Category Archives: Software

Geeks, Hobbies, and Free/Open Source: Feedback Wanted

Programming, Society, Software

I’ve been thinking lately about ways to improve ways in which I interact with Free Software projects, and ways in which they interact with me. Before I proceed to take steps or make suggestions, I’d like to see if others share my traits and observations.

Here are some questions I have been thinking of. If you’d like to help give me anecdotal evidence, please post a comment below this post. Identify the question numbers you are answering. It helps me if you can give specific examples, but if you don’t have the time or memory for that, no problem.

I will post my own answers in a day or two, but the point of this post is listening, not talking, so I’ll not post them immediately.

Hobbies (General – any geeks)

  • H1: To what degree do you like your hobbies to be challenging vs. easy? If something isn’t challenging, does that make it a good, bad, or indifferent candidate for a hobby
  • H2: To what degree do you like your hobbies to be educational or enlightening?
  • H3: How do you pick up new hobbies? Do you go looking for them? Do you stumble upon them? What excites you to commit time and/or money to them at the beginning?
  • H4: How does your interest wane? What causes you to lose interest in hobbies?
  • H5: For how long do you tend to maintain hobbies? Sub-hobbies?
  • H6: Are your hobbies or sub-hobbies cyclical? In other words, do you lose interest in a hobby for a time, then regain interest for a time, then lose it again? What is the length of time of these cycles, if any?
  • H7: Do you prefer social hobbies or solitary hobbies? (Note that many hobbies, including programming, video gaming, reading, knitting, etc. could be either social or solitary, depending on the inclination of individuals.)
  • H8: Have you ever felt guilt about wanting to stop a hobby or sub-hobby? (For instance, from stopping supporting users of your software project, readers of your e-zine, etc) Did the guilt keep you going? Was that a good thing?

Examples: video games might be a challenging hobby (depending on the person) but in most cases aren’t educational.

A hobby might be “video game playing” or “being a Debian developer.” A sub-hobby might be “playing GTA IV”, “playing RPGs”, or “maintaining mutt”.

Free/Open Source Hobbies

  • F1: Considering your answers above, do your FLOSS activities follow the same general pattern as your other hobbies/interests, or are there differences? If there are differences, what are they?
  • F2: Has concern for being expected to support software longer than you will have an interest in it ever been a factor in a decision whether to release source code publicly, or how public to make a release?
  • F3: Has concern over the long-term interest of a submitter in maintaining their patch/contribution ever caused you to consider rejecting it? (Or caused you to avoid using software over the same concern about its author)
  • F4: In general, do you find requirements FLOSS projects place on first-time contributors to be too stringent, not stringent enough, or about right?
  • F5: Have you ever continued contributing to a project past the point where your interest would otherwise motivate you to do so? If so, what caused you to do this? Do you believe that cause is a general positive or negative force for members of the FLOSS community?
  • F6: Have there ever been factors that caused you to stop contributing to a project even though you still had an active interest in doing so? What were they?
  • F7: Have you ever wanted to be able to take a break as a contributor or maintainer of a project, and be able to return to contributing to it later? If so, have you found it easy to do so?
  • F8: What is your typical length of engagement with FLOSS projects (such as Debian) and sub-projects (such as maintaining a particular package)?
  • F9: Does a change in social group ever encourage or discourage you from changing hobbies or sub-hobbies?
  • F10: Have you ever wanted to stop working on a project/sub-project because the problems involved were no longer challenging or educational to you?
  • F11: Have you ever wanted to stop working on a project/sub-project because of issues with the people involved?

Examples on F9: If, say, you are a long-time Perl user and have gone to Perl conferences, but now you are interested in Ruby, would your involvement with the Perl community cause you to avoid taking up the Ruby programming hobby? Or would it cause you to cut your ties with Perl less quickly than your changing interest might dictate? (This is a completely arbitrary example and isn’t meant to start a $LANGUAGE thread.)

Changes over time

  • C1: Do you believe that your answers to any of the above questions have changed over time? If yes, then:
  • C2: What kinds of changes have happened?
  • C3: What caused the change?
  • C4: Do you believe the changes produced positive results for you? For the community?

A Proud Dad

Children & Computing, Debian, Family, Linux

I saw this on my computer screen the other day, and I’ve got to say it really warmed my heart. I’ll explain below if it doesn’t provoke that reaction for you.

