you ask?
Let's say you become interested in CABAL's mailing list / newsgroup
today, May 24, 2005. You can, of course, join the mailing list --
allowing you to read and respond to new posts. (Older posts are
browseable only via the Pipermail archive at
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire , and you can't easily respond
to them.)
Or you can participate in it, in its newsgroup form. You have instant
access to all posts ever made , all the way back to December 2000 --
and can continue the thread on any of them. You don't need to subscribe
before you can post, or unsubscribe to stop being barraged with stuff.
And newsgroups settled the infamous private-versus-group reply issue
properly , long ago. There are no dumbass flamewars over Reply-To,
because "Followups" (group responses) are treated distinctly from mailed
(private) responses.
The only drawbacks are (1) people being unfamiliar with newsreaders and
how newsgroups work, (2) people confusing the general concept of
"newsgroups" with whatever they've heard about Usenet, and (3) people
stuck behind poorly designed firewalls that don't allow NNTP access
(119/tcp) but do permit e-mail.
Fortunately, adding NNTP access to a Mailman list doesn't impair
"regular" mailing list functions, but does allow a second avenue of
access.
One little problem I haven't figured out how to fix: Mailman sends
over only to the news server only new mailing list posts, starting
with establishment of the gateway. So, lg.tag's news spool has only the
five or six latest TAG posts in it, whereas cabal.conspire's has that
entire mailing list's history.
Ben, if you feel like a challenge (since you have a shell account,
here), Mailman keeps the mailing list's mbox at
/var/lib/mailman/archives/private/tag.mbox/tag.mbox, which you'll be
able to read/copy, even though you can't "ls" the directory it's in.
(List members can fetch that file as
http://lists.linuxgazette.net/mailman/private/tag.mbox/tag.mbox .)
Leafnode has the corresponding mail spool inside /var/spool/news/lg/tag/ .
If you or anyone else can figure out how to get the rest of the mbox's
contents into that news spool, I'd be grateful.
[Raj]
There is a service run by news.gmane.org which turns publicly available
mailing lists to news (or usenet posts, I am not sure of the correct
term). They have a free nntp server running at news.gmane.org and you
can follow quite a lot of mailing lists using you favorite nntp client.
I find it quite useful in following mailing lists in which have a bit
of interest.
Excellent tip! I note that they have 6929 newsgroups, including
"gmane.org.user-groups.linux.cabal". But, of course, anything you post
there isn't going to get gated back into the mailing list in question:
It's a unidirectional gateway, only.
Well, I know that it isn't for the CABAL conspire mailing list, for
example. I suspect it ends up being bidirectional only for mailing
lists that permit posting from non-subscribers -- which have been
becoming rare.
[Raj]
I am not sure about the CABAL mailing list, but I use the gmane nntp
interface to mail to the php.general mailing list
(http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.php.general). The first time I put a
mail into that mailing list, I got a mail from Gmane asking you to
respond to it (the mail), to verify that I am a real human being not a
spammer. After a few minutes, the posting appeared on the mailing list.
I checked on other archives of the php.general ( for example
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-general ) to verify that it was
appearing not only on the gmane's archive but on the real php-general
mailing list .
php-general accepts mail from a "list of pre-approved mail addresses" --
basically an email id which has replied to its challenge when the user
posted mail for the first time. I guess you can say it can accept mail
from non-subscribers. I will check some mailing list which requires
subscription (for example Linux-india-general
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.india.general) and let
you know the results.
At a guess, php-general may be set up the same way CABAL's conspire list
is: Postings are accepted from subscribed addresses, while any from
non-subscribed addresses are held for listadmin vetting.
That mailing list's subscriber roster includes, for example, member
"[email protected]", which no doubt is the script that grabs and
translates all new mailing list postings to articles in gmane.org's
news spool. If someone who is not a mailing list subscriber, such as
you, duly joins Gmane (the "proving you're a real human being not a
spammer" bit -- a delightful turn of phrase, by the way), and then
follows up an article in newsgroup "gmane.org.user-groups.linux.cabal",
a different script grabs your article from the spool and generates an
e-mail to the mailing list address -- where it's held for listadmin
attention as a non-subscriber post. I as listadmin would undoubtedly
respond by approving the post manually, and adding your address to the
roster of non-subscribed addresses whose postings will be auto-accepted
anyway in the future.
I suspect something similar happened with your Gmane-based posting to
php.general: Either it was merely manually approved by a listadmin and
that's it, or it was approved by such a listadmin and then your address
was cleared for subsequent acceptance.
please share your experience
From J.Bakshi
Answered By: Thomas Adam,
Mike Orr,
Jimmy O'Regan
Hi,
some of you already have done some experiments with different window
managers . I request you to share your experience. I was a KDE user.
[Thomas]
You're asking for a fight, yes?
Joydeep, I/we have already pointed
you to past articles in the past, about different window managers.
Heck, I even published it in TAG for you. Here it is:
(hint: look at the footnotes, and the URLs therein)
Thanks for the link. I am also grateful to both Thomas and Mike Orr to
let me/us know about their valuable experience about different WMs as
well as their positive as well as negative ( I should use less feature)
sides. specially Mike's reply makes me sentimental for going back to
KDE -:))) . but at the same time I have a question in my mind ( may be
a common question ) that we generally, I repeat generally don't go for
a H/W up-gradation frequently. I used my first self-assembled PC for
roughly 10 years. KDE becomes gradually more hungry as a result fatty
too -:) . so it may happen that KDE makes your 2/3 years old H/W ( cpu,
RAM) obsolete . and then you may fell switching over to other small and
fast WM to continue with your existing H/W. only KDE themselves allow you
to continue with KDE by providing fast and a little fatty code.
[Thomas]
Well, yes. My own opinion is that you shouldn't have to upgrade your
PC from a few years ago, to satisfy the working of KDE (or some other
application.) If it is programmed well, then it ought to handle
lower-end system just fine. I suspect it's a trade-off though between
users wanting more features, and the fact that the developers of KDE
themselves have a lot of new shiny hardware, such that they're not
aware of the slowness issues on older hardware.
definitely they have latest H/W , so they don't bother about the older
-:(. but the term latest depends on time factor. those who have latest
H/W have no problem to run KDE. and soon their H/W become older with respect
of KDE . so if KDE doesn't control its intention to become more hungry and
fatty , it gets new users who own latest H/W at the same time loose its
users who had latest H/W once with respect to KDE and are not able to do
frequent up-gradation for KDE.
[Jimmy]
"The trend in desktops, across all operating systems has been to
continuously add features and graphics with each new release.
Unfortunately, cool icons, animation and complicated multi-paned
desktops have usually required increasingly capable machinery. For
various reasons, Linux desktops seemed to have suffered less from this
performance crunching bloat than other packages, such as Windows XP.
KDE 3.1 has actually reversed the trend. To prove my point, I loaded it
on an antique 133 Mhz. Pentium desktop machine. The box had 128 MB of
RAM, 256K of L2 cache, a 2.5 GB disk and Debian. Even though KDE took
about two and 1/2 minutes to load, most of the programs, menus, icons
and animations seemed to appear almost instantly and ran without a hitch."
KDE developers do know about the slowness of KDE. Heck, back in 2001
Waldo Bastian wrote this paper
(http://www.suse.de/~bastian/Export/linking.txt) about part of the
reason behind it (ld.so isn't great at resolving C++ symbols) and wrote
a module for KDE to work around it
(http://webcvs.kde.org/kdelibs/kinit). Michael Meeks is currently doing
similar scary things with OpenOffice:
"Spent some time examining C++ symbol table creation in some detail;
slightly amazed to see the amazing C++ vtable construction inefficiency
in terms of bulk of symbols; GObject for all it's failings is extremely
symbol efficient in that way."
(http://www.gnome.org/~michael/activity-to-2004-06.html)
My local
LUG in India has reported me that KDE 3.3 is more faster than its previous
version. so hope for the best -:) any feed back is welcome
recently I have switched over to icewm. icewm runs comparatively faster
than kde -:)
[Thomas]
Of course it runs faster -- it's a WM and not a DE. That, and DEs tend
(not always, but in the case of KDE it does) load up core libs that are
needed to run a small part of KDE (or sometimes a large one) that you
might never use. Then there's konqueror -- the libs for that are much
the same. So you can see how the memory factor escalates as time
increases. You want to know how I got on the "straight and narrow",
eh? Well, read on:
This was the first ever distro I used. I has absolutely no idea what I
was doing, but I do remember being able to get XFree 3.x up and
running, having spent a few months prior to that using the console, as
I really didn't know any better.
When X started, up popped twm. Coming from a Windows background at the
time, I thought that maybe I had broken my computer. Whilst something
had obviously loaded, it was not what I was expecting. The menus were
not very well defined, and for me to see them, I had to click and hold
the mouse button. Hardly user-friendly...
[Jimmy] IIRC, I've only used TWM three times: first, Summer '98, when trying
out VNC for the first time (with the Java applet), then again researching
an article about CoLinux, using Cygwin, then a few weeks later with that
setup, trying out Metasploit: injecting a VNC server using an RPC
vulnerability, and viewing the results from the VNC viewer on CoLinux,
viewed through Cygwin's X server (I was able to see it worked by the
window-in-window view :)
[Thomas]
... or so I thought. But at the time, I just assumed twm was all there
was. I got to know it, and tweak things about it. Surprisingly enough,
twm is more customisable than people tend to realise. Ok, so I know the
default look-and-feel of it is enough to make anyone vomit (the green
really does remind me of the sea), but if one goes digging about
~/.twmrc, it becomes obvious of the things one can change about twm. I
started off by changing the colour, to a deep red. Since the foreground
colours were white, the contrast this gave was pleasing to me.
Twm also has an icon manager. I didn't know this was the name of it,
and why should I? Whenever I iconified a window, it just appeared on
the root window as a text label almost. But even that's customisable...
The end result, was that although very primitive, it functioned, and I
was happy with it.
I ended up staying with twm for about a year. I didn't know any
different, and it was only after leaving Slackware, for this then new
distribution RedHat, that things changed slightly...
RedHat 5.0: KDE
[Jimmy] That was my first distribution! February '98, in college.
[Thomas]
Anyone reading this that knows me, will laugh at the thought of me ever
trying KDE, let alone using it. But it's true, one might say, almost
unavoidable that I would use it at some point. Of course, I'm referring
to KDE 1.x the version of KDE that actually worked. My main PC (up
until very recently) was a P166. KDE 1.x actually ran on it at a not
unreasonable speed, all things considered. KDE was still in its infancy
compared to the over-weighted and monsterous beast it has become
today).
But (and you can quote me on this) I liked KDE 1.x. I liked its style,
and speed, even on a P166 and that matters when that machine was old,
even when I was using it. Compared to the twm jail-house I had been in
previously, this thing was immense.
Sure, I had a few issues with it. I remember distinctly that the icons
on the desktop were tempermental. One moment they'd work, and the next
moment, they wouldn't, or they'd disappear completely, etc. But I
didn't let this bother me too much. It was useable. It worked very much
like windows, which meant I didn't have to think about what I was doing
-- KDE made all the choices for me.
I then switched distros a lot thereafter. I tried GNOME, and various
other WMs, before settling on FVWM -- actually, this was on RH4 using
their 'AnotherLevel' package. (The Lesstif theme)
[Jimmy] And that was my first WM (though with the FVWM95 default theme). Then
Afterstep, Enlightenment+Gnome/KDE/Afterstep,
Sawfish+Gnome/KDE/Enlightenment/WindowMaker, KDE/Gnome, now Gnome with
whatever it uses now -- Metacity, I think.
[Sluggo]
You used KDE before FVWM? That's a trip.
[Thomas]
Oh no. I used TWM before I used anything else -- by "settled", I meant
that I went back to FVWM having tried KDE. I guess the ordering was
too vague in my description.
[Sluggo]
Although I guess now that
KDE is the default on many systems, it's pretty common.
[Thomas]
It is more common now than it used to be. For years RH (through
releases 4-6) pushed FVWM into the forefront. Indeed, the classic
"desktop" competition that RH held in 1996 spawned the (in my eyes)
infamous AnotherLevel theme. How I loved it. It was only very
recently (say RH 8 onwards) that used KDE as the de facto upon
installation. Although now that GNOME is the GNU desktop, that has
seen its way to the top on some distros (Ubuntu is noticeable for
this.)
[Sluggo]
The first
encounter I had with a GUI (besides Macintosh) was when the university
computer lab replaced its h19 terminals with X-terminals. I thought
it was a ridiculous waste of money at the time. The terminals came
with a built-in window manager (Motif) and a menu to telnet into the
frequently-used hosts.
[Thomas]
Hehehe, what a cool thing to do. Bet it was slow though?
[Sluggo]
Slow, no. What do you mean? All the hosts were on the campus network,
which was no slouch.
[Thomas]
Ah, I see. I just had problems trying to picture the scale of it in my
mind -- whether the more users were on it at anyone time might have
meant things were fairly slow (at University here, you can always
tell when there's too many people logged on. :))
[Sluggo]
This was the University of Washington, so
pine was encouraged. But you could do xdm login to a BSD/ULTRIX host
and get twm. That's what the cool people did.
[Thomas]
Nice bit of history you've detailed there, Mike. I'd really love to
see an article of how Unix was used in the past. Now, with PCs so
cheap and popular, it's all the same method. You don't often hear of
people saying they're using a dumb-terminal (unless they have an XDMCP
server running.)
[Sluggo]
The tradeoff was it
took more CPU time on the host, so after eight hours you got nice'd
and things slowed way down. That was late 1990. Most of what is
now blogs and chatting and eBay was done on Usenet. I'd go down
Friday evening to read news and get home Saturday afternon. We
didn't really use the GUI at all except to set the background
image and run a clock.
A few people played MUDs.
[Thomas]
If you ever get the time, I would encourage you to write an article
about it -- things like that fascinate me.
[Thomas]
You don't have to look very far for the WM I use. Just look at the
recent articles I have written, as well as recent TAG entries from a
few months past. Indeed, you can see my config file on the fvwmwiki:
my H/W config is AMD semapron 1.5GHZ with 128MB DDR , 256KB
L1, UDMA HDD . I have also tested fluxbox which is based on blackbox and
slower than icewm.
[Thomas]
The speed issue is largely dependant on a number of things, Joydeep.
