Today my manager and I announced my upcoming departure from Mozilla. I’ve only worked there a short while, so this feels really abrupt to me, as I’m sure it does to the many Mozillians that I work with every day. Because ultimately the details of my departure and the various decisions leading up to it are private, and I don’t want to say anything that might be misconstrued or misinterpreted, I won’t get into that sort of thing here.

I’m not much of an electronics guy. If I was exposed to it as a kid, I might have gotten into it, but there wasn’t much going on back in those days. Certainly not in central Maine, anyway. By the time I was really exposed to it in college, much of my curiosity and excitement for such things had been crushed, so I avoided the opportunity to learn when I could have.

Did you know that the cloud team generates daily images for buster, bullseye, and sid? They’re available for download from cdimage.debian.org and are published to Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. This is done both to exercise our image generation infrastructure, and also to facilitate testing of the actual images and distribution in general. I’ve often found it convenient to have easy access to a clean, up-to-date, disposable virtual machine, and you might too.

When buster was first released back in early July of last year, the cloud team was in the process of setting up some new accounts with AWS to be used for AMI publication. For various reasons, the accounts we used for pre-buster releases were considered unsuitable for use long term, and the buster release was considered to be a good logical point to make the switch. Unfortunately, issues within the bureaucracy of both SPI/Debian and AWS delayed the complete switch to the new accounts.

Following up on a previous post announcing the availability of a first round of AWS AMIs for stretch, I’m happy to announce the availability of a second round of images. These images address all the feedback we’ve received about the first round. The notable changes include: Don’t install a local MTA. Don’t install busybox. Ensure that /etc/machine-id is recreated at launch. Fix the security.debian.org sources.list entry. Enable Enhanced Networking and ENA support.

At this past November’s Debian cloud sprint, we classified our image users into three broad buckets in order to help guide our discussions and ensure that we were covering the common use cases. Our users fit generally into one of the following groups: People who directly launch our image and treat it like a classic VPS. These users most likely will be logging into their instances via ssh and configuring it interactively, though they may also install and use a configuration management system at some point.

Following up on Steve McIntyre’s writeup of the Debian Cloud Sprint that took place in Seattle this past November, I’m pleased to announce the availability of preliminary Debian stretch AMIs for Amazon EC2. Pre-generated images are available in all public AWS regions, or you can use FAI with the fai-cloud-images configuration tree to generate your own images. The pre-generated AMIs were created on 25 January, shortly after Linux 4.9 entered stretch, and their details follow:

Infusing an old bike with new life I bought this early/mid 1990’s Bianchi Brava from my officemate at MIT in 2005 or 2006. For some time before I bought it, it had been sitting unused in our office and had fallen in to disrepair. When I bought it, I promptly converted it to a singlespeed with the help of Tyler from Paramount Bicycle Repair in Somerville. I rode in that configuration for a couple years, then bought bull-horn bars, scrapped the brakes, and converted it to a fixed-gear, which I rode for another couple of years.

A couple of points that I wish to ponder in depth some more. Figure I’ll make a record of them now. Both thoughts need further research… Term limits for representatives/senators. Polls indicate that most Americans support this. However, I’m not so sure. People leaving congress to pursue lobbying jobs are a major part of the problem. As Lessig claims, public service is almost considered a “minor league” for lobbyists. Term limits would not help this situation, and might make it far worse.

It’s been a little too long since I kept the Debian Choqok packages as up to date as I’d like. This has lead to some issues, since bug #591100 really should have been fixed in time for squeeze. Then, when upstream stopped pushing their svn changes to gitorious and moved their actual development to kde.org’s local git hosting, all my branches got screwed up, leading to further delays. I think this is fully resolved at this point.

Did you know that the cloud team generates daily images for buster, bullseye, and sid? They’re available for download from cdimage.debian.org and are published to Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. This is done both to exercise our image generation infrastructure, and also to facilitate testing of the actual images and distribution in general. I’ve often found it convenient to have easy access to a clean, up-to-date, disposable virtual machine, and you might too.

When buster was first released back in early July of last year, the cloud team was in the process of setting up some new accounts with AWS to be used for AMI publication. For various reasons, the accounts we used for pre-buster releases were considered unsuitable for use long term, and the buster release was considered to be a good logical point to make the switch. Unfortunately, issues within the bureaucracy of both SPI/Debian and AWS delayed the complete switch to the new accounts.

Following up on a previous post announcing the availability of a first round of AWS AMIs for stretch, I’m happy to announce the availability of a second round of images. These images address all the feedback we’ve received about the first round. The notable changes include: Don’t install a local MTA. Don’t install busybox. Ensure that /etc/machine-id is recreated at launch. Fix the security.debian.org sources.list entry. Enable Enhanced Networking and ENA support.

