2006-03-01: Writing day
Today was my work from home day and it turned into proposal writing day. I
had three major writeups that had been hanging over my head, and I managed
to finish them all (although it took me until after 7pm after starting at
10:30 this morning, so nothing else got done).
Only the first is public. I finally wrote up the details of how we use
revision control systems (ETA: link is now dead), for both CVS
and Subversion. Most of the CVS details are copied from an old guide I
wrote a while back, but now everything is in one place. There are even
more details I could put together, but this is a good starting point.
Still on my plate is converting the Debian package build documentation to a
web page and writing up how we handle our locally developed packages (the
prerequisite for which is putting my release tool up on my pages), but
that's somewhat of a lower priority.
The other two were internal proposals, one around how we handle functional
accounts, and a second about how we should use LDAP to do fine-grained
account management on our client Unix systems.
So, no reviews written today (although I will mention in passing that
Parable of the Sower is a damn good book), and no more Debian or
Kerberos work. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to tackle tomorrow. It's
probably time for me to do more serious coding, but on the other hand
fixing the WebAuth web pages finally is rather attractive.
2006-03-02: WebAuth pages
I finally had a chance to look at the old WebAuth pages in some detail
(originally written for WebAuth v2), and I think that, with the
weblogin help page, we can
actually retire the old pages entirely and just replace them with the
new pages. That will get rid of a point of old confusion and then I can
grab the webauth.stanford.edu virtual host for the new pages.
I also did a lot of cleanup of the pages, removed some old irrelevant
entries, and pointed to the new Mailman lists and archives.
Assuming that my proposal is approved, I'll probably move the pages
tomorrow or early next week and then expand the FAQ a bit more for some of
the more recent questions. I already have a few changes queued for WebAuth
3.4.3, although I need to do a fair bit of work on the weblogin script to
handle the (now more complex) SPNEGO requirements.
2006-03-03: WebAuth web pages
Today was spent improving the WebAuth web pages rather than getting
anything else done (although I did poke at the gnubg problems on hppa and
m68k enough to track down the problem and the necessary bits to fix it are
now in progress).
Anyway, the WebAuth pages now have an additional FAQ entry about the
segfault problems that people run into most, a bit more cleanup, a
long new page on the major features and a comparison to other web
authentication systems, and less old cruft. They'll probably become the
main WebAuth pages shortly, retiring the old v2 cruft.
Not much else done. Still behind in e-mail, still behind on some other
projects, and still behind on writing reviews, but not critically so in any
department. I also got a few new books tonight. What I'm doing this
weekend is still up in the air; I figure I'll just play it by ear.
2006-03-04: Debian day
Today ended up being a day for working on Debian packages.
A new upload of gnubg is now sitting in Incoming. It disables Guile on
AMD64 in the hope of getting rid of the segfault. It's not really what I
want to do, but it seems to be the best option. I also got it to build
against the current libart and submitted the bug against ftp.debian.org to
remove gnubg-bearoffs, so soon hopefully it will be error-free and ready to
go into testing.
I also figured out that the ftgl build failure on m68k appears related to
the buildd and not the package, so that was good.
Then I started working on libpam-krb5 bugs and found out that its segfault
is actually due to a bug in libkrb53. That's been fixed and submitted to
the upstream RT. In tracking that down, I ended up building a separate
debugging package for the Kerberos libraries, and I think I'm going to make
that a standard part of the build if Sam agrees.
Of course, then, in testing the debugging package build, I ran into the
long-standing lintian bug that causes it to error out on debugging data
packages. So I went ahead and fixed that and proposed a patch; hopefully
someone will get a chance to look that patch over soon so that I can commit
it.
And then I started doing other lintian work rather than going back to
working on libpam-krb5. *heh*. That's always how it goes. But I got a
lot done.
I'm having some concentration problems right now (too easily distracted),
so I'm letting things flow as they come to me and not worrying too much
about prioritizing things right now. Whatever I feel like I can get
momentum on, I'm doing. So I'm not catching up in any sort of organized
fashion, but I am feeling more productive.