Typically, it could be that you're running extraneous applications
along with the window manager you're loading, or it might be that the
WM itself is loading them, providing you with the default theme it
ships with (Englightenment used to do this -- no wonder I hated it.)
Indeed, I often get asked this question about FVWM -- and why that's so
slow. Typically in FVWM's case, it can usually be attributed to the
over use of colorsets. Colorsets (in FVWM parlance) are a means of
specifying (in a lot of detail) the colours that can be assigned to
various parts of a window (and all aspects thereof) as well as
background colours. Colorsets can be told to use gradient colours, and
the like, that, on lower-end systems take up a lot of memory.
Also, colorsets when used with transparency can cause a slow-down, due
to the way the Xserver handles it (remember that colour management is
the responsibility of the Xserver.) You can tell colorsets to buffer
the transparent images as well -- this can be slow. Where colorsets
use pixmaps (and other graphics colours as opposed to single block
colour) then more memory is used. Indeed, when specifying colorsets in
FVWM the numbering is important. If one were to use:
Colorset 100 fg white, bg blue
Then in memory, there would be allocated space for 101 colorsets,
irrespective of whether they've been defined or not -- so keeping the
numbers low, in their definition is often important. (I'll be
discussing colorsets in FVWM properly in an article.)
But I digress.
There are of course, some general things one can try to reduce
slowness. It's not so much of a problem on 2.6 kernels (as the
scheduler is much better), but the Xserver used to be reniced when it
was running so that it was more responsive -- but such things waere
only ever negligable at best -- and renicing a process is NOT a general
ideal to making things run faster -- but for really low-end systems, it
might.
Going back to the subject of colour, running one's Xserver with a low
colour-depth is advisable, something like:
startx -- -bpp 16
Which can reduce memory consumption. Note that colour-handling in FVWM
(and colour limiting, where it is applicable) is now done automatically
in FVWM where those applications try and steal the entire
colour-pallette (netcape 4 used to be notorious for this.)
[Sluggo]
I suppose you mean where the window has a different palette than the
window manager, so everything around the window turns psychedelic colors
when you move the mouse into the window.
[Thomas]
That's the one, yep. I'm glad you're aware of the difference between a
colour palette (of a window) and that of the overall Xserver. :)
[Sluggo]
That was cool too. We used to
do it on purpose just to watch the colors change. (Stop snickering,
Ben.) It wasn't just Netscape. I think xloadimage (an image viewer
that comes with X) did it too. It's not "stealing" the palette.
[Thomas]
Indeed not. Where a palette is "stolen" what tends to happen is that
the application defaults to black and white.
[Sluggo]
It's
just a fact of life that if the image has a different palette than the
environment, one of them will have the wrong colors. The program
rightly assumes that if the mouse is in its window, you want to see that
image properly. Of course, now that everybody's video card has enough
memory for 16 million colors, palettes don't matter anymore.
[Thomas]
I'd agree, except for the fact that palettes do matter, as they're
ultimately affected by the overall colour-depth the Xserver runs in. I
don't run mine in so-called "true-colour". Mine's in 16 bit (sometimes
eight.) But then I don't have a great graphics card... :)
[Sluggo]
I don't remember if I first used FVWM before or after Linux (1993),
[Thomas]
It wouldn't have been before -- FVWM 1.24 (?) was released in 1993.
[Sluggo]
but
it was my second window manager and I used it for years. Used
WindowMaker for a while, tried a bunch of others. At work (1998) I
used KDE so that any unfamiliar thing I might need was under the menus.
[Thomas]
I think a lot of people that used Linux early on, followed this path.
KDE despites all its faults now, really was something of a revolution
back then. In fact, as I said in my commentary before, I actually
liked KDE 1.X -- it really did look promising. And then they added
cruft to it...
[Sluggo]
That seemed better than wasting time finding something equivalent and
installing it. Then I switched to KDE at home too, and Thomas knew I
was lost.
[Thomas]
Don't worry, you'll come back to your roots eventually. :)
[Sluggo]
For speed, there are pretty much three classes of window
managers/desktop environments:
KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment: slow.
WindowMaker, fluxbox, uwm, and a dozen others: much faster.
FVWM, twm, wm2: slightly faster still.
larswm, ratpoison: fastest.
[Thomas]
That's a fair comparison. Mind you, when you wrote it, what was you
thinking when categorising by speed?
[Sluggo]
The delay between when you initiate an action and it happens. KDE
opens and closes windows noticeably slower than FVWM.
[Thomas]
Ah, I see. That might be to do with how the windows are decorated in
KDE. But I can't say for sure (typically what happens is that the WM
will grab the window before it is mapped visibly onto the screen --
and then apply the decorations. The details of which I am not about to
delve into. :P)
[Sluggo]
You'll notice a direct tradeoff between speed and features, and between
using xlib directly vs a widget library. But xlib programs also look
like crap and have idiosyncratic input behavior (whether you can tab
between fields or press Enter for OK, whether you can replace text by
selecting it, etc), so there's another tradeoff.
[Thomas]
Umm, yes, but the speed of the window manager (at the root level)
depends how it is implemented. Most WMs have to be written in Xlib if
they have any chance of running smoothly. But the speed of the WM
doesn't care for what widget set the application was written in.
Well, let's see. Most of the x* apps that are bundled with the XFree86
release are written using the Xt widget set (one level of abstraction
up from pure Xlib.) Yes, they might look ugly, but there's some things
you can do to "tart" them up.
X apps should (where they've been programmed properly) respond to
resource settings. These are values held on the Xserver that makes
customisation of the application's widgets available to other uses of
the program. When the Xserver loads, it will often process the files
stored in:
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults
... the program responsible for that is 'xrdb'. Indeed, like any
command one can customise it for theirselves. Whereas most commands
when they load look for a config file in $HOME to use instead of the
global-wide one, xrdb doesn't since one can use multiple files for
different programs. Instead, one can use a ~/.Xresources file or a
~/.Xdefaults file (they're the same file -- one is often a symlink to
the other.) As to what they can contain, let's take an example.
xclock.
That's a simple application. If we wanted to, say, tell it to use a
red background, then to our ~/.Xresource file, we could add:
xclock*background: red
... and note that the syntax. The "*" matches anything after xclock in
the resource name, whereas, I could have used:
xclock.background: red
... which would have stopped the matching at the full word 'xclock'.
The colours are looked up via the RGB.txt file, so as long as the
colour names are listed there, things will be fine.
Note that it's traditional amongst resource names to be lower case.
Indeed, the resource name can be ascertained via the 'xprop' command
(or FvwmIdent module, should you use FVWM.)
Going back to the xrdb file though -- save it. In order for those
values to be applied to the server, we have to tell xrdb to load the
file. The command that should be used is:
xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults
... indeed, that does what you think it does. If you were to use:
"xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults" --- that would work, but you'd overwrite the
global definitions stored in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults -- so
-merge is always the best one to use. I also add this to my
~/.xsession file.
[Sluggo]
Another question is memory. Your computer (1.5 GHz, 256 MB) is passable
for KDE, but another 256 MB would be more comfortable.
[Thomas]
Indeed. X11 by itself takes up a fair chunk.
[Sluggo]
I tried wm2 and
other minimal window managers, assuming they would use less memory than
FVWM, but they didn't. So FVWM is amazingly efficient given its wide
configurability.
[Thomas]
It's fast because a lot of the more "niftier" features aren't part of
the core FVWM -- they're modules. All that's in the FVWM core is
enough to get FVWM useable, without bloating it out.
[Sluggo]
And the speed it pops up windows and restores them is
about as snappy as you can get without losing the "overlapping windows"
paradigm.
[Thomas]
There's lots you can do about that. Overlapping windows can be a thing
of the past, depending on the window placement policy in use. In FVWM
parlance:
style * MinOverLapPlacement
[Sluggo]
No, I mean losing the capability of overlapping windows.
[Thomas]
Ah, that's err, rather a big difference from what I was rambling on,
earlier. :)
[Sluggo]
Most Unix, Mac,
and Windows users are used to moving a window anywhere and letting other
windows partially sit on top of it.
[Thomas]
Yup -- I do it all the time under Windows at University. Alas, it's
the only way of working.
(At University, I usually embarrassingly keep typing in my Linux
username and password that I'd use at home, and then getting frustrated
when the netadmins ask me who "n6tadam" is, and why am I trying to
"crack their account".)
[Sluggo]
Windows 1.0 had only tiled windows,
meaning a window could never cover another, and they all covered 100% of
the screen so there was never a background peeking through.
[Thomas]
I liked this way of working (IIRC, the same paradigm was true under Win
3.1 with progman.exe)
[Jimmy]
Not quite. It was the default for each application to use the full screen,
but it was possible (if damn near unworkable) to have multiple programs
overlapping.
[Sluggo]
larswm returns to this as a way to maximize productive space and performance,
although it also allows some windows to "float". Normally you'd use tiled
windows for xterms, editors, your clock/biff/meter panel, etc, and floating
windows for graphical applications like Firefox and the GIMP.
[Thomas]
That sounds like an interesting way of working, actually. Was that the
default way of working under larswm? (I'll try it under FVWM and see
if I like it. I currently use 'MinOverLapPlacement', and although I
have 9 pages avilable, they almost all look too cluttered, and feel it
in operation.)
[Thomas]
... tries to achieve that. That will try and place windows in a linear
fashion filling up as much screen as it can, as in:
... one can set placement penalties -- to place windows away from
others, based on the edge of them and such like -- I don't want to go
into too much detail as it can get boring.
Other placement policies one can use is: "TileCascadePlacement", that
works like MinOverLapPlacement, but will start tiling window, when all
of the available screen space has been used. There's countless
others...
[Sluggo]
I'm mostly satisfied with KDE. Of course, everybody wishes it started
up faster and opened windows faster. But the features, themability, and
integration is a good tradeoff. As the KDE developers have pointed out,
KDE is "bloated" only in the sense that it has more features.
[Thomas]
Sure -- but how useful are they? :)
[Sluggo]
You haven't spent years struggling to get programs to input and display
non-English characters. Every program did it differently, you needed
special fonts, and some programs didn't do it well at all.
[Thomas]
Oh, I can well imagine though. It's bad enough now (although
considerably easier, I'm sure.)
[Sluggo]
Now with KDE
you just click the keymapper icon in the bottom right and the keyboard
changes language. I don't use that feature -- I got so burned out that
I do everything in ASCII now -- but it's nice that it's there without
having to dig through a HOWTO and configure a bunch of programs.
[Sluggo]
But the
features are implemented efficiently, compared to running equivalent
programs standalone. konsole with one session uses more memory than
xterm, but konsole with two or three sessions uses less memory than two
or three xterms, and it has convenient tabs and font selection.
FVWM can't be beaten for manual window placement (why doesn't KDE have
that?), and it's more intelligent about not giving new background
windows the focus when you don't want it to. On the other hand, it only
has one flat list of windows per desktop, whereas KDE groups them by
application. The latter is important when you have fifty GIMP windows
open, a couple konsole sessions and a few Firefox windows. And FVWM can
show windows without decorations -- e.g., biff and transparent oclock --
and you can use the root menu to move them or kill them. But you have
to set up the menus yourself (unless you're using Debian, which has a
WM-independent menu configuration). But I like KDE's panel and klipper
and grouped window list, so that usually clinches it for me.
openbox is another WM performs well but lacks of
theme . UWM ( unix window manager) with UDE ( unix desktop environment)
though based only on xlibs to speed up but I have found hardly any speed
difference between icewm and UWM ( with UDE ).
[Thomas]
Any good WM can only be written in pure Xlib (as FVWM is.)
fvwm is there but setting
its configuration is terrific .
[Thomas]
"Terrific"? That's a new one. :P
I have not tested the enlightenment window
maker yet.
[Thomas]
Enlightenment and "Window Maker" are two different programs.
If any one use any window manager faster than icewm (and configurable
like icewm ) please share the experience.
[Thomas]
That's a matter of personal bias -- and indeed, see my ramblings above.
[Sluggo]
But speed isn't the only criterion. If speed is the only thing you
care about, try one of the minimalistic window managers like larswm
(http://home.earthlink.net/~lab1701/larswm) or ratpoison
[Rick]
Well, opening up gateway services carefully and slowly, to control spam
and other service abuse, is only reasonable:
...............
We look forward to federating with any service provider who shares our
belief in enabling user choice and open communications. We do believe,
however, that it is important to balance openness with ensuring that we
maintain a safe and reliable service that protects user privacy and
blocks spam and other abuses. We are using the federation opportunity
with EarthLink and Sipphone to develop a set of guidelines by which all
members of the federated network can work together to ensure that we
protect our users while maximizing the reach of the network. [...]
Seems reasonable to me. On a related note, I bought Linux Format today
and was amused to see this:
"The award of 15 [Summer of Code] bounties to the Gaim project led to
speculation that Google has its sights set on integrating instant
messaging into its search portal."
Massachussetts decrees all state documents must be in PDF or OpenOffice
formats starting in 2007.
[Jimmy]
Microsoft are (surprise, surprise) upset with this decision. Alan Yates
wrote
a series of "concerns" about the decision.
Tim Bray (creator of XML) took the time to
reply
to some of these concerns, though this, perhaps, sums it up best:
...............
Recently we spent a few days on a farm on Saskatchewan, during which I
had occasion to help clean the floor of the barn, one of whose
inhabitants was a Hereford bull named "El Presidente", being boarded for
a friend. So, when I assert that these talking points are, by and large,
Dung of Male Bovine (DoMB for short), I do so in an educated voice.
...............
One of the most commonly questioned "concerns" is that of the difficulty
of changing formats:
...............
Yates raises the spectre of "enormous costs" facing Massachusetts in a
file format switch.
This is rich.
Yates' hyperbolic sense of moment is unevenly apportioned. He omits the
enormous cost of a possible Microsoft upgrade to Office 12 one day,
should Microsoft be so lucky.
The KOffice team were also keen to correct Yates' assertion that "[the]
four products that support the OpenDocument format ... are slight
variations of the same StarOffice code base": http://dot.kde.org/1127515635
In an
interview
at OnLAMP.com, Richard M. Stallman discusses (among other things) version 3 of the GPL.
Though details of GPL 3 are sketchy, it has seemed certain that it will
contain a 'web service' clause: licences such as the Affero GPL and the
APSL have clauses that require the distribution of source code for
modified versions of software covered by those licences if the software
is used in public servers.
