No Such Weblog

My laptop spent some of its Sunday on upgrading to Fedora Core 6, once again using the yum package manager. The upgrade was extremely uneventful, and there are few (if any) user-visible changes. For a change, suspend/resume continues to work after the upgrade.

I’m running Fedora Core on my laptop. One of the habits of that distribution is to install the kernel du jour as part of the usual upgrade process, and to let old ones stick around — including the kernel-devel packages which tend to have a lot of files with precisely the same names.After a year or two, trying to remove some old kernel-devel packages will lead to a nasty surprise: rpm needs 1G of memory. My laptop doesn’t have that.Turns out that rpm doesn’t deal particularly well with lots of files in lots of packages that have the same or almost the same name. For that reason, there’s a list of directories where rpm gets sloppy about checking for duplicates; /usr/src is among them. Unfortunately, this sloppiness leads to loss of files during upgrades. Therefore, some bright engineer decided to deactivate the sloppiness when packages are removed. The result: 1GB of virtal memory is needed to clean up the kernel-devel packages.There doesn’t seem to be a clean work-around — except possibly in the latest “forked” rpm. My way out of this mess was to download the sources for rpm, disable patch #12 (“exclude”) in the spec file, rebuild, and then run rpm using the newly-built instances of librpm and librpmdb. I got rid of the kernel-devel packages quickly, and continue to use the “usual” instance of rpm for everyday purposes.Thanks for the folks on #rpm for their help!Still, this entire story points to several instances of rather poor engineering in rpm: The duplicate handling was implemented without any regard for memory consumption or efficiency; the workaround breaks upgrades; and the workaround to the workaround breaks removal of packages again.Sometimes, I’d wish I was using a Debian-based system.

Push the Brand was quick to remix last week’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force Witch Hunt: Fifty open infernal chests with garlic, rosaries, and a crucifix had been distributed across Luxembourg city this Tuesday, deposited in front of posters showing a glamorously photographed beauty that had obviously been the victim of vampirism, with the slogan “pr駱arez-vous.” The public reaction included traffic chaos and bomb experts who were quick to realize that the coffins were quite harmless. The police collected all boxes.It’s unknown what this advertising is all about, but the campaign was clearly successful. Push the Brand has, of course, apologized.

ICANN’s At Large Advisory Committee (I was on that committee in a prior life; it’s supposed to advocate users’ interests in ICANN) seems to have opened up the mailing list that it’s suggested to use for the bulk of its work. There’s, of course, also an internal list that the public doesn’t get to see. It was probably time for this move.List Info Page.

I spent a splendidly sunny Saturday morning on Kirchberg — not just Luxembourg’s quartier Europ馥n, but also the site of a huge amount of public spending into some rather fine modern architecture: Christian de Portzamparc’s Philharmonie and IM Pei’s Mus馥 d’Art Moderne.Fortunately for me, the Philharmonie was actually open for a group of fashion photographers (or so it seemed). I did get to take some nice shots of the entrance hall before I was very politely shown the door by a security guard.At MUDAM, I wasn’t surprised to once again find the architecture more impressive than the art shown, this time, a number of works by the late Michel Majerus. Fortunately, MUDAM has an enlightened photo policy: As long as you don’t use the flash, they’ll leave you alone.My photos here; MUDAM photos on flickr.

The petitioner requests that Bristol City Council rejects calls from Conservative Cllr Spud Murphy to remove the Banksy painting on Park Street at significant expense, and instead keeps it as a popular and amusing asset to the city for so long as Bristol residents continue to support it.

The art in question.

I flew back from San Jose through Minneapolis and Amsterdam this week, on NWA. Luxembourg being one of the few airports around the globe that still haven’t decently implemented e-Tickets, I was traveling on my usual paper ticket for the entire trip.I knew that Northwest has replaced staff at smaller outstations with minimum wage workers. But the experience in San Jose was mind-boggling: The first employee at check-in obviously hadn’t ever seen a paper ticket before, and tried to coerce my passport into the e-ticket check-in machine (which first failed because she mechanically mis-handled the thing). When I insisted that I had a paper ticket and showed her the coupons, she mis-took them for boarding passes. “No. I need a boarding pass. This is not a boarding pass. This is a paper ticket flight coupon.” Employee number two at least found the right menu on the check-in computer’s screen; he then proceeded to get confused as to whether he needed to check for a visum to let me travel to the European Union. “I’m a German citizen who lives in Luxembourg. I’m in the US under the US visa waiver program for a short-term business trip. I don’t need a visum to travel back from the US to my country of residence.” That was apparently information he was unable to extract from my passport and his system. The next question was then whether the passport’s expiration date was 11 February or 2 November. (The date format used on German passports actually can be inferred from my birthday, but once again that was too much for this agent.) When the confusion was over, he didn’t even know how to properly staple together a boarding pass and a paper ticket.As the icing on the cake in San Jose, I got the dreaded “SSSS” on my boarding pass (although I’m a top-tier frequent flyer with a close partner of NWA); funny enough, the TSA agents in San Jose couldn’t be bothered and waved me through considerably more efficiently than a lot of other security droids that I have had fun with recently.Once in Minneapolis, things were mostly done competently — though agents there almost forgot to take the green visa waiver stub out of my passport. Hadn’t I thought of it myself, I might have faced not-so-funny interactions next time at US immigrations.The morale of the story is that, in times of cost-savings and automation in the travel business, you’re increasingly lost if you don’t know yourself how things are handled.

Courtesy of Google News:

I’m in Cambridge Massachusetts for a bit more than a week, attending a bunch of meetings. Occasionally on these trips, there are moments when you encounter an element of a different culture that you just don’t get. This time, it’s the apparent preference of US folks for plastic cutlery, plates, etc.Strangeness 1, from this European’s pespective: The breakfast buffet at the Residence Inn actually offers both the throw-away plastic stuff, and the real china and metalware variant. Strangeness 2: Many of the US guests actually chose the plastic stuff. Why on earth?

At 23C3, Larry Lessig is speaking on “free, the difference between code and culture”. His main point: Different communities need to articulate different freedoms and restrictions in licenses. What the GPL uses as a defense against free riding for code (sharing alike) might not be enough for photos or music or text. The non-commercial restriction that CC licenses are able to express is one tool that might serve as such a defense. Lessig also notes the importance of communities respecting other communities’ needs in terms of licenses, instead of imposing their terms and notions on others. Doing otherwise would be “imperialism,” says Lessig.Barlow, from the floor: Civil disobedience will be important to break the current copyright system. Teenage geeks win the technical side of the war, and recording industry will lose battle for their hearts and minds.Lessig: Don’t doubt technical community’s ability to crack DRM, but doubt their ability to deal with the politics that are created. Don’t lose the opportunity to convince people why we are right. MGM vs. Grokster got thought about as “should people be allowed to steal,” and was lost. If there’s a perception that community doesn’t take on the political side of the argument, but just wants free stuff, then it’ll continue to lose.