We had another live airing of the Free Software Round Table last Saturday night.  One of the big news items in the Linux world was that Ubuntu had released the 7.10 version of their distribution, which is code named Gutsy Gibbon.  I had been running the previous version of Ubuntu on my laptop and decided that it would be kind of fun to upgrade to the next version while we were on the air.  So, the first thing we did at the beginning of the show was talk about Gutsy and then I started upgrading.  It had to download 1.1GB of updates (which took about an hour) and then it started installing the updates (which would have taken about 2 hours).  However, after 1 hour of upgrading we were about to finish the show and head home.  So, I restarted my machine right in the middle of the update.  It rebooted, but a slew of things were broken.  It’s a little embarrassing to be live on a Linux radio show while you ‘brick‘ your Linux laptop.  However, last night I was able to run ‘dpkg –configure -a’ to finish installing the packages that it had half installed, and then run ‘aptitude dist-upgrade’ to finish the rest of the installation.  The system is now up and running just fine.  Besides the bricking incident the radio show went really well.  I don’t think we’ll be doing another 2 hour show anytime soon, but the hour that we actually had content prepared for went really well.

I just updated my blog to wordpress 2.3.  It seems like I only post to my blog when wordpress has a release.  So, instead of complaining that I don’t post to my blog enough, complain that wordpress doesn’t have new releases often enough.

I set up IPv6 connectivity for my home network last week.  So, you can now ping6 me here: 2001:470:1f06:33::2 as well as a few other internal IPv6 addresses.  This was a wonderfully interesting, albeit mostly pointless, exercise.  Well, it’s not fair to call it pointless.  I did learn a whole lot about IPv6 and I can now connect directly to machines on my network.  But, other than that it really doesn’t do much.  Oh, I can now see the swimming turtle over at www.kame.net.

I’ve been working on some new code at work that will really help us put the squash on web based proxy sites.  The web based proxies make it way too easy for people to get around a filter.  Blocking access to these proxies is a really big problem for the entire industry.  They go up and down so fast that the traditional host name evaluation just doesn’t work.  So, we’ll throw in a little automated discovery mumbo-jumbo and some distributed data acquisition gobbledy-gook and we’ll be good to go.

I also recently released some code at work that should seriously cut down on the bandwidth that we use when upgrading our categorized list of host names.  The way we updated the list in the past always bothered me but I didn’t have the time to devote to fixing it nor a clear picture of how the entire process should work.  When a little bit of time cleared up I did some research and came up with a plan.  With the new code the download size, on average, will drop from over 100MB a week per customer to under 3MB per customer.  Oh, and the whole thing will work better and be more exact as a result.  You’ve got to love when there are basically no drawbacks to a change.

My boss recently (like just today) built a new computer for himself and his family.  His video card has more memory on it than any of my computers have in system ram.  Yeah – it’s that kind of computer and it is awesome.  He really decked it out – from the giant copper heatsink to the hard drive with a window, it is bad-ass.  Now all he needs is some neon lights … and maybe a set of spinners.

Speaking of spinners, Public Enemy kicks ass and I’ll stand behind it.  Oh, Radiohead kicks ass too.  They just released an album called In Rainbows that is only available online at www.inrainbows.com where you can name your own price.

Last thing I promise – by the time anyone reads this the 7.10 release of Ubuntu will have been released.  I’ve been running the beta for a few weeks and I highly recommend it to … basically everyone.  Download Ubuntu, don’t be a sucker.

Today is Tom Melendez‘s last day at work.  I remember the time before he started here pretty well.  John Palmieri, who had been working here for a few years, had just taken a position with Red Hat, so we were looking to hire someone.  I already knew Tom as I had been attending LIPHP for a while before this.  When I overheard that some guy named ‘Tom’ would be coming in for an interview I immediately began to wonder if it was Tom Melendez or not.  I was very psyched when I saw him sitting in the conference room for his interview.

Working with Tom these past few years has been a great experience and I wouldn’t have picked anyone else to work with.  I learned a lot by working with Tom.  The things that I learned weren’t limited to just technical things.  I learned more about real estate, taxes, time management, setting priorities and all kinds of general life management things from Tom.  I tried to spend a lot of spare time with him just to pick his brain and absorb as much of this stuff as possible.