These clauses are considered non-free by Debian, because this affects
the use of the software. RMS's comments show that he has considered this.
...............
Running a program in a public server is not distribution; it is public
use. We're looking at an approach where programs used in this way will
have to include a command for the user to download the source for the
version that is running.
But this will not apply to all GPL-covered programs, only to programs
that already contain such a command. Thus, this change would have no
effect on existing software, but developers could activate it in the future.
Peru has passed a law that requires the use of free software in
government departments.
...............
Article 1 - Objective of the law
Employ exclusively free software in all the systems and computing
equipment of every State agency.
Article 2 - Scope of application
The Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, as well as the
autonomous regional or local decentralized organisms and the
corporations where the State holds the majority of the shares will use
free software in their systems and computer equipment.
A review of Rockbox, an open-source firmware for Archos digital music
players. They are also porting it to some iRiver models, although this
isn't finished. The article also discusses GP2X, a handheld
video-game console with open specifications. It runs Linux, although it's
unclear whether the distribution will be DRM protected.
There was a lot of
fuss in Australia
when several companies who are in some way using "Linux" were contacted
by Jeremy Malcolm, a lawyer acting on behalf of Linux Australia Inc.,
demanding that these companies agree to a trademark licence and pay a
fee of between A$200 and 5000.
Although it was widely reported that this was somehow an attempt by
Linus Torvalds to cash in on the success of Linux, in
this post
to the Linux kernel mailing list, and after a brief explanation of
trademarks, Linux said this:
...............
Finally, just to make it clear: not only do I not get a cent of the
trademark money, but even LMI (who actually administers the mark) has so
far historically always lost money on it. That's not a way to sustain a
trademark, so they're trying to at least become self-sufficient, but so
far I can tell that lawyers fees to give that protection that commercial
companies want have been higher than the license fees. Even pro bono
lawyers chanrge (sic) for the time of their costs and paralegals etc.
...............
(LMI is Linux Mark Institute (http://linuxmark.org): "LMI is not
designed to generate profits for anyone, which is why Linus Torvalds has
given LMI primary sub-license rights for the mark.")
In the end, however, the trademark was ruled invalid in Australia:
...............
In a letter dated 31 August addressed to Perth-based lawyer Jeremy
Malcolm, who represents Torvalds, Intellectual Property Australia
official Andrew Paul Lowe said: "For your client's trademark to be
registerable under the Trade Marks Act, it must have sufficient
'inherent adaptation to distinguish in the marketplace'.
"In other words, it cannot be a term that other traders with similar
goods and services would need to use in the ordinary course of trade."
Sun Microsystems announced that they will be making Project DReaM
("DRM/everywhere available") available under the terms of the CDDL (the
licence used for Open Solaris) as part of their Open Media Commons
initiative (http://www.openmediacommons.org), aiming to provide an open
standard for DRM.
Sun's Jonathan Schwartz spoke about the project:
...............
The issue at hand is fair compensation without loss of fair use. The
Open Media Commons is committed to creating an open network growth
engine, all the while continuing to protect intellectual property in a
manner that respects customer privacy, honors honest uses of media, and
encourages participation and innovation.
DRM-OPERA: An interoperable DRM architecture that is not
dependent upon a specific hardware set or operating system.
Java Stream Assembly: Java-based server software that allows for
distribution of video over a network.
Sun Streaming Server (SSS): Serves standards-compliant video and
audio media over an IP-based network. Generally, SSS serves MPEG-4 video
media. It also supports Apple Computer's QuickTime.
DRM-OPERA's roots lie in Project OPERA, which came out of the Eurescom
R&D initiative sponsored by the European Union and the European
telecommunications industry. Sun's R&D lab contributed heavily to
Project OPERA, which produced an architecture for interoperable DRM in
2003.
OPERA achieves interoperability among DRM systems -- interoperability
between Microsoft and RealNetworks DRMs has already been demonstrated --
essentially by reducing DRM licenses down to a lowest common denominator
of authenticating users only (as described above) and providing "play
once" as an atomic licensing term that all DRM systems can understand
and support. Each of the DRM systems involved in a specific instance of
interoperability can manage more complex licensing terms internally and
communicate them through the OPERA architecture via "play once" licenses.
Larry Wall talks about the current state of affairs in the Perl world,
using spies as his analogy:
...............
Anyway, now that I've been wading through the Bond corpus again, I've
noticed something I've never noticed before about the show. It's just
not terribly realistic. I mean, come on, who would ever name an
organization "SPECTRE?" Good names are important, especially for bad
guys. A name like SPECTRE is just too obvious. SPECTRE. Boo! Whooo!! Run
away.
You know, if I were going to name an evil programming language, I
certainly wouldn't name it after a snake. Python! Run away, run away.
...
Everyone my age and older knows that Five-Year Plans are bad for people,
unless of course you're someone like Josef Stalin, in which case they're
just bad for other people. All good Americans know that good plans
come in four-year increments, because they mostly involve planning to
get reelected.
I probably shouldn't point this out, but we've been planning Perl 6 for
five years now.
Comrades, here in the People's Republic, the last five years have seen
great progress in the science of computer programming. In the next five
years, we will not starve nearly so many programmers, except for those
we are starving on purpose, and those who will starve accidentally.
...............
Microsoft and JBoss agree to increase interoperability
Specifically, the companies expect their collaboration to achieve
interoperability in several domains:
Microsoft's Active Directory--so the companies' software has
integrated sign-on and federated identity management mechanisms.
Web services standards, which govern how applications employ services
available on a group of often loosely connected servers.
Management with Microsoft Operations Manager.
SQL Server, Microsoft's database software, with JBoss' Hibernate and
Enterprise JavaBeans software.
...............
This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/
Notes from Linux World 2005 - San Francisco: Linux World goes Enterprise
With a deluge of product announcements and a heady debate on the
future of software patents, the Linux World Conference and Expo
(LW2005) sailed into San Francisco in early August. Debian
announced its intention to go more commercial, and Darth Vader and
representatives of the Evil Empire up north made an appearance as
well.
This was fun as always, but some of the flavor of past LW
conferences was missing.
To some extent, this was less a Linux World conference and more
an Open Source Software conference, with many major companies
showing off their Open Source credentials. Just look at the keynote
presenters, starting with Oracle, HP, and IBM, (See the conference
website) then there were the Red Hat and Mozilla presentations.
Certainly there were good panels, like the one OSDL presented on
software patents, but the 500 pound gorillas dominated.
Of course, IDG, the conference organizer, did say that the
"prevailing theme of this summer's conference program will be Linux
in the enterprise." They did emphasize that the "conference program
will illustrate how enterprises are reaping the business benefits
of Linux and Open Source," so there were presentations on Grid
offerings and on calculating the ROI of using Open Source Software
in the Enterprise.
Many alumni I spoke with noticed the change in emphasis and were
wistful for the older, Linux bad-boy attitudes and the give and
take of technical presentations where peers openly disagreed. To be
sure, there was some of that, but there were more suits and better
shoes at LW2005, and that boosted attendance at both the conference
and the expo. Perhaps this is the inevitable fallout of getting
corporate elephants to dance...
Strong set of conference tutorials
Linux World had an opening day of tutorials organized into 1 or
2 sessions of 3 hours, followed by three days of conference
sessions and the Expo. I did see a few folks who went just to a
tutorial and then the Expo, even though the keynote speeches were
open to all.
The topics spanned included Samba and its administration,
hardening Linux systems (taught by Bastille Linux creator Jay
Beal), a Linux cluster hands-on lab, Xen and other Virtualization
Techniques, a session on the Novell kernel debugger, and a detailed
look at Google APIs and utilities. There was also a 2-part Linux
system administration track. Each tutorial had a book of slides and
some additional reference material. Since they were priced fairly,
this was a good deal.
Jay Beal's system hardening materials were based on material
from his security
talks website, which includes links to an earlier BlackHat
presentation on locking down Solaris and Linux that was shrunk a
bit for his LW2005 tutorial. Of course, many of his points are
incorporated in the Bastille Linux scripts, which
also offer good explanations for its many security options. Use
those scripts and check out the security
talks link.
The tutorial for web developers on using Google utilities and
APIs was taught by Deryck Hodge of the Samba team. It covered
custom searches, using the Google API as a Web Service with Perl
and Python, gcli as an interactive "shell" for Google searches,
GMail tricks, XML parsing, and building custom maps for display. He
promised to have "code and tutorial stuff" available on his updated
website.
There also was a 3-day, conference-long session on Linux System
Administration in a large room that was open to any full conference
participant. That tied in very nicely with the 'free' (as in beer)
Linux certification exams offered by LPI, the Linux Professional
Institute — Expo attendees were offered the exams for only
$25 instead of the usual $100, so a newbie could (with some outside
reading) attend part or all of the 3-day session and have a good
shot at the basic certification.
Good track of security presentations
Several of the security presentations were led by Jay Beal (who
presented the Linux hardening tutorial), but many other presenters
rounded out the topic. The first session, "Linux Security Report",
was presented by Coverity creator Seth Hallem. He advocated using
static code analysis to find as many potential bugs as possible, and
his tool (Coverity Prevention, a spinoff from a grad project at
Stanford University) is very good at finding those static bugs.
His main point was that good
static analysis will run down more code paths than test cases can,
and will check all variables, working toward a goal of zero
compromising defects. Large software vendors like Oracle, Cisco, and
Sun seem to have joined the Coverity static analysis camp.
He presented a lot of statistical data: security vulnerabilities
go up with more code (but Linux seems to mostly reverse this),
developers spend about 40% of their time on reworking buggy code,
the vast majority of security flaws are from detectable bugs not
caught by limited test cases, etc. One key result: Linux was very
good in comparison with commercial software of its size and
complexity.
Another key result: over half of the bugs in Linux were in the
device drivers, with only 1% in the kernel (and most of these due
to the addition of new features). That's especially good, since
many Linux installations will not use the problematical drivers.
They discovered 1,008 defects in other parts of version 2.6.12
outside of the file system and kernel. Below is a pie chart of
those defects.
Two slides about defects in Linux code (security
vulnerabilities go up with more device driver code):
A white paper on bugs in the Linux kernel is available
here (requires registering with Coverity).
Evil Empire at LW2005
Among the surprises at LW2004 was the appearance of Microsoft in
sessions and in the vaulted Golden Penguin Bowl contest. This year
had Microsofties competing with Google geeks, who won handily, but
the crew from Redmond performed fairly well, actually listing
almost as many UNIX variations as the winning Google team in the
final round. In the spirit of the occasion, the MS trio came
dressed as 2 Imperial Storm Troopers and Darth Vader (where did
they get those great outfits?!!).
That was fun, but is this the proverbial "wolf in sheep's
clothing" syndrome? Is MS trying to put on an Open Source party
hat while surrounding and assimilating Linux as just a better Unix
that's easier to manage with MS tools and utilities? Or are they
genuinely turning over a new leaf?
Bill Hilf, Director of Platform Technology Strategy at
Microsoft, presented one of the more surprising sessions, S42:
"Managing Linux in a mixed environment... at Microsoft?: A look
inside the Linux/Open Source Software lab at Microsoft". His
biography showed a long history of open source credits, including
being a senior IT architect at IBM and leading Linux technical
strategy for their global markets organization. He was one of the
storm troopers, answering most of the Penguin Bowl questions. Unfortunately, his
on-line LW2005 slides consist only of the title slide. He was
also interviewed the day before
on Slashdot.
Hilf said that MS wanted a real expert on Linux and Open Source
software, "...not someone to kill the penguin." He also noted that
his team regularly uses "over 40 different flavors of Linux and
BSD, plus several commercial Unix" products.
Hilf spoke the language of the audience and certainly had the
right credentials; it felt like a peer was addressing the
audience. Hilf gave us spins and feeds, diagrammed a very large
test data center of over 300 clients and servers, and showed us
real Linux servers running Open Source software at the evil empire.
He also explained how reluctant MS co-workers were eventually won
over (after uncovering SMB errors with a Samba SMB Torture suite)
and became interested in his lab as an integration test bed. But he
gradually tempted everyone present with current or beta integration
tools based on MS tech, especially the MS Virtual Server. He said
it was a full product (minus a box) worth $1000 and most attendees
made sure to get the software as they left.
His last (and most persuasive) effort, was a demo displaying the
ease of scripting in Monad/MSH, a kind of .Net enhanced Bash shell
with POSIX features. And it's good, very good. Its a familiar shell
environment that also leverages the .Net infrastructure and can
control services in both the Linux and Windows spheres. It's also a
trail of honey to win some mindshare among system administrators
and younger Linux users. Here's more on
MSH.
All this will make it easier to integrate Linux and Windows - in
fact, any Unix work-alike - yet it seems specifically planned to
favor managing the integration from the Windows side.
After LW2005, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco,
Microsoft announced its upcoming Virtual Server upgrade would
support the virtualization of both Linux and Solaris operating
systems on Windows servers. Is this a new strategy to surround and
'assimilate' Linux? (Remember that magazine cover before the Web
showing Bill Gates as a
Borg? What will another year or two bring?)
Just after LW2005 there were articles about a potential deal
with OSDL and Microsoft to do so-called independent research on the
prospective advantages of Windows and Linux. Was this the camel
getting its nose in the tent, or is this just a continuation of the
rapprochement started with Sun in the last year? After all, back in
July, OSDL leader Stuart Cohen said he could "...see Microsoft
participate in software that runs on top of Linux in the
future."
Is a deal with OSDL good for Linux and the community? While
truly independent research helps us all, there is probably no way
that the results would not be exploited by Microsoft (and they
probably expect to pick up some points with their latest version of
WinServer). As I finish this article, there seems to be a complete rejection of the
joint study by OSDL. It seems that OSDL asked MS to release its Office
Suite on Linux as a test and MS balked. Figures...
Keynotes and press conferences -- DCCA is born
There were many press announcements but among the most significant
was the announcement of the Debian Common Core Alliance. Although
there isn't a clear consensus on whether or not this is the best
thing for Linux, most long term Linux users at the conference
seemed accepting if not enthusiastic about the development, along
with large doses of skepticism. Several sources suggested that a
common core may be the best that the Debian community can muster
since so many organizations and individuals are involved. But the
needs of the large base of Debian users makes this move necessary.
