2006

Fancy blog has been silent for the last half year so I thought it would be nice to compensate that by doing a small summary of the exciting year 2006, here you go (click the pictures for larger versions):

Alice
The year started out in January with Hanna's sister Heidi giving birth to the most adorable girl Alice, for whom Hanna and I are god-parents. We have spent lots of time with Alice during the year, she's into music and video games judging from how fun she has throwing them around ;-)

Master thesis and graduation
I spent the first half of 2006 writing my master thesis and presented it in June. The thesis got published (download as pdf) and I got my Master of Science in Computer Science and Engineering. The short and concise title is Describing Live programming using program transformations and a callstack explicit interpreter.

Motorolan
As soon as I had presented my thesis I started working at Motorola, and have been for almost half a year now. I had high expectations of which most (and some more!) have been fulfilled, having the opportunity to work with very talented people and exciting technology and products. I recently travelled to our office in San Diego, California and experienced their terrible and dreadful december weather (see for yourself in the picture)! Alan, thanks for the hospitality and hope to see you soon in Sweden!

Midsummer in Rimforsa
Our friends Sofie and Daniel hosted the traditional midsummer party in their newly built house. Many of our friends moved away from Linköping during the year, mostly to Stockholm. The bad part is obviously that we get to see them less frequently (a consequence is that I get to play less snooker since two of my best snooker mates moved out) but the upside is that they moved because of employment so good for you guys! (But do move back soon will you!)

Moving a house and more (almost)
My parents and younger brother moved away from the house outside Motala (thirty minutes from here by car) where I grew up to Tidaholm (west from here and a good two hour drive). Moving the house, or rather the contents inside it, was an enourmous task considering how much stuff had gathered up during decades. It was also very nostalgic and often hard to part from many things that had to be thrown away. We all helped in with the hard work and now they are happily installed in the new house and some ~10-15 tons lighter (no kidding, that was the amount of stuff that got thrown away).

Hanna got awarded
In the autumn we got invited to a fine ceremony where Hanna got an award for outstanding study results. Hanna has an Master of Science in Engineering Biology and graduated in 2005. She has since graduation worked half-time at the University lecturing maths and statistics and doing administration, half-time at Cosmetox but will in 2007 focus on working full-time at Cosmetox.

Highest bid, sold!
We bought an apartment not far away from the one we're currently renting. We'll get access to it mid Jan 2007 and will do lots of renovating before actually moving in. We've already decided on and ordered the new kitchen and will put new floors in all rooms, paint, replace the wallpapers and lots more.. We will put up before and after pictures on the blog!


2006 in summary has been a year of change and a turning point of life and situation for both Hanna and me as well as for many of our friends. Skål and Happy new year to you all!

Best cheating video, ever

My man Andreas Paleologos has made yet another top notch music video, "A Cheater's Armoury", for the norweigan artist Hanne Hukkelberg. Beautiful!

Bongobong is ready for cooking

"It's a sweet little box, almost six years old. a pentium three with fedora core 5, sorry Bill gates, no money for you...."

Marcus is up to speed with his song blog at bongobong.se, covering Depeche Mode (Master and Servant) -- Server in the kitchen!

IBM, Intel puts more pressure on Sun via Harmony FLOSS Java

Today during our JavaOne talk (given by Tim and I) I was proud to demonstrate JEdit running on Harmony!

That's right, with Swing/AWT code. The formal contribution is on it's way, and I don't wish to steal any more thunder from the contribution when it's made, but we (Intel hat on here..) wasn't able to make the donation in time for the talk today because of internal process loose ends, and I wanted to make a splash for us at JavaOne.

I expect it will be here in the next couple of days.

Harmony - The question of compatible open source isn't "whether", but when!

Full thread here.

The Harmony project has had most of its contributions from IBM (update: and Intel obviously - my mistake) - first the VM, then some class libraries ("The new class library code includes security, cryptography, javax.net and unit tests"), and now Swing.

This puts Sun under heavy pressure to FLOSS' their own Java sooner rather than later since they sure don't want the alternatives stealing their show (from their perspective), they have already made the decision after all (but not given any timeframe).