2006-03-05: kstart 3.2
Turns out that in adding the -g feature (which didn't end up working since
MIT Kerberos won't use ticket caches not owned by the running user), we
accidentally introduced a bug that caused k5start and krenew to not run
aklog even if desired. I went ahead and released kstart 3.2, reverting
that feature and fixing the bug.
I still need to rework the code so that I can reuse more code between the
three programs and provide a simple source file that we can copy into our
suexec implementation when the time comes, but I don't feel like doing that
today.
You can get the latest version from the
kstart distribution
page.
2006-03-06: Small haul
I haven't made one of these posts in a while. I've been very restrained
about my book purchases. But I did place a small Powell's order and the
out of the blue someone sent me a gift for help with WebAuth, which was
really unexpected and nice.
Candas Jane Dorsey -- Black Wine (sff)
Thomas A. Limoncelli -- Time Management for System
Administrators (non-fiction)
Alan Moore, Kevin O'Neill, et al. -- The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen (graphic novel)
Robert M. Pirsig -- Lila (non-fiction)
Justina Robson -- Natural History (sff)
The time management book is excellent so far. The real test will be how
many useful practices I get from it over time, but it's a fantastic read
regardless. Recommended.
In other news, Geoff Ryman won the Tiptree Award for Air, an honor
that it thoroughly deserves.
Currently reading: Time Management for System Administrators by
Thomas A. Limoncelli, Beauty by Sherri S. Tepper, and Salt: A
World History by Mark Kurlansky.
2006-03-07: Roundup
Much of today was spent thinking that VMware was breaking something about
AFS system calls, trying to figure out why and how, wasting other people's
time to help, staring at KTH Kerberos code, being confused by the Linux
kernel defining the system call number for AFS, and then discovering that
all of the problems were because AFS is now case-sensitive about cell names
and a config file had the cell name in uppercase.
The less said about that, the better.
The rest of the day was spent installing
Roundup on my personal workstation
as a ticket tracking system so that I can get various bugs in software
packages I maintain out of my e-mail and into something more structured.
This was incredibly successful. I haven't bothered setting up an e-mail
interface yet, but the web interface rocks, and that's rare for me to say.
It's also wonderfully customizable, although fiddling with the HTML is a
touch tedious. But following the instructions, I added a new field and
made it searchable, and that worked as expected.
Now I need to fill it, of course, and then possibly work out some other
methods of accessing the data, but so far, so good. Next week, we're going
to install an instance for the use of my whole team at work, which will be
a bit more of a stress test.
2006-03-08: Schedule thoughts
rone asked how the Time Management for System Administrators book
was. I've finished it and hence need to write a fully review, but this is
a partial answer, plus a few things that I've been thinking about.
The short answer is that it was good enough, or came at the right time, to
get me to start trying the techniques that it talks about. I've been
looking for a better system of keeping track of what I need to do for quite
a while, without a lot of success, but also without spending a lot of time
looking at the major time management systems out there. All of them felt
too large and complex and complicated from an outside look and ended up
scaring me off.
This book has a simple system that he introduces in phases and makes it
pretty easy to pick up bits of it. The core idea is that one has a daily
to-do list, one spends time each morning prioritizing the list, doing time
estimates, and pushing back to other days lower-priority tasks that don't
fit into the day. Then, at the end of the day, anything that's not done
gets moved to some other day. It's pretty simple, but just breaking up my
to-do list over a bunch of days and being able to write something down that
I want to do and give it a realistic time frame has been surprisingly
effective so far.
I've only been trying this for three days, though. I'm going to try it for
three weeks and then evaluate how well it's working for me. Unless I use
it for three weeks whether it feels like it's working or not, I won't be
giving it enough of a chance to build new habits.
A few other things I've noticed:
Pushing things you haven't finished back to the next day has a tendency to
create this bulldozer effect where each day's to-do list gets longer and
longer. I think I can see a few ways of dealing with that, but it will
require some attention.