Evidence a 4-year-old has been using my computer

So here’s why that made me happy. Well for one, it was the first time Jacob had left stuff on my computer that I found later. And of course he left his name there.

But moreover, he’s learning a bit about the Unix shell. sl is a command that displays an animated steam locomotive. I taught him how to use the semicolon to combine commands. So he has realized that he can combine calls to sl with the semicolon to get a series of a LOT of steam trains all at once. And was very excited about this discovery.

Also he likes how error messages start with the word “bash”.

Unix Password and Authority Management

Linux

One of the things that everyone seems to do different is managing passwords. We haven’t looked at that in quite some time, despite growth both of the company and the IT department.

As I look to us moving some things to the cloud, and shifting offsite backups from carrying tapes to a bank to backups via the Internet, I’m aware that the potential for mischief — whether intentional or not — is magnified. With cloud hosting, a person could, with the press of a button, wipe out the equivalent of racks of machines in a few seconds. With disk-based local and Internet-based offsite backups, the potential for malicious behavior may be magnified; someone could pretty quickly wipe out local and remote backups.

Add to that the mysterious fact that many enterprise-targeted services allow only a single username/password for an account, and make no provision for ACLs to delegate permissions to others. Even Rackspace Cloud has this problem, as do their JungleDisk backup product, and many, many other offsite backup products. Amazon AWS seems to be the only real exception to this rule, and their ACL support is more than a little complicated.

So one of the questions we will have to address is the balance of who has these passwords. Too many people and the probability of trouble, intentional or not, rises. Too few and productivity is harmed, and potentially also the ability to restore. (If only one person has the password, and that person is unavailable, company data may be as well.) The company does have some storage locations, including locked vaults and safe deposit boxes, that no IT people have access to. I am thinking that putting a record of passwords in those locations may be a good first step, as putting the passwords in the control of those that can’t use them seems a reasonable step.

But we’ve been thinking of this as it pertains to our local systems as well. We have, for a number of years now, assigned a unique root password to every server. These passwords are then stored in a password-management tool, encrypted with a master password, and stored on a shared filesystem. Everyone in the department therefore can access every password.

Many places where I worked used this scheme, or some variant of it. The general idea was that if root on one machine was compromised and the attacker got root’s password, it would prevent the person from being able to just try that password on the other servers on the network and achieve a greater level of intrusion.

However, the drawback is that we now have more servers than anyone can really remember the passwords for. So many people are just leaving the password tool running. Moreover, while the attack described above is still possible, these days I worry more about automated intrusion attempts that most likely won’t try that attack vector.

A couple of ways we could go may include using a single root password everywhere, or a small set of root passwords. Another option may be to not log in to root accounts at all — possibly even disabling their password — and requiring the use of user accounts plus sudo. This hasn’t been practical to date. We don’t want to make a dependency on LDAP from a bunch of machines just to be able to use root, and we haven’t been using a tool such as puppet or cfengine to manage this stuff. Using such a tool is on our roadmap and could let us manage that approach more easily. But this approach has risks too. One is that if user accounts can get to root on many machines, then we’re not really more secure than a standard root password. Second is that it makes it more difficult to detect and enforce password expiration and systematic password changes.

I’m curious what approaches other people are taking on this.

rdiff-backup, ZFS, and rsync scripts

Debian,

rdiff-backup vs. ZFS

As I’ve been writing about backups, I’ve gone ahead and run some tests with rdiff-backup. I have been using rdiff-backup personally for many years now — probably since 2002, when I packaged it up for Debian. It’s a nice, stable system, but I always like to look at other options for things every so often.

rdiff-backup stores an uncompressed current mirror of the filesystem, similar to rsync. History is achieved by the use of compressed backwards binary deltas generated by rdiff (using the rsync algorithm). So, you can restore the current copy very easily — a simple cp will do if you don’t need to preserve permissions. rdiff-backup restores previous copies by applying all necessary binary deltas to generate the previous version.

