Entries by Adrian von Bidder

The Apple universe is happy to live with whatever Steve Jobs allows to get in. Numerous examples going back at least 20 years are available; most recent Apple's law action against a manufacturer offering compatible batteries and now an external harddisk for iPods.

Microsoft is obviously the traditional enemy for many (personally, I think there's not much difference between MS, Apple and Google anymore.) So no surprise that MS Exchange plays a role in the story about a remote wipe function of many smartphones. Just being connected to a MS Exchange server allows the administrator of that server to remotely factory-reset the smartphone. I'm not sure if there's a complete list of vulnerable smartphones, but at least iOS, webOS and Android based phones are affected. Personally, I'd say this is a serious security issue. But of course, according to the manufacturers, it is a function for the convenience of network adminstrators so they can wipe stolen phones remotely.

Update: Nico: If I'm somebody who is really after your data, I've got your smartphone and I'm clever enough not to connect it to the net before I got the data out. So you're only catching the “Oh look what I accidentally found” case, which I think is really just giving you a false sense of security.

Anonymous: Google is the company with the Do Not Be Evil company motto and the very good press and marketing team touting everywhere how much they do for the good of everybody. Except when it cuts into their earnings. Like really cooperating with the Linux kernel folks. Like living up to what they announced they'd do in China. It's also the company covertly collecting WLAN data, and only admitting to exactly as little as they can get away with when it comes into the open. And, in the end, simple greed will do the rest: it's a powerful big company with plenty of very well paid career positions, and in my experience this company tends to attract people who will use this power in any way they can to increase their income. At this level of business, a company motto like the one of Google is just a few meaningless words. The real company motto is “Earn Money. In Whatever Way.” Other examples are told by anybody who needed to interact with their so called customer support, either because they got their free account locked or because they had a specific request as a paying customer placing ads on Google (and I'm talking about a company with at least several CHF 10k per year in ads, not just a small nobody.)

Watching the Star Wars Trilogies (both old and new) has finally closed one of the major (in at least some of my collegues' view) holes in my cinematographic education. (I've seen some of the new trilogy when it came out, but not all.) Oh well ... while it's quite enjoyable to watch, it's probably at least as important to have seen them just to spot the references all over the place.

Repo Man was where I found myself — literally — laughing out loudly all by myself. And not only because of the vintage special effects (1984).

The Straight Story (Lynch) is just beautiful. Alvin Straight is your proverbial old uncle who may be a bit funny in the head but you just have to like him...

If you like mind control stories, The Manchurian Candidate is for you. Now that would be a way for Debian to achieve world domination. Worth thinking about?

Speaking of american politics, this reminds me of All the President's Men, which I've seen (and liked) a long time ago. I don't know enough about history to tell how close it is to reality, but it's at least a well made political thriller. Based On A True Story is the term usually used, isn't it?

Hello,
Just to let you know that we sent to you some possible interesting informations, but it seems it has been discarded in undesired mails.
Regards.

That was the full content of an email I got today, with my email address in both To: and From: headers. It's certainly undesired email, but I just can't see why somebody would send it out. Verifying an address list to see how many bounces? Just being silly?

I very much like that it is so easy to extend PostgreSQL in various ways, including adding server-side languages (for triggers and other stored procedures) as dynamically loadable modules. But somehow the thought that some people actually seem to use PHP as a server-side language, or consider making it possible to use JavaScript, makes me very afraid (recent discussion on the general pg mailing list.) Should PostgreSQL have a “taint” flag like the kernel?

(Admittedly JS is a side effect of also enabling Lua and Scheme, which may make more sense.)

Update 20100618: Added Debconf info.

The famous Debian Umbrellas (big picture) have finally arrived, so I'm keen to get rid of them. Order yours now!

Information about Debconf: I'm not coming to Debconf. But Luca Capello was friendly enough to offer to carry some umbrellas. Coordination via the wiki, orders need to be placed before June 27th.

A somewhat naïve young man, a kidnapping, a policeman's daughter, a night club singer, said policeman's partner being involved, a love triangle, a pervert and (probably because it's Lynch) a cut off ear. What more do you need ... ? Or, in other words, I absolutely regret not having seen Blue Velvet before.

In contrast, Pink Flamingos takes its fight over the title of the “filthiest woman alive” (which sets the whole plot in motion) a bit too literal for my taste. I like movies that leave more things up to the imagination of the spectator. Or perhaps it's just that my sense of aesthetics doesn't agree with John Water's.

(And to the person who knew nothing bettter to say than “You idiot” to my negative critique about Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: I don't delete comments on my blog that don't agree with me. But I do not tolerate personal attacks. Post it to your own blog. You're as entitled to your opinion as I am.)

Probably it's just a question of me not paying enough attention to the news... So: pointers welcome.

There are quie a few shiny new filesystems for local storage, like btrfs or HAMMER (and nilfs, Tux3, ext4, Reiser4...)

It seems the distributed storage side is covered as well, with ceph being merged recently. There are other systems (like, for example, Lustre), but they haven't appeared much in the news channels I tend to read. What I'd be curious is if any of these support hierarchical storage architectures like pushing out rarely used data to tape libraries. (But this is just idle speculation, I don't need this anywhere.)

But what I would really need is a replacement for NFS (v3): a classical client-server filesystem. I'm not sure NFSv4 is the “right” solution (where I'd use it, I currently can't because we rely too much on POSIX ACLs there, making the transition to NFSv4 quite a chore.) I think POHMELFS might be a solution in the long term, or CRFS, but I'm not sure how much progress there is on these; apt-cache search is silent, not a good sign. There's Samba 4 — I guess I'll have to look at it, since it's supposed to be much cleaner and nicer to use than its predecessors and might be a good solution even if no Microsoft systems are involved. Is this what small environments (a fileserver and 100 clients or so) will want to use? Comments are very welcome.