The biggest win I've gotten so far is reapplying an old change that I tried
a long time back and didn't make stick. There is important e-mail and not
important e-mail. Important e-mail, like work mailing lists, I do need to
read all day. Unimportant e-mail, like technical mailing lists I follow,
does not need to be read all day. I am obsessive about reading unread
mail, which means that if I have all of my Gnus topics open during the day,
I spend a lot of time checking for new mail and reading the small handful
of messages that have come in. I've gone back to closing all topics except
the important ones and reading that mail in batch, once per day, in the
evening. This works much better.
One of the reasons why I couldn't stick to that before is that I'd finish
something, be at a loss for what to do next, and start reading just a
little mail while I thought. Of course, a little would turn into a lot.
Having a concrete to-do list for the day makes it far more likely that I'll
just start the next task. I don't have to think about what to do next; I
have it written down.
Also, new matra to keep repeating to myself: Usenet is a social hobby. I
have no obligation to read Usenet messages. If I'm not enjoying
participating in a Usenet thread, I should simply stop. It doesn't matter
what other people think of my opinions on Usenet; nothing I'm talking about
there is important enough to get into an argument, or continue an argument,
about it. If someone on Usenet persistantly pisses me off, I should
killfile them and never look back. There are too many interesting, fun
people in the world to waste my time on assholes who may or may not stop
being assholes if I talk to them long enough. I do not need to read other
people's technical opinions on Usenet; I have a multitude of other, far
higher-quality, far higher-signal sources to get technical information. As
soon as it stops being fun, stop, cut my losses, and move on. The
same applies to all social mailing lists. (For whatever reason, I don't
have this problem on LJ.)
That's the quick snapshot. Tomorrow, I have a good-sized pile of work to
go through, and now it's time to walk and then read. More book reviews
hopefully coming soon; I'm building up a backlog.
2006-03-09: WebAuth musings
So far, so good with time management. I think I've gotten more done in the
past four days than I normally get done in two weeks. It's kind of scary,
really. There is a bit of a bulldozer effect happening, where my to-do
list gets longer and longer because I'm pushing things back to the next
day, but I'm starting to think that was just an initial effect. There were
so many things on my plate that needed dealing with, and when I jumpstarted
the to-do list, I wrote them all down at once.
Tomorrow, the list will start smaller than it started today (although not
by that much). Most notably, though, it's short a few major, long-duration
items. We'll see if it straightens up over time.
The last task of this afternoon was writing up a more thorough
specification for the WebAuth weblogin script. That got me thinking about
the future of WebAuth, particularly since Cosign is looking nicer and
nicer. I keep thinking maybe we should switch, but on the other hand we
have such a strong investment in WebAuth. So, I instead started thinking
about how I could implement Cosign's site-wide logout feature.
WebAuth supports arbitrary authentication types and arbitrary tokens. This
means that I could add a Cosign-style authenticator that's just a session
ID for a ticket cache stored on the weblogin server and hand out
corresponding id and proxy tokens. When the application server gets an id
token of this sort, it could know it has to ping the central server for
each request to verify the user is still logged in. It can also use such
IDs as proxy tokens when appropriate.
The hard part, of course, is the state maintenance. That's where the
Cosign folks have put a lot of work into this. The daemons on the weblogin
servers need to communicate state information to each other and deal with
crashes, network partitions, and similar problems robustly.
If I implemented this sort of scheme, I think it almost has to be a big
switch on the WebKDC to either use one style or the other. Although...
you can use a Cosign-style single sign-on authenticator and still use
WebAuth-style application authenticators if you want to, since the WebKDC
has access to the ticket cache and can cobble up whatever it needs. That's
rather interesting. Although to support site-wide logout, you may want to
force use of central ticket caches as site-wide policy.
Anyway, I think this is actually doable, and except for all the state
maintenance and replication on the WebKDC, not actually that much work.
It's a long-term thing, but if we can also get funding to do real Windows
WebAuth, that eliminates much of the reason to switch to Cosign.
Writing the Windows WebAuth proposal is a task for either tomorrow or early
next week, I think.
2006-03-10: Time management thoughts
So, one week in to trying a new system. How's it going?