At this past November’s Debian cloud sprint, we classified our image users into three broad buckets in order to help guide our discussions and ensure that we were covering the common use cases. Our users fit generally into one of the following groups: People who directly launch our image and treat it like a classic VPS. These users most likely will be logging into their instances via ssh and configuring it interactively, though they may also install and use a configuration management system at some point.

Following up on Steve McIntyre’s writeup of the Debian Cloud Sprint that took place in Seattle this past November, I’m pleased to announce the availability of preliminary Debian stretch AMIs for Amazon EC2. Pre-generated images are available in all public AWS regions, or you can use FAI with the fai-cloud-images configuration tree to generate your own images. The pre-generated AMIs were created on 25 January, shortly after Linux 4.9 entered stretch, and their details follow:

A coworker asked recently about how people use VMs locally for dev work, so I figured I’d take a few minutes to write up a bit about what I do. There are many use cases for local virtual machines in software development and testing. They’re self-contained, meaning you can make a mess of them without impacting your day-to-day computing environment. They can run different distributions, kernels, and even entirely different operating systems from the one you use regularly.

Have you ever wondered what a security probe of a computer sounded like? I’d guess probably not, because on the face of it that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But there was a time when I could very clearly discern the sound of a computer being scanned. It sounded like a small mechanical heart beat: Click-click… click-click… click-click… Prior to 2010, I had a computer under my desk with what at the time were not unheard-of properties: Its storage was based on a stack of spinning metal platters (a now-antiquated device known as a “hard drive”), and it had a publicly routable IPv4 address with an unfiltered connection to the Internet.

Join Microsoft to celebrate Debian 8 at LinuxFest Northwest

minas.morgul.net is the hub of much of my digital life. It also provides services for quite a few friends, ranging from backup DNS to mailing lists and IRC. It lives in a datacenter 3000 miles away from where I live, with conditioned power, climate control, etc. It’s got redundant power supplies, RAID disks, remote console, and most of the other stuff you’d expect from a machine that’s supposed to be up and running non-stop.

Join Microsoft to celebrate Debian 8 at LinuxFest Northwest

Linux Fest Northwest has been going on for 14 years. For most of those years, I’ve lived in the wrong timezone for it to be worth attending. A couple weeks ago somebody posted to a Seattle area Linux forum asking if anybody else was going to this year’s edition, taking place on the last weekend in April. My memory was jarred, and my excitement kindled. I used to make it to conferences with some regularity, but it’s been several years.

A couple of points that I wish to ponder in depth some more. Figure I’ll make a record of them now. Both thoughts need further research… Term limits for representatives/senators. Polls indicate that most Americans support this. However, I’m not so sure. People leaving congress to pursue lobbying jobs are a major part of the problem. As Lessig claims, public service is almost considered a “minor league” for lobbyists. Term limits would not help this situation, and might make it far worse.

Today is the first time I’ve taken an interstate train trip in something like 15 years. A few things about the trip were pleasantly surprising. Most of these will come as no surprise: Less time wasted in security theater at the station prior to departure. On-time departure More comfortable seats than a plane or bus. Quiet. Permissive free wifi Wifi was the biggest surprise. Not that it existed, since we’re living in the future and wifi is expected everywhere.

A coworker asked recently about how people use VMs locally for dev work, so I figured I’d take a few minutes to write up a bit about what I do. There are many use cases for local virtual machines in software development and testing. They’re self-contained, meaning you can make a mess of them without impacting your day-to-day computing environment. They can run different distributions, kernels, and even entirely different operating systems from the one you use regularly.

Have you ever wondered what a security probe of a computer sounded like? I’d guess probably not, because on the face of it that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But there was a time when I could very clearly discern the sound of a computer being scanned. It sounded like a small mechanical heart beat: Click-click… click-click… click-click… Prior to 2010, I had a computer under my desk with what at the time were not unheard-of properties: Its storage was based on a stack of spinning metal platters (a now-antiquated device known as a “hard drive”), and it had a publicly routable IPv4 address with an unfiltered connection to the Internet.

In another of my frequent late-night bouts with insomnia, I started thinking about the intersection of a number of different issues facing Debian today, both from a user point of view and a developer point of view. Debian has a reputation for shipping “stale” software. Versions in the stable branch are often significantly behind the latest development upstream. Debian’s policy here has been that this is fine, our goal is to ship something stable, not something bleeding edge.

Am I missing something obvious? When did this get so hard? In the old days, you configured your desktop session on a Linux system by editing the .xsession file in your home directory. The display manager (login screen) would invoke the system-wide xsession script, which would either defer to your personal .xsession script or set up a standard desktop environment. You could put whatever you want in the .xsession script, and it would be executed.