Anyways, FLOSS Java marches on with or without Sun.

opensource dot motorola

LIBERTYVILLE, IL – 15 May 2006 – Motorola (NYSE: MOT) today announced the launch of opensource.motorola.com, a new resource aimed at sharing source code, original open source projects and new ideas and information with open source developers around the world.

...

A key part of Motorola’s ongoing commitment to open source, opensource.motorola.com features source code -- including kernel and drivers -- for Motorola’s Linux-based devices including the A1200/MING and A780/E680. It also features Java technology including Java test frameworks, sample test cases, and – coming soon – code, documents, and specifications for Motorola-lead JSRs (Java Specification Requests) such as MIDP 3.0 (Mobile Information Device Profile) (see related press announcement).

In addition, the site will house new projects and Motorola contributions across its IP portfolio including Linux and Java related code.

Terrific news which makes me even more motivated to start working for Motorola at the swedish Kreatel office. My ETA is 12th of June, T-26 days. Finishing up my master thesis right now, will blog about it soon!

Jonathan Schwartz up to expectations

I wrote about my high hopes for what Jonathan Schwartz as CEO for Sun would mean for FLOSS, Java in particular.

The question is not whether we will open-source Java, the question is how

Jonathan Schwartz stated this yesterday at Sun's JavaOne developer conference 2006. More info at zdnet.

Jonathan Schwartz (Score:5, Informative) vs Scott McNealy (Score:1, Funny)

Scott McNealy is stepping down as Sun CEO and will be succeeded by the No. 2 executive, Jonathan Schwhartz.

Somehow I think this is very, very good for the FLOSS communities as well as for Sun. I've never been a fan of McNealys tiresome and sales oriented (as in: not all that fact based) bashing retorics. I'm also under the impression (don't sue me if I'm wrong) that Schwartz really understands FLOSS and it's value for Sun. Sun is a huge contributer already: OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, Niagara (Verilog sourcecode for the processor with more cores than you can count on your fingers and toes) and more. Schwartz recently blogged about the possibility to release OpenSolaris under GPL3 (in addition to CDDL), and my opinion is that we can expect Sun to release Java as FLOSS a bit sooner with Schwartz as CEO. Yes, free (official) Java will happen, it's just a matter of time.

The independant FLOSS Java stack so far is very impressing; a bunch of VM:s (some tiny and easy to port, some heavier with good JIT compilers), GCJ (GCC java with AOT support), ECJ (awesome compiler part of the Eclipse project), Classpath (the libraries with better quality every day), Eclipse IDE (that's enterprise-ready for you), SWT (FLOSS widget toolkit, an alternative to Swing, used by Eclipse and others), Java-GNOME (a set of Java bindings for the GNOME and GTK+ libraries), JOnAS (an implementation of the J2EE spec), JBoss (let me hear you say enterprise-ready once again, the company got recently acquired by Red Hat) and more.

The biggest problem with FLOSS Java today is the incomplete implementation of the class libraries (Classpath), but don't feel too worried about the FLOSS Java future because it's:

1. Really good today and constantly improving



2. Getting more momentum with strong support from companies and foundations such as Red Hat, Apache and IBM (all of which are big supporters and users of Java) - you did read about the Harmony project, didn't you? and



3. Very soon such a serious alternative to Sun Java that Sun will need to set its own Java free (mainly the class libraries but the VM would be nice as well, so would the compiler but neither are crucial) - you all do realise that Sun Glassfish ("a free, open source application server") is a response to the success of JBoss and JOnAS?

And then don't forget a FLOSS .NET, which in its Mono implementation is very good today and will improve further. The times they are a-changin'.

Yum:my stuff for the Lazy (or lazier) admin

Erik, isn't it kind of always (say, daily) the right time to put that up alias to work?

As for my contribution, here is the Fedora Core version: alias up='yum update' ;)

Seriously speaking, the lazy Fedora admin perhaps doesn't need no up alias but the even lazier will enable automatic unattended daily upgrades, via service start yum. As for all other services that you want to have autostarted on reboot, it needs to be but inside /etc/rc.d/. We have two handy text-mode tools for that in fedora-land (graphical ones are also available), either run chkconfig --add yum or for another flavor run ntsysv, the latter will present a text menu where you just check the yum item and press Ok.