The real answer is: too soon to tell. I got more done this week than I
would normally get done in two or three weeks, which is rather nice. At
least some of this is probably due to being more organized. However, I'm
also in the middle of a productivity streak anyway and it's not yet clear
that time management will help manage my mood cycle, much of that gain was
from doing something I already knew would work (not reading unimportant
e-mail during the day), and I cut back on both writing and reviewing time
and need to bring that back into balance. So I saw substantial
improvements, but I'm not comparing apples to apples yet.
However, time management certainly isn't hurting. Laying out each morning
what I'm going to do that day is incredibly helpful, as is having an
effective prioritization system. Forcing myself to put time estimates on
everything has been very helpful in spotting where my estimates are off.
(I generally overestimate any task involving interacting with other people,
and underestimate any coding task.) And I do feel more under control of my
schedule by being able to push things days into the future and know they'll
turn up again.
I'm going to use the inexpensive $20 planner I picked up for the first 21
days of this while I'm doing habit building and evaluating whether it's
going to work, but I can already see that if I stay with this system, I'm
going to end up springing the $110 for a real DayTimer sooner or later.
I'm thinking about holding off until July when the next set of pages start
out of a completely dumb desire to avoid waste, but I may not. Something
that lays flat is nice, using the planner for information other than just
the daily schedules would be nice, I do need the calendar pages I think,
and I want something that's self-contained enough to have a place for a pen
(or pencil -- I'm still undecided on writing instrument).
I'm about to test one hoped-for feature of this system, namely that I'm
intentionally not scheduling weekends and pushing all work-related tasks
back into the next week. I think that if I stay with this system, I'm
going to be more intense during the week, even if I rebalance so that I can
go back to writing earlier in the evening. I'm not going to be reading
unimportant e-mail during the day, so I'm always going to have that
catch-up at night, which will cut into other things. I'm also probably
going to be a bit more tired at night, since I'm working more efficiently
during the day. So, all of that means that I want my weekends to be even
more free than they have been, not taken up by all the stuff that I felt
like I couldn't get done during the week. We'll see how that works.
All in all, though, so far, so good. I don't think I could have hoped for
anything better at this early stage. The real test is in going a few
months with it, though; one week really isn't enough to tell, and I've
dropped more things than I can count after only doing them for a week or
two.
2006-03-11: lintian joy
Taxes are done, paper mail has been sorted through, some additional e-mail
has been cleaned out, and a new gnubg package has been uploaded that should
fix the segfault on AMD64 and be a good candidate for migration to testing.
The rest of the day was spent working on lintian, which is becoming more
and more fun the more I get the hang of it. I don't know what the linda
people were complaining about; I find lintian quite easy to work on. One
does have to use a very wide editor window, since the code lines aren't
wrapped, but I've gotten used to it.
It's rather fun just going through the bug log and checking and applying
old patches or fixing old problems. 17 bugs are now fixed in Subversion
and waiting for the next upload, many of which were false positives and
similar annoying problems. Most, but not all, of those commits were mine.
What I was going to do today was look at installing new blog
software, but I decided the prospect was too intimidating to deal with
right now. I'm guessing that converting my Movable Type databases is going
to be a pain in the ass, since I used BerkeleyDB instead of MySQL for the
backend. Maybe I can push them all into MySQL using something internal to
Movable Type and then convert. I'm still torn between Serendipity and
WordPress for the next blog package. Serendipity looks rather nice.
I think I'm going to worry about this some other time, though.
2006-03-13: Project ramp-up
Things are definitely starting to intensify at work. Currently I'm working
on a new WebAuth release with enhanced SPNEGO (in general, Apache
REMOTE_USER) support. Since I was in the code anyway, I'm going to clean
up the documentation and some of the code for the weblogin scripts and
really document the template parameters, which means that I think this next
release is going to be 3.5.0 since template parameter names are going to
change.
The target release date for something for internal testing is Wednesday. I
hope to get a public release out Friday (and really should send out an
announcement about the new web site and mailing lists before that -- and
now I've written that down, so I'll remember to do it).
