Bobulate
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It’s simple!
May 25th, 2009
The modh coinniollach is not as difficult as it often seems (…) all you need to do is to delete the ‘dh’ from the aimsir fhaistineach and to replace it with ‘nn’.
My brother brought me those instructions out of an Irish paper; I’m sure it’s good grammatical advice, but I find I’m lacking the knowledge necessary to put the advice into practice.
The reason I bring this up is not one of Irish grammar (though you may consider it a shout out to my friend Shane in Japan), but one about context and documentation. I’m an IRC user. Since 1994 or so, and for most of that time I’ve been [ade] or adridg on the networks I use (Ade Lovett used to be without the brackets). For most of that time, screen + ircii or irssi have been my tools of choice — I never could get quassel to do anything useful on the operating systems I use, and konversation, while nice, doesn’t survive my KDE session. So it came as a bit of a surprise to need to use jabber; this is used for FSFE communications, so I started up kopete.
Suffice to say it’s been an extremely annoying three hours of futzing about.
There’s not much point in writing bug reports against kopete from KDE 3.5.10, so I won’t (scratch 20 minutes because a newline got into the server’s hostname when pasting it into the configure dialog); in addition I can’t always tell the difference between a bug and myself being stupid (groupchats are totally different from contacts). The only thing I can sensibly do is add some notes to the wiki for the congenitally IRCed. Now, having written a sentence like “use RMB on the systray, pick and identity and then ‘Join Groupchat…'” I realize that there’s an awful lot of context missing there as well (and it’s o-so-disrespectful of tablet users). I take my cap off for the KDE Userbase editors, for sure.
Sadly enough, this entire tale could be retold with “pdflatex” in the place of IRC and “OpenOffice” in the place of Jabber. I now have a working OOo on FreeBSD 7-STABLE without a JRE, but that too took a measure of doing. It’s just the price you pay when you start interacting with different communities with different tools.
Picknicking for Europe
May 24th, 2009
The mother of my children (MOMC) is in Norway for a few days, leaving me with the kids for the long weekend and the school days following. This is a reversal from our usual roles, where I’m galavanting about to Free Software conferences and she’s at home dealing with the kids (and acting as editor for the town paper). It’s been great weather so far, but how do you keep the kids busy?
Oddly enough it was the EU parliamentary elections that provided a solid friday afternoon’s entertainment. I don’t know how it is elsewhere within the union, but the distinguishing trait of the run up to the elections has been a total lack of a campaign, debate, or even information on what the whole darn thing is about. Sure, there’s a few posters up saying “party X is against Brussels” (have you been there? the Brussels cheese is awesome in its horribleness). Friday’s Trouw had a column decrying the lack of content in the election; saturday’s NRC had a half page on this same lack.
Anyway, the Greens were out on the streets handing out invites to a picknick in the park. Since the kids were tagging along on my shopping expedition (shopping list: blue cheese, espresso coffee and soy sauce) I figured it would be a good thing to attend. I added a baguette and some camembert to the list. The campaign trail was said to contain a trampoline and a speech by the leader of the Greens in the Netherlands; one of those must be applicable to a 4- and a 6-year old.
One thing that particularly struck me was the lack of security at the event. National politicians who wander into a park and give a speech and then stick around for a glass of apple juice just seems odd. Good, but odd. Also I realised that explaining democratic structures to small kids is kind of complicated: “but dad, why is there a Dutch parliament as well as a European one?” Is that the principle of subsidiarity at play there?
I’ll leave out the actual political content of the afternoon — it was quite light in payload, but at least there was something, and that made for a refreshing change.
PS. The alternative would be to send the kids to the Glory Hole with Paul Adams (congrats on completing your thesis, dude). That would be humongous indeed.
Conference Wrap-up
May 24th, 2009
It seems an age and a half ago, but the NLUUG spring conference on File Systems and Storage was just over two weeks ago, on may 7th. As the (now ex-) head of the programme committee I’d like to take a moment to look back and sum up the conference and what I got out of working on an event like this.
The NLUUG was the Dutch national UNIX users association — like many national UUGs in Europe, founded about 25 years ago — and has now re-branded itself for Open Systems and Open Standards. Those are more important in the long term than the proprietary UNIXes and provide us with a broader range of topics to think about. The NLUUG has been organizing two conferences a year for over ten years; this is the stated core business of the association. Some topics come back regularly, like security, whenever the state of the art has changed. Most of our conferences try to combine practical, sysadmin-oriented talks with cutting-edge research or development talks.
