Touched

I got a totally unexpected surprise the other day when I got a parcel delivered to work that looked like it came from Amazon. After a few “What the fuck? I haven’t ordered anything”s I opened it and was almost knocked over to see that my mate, Matt Yallop had bought me a copy of “Redemption Song”: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer from my Amazon Wishlist.

Wow. I can’t imagine a better unexpected gift. The gift tag reminded me that, although unintentionally, I hadn’t actually spoken to most of my best friends since Christmas. I’m not so sociable these days, I feel like I spent that last 12 years being super-sociable and now I’m all socialised out. It’s like I’ve been to every bar, pub and club in the country and I’m too absorbed in what I’m doing these to poke my head above the screen or the pillow long enough to communicate to people who aren’t within my field of vision. Also most socialising involves consuming incredible amounts of alcohol and well, it makes me too ill to be worth it. When the up isn’t worth the down, it’s time to retire from the game.

And that’s pretty sad really, perhaps a little unhealthy even, but I’m completely satisfied with my little piece of the world’s jigsaw. I should try harder to take time out but I’ll always be thinking that I should be reading some article on securing DNS updates with dnssec, sleeping off my hard week’s work or pinning down all of the phone and ethernet cables that litter my house and getting them out of sight; or some other random work/home task nonsensia. Sad, but I’m striving hard and I’m happy doing it. It’s a trait I inherited.

So anyway, I received this book from Yallop and well, big Internet thanks man, I was genuinely taken aback. I read the first 2 or 3 chapters as soon as I got home. I already have a couple of books on The Clash, A Riot of Our Own: Night and Day with the “Clash” by former Clash roadie Johnny Green and Passion Is a Fashion: The Real Story of the “Clash” by Pat Gilbert are excellent in-depth books which shatter some illusions I had. Don Letts DVD, The Clash – Westway to the World is also excellent. All 3 are serious recommendations for anyone interested in people that made up The Clash.

Such is my obsession with The Clash and the characters within the band that I had to suppress the risk of leaky eyes 3 times in the first 2 chapters which dealt with his death and his funeral. It was really poignant. Joe Strummer was complicated, an outsider and an everyman with an incredible work ethic and view of the world which he was able to present to people and have them internalise as their own beliefs. I’m one such person. I wouldn’t believe in the things I do without Joe Strummer. My senses of right and wrong and what is important and what isn’t would be infinitely less attuned.

As I was only just born when White Riot came out, I missed them first time around, I was a new fan, the scourge of the old fans. I got into The Clash when I was 14 and Should I Stay or Should I Go was on the Levi’s ad. I bought The Story of The Clash vol 1 on vinyl and thought it was a waste of money for a week, but carried on playing it as it was the most money I’d spent on a record at the point. 2 weeks pocket money or something. It sounded so alien and esoteric compared to all other music I’d heard before and then it began to make sense. As time went by I became more and more absorbed by the music, the band, the people and the message until I became the encyclopedia I am today. (Note to self: really must make definitive Clash website and re-write Wikipedia page).

When Joe died I didn’t take it in for a few days and then maybe it took me nearly a year to realise the affect it had one my thinking. As a new fan I still had dreams of seeing a re-formed Clash play just once as a swan-song. It really tugs at me that The Clash are definitely over.

So, my oldest, closest and dearest friends, I haven’t forgotten you and you don’t have to buy me things from my Amazon Wishlist to remind me that you’re still alive, but thanks for caring and thanks Matt for one the best, most tuned-in surprises I’ve ever had. I’m touched.

Dell Goes Linux

After weeks of speculation, Dell, the second largest PC manufacturer in the world, have finally announced that they are going to ship desktops and notebooks pre-installed with Linux. This is great news, regardless of what you think of Dell.

It’s great news because Linux geeks will be able to get their OS of choice pre-installed, even though the geeky amongst us would still prefer to build our own PCs and install Linux ourselves. It’s great news because maybe we can get notebooks which contain components known to work with Linux, without having to resort to using ndiswrapper, binary userspace daemons and all manner of other crap to get wireless support.

It’s great news because, although it took a long time, maybe other PC manufacturers will want to make sure that Dell don’t corner the pre-installed Linux market, which is likely to see a tidal wave of purchases (we’ve been waiting for this for yeeeeeeaaars) and want a piece of the action themselves, which leads to competition, which leads to a better deal for customers and an array of choices.

It’s great news because people will be able to buy Linux PCs off the shelf if they want to. It’s great news because a vendor has finally stood up to Microsoft regarding their discounts on Windows licenses for vendors who refuse to ship anything other than Windows. Yeah maybe Dell did this a while ago, but still…

I don’t care whether you like Dell or not, but at least we have a choice now. Maybe your choice won’t be Dell, or even Linux, but at least we have the choice and hopefully soon we will see similar announcements from other manufacturers.

Whatever you views, having the second largest PC manufacturer in the world agree that Linux has enough demand to provide it on the desktop is a large step towards becoming a real option in normal people’s front rooms and workplaces at a time when most businesses are deciding whether to stick with Windows 2000/XP for as long as possible, move to Vista or try Linux.