Then, I have a few weeks while that's being tested, during which I need to
work on remctl and during which we'll be finalizing the work that we want
to contract out for the Kerberos migration. Then, starting at the
beginning of April, I expect both the Kerberos development and our new web
developer to start at the same time, which means I'll be completely
swamped with that work.
I'm starting to think that May may be better for my trip to Canada than
April, just because it's becoming less and less clear whether I can get
away in April at all. Rather a lot is going to be going on.
I'm hopeful but nervous about this Kerberos upgrade. Having it done is
going to be fantastic, but there are a lot of steps still and a lot that
can go wrong. But that's the reason why we're getting detailed migration
plans and upgrade documentation before we start, and I think after I have
all of that in my hands, this will look much better. And ideally we can
provide a good enough test environment that the contractors can do some
testing of the plan.
Then, after all that's done and I have a chance to catch my breath, more
parts of the Kerberos project continue. Plus, I get to do a major upgrade
of Stanford's Usenet servers and a significant rework of our account
creation infrastructure.
Life is definitely not going to be boring.
2006-03-17: lbcd 3.2.4
This is only a documentation change. We ran into a situation where we had
a system that not only had multiple interfaces but whose multiple
interfaces were participating in different load-balance pools. lbcd when
listening to all interfaces (the default) responds on whatever interface
the kernel decides is best for reaching a given remote host, but since
lbnamed uses the source address to map incoming packets to hosts that it
had queried, this meant that one of the interfaces always showed down.
I was going to modify lbcd to always respond on the same interface that the
query came from, but it turns out that this is insanely difficult to do.
Either you have to use deep magic in recvmsg (and somewhat non-portable
deep magic as well), or you have to listen on each interface separately
(and thus use deep magic to get a list of interfaces).
So I gave up and just documented the situation and the workaround of
running multiple copies of lbcd with the -b flag.
You can get the latest version with the documentation update from the
lbcd distribution page.
There's lots of wonderful information on the web, but when it comes to a
specific question about Unix network programming, there's still no
substitute for Stevens.
2006-03-17: Journal lameness
Well, I've certainly not been doing well at writing journal entries lately.
I've been hard at work on, well, work, and in the evening, I've been
reading technical mailing lists and then going off to read books. This
means that both reviews and journal entries haven't been written (which
means that I'm also badly behind on writing book reviews). On the other
hand, quite a bit of other things have gotten done.
I think the bulldozer effect of my new time management system (yes, still
sticking with it) is getting better. Admittedly, that's partly because I
actually worked far too much this week and need to cut back on how much I'm
tackling each day, and I also am still underestimating the amount of time
things take. However, I'm now only pushing five items (four hours of
estimated work) back to next week, whereas last week I pushed twenty items
on to this week (and over eleven hours of work). I've now pushed more of
my long-term to-do list into the group Roundup tracker; I only have one
other stash of to-do items to sort through and then push into the work
tracker and my personal tracker. So slowly this system is helping me get
on top of all the things I'm supposed to be doing.
The little planner I bought when I was first getting started with this is
holding up surprisingly well, although it doesn't have a calendar. I
really do need to re-read the time management book, though, and pay close
attention to some of the things I skimmed over the first time.
On the technical side, the internal testing pre-release of WebAuth went out
on Wednesday as planned, despite seven hours of meetings that day (most of
which was one five-hour once-per-year meeting). I didn't get the public
release out today, as you might have noticed, but I have hopes for getting
it out on Monday. I also got a bit of remctl development work done this
week, which was a very nice feeling.
Enough for this week. The weekend is completely unscheduled beyond a vague
intention to get back to INN, and will probably involve quite a bit of
watching basketball and a new baby social visit. Now, it's off to read for
a bit before I fall asleep.
Currently reading: Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.