One commenter opined that having a common core (supported by
less than 70% of the Debian organizations) would not actually
create more Debian forks, but also may not significantly reduce the
current number of Debian forks.
Ian Murdock, co-creator of Debian Linux, introduced the the DCCA
at a press conference on the first day of LW2005. Key among the
goals for the first common core release is full Linux binary
compatibility, which means supporting the LSB Linux Standards Base
(DCC will be compatible with LSB packages which use the RPM format
by using the 'alien' tool to translate the package into native
Debian format, since LSB specifies the format, not the RPM suite). A
major secondary goal is having more regular release cycles. DCCA
hopes to track LSB releases, roughly an 18 month cycle. Beyond
that, the goal is to create a 100% Debian core that can support
enterprise business users and their applications and accelerate
acceptance of Debian.
DCC is not a Linux distribution. Its better thought of as a
software repository with common fixes and updates. Individual
distros will use that core and also contribute to it. ISVs would
also certify applications to that core. Among the initial DCCA
founding members are Xandros, Knoppix, Linspire, Mepis, and SunWah.
More Debian distros and some hardware vendors are expected to join
by year end.
The first DCC release is expected in mid-September. It will be
based on Debian 3.1 and should be certified to LSB 3. DCC version
numbers are based on the major version of LSB.
Bruce Perens of Open Source Labs spoke favorably about DCCA at
the initial press conference and also the next day at panel of
Linux/Open Source software authors linked with the PTR/Perens
publishing project. Check out the
PTR site for downloadable books.
According to Bruce, the DCCA will provide a way to "certify to a
Linux distribution, [while having]... multiple support providers
who... differentiate themselves at a higher level up the stack." He
also noted that globally Debian Linuxes have 2-3x the installed
base of SUSE Linux, and this will expand that base.
I spoke with Ian Murdock just before the article submission deadline,
and he said "We're in heads-down mode, working on DCC 3.0, the first
version of DCC, based on the 2.6.12 kernel... On the engineering front,
it's going well." Ian commented on the partner certification program,
"...at the end of the day our goal is to have a core that ISVs, etc., can
certify to... An ISV would certify once and that would be it."
Ian added, "Debian is a community project. We are also becoming
active as the DCC in other Linux projects. For example, we don't
want to define our own standards; we want help LSB to define
formal standards that will be used for all Linux versions, such as
package-name issues, and then we'll do a specific implementation
for Debian. We want to be additive to existing projects, not
reinvent anything."
"I'd love to see DCC play a role on the LSB project; standards
with implementation associated with them are always more successful
than generalized standards. If DCC could become a reference
implementation, it would make LSB and DCC stronger and also make
the whole Linux world stronger."
Freeing Up Software Patents
Open Source software and the future of software patents were
touched on by 2 different keynotes, one by RedHat deputy general
counsel, Mark Webbink, and also in a panel moderated by Stuart Cohen,
CEO of Open Source Development Labs, as well as the author panel.
Webbink spoke about the innovation-crushing effect of software
patents and called on Microsoft to refrain from using software
patents against users and individual developers. (Software
Protection and the Impact on Innovation)
Software patents are more contentious than copyrights and
hardware patents, which cover a single object or entity. Software
patents typically try to patent ideas, processes, sequences, and
even appearances. A pharmaceutical patent would typical cover a
single formula or drug family, specified fairly precisely. Software
developers run afoul of software patents more often because they
are more vague and there have been too many granted for trivial or
non-unique 'inventions'.
There currently are over 150,000 software patents, growing at
about 10,000 a year. Webbink noted patent searches often cost $5000
each. Searching and analyzing even only 3000 patents would cost
$1.5 million. He added that MS alone plans to file 1000-2000
software patents a year.
"What if Dan Bricklin had patented VisiCalc? that would have
locked up spreadsheet software through the year 2000." Webbink said
many current software patents are not that significant. He noted
that MS has a patent for adding and removing white space in a
document.
He stridently criticized the patenting of software code alone.
Patents should be applied only to unique inventions. He concluded
by saying that software patents are used primarily to block
innovation by competitors.
OSDL hopes to create a patent repository that will support the
Open Source software community and not to restrict innovation. This
would be accomplished by major ISVs, like IBM, Oracle, Novell, Red
Hat, etc. giving their intellectual property to OSDL or another
non-profit to administer.
Perens, at the author panel, noted that "... every large Open
Source software project infringes on some patents, but these are
bad patents," adding that "we need significant patent reform in the
US". He was also skeptical of the OSDL patent pooling idea, as many
of those patents may be encumbered by cross-licensing agreements
and won't be that useful in defending Open Source software. "This
is spitting in the wind", he added, and not reforming existing
law.
Diane Peters, general counsel for OSDL, recently offered more
detail on the OSDL Patent Commons project. See this
report for OSDL's position.
Eben Moglen, Chair of Software Freedom Law Center, spoke at the
OSDL panel keynote and supported the project. "OSDL is the ideal
steward for such an important legal initiative as the patent
commons project... there is strength in numbers and when individual
contributions are collected together it creates a protective haven where
developers can innovate without fear."
Of Swag and Collateral
The Expo had a lot of vendors and a lot of freebies, including a
program of free sessions on each day. Among the best freebies were
Linux penguins, cloth creatures from Sun Wah and Novell, both cuddly. There
was also the 10-inch Dilbert doll from EMC. My fiancee loved all of
them!
VMWare, as part of its efforts to contribute to the Open Source
software community, brought attention to itself by giving full user
licenses to VMWare desktop for all Expo visitors who registered at
the booth. (but it has been about 30 days and I still haven't
gotten my license yet). This one does not expire...
Besides several CDs of software and collateral info, IBM also
passed out a flashlight with a bright white LED. The interesting
part is that this one is recharged by a USB port. (So if the power
fails, you can find your way out of your cubicle...)
Besides its ubiquitous red baseball hats, Red Hat also handed
out thousands of 4 oz. chocolate "Shadow" bars, which were tasty
and included a slip under the wrapper with an offer code for $100
off any Red Hat class for the rest of 2005 (extra sweet... BTW, the
code # is 458551W).
Novell also offered green SUSE hats at their booth, some of
which were later found on the "Pike 'O Shame" at the Fedora booth,
along with a few skewered cuddly SUSE lizards (the announced Open
SUSE will have some proprietary Novell code which is encumbered by
cross-licensing deals for now - but they intend to 'open' that
soon, but apparently not soon enough for Fedora loyalists). See,
this still is a colorful community!
Oracle ran its annual Linux install-fest on two "Birds of a Feather" (BOF) evenings
(thanks to Kurt Hackel for organizing it so well) and participants
at this BOF got trial SUSE and Red Hat software CDs and NEW Oracle
10g R2 CDs plus a light dinner. And I think that was the only
food at the BOFs.
Of course, there were several great BOFs, including an open
session with the notorious CmdrTaco of Slashdot. And that may have
kept too many people up too late.
News and Press Releases
I received more PR emails about product announcements for
LinuxWorld 2005 than all the other conferences I registered at for
that last year. Some were major and some were minor. Here are a
couple of bullets on a few:
Red Hat is adding a new Global File System to Fedora Core 4 and
its Enterprise Linux line, under GPL.
Oracle clusters on Linux will support that RH Global File
System.
EnterpriseDB won Best Database Award; Beats MySQL, Oracle and
IBM for Top Honors.
Novell will resell MySQL Network, an enterprise service
package.
IBM announced its Grid and Grow turnkey virtualization offering
using IBM's BladeCenter platform.
Bastille-Linux group released version 3.0.7, for Fedora Core 4
as well as RH Enterprise 4.
(Some of these may appear in the NewsBytes section of the Linux Gazette. Here's
a more complete list at the
LW2005 Press site, But a few new efforts should be noted:
Splunking, anyone?
Although Google and MS may provide some competition, an SF
startup is targeting the search and virtualization of Data Center
logs and other info sources. The idea here is to allow systems
administrators, support staff, and developers to diagnose and
resolve problems faster by having needed meta data in one
place.
Splunk finds and organizes multiple files in search databases
and provides a report language. Data can be entered by reading files
in specified directories, tailing live files, or listening to
messages sent via named pipes. Currently, searches are by key word,
time and specified text strings. The Splunk server has software
that tries to discover event relationships across network and
machine domains.
For now, you can get the free Splunk Personal Server from
splunk.com, get a public beta
of their new product, or go to the project pages.
Open Source Hardware?
OpenGear demonstrated very cost-effective KVM consoles with
remote access features. Not very dramatic, except OpenGear is
participating in the 'okvm project' (see the project page) which is developing
Open Source console and KVM management software and is hosted as a
SourceForge project. And okvm also is developing plans for open
source KVM hardware. This stuff...
OpenGear currently sells an 8-port KVM for only $500 and a 48
port unit for only $1500 retail. A review in
ITworld was very favorable. Visit opengear.com for more info on their KVM
over IP products and the move to Open Source hardware.
Make the move
Resolvo Systems offers its MoveOver product in desktop and
enterprise editions. The idea here is to automate the transfer of a
user's Windows desktop settings, files, and environment to Linux.
Resolvo makes a limited edition available free to individual users
and has contributed source code to the new OpenMoveOver
project on SourceForge.
As part of an LW2005 promotion, Resolvo is also offering its
Quro Linux management product free to new registrants. It acts as a
domain controller and LDAP server. Check that out at Resolvo.com.
Resolvo is partnering with CodeWeavers for migration to the
CrossOver office suite and Moveover Enterprise was a Best
Integration Solution Finalist for this year's LinuxWorld.
Resource Links
Session
PDFs... Best if you use the expo web site to get the session
number first.
Here
is a link for all the LW2005 Product Excellence Awards finalists...
what the competition was...
And here are the actual LW2005 Product Excellence Awards
winners...
(from LinuxWorld and Sys-Con Media)
Best Security Solution: Astaro
Most Innovative Hardware Solution: Levanta
Best Servers: Rackable Systems
Best Integration Solution: Win4Lin, Inc.
Best Data Backup or Storage Solution: Coraid
Best Database Solution: Enterprise DB Corporation
Best Open Source Solution: Mambo
Best Systems Management Tool: The OpenNMS Project
Best Utility/Grid: Rackable Systems
Best Desktop/Productivity/Business Application: Xandros
Best Messaging Solution: Scalix
Best Clustering Solution (Joint Winners): SteelEye Technology
and Appro International
Best Application Development Tool: SlickEdit
Best in Show: LTSP (yes, Linux Terminal Servers)
LinuxWorld-Boston is scheduled for April 03-06 in 2006. And
LinuxWorld-San Francisco 2006 will probably be held next summer.
Drop in if you are on either coast then.
Howard Dyckoff is a long term IT professional with primary experience at
Fortune 100 and 200 firms. Before his IT career, he worked for Aviation
Week and Space Technology magazine and before that used to edit SkyCom, a
newsletter for astronomers and rocketeers. He hails from the Republic of
Brooklyn [and Polytechnic Institute] and now, after several trips to
Himalayan mountain tops, resides in the SF Bay Area with a large book
collection and several pet rocks.
Let's get the negative out of the way up front:
to my mind the contents of this book are not hacks.
O'Reilly does have a "hacks" series and
insiders may well have known what to expect
but I consider the title at best a misnomer.
There's no real programming, no patching object code,
no modifying a module to make some other piece of hardware work.
This is a book about using Knoppix, um, disaster recovery,
er, fixing Linux -- Windows even -- well,
about so much that almost everybody ought to read it.
It would be a shame if the title were to turn off potential readers.
If it hadn't been for the sub-title,
"100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools",
I likely wouldn't have bothered to look at it at all.
The people that won't be interested in it are those who have no
interest in computers per se and just started using GNU/Linux
because they want a stable environment in which to get their
work done without having to "open the hood" as it were.
But even old hands ought to find this book of interest,
if for no other reason than the different approach often used:
booting Knoppix on a machine with some other system(s) installed and then
working on it -- frozen in time -- without necessarily
changing anything or otherwise impacting what is there.
Perhaps it is worth mentioning for those still unfamiliar with Knoppix
that it boots a PC, determines what hardware is available,
and brings up a graphics interface
in which all drives and partitions are accessible
in read only mode
until you deliberately change that status.
Consider the following examples: do you need or want to
leave your notebook at home and just take the CD and a USB
drive to customer sites? Hack #21.
do forensic analysis on a compromised machine? Hack #47.
repair Lilo or Grub after the MBR was zapped? Hacks #52 & #53.
recover as many files as possible from a drive long past its
"best by" date? Hack #59.
change a long-forgot root password on a boot-manager secured machine?
Hack #66.
repair a Windows registry? Hack #76.
clean an infected Windows machine? Hack #78.
At current writing Knoppix version 4.0 has been out for easily
two months, mine on DVD.
Although the CD that comes with the book is version 3.4,
this should not be a problem when you get the DVD.
The "hacks" should still work
as long as you watch out for changes in file structure.
The book includes the following chapters (hack numbers in parentheses):
Boot Knoppix (1 - 9)
Use Your Knoppix Desktop (10 - 20)
Tweak Your Desktop (21 - 31)
Install Linux with Knoppix (32 - 36)
Put Knoppix in Your Toolbox (37 - 51)
Repair Linux (52 - 70)
Rescue Windows (71 - 79)
Knoppix Reloaded (80 - 93)
Knoppix Remastered (94 - 100)
Although the entire book is a definite re-read, at the moment my
favorite chapter is 8, with introductions to numerous varieties
of Knoppix such as:
Hack #82 is for multimedia freaks.
Hack #84 describes a version under 50MB in size!
Hack #87 is about a version specializing in security; if I only
had the broadband to set up a honey pot and La Brea tarpit...
I can't remember when I have had a book in my hands so consistently
filled with interesting and useful information from cover to cover.
It was a delight to read and is full of (mostly) short sequences
of CLI commands that can be used after changing only device names.
And in passing it teaches more than one might expect, e.g. the
usefulness of chroot on-the-fly.
Knoppix belongs in everybody's toolbox and
Kyle Rankin's "Knoppix Hacks"
(O'Reilly, ISBN 0-596-00787-6)
belongs on everybody's bookshelf.
It is well worth the $30 price and
I highly recommend it to anyone seriously interested in PCs.
Edgar is a consultant in the Cologne/Bonn area in Germany.