Did you know that the cloud team generates daily images for buster, bullseye, and sid? They’re available for download from cdimage.debian.org and are published to Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. This is done both to exercise our image generation infrastructure, and also to facilitate testing of the actual images and distribution in general. I’ve often found it convenient to have easy access to a clean, up-to-date, disposable virtual machine, and you might too.

When buster was first released back in early July of last year, the cloud team was in the process of setting up some new accounts with AWS to be used for AMI publication. For various reasons, the accounts we used for pre-buster releases were considered unsuitable for use long term, and the buster release was considered to be a good logical point to make the switch. Unfortunately, issues within the bureaucracy of both SPI/Debian and AWS delayed the complete switch to the new accounts.

I’m trying to use this to capture some of my thoughts on the current GR, and to document my approach to this vote. If nothing else, I hope to use this to convince myself that I’ve read and understood the various options in the GR. From my perspective, two of the choices on this ballot are easy to deal with, in that they have very clear meaning and the ramifications are easy to understand.

Further Discussion builds concensus within Debian! Further Discussion gets things done! Further Discussion welcomes diverse perspectives in Debian! We’ll grow the community with Further Discussion! Further Discussion has been with Debian from the very beginning! Don’t you think it’s time we gave Further Discussion its due, after all the things Further Discussion has accomplished for the project? Somewhat more seriously, have we really exhausted the community of people interested in serving as Debian Project Leader?

When reviewing pull requests on GitHub, it’s often useful to have local access to the changes under review. There are a few different documented ways to accomplish this, but none have left me entirely satisfied. So, I came up with something different. Maybe it’ll work for you. The existing methods are: You can add a new git remote referencing the source of the PR, then fetch it and check out the branch containing the proposed changes.

Lwn, Slashdot, and many others have marked the recent announcement of Linux Journal’s demise. I’ll take this opportunity to share some of my thoughts, and to thank the publication and its many contributors for their work over the years. I think it’s probably hard for younger people to imagine what the Linux world was like 20 years ago. Today, it’s really not an exaggeration to say that the Internet as we know it wouldn’t exist at all without Linux.

Following up on a previous post announcing the availability of a first round of AWS AMIs for stretch, I’m happy to announce the availability of a second round of images. These images address all the feedback we’ve received about the first round. The notable changes include: Don’t install a local MTA. Don’t install busybox. Ensure that /etc/machine-id is recreated at launch. Fix the security.debian.org sources.list entry. Enable Enhanced Networking and ENA support.

At this past November’s Debian cloud sprint, we classified our image users into three broad buckets in order to help guide our discussions and ensure that we were covering the common use cases. Our users fit generally into one of the following groups: People who directly launch our image and treat it like a classic VPS. These users most likely will be logging into their instances via ssh and configuring it interactively, though they may also install and use a configuration management system at some point.

Following up on Steve McIntyre’s writeup of the Debian Cloud Sprint that took place in Seattle this past November, I’m pleased to announce the availability of preliminary Debian stretch AMIs for Amazon EC2. Pre-generated images are available in all public AWS regions, or you can use FAI with the fai-cloud-images configuration tree to generate your own images. The pre-generated AMIs were created on 25 January, shortly after Linux 4.9 entered stretch, and their details follow:

Join Microsoft to celebrate Debian 8 at LinuxFest Northwest

I’ve run OpenWRT on my home router for a long time, and these days I maintain a couple of packages for the project. In order to make most efficient use of the hardware resources on my router, I run a custom build of the OpenWRT firmware with some default features removed and others added. For example, I install bind and ipsec-tools, while I disable the web UI in order to save space.

If you’re running Spamassassin on Debian or Ubuntu, have you enabled automatic rule updates? If not, why not? If possible, you should enable this feature. It should be as simple as setting "CRON=1" in /etc/default/spamassassin. If you choose not to enable this feature, I’d really like to hear why. In particular, I’m thinking about changing the default behavior of the Spamassassin packages such that automatic rule updates are enabled, and I’d like to know if (and why) anybody opposes this.

Today is the first time I’ve taken an interstate train trip in something like 15 years. A few things about the trip were pleasantly surprising. Most of these will come as no surprise: Less time wasted in security theater at the station prior to departure. On-time departure More comfortable seats than a plane or bus. Quiet. Permissive free wifi Wifi was the biggest surprise. Not that it existed, since we’re living in the future and wifi is expected everywhere.

