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Carefully, Correctly Wrong
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| Monitor |
[Sep. 30th, 2009|10:23 pm] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tartful_dodger's laptop has gone for a burton. I have a spare desktop which is just about usable for web browsing and instant messaging, but I don't seem to have a spare monitor any more.
Does anybody Mancunian (esp. Levenshulme people) have a spare monitor they could loan until Olly's laptop is repaired? It could take a few weeks... |
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| Quick Update |
[Apr. 18th, 2009|11:47 am] |
Posting this from tartful_dodger's laptop using an Ubuntu LiveCD (eww) because the hard drive is fucked.
Given that the laptop is still usable for web browsing and IM despite being diskless, I'm going to try to get Morgan to just take the hard drive back for replacement rather than the entire machine; that way Olly will have more online presence over the next few days. Intil wifi driver even works nicely, hooray for free software.
This Gateway laptop design is pretty dumb though - the hard drive is not attached to the laptop chassis, it's attached to the underside of the case, meaning that any shock to the system goes straight into the drive. No wonder 50% of the sectors are bad! |
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| Textual Diff of OpenDocument Files |
[Apr. 12th, 2009|06:50 pm] |
Being a Good Geek as well as an activist, I keep most of my activism files in a Subversion version-control repository. This lets me keep my files backed up, store changes between them, and work nicely with multiple users (assuming anybody else ever wants to give me a hand).
I also keep my files in OpenDocument because it's an open, standard format which can be read by a variety of software on a variety of platforms, most popularly OpenOffice.org. Being an open, standard format, various tools have risen around it, and I thought it might be possible to easily determine the textual differences between two OpenDocument files. This could be tied in with my repository so I can see the actual differences as well as my commit log. However, I didn't find any such utility, so I wrote my own based around odt2txt, GNU diffutils and the subversion docs.
I chose in this script to strip out command-line options to get the file arguments; another way would have been to test each parameter to see whether it was an existing OpenDocument file, but that seemed a little nastier to me. It does mean that my script has to know what parameters svn might pass to diff, though.
( Show us the source )
So this script works just fine - I can call it with svn diff --force --diff-cmd=odtdiff.bash myfile.odt. The only problem is that I can't tell Subversion always to use this command to diff OpenDocument files, which seems like a big flaw in Subversion...
Incidentally, I tried a variant where I call odt2txt --raw and xmldiff but it really wasn't very human-readable. |
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| Encryption and Authentication |
[Jan. 13th, 2009|11:19 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | geek | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The White Stripes - "You Don't Know What Love Is" | ] |
I run logwatch on the machine which hosts my mail, websites, IRC client etc. I was annoyed recently to see a machine in Taiwan trying to guess a valid mail username and password on my server in an attempt to relay mail through it. I wasn't particularly worried, since all my mail user passwords are randomly generated and very hard to guess, but it was pretty annoying.
While investigating solutions to this, I noticed that it was possible to authenticate (i.e. give a username and password, which then lets you relay mail through my server, rather than just deliver mail to its users), without encryption (a layer of magic which stops people eavesdropping on your connection). Now, this isn't particularly a problem because (1) I was using encryption anyway and, (2) even if I hadn't been, the authentication method I was using doesn't require either side to actually reveal the password, so it couldn't be used by an eavesdropper.
On the other hand, it was still potentially allowing my mail to be read by anybody it passed by (such as the people running a wireless network in a cafe or hotel), which is pretty bad form - had I misconfigured my mail client, which I hadn't. So I felt this was a loophole which needed closing, and the mail server docs told me how.
I notice that the brute-force attacks I had originally spotted didn't use encryption - there's no reason why they couldn't, other than that setting up encrypted connections costs you time and computational effort, which may be an issue if you're trying to attack a large number of random mail servers. Still, I have a feeling that I won't see them again, which makes me happy - one fewer thing to distract me from real problems in my logs.
(FWIW, before someone says it, I don't really like the idea of using stuff like fail2ban to firewall away dictionary attacks; the whole idea of tailing logfiles seems inelegant, and I'm confident enough in the strength of my passwords - my system's SSH passwords in particular use pam_cracklib to make sure they can't be weak.) |
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| Management Speak |
[Jan. 11th, 2009|11:06 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | geek | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  aggravated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - "Today's Lesson" | ] |
I hate monodevelop on principle. It doesn't invite you to create programs , applications or even projects , it invites you to create...
...solutions .
When I've finished hating it with the fire of a thousand suns, I might see what C# is like to code with. |
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| Hippy Music |
[Dec. 3rd, 2008|04:17 pm] |
You know you're an enthusiast of free software and open formats when you realise that your work computer hasn't been able to play MP3 files since it was reinstalled the other week, and you didn't notice because all your music is in Vorbis...
