Last week I installed Ubuntu Gutsy onto Heather's laptop. While Gutsy seems to be an easy task for most situations, installing it onto a Pentium 366 laptop with 200M of RAM and (particularly) an 800x600 screen was harder than it perhaps should have been.

I'm sure that most installations these days aren't 800x600, but the graphical installer in Gutsy seems determined to make this painful. I had to move the toolbars to the sides of the screen, and then I could see the top half of the buttons on each page. It was like the page was sized for 600 vertical pixels, but the designer had forgotten about toolbars and title bars - not that I could see any screens in the process I followed that needed more than 5/6 of that screen anyway. Eventually I got it installed, and it even seemed to run OK once we booted into it. That's "OK for a 200M P366 with an 800x600 screen" though.

Looking around at the price of a new laptop made putting up with that sort of performance a whole lot less palatable. The Acer Aspire 5310 (with free RAM upgrade) was $898 at Dick Smith, with a $99 cashback offer. A quick google shows that it's using the Broadcom 43xx wireless which isn't even close to being the best, but can be made to work with Linux. Everything else seemed likely to work, so we bought it.

Installing Gutsy on it was nearly trivial, though I had to install bcm43xx-fwcutter on a different PC (my laptop, which is running Debian, in fact) to get the firmware for the WLAN before I could get the wireless working. I'm surprised that Broadcom still don't make that firmware publicly available somewhere, rather than forcing people to jump through the sort of hoops that would get them wanting an Intel chipset next time.

Anyway, everything installed very easily, and the laptop is working quite nicely. Strangely neither sound, nor suspend to ram are working out of the box. They're not so important in this case fortunately, but perhaps in due course I'll try and get them working and post some details about it.

Much harder has been getting the fabled 'cashback' from Acer. I think I now know what I'm being paid $99 for. Firstly the only way to get your cashback is by registering through a webpage. Heather's first attempt to do this resulted in an error from our proxy about a malformed request, so I got called in. I tried registering using on my laptop, but couldn't even get to the cashback page. I then tried using IE6, with similar results. So perhaps it's my PC? I tried using a different PC, with the same result again!

We tried ringing them up, but they were absolutely determined that (even after 20 minutes on the phone) they were not going to accept that information over the phone. So the only way to get the cashback from Acer was via their thoroughly broken website. Even their Contact Acer page is broken in firefox just showing a blank. Firefox users need not apply.

Eventually, while spending some time in front of Heather's main computer (which had made it all the way through to submitting their on-line form before failing) I realised that the error she was getting was a proxy error from some in-form javascript submitting an invalid request, so I disabled the proxy, the form finally worked, and I managed to apply for the cashback. Now we just have to send the printed form in, along with some blood from our firstborn, the ashes of my grandmother, various barcodes, receipts and toenail clippings and we're sweet. They say they'll send us some money within 30 days. I think we should maybe frame it or something. I just know I'm going to feel really inclined to take advantage of cashback offers in future.

In Other News: DVD Slideshow

Meanwhile I've been playing with DVD Slideshow which seems to be just what my parents have been after for a while, so they don't have to keep their favourite photos on the camera to be able to show them off on someone's TV. It's great! At least it is great now after I changed all the calls to ffmpeg to add a 'k' after the bitrate parameter. But that's Open Source Software, I guess. I'll send a patch to them... :-)

A recent thread which started on the Debian Release mailing list caught my eye this week. I attempted to aid the migration of this thread to the debian-ipv6 mailing list, which is really a better place for this and sorely in need of controversial topics for discussion.

It is interesting how people can so blindly decide that broken things should be destroyed. Repair often appears not to be an option, even for a long-term, wide-reaching effort like this, though we are all working on open-source software!

In this case there are an unknown number of less fortunate people in the world who are located behind some kinds of broken DNS infrastructure which discards 'AAAA' lookups. Of course 'AAAA' lookups are attempts to resolve a name to an IPv6 address, and the resolver in a 'modern' libc (i.e. one from the last five years or so :-) will try to retrieve an IPv6 address before it attempts to resolve a name as IPv4 with an 'A' lookup. That is how the standard is written, so if you want to comply with the standard you have to do it that way. Other things also interfere, but this element of the specified behaviour seems to cause the most annoying and pointless whingeing I have heard.

I suppose that the people who want working IPv6 make it so, and do not have problems with this behaviour. But it seems that people who are behind this kind of broken DNS either disable IPv6, or they have to whine about IPv6 being turned on by default, and can't we please all go back to the good old days. What's wrong with IPv4 anyway? Doesn't NAT solve all of it's problems? Are we sure this new (heh!) technology is safe?