I’ve aborted several attempts recently to get something of interest posted. For whatever reason, none of that stuck. So here’s something with fewer expectation attached to it: A collection of random updates. Debian packaging Spamassassin The Spamassassin project released version 3.4.0, a major update over the 3.3.2 branch, after nearly two-and-a-half years in development. 3.4.0-1 is currently in unstable and testing, and seems to be working reasonably well for me.

“Netiquette” is an ancient term, dating back to the earliest days on the internet. These days, one might argue that it’s no longer relevant, or that there are so many different definitions that it’s been rendered meaningless. However, one particular aspect of it endures: “Don’t feed the trolls!” A recent thread on the debian-security mailing list provided an amazingly effective demonstration of the effectiveness of this approach. A certain pseudonymous individual made multiple posts in this thread that exhibited classic troll behavior (no meaningful contribution to the discussion, inflamatory comments, etc).

It’s been a little too long since I kept the Debian Choqok packages as up to date as I’d like. This has lead to some issues, since bug #591100 really should have been fixed in time for squeeze. Then, when upstream stopped pushing their svn changes to gitorious and moved their actual development to kde.org’s local git hosting, all my branches got screwed up, leading to further delays. I think this is fully resolved at this point.

A coworker asked recently about how people use VMs locally for dev work, so I figured I’d take a few minutes to write up a bit about what I do. There are many use cases for local virtual machines in software development and testing. They’re self-contained, meaning you can make a mess of them without impacting your day-to-day computing environment. They can run different distributions, kernels, and even entirely different operating systems from the one you use regularly.

Ok, so importing the existing posts from posterous worked smoothly. That’s nice. I’ve signed up for a disqus account and enabled comments. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t like generating “footprints” across a bunch of third-party sites as I navigate the web, and I take steps in my browser to avoid doing so. So requiring readers of my blog (all 3 of them) to download from a third-party in order to see my blog, let alone actually comment on it, seems really hypocritical.

I’ve run OpenWRT on my home router for a long time, and these days I maintain a couple of packages for the project. In order to make most efficient use of the hardware resources on my router, I run a custom build of the OpenWRT firmware with some default features removed and others added. For example, I install bind and ipsec-tools, while I disable the web UI in order to save space.

When reviewing pull requests on GitHub, it’s often useful to have local access to the changes under review. There are a few different documented ways to accomplish this, but none have left me entirely satisfied. So, I came up with something different. Maybe it’ll work for you. The existing methods are: You can add a new git remote referencing the source of the PR, then fetch it and check out the branch containing the proposed changes.

Am I missing something obvious? When did this get so hard? In the old days, you configured your desktop session on a Linux system by editing the .xsession file in your home directory. The display manager (login screen) would invoke the system-wide xsession script, which would either defer to your personal .xsession script or set up a standard desktop environment. You could put whatever you want in the .xsession script, and it would be executed.

I’m not much of an electronics guy. If I was exposed to it as a kid, I might have gotten into it, but there wasn’t much going on back in those days. Certainly not in central Maine, anyway. By the time I was really exposed to it in college, much of my curiosity and excitement for such things had been crushed, so I avoided the opportunity to learn when I could have.

I’m not much of an electronics guy. If I was exposed to it as a kid, I might have gotten into it, but there wasn’t much going on back in those days. Certainly not in central Maine, anyway. By the time I was really exposed to it in college, much of my curiosity and excitement for such things had been crushed, so I avoided the opportunity to learn when I could have.

“Netiquette” is an ancient term, dating back to the earliest days on the internet. These days, one might argue that it’s no longer relevant, or that there are so many different definitions that it’s been rendered meaningless. However, one particular aspect of it endures: “Don’t feed the trolls!” A recent thread on the debian-security mailing list provided an amazingly effective demonstration of the effectiveness of this approach. A certain pseudonymous individual made multiple posts in this thread that exhibited classic troll behavior (no meaningful contribution to the discussion, inflamatory comments, etc).

The Internet changed yesterday. Did you notice? If not, we did it right. Mozilla was one of hundreds of participants in World IPv6 Day, both “the largest experiment in Internet history” and “the nerdiest holiday ever”. Mozilla added IPv6 connectivity to the following sites: www.mozilla.org www.mozilla.com wiki.mozilla.org addons.mozilla.org In addition, we’ve been running IPv6 on our desktops, laptops, and other devices in our Mountain View, CA office for several months.

Somewhere along the lines recently, I took an interest in JavaScript programming. I wrote some bad JS code way way back in 1999 while working for a small, long gone ISP, but had spent very little time in it since. When I last wrote JS, there was no XHR, JSON, FireBug, JQuery, prototype.js, etc. Netscape was pushing some new “layers” thing that was supposed to be the basis of their DHTML implementation, and Microsoft was doing something completely different.

