Planet Offtopic2

My opinion on proportional representation is no secret. I think electoral reform is favourable, but I think proportional representation is an inherently flawed concept. For more on that, here's my column in today's Mercury. (893 words)

1. Idea - estimates for time to completion range from 3 days to 3 weeks
2. Pretty convincing first stab ‘look how cool this would be’
3. The Hard Slog to get something that actually works. Estimates now range from 3 months to 3 years.
4. First real users pop up, discovery is made that all assumptions were off
5. Starts to look good to the first real user
6. Elation!
7. Someone actually uses the code it for real, the bugs come out in droves
8. A zillion bugs get addressed, harsh words are spoken
9. Elation!
10. The guy you had previously told that 100 million users would not ‘in principle’ be a problem actually took your word for it, and deployed it on said user base. Harsh words are spoken.
11. Fundamentals are reviewed, large fractions of the code base reworked
12. Product now actually does what everybody hoped it would do.
13. Even very unlikely bugs have cropped up by now, and have been addressed. Even rare use cases are now taken into account.
14. If a user complains of a crash at this stage, you can voice doubts about the quality of his hardware or operating system.

PowerDNS went through all these stages, and took around 5 years to do so. Not all parts are at ‘stage 14’ yet, but for the Recursor, I seriously ask people to run ‘memtest’ if they report a crash.

The above 14 points are never traversed without users that care. For PowerDNS, step ‘4’ was performed by Amaze Internet and step ‘7’ by ISP Services. 1&1 (called Schlund back then) was instrumental in step ‘10’ when they started using it on millions of domains.

For the PowerDNS Recursor, steps ‘4’ and ‘7’ not only happened over at XS4ALL, but they also paid for it all!

Step ‘10’ occurred over at AOL and Neuf Cegetel, who together connected the Recursor to 35 million subscribers or so.

Finally, the parts of PowerDNS that have reached the end of the list above have done so because of literally hundreds if not thousands of operators that have made the effort to report their issues, or voice their wishes.

Many thanks to everybody!

Hmm, the above does not sound very professional..

I’ve heard the theory that some people think they can plan software development more professionally. I used to believe them too. But any real project I’ve heard of went through the stages listed above. No schedule, no Microsoft Project sheet, no Gantt Chart I know about ever even came close to reality.

But I’d love to be wrong, because I agree fully that it would be great if software development was more predictable.

This is especially true since the aforementioned “process” necessarily involves several very committed users, who have to voice the harsh words, but do have to stick with the project.

So please comment away if your real life experiences are different - I’d love to hear!

I just returned from FOSS.my 2008, a Free/Open Source conference in Kuala Lumpur. This is the first open source conference I've attended after many years since FOSSCON in '03, which MIMOS gave up on afterwards (epic fail there, MIMOS).

It's great to attend a tech conference again after a long absence from conferences in general. I met some awesome folks, listened to some talks, and ate some good food. Fun times. Here are some pictures.

Yoon Kit gives his keynote speech, which describes the wicked web of drama around ISO voting for ODF vs OOXML.

Colin Charles of Sun/MySQL and Daniel CerVentus of Earth247.tv.


Toru Maesaka, the memcached guy from Japan.

Toru Maesaka and Fajar Priyanto from IBM.

Pia Waugh giving a talk on the OLPC XO. She's a consultant from Australia, and knows kung fu (seriously).

This is the first time I've seen an OLPC XO in real life. Pia dropped these a few times, demonstrating its toughness to a shocked audience.

Here I am, posing with an OLPC XO. Some of my friends on IRC joke that whenever I get disconnected (which happens a lot on the lousy internet connection I used to have at USM), it's because I needed to crank the power on my OLPC to charge it up again (very funny, guys).

This was taken at the speakers' dinner. From left is Yoon Kit, Han and Pamela Fox. Pamela is from Google (how cool is that?).

Here's James Morris, a Linux kernel hacker from Australia.

James Morris speaks about Fedora Kiosk Mode.