O2 Aren’t all Arseholes

I’m still on O2, despite my rant about them a few years ago which is still attracting comments. I compared the respective offers from the O2 store sales guy and the one in Phones4U and frankly, the O2 guy won on technique, or lack thereof, alone.

The deals cost the same (although the Phones4U staff tried to ‘up-sell’ us), the phones were the same, but the O2 guy let us ask him questions and let us make our choice or leave it. The Phones4U staff were forceful, kept us there for half an hour or more, making ever more confusing offers and trying to convince us to sign the deal without leaving. I had to stop the senior sales girl (who had joined the original sales guy) twice and ask her to slow down and stop throwing numbers at us. We were offered all sorts of things, cash back, £40 in cash before we left the store, thousands of free minutes and hundreds of texts, all for more than we wanted to pay, provided we signed the deal. I explained politely that I refused to sign anything without first comparing with the competition and when I explained this they stood up and turned their backs on us so we left. I have since been informed that you never actually get any cash back, you get more free call credit. Something wrong with the wording there I think.

The thing was, the deal was better than O2 were offering, but O2 let us choose our deal, Phones4U took what we wanted and then tried to sell us a more expensive deal which was too complicated to follow and then blanked us when we asked if we could continue on our research mission and then return when we had made a decision. So, as annoyed as I was that O2 didn’t know my tariff details and took more than half an hour to come to that conclusion, their sales staff are polite, friendly and helpful while the Phones4U staff were aggressive and rude in their sales technique. I did a short course in sales techniques so I knew why they were being that way – to overwhelm you with impressive sounding figures and get you to sign before you get chance to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages. It’s all about the money. Get the sale. Fuck what the customer wants.

Fuck you, to coin a phrase. You don’t get my money if my university educated brain can’t follow your deal or you try to overwhelm me with figures. Clarity and giving me what I want is the key to getting my wallet open.

No News is Good News

That’s because there has been no news. Or at least I haven’t told anybody any of the news because I’ve been busy.

So, here’s the news:

I passed my CCNA first semester with flying colours. Always a relief 🙂

I got a new phone, a Sony Ericsson k800i and got a free 1GB iPod Shuffle.

My good friend and work colleague Graham Jones died of cancer. Graham was the nicest, kindest most sincere bloke you could wish to meet. A lot of people say that about a lot of people, but it’s true of Graham. There were more people outside trying to get into his funeral than there were inside the packed out hall. RIP brother.

I have given up cigarettes and alcohol. Really. I stopped smoking in November and I’ve been out drinking once since October and it reminded me why I hadn’t been out since October. I don’t enjoy it any more and I feel ill for 3 days afterwards. Really ill. It just wasn’t worth it any more. Most of my friends will think I’m joking when they read this, I’m not. That’s not to say I won’t fall off the wagon at some point of my own choosing, but it means that it will be fruitless inviting me on nights out any more, at least until somebody invents an instant cure for hangovers that works. Besides, everybody gave up inviting me out on nights out ages ago because I always make excuses about not wanting to go.

On final note, I have been made a company director at work. Yes, Adam Sweet, Technical Director. That’s me. You may bow 🙂

Hope you’re all well. There is probably far more which I have missed out, but that’s it for now.

IPMI on Linux. It’s Good for Me, it’s Good for You

At work I have been setting up IPMI support under Linux so that we can have local facilities when working remotely. By local facilities I mean being able to shutdown or restart the machine when something nasty happens and the machine locks up, being able to view and alter the BIOS, the bootloader, the boot-up sequence, the shutdown sequence and the kernel output when it panics.

This basically means that you see what happened, press the bug red button and then watch it come up again as though you were working on the machine locally. You can’t do this over SSH. Normally you would pay a couple of hundred or over a thousand GBP for an IP KVM, depending on how many ports you required and again for a remote power control device.

To use IPMI you need a machine with an IPMI BMC in the machine, preferably v2.0, you need a BIOS which lets you do console redirection and you can set the rest up in software, using OpenIPMI and IPMItool. What you can do is setup a serial console over the BMC and have the BMC redirect that over it’s own LAN interface so you can talk to it remotely. You also set up your bootloader and init to setup a console over the same serial port and then all you have to do is talk to it. The BMC is OS independent and works whether the machine is powered on, powered off and operational or not, so long as there is a power source connected to the server.

To help other people do the same thing, I wrote an IPMI howto on my wiki, there is already some other stuff on chrooted DNS, DNSBLs and greylisting. I admit, that I have yet to make it completely comprehensive, but all of the details you need to do it are there and the links will fill in any gaps while I finish it off.

This is my first real wiki article and was inspired by Ade opening up his secret wiki. It made me realise that I really ought to have some kind of config and howto repository to go back to myself.

Anyway, if you’re managing remote servers or plan to, think about using IPMI and then look at my IPMI article.