Join Microsoft to celebrate Debian 8 at LinuxFest Northwest

Linux Fest Northwest has been going on for 14 years. For most of those years, I’ve lived in the wrong timezone for it to be worth attending. A couple weeks ago somebody posted to a Seattle area Linux forum asking if anybody else was going to this year’s edition, taking place on the last weekend in April. My memory was jarred, and my excitement kindled. I used to make it to conferences with some regularity, but it’s been several years.

The Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle has been putting on a winter light display for years. In the past it’s been known as Wild Lights, but this year they rebranded it as Wildlanterns and gave it a major refresh. If you’re near Seattle and able to check it out, I highly recommend going. I went the other night with my family and took a number of pictures, which you can see in the photo album.

Infusing an old bike with new life I bought this early/mid 1990’s Bianchi Brava from my officemate at MIT in 2005 or 2006. For some time before I bought it, it had been sitting unused in our office and had fallen in to disrepair. When I bought it, I promptly converted it to a singlespeed with the help of Tyler from Paramount Bicycle Repair in Somerville. I rode in that configuration for a couple years, then bought bull-horn bars, scrapped the brakes, and converted it to a fixed-gear, which I rode for another couple of years.

I’ve aborted several attempts recently to get something of interest posted. For whatever reason, none of that stuck. So here’s something with fewer expectation attached to it: A collection of random updates. Debian packaging Spamassassin The Spamassassin project released version 3.4.0, a major update over the 3.3.2 branch, after nearly two-and-a-half years in development. 3.4.0-1 is currently in unstable and testing, and seems to be working reasonably well for me.

It’s amazing to ponder the fact that, when I look at any photograph taken over almost the past century, my grandfather existed somewhere on Earth in that same sliver of time. In any of the famous pictures from the Great Depression, the second World War, the Atomic Age of the 1950’s American Dream, and the Space Age of the 1960’s, Stuart Meyerhans was somewhere when that photo was taken, doing something, being someone.

Join Microsoft to celebrate Debian 8 at LinuxFest Northwest

Linux Fest Northwest has been going on for 14 years. For most of those years, I’ve lived in the wrong timezone for it to be worth attending. A couple weeks ago somebody posted to a Seattle area Linux forum asking if anybody else was going to this year’s edition, taking place on the last weekend in April. My memory was jarred, and my excitement kindled. I used to make it to conferences with some regularity, but it’s been several years.

minas.morgul.net is the hub of much of my digital life. It also provides services for quite a few friends, ranging from backup DNS to mailing lists and IRC. It lives in a datacenter 3000 miles away from where I live, with conditioned power, climate control, etc. It’s got redundant power supplies, RAID disks, remote console, and most of the other stuff you’d expect from a machine that’s supposed to be up and running non-stop.

Lwn, Slashdot, and many others have marked the recent announcement of Linux Journal’s demise. I’ll take this opportunity to share some of my thoughts, and to thank the publication and its many contributors for their work over the years. I think it’s probably hard for younger people to imagine what the Linux world was like 20 years ago. Today, it’s really not an exaggeration to say that the Internet as we know it wouldn’t exist at all without Linux.

Ok, so importing the existing posts from posterous worked smoothly. That’s nice. I’ve signed up for a disqus account and enabled comments. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t like generating “footprints” across a bunch of third-party sites as I navigate the web, and I take steps in my browser to avoid doing so. So requiring readers of my blog (all 3 of them) to download from a third-party in order to see my blog, let alone actually comment on it, seems really hypocritical.

Today my manager and I announced my upcoming departure from Mozilla. I’ve only worked there a short while, so this feels really abrupt to me, as I’m sure it does to the many Mozillians that I work with every day. Because ultimately the details of my departure and the various decisions leading up to it are private, and I don’t want to say anything that might be misconstrued or misinterpreted, I won’t get into that sort of thing here.

The Internet changed yesterday. Did you notice? If not, we did it right. Mozilla was one of hundreds of participants in World IPv6 Day, both “the largest experiment in Internet history” and “the nerdiest holiday ever”. Mozilla added IPv6 connectivity to the following sites: www.mozilla.org www.mozilla.com wiki.mozilla.org addons.mozilla.org In addition, we’ve been running IPv6 on our desktops, laptops, and other devices in our Mountain View, CA office for several months.

I announced to my manager a couple of weeks ago that I’d be leaving Yahoo! on March 3. Yesterday I informed the rest of my team. The final decision to leave has been surprisingly difficult, and still has me feeling very unsettled. I came to Yahoo! just over a year ago, after almost 10 years at my previous job. Leaving after such a short time is strange, especially since there is a whole lot of stuff left for me to learn and do.