His day job involves helping a customer with payroll, maintaining
ancient IBM Assembler programs, some occasional COBOL, and
otherwise using QMF, PL/1 and DB/2 under MVS.
(Note: mail that does not contain "linuxgazette" in the subject will be
rejected.)
Many years ago, I was taking a LOT of pictures at work with an
early technology digital camera. It provided images in JPEG format.
I was in the process of modifying the images to correct problems
with contrast when I discovered that the camera did a lousy
job of compressing the files.
With the standard software provided by the Independent JPEG
Group (which contains the marvelous jpegtran utility), I
could often reduce file size by 50%. Losslessly. How does this
work? A standard JPEG image uses encoding parameters from
sub-sections of the image. An optimized JPEG image uses
encoding parameters from the entire image. While
the JPEG algorithm is already lossy, the jpegtran utility
preserves the "lossiness" of the original JPEG image exactly. The
new file is thus lossless with respect to the original file.
Unfortunately, I'd taken several hundred photos, and processing
them one at a time by hand would have taken forever. So... I wrote
one of my first major shell scripts ever. Once I had it working, I
was able to optimize all of the images in less than ten minutes!
The opt-jpg script was born.
A few weeks later, I discovered that "progressive" JPEG images
were sometimes even smaller, but not always. Thus, I modified my
script to try it both ways, and to keep whichever result was
smaller. This made for a trickier script, but the results were
worth it. The opt-jpg script was improved.
And even later, an unfortunate event with misnamed BMP images
forced me to add error-checking, so that the script wouldn't modify
non-JPEG files. The opt-jpg script became more robust.
Further time resulted in a GIF optimizing script (based on
gifsicle) and a PNG optimization script (based on
pngcrush) as well, called opt-gif and opt-png,
respectively. These routines work by colormap reduction, filtering
changes, and other such tricks. You'd be amazed at how many images
out there have a enormous 256-entry colormaps and only use 3 or 4
of the entries. I recently packaged all of these scripts together
and published them as the littleutils.
While my original motivation in writing these scripts was for
dealing with lousy digital cameras, they are also well-suited for
optimizing all of the graphics on a web site. Why optimize your
graphics? To save hard drive space. To fit more images on your
site. To reduce the amount of time it takes for visitors to your
site to load your pages. The reasons are obvious.
So how does it work? We'll demonstrate with the web pages of the
Linux Gazette itself. First, let's get all of the website files
copied onto a local hard drive. The following command sequence
(under bash) will accomplish this:
# wget --no-directories --timestamping --recursive --level=1 \
--accept=.gz http://linuxgazette.net/ftpfiles/
# for i in *.tar.gz ; do tar -xvzf $i ; done
And before we begin, we need to establish how much filespace our
current images require:
# cd lg/
# find . -name "*.jpg" -print | tar -cf ../jpg.tar -T -
# ls -l ../jpg.tar
# find . -name "*.jpeg" -print | tar -cf ../jpeg.tar -T -
# ls -l ../jpeg.tar
# find . -name "*.JPG" -print | tar -cf ../JPG.tar -T -
# ls -l ../JPG.tar
jpg.tar + jpeg.tar + JPG.tar = 44288000 bytes total
# find . -name "*.gif" -print | tar -cf ../gif.tar -T -
# ls -l ../gif.tar
gif.tar = 13066240 bytes total
# find . -name "*.png" -print | tar -cf ../png.tar -T -
# ls -l ../png.tar
png.tar = 21596160 bytes total
Next, you'll need to download and install the littleutils.
It's a pretty standard "./configure && make && make
install" routine. Once that's done, we can optimize the images:
After some lengthy period of time (PNG optimization is
particularly slow), the images will be fully optimized. If
the tar commands above are repeated, we get the following
results (over a 6-megabyte improvement!):
jpg.tar + jpeg.tar + JPG.tar = 41185280 bytes total (a 7% savings!)
gif.tar = 12759040 bytes total (a 2.5% savings)
png.tar = 18452480 bytes total (a 15% savings!!)
Also, if you scroll through the results, you'll find that
several files are misnamed. In particular, there were a lot of GIF
images posing as PNG images. (Apparently a few people out there
think that "mv image.gif image.png" is an easy way to convert image
files. Not quite...) There were even a few Windows BMP images
posing as PNG images. <blegh> A complete list of these
files can be found here: badfile.txt. If these files are
properly renamed and optimized (or better yet, properly converted
and optimized), then further filespace savings can be achieved.
[ Thanks for spotting those for us, Brian; they're all
fixed now. I take some small pleasure in noting that all the errors, with
the exception of one class, were from before I took over running LG. The
errors that came from me - mea culpa - resulted from the fact that
"convert" fails to actually change the image type if the original file has
a mismatched extension; that script is now also fixed, with the image types
forced to the correct ones. -- Ben ]
While this example clearly shows that littleutils can
be used to achieve considerable filespace savings, there are two
major caveats:
[1] The image optimization in littleutils is
aggressive, with all extraneous information being
thrown away. This includes comments, ancillary tags, colorspace
information, etc. You ought to run a few test cases before
optimizing your entire Photoshop collection.
[2] The image optimization in littleutils does
not preserve interlacing. GIF and PNG images will always have
interlacing removed, and JPEG images may be converted to
progressive or non-progressive (depending on which is smaller). If
interlacing is particularly important to you, you'll need to skip
optimization or modify the scripts to keep the interlacing as you
want.
However, for most website purposes, the optimization scripts
found in littleutils work quite well. Merry optimizing!!
For further website optimization, you might also consider
using the repeats utility, also from
littleutils. This nifty script will find duplicate files in
any directory tree. If run in the Linux Gazette directory, the
following duplicate files are found: repeats.txt. To reduce website
filespace requirements even further, all but one of the duplicates
could be deleted, and the HTML references to the deleted duplicates
could be pointed to the remaining copy.
Brian Lindholm is a Virginia Tech graduate and middle-aged mechanical engineer
who started programming in BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I (way back in 1980). In
the late eighties, he moved to Pascal and C on an IBM PC-compatible.
Over the years, Brian became increasingly disgruntled with the instability
and expense of the various Microsoft operating systems. In particular,
hehated not being in full control of his system. MOST
fortunately for him, however, he had a college roommate who ran Linux (way
back in the Linux 0.9 and Slackware 1.0 days). That introduction was all
he needed.
Over the years, he's slowly learned more and more, and now manages to keep his
Debian system running happy and stable (even through two major upgrades: 2.2 to
3.0, and 3.0 to 3.1). [A point of note: His Debian system has NEVER crashed
on its own. EVER. Only power failures, attempts to boot off the wrong
partition, and a particularly flaky IDE Zip drive ever managed to take it
down.] He loves Vim and has found Perl amazingly useful at work.
In his non-Linux life, Brian helps design power generation equipment (big power
plant stuff) for a living, occasionally records live music for people, reads
too much science fiction, and gets out on the Appalachian Trail as often as he
can.
One of the biggest noises in Open Source this year was made by
Google's announcement of the Summer of Code: a
project to encourage students to participate in the development of
open source projects during the summer holidays.
Google teamed up with a number of "mentor" groups, who each
provided a list of project ideas to the hopeful applicants. The
applicants could then write a proposal for Google. Google sorted
the list of applicants by project, and provided the mentor groups
with a list, and a number of applicants they could choose.
The deadline for applications was June 14th; successful
applicants were
notified on the 25th, to have their project deliverables turned
in by September 1st. The list of successful projects will be (will
have been) announced on October 1st. (I have attempted to build a
list of projects, sorted by mentoring organisation, which I have
included as an appendix to this
article.)
Successful participants receive $4500 for their efforts, with a
further $500 going to the mentor organisation. Though Google had
originally intended to select 200 applicants, the response was so
high (8700 has been quoted) that in the end they chose 410.
This
article, containing advice to future applicants, explains how
the selections were made:
We received 126 applications. We selected 12 of
these for approval. Google gave us 10 slots, so the top 10 choices
were funded. It was very easy to reject perhaps a third of
applications that were very poor, indeed. Where do people get the
notion that cutting and pasting my own text from the project
description so that I can review it is worth $4500? Who are the
people who think that one-line or one-paragraph applications will
get them the stipend? Some of these very brief applications were
written by people with impressive resumes. It was obvious they
could do better.
Unlike previous "bounties" for open source projects (Novell, for
example, announced a set of Gnome Bounties a few months
previously), Summer of Code was strictly for students. There were
no restrictions on the basis of nationality, but proof of
attendance at a third-level institute was a requirement in addition
to the proposal, in which academic merit was to be shown, and
deliverables defined.
Aftermath
Google have been roundly applauded for their Summer of Code
idea, though it hasn't been without criticism. The amount of money
in particular has been a source of complaint, as being well below
the amount a summer intern would earn in the US. There have also
been problems for participants outside the U.S. Although American
students will not have to pay tax on the money from the Summer of
Code, that does not apply to non-Americans, and for participants in
countries that do not have tax treaties with the U.S., both local
and American tax apply.
There has been some complaint about the choice of projects. One
project that has been singled out as a waste of funding is The Sneaky
Snakes, a Snake clone in Python, mentored by the WinLibre
project. (In my opinion, that organisation deserves criticism
for squandering funds; not for choosing the Snake clone, but for
choosing three separate but similar updaters).
There was also quite a lot of disappointment from those who
weren't accepted. The Summer
of Rejects site has a list of Rejected
Ideas, and the summer-discuss
mailing list (Google group) had quite a few messages from people
who intended to complete their projects without funding. (I haven't
found any evidence of that happening, though).
The process wasn't problem free for the mentors either. In
this
message to the 'wine-devel' mailing list, Jeremy White of Codeweavers
said:
To be honest, we're running a bit behind here; I
think Google jumped into this without being as prepared as you
might otherwise hope, and there have been challenges in figuring
this all out. (We're still largely clueless about the
responsibilities of mentors from Googles perspective, for
example).
Several of the mentoring organisations had already been running
bounties of their own. Some of them have
mentioned the fear that SoC will have a negative effect on the
bounties offered by open source projects:
Working for "free" is one thing; getting paid to
work on Free and Open Source software is quite another. Google's
funding of the various projects didn't raise notable problems,
though it may have raised expectations for the future.
"One minor issue for us it that the reward offer
is quite sizable, and was, in most cases, larger than what the
bounty would have fetched in the usual Bounty system employed
within Ubuntu," Ubuntu's Weideman said.
"This expectation will need to be
managed."
(I think it's fair to say that if Ubuntu had come up with a list
of projects specifically for Summer of Code, instead of
merely pointing to their existing task list, then they wouldn't
have this problem).
There were also a few odd wrinkles.
This message on Subversion's SoC list shows a common event in
open source: the applicant found another project that performs
most of the same work as his proposed project.
Now, this is a little tricky:
commitmessage.tigris.org is a separate project from Subversion, yet
part of the point of Summer of Code is for the student to actually
work with the designated mentoring organization -- which in this
case is the Subversion project. So we have an unusual situation
going on here. Brian submitted his code to
commitmessage.tigris.org, which is entirely maintained by one
person, Stephen Haberman. However, his mentoring organization is
the Subversion project, which has thirty to eighty developers
(depending on how you count), and naturally, the dynamics of the
two projects are significantly different. Google's Summer of Code
program is more geared toward the second kind: it's meant to give
students a chance to work with large teams and their collaborative
mechanisms.
Google's Chris DiBona, who was Google's public face of the
Summer of Code, has expressed a hope to repeat the Summer of Code,
but the success of this year's competition will first have to be
determined.
The Projects
The information available about the chosen projects has been
somewhat uneven: ironically, the projects mentored by Google are
among the hardest to find information about.
Several of the participants kept blogs detailing their progress:
some of these are aggregated at PlanetSoC. There's also a mugshot gallery of some of
the participants.
In some cases, the work has been good enough to release:
Mono 1.1.9 includes
the Summer of Code work on JScript and the MonoDoc browser,
Wine 20050830
includes theming and Mozilla work, etc.
Many of the projects were the usual sort of development tasks
available in open source; understandable, as the participants only
had two months in which to complete their projects.
Some, however, were extremely ambitious ideas. "JavaEye", one of
the Project Looking Glass projects, has this in
the introduction of its proposal: Has anyone watched Minority
Report? Have u seen Tom Cruise just use his hands moving in a 3D
space to control the computer? Do you want to do it in the next
generation Java Desktop? If yes, I can make it to become
true. Perhaps this was a little too ambitious (at
the time of writing no code had been made public), but it's
certainly an intriguing idea.
Both Gnome and Gaim had similar ideas. CamTrack (Gnome) is an
accessibility aid, which allows the user to move the mouse cursor
with the motion of their head using a webcam. CamTrack is available
for download.
CrazyChat (available from
Gaim CVS) determines facial expressions and head movements,
again using a webcam, and controls a 3D avatar using this
information.
Portland State University has, among other ambitious projects, a
software implementation of 802.11; KDE has del.icio.us-like tag
browsing for the file system; Gaim has a collaborative code
editor... I could list my favourite project ideas, but I spent
quite a while building the list below, so feel free to pick your
own!
KDE received the second largest amount of SoC developers, and so
have an impressive list of projects (most
of the code is available in the 'playground' area of
KDE's SVN repository).
Project Looking Glass is Sun's
Java-based 3D desktop system. Most of the projects
here are reimplementations of common desktop utilities, with a 3D
twist. The code for these projects is available from the
lg3d incubator project on java.net.
Information about Internet 2 projects is quite sparse. The only
information I could find is in a set of minutes
(text, scroll almost to the bottom), and I have to admit that none
of it means anything to me.
The Bricolage site was unavailable at the time of writing:
We're working on recovering the data from a catastrophic
failure. Hopefully, they'll have the problem fixed soon:
you'll find their projects here.
On the projects
page, the Perl projects are listed with interviews with their
creators, which are linked to below, apart from BitTorrent
(interview)
and WWW::Kontent (interview,
journal).
As a university, it's unsurprising that the academic merit of
these projects is
quite high. (See also some of the
other projects completed by the "OSS class").
This information wasn't available on the Monotone website; thanks
to Nathaniel Smith for providing this information. He also said
that all of the applicants were successful.
