Let's say you're just getting started using ikiwiki as your blog, switching from something else and converting the data over from it, as more and more people seem to be. Which is great, but you don't want to flood your aggregator.

You probably set up the blog with a line like this on a page named "blog" of your wiki:

[[inline pages="blog/*" show=30]]

Problem is all the links and guids and other less than stellar things that rss agregators use to prevent dups and flooding have changed and now all 30 pages are going to flood aggregators. As of version 1.16, ikiwiki has a nice new feature that can help deal with this:

[[inline pages="blog/* and created_after(blog)" show=30]]

Now only pages created after the blog page itself will show up on it, while all the old ones will still be available as archives.

If you flooded your aggregator before this, I suppose you're forgiven. Though it was even possible to avoid flooding before this feature, with some difficulty. :-)

updo.debian.net is the new url for the upstream Planet Debian that I've been running for a while, aggregating some of the blogs of upstream software authors. Now it's a wiki so it's really easy to add new feeds to it.

Oh and BTW, if jwz's posts get on your nerves, a jwz-free version is hidden in a link at the bottom of the page. :-) And other feeds could be pieced together if you're only interested in say, the linux hackers, since posts are tagged and can be filtered by software or author.

googling the book whose title has caught my notice in the library shelf 5 feet away.

I've also noticed that if I'm in the library and want some book, I still prefer to download an e-book if I can, rather than digging up the dead-tree copy.

Libraries are still great for the serendipity factor even if you avoid touching the actual books.

(This is a long ramble with a concluding announcement that kitenet.net users should read even if they skip the rest.)

Back in spring of '03 I bought a used VA Linux 2u on ebay for $300 and dropped it a cabinet in the blue spaceship halls of the Hurricane Electic co-lo in Fremont, CA. I've never seen it again; I use it every day. Weird world.

Digression: The reason I needed to have a hunk of silicon and spinning metal hooked up to a power and an ethernet cable somewhere is this: On the internet you can either be a soverign entity, controlling your own computation, choosing your own software, making your own mistakes, and doing things your way -- or you can be a sheep. Or at least that's what I believe; reasonable people think otherwise. Here's a story illistrating this concept.

Not only do I want to be a sovereign entity on the internet, but I want to empower others to be the same, to the small extent that I can: making software that supports it easier to install; contributing to co-ops like the one that hosts my computer; working on software that empowers users to become programmers; fiddling with making special-purpose embedded hardware useful for general purpose use; and letting a few users run code and such on my server and use it much the same as I do. It's a theme through a lot of my activities.

Anyway, it seems like my computer has been there longer than three years, and it's had a good run, despite little incidents like:

• The power and reset buttons apparently getting broken somehow a few months after it was installed. No idea how, but the console monkeys tell me they don't work anymore.
• That time I tried to get grub to display to the serial console and instead made it hard lock on boot.
• At least two kernel crashes that needed a reboot.
• Someone yanking the power cord once.

Mostly though it has kept on running without problems for years, being my personal server and performing a few other roles. This seems to prove something I've long suspected; that computer hardware runs much better when I'm not near it.

But that can't last. Eventually a hard drive will die, eventually whatever fans have (probably) already died will overheat it. Eventually I'll screw up a kernel update (which still have to be done blind, since I never did get grub talking to that serial port.) One option was to go back out there and do enough maintenance for it to last another three years. The other option was to move away from running my server on that nasty computer hardware stuff.

Happily, in the intervening three years, that has become, in a way, possible. Xen and the like are big news, letting a single standard server appear as multiple separate machines. Not a new idea, but an idea newly within easy reach.

So when I heard that Steve Kemp was puttng together a Xen co-op to buy a machine and split it up 6 ways, into 6 virtual machines, I jumped at the opportunity. Not only does Steve know a lot more about administering Xen than I do, but he got a good deal for on hardware that should be fully managed in case of breakage. Plus, he's providing a template for doing this on a grassroots level that I hope many other people follow. (Only partly because I want to have more than one little virtual server other there, rather than one big physical one..)