This post could easily have been titled “Why did this hurt so much?” or even simply, “What happened!?” It’s nice to come away from a race having learned something. Unfortunately, the lessons aren’t always pleasant. The best way I can phrase the lesson from this year’s Bavarian Bike & Brew race is like this If you want to find out whether your training is working, stop doing it for a year and see what happens.

A couple of notable things stand out from last weekend’s race. It was a super fast course and the weather was beautiful. It had rained the day/night before, so there was no dust and the traction felt infinite. (unlike a couple years ago, where a rider 20 feet in front of you would literally vanish in a dust cloud) I didn’t take any time to warm up before the race, and it starts with a mile of climbing right out of the gate.

A whole mess of stuff has changed since the Beezley Burn race. Mostly this involved training and bike fit stuff. I had a new saddle and freshly dialed geometry, and this was also the first race in which I rode with Time’s ATAC pedals. I was interested to see how things would go. This is also the race I’ve done the most in my time in Washington, so there’s a lot of data to compare it with.

Rode hard out of the starting gate and put a lot of hurt into my competitors (not to mention my own legs!). The first 2 km were on a wide open straight fire road with a headwind. Didn’t really want to be leading the charge into the wind, but I didn’t want to be following anybody else’s pace either. Shortly before we entered the singletrack, I let Peter Super and Steven Moe pass, and the three of us remained together for most of the first lap.

Ok, so importing the existing posts from posterous worked smoothly. That’s nice. I’ve signed up for a disqus account and enabled comments. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t like generating “footprints” across a bunch of third-party sites as I navigate the web, and I take steps in my browser to avoid doing so. So requiring readers of my blog (all 3 of them) to download from a third-party in order to see my blog, let alone actually comment on it, seems really hypocritical.

Day one with Octopress was fairly productive. Or at least, I didn’t punt. There are a couple of things I’ve yet to figure out. Most glaringly is comments. I don’t really want to rely on disqus or another third party for comments, but that appears to be the accepted way of implementing commenting on Octopress blogs. And I need to start coming up with my own layout/skin.

Since posterous is shutting down, I need to work out some new blogging platform. Le sigh This is a first attempt at using Octopress and Jekyll. The philosophy of the tools seems to mesh with my expectations, so it’s a promising start.

I’ve run OpenWRT on my home router for a long time, and these days I maintain a couple of packages for the project. In order to make most efficient use of the hardware resources on my router, I run a custom build of the OpenWRT firmware with some default features removed and others added. For example, I install bind and ipsec-tools, while I disable the web UI in order to save space.

I’ve aborted several attempts recently to get something of interest posted. For whatever reason, none of that stuck. So here’s something with fewer expectation attached to it: A collection of random updates. Debian packaging Spamassassin The Spamassassin project released version 3.4.0, a major update over the 3.3.2 branch, after nearly two-and-a-half years in development. 3.4.0-1 is currently in unstable and testing, and seems to be working reasonably well for me.

Today my manager and I announced my upcoming departure from Mozilla. I’ve only worked there a short while, so this feels really abrupt to me, as I’m sure it does to the many Mozillians that I work with every day. Because ultimately the details of my departure and the various decisions leading up to it are private, and I don’t want to say anything that might be misconstrued or misinterpreted, I won’t get into that sort of thing here.

A couple of points that I wish to ponder in depth some more. Figure I’ll make a record of them now. Both thoughts need further research… Term limits for representatives/senators. Polls indicate that most Americans support this. However, I’m not so sure. People leaving congress to pursue lobbying jobs are a major part of the problem. As Lessig claims, public service is almost considered a “minor league” for lobbyists. Term limits would not help this situation, and might make it far worse.

minas.morgul.net is the hub of much of my digital life. It also provides services for quite a few friends, ranging from backup DNS to mailing lists and IRC. It lives in a datacenter 3000 miles away from where I live, with conditioned power, climate control, etc. It’s got redundant power supplies, RAID disks, remote console, and most of the other stuff you’d expect from a machine that’s supposed to be up and running non-stop.

I'm writing as a constituent to inquire about your position regarding H.R. 3261, the "Stop Online Piracy Act", and to encourage you to vigorously oppose this bill when it reaches the House floor. The Act has numerous problems and poses a major threat to the continued health of the Internet as a medium for open communication. The Act introduces technical and financial burdens that effectively impact every site that provides a mechanism for the publishing of user-generated content, while also eliminating judicial oversight.