Don’t Let Your Product Die

It seems that the once popular Windows and Netware mail client Pegasus Mail and the accompanying Mercury mail server are no longer with us. Pegasus developer David Harris announced on 3rd Jan 2007 that development and distribution has ceased.

Why let this code die? I have to admit, I’ve never used it, but why let it just die? Why doesn’t he just make the code available under the GPL to allow anyone that cares about it do what they want? It doesn’t need to just stop existing. It may well continue to serve it’s users well in a new guise, led by people who care about the product, or maybe assimilated into other Free Software projects in the same way that Eudora and Netscape did when they decided to cease development of their mail clients and web browser. The results of which are now known as Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird.

For non-techies, Free Software is the software movement which makes all of its software available to anyone, free of charge and allows you to take that code and do what you want with it, change it in any way you like, provided of course that the code remains freely available. Free Software is also known as Open Source, referring to the fact that the source code of the program is available, but the term Free Software perists as the correct term as it implies the freedom of choice, freedom of use, freedom to modify and the political and legal freedoms that Free Software provides. The software license used to ensure these freedoms is the GPL, or GNU Public Licence.
Free software is not the same as freeware. Freeware is commonly simple Windows programs that don’t have enough appeal to be worth charging for. In some cases, freeware may be useful software which is made available at no cost by the good will of the developer. However the distinction is that Free Software allows you to download and change the code that makes the program do what it does. Freeware does not.

I’m not at all sure why freeware isn’t Free Software, only perhaps that the developers of freeware don’t want other people to change their programs so that they can retain control and maybe one day charge for it.

But anyway, if anyone knows how to contact David Harris of Pegasus Mail, please ask him to consider making the source code to Pegasus Mail and the Mercury MTA available under the GPL, it may well keep his products alive.

Don’t just let projects die when you decide not to carry on, make the code available so that other people can carry on your work or use it to improve existing Free Software.

UPDATE 24/01/2007: Ok, so the guy decided not to quit following the deluge of pleas he received following his announcement. He has decided to continue to with revised funding.

Say No to Software Patents

While I am by far the one of the least able to explain this topic to you if you don’t already understand it, you need to say no to software patents. Just in case you get lost, hang on until you get to the end and then just read the bullet points…

Why? Well, think of this way, it means that people will be able to patent software ideas and ensure that nobody else can implement them without paying a license fee to the patent holder. While in most spheres of human endeavour, this might seem reasonable, but the problem is this: only large companies can afford to register and maintain patents, which means that they can (and do!) patent everything they can think of in case somebody else comes up with the same idea and tries to market it, to make everybody else pay to use their version and to sue anybody else who has a competing product.

This means that you can only go to one company for your office programs, your web browser, your email program, your zip program, your PDF reader and so on. Well, in most cases that kind of thing won’t happen because all of these examples have what is known as prior art or are so widespread that the patent isn’t enforceable, but for the non-techies listening here, the point is valid even if the examples aren’t. Valid examples are things such as encryption algorithms, filesystems and file-sharing technologies or to put it bluntly, the complicated things that most people don’t understand about computers but need to do all of the things that they do on a daily basis.

What would you do if you had to pay extra to click on a link on a website? In 2002, BT (yes, good old British Telecom!) tried to sue 17 ISPs for the use of a patent it held on clickable links on a web page which, when clicked, take you to a new page, which are hyperlinks as most people know them, the main way the web is navigated these days. Thankfully that patent claim was thrown otherwise your Internet connection charges would be higher to pay for this ability to click on web page links.

What if you had to pay over £100 for a copy of Microsoft Office just so you could read the Word document your friend emailed to you? Well most of you are already doing that because you don’t realise you could use Open Office for free. But if a Microsoft patent claim were upheld regarding how those files worked, it would mean that you no longer have the choice to use something other than Microsoft Office to open your files. They’re YOUR files!

Or how about the fact that all of your lovely USB memory sticks or camera memory cards come with the FAT32 filesystem on them? A filesystem is a set of rules about how files are laid out on a disk and FAT32 is the standard filesystem for such file storage devices. Did you know that Microsoft had a patent claim upheld regarding the FAT filesystem, despite the claim being thrown out previously due to the fact that the filesystem had existed for some time prior to Microsoft’s patent filing. This now means that Microsoft can charge all manufacturers using the FAT filesystem on their devices, a charge which is in turn passed on to you, the consumer, even if you don’t want to use FAT. It stands a chance that Microsoft isn’t in fact charging for it, just holding it in the background as a legal deterrent to it’s competitors should they themselves claim that Microsoft is doing them wrong in some way, either way, you’re funding the legal battles or the license fees for the patented technology.

Did you know that the most popular digital music format in the world, MP3 is subject to patent and which ever MP3 player you use, be it an iPod or Windows Media Player, requires a royalty payment from the manufacturer (be it Microsoft or Apple in the examples given), which again is passed on to you.

If you don’t understand my rambling techno-bollocks, imagine if there was only one company in the world that was allowed to make Baked Beans, or bread, or toilet roll and everybody else who had to make bread or baked beans or toilet roll had to pay the patent holder first and so their bread, beans or bog roll are more expensive or perhaps inferior due to the license cost being added to the manufacturing cost. What if you like beans but didn’t like company X’s beans? Well, you wouldn’t know anyway because there wouldn’t be another brand of beans.