Fortunately some people are so good at making their pain felt by other people that they can get other people to do their work for them. So Mithrandir has written a nice elegant patch for libc6 so that it won't do the IPv6 lookups unless you have a usable IPv6 configuration. I've filed bug #435646 against Debian to get this included, but Aurelian Jarno justifiably wants a few people to test it a bit harder... So I've taken the original patch and tweaked it to apply against current libc6 sources (2.6-5) and tested it for myself. It works as desired, as far as I can see, when comparing behaviour with an unpatched system. The patch is attached to the bug report, of course.

Perhaps some other people out there can put a wee bit of CPU into testing this for other environments so that we can make life easier for those people with no time / inclination to use IPv6, to ensure that they don't just disable it because it is making life too painful for them in it's current form?

How to build libc6 for fun and proft

If you have appropriate deb-src URLs configured, and are running Sid, then the following will let you build a local copy of libc6 with the patch. This is probably better testing than if I just make my packages available (which are only i386 in any case).


apt-get build-dep glibc
apt-get source glibc
cd glibc-2.6.1
debian/rules unpack
cd build-tree/glibc-2.6.1
wget -Oglibc-only-lookup-ipv6-if-it-makes-sense-debian.patch http://tinyurl.com/3xzm3o
patch -p1 <glibc-only-lookup-ipv6-if-it-makes-sense-debian.patch
cd -
dch --newversion 2.6.1-1+v6 "Apply IPv6 Resolver Sanity"
fakeroot debian/rules binary


Wait a few hours for it to build...

Install...

And then confirm that this only does 'AAAA' lookups if (when) you actually have a global or site scoped IPv6 address. When you only have a loopback or link local IPv6 address then you should only see 'A' record lookups.

Step 3: profit!

Whoops! I forgot the fun bit: please update the bug report :-)

What the patch does

In my opinion this is quite an elegant solution from Tolleff. He has picked a single characteristic of the IPv6 interfaces to further refine whether the IPv6 configuration of some interface is actually usable.

With IPv6 it is much more common to have multiple addresses assigned to a single interface. Interfaces are automatically configured with a link-local address which is not globally routable, and the loopback interface is also configured with the IPv6 equivalent of 127.0.0.1 (which is "::1").

To get a usable IPv6 setup you will also end up with a more widely usable address. In most cases this will be a global address, meaning that it is (in theory) globally routable from other people who also have global addresses, or you could have a "site" address, which is the IPv6 equivalent of RFC1918 addressing.

The patch considers that for the purposes of name resolution, it will be pointless to do AAAA lookups unless you have an address of the second kind. This means that people behind broken DNS won't be impacted unless the try and set up IPv6, and people who don't try and set up IPv6 won't get the 'hesitation' while their system attempts to resolve each address in IPv6 space first.

It will also mean that when people start to enable IPv6 around them, their setup will continue to work correctly.

I followed the advice of the lazywebs a while ago and bought myself a phone (Nokia 6100) on the local auction website then went around to the local Vodafone dealer and bought a SIM card for it.

When I signed up I ticked the box saying "Enable Global Roaming" and now that I'm travelling I realise I should have actually confirmed that happened before I left the country, because it didn't happen. Now I'm sitting in Melbourne with only the (free :-) Wifi to keep me company.

So looking at the Vodafone site, it appears that I could dial "777" to enable global roaming. Apparently I should have done that a few days ago, because it sure won't work now. Perhaps this "Manage Your Account" thingy will work? A period of perusing pages of FAQs follows, and I eventually conclude that it would work.

Except that when I try and register for the service I am told that my phone number is not valid. Yes, I moved my old number across to Vodafone, about the same time Brenda was lamenting the inadequate preparation Vodafone did for Mobile Number Portability, and while the actual phone has been working, Brenda did note back on April 1st that "you can't use the website to manage your account". Two months on and it still isn't possible, which is pretty poor really - you would think Vodafone would be actively encouraging people to move across to their network.

So I'm effectively phoneless until I get to Edinburgh and can buy a SIM card.

At least I can still get on IRC and ask someone to call Heather and tell her why I'm not phoning.

I have just received the most bizarre share purchase offer I've ever seen. It seems some weirdo company called Colonial Capital Corporation wants to pay about 60% of the market rate to buy my shares in Tower Australia Group.

I only have these few shares because of some insurance policy I used to have, and probably I should have sold them years ago, but to be offered 60% market value seems pretty insulting. I wonder how many suckers will be fooled?