They are upgrading the Penang bridge from 4 lanes to 6 by adding an extension on either side of it. The construction work is annoying though, and traffic is horrible even on a weekend. We had to cross the bridge to attend a wedding on the peninsular, and I got a few photos of the bridge being worked on.

India follows MIT opencourseware, with those great lectures on a wide range of topics. I'm viewiing the ones by professor Dasgupta on Artificial Intelligence.

Inmortal, indestructible, opposed substances come from it and when one stands above other, a reaction that restablishes equilibrium comes paying mutual retribution following the disposition of time.

I've been looking for the white-bellied sea eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster) for ages now. I see one occasionally near Queensbay Mall, but I never have my camera handy when I spot it. It taunts me by flying all majestically when I don't have my camera with me.

For a long time, the only raptors I seem to be able to take pictures of is the brahminy kite. When I first saw this bird I thought it was yet another brahminy kite, but upon closer inspection it turned out to be that elusive white-bellied sea eagle! I am very pleased with these photos.

The brown shrike (Lanius cristatus) is a passerine bird that is a common migrant to Penang around this time of year. They make chirrupy little noises that some folks might find cute (or not, the sounds can be a bit annoying). These are the first decent shots I've taken of the bird.

Migrant birds are a fun sight to see in the tropics during winter in the north, when they all come down here to enjoy the sun. Egrets can be seen along the shoreline lazing about. These photos were taken at Gurney Drive.

These are great white egrets (I think).

Here's another of those egrets.

I have no ideas what these are. They look like sandpipers or plovers. I can't really tell at this resolution.

The collared kingfisher is a coastal bird. Here it is waiting to prey on crabs.

The forest wagtail (Dendronanthus indicus) is a rare migrant visitor to these parts. Therefore these are extremely lucky shots I got. This little bird seemed unfazed by my presence and went about his business, wagging his tail (from side to side). I also have some video footage of him, but I'd like to make that into a full documentary-type show complete with a cool voice-over (my voice-over person still needs to buy a microphone). Until then, enjoy these still photos.

Behold! The forest wagtail!

A closeup of his mug.

Off he goes into the wild blue yonder.

The bird guides say the chestnut munia (Lonchura atricapilla) is easy to find in open country. Clearly the books underestimate their hiding ability, because this is the first time I've seen one for sure. There were actually a whole flock of them, but I could only get one or two on camera.

This guy isn't as scared as the rest of the flock.

They may not exactly be birds of a feather, but the chestnut munia and the scaly-breasted munia do flock together.

The chestnut munia is also known as the black-headed munia.

Looks like we had a good rebound those few days before the U.S. elections; money is flowing or just short closing? Luckily I had considered this could happen and closed my short positions in futures to cover my portfolio at a small profit. I didn't manage to completely hedge my portfolio ...

They're using the phrase "a sense of" even more than they used to. They refer to "the sense of jubilation" in the Democrat camp, or "a sense of taking stock" amongst Republicans. Practically every other sentence uses this moronic phrase. There's a real sense of lazy journalism at the BBC.

On the "moronic phrase" note: "Yes We Can" is just about the stupidest campaign slogan ever.

Also, the election coverage on the BBC was surprisingly biased. Way too many left-leaning talking heads, very
little positive coverage of the McCain campaign. It wasn't Fox News, of course, but it was bad: I expected better from the BBC. It was almost worth it to see John Bolton nearly explode with anger though.

Dear America: well done.

Seen in engineer's finance: http://www.engineersfinance.com/blog/2008/11/02/being-more-productive-at-work/#more-129 "We spend a lot of time trying to find ways to be more productive. To do things faster, better, cheaper and spend our time more effectively. But instead of just doing more in less time, maybe we should focus on actually enjoying the work we’re doing instead." Also ...

Argggh!

Occasionally I can see a winged speck perched high up in the branches of a tree. I'll take a picture with zoom and usually I won't find out what it is until later when I have a chance to study the picture. Early this month I got a picture of a coppersmith barbet (Megalaima haemacephala) sitting in a tree at VC Rock in USM. This is the first time I've ever photographed a barbet. If you look closely, you can see its whiskers.