Petr Baudis -- monotone<->git import/export
Timothy Brownawell -- implementing more advanced merge support
(some new algorithms for textual merging and tree layout merging
that improve on the traditional 3-way merge)
Kaushik Veeraraghavan -- speeding up the Botan crypto library,
so that we could switch to it from Crypto++. Botan is now not only
much more cleanly designed, implemented, and documented (and with
fewer obscure aliasing bugs), but is also faster than Crypto++ at
the operations we care about...
Gaim was one of the best documented SoC mentor organisations.
As well as a project page with
very clear descriptions of each project, they also provided blog
space for each participant, as well as a Planet Summer of
Gaim aggregator.
The list of projects appeared in Wine
Weekly News, with a note of disappointment that at least one
had been dropped, and there had been no code from another.
Of these projects, the Mozilla, Theming, and DirectInput have
been added to Wine CVS.
Jimmy is a single father of one, who enjoys long walks... Oh, right.
Jimmy has been using computers from the tender age of seven, when his father
inherited an Amstrad PCW8256. After a few brief flirtations with an Atari ST
and numerous versions of DOS and Windows, Jimmy was introduced to Linux in 1998
and hasn't looked back.
In his spare time, Jimmy likes to play guitar and read: not at the same time,
but the picks make handy bookmarks.
The ideal programming language for beginners should offer the
minimum barrier between thought processes and their concrete
implementation as programs on the machine. It should not be a
‘toy’ language - its structure should be rich enough to
express complex computer science concepts without being awkward.
The language should encourage good coding habits and students
should be able to look at it as an extension of the three things
which they have already mastered to varying levels of proficiency -
reading, writing and mathematics. Do we have such languages? Yes -
the programming language Scheme fits in admirably.
DrScheme is a superbly
designed programming environment for a family of implementations of the Scheme programming language. Combined
with a great, freely available textbook, How To Design Programs which lays
emphasis on the program design process rather than on finer
algorithmic/syntactical details, DrScheme is bringing about a
revolution in the way elementary computer programming is taught to
school/college students. The objective of this article is to
provide a quick introduction to the fascinating DrScheme
environment as well as the Scheme programming language; it would be
great if some of the teachers who might be reading this get
sufficiently motivated to give DrScheme a try in their classes!
What Ails ‘Conventional’ Programming
Languages?
Why Yet Another Language, you might ask. Why not just teach the
kids one of C/C++/Java, the three most popular programming
languages?
I have been teaching introductory classes in computer
programming using C for the past many years. Most of my time is
spent on teaching the intricacies of the language's low level
syntax, especially pointer handling, memory allocation/deallocation
etc. But isn't this an essential part of the profession of
programming - are we not supposed to understand how things work
deep down? Yes - but there are two problems here:
The objective of an introductory programming curriculum should
be to give the students a firm foundation in the art of problem
solving; the more time we dedicate to teaching syntax, the less
time we have to teach strategies (How To Design Programs
calls them ‘recipes’) for problem solving. Think of a
person who has mastered the whole of English grammar but is
incapable of writing even a two-page essay!
Computer Programming can be thought of as a purely intellectual
activity divorced from any real computer hardware. The skills in
reasoning and systematic thought acquired through a study of
programming can be easily transferred to many other domains which
are not directly connected with computers or computing. People who
are not going to become professional programmers don't gain
anything by understanding implementation details at the expense of
acquiring good design skills.
The importance of learning things at the ‘machine
level’ is not being underplayed here; what is being pointed
out is that an introductory curriculum should focus heavily on
developing the student's design and analysis skills. Only later
should the focus shift to lower level details.
Getting Started with DrScheme
Precompiled binaries of DrScheme can be downloaded from the
project home page. The
executable is called ‘drscheme’. Here is a snapshot of
the integrated development environment which includes an editor, an
interactive interpreter prompt and a ‘stepper’ for
visualizing the evaluation of Scheme expressions.
The work area is divided into two parts - the upper part is the
editor and the lower part, the interactive interpreter prompt.
Short code segments can be typed directly at the interpreter prompt
and get evaluated immediately. Longer programs can be written in
the editor window and executed by hitting the ‘run’
button.
Parentheses, Parentheses Everywhere
Here are two simple Scheme expressions:
(+ 1 2)
(+ (* 2 3) (* 4 5))
which evaluates to 3 and 26 respectively. What one notices
immediately is the use (or abuse, as some might say) of parentheses
as well as the unusual prefix notation. Both have their own logic.
In a conventional language like C, a function call looks like this:
fun(1, 2);
This is prefix notation (‘fun’ comes before the
operands). But operators work in an infix manner:
1 + 2
Scheme doesn't differentiate between operators and functions -
operators too are functions and both are applied in a similar way;
in uniform prefix style. Sacrificing ‘conventions’ to
get a highly regular structure isn't too bad an idea.
The DrScheme editor performs parenthesis matching automatically;
so you need not spend time trying to do it by hand.
A DrScheme program is composed of a set of Scheme expressions -
the form of an expression can be captured concisely as:
(action arg1 arg2 arg3 ... argn)
What if we type:
(1)
at the interpreter prompt? DrScheme generates an error message:
procedure application: expected procedure, given 1 (no arguments)
The designers have taken special care to make the error messages
simple and meaningful.
Everything (or Almost Everything) is a Function!
In Scheme, all computations are done via the application of
functions. Defining a function is very simple:
(define (my-sqr x) (* x x))
The function can be called like this:
(my-sqr 3)
The ‘everything as function’ point of view simplifies
things a great deal. Here is how we write an if statement in
Scheme:
(define a 1)
(define b 2)
(if (< a b) (+ 1 2) 5)
The general format of an ‘if’ statement is:
(if expr1 expr2 expr3)
You might think of ‘if’ as some kind of special
function which takes three expressions as arguments, evaluates the
first expression and evaluates the second expression only if the
first one is true; otherwise the third expression is evaluated. The
value of the expression is returned.
A Model for Expression Evaluation
Here is how we write the famous factorial function as a Scheme
program:
(define (fact n)
(if (= n 0)
1
(* n (fact (- n 1)))))
It's essential that students get a feel of how the expression, say,
(fact 3)
is evaluated by the interpreter. One of the advantages of the
‘functional’ approach adopted by Scheme is that most
evaluations can be modeled as simple substitutions. Thus, the
interpreter would, in the first step, substitute (fact 3) with:
(* 3 (fact 2))
Here is how the process of substitution proceeds further:
An interesting feature of the DrScheme environment is a
‘stepper’ which helps you visualize this evaluation
process. Here is a snapshot of the stepper in action:
Note that we are presenting recursion as something quite
natural: contrast this with the way we introduce it in
‘conventional’ languages - as something magical and
mysterious!
Language ‘Levels’
We have seen the use of the ‘define’ keyword to bind
values to names. Let's try the following experiment:
(define a 10)
(define a (- a 1))
we are trying to write the Scheme equivalent for the C statements:
a = 10;
a = a - 1;
We note that Scheme is giving us an error message:
define: cannot redefine name: b
So, ‘define’ is not the same as the classical
assignment operator! In fact, we use a different operator to do
assignment, ‘set!’. Let's try:
(define a 10)
(set! a (- a 1))
You might either get a syntax error or you will see that set! has
the desired effect. The behaviour depends on the current language
‘level’ which you have chosen. Hit Alt-L and a window
pops up:
You see that the language level currently in effect is
‘Intermediate student with lambda’. Each
‘level’ exposes the student to a part of Scheme.
Because assignment is a complex operation, it becomes available
only when you choose the ‘advanced student’ level. The
obvious question now is:
Why is Assignment an ‘Advanced’ Operation?
Let's think of the factorial function expressed as a C
routine:
int fact(int n)
{
int f = 1;
while(n != 0) {
f = f * n;
n = n - 1;
}
return f;
}
what if we interchange the two statements within the body of
‘while’ loop? We get a serious error - the function now
returns 0 for all values of ‘n’ other than 0.
The assignment operator introduces complex ordering dependencies
between statements in our program. A beginner will have to spend
considerable time and effort before he purges all ‘ordering
bugs’ out of his code. In a ‘pure functional’
style of coding where we do not make use of assignment, such bugs
do not occur. It so happens that a lot of very interesting programs
can be constructed without using assignment. There are also plenty
of programs (mostly modelling real-life entities like say a bank
account) which can be built only by using explicit assignment. An
intelligent teaching strategy is to first let the students gain
enough experience writing ‘pure-functional’ code and
then introduce assignment as an advanced operation.
Higher Order Functions, Lambda and Closures
Functions are first class objects in Scheme - they can be stored
in variables, passed to and returned from other functions.
(define a +)
(a 1 2) ; evaluates to 3
(define (my-sqr x) (* x x))
(define (foo f x) (f x))
(foo my-sqr 3) ; evaluates to 9
It's possible to create functions ‘on-the-fly’ using
‘lambda’:
(define (foo f x) (f x))
(foo (lambda (x) (* x x)) 3) ; evaluates to 9
The general format of ‘lambda’ is:
(lambda (arg1 arg2 .... argn) expression)
It generates an ‘anonymous’ function which accepts
‘n’ arguments and whose body evaluates to the value of
‘expression’.
Look at the code below:
(define (add x)
(lambda (y) (+ x y)))
(define f (add 1))
(f 2)
The function ‘add’ returns a function; in the body of
this function, the value of ‘x’ would be the value it
had at the point when the function was created. Such functions in
which certain variables have values ‘captured’ from the
environment which existed during the creation of the function are
called ‘closures’.
Closures and higher order functions provide tremendous
expressive power to the language; the computer science classic
Structure and Interpretation
of Computer Programs has a thorough discussion of this
topic.
Defining Local Variables
Let's define a function ‘fun’:
(define (fun x y)
(let ((p (+ x y))
(q (- x y)))
(* p q)))
(fun 2 3) ; evaluates to -5
In the body of ‘let’, var1, var2 etc will be assigned
the values obtained by evaluating exprn1, exprn2 etc. These
bindings are ‘local’ in the sense they vanish once the
evaluation of the body of ‘let’ is over.
Creating Compound Data with ‘Structures’
Using structures is extremely simple in Scheme:
(define-struct point (x y))
(define p (make-point 1 2))
(point-x p) ; evaluates to 1
(point-y p) ; evaluates to 2
True to the functional nature of the language, the
‘define-struct’ keyword does nothing more than
constructing three functions on-the-fly; a
‘constructor’ function called ‘make-point’
which builds an object of type ‘point’ and two
‘accessor’ functions ‘point-x’ and
‘point-y’ which help us retrieve the value of the
fields x and y.
The ‘List’ Data Structure
The ‘list’ data structure is central to Scheme
programming. The three fundamental operations on a list are
car, cdr and cons. The following code segment
illustrates use of all three operations.
(define a (list 1 2 3)) ; create a list (1 2 3) and bind it to ‘a’
(define b '(1 2 3)) ; same as above; note the use of the quote
(empty? b) ; returns false
'() ; empty list
(cons 1 '(2 3)) ; yields '(1 2 3)
(car '(1 2 3)) ; yields 1
(first '(1 2 3)) ; same as above
(cdr '(1 2 3)) ; yields '(2 3)
(rest '(1 2 3)) ; same as above
Simple Graphics
It's interesting to note that we have seen enough of Scheme
syntax to be able to write fairly sophisticated programs. The
DrScheme programming environment comes with
‘teachpacks’ which offers additional (and often
interesting) ‘library level’ functionality. Let's take
the ‘add teachpack’ option from the
‘Language’ menu and include the ‘draw.ss’
teachpack. Then we run the following code segment:
(start 300 300) ; opens a window
(define p (make-posn 0 0)) ; creates a ‘posn’ structure
(define q (make-posn 100 100))
(draw-solid-line p q 'red) ; draws a line from p to q in color red
The Chaos Game
Let's play a game. We plot 3 arbitrary points A, B, C on a piece
of paper. In addition, we plot an arbitrary initial point X1. Now,
we roll a 3 sided die whose sides are labelled A, B, and C. If A
comes up, we will plot the midpoint of the line joining X1 to A. If
B comes up, we plot the midpoint of the line joining X1 to B; the
case with C is similar. We will call this new point X2. Roll the
die again. Plot the midpoint of the line joining X2 to either A, B
or C depending on the outcome of the die toss. We call this new
point X3. Repeat this process indefinitely.
A computer program allows us to easily plot thousands of such
points. The image which arises out of this seemingly random process
has a striking regularity. Let's write a Scheme program to
implement our ‘game’.
First, let's define some utility functions:
(define (draw-point p color) (draw-solid-line p p color))
(define A (make-posn 150 10))
(define B (make-posn 10 290))
(define C (make-posn 290 290))
(define X1 (make-posn 150 150))
(define (average x y) (/ (+ x y) 2))
(define (mid a b)
(make-posn
(average (posn-x a) (posn-x b))
(average (posn-y a) (posn-y b))))
The Scheme function invocation (random n) returns a random number
between 0 and n-1. Let's write a function which returns either the
point A or B or C depending on the toss of a die:
(define (A-or-B-or-C)
(let ((i (random 3)))
(cond ((= i 0) A)
((= i 1) B)
((= i 2) C))))
The ‘cond’ expression returns A if (= i 0) is true;
otherwise it returns B or C depending on which of the statements (=
i 1) or (= i 2) is true.
We need an initialization routine which will open the window and
plot the first 4 points:
(define (initialize)
(begin (start 300 300)
(draw-point A 'blue)
(draw-point B 'blue)
(draw-point C 'blue)
(draw-point X1 'blue)))
Now its time to compose the main plotting routine (let's call it
plot-curve). Here is the strategy:
plot-curve accepts two arguments x and n. The initial value of
‘x’ is X1 and ‘n’ is the number of points
we wish to plot, say 10000.
If n is 0, nothing to do.
When n is not 0, let ‘i’ be the midpoint of the
line joining x with either A or B or C (depending on the result of
the die-toss). Plot i.
Repeat the same process with ‘i’ in the place of
‘x’ and n-1 in the place of ‘n’ (one less
point to plot).
Here is the code which implements this idea:
(define (plot-curve x n)
(when (not (= n 0))
(let ((i (mid x (A-or-B-or-C))))
(begin
(draw-point i 'red)
(plot-curve i (- n 1))))))
The complete program is shown in Listing 1. The graphical output we
get looks like this:
Programs as Prose (or Poetry)
One interesting point about plot-curve is that we can almost
read it aloud; there is not much difference between the pseudo-code
description and the actual function. In a way, writing a program is
akin to writing prose or poetry - a program is meant to be read,
understood, appreciated and enjoyed by a human being besides being
executed on the machine. The earlier one appreciates this fact, the
better.