This year, File Systems and Storage, is a fairly low-level UNIXy topic. Now, I’m a BSD guy, so I think UFS should be good enough for everyone, but that is taking a narrow view of the whole. For one thing, it neglects the storage side of things — mostly I remember wrestling with vinum about eight years ago and being relieved when GEOM showed up.
Still, Linux has grown three new file systems in the last two kernel releases (possibly more). Those address different ideas about disk organization and new notions about metadata on files. Solaris got ZFS, which (re)combines the storage pool with filesystem management. [[ I should note that when I’m not a BSD dude, I do OpenSolaris things. Taking stock yesterday, I realized I have Free Software operating systems on most of my machines and two popular proprietary operating systems (I should cut that in half) but nary a Linux kernel in sight. ]]
And then there’s clustered file systems and file systems for virtualized environments (where de-duplication becomes important). The breadth of relevant problem areas and the range of technical solutions is huge. And now I’ve still neglected storage, with provisioning, mirroring, deduplication, backup and whatnot.
Suffice to say that the range of topics is pretty broad.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get a comprehensive range of file system talks; only four if I remember correctly. Several Samba-related talks, libferris (Plan 9 on steroids: everything is a filesystem), storage architectures and some search and semantics (after all, what’s the point of storage if you can’t find stuff?) rounded out the programme.
The conference itself picked up 285 attendees, which is a little below our target number of 300 for an “ideal conference” — but given the economic situation this is not all that surprising. Attendance also varies considerably depending on the topic. Security and virtualization are perennial favorites.
The day opened with Ted Ts’o, CTO of the Linux Foundation and maintainer of the ext4 file system for Linux. Later in the day he did an ext4 talk, but the opening was, surprisingly and most interestingly, an economic one. The message came down to this: SSD’s are not going to solve all our problems. In a whirlwind exploration of the economics of storage and the hard drive business, Ted showed that with current — or even next-generaton — processes it’s impossible to replace hard drives. The SSD remains a cool bit of kit, though. It was a great opening keynote; speakers later in the day referred to it in their own talks, which I think shows how much of an impact it had on everyone.
Since I was session chair all day (without my signature horse whip; I reserve that one for Akademy) I didn’t even peek in on most of the talks (we have three tracks), but the comments I heard from attendees were overwhelmingly positive.
All in all a good conference, and I’d like to thank our organizing bureau and the other PC members Ralf van Dooren, Melanie Rieback and Jos Vos for a constructive and interesting season of cooperation. Now I’m looking forward to upcoming conferences again — like Akademy, as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, and the NLUUG Fall Conference, which has “the Open Web” as topic.
Moving right along
May 19th, 2009
Some folks have noticed that my “Bobulate” blog on fruitsalad.org has gone away. This is true. For many years, the KDE-FreeBSD team used fruitsalad, kindly hosted by Hasta AB (a manufacturer of cool curtain rods and blinds). It seems the machine has rolled over and died one last time; the home directories are no longer mounted. While I might have liked a little notice (for instance to get backups off of the machine) there’s not much to be done about it right now except try to reconstruct things using search engine caches. Nonetheless, thanks to Hasta AB for hosting things for so long.
On the KDE-FreeBSD front, development things are now hosted at iXsystems, such as the ports repository, patches, and whatnot. I’ve been slowly updating all my FreeBSD machines to the current ports (KDE 4.2.3) to see what it’s like and what I should expect when updating the packages that I do for OpenSolaris.
As for my blog, I’m happy to move it in with the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). I’ve been involved with the FSFE for some years now, latterly as an FSFE fellow (still owing Rainer much beer, I think) and as a member of the Freedom Task Force. These relationships with the FSFE follow from the kind of things I do as a board member of KDE e.V., where I wear the “legal dude” hat, and from my long-term commitment to Free Software. I’ll be using the FSFE blog platform (it’s WordPress) for my own writings from now on. I will try to continue to cover the usual topics: kids wearing funny hats, Free Software conferences, legal issues, KDE development and KDE packaging on non-Linux Free Software operating systems.