Things I like about rdiff-backup:

  1. Bandwidth-efficient
  2. Reasonably space-efficient, especially where history is concerned
  3. Easily scriptable and nice CLI
  4. Unlike tools such as duplicity, there is no need to periodically run full backups — old backups can be deleted without impacting the ability to restore more current backups

Things I don’t like about it:

  1. Speed. It can be really slow. Deleting 3 months’ worth of old history takes hours. It has to unlink vast numbers of files — and that’s pretty much it, but it does it really slowly. Restores, backups, etc. are all slow as well. Even just getting a list of your increment sizes so you’d know how much space would be saved can take a very long time.
  2. The current backup copy is stored without any kind of compression, which is not at all space-efficient
  3. It creates vast numbers of little files that take forever to delete or summarize

So I thought I would examine how efficient ZFS would be. I wrote a script that would replay the rdiff-backup history — first it would rsync the current copy onto the ZFS filesystem and make a ZFS snapshot. Then each previous version was processed by my script (rdiff-backup’s files are sufficiently standard that a shell script can process them), and a ZFS snapshot created after each. This lets me directly compare the space used by rdiff-backup to that used by ZFS using actual history.

I enabled gzip-3 compression and block dedup in ZFS.

My backups were nearly 1TB in size and the amount of space I had available for ZFS was roughly 600GB, so I couldn’t test all of them. As it happened, I tested the ones that were the worst-case scenario for ZFS: my photos, music collection, etc. These files had very little duplication and very little compressibility. Plus a backup of my regular server that was reasonably compressible.

The total size of the data backed up with rdiff-backup was 583 GB. With ZFS, this came to 498GB. My dedup ratio on this was only 1.05 (meaning 5% or 25GB saved). The compression ratio was 1.12 (60GB saved). The combined ratio was 1.17 (85GB saved). Interestingly 498 + 85 = 583.

Remember that the data under test here was mostly a worst-case scenario for ZFS. It would probably have done better had I had the time to throw the rest of my dataset at it (such as the 60GB backup of my iPod, which would have mostly deduplicated with the backup of my music server).

One problem with ZFS is that dedup is very memory-hungry. This is common knowledge and it is advertised that you need to use roughly 2GB of RAM per TB of disk when using dedup. I don’t have quite that much to dedicate to it, so ZFS got VERY slow and thrashed the disk a lot after the ARC grew to about 300MB. I found some tweakables in zfsrc and the zfs command that let me tweak the ARC cache to grow bigger. But the machine in question only has 2GB RAM, and is doing lots of other things as well, so this barely improved anything. Note that this dedup RAM requirement is not out of line with what is expected from these sorts of solutions.

Even if I got absolutely stellar dedup ratio of 2:1, that would get me at most 1TB. The cost of buying a 1TB disk is less than the cost of upgrading my system to 4GB RAM, so dedup isn’t worth it here.

I think the lesson is: think carefully about where dedup makes sense. If you’re storing a bunch of nearly-identical virtual machine images — the sort of canonical use case for this — go for it. A general fileserver — well, maybe you should just add more disk instead of more RAM.

Then that raises the question: if I don’t need dedup from ZFS, do I bother with it at all, or just use ext4 and LVM snapshots? I think ZFS still makes sense, given its built-in support for compression and very fast snapshots — LVM snapshots are known to cause serious degradation to write performance once enabled, which ZFS doesn’t.

So I plan to switch my backups to use ZFS. A few observations on this:

  1. Some testing suggests that the time to delete a few months of old snapshots will be a minute or two with ZFS compared to hours with rdiff-backup.
  2. ZFS has shown itself to be more space-efficient than rdiff-backup, even without dedup enabled.
  3. There are clear performance and convenience wins with ZFS.

    4. Backup Scripts

    So now comes the question of backup scripts. rsync is obviously a pretty nice choice here — and if used with –inplace perhaps even will play friendly with ZFS snapshots even if dedup is off. But let’s say I’m backing up a few machines at home, or perhaps dozens at work. There is a need to automate all of this. Specifically, there’s a need to:

    1. Provide scheduling, making sure that we don’t hammer the server with 30 clients all at once
    2. Provide for “run before” jobs to do things like snapshot databases
    3. Be silent on success and scream loudly via emails to administrators on any kind of error… and keep backing up other systems when there is an error
    4. Create snapshots and provide an automated way to remove old snapshots (or mount them for reading, as ZFS-fuse doesn’t support the .zfs snapshot directory yet)

    To date I haven’t found anything that looks suitable. I found a shell script system called rsbackup that does a large part of this, but something about using a script whose homepage is a forum makes me less than 100% confident.

    On the securing the backups front, rsync comes with a good-looking rrsync script (inexplicably installed under /usr/share/doc/rsync/scripts instead of /usr/bin on Debian) that can help secure the SSH authorization. GNU rush also looks like a useful restricted shell.