The joys of a new employer ... only 5min by bike to the office instead of 1h by train. And, of course, we're using Debian a lot, and I may do the odd bit of Debian work on company time. Like, right now, working with Klaus Zerwes on getting JWhoisServer uploaded. I hope more opportunities come up.

I guess having only the Japanese version of Tetsuo and not understanding anything might not have helped, but on the other hand there isn't all that much dialogue. Tetsuo is one of those movies I find difficult to judge; while it has some great moments, I also found it to be a bit long in some parts. Very good sound track, though. YMMV, I guess.

If you like the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett, you may want to have a peak at Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic, which I found quite well made (... and where I once again found that I don't have a good memory for faces, although in the end I remembered where I saw Twoflower's face just before reading the name in the closing credits ...) A bit disappointing, in contrast, was Terry Pratchett's Hogfather: to me, it proves that a movie should have some distance to the book, since what works when written down doesn't necessarily work on the screen. I quite liked Michelle Dockery as Susan, though.

Update: I'm taking orders now.

I was planning to take orders for the Debian Swirl umbrella starting tonight, but a bit of research showed that shipping prices for parcels are insane (CHF 37 for europe), but it seems I can get away with sending this as a Swiss Post “Maxi Letter” instead, which would result in a shipping price of CHF 12.50 for four and CHF 24 for up to eight umbrellas (1kg or 2kg.) So now I'll go and look into getting some kind of flattish box to stay within the allowed dimensions before I can be sure this is possible. In any case, I expect the delivery in the first week of June.

Since I'll not be coming to Debconf, it would be nice if somebody could take some umbrellas to New York. I'm currently not travelling much, so I'd have to rely on a friendly volunteer. (I'm based in Basel, Switzerland; I am known to go to Zürich regularly.)

Whew. Thank God I did download that one and not spend money on it. If you're trying to poke fun (or be satirical) at the Nazis, do it like Chaplin, or do it like Monty Python. Inglourious Basterds is just not funny and hasn't got enough substance to be satire. It's just fooling around by people with too big an ego and too much money. I'm extremely disappointed with Tarantino here; I liked his other movies and had expected quite a bit more here. I'm not surprised to see Brad Pitt in such a movie (he's not a bad actor, but I've always had the impression that he's not picky about the roles he's playing), and Uma Thurman gets bonus points for not appearing :-)

It just occurs to me that as well as completely missing the mark with the plot here, Tarantino also utterly fails at assembling a gripping soundtrack. Coincidence? If we ignore all this, the film is at least well made, and most of the actors show a good performance (I particularly “like” Christoph Waltz being the complete asshole.)

(On second thought: now, he didn't miss the mark with the plot, but with the way he's been filming it. Use the same plot but do it as a slapstick comedy, I think it could have been really funny. Use the same basic plot but take it seriously, it might have been a real thrilling war movie. Etc. So the plot is not to blame.)

The Android developers seem to feel that they have been singled out for a level of criticism which few other embedded vendors — including those demonstrating much worse community behavior — have to deal with.

This is from Jonathan Corbet's coverage of the Collaboration Summit and matches my impression. I guess what some Google folks don't necessarily see is that they work for a company that has a big sign outside that effectively says “we are not Microsoft or Apple or Sony or the RIAA/MPAA” (implied: we're the good guys.) If you put up such a sign, and then disappoint people's expectations, you got to live with the consequences. (Google's marketing was once more successful with their recent actions in China. Get lots of good press coverage, get rid of quite a few critics, and pull out of a market where you didn't make big money in any case.)

The friend who lent me his “Kottan ermittelt” DVDs gave me the 1981 movie (cinema, not TV) Den Tüchtigen gehört die Welt. I guess a warning is in order: if you liked the TV series, it's possible that you'll share my disappointment with this film. There are reports of a new movie to be made this year, and I also haven't seen the first 9 episodes of the TV series yet, so I'll probably report on Kottan again some time in the future.

I was surprised but liked the film: There's a coherent plot and even a happy end. And it's till a film by David Lynch: Wild at Heart. Also by Lynch: the very early Eraserhead. Now this is Lynch (at least for me, since I started with “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive”), and I really like the hairstyle of Henry Spencer.

Something completely different: Harold and Maude, or what happens when a bored high society youth falls in love with an 80 years old eccentric who shares his hobby of going to funerals of some random people.

Conditions for ordering: Not yet. The umbrella will be available ca. end of May, I'll give details about ordering it then. Information so far: CHF 25 per umbrella (ca. EUR 17 / USD 23), including ca. CHF 6 donation to Debian (via debian.ch); at least at first, I plan to ship in lots of 5 or more to save postage. International travellers should coordinate... (if you're close to Basel, Switzerland, you will obviously be able to get one directly as well.)

Update 2010-06-15: I got the umbrellas now, so you can order them.

The answer is probably “no way!” I like the way Jon Corbet put it (article will be free in a few weeks):

The SCO affair is kind of like a bad zombie movie; the plot is implausible, the acting is horrible, and, even though you know the good guys must win in the end, that obnoxious zombie just keeps coming back and ruining the party.

Realistically, what will happen? The judge in the Chapter 11 case has so far been quite interested in helping SCO succeed, so I guess there will be an appeal on this. The contract claims in the cases surrounding this are probably not very relevant, so I'm not sure how much press they'll get (although I'm sure Pam will continue to cover the issue — although I think the Apple vs. HTC patent cause should be the one that should be in the center of attention right now.)

And, of course, there's the Canonical vs. SPI lawsuit coming up. I find it very difficult to tell in what direction that will get decided, but I hope it won't take as long as the SCO case.