For the curious of you, the yum "service" doesn't start a daemon as usual, but rather forces /etc/cron.daily/yum.cron to run (daily, via cron -- no kidding!) by passing a lockfile test. More details in /etc/init.d/yum.

-1 day warez

[~]$ rpm --changelog -q firefox | head -n 2
* Thu Apr 20 2006 Christopher Aillon <caillon @redhat.com> - 1.5.0.2-1.1.fc5
- Update to 1.5.0.2
[~]$ date
Wed Apr 19 09:50:58 CEST 2006


Ain't that fresh? Check out the blingy changelog yourself, part of Fedora Core 5 updates repoview.

Awk (r)ate my grades!

Erik has written a cool Grade calculator for students at Linköping University.

...this particular programmer for some reason, which to this day is still unknown, felt the need to play around a bit with awk, he created a script that could calculate his average grade. Did he do this because he was a vain man, and wanted some confirmation? Or was it simply a good way to try awk? We'll never know.

I have two questions for you Erik:

1. Are you saving my grades when I submit them?


2. Will you publish your average grade?

For those of you interested in my average, it has a sha1sum of d38c8664e7e51744376724c8bf146fbdf5644e61 when rounded to one decimal, go figure.

Totally horrible and elitist

Priceless statement from Eric Raymond (from a mail on fedora-devel), ..and I quote:

That's a horrible, elitist attitude thast will lose us the market-share war.

Don't forget to check out Everybody loves Eric Raymond -- totally immature, kind of horrible but very funny.

FC5 Updates repoview

I couldn't find any repoview for FC5 Updates so I created one myself until there is an official one. Repoview generated html are great for browsing packages in Core and Extras but also (since the changelog is available) great for checking for security patches in Updates -- before the package header is downloaded (otherwise rpm -q --changelog packagename comes in handy). Now online at http://fancy.se/fc5updates-repoview/ -- feel free to use it!

Fedora Updates 5 repoview (security- and bug fixes against Core repository)

For reference:
Fedora Core 5 repoview (frozen March 14th 2006)
Fedora Extras 5 repoview (continuously updated)

Pimped!

Having used Debian testing and stable (sarge and sarge) for this server the last two years, time had come for some serious pimpin'. The hardware is old and low-end but works incredibly well (PowerBook Lombard G3/333 Mhz). It's well built, noiseless and consumes less than 20W on average. I had to do something with the hardware though so out: 20GB Fujitsu 4200RPM, in: 80GB WD 5400RPM bling!

Fedora Core is a terrific desktop distribution (I've used it since FC3) but also very nice and shiny server-wise:

• ExecShield (rocks!) bling!


• Stack Smash Protection and FORTIFY_SOURCE (rocks!) bling!


• SELinux (for those that dare) bling!


• Solid package management bling!


• Well maintained security updates bling!


• Ever-growing community driven extras repository bling!


• XEN virtualization (not for PPC yet though) bling!


• All built with GCC 4.1 bling!

As for the packages, watch your eyes - did I say it's shiny?
Debian sarge version -> Fedora Core 5 version:

• Apache httpd 2.0.54 -> 2.2.0 bling!


• Kernel 2.6.8 -> 2.6.16.1 bling!


• Moinmoin 1.3.4 -> 1.5.2 bling!


• MySQL 4.1.11 -> 5.0.18 bling!


• PHP 4.3.10 -> 5.1.2 bling!


• Python 2.4.1 -> 2.4.2 bling!


• Subversion 1.1.4 -> 1.3.0 bling!

Pimped!

Hello Moto, hello Kreatel

I've signed up as employee of Kreatel (recently acquired by Motorola) where I will be doing software engineering starting early June -- shortly after I've presented my master thesis at the university). Google will tell you more! I'm very excited about this and have already had the opportunity to meet most of the folks in the software group, although they filled me with whiskey and robbed me of all (no, not really) my money in texas hold 'em. ;) More to come!

Life++

What is Second Life?

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by nearly 100,000 people from around the globe.

I've heard about Second Life (created by Linden Lab) numerous times last (and this) year, but never investigated it further until today. I've just watched a streamed presentation via Google Video, recorded during Google engEDU tech talks. I haven't tried the actual product though, being mostly interested in the tech and ideas behind.