Research on deduplicating disk-based and cloud backups

Debian, Linux,

Yesterday, I wrote about backing up to the cloud. I specifically was looking at cloud backup services. I’ve been looking into various options there, but also various options for disk-based backups. I’d like to have both onsite and offsite backups, so both types of backup are needed. Also, it is useful to think about how the two types of backups can be combined with minimal overhead.

For the onsite backups, I’d want to see:

  1. Preservation of ownership, permissions, etc.
  2. Preservation of symlinks and hardlinks
  3. Space-efficient representation of changes — ideally binary deltas or block-level deduplication
  4. Ease of restoring
  5. Support for backing up Linux and Windows machines

Deduplicating Filesystems for Local Storage

Although I initially thought of block-level deduplicating file systems as something to use for offsite backups, they could also make an excellent choice for onsite disk-based backups.

rsync-based dedup backups

One way to use them would be to simply rsync data to them each night. Since copies are essentially free, we could do (or use some optimized version of) cp -r current snapshot/2011-01-20 or some such to save off historic backups. Moreover, we’d get dedup both across and within machines. And, many of these can use filesystem-level compression.

The real upshot of this is that the entire history of the backups can be browsed as a mounted filesystem. It would be fast and easy to find files, especially when users call about that file that they deleted at some point in the past but they don’t remember when, exactly what it was called, or exactly where it was stored. We can do a lot more with find and grep to locate these things than we could do with tools in Bacula (or any other backup program) restore console. Since it is a real mounted filesystem, we could also do fun things like make tarballs of it at will, zip parts up, scp them back to the file server, whatever. We could potentially even give users direct access to their files to restore things they need for themselves.

The downside of this approach is that rsync can’t store all the permissions unless it’s running as root on the system. Wrappers such as rdup around rsync could help with that. Another downside is that there isn’t a central scheduling/statistics service. We wouldn’t want the backup system to be hammered by 20 servers trying to send it data at once. So there’d be an element of rolling our own scripts, though not too bad. I’d have preferred not to authorize a backup server with root-level access to dozens of machines, but may be inescapable in this instance.

Bacula and dedup

The other alternative I thought of system such as Bacula with disk-based “volumes”. A Bacula volume is normally a tape, but Bacula can just write them to disk files. This lets us use the powerful Bacula scheduling engine, logging service, pre-backup and post-backup jobs, etc. Normally this would be an egregious waste of disk space. Bacula, like most tape-heritage programs, will write out an entire new copy of a file if even one byte changes. I had thought that I could let block-level dedupe reduce the storage size of Bacula volumes, but after looking at the Bacula block format spec, this won’t be possible as each block will have timestamps and such in it.

The good things about this setup revolve around using the central Bacula director. We need only install bacula-fd on each server to be backed up, and it has a fairly limited set of things it can do. Bacula already has built-in support for defining simple or complicated retention policies. Its director will email us if there is a problem with anything. And its logs and catalog are already extensive and enable us to easily find out things such as how long backups take, how much space they consume, etc. And it backs up Windows machines intelligently and comprehensively in addition to POSIX ones.

The downsides are, of course, that we don’t have all the features we’d get from having the entire history on the filesystem all at once, and far less efficient use of space. Not only that, but recovering from a disaster would require a more extensive bootstrapping process.

A hybrid option may be possible: automatically unpacking bacula backups after they’ve run onto the local filesystem. Dedupe should ensure this doesn’t take additional space — if the Bacula blocksize aligns with the filesystem blocksize. This is certainly not a given however. It may also make sense to use Bacula for Windows and rsync/rdup for Linux systems.

This seems, however, rather wasteful and useless.

Evaluation of deduplicating filesystems

I set up and tested three deduplicating filesystems available for Linux: S3QL, SDFS, and zfs-fuse. I did not examine lessfs. I ran a similar set of tests for each:

  1. Copy /usr/bin into the fs with tar -cpf - /usr/bin | tar -xvpf - -C /mnt/testfs
  2. Run commands to sync/flush the disk cache. Evaluate time and disk used at this point.
  3. Rerun the tar command, putting the contents into a slightly different path in the test filesystem. This should consume very little additional space since the files will have already been there. This will validate that dedupe works as expected, and provide a hint about its efficiency.
  4. Make a tarball of both directories from the dedup filesystem, writing it to /dev/zero (to test read performance)

I did not attempt to flush read caches during this, but I did flush write caches. The test system has 8GB RAM, 5GB of which was free or in use by a cache. The CPU is a Core2 6420 at 2.13GHz. The filesystems which created files atop an existing filesystem had ext4 mounted noatime beneath them. ZFS was mounted on an LVM LV. I also benchmarked native performance on ext4 as a baseline. The data set consists of 3232 files and 516MB. It contains hardlinks and symlinks.