The peculiar syntactical structure of Scheme forces you to think
of writing your code as layers of functions; it's virtually
impossible to write spaghetti code (of course, nothing prevents you
from purposefully obfuscating your code). Each function definition
can be thought of as building up a vocabulary with the ultimate
objective of describing the solution in terms of a language which
is as close to its word-description as possible. SICP again provides some
interesting examples of the ‘programming as language
building’ activity.
Turtle Graphics and the Koch Curve
The ‘turtle.ss’ teachpack is great fun to play with.
Load this teachpack and just type:
(turtles)
at the interpreter prompt. You will see a window popping up with a
small triangle at the centre; this is our ‘turtle’. You
will be able to move this turtle all over the screen and make it
trace out interesting figures by executing simple commands.
(draw 50) ; the turtles moves 50 pixels in the current direction
; also, a line of length 50 pixels is drawn
(turn 72) ; turns the turtle 72 degrees counterclockwise
(move-offset -200 10) ; change the position
; new horizontal position will be old + (-200)
; new vertical position will be old + 10
A Koch curve
is an interesting fractal figure. The figure below demonstrates the
construction procedure:
We start off with a single line segment, then divide it into 3
equal segments. We draw an equilateral triangle that has the middle
segment as the base. We then remove the middle segment. We apply
this procedure recursively on all line segments.
The idea can be implemented as a simple Scheme program using the
turtle graphics teachpack.
We have seen that using Scheme, we can do cool math-oriented
stuff very easily. This doesn't mean that the language can't be
used for doing ‘real-world’ stuff like talking with a
program over the network, reading from / writing to files, running
multiple threads etc. For doing most of these things, we will have
to choose the ‘PLT’ option from the
‘Language’ menu.
Conclusion
This article has presented a very superficial view of the
DrScheme programming environment (as well as the Scheme language) -
the best way to really get started is by reading How To Design Programs and visiting the
TeachScheme Project Home
Page. I am sure that the ‘Scheme Philosophy’ will
radically change your approach towards teaching and learning
elementary computer programming.
As a student, I am constantly on the lookout for fun
and exciting things to do with my GNU/Linux machine. As
a teacher, I try to convey the joy of experimentation,
exploration, and discovery to my students. You can read about
my adventures with teaching and learning here.
Part computer programmer, part cartoonist, part Mars Bar. At night, he runs
around in a pair of colorful tights fighting criminals. During the day... well,
he just runs around. He eats when he's hungry and sleeps when he's sleepy.
The Ecol comic strip is written for escomposlinux.org (ECOL), the web site that
supports es.comp.os.linux, the Spanish USENET newsgroup for Linux. The
strips are drawn in Spanish and then translated to English by the author.
These images are scaled down to minimize horizontal scrolling.
To see a panel in all its clarity, click on it.
These cartoons are copyright Javier Malonda. They may be copied,
linked or distributed by any means. However, you may not distribute
modifications. If you link to a cartoon, please notify Javier, who would appreciate
hearing from you.
"we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by
Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit
for it in the comments."
Or "Black Wednesday"
(http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Black_Wednesday.txt):
'"No, you're just wasting your time with that! Who cares about the Apple
II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. Your OS will be obsolete
before it's finished. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you're
going to start on it now!".
With that, he walked over to my desk, found the power cord to my Apple
II, and gave it a sharp tug, pulling it out of the socket, causing my
machine to lose power and the code I was working on to vanish. He
unplugged my monitor and put it on top of the computer, and then picked
both of them up and started walking away. "Come with me. I'm going to
take you to your new desk."'
"Well, it's Steve. Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and
won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the
situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field."
"A what?"
"A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He
can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not
around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules. And there's a
couple of other things you should know about working with Steve."
"What else?"
"Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it
doesn't necessarily mean he'll feel that way tomorrow. You have to
low-pass filter his input. And then, he's really funny about ideas. If
you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell you that he thinks it's
stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he'll
come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it."
[2] As you might guess, it's a blog for the past: it has the usual blog
features: RSS feeds, comments, categories, and the like; it also has
fields for the characters involved, related stories, and the date field
is geared towards the original time of the story, as well as the ability
to rate the story and add related external links.
The site mentions that the source code is to be released under the GPL,
but almost a year and a half ago.
I've already got a host of ideas for video games to accompany classic
literature:
Catcher in the Rye: Sort of like a first-person shooter, except
instead of avoiding getting shot, you have to avoid things that rip away
the hypocritical mask the world wears to cover up its essential
lousiness. Don't let your "ennui" levels get too high!
A Tale of Two Cities: Will Sydney Carton end up on the
guillotine? Not if you can help it.
Huckleberry Finn: You and Jim, drifting down the Big Muddy, seems
like a relaxing time -- but watch out for alligators and con artists.
Anna Karenina: Dodge that train!
Johnny Tremain: Use all your skill to re-attach Johnny's hand!
Allegory of the Cave: Help Plato get out of that cave! (Could
also be used for Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.)
La Divina Commedia: Heaven, hell, or purgatory -- your skill will
decide!
...............
I've got to confess: I got an e-book (the lure of new pTerry weeks early
was too strong to resist). Yep, DRM sucks, as does the viewer software,
but I have to take my hat off to the underhanded mind that decided the
ebook would be encrypted with the credit card number used to buy the
thing. That's just... devious.
Oh, BTW, the book is great, as is "Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman
...............
Mrs Higgler was older than Mrs Bustamonte, and both of them were older than
Miss Noles and none of them was older than Mrs Dunwiddy. Mrs Dunwiddy was old,
and she looked it. There were geological ages that were probably younger than
Mrs Dunwiddy.
As a boy, Fat Charlie had imagined Mrs Dunwiddy in Equatorial Africa, peering
disapprovingly through her thick spectacles at the newly erect hominids. 'Keep
out of my front yard,' she would tell a recently evolved and rather nervous
specimin of Homo habilis, 'or I going to belt you around your ear-hole, I
can tell you.'
...
The creature laughed, scornfully. 'I,' it said, 'am frightened of nothing.'
'Nothing?'
'Nothing,' it said.
[...] 'Are you extremely frightened of nothing?'
'Absolutely terrified of it,' admitted the Dragon.
...............
Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index
Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the
Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press
conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."
...
"Book burning is just the beginning," said Google co-founder Larry Page.
"This fall, we'll unveil Google Sound, which will record and index all
the noise on Earth. Is your baby sleeping soundly? Does your high-school
sweetheart still talk about you? Google will have the answers.
[Thomas]
I just couldn't pass this up, without a reply.
[Sluggo]
I knew you wouldn't be able to.
[Sluggo]
That one's great. Comments:
FOOD & DRINK
Bacon.
Ugh. OK, my comments (as the closest thing to a resident bacon expert)...
[Sluggo]
So that's why Canadians call Canadian bacon "back bacon".
[Jimmy]
It's called 'back bacon' because... (drum roll...) it's made from the
pig's back. Better quality meat. Usually, the bacon that's made into
rashers comes from the pig's stomach (pork bellies are one of the more
important agricultural commodities), and "dinner bacon" usually comes
from the legs.
IIRC, 'back bacon' is actually ham
[Thomas]
Hehe, so now you see? Indeed, one thing that I am quite annoyed with
over here, is that pre-packed bacon tends to have the rashers packed
with water --- so that when you cook then (fry it, usually), it doesn't
fry but boil. The net result is that the rasher shrinks to nothing.
Well, there are two views you can take on this. Either: a) that's the
idea, or, if you know a little more about bacon curing (which,
unfortunately, I do), b) that's an unfortunate side-effect of making
bacon more affordable.
(Or maybe even: c) a little from column A, a little from column B)
[Sluggo]
Blancmange & pudding. My British friend said our pudding is "blanche
menage". Not quite what this thing says.
[Thomas]
Hehehehe, that's a nice play on words.
[Kat]
I haven't read the link yet, but when Ben relayed "blanche menage" to me
last night, I responded with "I've heard it called
'blench mange'" (pronounced as in the skin ailment, not as in the French).
[Sluggo]
Doner. My mom used to make shish kebabs on a skewer, sans pita. Yum!
A vertical lamb on a spit is a vertical lamb on a spit, not a doner or a
gyro. Although you might call it "gyro meat". Now, what's the
difference between these and a shaverma? (Note: gyro is supposed to be
gyros (singular), although nobody except Greeks pronounce it that way.)
[Kat]
Doner/gyros/shawerma-shwarma-shwerma-etc.:
No difference that I have detected other than the national/linguistic
origin of the cook/vendor. (Turk/Greek/Arab)
[Sluggo]
Like Greek coffee vs Turkish coffee vs Arabic coffee.
[Ben]
For me, there's actually a difference between Armenian and Turkish
coffee [1], although it may well be connected to the specific areas of
Armenia and Turkey from which the people who made the stuff for me have
come. (I actually have a lot more experience with Armenian coffee, even
after all these years in the US. Go figure.) I strongly suspect that
there's a lot of overlap, particularly in regions that border on each
other, but my sample set has not yet included that.
[1] As Sirdar Argic cheers his idiotic head off...
[Jay]
Benjamin Okopnik's criminal Armenian grandparents are responsible for
the conversion of linuxgazette.com to a CMS.
[Sluggo]
English muffin. What a hoot. What about Australian toaster biscuits
(which I think are called crumpets in England). They're like an English
muffin but more solid and sweet.
[Thomas]
Hmm. A muffin is a muffin (unlike a crumpet, which is very airy,
muffins are somewhat more solid, and have a much more floury taste).
[Sluggo]
Scone. The hospital I worked at served them with raspberry jam. No
clotted cream, tea, or strawberry jam. That may be highly gauche but
they're great tasting that way.
[Thomas]
Indeed. Mmmm, clotted cream is nice with them, though. As is just
honey.
[Sluggo]
Clotted cream sounds very tasty from all the descriptions I've read.
[Kat]
There's an American tendency of late to doctor the dough itself with
fiftykajillion additions, making it darned near impossible
to find the standard thing other than in "tea shoppes".
[Sluggo]
Scoff. Closest equivalent is "scarf it down". Kind of the reverse of
the ass/arse thing. Scoff is what I would do if Ben said, "I'm an
innocent lad who has never done anything wrong."
[Thomas]
Indeed. The meaning of 'scoff' to show contempt has always been a much
lesser use. But both usages are now acceptable.
[Kat]
Well you should scoff there, it'd be utterly lacking in style points!
[Sluggo]
Stuffed. "I'm stuffed," means very full, not just full. Especially
used around Thanksgiving. It may have an additional meaning in Texas.
[Thomas]
It's usually a very common saying around Christmas time (having just
spent three hours eating a turkey and all the trimmings).
[Sluggo]
Water. Why would you ask a salesman in a washing machine shop, "Is
water metered here?" What does that mean?
[Thomas]
'metered' as in the amount of water used is registered on a meter (that
is in units of something or rather).
[Sluggo]
It sounds like "Mind the gap" or "Does the red light not apply?" (as a
Dublin garda said).
[Rick]
The latter does sound wonderfully Irish.
That's an Irishism? I suppose it must be: doubly so, as it reminds me
of a story
I was walking down the street with my son's mother, many years ago
when we were still a couple. She wasn't watching where she was going,
and bumped into a man with a labrador who was coming the other way. He
said nothing, and kept going; she decided that he bumped into her
and inhaled deeply to start throwing abuse (she has a pretty short
fuse).
I grabbed her arm and dragged her along. This shocked her into silence
(I was hen-pecked, I can admit it) for a few seconds, before she
started to protest.
"What's wrong with him. Is he blind?"
"Yes. Did the guidedog not give it away?"
[Rick]
On the other hand, I think I
wax positively English in the caustic wording I employ for notes on
windshields of people who'ved blocked handicapped parking zones:
"Dear Sir:
I'm afraid that being morally handicapped doesn't count."
[Brian]
Whereas the missive I'd prefer to leave on a windshield or five is
caused by people with temporary (or permanent) handicap stickers, but
literally no mobility or visible handicap I can discern that warrants
being able to park specially. However, in many of these cases, I've been
able to find another reason for their markings:
"I've been following you about to see whether the Handicapped Sticker
was for your driving or parking (I hesitate to use the word 'skills',
under these unfortunate circumstances). I'm so sorry that you seem to be
doubly cursed."
[Kat]
A gentle note here:
Mobility impairment does not necessarily manifest visually as lurching
or limping or halt movement. It may be a case of
something like congestive heart failure or some other incapacity of
stamina rather than motion.
(This is not to say that I'm not aware of the tendency of some physicians
to issue spurious placards for the benefit of
conniving persons. Just that not all cases of invisible handicap equate
to lack of need.)
[Sluggo]
Yes. My mom is not visibly handicapped but it's hard for her to walk
more than a block without resting, and the hot sun can exacerbate her
condition (MS). So those handicapped parking spaces make a big
difference. God forbid somebody should decide she's "not handicapped
enough". People don't realize the enormity of problems handicapped
people deal with...
[Rick]
You might wish to know that "enormity" is not a noun used to denote
magnitude. It means "great and notorious wickedness".
That's a common usage error. I'm guessing that someone once encountered
a phrase like "sentenced for the enormity of his deeds" and erroneously
concluded that "enormity" must be something like "enormousness". And
thus the misconception became established.
I hadn't realized it either. Course, it's less out of place in Mike's
comment...
[Sluggo]
Weird. I've only heard it the other way. Unless I've been
misunderstanding it all this time.
[Sluggo]
(a) being turned down for Access vans because she can use the bus
lifts. "It's not using the lifts that's the problem, it's walking to
the bus stop, which are now a half mile apart." And getting hit by cars
crossing the street to said bus stop, as has happened twice.
(b) Section 8 (the apartment subsidy program) demands an inch-thick set
of forms every year to justify the voucher, with doctors' statements,
income and expense receipts. (That's the program Bush has frozen and
wants to eliminate in a couple years.)
(c) an apartment manager with anger management problems.
(d) her car is an '84 Toyota held together by prayer. If it conks out,
getting to medical appointments becomes a much bigger ordeal.
(e) writing to drug companies asking for reduced-price medications.
Some companies require little paperwork; others a lot.