2006-03-18: Beauty
Review: Beauty, by Sheri S. Tepper
Publisher: Bantam
Copyright: 1991
ISBN: 0-553-29527-6
Pages: 463
Beauty is the daughter of a noble, a father with a wonderful estate but
little in the way of attention for his daughter. This is just part of
life, however, and she's not too unhappy with it. Her mother is dead or
gone, and no one will talk about her except negatively. She was raised
largely by an array of herb-named aunts and the local priest, and has heard
the rumors and whispers about being cursed long before she knew that being
cursed was something bad. There is something bright and burning in her
chest, but it has little impact on her life. Until, that is, she discovers
a letter from her mother: her mother was from Faery, returned to Faery, and
she was cursed by a fairy godmother to prick her finger and fall into an
enchanted sleep.
Tepper starts by setting up a classic retelling of the Sleeping Beauty
myth, with an engaging first-person style in the form of Beauty's journal
entries, but there are over 400 pages here and Sleeping Beauty is not a
particularly complex story. Indeed, the eponymous hero escapes her
sleeping fate through a well-handled ambiguity and Beauty quickly
wanders far afield, turning into a grab bag of fractured fairy tales,
stories of Faery, good versus evil polemic, time-travel, and futuristic
dystopia. Some of these stories are engrossing and excellent, some are
frustrating and shallow, and some are little but thinly veiled excuses for
Tepper to rant. Taken as a whole, they form a novel that is deeply flawed
but still worth reading.
The fractured fairy tales are the best part of the book. Apart from the
Sleeping Beauty motif that forms the stage for the story, there are
retellings of Cinderella and Snow White, a frog prince, and a passing
mention of Rapunzel, plus doubtless many other allusions that went past me
unnoticed. Beauty brings a practical empathy to the stories and a wry
amusement when she recognizes them along with the reader (having learned
them during her time in the twentieth century). Tepper adds a nice layer
of reality while still preserving the details of the stories. This isn't
minutely realistic historical fiction, but Tepper does a good job of
putting stories into a 14th century context, adding some complexity to the
supporting characters, and coming up with amusing explanations for minor
details. The best is the treatment of Snow White, featuring a collection
of Basque dwarf miners and an unspeakably beautiful Snow White with
slightly less brains than the average cabbage.
Less successful is the time travel dystopian plot. Immediately after the
opening sequence, Beauty is taken to a future where the world is covered
with high-density apartments, the environment has been destroyed by
relentless population pressure, and people are fed with tasteless processed
algae. This scene, the subsequent escape to the twentieth century, and the
events that follow are mostly an excuse for Tepper to rant about the evils
of pro-life fanatics, religion, population growth, horror, slasher movies,
and porn, using a dystopian scenario that feels like it escaped from the
1960s or 1970s. It's not particularly realistic, even in the areas where I
probably agree with Tepper politically, and it leaves a bad aftertaste of
heartfelt but unoriginally simplistic political obsessions. The
eye-rolling induced by sweeping proclamations about porn leading to rape
and snuff films interferes somewhat with reading the novel.
This vision of a catastrophic future thankfully fades into a background
motivation for Beauty and the book is better for it. Time travel is
otherwise used as an excuse to let Beauty write with the same assumptions
as the reader, providing a more sympathetic (but less unique) narrator for
the rest of the book, and to tie the main thesis of the story to the
history of Faery.
Faery is the other major subplot of the book. Beauty spends time there,
trying to get to know her mother and come to terms with that side of her
heritage. Tepper throws in a retelling of the story of Thomas the Rhymer
(inferior, though, to
Ellen
Kushner's excellent treatment) and does a good job with Faery fading from
a land of beauty to a land of illusion. This is one of the better bits of
subtlety in the novel; the parallels between Faery's determined ability to
ignore real ugliness and cover it in glamor and the long decline of beauty
in the world are thought-provoking. It's a shame that so many of the Faery
are stupid and a little silly, which makes it difficult for the Faery war
subplot to gather much emotional momentum.
It's hard to find at times under the sprawl of plotlines, but if
Beauty could be said to be about one thing, it is the decline and
fading of the concept of beauty. Beauty herself is, through her "curse," a
guardian of sorts of the concept of beauty, which Tepper approaches from a
pastoral, romantic perspective and links to the beauty of the environment,
simple love, imaginative stories, and a Heaven-like abstract rightness.