Here are my results. Please note the comments below as SDFS could not accurately complete the test.

Test ext4 S3QL SDFS zfs-fuse
First copy 1.59s 6m20s 2m2s 0m25s
Sync/Flush 8.0s 1m1s 0s 0s
Second copy+sync N/A 0m48s 1m48s 0m24s
Disk usage after 1st copy 516MB 156MB 791MB 201MB
Disk usage after 2nd copy N/A 157MB 823MB 208MB
Make tarball 0.2s 1m1s 2m22s 0m54s
Max RAM usage N/A 150MB 350MB 153MB
Compression none lzma none gzip-2

It should be mentioned that these tests pretty much ruled out SDFS. SDFS doesn’t appear to support local compression, and it severely bloated the data store, which was much larger than the original data. Moreover, it permitted any user to create and modify files, even if the permissions bits said that the user couldn’t. tar gave many errors unpacking symlinks onto the SDFS filesystem, and du -s on the result threw up errors as well. Besides that, I noted that find found 10 fewer files than in my source data. Between the huge memory consumption, the data integrity concerns, and inefficient disk storage, SDFS is out of the running for this project.

S3QL is optimized for storage to S3, though it can also store its files locally or on an sftp server — a nice touch. I suspect part of its performance problem stems from being designed for network backends, and using slow compression algorithms. S3QL worked fine, however, and produced no problems. Creating a checkpoint using s3qlcp (faster than cp since it doesn’t have to read the data from the store) took 16s.

zfs-fuse appears to be the most-used ZFS implementation on Linux at the moment. I set up a 2GB ZFS pool for this test, and set dedupe=on and compress=gzip-2. When I evaluated compression in the past, I hadn’t looked at lzjb. I found a blog post comparing lzjb to the gzip options supported by zfs and wound up using gzip-2 for this test.

ZFS really shone here. Compared to S3QL, it took 25s instead of over 6 minutes to copy the data over — and took only 28% more space. I suspect that if I selected gzip -9 compression it would have been closer both in time and space to S3QL. But creating a ZFS snapshot was nearly instantaneous. Although ZFS-fuse probably doesn’t have as many users as ZFS on Solaris, still it is available in Debian, and has a good backing behind it. I feel safer using it than I do using S3QL. So I think ZFS wins this comparison.

I spent quite some time testing ZFS snapshots, which are instantaneous. (Incidentally, ZFS-fuse can’t mount them directly as documented, so you create a clone of the snapshot and mount that.) They worked out as well as could be hoped. Due to dedupe, even deleting and recreating the entire content of the original filesystem resulted in less than 1MB additional storage used. I also tested creating multiple filesystems in the zpool, and confirmed that dedupe even works between filesystems.

Incidentally — wow, ZFS has a ton of awesome features. I see why you OpenSolaris people kept looking at us Linux folks with a sneer now. Only our project hasn’t been killed by a new corporate overlord, so guess that maybe didn’t work out so well for you… <grin>.

The Cloud Tie-In

This discussion leaves another discussion: what to do about offsite backups? Assuming for the moment that I want to back them up over the Internet to some sort of cloud storage facility, there are about 3 options:

  1. Get an Amazon EC2 instance with EBS storage and rsync files to it. Perhaps run ZFS on that thing.
  2. Use a filesystem that can efficiently store data in S3 or Cloud Files (S3QL is the only contender here)
  3. Use a third-party backup product (JungleDisk appears to be the leading option)

There is something to be said for using a different tool for offsite backups — if there is some tool-level issue, that could be helpful.

One of the nice things about JungleDisk is that bandwidth is free, and disk is the same $0.15/GB-mo that RackSpace normally charges. JungleDisk also does block-level dedup, and has a central management interface. This all spells “nice” for us.