A quick search for CCC shows how well-recognised this David Tweed asshole really is.

Good to see that Wikipedia has a pretty thorough write-up on the guy. Maybe someone has some pictures of him that they could upload there as well, so we can recognise him in the street. The Melbourne Age can help out a little on that point, as can the Sydney Morning Herald though he always wears sunglasses, it seems.

The registered office of the Colonial Capital Corporation (NZ Company no. 1891726) is "Andrew James Kennedy, Level 2, 6 Clayton Street, Newmarket, Auckland". I guess if you know that person you should make sure they are aware of the kind of amoral shyster they are fronting. It seems that particular location is a "virtual office" that you can rent for only $120/month from the "Auckland Business Centre Limited", Ph. 09 522 7130. I wonder if Mr. Kennedy takes phone calls, and what company name he gives when he answers?

A previously infamous company also with David Tweed as sole director is National Exchange Ltd (NZ Company no. 1559669). The office for that one was at Suite 102, 63 Remuera Road. No name associated with that, but the constitution is pretty much a license to ensure any funds get offshore as quickly as possible, and a Google search suggests that the address generally has some very dodgy businesses associated with it.

I need a new phone. My current phone has the battery cover falling off it because I fiddle with things all the time, and since I have my phone with me all the time it seems to get all the punishment from this. And then I drop it, and bits fly off in all directions. It mostly still works, but it's a few years old and the battery doesn't last for more than a couple of days anyway.

So I really need a new phone.

As far as I can see though I'm too unfashionable, or I'm not geeky enough, or I'm too geeky. Well, something is wrong with me anyway, because nobody makes a phone for me.

My Dream Phone

My dream phone is not something that is bleeding edge, but it is seemingly impossible for phone manufacturers to sell such a thing to the phone companies.

What's so hard about that? It seems that all of the features I am after are possible, and have been possible for years. My problem is that the phone manufacturers and marketers have arbitrarily decided that everyone wants to have an (undreadable in sunlight) colour display, except for cheap bastards. And cheap bastards are clearly cheap bastards and so wouldn't dare to want any other features.

Personally I would happily pay $300 for a new phone with no camera, no music player, no video calling, no picture messaging and no "crap of the week" option... Of course it would have to be small, have good battery life, a monochrome display, have an alarm clock, work in other countries and be reasonably stylish. If it had bluetooth, high-speed data capability and a (basic, simple) appointment calendar I'd pay another $300 easy.

Since my phone currently transforms into a 3D jigsaw puzzle at the drop of a hat it rapidly becomes a conversation piece and I have had universal agreement that while functionality like camera, movie and mp3 player might appeal to some people, nobody I know wants to use the phone as much more than a communication device. Invariably the people I'm talking to acknowledge that while the set of such people might exist and might even be large, they are not actually a part of it.

The "I Just Want a Phone" Options

Some of the manufacturers seem to have noticed that people want a simpler, kinder phone. Unfortunately they are targetting their offerings at the octogenarian market, rather than their children. Yes, I do "Just Want a Phone", but I am not yet palsied and could still hit the buttons on something that is 35mm x 90mm x 15mm thank you very much. If I could find one.

My general communication does also involve the use of other devices from time to time, such as a laptop and an internet tablet, so it would be "nice to have" the ability to do bluetooth and high-speed data.

The Best Phone I Ever Had

The best phone I have ever had was a Nokia 8310. It was nearly small enough to be perfect. It had a monochrome, sunlight-readable display. It had an excellent battery life (regularly lasting more than a week on standby). The model was so functional and usable it has, of course, been discontinued.

Since then, it seems, all of the small, stylish phones must have an unreadable-in-sunlight colour display, and most of them have a bunch of other stuff to add weight and size to the device and make it chew through batteries as quickly as possible.

Every few months I take a look through the current offerings, but it seems I'm just too weird.

Perhaps I could steal that Nokia 8310 back off my wife now that she has a new battery for it...

Last week I was flying down from Auckland to Wellington and when I checked in the lady at the counter said "I believe they are going to announce a delay on that flight due to the late arrival of the incoming aircraft".

Sure enough, 5 minutes later we were told our flight would be delayed "about 20 minutes".

I'm pretty suspicious about airline delay announcements. I don't know what school of optimism or psychology they send those people on, but it seems like they never want to tell us when the flight really is delayed until.

So I cranked up my laptop and connected to a free WLAN (curiously called "Mahara", but it was open enough for my VPN to start without me having to visit a web page or anything - nice). I browsed to the airline arrivals page and discovered that the plane we were due to travel on was due to arrive 45 minutes late.

