Blog Without An Important Name

Last week I spent Monday through to Saturday at linux.conf.au, which was a very good conference on Linux stuff. I hoped to write about things as they happened, but lacking a laptop, I was only able to spend an hour or so per day using a computer and so it didn’t happen. So now I’ll go through and write about it. Given this is a few days later, I’ll probably not include as much detail as I would have if I did it closer to the time.

Monday, 23rd Jan

This day was devoted to the miniconferences. None of them was especially exciting to me, so I went to the Damian Conway one, which was him doing a talk on presentation skills in the morning, and Perl 6 in the afternoon. He is a very good speaker, and so the presentation skills one was well worth it, and the Perl 6 one was also. There’s a lot of good stuff coming into that. I’m thinking I might have to follow the development a bit, or perhaps even get involved.

If you ever have the chance to see Conway talk, do. It’s quite an experience. It was also pretty nice, as I’d previously done the presentation skills one, so seeing the Perl 6 one pointed out a lot of the things he’d been talking about.

Tuesday, 24th Jan

On Tuesday, I went to the Debian miniconf, which was less interesting. Given I’m not really involved in the Debian development or anything, this is probably to be expected. There was a few things that were worth seeing however.

Wednesday, 25th Jan

This day the conference proper started. The talk I went to in the morning was A whirlwind tour of changes in the Linux 2.6.x system call API. It covered a few of things that I’d heard about, but didn’t really know the details of. Now I think I’m going to have to play with some of them a bit. I already have an idea for something I’m going to do with this. As soon as I can make something using inotify compile on 2.6.12.

After lunch was Tridge’s Samba 4 Status Report, which demonstrated how good samba 4 is looking. It can now replace a Windows PDC with a few clicks and 30 seconds, which (as I understand it) is better than Windows can actually do. Oh, and they’re also going to have support for the network filesystem in Windows Vista before Vista actually comes out, which is really quite funny. It’s a bit of a pity I don’t do anything much with Samba, except for using it share files from my machine to Windows ones, so none of these advancements are any use to me. But I can see them being really good for anyone who has a sizable network.

The final talk of the day was From New Zealand to Bolivia, the Koha Library system flies. This one is about a New Zealand developed, open sourced library catalogue system. It covered more the social and background side of things, rather than the technical side, which was good. It described the kinds of organisation that have been using it, and the kind of work that has been done on it.

Later that evening was the keysigning. That had around 50 people at it, so hopefully some more of those people hurry up and do the actual signing thing. My current key can be found online, it already has a fair few new signatures.

More later…

Things have been pretty flat out lately. I’ve gotten myself employed again, for a month or so. Should be good for the pocket money. However, with that I’ve been learning my way around the code for a very large and complex application. This is something that causes mental tiredness after several hours, so I’ve been quite worn out when I’ve been getting home.

Next week is a bit of a chance to regroup however, as I’m not going to be working. In fact, I’m going to be spending the whole week at Linux.conf.au, which is very handily being held in Dunedin. Looking over the program, there is going to be a lot of very cool stuff happening, and a fair bit that isn’t on the program, also. A few people I know online but have never met are down for it, which should be good.

This is going to mean a slow-down in all the things I should be doing, unfortunately. Finishing up what needs to be done on eMusic/J, and doing more thesis work are probably going to take a back seat for a while.

The new version is in the usual place.

Well, finally I put the major feature into eMusic/J that I was waiting for before I put out a new release: the drop directory thing. There are a bunch of other changes, and I’ll just put a narrated and abridged version of the changelog here.

• If a download fails 5 times, it won’t be automatically started again. This stops you constantly hammering the eMusic servers just because you have three tracks that are failing. The counter can be reset by forcing the track to start downloading.
• Refactored the display of extra information (in the info panel) to be much more general, to allow more things to be displayed. This affects (and effects!) the next two things.
• Album covers now show the cover when they are selected. A couple of people had pointed out to me that it was a little bit stupid how clicking the tracks showed the album cover, but clicking the actual album cover download didn’t. So now it does.
• Genre and duration now show for tracks in the info panel. There’s not actually a lot of extra info in the .emp files (I think things like the year would be nice), but these two are, and are now shown at the bottom.
• Added ‘undocumented’ option “noServer” to preferences. If the line:
  noServer=1
  is added to ~/.emusicj/emusicj.props then the client/server business won’t happen, which will lead to faster startup on the machines that it doesn’t work on. I’ve heard from one person that the part of the program that listens for another copy starting up doesn’t work, and it makes eMusic/J take quite a long time to start (as it goes through a large number of ports to try to find one that is free). Putting this option into the properties file will stop it even trying to start that part of the program up, making it faster. Not recommended unless a) starting eMusic/J is slow and b) you get the message Failed to start the server for listening just before the window comes up.
• Drop directory support now works. The program will monitor a specified directory and autoload any .emp files that end up in there. Finally! You can point eMusic/J to a directory (it’s in the preferences screen), and every 30 seconds it will check it. Any new .emp files it spots, it will start monitoring. If they don’t change for 30 seconds, it will load them, and then delete them. The business with the ‘if the don’t change’ is to stop it from trying to load one as it’s half downloaded. This is good for downloading music remotely (just copy the file into the directory on the remote machine, wait a bit, pick up the downloaded music), and to make it easier for the people for whom the server fails to start for listening. Instead, they can tell the browser to automatically save the files to that directory.