The only remaining question would be whether to just use JungleDisk to back up the backup server, or to put it on each individual machine as well. If it just backs up the backup server, then administrative burdens are lower; we can back everything there up by default and just not worry about it. On the other hand, if there is a problem with our main backups, we could be really stuck. So I’d say I’m leaning towards ZFS plus some sort of rsync solution and JungleDisk for offsite.

I had two people suggest CrashPlan Pro on my blog. It looks interesting, but is a very closed product which makes me nervous. I like using standard tools and formats — gives me more peace of mind, control, and recovery options. CrashPlan Pro supports multiple destinations and says that they do cloud hosting, but don’t list pricing anywhere. So I’ll probably not mess with it.

I’m still very interested in what comments people may have on all this. Let me know!

Wikis, Amateur Radio, and Debian

Debian

As I have been getting involved with amateur radio this year, I’ve been taking notes on what I’m learning about certain things: tips from people on rigging up a bicycle antenna to achieve a 40-mile range, setting up packet radio in Linux, etc. I have long run a personal, private wiki where I put such things.

But I really wanted a convenient place to put this stuff in public. There was no reason to keep it private. In fact, I wanted to share with others what I’ve learned. And, as I wanted to let others add their tips if they wish, I set up a public MoinMoin instance on . So far, most of my attention has focused on the amateur radio section of it

This has worked out pretty well for me. Sometimes I will cut and paste tips from emails into there, and then after trying them out, edit them into a more coherent summary based on my experiences.

Now then, on to packet radio and Debian. Packet radio is a digital communications mode that runs on the amateur radio bands. It is a routable, networking protocol that typically runs at 300bps, 1200bps, and 9600bps. My packet radio page gives a better background on it, but essentially AX.25 — the packet protocol — is similar to a scaled-down TCP/IP. One interesting thing about packet is that, since it can use the HF bands, can have direct transcontinental wireless links. More common are links spanning 30-50 miles on VHF and UHF, as well as those going across a continent on HF.

Linux is the only operating system I know of that has AX.25 integrated as a first-class protocol in the kernel. You can create AX.25 sockets and use them with the APIs you’re familiar with already. Not only that, but the Linux AX.25 stack is probably the best there is, and it interfaces easily with TCP/IP — there are global standards for encapsulating TCP/IP within AX.25 and AX.25 within UDP, and both are supported on Linux. Yes, I have telnetted to a machine to work on it over VHF. Of Linux distributions, Debian appears to have the best AX.25 stack built-in.

The AX.25 support in Linux is great, but it’s rather under-documented. So I set up a page for packet radio on Linux. I’ve had a great deal of fun with this. It’s amazing what you can do running a real networking protocol at 300bps over long-distance radio. I’ve had real-time conversations with people, connected to their personal BBS and sent them mail, and even use AX.25 “nodes” (think of them as a kind of router or bridge; you can connect in to them and the connect back out on the same or different frequencies to extend your reach) to connect out to systems that I can’t reach directly.

MoinMoin has worked out well for this. It has an inviting theme and newbie-friendly interface (I want to encourage drive-by contributions).

Debconf10

Debian

Debconf10 ended a week ago, and I’m only now finding some time to write about it. Funny how it works that way sometimes.

Anyhow, the summary of Debconf has to be: this is one amazing conference. Despite being involved with Debian for years, this was my first Debconf. I often go to one conference a year that my employer sends me to. In the past, it’s often been OSCon, which was very good, but Debconf was much better than that even. For those of you considering Debconf11 next year, perhaps this post will help you make your decision.

First of all, as might be expected from a technical conference, Debconf was of course informative. I particularly appreciated the enterprise track, which was very relevant to me. Unlike many other conferences, Debconf has some rooms specifically set aside for BoFs. With a day or two warning, you can get your event in one of those rooms on the official schedule. That exact thing happened with a virtualization BoF — I thought the topic was interesting, given the recent shifts in various virtualization options. So I emailed the conference mailing list, and we got an event on the schedule a short while later — and had a fairly large group turn out to discuss it.

The “hallway track” — conversations struck up with others in hallways or hacklabs — also was better at Debconf than other conferences. Partly that may be because, although there were fewer people at Debconf, they very much tended to be technical people whose interests aligned with my own. Partly it’s probably also because the keysigning party, which went throughout the conference, encouraged meeting random people. That was a great success, by the way.