Sure enough, 20 minutes later we were informed that the plane would be 45 minutes late, and it was.

Why do airlines do this? Is there some psychological study somewhere that says that you should break this bad news 20 minutes at a time, because I sure think I would rather just know the whole lot up front. Do they somehow think that the collective belief of the passengers will cause the incoming jet to be 50% more efficient, and be able to fly the 1 hour route in only 40 minutes?

Fortunately nowadays we can use information sources on the internet to work out the truth before it is announced. I know that when I was flying to Sydney for LCA I flummoxed one of the attendants by telling her when the flight would actually be departing only a few minutes before she announced it to everyone.

I guess it gives me something to do while I wait...

From today my blog is available on IPv6. I've set it up so that http://debiana.org/ is only serving an AAAA record (for this server) and no IPv4 records (+/- DNS timeouts, of course...).

Tomorrow I will work on getting a nameserver or two running on IPv6, to extend the IPv6 infrastructure another level.

This is all me fiddling now that we have an IPv6 allocation at Catalyst, and are developing our IPv6 infrastructure in order to be able to deploy a couple of the .nz nameservers on IPv6 in due course. I'm not sure if I can point a .org domain at IPv6 nameservers so I might have to pick one of my .nz domains and use that to have a top to bottom IPv6 infrastructure.

For IPv6 to start to work, I think people just have to start using it, so I'm going to change the systems that I can change. So I've also put a fixed IPv6 address onto my laptop, which is nice, and I will be converting all of my home systems to IPv6 addresses as well as time permits.

Of course I can't get rid of IPv4 yet, but I think I will probably be trying to run that through a proxy somewhere non-local if I possibly can.

If you can access this server via IPv6 I would be really interested to see a traceroute from you :-)

There was an interesting read the other week on LKML where someone or other was trying to say that no kernel config options should be hidden, and any that are should be turned into options that are linked, so that you can "see what you are doing".

At the time Linus posted an excellent rant straight back, saying that more options should be hidden, and that the knobs and twiddles that people see should be obvious. I thought at the time that Linus response on this was extremely appropriate, but I didn't expect to be bitten by the opposite approach quite so immediately!

I have been trying to build 2.6.20 for the last few days and wondering where in hell has the "Software Suspend" option gone. Well, today I found out that if you disable "Hot Pluggable CPUs" the option will never appear. If Linus has his way this problem would not happen, because the two knobs that people might want to twiddle, which appear superficially unrelated would actually have three settings in truth:

• CONFIG_USER_HOTPLUG_CPU
• CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU
• CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND

The first setting would be a user-selectable knob, which would ensure that CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU was enabled, regardless of the state of software suspend. The last one would ensure that CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU and CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND were enabled.

The current approach is that iff I enable software suspend, then the hotplug CPU option disappears, and OTOH if I disable hotplug CPUs the software suspend option disappears. What I did was to start with a clean, unconfigured 2.6.20 kernel and go through all of the options starting at the top, which is something I tend to do with new hardware. The idea of hot plug CPUs seemed like something I didn't need, so I disabled it.

With Linus' approach I would then have enabled Software Suspend a couple of minutes later, and the hidden config option would have been re-enabled behind the scenes. With the way things are at present, I built a good number of kernels and went through quite a bit of hardware blaming before I grepped .Kconfig for SUSPEND and found out what had happened, and which option I needed to enable.

It is nice to know that their is such deep sanity at the heart of the kernel development process! Hopefully someone in a position to do so will notice this particular little gotcha and fix it soon, or perhaps someone wanting an "in" to start kernel hacking could go through the kernel configuration and clean up such gotchas. It certainly seems to me that Linus would accept patches for this as being rational.

<rant>

I know: I'm a broken record, but there seems to be a depth of stupidity to the Pizza UI which just makes it such an easy target...

Consider this "funny once" joke. When I try and enter my credit card details these guys have programmed their Pizza interface somewhat better than these losers. Some standard UI metaphors work: for example when I go to Hell, I can at least tab correctly from one field to the next. Still though, when I arrive at a field which is a drop-down box, they clearly have so much control over the "user experience" that stuff like hitting the down arrow to select from a drop-down has to be handled personally, and the programmer appears to have forgotten to implement that sort of behaviour.