The main problems are that patents crush the little guy. We’ve all had ideas for inventions we think could make us money but the first hurdle is patenting it to protect it. You can’t afford the £1,000 or whatever it costs per year, but big companies can and that puts you out of the market straight away.

The second thing is that where there is only one supplier of an item and no competition, then you get a monopoly where the company can produce their product as shoddily as they like, charge as much as they like and innovation is stifled. This is already evident in the software market. Everybody uses Windows because everybody uses Microsoft Office. Windows is a leaky piece of shit. I don’t use Windows for these reasons. I don’t use MP3 either, or Microsoft Office.

Internet Explorer is what happens when you have a software monopoly. Get a lot of viruses? PC running slow and you don’t know why? It’s because Internet Explorer gets shot to pieces every day on the Internet. Most spam is generated by virus infected PCs and many of these viruses get onto your PC through Internet Explorer. 98% of all emails are spam. That’s billions daily. Because for years there was no competition to make Microsoft try harder. Until Mozilla Firefox of course, which I implore you, for the safety of your computer to download, install and use as your default web browser.

Get viruses via email? Well maybe not so many now, but it was the dominant way of viruses passing themselves around for a good few years because Internet Explorer’s sister program, Outlook Express was shit at dealing with dodgy emails and opened everything by default. That’s what happens when there is no competition. Until of course Mozilla Thunderbird came along, which I implore you to install as your email program for the good of mankind (email is still a risk, but not like it once was and Outlook Express behaves a little better these days, but still do it for the moral value of turning your back on monopolistic software companies that want to stop you thinking you have a choice, rather than blindly accepting everything that is placed in front of you like readers of tabloid newspapers do).

The main proponent of software patents is Microsoft, who have been convicted of anti-competitive practices in the EU and in several other countries. They are fighting anti-competition battles in courts all over the world including the US, EU, South Korea and so on. A software patents bill has already been defeated in the EU parliament last year after being being brought back from the dead several times due to insistent pressure by defenders of the patent system (aka Microsoft amongst others).
If you value you the freedom you have to do what you want with your own files then please go sign the petition to the British Prime Minister. This is not some noddy computer hippy website, it is a site set up by the Prime Minister’s Office to solicit petitions from the public on issues they believe in. It is already gaining press attention.You can sign the petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/softwarepatents/.

Oh and if you care about the freedom to do what you want with your own files, you should be very afraid of DRM (Digital Rights Management) which is in Windows Vista, recent versions of Microsoft Office, Apple iPods, the iTunes music store and is being built on to the motherboard of modern PCs. It allows companies (Microsoft, Apple etc) and the Motion Picture Association of America amongst others to provide restrictions on what you can do with your files, your DVDs, the music you paid for and downloaded from iTunes and your Microsoft Office documents. The DRM included in Microsoft Office is capable of refusing to open documents created in it unless you have a copy of Microsoft Office, which again rules out any choice to use any other office software other than Microsoft’s. Which means you would be shit outta luck sending me Word documents. Although it is possible, it hasn’t been done yet thankfully, but there are many other restrictions in Microsoft Office there that are more real. Have you tried to play the music you downloaded through iTunes on any other portable media player yet? You can’t.

Read more on DRM here and here.

The concept I am asking you to petition on, is not that plagiarism should be considered acceptable, but that the ability to take an existing idea and then take it a step further, to improve it, or to take it in another direction should be allowed. That is how the Internet developed. One person had an idea, then another person thought, “It would be great if it could do this…” and then somebody else added something else. It was evolutionary. No one organisation could naturally have had all of those ideas themselves. It is a feat of collective thinking. Also, having an idea separately from somebody else should not preclude you from acting upon it.

Computer software is not a patentable idea. It is at it’s most basic, algebra. Instructions to perform lots of calculations sequentially. You can’t patent maths because it is an indisputable idea that 1 + 1 = 2 and always will be to every person. No one person can claim that concept because it has always existed.

What this petition is asking for is for software patents to be made unenforceable in the UK.

Just in case you got lost:

  • Patents reduce competition, degrade product quality, increase prices and tie you to the apron of a single supplier which doesn’t have to try hard for your money.

Or, more succinctly:

  • Patents bad, freedom good.

Anyway, please sign the petition. And download Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office.

It’s From When I Was Famous

Every now and again I get an email from people about my band, Passion Star. I was almost famous you know. I was on TV, a film soundtrack and we played from one end of the country to the other. We played in front of crowds as big as 35,000 people. The one thing we didn’t do however, was break into the the UK top 40 singles chart, instead our 3 singles bumbled around the 90 mark, but we still meant a lot to some people. The story is here.