It’s going to be weird at work with him not being here.  I’m pretty confident that we’re going to continue to do great work, but I’m also pretty sure that it is going to be a little less fun for a while.

I wanted to wish Tom good luck at Yahoo!, and what better place to do that than on my blog.  I’m sure he’s going to do great things with Yahoo! News and then go on to great things throughout Yahoo! and whatever company is lucky enough to have him next.  Make us proud, Tom!

Child Brutality

This past weekend Jen and I went to a party for her sister’s confirmation and her brother’s communion. We got there a little late because we were at Tom‘s going away party. We walked in and there were a few kids there that I hadn’t met before. Jen’s sister had a friend there and her brother had a friend there, who in turn had brought his little brother. Of course, all of the corresponding mothers are present as well.

Now, I started playing frisbee with the kids that are there. This was a little complicated because all three of the boys lined up on one side of the yard with just me on the other side. So, it is basically my job to make sure that no one child feels left out. I’m trying to distribute the throws evenly, but the frisbee isn’t exactly a tool of precision. Things are only made worse because the two brothers (~ age 9 and 6) are fighting every time that one of them catches the frisbee. Now I feel like I’m starting a fight between these two kids and that the mother probably hates me for getting them all riled up. Of course, I don’t really know any of these people besides Jen’s family, I’ve only been there for 5 minutes at this point.

It was then that I threw the frisbee to the 9 year-old boy, he bobbled it in front of himself for a little bit, eventually dropped it, looked up at me holding his mouth and said, “You knocked my tooth out.”. He runs past me, holding his bloody tooth, and his mother takes him in to the house to get him cleaned up. When he comes back out I ask him to smile for me and I can see what I believe to be the top half of one of his front teeth still in his mouth. Only later on did I discover that the tooth had been loose for a while and what I thought was a half of a broken tooth was in fact the new adult tooth already showing through his gums.

I was pretty scared there for a minute, but his Mom ended up thanking me for my help extracting the tooth. Apparently it had been holding on for a while.

Puppet / CFengine2 / FAI

At work I have the need to remotely manage a few hundred linux machines. I need to have the ability to pick and choose what packages are installed on those systems and what their configuration files look like. Most of the systems are going to be identical in package selection, and their configuration will be driven from a database. There will be scripts that reside on the machine which can take the settings from the database and produce the configuration files that are needed for each service. I do need the ability to control these things by grouping machines and by singling out individual machines and making changes to their installed packages, etc.

I asked in #debian if anyone knew of any such beast and someone in there recommended using FAI (Fully Automatic Install) for the initial installation of the system, and then using either puppet or cfengine2 for maintenance thereafter.

I haven’t done too much research yet, but puppet seems to be really interesting.  I’m not sure that it is going to fit our needs 100%, but it is definitely worth a lot more investigation.  It seems like a lot of these tools cater to clusters, which makes sense.  But, we have requirements that a cluster doesn’t, just as a cluster has needs that we don’t have.

John (sid) Teddy and Ilya (dotCOMmie) Sukhanov took the initiative and created planet.lilug.org which my blog is now syndicated on. Seeing as my blog is now syndicated on a Linux related blog site I will likely start writing about more technical and nerdy things than I did before. Seeing as I didn’t write very much before at all I figure this is an improvement. So, here goes.

Here’s a little background. The company at which I work sells software that filters Internet traffic at K-12 schools as well as provides curricular tools for teachers. We sell this software as a software appliance that is a Linux distribution. This makes all kinds of sense since we provide many other services like routing and firewalling. Also, in order to provide a strong filtering solution, being the gateway of a network really helps.

Now, the Linux distribution that we are using is based on SuSE 7.1 with many many updates that we performed ourselves by packaging software as RPMs. This is less than ideal because it means that we have to maintain all of the software on our own, and it makes it difficult for us to benefit from work that is going on in other communities. So, we’re looking for alternatives.

We originally looked in to rPath, but due to several reasons including cost, package selection, proprietary server-side component, dependence on one company, etc. we decided against it. Since then we have been looking in to Debian. At first glance Debian looks like a great fit. It has a very strong updating and packaging system. It has well defined policies and all kinds of documentation. There really is a lot of documentation – I was really surprised. There are a lot of tools that already exist for Debian which we could use like debtakeover and debian-installer. Oh, and there is a tremendous community, which makes it easier to find help and easier to find experienced employees.