Against beauty stands the Dark One, Satan in essence, who creates a hell
full of pornographers and horror movie producers (Tepper really is a little
obsessed) and who attempts to capture and destroy Beauty through the story.
It's all very black and white, even featuring whispered references to the
Holy One, and while this fits Beauty's starting 14th century Christian
mindset, I prefer more shades of grey in the moral conflict of novels I
read. Faery could have provided that, as sympathetic but disobedient
former allies of the Holy One who now pay a tiend to Hell, but they end up
as mostly superficial dupes.
As a novel, Beauty is all over the place, and I think it suffers
from attempting too much at once. Tepper's grasp of her themes is uneven
and I doubt all of the book will be to anyone's liking. I wish Tepper had
stuck to the after-the-fact loquacious journal style of the excellent
opening chapters (the journal headings remain, but the style shifts more
and more to real-time first-person as the story goes along), had trimmed
much of the polemic, and had dropped one or two major themes. It's not
that the book is plodding or long, but the numerous threads only vaguely
cohere into a unified story. Still, Beauty herself is a compelling
character and held my interest through the entire story. I was afraid that
the outraged good versus evil dualism was going to drown the ending of the
book, but right at the end Tepper returns to the fractured fairy tale style
that she does best and salvages a satisfying ending.
I'm not sure I'd recommend this one, but I didn't regret reading it.
Rating: 6 out of 10
2006-03-19: Wonderful catch up
I love a weekend devoted to cleaning things up, organizing things, getting
things off my to-do list or out of places where they're nagging at me, and
coming away feeling far more organized.
Using Roundup to store long-term issues is going to work quite well. I'm
still just laying the groundwork for organization rather than doing very
much, but I can feel already that I'm going to be far more organized about
accomplishing things. All of the old gateway bugs have been sorted out and
are now in my local Roundup instance. All the work stuff is in the work
tracker (which is even better, since that means other people can pick
things out of it to work on). I have fewer groups in Gnus with ticked
articles than I have in years, and I still have some low-hanging fruit that
I can clean up tomorrow.
And, as a bonus, I sorted through the pending INN stuff and built another
test release of INN 2.4.3. Tomorrow I put that on headwall and make it
available for general testing, and if nothing major turns up, I'm going to
release it on Tuesday or Wednesday. It's been long enough.
Only one review written this weeked, and after walking tonight I'll have
three pending. I think this coming week is going to be the week when I
start figuring out how to quit a bit earlier and leave more time in the
evening for doing other non-work things, since I'm certainly working more
than 40 hours a week for Stanford right now.
2006-03-20: WebAuth 3.5.0
This is the product of the past couple of weeks of work. Originally, the
SPNEGO support was an all or nothing thing; now, all the user interface
changes and page flow work has been done to also allow it to work in a
voluntary mode, where the user can decide whether or not to try SPNEGO.
While I was at it, I also drastically improved the documentation of
weblogin and its configuration options.
Not a lot of changes to the other parts of the system, but I did make
WebAuthExtraRedirect the default since we run that way everywhere around
here and it works fine. I also allowed the module to accept it as a server
config option as well as in a directory block.
You can get the latest release from the WebAuth pages.
2006-03-22: INN 2.4.3
INN 2.4.3 has finally been released. This is a long-overdue bug fix
release (overdue by about a year) confirming that yes, we're still working
on INN. I'm really glad to have finally kicked this out the door
(yesterday, actually), and attribute that to using a time management
system.
You can get the latest version from the
ISC FTP site.
Now, the next trick will be to find time on an ongoing basis to work on the
next version. That's going to be a lot harder, as I have a lot of
different projects going on at the same time right now and not a great deal
of time. However, I do have vacation coming up week after next, which
might be a good time to get started.
2006-03-23: Unicode
I finally got around to looking at a contribution I received a while back
to merge the misc-fonts Unicode characters into the 10x20 Neep font I use
as an X screen font. Nice. I'm going to install it on my desktop system
for testing, and that eliminates the reason why I hadn't switched
everything over to Unicode yet. So tomorrow, I switch locales finally to
en_US.UTF-8 (although still with LC_COLLATE set to C, since the en_US
collation is not at all what I want), change my fonts for everything,
change my less configuration to default to UTF-8, and start being able to
look at Debian changelog files in less without seeing them mangled.