So Debconf succeeded at informing, which is perhaps why many people go to these things. But it also inspired, especially Eben Moglen’s lecture. Who would have thought I’d come away from a conference enthused about the very real potential we have to alter the dynamics of some of the largest companies in the world today by using Free Software to it’s greatest potential?

And, of course, I had fun at Debconf. Meeting new people — or, more commonly, finally meeting in person people I’d known for years — was great. I got a real sense of the tremendously positive aspect of Debian’s community, which I must admit I have sometimes overlooked during certain mailing list discussions. This was a community of people, not just a bunch of folks attending a random conference for a week, and that point underlined a lot of things that happened.

Of course, it wasn’t 100% perfect, and it won’t ever be. But still, my thanks to everyone that organized, volunteered, and attended Debconf. I’m now wishing I’d been to more of them, and hope to attend next year’s.

Time to learn a new language

Programming

I have something of an informal goal of learning a new programming language every few years. It’s not so much a goal as it is something of a discomfort. There are so many programming languages out there, with so many niches and approaches to problems, that I get uncomfortable with my lack of knowledge of some of them after awhile. This tends to happen every few years.

The last major language I learned was Haskell, which I started working with in 2004. I still enjoy Haskell and don’t see anything displacing it as my primary day-to-day workhorse.

Yet there are some languages that I’d like to learn. I have an interest in cross-platform languages; one of my few annoyances with Haskell is that it can’t (at least with production quality) be compiled into something like Java bytecode or something else that isn’t architecture-dependent. I have long had a soft spot for functional languages. I haven’t had such a soft spot for static type checking, but Haskell’s type inference changed that for me. Also I have an interest in writing Android apps, which means some sort of Java tie-in would be needed.

Here are my current candidates:

  • JavaScript. I have never learned the language but dislike it intensely based on everything I have learned about it (especially the diverging standards of implementation). Nevertheless, there are certain obvious reasons to try it — the fact that most computers and mobile phones can run it out of the box is an important one.
  • Scheme. Of somewhat less interest since I learned Common Lisp quite awhile back. I’m probably pretty rusty at it, but I’m not sure Scheme would offer me anything novel that I can’t find in Haskell — except for the ability to compile to JVM bytecode.
  • Lua — it sounds interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s general-purpose enough to merit long-term interest.
  • Scala sounds interesting — a OOP and FP language that compiles to JVM bytecode.
  • Smalltalk. Seems sad I’ve never learned this one.
  • There are some amazing webapps written using Cappuccino. The Github issue interface is where I hear about this one.
  • Eclipse. I guess it’s mostly not a programming language but an IDE, but then there’s some libraries (RCP?) or something with it — so to be honest, I don’t know what it is. Some people seem very excited about it. I tried it once, couldn’t figure out how to just open a file and start editing already. Made me feel like I was working for Initech and wouldn’t get to actually compile something until my TPS coversheets were in order. Dunno, maybe it’s not that bad, but I never really understood the appeal of something other than emacs/vi+make.
  • A Haskell web infrastructure such as HSP or hApps. Not a new language, but might as well be…

Of some particular interest to me is that Haskell has interpreters for Scheme, Lua, and JavaScript as well as code generators for some of these languages (though not generic Haskell-to-foo compilers).

Languages not in the running because I already know them include: OCaml, POSIX shell, Python, Perl, Java, C, C++, Pascal, BASIC, Common Lisp, Prolog, SQL. Languages I have no interest in learning right now include Ruby (not different enough from what I already know plus bad experiences with it), any assembly, anything steeped in the Microsoft monoculture (C#, VB, etc.), or anything that is hard to work with outside of an Emacs or vim environment. (If your language requires or strongly encourages me to use your IDE or proprietary compiler, I’m not interested — that means you, flash.)