But, there are some open questions about Debian that mostly revolve around the release schedule. We have the need to have access to the latest software. So, if I want to use PHP6, SQLite4, or a driver only available in the 2.6.75 kernel, I need to be able to do that. But, I don’t really want to have to constantly perform major upgrades to our systems that may or may not contain features or bug fixes that I care about. It is for these reasons that I am torn between using Debian Stable or Debian Testing. I then toyed with the idea of using Ubuntu Server. This has many of the benefits of using Debian, and a 6 month release cycle. But I’m really concerned about Ubuntu using update-manager rather than apt to perform updates from one release to another. I haven’t found any information about what update-manager is doing exactly.

Right now I’m leaning towards using Debian Testing. It seems to be stable enough. I have it installed on a machine at work with a package selection that is pretty similar to what we would be shipping and there haven’t been any major updates yet, just a few packages every few days. I did look in to what is in the cue and it seems like there might be a libc update which a whole bunch of other updates are waiting on, so we’ll see how that goes. I’m also a little concerned about the speediness of security fixes for testing. I can understand patches going in to stable first, and then unstable, but I don’t want to wait 10 days for them to hit testing. I’m going to have to look more closely in to backports.org. That should make it more comfortable to use stable, but how comfortable is remotely updating hundreds of machines to the next stable going to be?

Anyway, that’s where things stand. If you have any tips, hints, or suggestions please leave them as comments to this post. Suggestions to use Gentoo can be directed to /dev/null. :-)

I think I’m finally giving up on making any real contribution to Gnome. It’s taken me a very long time to realize that I am just not that in to any single one of the Gnome components and I don’t have the time to really dig in to the general bits. I spent some time trying to get jhbuild to spit out binary packages, but building Gnome from cvs (or now subversion) is the kind of thing that rarely works entirely. I mean, there are over 130 packages getting worked on constantly, one of them is bound to either be broken or to interact badly with at least one other package. This made testing my work very difficult. Hopefully I’ll get back to this project at some point. Bits of it were definitely fun.

So then I started thinking about contributing to Fedora. I have a bunch of experience in packaging RPMs and in basically designing a distribution from work. So, why shouldn’t I get involved with Fedora. Well, it just feels like it is too done. There are so many people working on Fedora that it is hard to know where the help is needed. And, by the time you figure out where you can help, someone else has already done the thing you were about to do.

Now I’m looking in to Foresight Linux. This is an up-and-coming distribution that uses conary for package management and always includes the latest Gnome bling. It is based on rPath which I have been pushing like a drug at work. So, working with Foresight will give me some experience with conary and the other rPath tools. I’ve installed the regular rPath distribution before and it was fine, but I’m curious to see what Foresight has done on top of it. I’m going to try and use Foresight as the main distribution on my laptop for a bit. Of course, I’m in the process of installing it for the first time right now, so we’ll see how I like it.

Jen and I ran in to Nick Selvaggio the other day. Ready for this, he owns a fucking house. I’m proud of myself after I do the dishes or vacuum in our apartment and this guy is maintaining a whole house. Damn.

So, my friend Amanda recently wrote an entry in her blog on myspace about whether or not she would erase memories of past experiences from her mind if it were possible, as it is in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I started writing a comment on her blog and then decided that the comment was getting long enough that I should just post it here. So, in order to understand what I’m talking about, you should give her post about this matter a read first.

Amanda, I agree with what you’ve said here, except for your sentence which reads, “Denying yourself experience is only a way of limiting yourself and your significance to life and the lives of those around you.” This idea, that the lack of an experience is somehow a limitation, works in the context of Eternal Sunshine because the lack of an experience is really a blank hole. There’s really nothing there. But, in the real world, the lack of an experience is replaced by, the experience of something else.

I don’t subscribe to the opinion that one has to do as many things as possible and experience as many different things as possible to avoid not missing out on anything. Yes, diversity of experience is important, but I’m never going to fly the space shuttle and I don’t have to do heroine or have a one night stand either. It just boils down to if you’re not doing one thing, you’re doing something else. And, who knows which thing is more enlightening or more important to your development as a peson.