I've been meaning to do this for eons. It's really nice to have finally
gotten around to doing it.
Other than that, very busy, still not writing many reviews, but getting
lots of things done. I've finally dug through the huge backlog of to-do
entries that I had when I started with this new time management system, and
I now only have a couple of things already written in for tomorrow. That
means I can move into phase two and start pulling things out of my trackers
to do each morning, but probably not until I've finished cleaning out all
of my e-mail folders.
2006-03-24: Building RPMs
So is it just me or did no one ever bother to write actual documentation
for building RPMs, and in particular, for the spec file?
I got a really nice contributed spec file for kstart (based on the spec
file for Nagios plugins apparently). It used lots of macros and RPM
variables and I thought "gee, that's rather neat, nice to provide
automation like that." It still didn't hold a candle to the Debian
packaging tools, but hey.
So today, I go to integrate a co-worker's spec file for remctl into the new
package I'm working on, and I noticed that it didn't use most of those nice
macros. Huh. So off I went to learn more about what all those macros and
variables meant and did.
Er, well, not so much. It's possible that my Google-fu has simply failed
me, but as near as I can tell, there is no actual manual for RPM
building anywhere. There's a HOWTO (at several locations), which mentions
about 10% of these macros and variables. There's a book, Maximum
RPM, which is available on-line (nice) and essentially worthless (not so
nice). I suppose it's okay if you've never done this before, but again it
doesn't document any of the stuff that people actually use and didn't
answer any of my questions. All the links to it point out that it's
horribly out of date, which inspires a great deal of confidence. Oh, and
there's www.rpm.org, which is, I dunno,
adequate I guess if RPM were some average free software project maintained
by people who know nothing about effectively organizing web sites, but
which doesn't help you find anything. At least if, like me, you're
looking for detailed information about the spec format.
Or, to sum this all up, what the fuck? Millions of people actually use
this shit? By preference?
I've got to be missing some awesome killer documentation resource or
something, since this would otherwise just be silly. I knew that
Debian Policy was a killer
advantage for Debian, but I thought that was just in all the areas that it
specified the use of metadata and the rules it creates for packages to
follow that Debian packages actually follow. I didn't think that the sheer
existence of documentation about basic tools was also a major advantage.
Yeesh.
So, I have a remctl spec generated via 100% pure unadulterated cargo-cult
poking with a stick. It builds on a RHEL 4 system. If I had some
documentation of spec file formats, I'd have some idea if it built on any
of the other myriad of RPM-based systems that I don't personally have
access to. As is, not a clue. Maybe I used some Red-Hat-specific feature
somewhere. Who could tell?
PS: Dear RPM developers, your man pages suck. Please (a) learn how to
write nroff or (b) teach your tools how to write nroff that doesn't look
like crap. Little known fact: man pages do not actually have to be full of
extraneous and pointless blank lines, nor do they have to be full of badly
wrapped command examples. While you're at it, you may want to actually add
useful content, like, say, anything whatsoever of use about your programs
besides their command-line options.
Oh, and don't get me started on how rpmbuild requires that you run it as
root and let it spew all over system directories and the documented and
preferred way around that is to download a bunch of random local
configuration files from someone's personal web site that you can copy into
your home directory. 'cause, you know, what kind of weird person would not
want to build RPM packages as root?
The mind, it boggles.
2006-03-31: bundle 2.29
It's been a long time since I released a new version of this.
Hua provided a patch to specify a directory for bundle to cd into before
applying a bundle. This looks like an odd feature to want, but we
frequently want to apply a bundle as an action in remctl and pull the files
from an AFS directory that's access-restricted. We run bundle under
kstart, but we can't cd until after kstart obtains the right tokens. This
feature avoids having to have kstart start sh -c or writing another shell
script wrapper around the bundle.
You can get the latest version from the
bundle distribution
page.
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