Anyway, recently I got an email from a guy named Chris Fox who came from Wolverhampton and saw us a few times and later came across us playing in Dundee where he now lives. Well he writes for http://www.tangents.co.uk/ and was writing an article on another band, Spare Snare who hail from Dundee. Seeing the connection between Passion Star and Spare Snare both coming from his home towns he then saw more parallels and contacted me about the article as he prepared to write it.

I like the article myself and it matches much of how I remember things. What he kindly doesn’t mention is that the Dundee gig was an absolute stinker and his sister, who also saw quite a few of our early gigs, saw us play at Strathclyde University, which as it happens was quite possibly the worst gig we ever did.

Anyway, enough of my rambling, the article is here. Thanks Chris.

Sulking

Well, it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m ill and alone as I don’t feel well enough to go anywhere.

It’s been the quietest Christmas period for me since I was a kid I think as I haven’t felt much like going out drinking this year. I have been pretty much in bed or on the sofa trying not to puke for the last 4 days. Apologies to anyone who was expecting to hear from me in the last week, but I’ve not been up to it.

Yeah well it’s all “Woe is me” at the moment and I’m revelling in self-pity. Aside from my sorrowful attempts to have you feel sorry for me, Happy New Year 🙂

New Music Stuff

Woo. I got more new stuff.

First of all, I got a 12 string electro-acoustic guitar for Christmas, though sadly I’m not allowed to have it until Christmas which prompted a large sulk on the part of your truly.

Also, I picked up an old Hammond T500 organ yesterday via Freecycle. Wow, it’s huge and reeeeeeeally heavy. It looks and sounds like a church organ and I have no idea how to play it, though I have enough musical knowledge to know how to play chords etc. Will sounds great if I can find a use for it and get the sound how I want it. Think ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, The Doors and more recently, The Inspiral Carpets.

I may also be getting a drum kit on the cheap. Hopefully I will be able to find a bigger house on Freecycle for all of my crap.

ADSL Irritation

I’ve been having problems with my ADSL line since maybe April/May, but never severely. I’ve been with my ISP, Freedom2Surf for perhaps 3 and half years and I’ve never had a problem, ever.

In May or so 2006, I had a few connection drops and the line wouldn’t come back up, sometimes for between 4-6 hours or even 24 hours sometimes. As frustrating as it was, I figured that having a few dropouts wasn’t a big deal as the service had been impeccable for 3 years. The the dropouts became more frequent and also longer in duration. In the interim period many ISPs stated that the move to ADSL Max had caused some network instability for many customers, but the worst was over.

By September I’d had enough and submitted a support ticket. I was asked the standard questions, to which I replied and heard nothing back as in the mean time, my line was changed over to ADSL Max. ADSL Max offers up to 8Mb connections speeds and I was theoretically capable of up to 6Mb as I am around 3km from my exchange in Fordhouses.

With ADSL Max, the line synchronises at the highest possible speed and then over a 10 day period, changes occasionally, so the fastest error free connections speed could be worked out. During this period, I received a solid 7Mbs, which was incredible. After the end of the 10 day period, my bandwidth dropped through the floor to 16Kbs, which is around 500 time slower than I was getting up to that point. I went on holiday after a few days and thought the speed would sort itself out while I was away. On my return 15 days later it was the same so I submitted another support request. After a few days the speed came back to around 2Mbs, which although not in the dizzying heights of the line speed training period, was the same as my pre-ADSL Max speed and was certainly workable. After a few more days it dropped to 16Kbs again so I submitted another support request. Again the speed came back to 2Mbs after a few days and then dropped to 16Kbs. I think I submitted another support ticket, this time including the results of a BT linespeed test, which stated that my ADSL profile was set to 16Kbs and that I had already submitted 3 previous tickets about this issue.

I also explained that I had done everything possible to exclude problems at my end, changed modem cables, changed microfilters, moved the modem to nearer to the phone socket, no power cable interference, in fact the only thing I hadn’t done was try another router as I don’t have one. After a few days my connection picked up and then dropped again, so I phoned up.

The support guy was very helpful, I explained my situation and he agreed that there was a definite problem, performed some tests and then told me it was a suspected line fault for which he would report a fault with BT (the British phone company which supplies ADSL and telephone lines). He also said he would call back before 7pm on that or the following evening to tell me the results of BT’s tests.

A week later I called back to see what the results were as my man didn’t call back. Another support guy explained that BT had concluded the problem was with my equipment. So now I have to find another ADSL modem and router to check the problem out. Which is irritating because I don’t have one. Even worse is the fact that I might have to buy a new one if using a different router solves the problem.

I have to admit that my telephone line is quite noisy with what sounds like dialup modem signals just about audible on it, which may well be my ADSL modem spitting out signals which aren’t filtered out by the microfilter properly. Not being an ADSL geek, this obviously sound dodgy but I’m still not convinced that my router is at fault. The line has always been slightly noisy I think, but I have little option to try a new router, so Carl, bring your router next weekend to the LAN party if you can make it.

Why Open Source Java is Good News

I prepared some notes on a few topics and they weren’t used that much so I thought that I’d use them here as it’s been a while since I said anything useful on anything other than the miniutae of any particular issue.