So, would I erase portions of my memory? No. But, are there things that I wish hadn’t happened? Yes. There are choices that I made and there are experiences I have experienced that if I had the chance to do over again I would handle differently. I guess that is called regret. At some point the word ‘regret’ became a really bad word. That’s the perception I get from people in our generation at least. I could probably write a whole entry just about this, but I’ll cram it in to this one anyway. My rationale is that regret is natural. It’s not something that you really get to decide about after the fact. The idea that regret is a really bad thing seems to come up in the context of a few life experiences more often than with others. For example, if you don’t look both ways when crossing the street and you get hit by a car, you should regret not looking both ways. This example is obvious. But, if you go out drinking and do something “regrettable” with someone you don’t know / care to know, actually regretting it is seen as something to avoid. Entire songs have been written about this idea. I don’t follow this rationale. If you were put in the same situation, armed with all of the knowledge that you have now, would you do exactly the same thing? No? Well then welcome to regret. It’s not so bad now is it? With that said, I do think that getting all caught up in something from the past that you can’t change is unhealthy. But, that is different from regret in my eyes.

So, what the hell was I talking about? Right – erasing memory. So, like I said, in the real world if an experience is avoided, it’s replaced by another experience. Would I rather take this job or keep the one I have? Would I rather date this person or stay single? Would I rather go out and party all night or stay in and watch some movies? These are all common decisions that people make every day. But, who knows what might come of a job that you currently have if business starts booming; who knows what might happen if you’re single rather than in a relationship; and who knows what might happen if you stay home and watch movies? You just might write a blog entry about it that spurs a discussion.

I have this tendency to discuss things to death. Hopefully I’ve avoided that and have actually gotten a point across.

So, I decided that I wanted to know what was going in to Iraq’s constitution. I guess I’m some kind of a constitution junky (if that’s at all possible). Regardless of my reasons I set out to read the proposed Iraqi constitution. I found a copy of it that was translated by the Associated Press. It’s only 25 pages long, so it’s an easy read if you want to play the home game. I figured I would give my little commentary on the whole thing so I don’t feel like I’m just doing this for myself.

So, there’s this whole introduction that basically gives a history of Iraq’s trials, tribulations, and successes. My favorite line from this part, “We the sons of Mesopotamia, … the creators of the alphabet”. Yeah that’s right – they brag about how they created the alphabet in the first sentence of their constitution. How ballsy is that? After the introduction they start getting in to the meat of the thing.

Article I basically just declares that Iraq is a soveriegn democratic nation. Fair enough. But, it gets good in article II. “Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation: No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam.” Well there you go. I mean, I know they take their religion seriously over there, and that’s all well and good. But, why does it have to permeate its way into their government? There are people in the US who would do the same thing here given the chance. I just don’t know why the two are so related. Practice your religion any way you like before you leave the house, but please don’t gunk up my government with it.

Article IV declares that Arabic and Kurdish are the two official languages of Iraq. I’m not terribly sure why the government gets involved in this either. The US is doing just fine without an official language. People complain that Spanish speaking people should have to learn English when they move to America, but that’s just racism at its heart. The market will force people to learn English where necessary (as it does already).

Article VII contains all of the bits where Iraq denounces terrorism. I suppose that was to be expected, but it feels more like United States propoganda than anything else. “Entities or trends that advocate, instigate, justify or propagate racism [or] terrorism … are banned.” This seems like it would violate any sort of freedom of speech (which I haven’t found in the constitution yet), but we all have our priorities, right?

Article IX-b declares militias that are not part of the official armed forces to be illegal. I mention it only because it differs with the US. I guess that’s really my main goal here – I want to figure out how different their government is from ours. Article IX-e reads as follows, “The Iraqi government shall respect and implement Iraq’s international commitments regarding the non-proliferation, non-development, non-production, and non-use of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Associated equipment, material, technologies, and communications systems for use in the development, manufacture, production, and use of such weapons shall be banned.” Again, it seems a little weird for this to be in a constitution. Would the US agree to an amendment that made it illegal for our government to have nuclear weapons? Oh, and Article XI just declares that Baghdad is the capital city – kind of silly.