Had a day off sick with this cold yesterday. I deliberately didn't get up and do activisty things, just actually spent a day relaxing, lying in bed, failing to get dressed, pottering on the laptop. I also missed BiPhoria! for which I'm sorry, but frankly it was just what I needed. Still lacking job motivation, but doing better than I have been.
Tonight I'm off to a bi meeting after work, followed by a Lib Dem one. I need a shave when I get home - I'm having my photo taken tomorrow for my new Corporate ID Card. Speaking of which, I've got a rant about the Queen's Speech's Stasi implications coming up.
In happier news, I have an A6 week-to-view diary for 2009, which I can start filling up with events! |
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| Crypto Panic |
[Nov. 10th, 2008|11:30 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | geek | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
There's nothing like coming back from the pub, tired and tipsy, to read that the TKIP protocol used to secure wireless networks may be broken and then scrambling to find out whether your home wireless network uses TKIP, and if it does whether the proprietary firmware on your O2 broadband router can be configured to change that.
Looks like I'm using WPA2 with AES encryption, without enabling WPA backwards compatibility, so I should be OK. |
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| Virtualisation on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 ("Lenny"), part 1: Xen |
[Nov. 4th, 2008|12:04 pm] |
Virtualisation basically means Running multiple pretend-computers on one real computer . Most people have heard of VMWare, a program which pretends to be a standard i386 or amd64 PC and lets you run GNU/Linux on Windows or vice-versa; there's also Parallels which is some Mac thing, and a host of other programs right down to QuickTransit which lets you run individual Solaris/SPARC apps on an amd64 system running Solaris or GNU/Linux. Virtualisation is big business, and modern Intel and AMD CPUs include hardware support to make your virtualisation go faster.
Over in the free software world, for a long time we've had User Mode Linux which lets you run a (modified) Linux kernel as a standard application on your GNU/Linux system. The big thing a few years ago however was Xen, one of the first high-performance free software virtualisation applications.
I've got a Xen setup on my desktop, which is still running the currently-stable version of Debian GNU/Linux. I use a virtual machine to connect to work, which keeps my work stuff and home stuff entirely separate. Given my plans to turn that desktop into a media player, I want to upgrade it to the soon-to-be-released (honest) Debian Lenny, which has more tightly integrated MythTV software.
Unfortunately, since the release of Etch, Xen has fallen out of favour in the Linux world; I understand that while other projects like OpenVZ and even VMWare were working on a consistent virtualisation interface in the kernel, which would improve interoperability between virtualisation technologies, Xen basically said Hang on, we invented this stuff in Linux, you lot should do it our way . Linux evolved without Xen, and now cramming Xen support back into Linux is a bit of a bodge job. OpenSUSE did it first, and Debian has recently started including their patch.
I started off by installing linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-amd64, which set up a bootable kernel entry which didn't actually boot, hence this bug. It eventually transpires, after lots of Googling and asking on IRC, that I was supposed to install xen-linux-system-2.6.26-1-xen-amd64 which sets up a working kernel entry (as well as leaving a broken one but that's a separate bug).
Unfortunately, the Xen kernel in Lenny breaks both the vesa and nv drivers for the X Window System, meaning that you can't have both Xen virtualisation and a GUI at the same time:
Fatal server error:
xf86MapVidMem: Could not mmap framebuffer (0xd0000000,0x10000000) (Invalid argument)
It's been suggested that I can disable iommu to fix this, but I can't find out how to do that, and have read several things which suggest that it's impossible. Given how little success I've had in finding documentation about Xen in Lenny, which is a large part of the reason for me trying to file more bugs and write this blog post, I'm pretty much giving up hope of trying to get the technology I'm already familiar with to work. Next stop is going to be new kid on the block kvm. |
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| PVR / Media Solution |
[Oct. 31st, 2008|09:03 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | geek, house | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  happy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "Event Horizon" on DVD | ] |
Last weekend with greyeyedeve's laptop dead and wehmuth visiting, I finally set up my desktop computer on my computer desk, and we ended up using its 19" screen to display some video files and DVDs on; it's got a pretty good speaker setup, and the screen is viewable from across the room.
This got me thinking that what I'd like is to have my desktop be some kind of remote-control PVR-type thing - basically, when it boots up, if nobody logs in within (say) 2 minutes, it'll automatically log in as a separate user account which presents the PVR interface. This interface could be controlled with a mouse, but preferably also remotely via my laptop (I've used xine-remote's telnet-type interface but it's not in any way good).