There are worse sins than the ones visited on people arriving at Hell. In fact the UI from Hell regularly receives awards - presumably from people who find it "novel". The judges probably don't actually buy Pizza over teh intarwebs so they haven't seen it before. Or perhaps they like black, because it's all cool and designery, or they are poorband users who normally have to access their pizza through the 0800 interface. Hopefully those people will eventually be replaced by people who have used the site and got over it. People who actually want to order Pizza, and just want a page where they can quickly and easily do so, and who are sick of chucking devils in the corner just so they can click on a button.

Using this UI to present a plain 'website' is surely just the worst ever though. I regularly find music artists with this kind of site too, which for me means "nothing to see here: move along". And I do, of course, since it is clearly going to be a learning curve understanding their designer's idea of a "user interface" before I can find the information I'm after. After a long succession of bad experiences along these lines, finding out more about the actual music from the Amazon website than from the artist's one, I've pretty much given up on them. In fact nowadays I just go straight to Wikipedia, which has an increasingly comprehensive collection of information about music and musicians.

I haven't seen a really serious website, that wants people to buy stuff, which has been written using the Pizza UI, in fact. I'd wonder why that is, except that it is basically obvious to anyone who regularly buys stuff on the internet (or anywhere, in fact) that increasing the barriers to your customers is not good business sense. Experienced programmers will also understand that the Pizza UI cannot be used unless the server interaction is sufficiently simple, and the presentation is the driving motive.

The fact that Google now use this technology in that one simple way is really interesting. One wonders if it stems from the fact that through an accident of historical bias against Linux by Microsoft and Apple, Google were left with this as their only choice for a platform-independent way of delivering video to the world, and particularly to the sometimes vocal and influential thought leaders in the FOSS community. Or is it a more insidious plot, to ensure that Google, which is primarily in the advertising business of course, wants us all to be able to watch next years advertising, and this is a way of ensuring that we all have an appropriate advertising presentation layer installed!

I don't think that the people over at Google HQ are quite that machiavellian yet, however, and I expect the explanation really is somewhere between "we saw someone else do it and it was clearly a good idea" and "that was all that would work on the three main operating systems".

</rant>

Well hopefully that's got all of the vitriol out of me, and now I can be all relaxed and friendly for the coming week at linux.conf.au 2007. I certainly don't want to offend all the other open source geeks flocking to the best linux conference, as Google puts it.

Happy New Year!

Over the last week I've read some interesting things that I think rerally need to be nosed around a bit more, so here are my recommendations...

For anyone, anywhere

Peter Gutman's analysis of the cost of the cost of the content management features in Microsoft's Windows Vista is just the most amazing read. We will all be paying this cost for years unless we all argue with our feet.

I especially appreciate the humour in Peter's point about the modern motivations behind viruses and malware being commercially driven. Unfortunately it won't be in their interests to destroy their hosts, or else we would have an eruption of malware of mammoth proportions. Still, this new windows release represents a huge lowering of the bar for ODD/CD kids all over the world with the skill and inclination to seek infamy through the destruction of technological infrastructure.

For the people of New Zealand

If you are reading this then you are using the internet, and if you're using the internet from somewhere inside New Zealand and maybe wonder why things aren't always as fast as you might want, take some time to read and understand Neil Bertram's report on the effects of depeering in New Zealand. This is a nice thorough analysis of the issues surrounding the efficient provision of internet content in New Zealand, covering in excellent detail why the short-sightedness of depeering policies of Telecom New Zealand (including Xtra) and TelstraClear (including Clear Net & Paradise Net) is such a destructive thing for the New Zealand internet landscape.

Let me resoundingly discourage anyone from trying to get internet service from these companies. I certainly do not recommend anyone use them as their ISP, and moreover strongly recommend that content providers should follow the example provided by Radio New Zealand (see page 7 of Neil's report), in providing content at New Zealand's internet exchanges for people who use sensible ISPs and 'somewhere overseas' for the 'other' 75% of New Zealand broadband subscribers. It is only through aggressive use of policies like these that the real economic costs of depeering can be made to impact on the bottom line of companies driven by such short-term strategies.

I am pleased to say that I have personally convinced several ex-customers of Xtra and TelstraClear to include "peering with local internet exchanges" specifically as one of their primary decision-making criteria.

Hopefully readers of my earlier post will have already moved their custom elsewhere as well but the sad fact is that if you are one of the unfortunate victims of this monopoly, as so much of New Zealand is, then you really are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Even poorband users have to have a telephone line for their connection.

I would be interested to know if Vodafone peer on the regional internet exchanges - it would certainly affect whether I recommend their 'broadband' offerings to people.

For those of you who still need the feel of paper

I've just been completely blown away by Charles Stross' latest book called "Glasshouse" and have to recommend it as well.

Enjoy :-)