Planet GLLUG
Rev. Simon Rumble: I love a snaky review
There's few things finer than a review that slams an album, and none could be more deserving than the long-unawaited album from Axl Rose's Guns N' Roses cover band. Ever since waiting forty minutes at Roskilde for him to emerge, before giving up and going to see another band on the packed programme, I've had little patience for this self-important little turd. Apparently the gig I made the right decision going to see someone else, as apparently Rose spent most of the gig off-stage while his session musicians tried to fill the space with Jazz Odyssey.
So Chinese Democracy has finally been released. And it sounds like it's everything we all expected. Shite.
It would perhaps be unfair to call the album's lyrics — big on concepts like pullin' through, takin' your time and knowin' you ain't crazy no matter what they say — wildly solipsistic: plainly any listening multimillionare 80s hair metal frontmen struggling to complete a massively overdue, over-budget album are bound to feel a warm, inclusive tingle of identification.
Alexis Petridis' review hits the mark.
In the democracy of the market I suspect everyone, including the Chinese, will vote the same way on this one.
Paul Nasrat: puppetdoc goodness
http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetManifestDocumentation
Sample output here:
http://www.masterzen.fr/puppet/rdoc/index.html
Daniel Berrange: libvirt User Mode Linux driver and other new features
It has been a while since I reported on libvirt development news, but that doesn't mean we've been idle. The big news is the introduction of another new hypervisor driver in libvirt, this time for User Mode Linux. While Xen / KVM get all the press these days, UML has been quietly providing virtualization for Linux users for many years - until very recently nearly all Linux virtual server providers were deploying User Mode Linux guests. libvirt aims to be the universal management API for all virtualization technologies, and UML has no formal API of its own, so it is only natural that we provide a UML driver in libvirt. It is still at a fairly basic level of functionality, only supporting disks & paravirt consoles, but it is enough to get a guest booted & interact locally. The next step is adding networking support at which point it'll be genuinely useful. To recap, libvirt now has drivers for Xen, QEMU, KVM, OpenVZ, LXC (LinuX native Containers) and UML, as well as a test driver & RPC support.
In other news, a couple of developers at VirtualIron have recently contributed some major new features to libvirt. The first set of APIs provides the ability to register for lifecycle events against domains, allowing an application to be notified whenever a domain stops, starts, migrates, etc, rather than having to continually poll for status changes. This is implemented for KVM and Xen so far. The second huge set of APIs provide a way to query a host for details of all the hardware devices it has. This is a key building block to allow remote management tools to assign PCI/USB devices directly to guest VMs, and to more intelligently configure networking and storage. Think of it as a remotely accessible version of HAL. In fact, we use HAL as one of the backend implementations for the API, or as an alternative, the new DeviceKit service.
Paul Nasrat: puppetdoc goodness
http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetManifestDocumentation
Camltastic! (Richard Jones): Egg & "Verified by Visa"
Dear Sir/Madam,
I would like to permanently opt out of "Verified By Visa" when making purchases online. It just moves the liability on to me and the technical implementation of it is frankly crap. If not, I'll cancel my card (I expect you'll be happy about that) since it's no longer useful for purchases.
If however you are going to introduce some scheme which is really secure, such as a hardware token or one-time credit card numbers or authorization by SMS message, then let me know.
Camltastic! (Richard Jones): LWN.net has an interview with us about MinGW Windows cross-compiler
http://lwn.net/Articles/307732/
If you're not an LWN subscriber, you can use this free link to get to the article:
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/307732/0efc7b75c5696ae5/
Please consider subscribing to LWN!
Rev. Simon Rumble: But how does it work in theory?
Last night on Radio National's Australia Talks, Paul Barclay hosted Clive Hamilton and Mark Pesce to discuss the Internet censorship proposal from Labor.
The host was pretty clearly pro-censorship, and allowed Hamilton's bogus claims about the effects of pornography to pass without challenge. Anti-censorship callers on this talkback programme seem to have spent the entire programme on hold. My favourite bit, however, is when he cuts off Mark Pesce's description of how the Chinese have admitted it's not technically possible to have effective, mandatory censorship.