The kingfishers are plentiful again in my university campus. The migrant common kingfishers have arrived, and Billy the stork-billed kingfisher can be seen fishing illegally in the lakes.

The common kingfisher flits about on poles at Tasik Harapan.

My friend, Billy the stork-billed kingfisher. He's a welcome sight whenever I pass Tasik Aman.

Two white-throated kingfishers are sitting in a mangrove.

This white-throated kingfisher is pondering why I am pointing a camera at him. Little does he know that his pictures are all over the internet now.

The stand for my Samsung SyncMaster 943NWX monitor is back from the shop, and it is fully operational. I can use my new widescreen display now! My cat, Schröder, approves of it. Debian Lenny is also installed on this machine, since Etch has trouble getting the native resolution to scale right. The downside is that I have to download a ton of updates every other day until Lenny goes stable. But hey, it's shiny.

Today is the 79th anniversary of Black Thursday, the first of three miserable days on the stock market that signalled the start of the Great Depression. With that, rules for the Liberal leadership race about to come forward, and new developments on the highway construction front, there's lots to talk about these days.

First off, let me say that, given the choice, I want this man to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party.

With that out of the way, down to business. (1155 words)

"People don't like being preached at."

!!!

"But in a twist which will have Christians in gales of laughter, the advertising campaign...is to be stuck on bendy-buses."

May I suggest first that said Christians perhaps need to get out more, and second that "gales of laughter" doesn't seem like a very Christian response?

"fellow humanists, not known for their generosity, wouldn't stump up the cash."

Aren't you guys looking a little silly now?

Press release.

I'm not sure why this loathsome stuff is so much in the news these days.
You might not think it loathsome. Think again.

I had this problem recently: I was generating automatic VNC passwords via /dev/urandom, and needed to obfuscate them. Stupidly, vncpasswd is only interactive, and I wasn't in any kind of mood for hacking up the sources. A co-worker kindly pointed me to the solution:

printf "%s\n%s\n" "$PASSWD" "$PASSWD" | vncpasswd /tmp/vncpasswd

In my head, the use of getpass() means this couldn't work, but it does. It doesn't appear to be on Google, so I thought I'd mention it. Of course, as all know, the obfuscation done by vncpasswd is entirely pointless, but Xvnc at least will only take such "encrypted" password files.

This is not serious, I'm supposed to remember what I was doing three days ago? I can barely remember what I had for breakfast this morning.

I started walking again in the mornings. Today I was up before the crack of dawn for a brisk walk on the sea shore, and when I got back home, I even had enough energy left for a few rounds with the boxing bag. Finished reading Haruki Murakami, and now re-reading Living the Martial Way. It's a funny little book, so earnest it's hard to take it seriously, but with nuggets of wisdom nonetheless.

Since I can't vote, I may as well trivialise the election by laughing at McCain say things like "Obama's supporters are saying some pretty nasty things about Western Pennsylvania lately. And you know, I couldn't agree with them more. I couldn't disagree with you. I couldn't agree with you more..."

Doddery old fool.

I've recently been figuring out to build OpenSolaris ISOs (from SVR4 packages). It's surprisingly easy, but at least the IPS part is not well documented, so I thought I'd write up how I do it.

There are three main things you're most likely to want to do: build IPS itself, populate an IPS repository, and build an install ISO based on that repository. First, you'll want a copy of the IPS gate:

hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/pkg/gate pkg-gate

For some of my testing, I wanted to test some changed packages. So I mounted a Nevada DVD on /mnt/, then, using mount -F lofs, replaced some of the package directories with ones I'd built previously with my fixes. This effectively gave me a full Nevada DVD with my fixes in, avoiding the horrors of making one. I then cd pkg-gate, and run something like this:

$ cat build-ips
export WS=$1
export REPO=http://localhost:$2
unset http_proxy || true
set -e
echo "START `date`"
cd $WS/src
make install packages
cd $WS/src/util/distro-import
export NONWOS_PKGS="/net/paradise/export/integrate_dock/nv/nv_osol0811/all /net/paradise/export/integrate_dock/nv/nv_osol0811/i386"
export WOS_PKGS="/mnt/Solaris_11/Product/"
export PYTHONPATH=$WS/proto/root_i386/usr/lib/python2.4/vendor-packages/
export PATH=$WS/proto/root_i386/usr/bin/:$WS/proto/root_i386/usr/lib:$PATH
nohup pkg.depotd -p $2 -d /var/tmp/$USER/repo &
sleep 5
make -e 99/slim_import
echo "END `date`"
$ ./build-ips `pwd` 10023

In fact, since I was running on an older version Nevada (89, precisely), I had to stop after the make install and change src/pyOpenSSL-0.7/setup.py to pick up OpenSSL from /usr/sfw:

IncludeDirs =  [ '/usr/sfw/include' ]
LibraryDirs =  [ '/usr/sfw/lib' ]

(If /usr/bin/openssl exists, you don't need this). So, after this step, which build the IPS tools (and SVR4 package for it), it moves into the "distro-import" directory. This is really a completely different thing from IPS itself, but for convenience it lives in the IPS gate. Its job is to take a set of SVR4 packages (that is, the old Solaris package format) and upload them to a given IPS network repository: in this case, http://localhost:10023.

So, making sure we use the IPS tools we just built, we point a couple of environment variables to the package locations. "WOS" stands for, charmingly, "Wad Of Stuff", and in this context means "packages delivered to Solaris Nevada". There's also some extra packages used for OpenSolaris, listed here as NONWOS_PKGS. I'm not sure where external people can get them from, though.

The core of distro-import is the solaris.py script, which does the job of transliterating from SVR4-speak into pkgsend(1)-speak. As well as a straight translation, though, a small number of customisations to the existing packages are also made to account for OpenSolaris differences. These are done by dropping the original file contents and picking them up from an ad-hoc SUNWfixes SVR4 package built in the same directory.

Of course, each build has its differences, so they're separated out into sub-directories. As you can see above, to run the import, we make a 99/slim_import target. This basically runs solaris.py for every package listed in the file 99/slim_custer. This list is more or less what makes up the contents of the live CD. Also of interest is the redist_import target, which builds every package available (see http://pkg.opensolaris.org). By the way, watch out for distro-import/README: it's not quite up to date.

Another super useful environment variable is JUST_THESE_PKGS: this will only build and import the packages listed. Very useful if you're tweaking a package and don't want to re-import the whole cluster!

At the end of this build, we now have a populated IPS repository living at http://localhost:10023. If we already have an installed OpenSolaris, we could easily use this to install individual new packages, or do an image update (where ipshost is the remote name of your build machine):

# pkg set-authority -P -O http://ipshost:10023 myipsrepo
# pkg install SUNWmynewpackage # or...
# pkg image-update

If we want to test installer or live CD changes, though, we'll need to build an ISO. I did this for the first time today, and it's fall-over easy. First you need an OpenSolaris build machine, and type:

# pkg install SUNWdistro-const

Modify slim_cd.xml to point to your repository, as described here. It's not immediately obvious, but you can specify your URL as http://ipshost:10023 if you're not using the standard port, like me. Then:

# distro_const build ./slim_cd.xml

And that's it: you'll have a fully-working OpenSolaris ISO in /export/dc_output/ (I understand it's a different location after build 99, though). I never knew building an install ISO could be so simple!

Tags: OpenSolaris

What is cheap may still get cheaper, EuroStoxx 50 has estimated PE of 7.6 for 2008, and dividend yield of 6.2% This might be a good time to pick some stocks for a long term portfolio. Specially with interest rates going down. If history is going to repeat again, and ...

They've finally invented wireless power.

Vote obstruction may yet decide the outcome of the US election. Scary.

The WIOV 08 website is up, including the full program! See y'all there.