Chapter 2 of the constitution is titled “Rights and Freedoms”, so this is where it should get good. The first line of this chapter reads, “Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination because of sex, ethnicity, nationality, origin, color, religion, sect, belief, opinion or social or economic status.” Well played Iraq. I dig it. Heck, here’s a right that we don’t even have in the United States, “Each person has the right to personal privacy as long as it does not violate the rights of others or general morality.” Yeah, we don’t actually have an explicit right to privacy in the United States. You have to combine something like 3 different clauses in the constitution in order to find something like it. This would be a constitutional amendment I could get behind. But of course, the decision in Roe v. Wade was based on this weak right to privacy. Strengthening the right to privacy would only strengthen the grounds on which Roe v. Wade was decideed, so we’ll never actually see that happen in this country.

An Iraqi citizen is defined as anyone who is born to an Iraqi mother or an Iraqi father. So, it doesn’t matter where you are born geographically. I think that’s pretty cool. It has an air of inclusion. Iraq has an independent judiciary whose only superior is the law and the constitution. Every Iraqi is also guaranteed a trial by jury. This all seems to be pretty good.

Article XXII is a little weird in that it reads, “Work is a right for all Iraqis in a way that guarantees them a good life.” Once again, kind of weird to see that in a constitution, but whatever. I’ve never written a constitution after all. Article XXX is pretty interesting – “The state guarantees social and health insurance.” Yep – that’s right. I’m not even going to go into it.

I’m starting to wonder how different our constitution would be if it were written today rather than nearly 250 years ago. Article XXXIII – “Every individual has the right to live in a correct environmental atmosphere. The state guarantees protection and preservation of the environment and biological diversity.”

Well, Article XXXVI contains what I think is their right to free speech. But, they buggered it up pretty well, “The state guarantees, as long as it does not violate public order and morality: 1st – the freedom of expressing opinion by all means. 2nd – the freedom of press, publishing, media and distribution. 3rd – freedom of assembly and peaceful protest will be organized by law.” How necessary is the “as long as it does not violate public order and morality” loophole. They couldn’t get by without that part? That basically means, “You can say whatever you want as long as we like it.” That’s a pretty bogus freedom of speech if you ask me. I mean, I guess it’s better than what they had before, but how much better?

The next few pages of the constitution define their legislative branch. It’s kind of weird because they say that it is made up of the Council of Representatives and the Council of Union. Then, they go on and on about what the Council of Representatives is and what they’re responsible and capable of doing, but all they say about the Council of Union is, “The makeup of the council, the conditions for membership and all things related to it will be organized by law.” Oh well good.

The president of Iraq is not elected directly by the people but by a 2/3 majority vote in the Council of Representatives. I’m not sure how they expect to get a 2/3 majority vote for a president, but that’s what it says. We don’t actually have the right to a direct vote for president in the state’s either, but we at least make it look that way. :o) It seems that the Iraqi president doesn’t actually have that much power anyway. He is basically a puppet for the Council of Representatives. The real power seems to be in the hands of the prime minister, which oddly enough seems to be appointed by the president.

They then get in to defining the judicial branch. The supreme court has the responsibility of declaring if a law is constitutional or not before it is enacted. That’s kind of weird isn’t it? They also seem to be able to decide if a law is constitutional after the fact like our supreme court can, which is nice.

Article 109 reads as follows, “Oil and gas is the property of all the Iraqi people in all the
regions and provinces.” Yep – that’s the whole thing. That’s all they had to say about it.

They then go ahead and describe how Regions are defined, which are just like our states. I skimmed through that part and the only interesting thing is that they seem to establish state rights by saying that whatever is not defined by the federal government will be controlled by the states and that the state’s laws take precedence.

The last part just defines little tidbits like how the constitution is amended and how things should work while they transition to this style of government. Overall I think the constitution is nice. I don’t particularly like their freedom of speech, but I guess it is what was expected. Hopefully the Iraqis will be able to enjoy the freedoms that are expressed in this constitution. That’s the real test I suppose – if they can actually enact this document into a working government.

Hopefully I provided a terse summary of the Iraqi constitution. I found myself interested so maybe someone else was as well. There ya go.

Jen breaking in to Amanda’s house before we went out dancing.