I'm still a bit unsure about Xen from the point of view of wanting to fully control my machine, since it does a) let the admin of the underlying hardware get at any data they want to if it's not encrypted and, b) it doesn't make it easy to run your own kernel. Luckily I a) basically trust Steve, and b) he seems to want me to run the exact same kernel (latest Debian unstable stock kernel) that I want to run.

So, the conclusion to this ramble is that kitenet.net will be moving, over the next few weeks, to wren.kitenet.net, which is theoretically located in London, but which is not a "real" computer as you might be accustomed to thinking of them.

I decided against moving it all at once, and will be trying to keep all the various services working while shifting them around. The utterly gory details of the transitions are being kept on kite's page in my wiki, and announcements for kite users will be posted to kite's blog.

First significant software project to use ikiwiki for its web page (aside from my own code): ion (announcement)

Well, so it turned out not to be the Hurd after all. I'm very happy to be of service to a window manager that has been of such great utility to me. Tuomo had some pretty sharp insights about ways ikiwiki could be improved, although it took me a while to get around to doing some of them.

Tomoko sent me photos from the beach trip. It's mostly Kai, after all he was the center of attention, his first time on the island.

One photo has all four generations in it.

I've been using hnb ever since I blogged about it early last year. It has been getting on my nerves though, the UI is ok for outlining, but gets annoying for text entry, and the file format, being a nasty xml thing, is hard to keep in sync and I've sometimes lost a few entries of data. It also has a lot of open bugs, including really obvious things like support for encryption.

So today I found vimoutliner and gave it a try:

• The debian package (vim-vimoutliner, what a silly name) installs everything working without configs needed.
• Any file ending in .otl is an outline. Outlines are plain text files.
• As a vim plugin, it does a very nice job of getting out of the way when I'm editing text.
• It's really obvious how to add new items to the outline, add sub-items, move items to a different level, move stuff around, search, undo/redo, etc. Just indent with tabs, and use normal text editing for all of this.
• Since I already know how to use folds in vim, opening and closing levels was completly obvious, just use zc, zo, etc.
• Seems that the debian package needs to use double-backslash insead of double-dot as the prefix for the extended commands.
• There's all kinds of other features, more than I'll ever need. Nice to know they are there.
• Since my vim is already configured to support transparent (though perhaps not 100% safe) editing of encrypted files ending in ".gpg", it was easy to configure it to treat .otl.gpg files as transparently encrypted outlines: au! BufRead,BufNewFile *.otl.gpg setfiletype vo_base
• otl2html made it easy enough to add .otl file support into ikiwiki, and the file format allows fairly good mixing of WikiLinks and other stuff with the outline.

LWN has an article up about how RPM is forked, with no single agreed-upon upstream and lots of distros going off and patching it on their own:

Fedora currently ships version 4.4.2, and even the Fedora development repository has not gone beyond that. SUSE remains at 4.4.2, and the current RHEL offerings have rather older versions.

(And Debian's at 4.4.1+a year of patches.)

rpm is not the only peice of software that is a major component of many linux distributions but has no agreed-upon upstream maintainer, and thus effectively one fork per distro. Another such peice of software is cron.

Vixie cron was last released in '93. In many distributions it's still used, but in eg, Debian, the package is the result of 13 years of patches on top of that release. The debian version number is 3.0pl1-96. That's ninty-six versions based on 3.0pl1. The Red Hat sub-version is in the fourtys. There's no standard version anymore, just this pile of patches, and other piles of patches in other distributions. If we're lucky, they at least share the same security fixes.

Another example is makedev, which was had its last upstream release in '98 and is at patchlevel 82 in Debian. Or netcat, last released in '96, patchlevel 32 in Debian, and a fork/rewrite at netcat.sourceforge.net. Or xgalaga, whose upstream author has fallen off the net and last released it in '98. The Debian package, which I maintain, is at patchlevel 37, and seeme to be the only place a lot of people can find to send patches to. But I don't want to be its upstream maintainer.