Any suggestions for software which would help me do this? I'm running Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 ("Etch") at the moment, and intend to upgrade to the new Lenny release soon.
Next up, wiring up rear speakers for surround sound, and acquiring a PCI graphics card which can do some kind of video output to my TV. |
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| Social Life |
[Oct. 21st, 2008|12:45 pm] |
Last weekend was pretty busy; I spent Saturday daytime at an activist skills conference organised by the Campaigns Collective, focussing on non-violent direct action. I did some bi-activist hobnobbing and introduced the Uni's LGBT Soc bi rep to softfruit, which should be a fruitful partnership. Then I headed off to the Lass O'Gowrie to meet up with greyeyedeve and hang out with _tonylee_ and belle_fille1982 which was great fun.
I basically spent all of Sunday at the Marbella Café with Manchester Free Software, setting up a new LTSP server which we'd scrounged. This turned into a bit of an epic quest - I'd taken along my PATA DVD drive and a Debian installer DVD, only to find that the box had no PATA connectors, only SCSI; so we detoured via my office to borrow a CD-R, and chris' flat to download and burn a Debian installer image. The server itself is Dell, from the days when Dell made decent server kit, and was enormously heavy. After lugging it up two flights of stairs, we learned that the SCSI CD drive in the machine wasn't being seen by the BIOS and couldn't be used to boot the installer. Eventually we borrowed tdobson's laptop and set it up as a TFTP server to netboot the installer; this failed with the soon-to-be-released Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (Lenny ), but succeeded with the old release, aka Etch. Once we had a minimal Etch install up and running, we upgraded it to Lenny and rebooted. This screwed the entire box as it hadn't finished synching its RAID-5 array and couldn't tell which bits were what. So we had to start over from scratch, which was exciting. We ended up leaving the machine to synch overnight, and I got home at about 10pm. Last night I was back at the cafe to set up the LTSP cluster; this was not quite as smooth as hoped due to the switch from LTSP 4 to LTSP 5 involving a bit of retraining. But we left with 2 machines netbooting and running, which is much better than where we were before Sunday.
Now, I'd woken up in a foul mood on Sunday, and couldn't work out why; I'd spent most of the day at Marbella being vaguely manic and overexcited, bouncing and dancing around while we waited for the machine to reboot. I figured that missing out on weeks of cycling had left me over-energetic, so made the effort to lug the leather sofa into the front room when I got home. This is the next step on the way to sorting out the flat and its furniture, so I was very happy to get it done at last - we can now actually vaguely entertain people, though we're not quite ready for a party yet. I ended up collapsing with a well-earned chinese takeout and beer.
Tonight I get to go home, though I've got a reasonable amount of e-mail to play catchup with. Tomorrow I'm off to the cinema after work with greyeyedeve and what seems by now to be a cast of thousands, to see the Final Cut of Blade Runner at the Cornerhouse - I'll grab tickets after work today to make sure it doesn't sell out.
On Thursday I have wehmuth arriving for a few days, which should be cool; unfortunately I'm busy Lib Demming on Saturday afternoon, but should have plenty of time to hang out otherwise. Sunday I'm doing an all-day training course. |
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| Gnash Improvements |
[Sep. 19th, 2008|11:17 am] |
Gnash is a free implementation of Adobe's proprietary Flash player plugin for web browsers. The project's taken a while to get going, since Flash is really quite complicated, but it's a good idea because it'll make Flash sites accessible on devices for which Adobe doesn't provide their player (such as the iPhone, assuming it has enough CPU oomph).
I noticed yesterday after upgrading my Debian box that all of a sudden YouTube videos started working for me in Gnash, and have been catching up with some of the speeches from the Liberal Democrat conference. It's not perfect - the pause button doesn't work, for starters - but it's a definite improvement.
I'm less ambivalent over Gnash than I am over projects like Wine - both are chasing a complicated, moving target but Gnash is implementing an open standard while WINE is trying to implement a largely undocumented, proprietary API. I'd still rather see people pushing for open standards for media on the web such as Theora for video. But a more capable Gnash is certainly going to make it easier for people to switch to free software without changing their computing habits. |
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| debtorrent |
[Sep. 9th, 2008|09:07 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | debian, geek | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | busy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | 450KB/sec downloads are music to my ears | ] |
This is probably one of those situations where I'm late to the party, but I've just heard about debtorrent. This is a BitTorrent-like backend for Debian's APT packaging system which allows software to be downloaded in chunks from multiple hosts, allowing users to maximise their bandwidth and mirrors to distribute load more efficiently.