Just doing this, and grocery shopping, and looking for an apartment with
a nicer manager is a full-time job in itself.
[Sluggo]
All these verbs sound too formal for the
situation. The equivalent here would be, "Do you have to pay for water
around here or is it free?" But it's still a strange question to ask a
washing machine salesman.
[Sluggo]
Everyone buys water by the
cubic foot, yes. Although in some cities the landlord has to include it
in the rent so it's a de facto flat rate.
[Thomas]
Indeed.
[Sluggo]
One thing I noticed in England was a hotel with a machine in the shower
charging for hot water. I was incensed.
[Thomas]
That sounds stupid to me, too.
[Sluggo]
I already paid for my room,
dammit. Isn't a hot shower one of the basic things you expect in the
deal? Unsure if electricity's really that expensive in England,
[Thomas]
It is getting more expensive yes, as is gas.
[Sluggo]
and if
so, why tankless water heaters (which use a lot of energy) are so common.
Bang/chat up/cram/fluke/haggle/hanky panky/hunky-dory/nookie/not my cup
of tea/piece of cake/puke/put a sock in
it/round/sacked/sloshed/suss/twit. All used here.
[Thomas]
[Sluggo]
Cheesed off. That's the funniest one on the list. It doesn't really
work here; it sounds too much like cheesy or cheesehead.
[Thomas]
c.f. (although not strictly related): "Hard Cheese".
[Kat]
...? Where here? Works for my set, but it's a tainted sample as
it's full Anglophiles.
Kat, who's been horrifying Ben by spouting "Southernese"
[Rick]
Which, I would think, remains vanishingly rare in Florida, whose
cultural orbit oscillates mostly between Long Island and Havana, I had
thought.
[Jay]
Florida's not in the South; surely you knew that?
[Rick]
That would have been my strong suspicion -- though my brother-in-law
from the Panhandle makes (embodies) a pretty good argument for those
aforementioned pockets of Dixie.
[Jay]
Well, yeah, some of the South is in Florida.
Cheers,
jr 'and it's always acceptable to be a redneck' a
[Rick]
Except in Pensacola and like that.
[Ben]
Oh, Northern Florida is quite the country unto itself. Twenty miles
inland, the whole "southern cracker" thing is alive and well - including
the slave camps (a.k.a. "labor pools", recently exposed in a few of the
local papers), the accents, the attitudes... hell, up until the late
'70s, Bunnell - about thirty or forty miles south of St. Augustine - was
the state HQ of the KKK. I take especial joy in riding through that kind
of places with Kat behind me and watching those jaw muscles tighen up; I
wish they would say something to me.
It's a high-contrast place we live in; lovely, friendly, St. Augustine
[1], with half a dozen yoga studios, visiting Tibetan monks, and a
liberal arts college - and labor pools twenty miles away. Meanwhile, the
(local) accents here are an amazing lazy-mouth gumbo, damn near a
Louisiana/Alabama mush with an occassional burr thrown in for variety.
It can be lovely as a flavoring (say, in a librarian from Hastings whom I
met at a party, who sounded like fine velvet feels), but feels like a
chainsaw two inches inside your ear when used in its raw form.
Kat hasn't gotten that one down yet, and I'm quite grateful.
[1] Named, mind you, after the most vile, intolerant, rigid,
asexual freak - oh, and a brilliant logician - who ever poisoned a
religion from the inside... did I mention "contrast" already? Oh, good.
[Sluggo]
Healthful vs healthy. Not sure what he means. People are healthy if
they're not sick. Food is healthy or healthful. But a healthy snack is
a big snack, which is probably not healthful.
[Thomas]
Apply Modeus Tollens to that, to see where you get.
Indeed, we
know what we mean by it.
[Sluggo]
Knuckle sandwich. Also used here. But it's more of a 50s expression.
[Thomas]
Yeah, that's like so last year.
-- Thoomas Adam
^^
Is this the all new, super modern, Object Oriented Thomas?
Kebabs etc. (Re: English->American dictionary)
From Sluggo
I looked up kebab & co. in the dictionary (Webster's New World), then
'dict', then meandered to Wikipedia, and along the way found out some
stuff about Old Bailey.
Webster's says both kebab and shish kebab mean cubes of marinated meat
on a skewer with onions and tomatoes. That's what my mom used to make.
When I later encountered them in pitas, I wondered, "Why would you want
to muffle the wonderful taste of a shish kebab by imprisoning it in a
pita? And why are they calling them kebabs when they're gyros?" Webster
says kebab is an Arabic word but claims shish is Armenian.
Wikipedia discusses the variation and also gets into doners (doener,
donair).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kebab
"There are many varieties of kebab and the term means different things
in different countries. The term kebab without specifying the kind
refers to d�ner kebab in Europe and to shish kebab in the United States."
OK, that squares with my experience.
"Take-out gyros is quite popular in the United States where it is
usually beef and lamb, shawarma is available in ethnic neighborhoods but
d�ner kebab is unknown." Yes. Thomas (I think) mentioned a class
difference between gyros and doners, that gyros were acceptable but
doners were the province of yobs drinking after 11pm. Interesting that
we don't have doners, but we don't have gyros after 11pm either. We do
have yobs but they're called frat boys
, and their favorite food after
11pm is... nothing, just alcohol. Well, maybe late-night pizza. If you
did open a late-night doner stand, your first hurdle would be people
asking, "What's that?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawarma
"In Russia Shawarma
(Шаурма or
Шаверма)
(shaurma or shaverma) became one
of the most popular street foods. Originally from the former Soviet
Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, shawarma in Russia is generally
eaten with a variety of julienned vegetables, tomato sauce, and garlic
sauce that is wrapped in lavash." OK, that's what I encountered in St
Petersburg, called shaverma but looking to all the world like a gyro.
(And I quickly started eating them every day for lunch, and pel'meni for
dinner.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelmeni
The shavermas I got at a stand, but the pel'meni I bought frozen and
boiled at home, much to the surprise of an old WWII widow who lived in
the same communal flat. The gas stove scared me since I'd grown up with
electric, especially since you had to light it with a match. Said
babushka let me use her jar of matches. One stove in the other kitchen
always had a burner on low. I asked why. She said, so the guy doesn't
have to buy matches. (Gas was free, although electricity was, er,
metered.) I was incredulous. "He can't afford to buy a box of
matches?" She said, "He's a drunk."
Regarding bailey and Old Bailey (a courthouse in London, which I first
encountered in A Tale of Two Cities ) , I had assumed they were related
to bail/bailiff, and were called that for some unfathomable reason. But
Webster's says bailey is "the outer wall or court of a medieval castle;
term still kept in some proper names, as in Old Bailey".
[Rick]
Oddly enough, on a recent unplanned trip to London, I found myself with
an entire afternoon in which my only obligation was to travel about 7 km
to Liverpool Street Station, so I did it by shank's mare[1] -- and one
of several places I stopped to gawk was the Old Bailey.
It's so named becase it was built next to Old Bailey Street, which lay
just outside the perimeter wall -- the "bailey" -- of the mediaeval
walled city. The original building fell to the Great Fire (1666), and
it's been rebuilt more or less completely several times since then.
I also dropped into Hyde Park, stopped at St. Paul's Cathedral (how
could I skip that?), wandered around the "City" legal district and
the Barbican Centre, visited Dr Johnson's house, looked around the
Guildhall, and probably visited some other places I'm forgetting at the
moment.
(I had to make an unplanned side-trip into London from Glasgow because
my passport had vanished, and so I was obliged to visit the US Embassy
to get a new one. The whole gory tale is here:
http://deirdre.net/posts/2005/08/glasgow-ricks-departure )
[1] Before you ask, it's an 18th C. Scottish tongue-in-cheek coinage.
"To shank it" meant "go on foot", borrowing from the English "shank" for
one's leg portion from ankle to knee: The joke based on that expression
lay in referring to a "shank's nag" or "shank's mare" -- the mare of
your shank being your own foot, in the absence of more-luxurious
transportation. A modern analogue would be when someone suggests I buy
some ludicrously expensive part for my bicycle to save weight, and I
rejoin that I'd be "better off concentrating on lightening the bike motor".
And "bail" is
the convergence of no less than four different words:
(1) [Old French baillir: to keep in custody, deliver] money deposited
with the court to get an arrested person temporarily released.
(2) [Old French baille, bucket] a bucket or scoop for dipping up water
and removing it from a boat. What Ben will be doing when he gets back to
Florida.
(3) [Middle English beil, from Old Norse beygla, to bend] a hoop-shaped
support for a canopy, a hoop-shaped handle for a bucket or kettle, a bar
on a typewriter to hold the paper against the platen
(4) [Old French baile, from Latin bajulis, porter; this one is related
to bailey] formerly an outer fortifictation made of stakes, a bar or
pole to keep animals separate in a barn, a Cricket wicket.
I especially like the comment in the POD: "By the way, if you're reading
this far into the POD, you've earned the privilege to gripe about any
bugs you find."
"A gunman on a motorcycle fired several shots into the air after he was
kicked out of a Belltown bar early Friday, then shot into a crowd of
people before he was brought down by police gunfire."
please share your experience
From Sluggo
[Jimmy] Referring to Mike's forthcoming article.
Check next month's issue!
It's a bit rambling. Does it go into too many topics? Would it be
better split into multiple articles?
[Ben]
Nope - works fine as a retrospective (which, given your long gray beard,
shambling gait, absence of teeth, and the vacant look of someone who
lives almost totally in the past, is highly apropos.
(http://linuxgazette.net/gx/2003/authors/orr.jpg , for those who don't
know Mike and want to view the 92-year old physical wreck - the bier
isn't quite finished, so we had to prop him against the nearest wall.
Tisk, how some people let themselves go...)
I really enjoyed reading this thing, including the linked article by Ted
Nelson:
In a way the first luncheon speaker and his enthusiasm perfectly
embodied the ideas and controversy of the conference. This was
Representative Charles Rose, who wore a strinking plaid jacket.
I hadn't realized that there was a portmanteau word that encompassed
"striking" and "stinking" [1]; I'm shocked by the fact that the original
Committee That Designed English omitted it, and I'm glad, well and
fully satisfied, that this terrible injustice has finally been
corrected. I will surely find many uses for it from now on - say, at the
end of every sentence, strinking.
[1] Oh, his poor audience. To be visually and olfactorily assaulted at
the same time... I'll be his voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard,
too - just to make the experience complete. That's why so many people
left the conference, as Ted reported.
Rita's looking as bad as Katrina, depending on where it lands and how much
it weakens by then. When I woke up yesterday morning it was category 3,
when I got into work it was 5, and when I left our guys in Baton Rouge
were on the edge of evacuating. This morning they were packing.
The media is treating these as two flukes, but there are some dozen storms
forming in the Atlantic, so a reasonable chance at least a few of them
will be nasty. I would just go to the northeast or midwest for a couple
months to avoid the in-again-out-again.
[Ben]
[sigh] I wish. If NOAA had upgraded their estimate sooner, or if
everything on the boat had worked, or even - now that I've got the
welder, etc. going - if I didn't have to go to L.A., we'd be on our way
north right now. As it is, well, all I can do is hunker down and hope.
Also note that it hasn't been much of anything in the Atlantic, at least
not in the classical sense - the typical pattern being a low moving off
the coast of Africa, picking up heat and water off the edge of the ITCZ,
getting spin off the Coriolis effect, and making its first appearance on
Broadway somewhere around, oh, 17N65W. Instead, it's been "depression
forms in the Bahamas OH MY GAWD IT'S A HURRICANE!", with NOAA having
damn near zip lead time on these things - of course. Totally not their
fault, but not having that two-to-three week window to watch these
things mature is unsettling, to say the least.
There seem to be three factors converging:
1) Climate change (we're not supposed to say g%*@!% w*%!!&)
is increasing
the temperature fluctuations, exacerbating the storms.
2) We're coming out of a 30-year calm cycle for Atlantic storms. So
what's "extreme" now is people's short memories. I think we've assumed
that the calm period during most of the 20th century was "normal".
[Ben]
[Nod] I'm definitely aware of the historical perspective, having studied
the weather fairly intensively. Yeah, it's been a very quiet time,
comparatively.
I feel the worst for the Carribean islands. They get most of the storms
passing through every year. And they don't have a dry place to flee to.
[Ben]
"De hurricane, she do blow." There's two very effective ways of dealing
with a 'cane there - you either stay close to the water and build
6'-thick walls out of limestone (coral), like the Dutch did at the St.
Thomas waterfront, or you go high and build large houses with huge
shuttered windows and a strong below-ground basement (with water
storage), as they did at Mountaintop. In the second case, when the 'cane
is coming, you take all your stuff into the basement and _open the
shutters_ so your house offers nearly no resistance to the wind. After
the 'cane, you sweep out the leaves and bring your furniture back up.
Needless to say, bamboo and other light construction for said furniture
is strongly preferred...
Standard US construction - balloon frames, sheet rock, etc. - is beyond
stupid. And yet, most people in the islands do it - because those are
the construction methods and materials that are available.
reminder software
[Jimmy] Eight hours later...
closing unneeded ports
Converting bitmap to binary
![[BIO]](../gx/authors/dyckoff.jpg)
Howard Dyckoff is a long term IT professional with primary experience at
Fortune 100 and 200 firms. Before his IT career, he worked for Aviation
Week and Space Technology magazine and before that used to edit SkyCom, a
newsletter for astronomers and rocketeers. He hails from the Republic of
Brooklyn [and Polytechnic Institute] and now, after several trips to
Himalayan mountain tops, resides in the SF Bay Area with a large book
collection and several pet rocks.
![[BIO]](../gx/2002/note.png)
Edgar is a consultant in the Cologne/Bonn area in Germany.
His day job involves helping a customer with payroll, maintaining
ancient IBM Assembler programs, some occasional COBOL, and
otherwise using QMF, PL/1 and DB/2 under MVS.
![[BIO]](../gx/2004/authors/oregan.jpg)
Jimmy is a single father of one, who enjoys long walks... Oh, right.
![[cartoon]](misc/collinge/520cx.jpg)
![[cartoon]](misc/collinge/527_31.jpg)
![[cartoon]](misc/collinge/530impossible.jpg)
![[cartoon]](misc/ecol/ecol-216-e.png)
![[cartoon]](misc/ecol/ecol-217-e.png)
![[cartoon]](misc/ecol/ecol-218-e.png)