The other thing related to this is that I’ve set up Trac, which is a simple but effective project management system. So if there are bugs, feature requests or whatever, go here and report them. Makes things a bit better than just emailing me, as this way others can see them also.

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett is a good layman’s introduction to network security. It only covers a few points, although they are significant ones, some of which are not often discussed:

• Social engineering
• Authentication
• Redundancy
• Robustness

The book itself teaches about these from an unusual point of view, that of looking at things from the point of view of an attacker. It is written as though it is one large anecdote that makes all these points in the course of the telling. It’s useful for those who may not understand the details of networking so deeply, as it makes heavy use of metaphor to illustrate the points.

The network described is the primary means of long-distance communication for a group of people, and the attacker uses weaknesses of it to exploit it for his own ends. As these weaknesses, which are the ones listed above, are presented, you are shown the means and method of the attacks directly through the eyes of the attacker.

It is also worth noting that the author takes an interesting moralistic approach. Where most books from the attacker’s point of view don’t put things in bad guy/good guy terms, and most books from the point of view of network security staff do, this one reverses the normal roles. In Going Postal, the attacker is seen as the ‘good guy’, and the owners of the network are the ‘bad guys’. It also contains the interesting view that the network operators specifically aren’t seen to be bad, but merely doing the best they can under bad circumstances.

The main flaw is that, while the weaknesses described are brought to the readers attention, few specific solutions are presented. This may be something of an asset for the book however, as it will certainly prevent it from becoming out of date, as many standard technical books do.

It’d recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a general feel for network security, or likes a good long-running anecdote (one might almost say ’story’).

[OK, serious bit now. I’ve not read much Terry Pratchett (to my own detriment), but all I have read were very fun. This book certainly doesn’t go against that in any way. Go read it!]

I got a bunch of UI updates in, so it should now look/behave a little bit better. Here’s what’s changed:

• The display for the title and download status no longer gets ugly when the title is long. Now the download status will always be displayed, and the title truncated. The status is also in bold so it stands out a bit.
• ‘Stopped’ has been renamed to ‘Cancelled’ in order to be a bit clearer about what is really going on. The original separation was due to the ‘pause’ button simply pausing the loop that does the downloading and writing out of data. That is an ugly, ugly way of doing things and it got removed as soon as I worked out how to do download resuming, but the messages never got updated to what made the most sense.
• Added a ‘Cancel all’ menu item. Most useful to prevent having to manually go through and cancel every track seperately if you accidentally add an out of date EMP file.
• Added a status bar that indicates when the downloads are paused, this’ll probably be used for more things in the future. Turns out SWT (if you’re not building an Eclipse application) has no native ‘StatusBar’ class, but it was easy enough to stick in a block with a label in it.

Aside: Samson, you’ll be happy to note this covers all the things you brought up a little while back

Go get it!

I found a site loaded with classic, now public domain, movies and shows that I’ve been steadily downloading from for the past few days. There’s a lot of good stuff here, Sherlock Holmes shows (which beat the pants off the more recent shows of CSI: Des Moines, CSI: New York but a Different Part than Gary Sinise Is In and NCSI: SVU WKRP), Metropolis, Flash Gordon, Night of the Living Dead, and piles more.

I think that I’m going to have to periodically go through this and see what’s new. I see a lot of black and white in my future.

Well, mostly. I’ve finished rearranging the content on it so that it’s no longer in one great big page. Now all the important stuff is on the front page, and all the stuff that people are only likely to use a little bit are a click away.

It still needs a real user manual, but I might put some extra investigation into this. What I’d like is one that can be written up on the wiki, and is automatically imported into the program when I do a build for release. That also relies on me working out:

1. how to include HTML files and images into a JAR file
2. how to read said HTML and image files from the JAR file
3. how to use the SWT browser component on these files

I’m already doing parts of the first two in the program (for the button and app icons), so it may not be too hard. We’ll see.

Check the new page out and let me know.