This is the kind of thing that makes me gibber in horror when people at Ubuntu talk about Debian and other distros being part of an "ecosystem of software". I don't want to be part of an ecosystem; I'd rather be part of something that works not something that muddles through via massive trial-and-error and redundancy. Biomass is another word for "shit".

But I digress..

The most productive thing I've seen done to try to address this general problem is the Unmaintained Free Software wiki, which tries to track this software and find new maintainers. That has managed to match up some software with interested people (though it failed with xgalaga), but I think it actually works less well for big and important software that ends up forked and maintained separately by the major linux distributions.

I, myself, am beginning to use the degree of divergence from upstream as an indicator of how well a distribution maintains a given peice of software, with more divergence == bad. A distro that's doing a good job will a) get their patches integrated upstream and b) should work with other distros to find a new developer if upstream goes missing or insane. This is the inverse of what people might naively consider a good metric of how much work a distro is doing, but I think it leads to better software in the long run.

Down at the river today, I happened to run into the people who now own the old Cove Ridge store and are living where Mrs. Gamble used to live. They want to get rid of the store property since there's no way to get water or sewer there. So if anyone knows what I'm talking about and is interested for old times sake..

These folks are also apparently friends of JW's and know everyone up the holler, which led to some synapses I've not used in a while firing as I dredged up old dimly remembered names.

I found out today that someone found the small amount of information about me they needed to nearly successfully buy stuff in my name. They call this "identity theft", but since my identity still seems to be intect (pats his rampant ego) and since as an ardent SF fan, I'd like to reserve the term identity theft for the possibility of someone stealing a copy of me, I prefer not to use that term for this form of fraud.

Luckily I already had a fraud alert placed on my accounts before this happened; I started placing these alerts a while ago, on the basis that the banking system's verification methods are so broken that it makes sense to just do it pre-emptively, before you have any reason to think someone is trying to defraud you. Who knows if that does any good though.

Oddly, I almost ranted about this id theft nonsense last week, before I knew this happened. The thing is, while I'm calling to report credit cards as compromised and learning that someone managed to put together my name, address, phone number, and a not very well secured credit card number; at the same time I have something here with these properties:

1. Anyone can use it to verify if a given statement (such as "transaction

   128: please pay this person $500") was actually made by me and actually

   applies to the person I meant it to.

2. Using it doesn't automatically give it to a supposedly trusted third party, such as the low-paid phone support guy who has my credit card number and all the rest up on his screen right now as I ask him to cancel the purchase.
3. According to the experts is not breakable by any means except for a brute-force attack that would use the resources of a medium-sized country.
4. Can be used to identify me with a fair degree of certainty, even if you've not met me.
5. Is suitable for use on the internet.
6. Even if physically stolen from me is not trivially easy to break and use.
7. If I lose it or know that someone has stolen it from me, I can revoke its use in a way that is just as hard to forge or break.
8. Can, incidentially, be used to make private conversations just as hard to snoop on. But that's probably a different rant.

That magic thing is a public and private key pair for GPG, and it seems really weird to me that I can use this for unimportant things like signing email, and for crucial things like authenticating changes to the software deployed on millions of coumputers, but I cannot use it to pay a bill.

I wonder if the world at large will ever catch on to the uses of public key cryptography? Anyone want to start a First Bank of GPG?

discussion

Kite crashed. Don't know exactly why (though the kern.log has some strange and scary messages about USB controllers being halted and restarted); the friendly console monkeys got it back up without much fuss, although by that point I was restoring the latest backup and preparing to switch everything over to wren. Which would have been pretty ugly, with 12 hours of mail lost and stuff, so thank goodness that didn't happen.

I've put off finishing the move to wren for too long, but it will still wait until after my trip.

I can't resist this one.. here are the metros I've used:

From b3co.com

Not shown: San Jose light rail.

Cities I visited but missed the metro: Porto Alegre, Rio, Mexico City, Chicago, LA, Seattle

See also: visited countries and states

discussion