So, Sun finally released the Java source code under the GPL. Great News. Why? Well, here follows a slightly rambled list of opinions on the topic.

I don’t use Java particularly. Not on the desktop or the server and most people don’t really care about Java applets that much any more, but Java is pretty popular on embedded devices such as your mobile phone to play games and TV set-top boxes. Which I would guess is Sun’s main source of revenue from Java and I believe will be unaffected.

The good news for the open source community is that we get a solid bunch of code that we’ve had to largely avoid in the past due to licensing and redistribution issues. We have a platform we can use at last which will be easy to install and redistribute. We can now run Java apps easily – the Azureus bit torrent client, Freemind, the Java components of Open Office.org, the Apache Tomcat server, Open Exchange which builds on Tomcat and so on. Not exactly a raft of Java applications, but then we’ve never had a Free and complete Java implementation before. Java has always been something which has been viewed with suspicion under Linux.

Not only is the Open Source and Free software community now free to install Java and Java applications, but we now have the possibility to use Java as a language and a platform properly for the first time. The Java community can now contribute optimisations and features that they’ve been waiting for, which will only make Java better and prevent it becoming obsolete on the desktop and in the server room in the face of .NET, Mono, PHP and Python. It also gives us a powerful application server engine.

One of the big cliffhangers for whether Sun would Open Source Java was whether it would be forked, leading to 2 or more incompatible, competing Java implementations. I don’t believe this to be likely in anything other than specific uses.

There are already several non-Sun Java implementations such as:

  • Blackdown
  • Kaffe
  • Classpath
  • IBM JDK
  • Others

Most people aren’t using them. The Sun implementation is the standard and reference implementation and who wants to use a non-standard version. Certainly, Blackdown and Kaffe have been around for a few years and latterly, Classpath and none have ever been complete or widely used.

The only likely scenario of a competing Java implementation being a threat to the Sun implementation is if the Sun implementation doesn’t give users what they want and who would be stupid enough to do that? Besides, this is the Open Source community, where you can submit your own features and extensions.
As I said, aside from embedded usage, server and desktop usage are Java’s other 2 main areas. Installation and redistribution have always been troublesome on Linux, as nobody can package it for you, you have to get it from Sun, run the installer script, wave goodbye to your ethics and then set up your path. Awkward and compromising. Or use an incomplete implementation or live without. Thats for your desktop, for the server, you probably can install it yourself and have your ethics wiped away by business needs or management decisions, but still these issues all made Java a more difficult choice on Linux and one which people weren’t keen to utilise or program with.

On Windows servers, you probably do everything in ASP.NET, on Linux you probably did everything in PHP, or more recently Ruby, Python or even Mono. Now we have Java too and we can use Tomcat and Jakarta. Java is at last now a viable option on the Linux desktop or for the glue in server applications.

Today I Have Been Mostly Irritated By…

…Stupid mail servers.

You see, while being a reasonably well balanced person, I tend to see through things quickly, particularly advertising, marketing, PR, promotions, special offers and those guys with the throwing games at the fair ground and shit songs, irritating adverts and crap, mindless TV programmes piss me off really badly so much so that I have to turn over the TV or radio to make it all just go away.

As you may have read here and here, I like tinkering with mail servers, there seem to be endless permutations to solving any number of problems. So, I implemented greylisting a few weeks back and it has worked well, I received compliments on how much the spam rate had dropped, in fact to pretty much zero. I estimate that at least 90% of email connections my main mail server receives are spam and we drop about 40% of that with spam blacklists, Spamassassin was pretty ineffective and caused problems under heavy load so I dropped it and replaced it with greylisting. Greylisting refuses every email connection the first time round and tells you to come back in a short while.

A core feature of mail servers is the ability to spool message to retry later. When the retry comes , if it is after a certain period of time, the mail server looks up in the greylisting table whether it has seen mail from you recently and if it has, lets the mail through. Simple huh? And a pretty common tactic. Most spam comes from virus infected Windows machines and the spam software on them (which you won’t notice apart from your Internet connection being slow) isn’t normally intelligent enough to handle retries, they are normally optimised for sending as much spam as possible, regardless of whether it reaches it’s destination.

So, what has pissed me off today is a client complained that they aren’t getting some mail. I look into it and find that in each case the sending mail server can’t handle retries. WHY NOT??? Because, probably, their administrators don’t know what they’re doing. In one case, I guess it’s a policy decision. That’s YOU Blueyonder, spam capital of the UK. But in the other case, it looks like a home hosted mail server run by people that don’t know what they’re doing.

In this case, I had to whitelist (that means automatically allow, for the non-techies) the servers in question to allow my customers to receive the mail.

So, aside from my other rants on the topic of mail administration above, if you run a mail server, make sure you can handle reties within a reasonable period, unless you have a specific technical reason not to. As a hint, make the first retry within 10 to 15 minutes and then another one after an hour.

Oh yes, in completely unrelated news, I have given up smoking again. Completely unrelated, as I say.