Paul Barclay: I suppose we could debate all day whether or not, technologically, it's going to be possible to actually block these sites, but what I'm also interested in here...
Which reminds me of the classic quoted, attributed variously to an academic or French bureaucrat:
That's all very well in practice, but how does it work in theory?
Clearly the only way the pro-censorship guys can win this debate is by completely avoiding head-on debate. That certainly seems to be Conroy's approach!
davblog - Dave Cross: Technology Failure
The effect of this boast is somewhat lessened by the fact that their site claims that today's date is "November 18 108". They also have a "rental property of the week" called "End of file".
Rev. Simon Rumble: How much for the soul, Pete?
I sure hope Peter Garrett got a good price for his soul because his principles sure haven't amounted to much. He seems to have a Short Memory with his politicans, party lines, don't cross that floor!
There is one thing he's achieved. Any time one of my mates decides to joins the ALP and says you have to be in power to achieve change, my answer can be "oh yeah, like Peter Garrett has then?"
davblog - Dave Cross: Combining Google Accounts
This has proved to be a bit of a battle. And as it gives an interesting insight to how Google's tools aren't quite as integrated as they would like you to think they are, I thought I'd write up my experiences so far.
My first approach was to find some way to just merge the two accounts. That would have been great - just take the data from both accounts and combine it. But there wasn't an option to do that. I could add other email addresses to my dave.org.uk account, but they explicitly stop you from adding Gmail accounts. So I was left with trying to combine things a product at a time. I decided that I wanted to move everything over to the Gmail account.
Google Calendar
I've been using Google Calendar a lot recently. But it was on the dave.org.uk account. So I wanted to move control of that calendar to my Gmail account. That proved to be impossible. I could give the Gmail account complete access rights to the calendar, but I couldn't give it ownership. In the end I exported the calendar to a .ics file and imported it into the other account.
Google Docs
I have a number of documents in Google Docs. As with Calendar, it's easy enough to give another account complete rights to access and update you documents. And, even better, there's a new feature to transfer ownership of documents to another account. There's a rather scary-looking warning that you can only transfer ownership to another account from the same domain, but that didn't seem to be a problem as I was able to transfer documents from my dave.org.uk account to my Gmail account. Well, I could transfer some of my documents. For some reason, thsi feature isn't currently supported for spreadsheets. So I hav a bout a dozen spreadsheets that are still owned by the wrong account. I suppose I can download them as OpenOffice files and then recreate then in the other account. But it seems rather a roundabout approach.
Google Analytics
This worked well. I could add another account as an adminstrator of my Google Analytics account. And then that account could remove access from the original account. If only all the transfers were as simple as this one.
Google Adwords
I have a couple of small ad campaigns running through Google Adwords. This transfer was supposed to be simple. You can replace the owning Google account with another Google account. Except, apparently, my Gmail account was already the owner of another Adwords account. This might be to do with the connection between Adwords and Analytics. Anyway, I just closed down the old account and opened a new one.
Google Adsense
This is the one that it's most important to get right. I don't want to lose any money from my Adsense account. And I'd really like to hold on to all of the historical data from the existing account. I can't see any way to transfer control to another account, so currently I'm thinking that I might have to keep the old account open. If anyone has any advice, I'd love to hear it.
Google Maps
Trivial but annoying. I've got a map stored in Google Maps (it's the one on my Livery Companies site). As with Calendar, I can share it with the other account but I can't actually transfer ownership (as far as I can see). It would only tak an hour or so ot recreate it, but it's annoying to have to take that time.
Google Groups
Another slightly annoying one. I can obviously unsubscribe from all of my dave.org.uk groups and resubscribe from Gmail (there are only eleven of them). But then I'd get the mail in Gmail and I'd really rather that it continued going to dave.org.uk. I suppose what I'd like to do is to make another email address the main address on the old dave.org.uk account, then move the dave.org.uk address into the Gmail account. I haven't looked to see if you can do that yet. Something to try this evening. [Update: I've just looked. It seems you can't remove the primary email address on an account]
Having so many linked services run by one company is supposed to make life easier. But having battled with this over the last couple of weeks, it's clear that these services aren't as closely linked as you think they are.