Today my manager and I announced my upcoming departure from Mozilla. I’ve only worked there a short while, so this feels really abrupt to me, as I’m sure it does to the many Mozillians that I work with every day. Because ultimately the details of my departure and the various decisions leading up to it are private, and I don’t want to say anything that might be misconstrued or misinterpreted, I won’t get into that sort of thing here.

The Internet changed yesterday. Did you notice? If not, we did it right. Mozilla was one of hundreds of participants in World IPv6 Day, both “the largest experiment in Internet history” and “the nerdiest holiday ever”. Mozilla added IPv6 connectivity to the following sites: www.mozilla.org www.mozilla.com wiki.mozilla.org addons.mozilla.org In addition, we’ve been running IPv6 on our desktops, laptops, and other devices in our Mountain View, CA office for several months.

Somewhere along the lines recently, I took an interest in JavaScript programming. I wrote some bad JS code way way back in 1999 while working for a small, long gone ISP, but had spent very little time in it since. When I last wrote JS, there was no XHR, JSON, FireBug, JQuery, prototype.js, etc. Netscape was pushing some new “layers” thing that was supposed to be the basis of their DHTML implementation, and Microsoft was doing something completely different.

I announced to my manager a couple of weeks ago that I’d be leaving Yahoo! on March 3. Yesterday I informed the rest of my team. The final decision to leave has been surprisingly difficult, and still has me feeling very unsettled. I came to Yahoo! just over a year ago, after almost 10 years at my previous job. Leaving after such a short time is strange, especially since there is a whole lot of stuff left for me to learn and do.

It’s been a little too long since I kept the Debian Choqok packages as up to date as I’d like. This has lead to some issues, since bug #591100 really should have been fixed in time for squeeze. Then, when upstream stopped pushing their svn changes to gitorious and moved their actual development to kde.org’s local git hosting, all my branches got screwed up, leading to further delays. I think this is fully resolved at this point.

It’s amazing to ponder the fact that, when I look at any photograph taken over almost the past century, my grandfather existed somewhere on Earth in that same sliver of time. In any of the famous pictures from the Great Depression, the second World War, the Atomic Age of the 1950’s American Dream, and the Space Age of the 1960’s, Stuart Meyerhans was somewhere when that photo was taken, doing something, being someone.

When reviewing pull requests on GitHub, it’s often useful to have local access to the changes under review. There are a few different documented ways to accomplish this, but none have left me entirely satisfied. So, I came up with something different. Maybe it’ll work for you. The existing methods are: You can add a new git remote referencing the source of the PR, then fetch it and check out the branch containing the proposed changes.

I’m not much of an electronics guy. If I was exposed to it as a kid, I might have gotten into it, but there wasn’t much going on back in those days. Certainly not in central Maine, anyway. By the time I was really exposed to it in college, much of my curiosity and excitement for such things had been crushed, so I avoided the opportunity to learn when I could have.

Somewhere along the lines recently, I took an interest in JavaScript programming. I wrote some bad JS code way way back in 1999 while working for a small, long gone ISP, but had spent very little time in it since. When I last wrote JS, there was no XHR, JSON, FireBug, JQuery, prototype.js, etc. Netscape was pushing some new “layers” thing that was supposed to be the basis of their DHTML implementation, and Microsoft was doing something completely different.

This post could easily have been titled “Why did this hurt so much?” or even simply, “What happened!?” It’s nice to come away from a race having learned something. Unfortunately, the lessons aren’t always pleasant. The best way I can phrase the lesson from this year’s Bavarian Bike & Brew race is like this If you want to find out whether your training is working, stop doing it for a year and see what happens.

A couple of notable things stand out from last weekend’s race. It was a super fast course and the weather was beautiful. It had rained the day/night before, so there was no dust and the traction felt infinite. (unlike a couple years ago, where a rider 20 feet in front of you would literally vanish in a dust cloud) I didn’t take any time to warm up before the race, and it starts with a mile of climbing right out of the gate.

A whole mess of stuff has changed since the Beezley Burn race. Mostly this involved training and bike fit stuff. I had a new saddle and freshly dialed geometry, and this was also the first race in which I rode with Time’s ATAC pedals. I was interested to see how things would go. This is also the race I’ve done the most in my time in Washington, so there’s a lot of data to compare it with.

Rode hard out of the starting gate and put a lot of hurt into my competitors (not to mention my own legs!). The first 2 km were on a wide open straight fire road with a headwind. Didn’t really want to be leading the charge into the wind, but I didn’t want to be following anybody else’s pace either. Shortly before we entered the singletrack, I let Peter Super and Steven Moe pass, and the three of us remained together for most of the first lap.