It's dead easy to set up - just install the debtorrent package and tweak your package sources as described in the README. apt-transport-debtorrent will add a bit of extra efficiency to the process. It's in the main archive as of Lenny (Debian 5.0), and I might try to dig out an Etch backport for dist-upgrading my other machines... |
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| Magic Internets |
[Sep. 8th, 2008|11:29 pm] |
Whoo, I have Internet access at the new flat. Never mind the lack of central heating, the leaking sink, the inability to cook on the gas stove, the lack of washing machine, the dodgy electrics and so on - now it's home!
That being said, I'm not getting a very fast connection from ftp.uk.debian.org to test the speed - I'm hoping that the server's overloaded. I'll install a torrent client and double-check tomorrow. For now I need sleep!
And that means not downloading the entire Pornternets. Damn. |
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| Multiple Wiki Hosting |
[Sep. 3rd, 2008|09:19 pm] |
I want to host multiple wikis on my webserver. I want them to use separate databases, separate authentication and so forth. Is there wiki software (preferably Etch-packaged) which will do this for me? |
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| Packing, Binning and Moving |
[Aug. 31st, 2008|11:31 pm] |
This weekend has mostly been spent packing and binning stuff. Friday's late night meant that I frankly wasn't much use on Saturday, but today has been pretty good. I have a pile of 5 old 386, 486 and Pentium desktops which I'm going to have to take for WEEE disposal, along with a broken printer, scanner and some dead laptops. This means that I can actually take an inventory of my remaining computer systems, which are:
pasander, Core 2 Duo uber-laptoprogan, Celeron M less-uber laptoptandoor, Athlon desktopsparky, Sun Ultra 1- AlphaStation 255
antipode, Pentium MMX desktop
Currently, five of these are running various flavours of Debian GNU/Linux, and the AlphaStation has no OS at all. I'm not sure I'm going to keep all of these, but they're the ones which fall into the categories of useful or interesting. If I don't find a use for them
I will donate, rather than bin, the non-{i386,amd64} arch systems... |
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| Versioning Woes |
[Aug. 26th, 2008|05:15 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | geek | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | pissed off | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The B52s - "Rock Lobster" | ] |
Bollocks, I've just spent 7 hours elbow-deep in CVS trying to put all my recent code changes into a single branch and bring it up to the latest baseline. I was, in the common parlance of the Internet, doing it wrong, and now have to start again.
Oh well, at least it's keeping me busy... |
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| Forgotten Passwords |
[Aug. 16th, 2008|10:33 pm] |
Damnit, this is the third time this year I've had to generate myself a new Certificate Authority for the various secure stuff I do online (sending and receiving mail, now VPN). The first was because I forgot my passphrase, the second due to Debian's SSL weakness, and now I've forgotten the bloody passphrase again.
One option would be to pay someone to do CA stuff for me, but I'm far too cheap for that. The other option is to fly in the face of common sense and write down my password. |
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| Moving Infrastructure |
[Aug. 16th, 2008|11:24 am] |
Whoo, my order of a bunch of plastic crates arrived from Wilkinson Plus this morning, so I can get on with packing.
Have also ordered a BT landline at my new address, ahead of acquiring broadband there. Very tempted to go with Be since lots of my friends use them with few complaints.
Just making a list of other things I need to do, people I need to inform etc. before I move... |
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| xmms for Debian Lenny amd64 |
[Aug. 7th, 2008|11:30 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | geek, xmms | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | geeky | ] |
| [ | music |
| | DJ Food - "Spiral" | ] |
My favorite music player is xmms, the X [Window System] Multi Media System. It's basically a straight-out clone of Winamp 2, which doesn't do anything fancy. The killer feature for me is that, like Winamp, it can compress to a bar ~15px high at the top of my screen. If I want to see what I'm listening to, I just glance up; if I want to change volume, I slam my mouse up to the top of the screen and flick the scrollwheel. I find this totally intuitive and convenient - taskbar-based players either pop up at the start of the track, which is (a) distracting and (b) useless when you're not at the start of the track, or scroll the title which takes forever.
The main problem with xmms is that it's now basically unsupported and discontinued. Lenny , the impending 5.0 release of Debian GNU/Linux doesn't have a package for it at all, though the current one does. Last night I resolved to take the source code from the current Etch release and port it forwards to the new release.
The procedure is quite simple - I just added a source line for Etch to my package configuration, ran apt-get source xmms to obtain the Debianised source, and changed the debian/control file to replace the build dependency on the also-deprecated libxml-dev with libxml2-dev. I then installed those build dependencies, ran dpkg-buildpackage and removed the build-deps by marking them as auto-installed (at which point they had no manually-installed packages depending on them, so got removed).
But to save other people the hassle, I present some precompiled amd64 packages for xmms, and xmms-dev. |
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