I wonder what proportion of Google's customers have multiple accounts, and how many of them have tried to correct that. I bet most of them just give up.
If anyone has any stories about this (or, even better, inside information) I'd love to hear them.
[1] Actually, having had experiences similar to Nik's it's becoming less and less likely that I'll get a G1. But I still think this is a useful exercise.
Rev. Simon Rumble: Genoa police riot: cops get off
The police who raided and smashed the crap out of a building full of peaceful protestors in Genoa in 2001 will get off completely from all their crimes, despite being found guilty. A statute of limitations means their convictions and sentences will expire before going into effect.
This kind of injustice will breed violence. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the victims decided to mete out their own justice, given the system has completely failed them. What's more, I imagine if the cops ever tried to raid a building full of protestors again, the protesters might decide to use violence to defend themselves, since the state won't do it for them.
Scary stuff.
Rev. Simon Rumble: Vive le FIP!
I discovered a really great French radio station recently, France Inter Paris (FIP). It's got a quite unique format, playing blocks of themed music grouped roughly into styles. You tend to hear a half hour or so of music within a style, and the range of styles is incredibly eclectic.
Between 07:00 and 23:00 French time, a short news bulletin is run at ten minutes to the hour, and a dulcet-toned French woman will give a short background to the music. Otherwise it's pretty much advert and long talk free.
My only criticism is that outside the live announcer hours, you can't find out what music they're playing on the web site. Even when the music is listed, the stream is quite a bit out of sync with what's listed on the site.
Anyway, give FIP a go. It streams in high quality mp3 online.
Also an interesting read is the Wikipedia article, including details of the long-running pirate transmitter in Brighton, England.
Karanbir Singh: Now twittering
I might be the last person on this planet to join twitter, but sign up I have. And my username there is *drumroll* CentOS *drumroll*. And since people who read my blog might actually want to follow whats on there, here is a link to the feed CentOS on twitter.
First question though, how do I follow a search ? eg. I want to follow what everyone is saying about 'kung fu dancing' ? I hate to need to now *also* look at a rss reader to keep track of stuff on http://search.twitter.com/
- KB
Camltastic! (Richard Jones): OCaml Users Meeting, Feb 2009, Grenoble
The last meeting (rubbish photo I took below) was a great success, and since so much has happened in the community this year, I expect this one will be even bigger and better.
Update: Sylvain's announcement and the official photo
Huw Lynes: Pretty Pictures
Our supercomputer Merlin is in the news again. A couple of weeks ago a gaggle of American journalists turned up, apparently on some sort of tour of South Wales (no really). I got pressed into service to help give the machine room tour.
Anyway pictures from Silicon.com
Rev. Simon Rumble: Out come the broad beans
The broad beans came out today. We've had an enormous amount of beans from a very small space. They were lovely! However, they've been taking up a lot of space and providing a haven for snails and cabbage moth caterpillars that are munching the brocolli and sprouts. Tonight we'll eat the last beans in a risotto with some leftover salami from pizzas made earlier in the week. Yummy! I'll definitely be planting a lot of broad beans next winter. They've been an excellent crop.
In their place I've planted a bunch of tomatoes and a few lettuces. I've got a Digger's Russian Tomato mix and another 5-colour mix in there. They should come along nicely! I also planted out some peas and more beans.
Holly and I had a bit of a seed-a-thon this afternoon, planting loads of new seeds. I've had some going a week or two: tomatoes, cucumber, more beans. I bought some of those jiffy pellets to try too, since I've not been having much luck with chillis. They apparently work well in these little pellets that swell when you water them.
As well there's more radishes, more basil, more chives, more lettuces. The summer crops which we'll need to keep going.
davblog - Dave Cross: "Selling" Photos
This issue contains an article about the London Livery Companies. The online version of the article uses one of my photos (the one of Girdlers' Hall) but the print version uses three or four more. The publishers had contacted me a few weeks ago telling me that they were going to use my photos and asking if I would like a copy of the magazine.