This post could easily have been titled “Why did this hurt so much?” or even simply, “What happened!?” It’s nice to come away from a race having learned something. Unfortunately, the lessons aren’t always pleasant. The best way I can phrase the lesson from this year’s Bavarian Bike & Brew race is like this If you want to find out whether your training is working, stop doing it for a year and see what happens.

A couple of notable things stand out from last weekend’s race. It was a super fast course and the weather was beautiful. It had rained the day/night before, so there was no dust and the traction felt infinite. (unlike a couple years ago, where a rider 20 feet in front of you would literally vanish in a dust cloud) I didn’t take any time to warm up before the race, and it starts with a mile of climbing right out of the gate.

A whole mess of stuff has changed since the Beezley Burn race. Mostly this involved training and bike fit stuff. I had a new saddle and freshly dialed geometry, and this was also the first race in which I rode with Time’s ATAC pedals. I was interested to see how things would go. This is also the race I’ve done the most in my time in Washington, so there’s a lot of data to compare it with.

Rode hard out of the starting gate and put a lot of hurt into my competitors (not to mention my own legs!). The first 2 km were on a wide open straight fire road with a headwind. Didn’t really want to be leading the charge into the wind, but I didn’t want to be following anybody else’s pace either. Shortly before we entered the singletrack, I let Peter Super and Steven Moe pass, and the three of us remained together for most of the first lap.

I’m not much of an electronics guy. If I was exposed to it as a kid, I might have gotten into it, but there wasn’t much going on back in those days. Certainly not in central Maine, anyway. By the time I was really exposed to it in college, much of my curiosity and excitement for such things had been crushed, so I avoided the opportunity to learn when I could have.

The Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle has been putting on a winter light display for years. In the past it’s been known as Wild Lights, but this year they rebranded it as Wildlanterns and gave it a major refresh. If you’re near Seattle and able to check it out, I highly recommend going. I went the other night with my family and took a number of pictures, which you can see in the photo album.

Today my manager and I announced my upcoming departure from Mozilla. I’ve only worked there a short while, so this feels really abrupt to me, as I’m sure it does to the many Mozillians that I work with every day. Because ultimately the details of my departure and the various decisions leading up to it are private, and I don’t want to say anything that might be misconstrued or misinterpreted, I won’t get into that sort of thing here.

Have you ever wondered what a security probe of a computer sounded like? I’d guess probably not, because on the face of it that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But there was a time when I could very clearly discern the sound of a computer being scanned. It sounded like a small mechanical heart beat: Click-click… click-click… click-click… Prior to 2010, I had a computer under my desk with what at the time were not unheard-of properties: Its storage was based on a stack of spinning metal platters (a now-antiquated device known as a “hard drive”), and it had a publicly routable IPv4 address with an unfiltered connection to the Internet.

I'm writing as a constituent to inquire about your position regarding H.R. 3261, the "Stop Online Piracy Act", and to encourage you to vigorously oppose this bill when it reaches the House floor. The Act has numerous problems and poses a major threat to the continued health of the Internet as a medium for open communication. The Act introduces technical and financial burdens that effectively impact every site that provides a mechanism for the publishing of user-generated content, while also eliminating judicial oversight.

If you’re running Spamassassin on Debian or Ubuntu, have you enabled automatic rule updates? If not, why not? If possible, you should enable this feature. It should be as simple as setting "CRON=1" in /etc/default/spamassassin. If you choose not to enable this feature, I’d really like to hear why. In particular, I’m thinking about changing the default behavior of the Spamassassin packages such that automatic rule updates are enabled, and I’d like to know if (and why) anybody opposes this.

minas.morgul.net is the hub of much of my digital life. It also provides services for quite a few friends, ranging from backup DNS to mailing lists and IRC. It lives in a datacenter 3000 miles away from where I live, with conditioned power, climate control, etc. It’s got redundant power supplies, RAID disks, remote console, and most of the other stuff you’d expect from a machine that’s supposed to be up and running non-stop.

The Internet changed yesterday. Did you notice? If not, we did it right. Mozilla was one of hundreds of participants in World IPv6 Day, both “the largest experiment in Internet history” and “the nerdiest holiday ever”. Mozilla added IPv6 connectivity to the following sites: www.mozilla.org www.mozilla.com wiki.mozilla.org addons.mozilla.org In addition, we’ve been running IPv6 on our desktops, laptops, and other devices in our Mountain View, CA office for several months.

I announced to my manager a couple of weeks ago that I’d be leaving Yahoo! on March 3. Yesterday I informed the rest of my team. The final decision to leave has been surprisingly difficult, and still has me feeling very unsettled. I came to Yahoo! just over a year ago, after almost 10 years at my previous job. Leaving after such a short time is strange, especially since there is a whole lot of stuff left for me to learn and do.