On the good front, it amazes me how useful David Watson seems to be. I’m almost certain I’ve never met him, but he seems to keep popping up with solutions to my quandaries. Such as here and here. And he’s a fellow bass player. Keep on being one of the most useful people in world dude :).

Woohoo!

I have finally gotten around to buying a Cowon iAudio X5 multimedia player. So, ogg audio and video playback on the move for me. I meant to buy one a while back but couldn’t squeeze the legacy money repository any tighter.

So, woohoo for me 🙂

Remote Power Control

I’m going to be putting some servers into a data centre and manage them remotely. That means power control and optionally an IP KVM. Does anyone know the best way to do this? Do I need an IP KVM? What do they do that would mean I use an IP KVM rather than a normal KVM, both if I had to visit or if I worked from home?

The options I’m looking at at the moment are either some kind of remote power control device, using servers like Sun X2100s with either ” Optional System Management Daughter Cards” or “Standard Service Processor with embedded LOM” which use IPMI. Or maybe regular Dell or other servers, with the same kind of cards.

Are these cards any good? Do they work with Linux. Will IPMI 1.5 do what I want or do I need IPMI 2? It’s a minefield I tell ya. Can anyone make recommendations for remote power control devices, or BMC manufacturers and suppliers? What is preferable? A card or a separate device? I don’t know.

Oh yes and all of these servers will be running Linux…

Greylisting With Exim

I recently trialled and then implemented greylisting on a few Exim mail servers, seems pretty straight forward when you know how to add it to the Exim config. I guess I ought to post that config snippet in case it is of use to anyone as it took me a few goes to get right. On Debian and derivatives you need exim4-daemon-heavy and greylistd. You will also need to add the Debian-exim user to the greylist group and ensure that /var/lib/greylistd/whitelist-hosts is group readable.

I use Vexim for added ease of use as most of the integration of Spamassassin and ClamAV is done for you and it provides a web interface to managing virtual domains and users. Therefore my config is different from the Debianised split config. I used dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config to tell exim to use a single config file.

Note the commented out line, this was necessary to make it work with my customised Vexim setup. Yours may well be able to use it so leave it in to start with. I put this in vexim-acl-check-rcpt.conf, which of course you won’t have unless you’re using Vexim, so you’ll have to work out where to put it. I guess I can make edits if people tell me the details.

Give /etc/greylistd/config the once over to make sure it’s set up how you want it, I set my retry period down to 10 minutes as I have users who have time sensitive emails. Also look at /var/lib/greylistd/whitelist-hosts to allow all of the machines you need to be allowed straight through.

With Vexim, you are also using SMTP authentication by default so it would be nice to allow your users through without having to find another means of not greylisting them. If you don’t use SMTP authentication you’ll have to find another way and take out the !authenticated = * line.

This is essentially taken from the greylistd /usr/share/doc/greylistd.

Due to problems with getting WordPress to format the code for me and not hide the backslashes, I have removed the actual config and instead point you to my wiki article on greylisting. Apologies for that.

There are extra bits of config that allow you to catch emails with no envelope sender address, but I’ve not set this up satisfactorily yet, so answers on a postcard.

Other links to Exim Greylisting are at the following:

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/167

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Spam-Filtering-for-MX/exim-greylisting.html (didn’t work for me)

http://spod.cx/blog/greylisting_with_exim_spamassassin.shtml

Do You Know Whats Wrong With My Guitar?

Ok, I said had a few “Dear Lazyweb”s. This is the second in the series.

I put my home ‘studio’ back together to work on Jokosher as I had moved my PC, laptops, guitars and amp to my parents house before I went on holiday in case I was broken into while I was away. I have been twanging away quite a bit since I got back and now a problem with one of my guitars is really starting to bug me.

My Telecaster seems to have a tuning problem, it’s something that I noticed shortly after I bought it and at first I just thought I wasn’t tuning accurately enough, but it has become quite apparent the more I play it. It’s not that it won’t stay in tune which is a common problem with cheap guitars, more that it is out of tune after it has been tuned.

Basically, on a guitar, you have the body, which is the large part, the neck, which is the long thin bit with the wire strips across it and the head which is the bit on the end of the neck with with the tuning pegs on it. The strings are wound around the tuning pegs (aka machine heads) and then rest on a thing called the nut which sits on the join of the head and neck. At the other end, the strings rest on something called the bridge before going through the tail piece to keep them in place. When you pluck a string, it vibrates between the nut and the bridge and the vibration over the length of the string result in the pitch of the note that is heard. On the neck, those wire strips that go across the width are called frets and when you put your fingers between them, it causes the string to be shortened and hence create a higher note as the vibration is over a shorter distance.

Now, the problem I have is that when the the strings are in tune and played open, ie not using any frets, the note is in tune. When you play the note at the 12th fret, the string is in tune. If that isn’t the case it means the bridge or string saddles need to be adjusted. This wasn’t the case at first on my Tele and I had to adjust the saddles but it didn’t solve the main problem. The problem is that despite being in tune when open and when ‘fretted’ on the 12th fret, 2 strings particularly, B and G are out of tune on the second and surrounding frets, which makes playing chords or notes near that fret sound ugly as hell. Which means the guitar has a serious problem and can’t be played properly.