Notice that I say that they just told me that they were using my photos, not asking if they could use my photos or offering money for the use of the photos. This is because of the way that the photos were licensed. When the magazine found the photos on Flickr they were available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence - which basically means that anyone can do what they like with the photos as long as they a) credit me and b) license their work under the same terms.
On investigation, I found that many of my photos were under the same licence. But the licence I now prefer to use is the Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike licence. This licence is the same as the previous one, except that it only applies to non-commercial use. Anyone wanting to use the photos for commercial purposes would need to contact me and negotiate a seperate deal.
I've now gone through and relicensed all of my Flickr photos under the non-commercial licence. But I'm starting to have doubts about whether that is really what I want.
You see, this isn't the first time that something like this has happened. A while ago, I was contacted by an archeaologist who was using some of my photos of Cahal Pech to illustrate an article she had written about Mayan archeaological sites. Also, like many other people, some of my photos are in a couple of the Schmap guides.
In all of these cases, I'm pretty sure that these companies specifically search Flickr for photos that they could use without worrying about licensing issues. Flickr's advanced search specifically allows you to search for photos by the Creative Commons licence they are released under. If my photos had been under a non-commercial licence when those searches were carried out then my photos would not have been found and the companies wouldn't have even know of their existence.
So I need to have a bit of a think about why I take photos and why I make them available on Flickr. Clearly I'm not a professional photographer, so I don't expect to make a living selling my photos. It would, however, be nice to sell the occasional photo for a small amount of money. I do like to see my photos being used by other people, but do I want to allow people to make money using my photos without me getting a slice? There are plenty of people putting photos on Flickr who don't care about the issue (or haven't given it any thought) so there's no incentive for people who are looking for photos to look for ones that they have to pay for - even if it's only a small amount.
Currently my photos are all marked as non-commercial use. That means that they aren't showing up in commercial use searches. Will this mean that no-one ever uses my photos on a commercial project again?
I know that many of my readers put photos on Flickr under a wide variety of licences. I'd be very interested to hear how you chose the licence that you use.
Dean Wilson: Disturbing Diffs - Unsafe open?
Is move_file not as safe as file_move_safe? Is it safer? Dare I read the other diffs to find out? Am I better off not knowing?
Dean Wilson: Events - November 2008
Although, as a sysadmin, I feel a little bad about not making it to the Linux 2008 event (organised by the UKUUG) I couldn't really justify the time and cost this year. The talks were a decent selection but not enough to get me up to Manchester on my own budget for a weekend. I'll have to keep an eye out for next years LISA event in London to make up for it.
Last but not least - the FOSDEM 2009 dates have been announced (for the second time). Assuming they don't change during the week I'll be booking those before Xmas. Roll on February!
Dean Wilson: Dynamic Languages and joining arrays
First let's look at the big three, including perl, my current favourite. # perl $ perl -d -e 1; DB1> my @names = qw( A B C); DB2> print join(" : ", @names), "\n"; A : B : C # python >>> names = ['A', 'B', 'C' ] >>> " : ".join(names) 'A : B : C' # ruby irb(main):009:0> names = [ 'A', 'B', 'C' ] => ["A", "B", "C"] irb(main):010:0> names.join(' : ') => "A : B : C"
The perl approach is very procedural (ignore the use of the debugger as perl doesn't come with an excellent REPL in the core like the other two) and is the one I'm most familiar with so it's hard for me to be too critical about it. If you like OO then it's not for you.
Next we have Python, which is really growing on me as a language - apart from in this case. Putting the separator first and passing the list in as a parameter just feels very wrong and is the exact opposite of the ruby version, which I much prefer. To me the ruby approach of operating on the array is the most natural version and sits well in my head. As a small 'bonus' I also looked at the PHP equivalent -
# PHP $array = array('A', 'B', 'C'); echo implode(" : ", $array);This is close enough to the perl version that I can't really object to it, other than to (rhetorically) ask why the hell it's called 'implode'?
I guess all I can say in summary is round one to ruby.