Are you interested in massive online gaming/entertaining/communities, 3d computer graphics, online markets/economics, extreme data streaming, dynamic object creation with a custom programming language, fat server park, deployment on mono, cool use of the havok physics engine or just curious to hear what stuff interests google for tech talks? If not, please break; otherwise continue; and check this presentation out, it's almost an hour long but well worth it.

sec_stup[0] = "Who's your $USER?"

Overview copied from CVE candidate:

Name: CVE-2005-2508 (under review)
Status: Candidate
Description: dsidentity in Directory Services in Mac OS X 10.4.2 allows local users to add or remove user accounts.

Digging into the actual security advisory from Suresec we find the nasty details:

Vulnerability summary: dsidentity is a tool to add or remove users. For specific actions it is required that the user is in the admin group. The code being used to validate if a user is in the admin group or not uses getenv, as shown by the following code snippet:

char *envStr = nil;
envStr = getenv("USER"); //check for member of admin group
if ( (envStr != nil) && UserIsMemberOfGroup( inDSRef, inDSNodeRef, envStr, "admin" ) ) {
    return true;
}

This security hole has been found in numerous places at various times in the POSIX-era, but as illustrated it can still be found out in the wild. It's also very simple to explain and identify, thus qualifying nicely for a slot in my sec_stup[] array. Please note that although the security hole by itself is stupid, the person responsible for it most certainly is not. The major reasons for most security flaws are bad coding practices and lack of code reviews rather than stupidity. Lack of internal security audits could qualify as stupid, though.

If you didn't quite understand the problem of sec_stup[0], consider this small example:

[~]$ cat printuser.c && gcc printuser.c
int main() {
  printf("%s\n", getenv("USER"));
  return 0;
}
[~]$ ./a.out
olov
[~]$ env USER=root ./a.out
root

The lesser of evils

Vilken diskussion som helst tenderar lätt att komma tillbaka till det gamla hederliga textredigerarkriget, senast från lkml i en diskussion som började med GPL version 3:

Date	Tue, 24 Jan 2006 12:37:58 +0300
From	Wartan Hachaturow <>
Subject	Re: GPL V3 and Linux

On 1/24/06, Harald Arnesen  wrote:

> There (probably) wouldn't be a GNU/Linux without the man who developed
> the worlds best word-processor (and the worlds best programming editor,
> and the framework for the worlds best e-mail client).

Last I checked, vim and mutt were not written by RMS.

Harald lämnade öppet mål (lite kudos bör han väl ha ändå för att han ämnade ge creds till RMS, om än på ett väl klumpigt sätt) och Wartan var inte sen att ta chansen, skott rätt i krysset.

Min egen ställning är ett konstaterande: både VI och Emacs är onda, men där den första för mig är rent oanvändbar har jag en hatkärleksrelation till den senare. Emacs är den mindre onda och den jag alltid kommer tillbaka till då och då, som nån gammal klasskompis man först inte förstod sig på ett skvatt, senare lärde sig att uppskatta för/trots dess egenheter, för att till sist bli typ kompis med (man upptäckte att de andra inte var särskilt bättre). Man kan inte fly det förgångna!

C-x C-s C-x C-c

wp++

Uppgraderade WordPress till version 2.0 och passade samtidigt på att förenkla min .htaccess, ropa till om något inte fungerar som det ska!

FAT: Bad got worse

edit 2006-01-13: Added links with background information:
FAT Patent Review May Threaten Linux Foundation
Advocacy Group Goes After Microsoft's FAT Patent

Microsoft's file system patent upheld

Two patents covering one of Microsoft's main Windows file-storage systems [FAT] are valid after all, federal patent examiners have decided.

The FAT filesystem is the de facto standard for USB-sticks, and I don't see it going away (from mainstream use) in the coming five years at least. All non-crippled operating systems must be able to support it (like it or not). It now seems that a certain company will be able to enforce licensing costs for this very simple filesystem (FAT is really a very simple rather than a very poor filesystem, by design i presume). That might not be a problem for companies such as Canon and Kodak, who use it for their digital cameras, but what if they aim for the FLOSS-projects? Fedora Core? Debian? Slackware (there you go Gustaf)? The BSD:s? While I don't think that's a very likely situation, it's still very unpleasant and an abuse of the patentsystem.

If we should blame Microsoft or the US patent office, that I don't know. Yuck.