The problem gets better nearer the 12th fret, but that isn’t the point. The only other thing I can think of is either a) the guitar is fucked and needs to go back, which is a hell of a shame, or b) the truss rod needs adjusting, which is the limit of my knowledge about being a guitar technician and also, is beyond my experience which means it needs to go back to the shop. The truss rod is a metal rod in the neck of the guitar to keep the neck from bending or folding altogether under the tension of the strings. Anyone who knows better than me is welcome to make suggestions.

Problems with Jokosher/Gnome Audio/ALSA/DBUS/Ubuntu Edgy

I’ve been helping test Jokosher again, just as we come up to the second development release, but sadly I seem to have a problem with Jokosher recognising my Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live 5.1 since upgrading to Edgy. It all worked fine in Dapper. Please help if you have any understanding of DBUS, Gnome audio and ALSA. I don’t know where to go from here. So for now I’ll have to use my limited spare time on trying to help the docs team.

On a side note, check Jokosher out if you are interested in Linux audio production, we’re always looking for developers.

Been Around the World

Well actually haven’t but it feels like I have. I only went to Cyprus but it’s been chaos since I got back. It’s been a while so here’s a rundown.

Went to Cyprus, the Turkish part. It’s really nice, very peaceful where I went but you can see the place is in the middle of (re)development. It has suffered from under investment since the split with the Greek side but you get a sense that they are suddenly becoming aware of the income from tourism. Most of the place seems to be either run-down and covered in patches of debris or is being developed as fast as you can see, there are homes and apartments being built everywhere. Still, worse than British workers, there seem to be 7 or 8 people doing construction job and all but one of them are watching the other one do something small and fiddly.

I turned 30. I didn’t celebrate other than go for a meal with my family. Not that I was pissed off or depressed at my passing youth, merely that I just couldn’t be arsed. I really don’t feel like going out and getting wrecked these days, which was pretty much par for course during my late teens and 20s. Guess I’m getting old, but I can neither afford to waste money in such a way, nor waste the day afterwards recovering and more often than not, the day after that too. Some of my best friends also turned 30. Happy birthday to Rich, Adele, Anna, Joan, my nemesis Felim Whiteley who all share the same birthday as me and are also not listening apart from Felim probably. Hope you’re well my man, oh and by the way, someone left you a message in my comments. I can mail you his address if you don’t already have it.

I started doing a CCNA, funded by work, this is kinda cool but it’s all theory at the moment. I’m looking forward to playing with routers and stuff. It’s a real struggle to find the time to get my work done, especially with 2 or 3 weeks to catch up on after my holiday but I’m almost back up to date.

My mobile phone seems to be a bit fucked. The signal has always been a bit weak at home, but I’ve had calls drop out without signal problems and SMS messages that didn’t turn up. If you sent me a message and I didn’t reply then I can only apologise. Worse than this is the fact that the screen is now fuzzy in the top half and it’s a struggle to read messages some times. Ahh well, I’m not going to waste money I don’t have buying a new one when I’ll get a new one in March. Still I gotta wait for about 4 months with a dodgy phone.

I reinstalled my Ubuntu desktop with Edgy, which was kindly released on my birthday. The main reason was to make a clean sweep as both me and Aq wondered in the when we upgraded to Dapper whether we had missed out on some of the wizzy bits and pieces by doing so; and also to put my /home partition on Linux software RAID so I could play with it.

At work I’m busy as always. Top projects are still Asterisk, which I’ve been away from for quite a while, but which may well become quite important and a few other things. I have a number of “Dear Lazyweb” requests coming up so may well be asking for your advice.

I also have to learn PHP which is going to be a challenge given that I’m already short on time and doing a CCNA. Anyone got recommendations for PHP5 books or courses? My employer would like a number of us to learn at the same time, in a semi-organised way.

Oh yes and I’ve been ill for the last week. I was in a bad way Sunday and Monday, went in to work for a meeting feeling lousy on Tuesday but have been getting better since. My throat is still really sore and my chest is heavy, I haven’t smoked since I’ve been ill and I’m having sleepless nights. Hopefully I’ll be properly recovered soon.

That’s all for now, no doubt I will think of more stuff to write after hitting submit and will then take another 6 weeks to write them out. Hope you’re all well you kerrazy kidz.

30 Today

Yeah I turned 30 today and so far it seems ok.

Got 3 cards so far but no presents, don’t that suck? In fairness I haven’t seen anyone yet apart from my work colleagues so I’m sulking about nothing. I’m going for a meal with my family later so all of the surprises are to come.

I was thinking about the excitement of birthdays from when I was a kid. Man it seems like forever ago. Not being able to sleep the night before and then waking up to all of those presents. Wow. The magic kinda goes away after your early 20s. It’s weird how all of those toys would make you so happy and these days I’m so hard to please. Think I lost something somewhere along the way.

Ahh well, that concludes this episode of the sad and desperate 🙂