Brief Reivews of Languages I Have Used

To give you a bit of an idea of where I’m coming from:

  • C: Not much to say there. I think its pros and cons are well-known. I consider it to be too unwieldy for general-purpose use these days, though find myself writing code in it every few years for some reason or other.
  • Perl: The first major interpreted language I learned. Stopped using it entirely after learning Python (didn’t see any advantage of Perl over Python, and plenty of disadvantages.)
  • Python: Used to really like it. Both the language and I have changed. It is no longer the “clean” language it was in the 1.5 days. Too many lists-that-aren’t-lists, __underscorethings__, etc. Still cleaner than Perl. It didn’t scale up to large projects well, and the interpreted dynamic nature left me not all that happy to use it for some tasks. Haven’t looked at Python 3, but also it probably isn’t ready for prime time yet anyhow.
  • Java: Better than C++ for me. Cross-platform bytecode features. That’s about all that I have to say about it that’s kind. The world’s biggest source of carpal tunnel referrals in my book. Mysteriously manages to have web apps that require 2GB of RAM just to load. Dunno where that came from; Apache with PHP and mod_python takes less than 100M.
  • Haskell: A pretty stellar mix of a lot of nice features, type inference being one of the very nice ones in my book. My language of choice for almost all tasks. Laziness can be hard for even experienced Haskellers to understand at times, and the libraries are sometimes in a bit of flux (which should calm down soon). Still a very interesting language and, in fact, a decent candidate for my time as there is some about it I’ve never picked up, including some modules and web toolkits.
  • OCaml: Tried it, eventually discarded it. An I/O library that makes you go through all sorts of contortions to be able to open a file read/write isn’t cool in my book.

Jacob has a new computer — and a favorite shell

Children & Computing, Debian, Family, Linux

Earlier today, I wrote about building a computer with Jacob, our 3.5-year-old, and setting him up with a Linux shell.

We did that this evening, and wow — he loves it. While the Debian Installer was running, he kept begging to type, so I taught him how to hit Alt-F2 and fired up cat for him. That was a lot of fun. But even more fun was had once the system was set up. I installed bsdgames and taught him how to use worm. worm is a simple snake-like game where you use the arrow keys to “eat” the numbers. That was a big hit, as Jacob likes numbers right now. He watched me play it a time or two, then tried it himself. Of course he crashed into the wall pretty quickly, which exits the game.

I taught him how to type “worm” at the computer, then press Enter to start it again. Suffice it to say he now knows how to spell worm very well. Yes, that’s right: Jacob’s first ever Unix command was…. worm.

He’d play the game, and cackle if he managed to eat a number. If he crashed into a wall, he’d laugh much harder and run over to the other side of the room.

Much as worm was a hit, the Linux shell was even more fun. He sometimes has a problem with the keyboard repeat, and one time typed “worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm”. I tried to pronounce that for him, which he thought was hilarious. He was about to backspace to fix it, when I asked, “Jacob, what will happen if you press Enter without fixing it?” He looked at me with this look of wonder and excitement, as if to say, “Hey, I never thought of that. Let’s see!” And a second later, he pressed Enter.

The result, of course, was:

-bash: worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm: command not found

“Dad, what did it do?”

I read the text back, and told him it means that the computer doesn’t know what worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm means. Much laughter. At that point, it became a game. He’d bang at random letters, and finally press Enter. I’d read what it said. Pretty soon he was recognizing the word “bash”, and I heard one time, “Dad, it said BASH again!!!” Sometimes if he’d get semicolons at the right place, he’d get two or three “bashes”. That was always an exciting surprise. He had more fun at the command line than he did with worm, and I think at least half of it was because the shell was called bash.

He took somewhat of an interest in the hardware part earlier in the evening, though not quite as much. He was interested in opening up other computers to take parts out of them, but bored quickly. The fact that Terah was cooking supper probably had something to do with that. He really enjoyed the motherboard (and learned that word), and especially the CPU fan. He loved to spin it with his finger. He thought it interesting that there would be a fan inside his computer.

When it came time to assign a hostname, I told Jacob he could name his computer. Initially he was confused. Terah suggested he could name it “kitty”, but he didn’t go for it. After a minute’s thought, he said, “I will name it ‘Grandma Marla.'” Confusion from us — did he really understand what he was saying? “You want to name your computer ‘Grandma Marla?'” “Yep. That will be silly!” “Sure you don’t want to name it Thomas?” “That would be silly! No. I will name my computer ‘Grandma Marla.”” OK then. My DNS now has an entry for grandma-marla. I had wondered what he would come up with. You never know with a 3-year-old!

It was a lot of fun to see that sense of wonder and experimentation at work. I remember it from the TRS-80 and DOS machine, when I would just try random things to see what they would do. It is lots of fun to watch it in Jacob too, and hear the laughter as he discovers something amusing.

We let Jacob stay up 2 hours past his bedtime to enjoy all the excitement. Tomorrow the computer moves to his room. Should be loads of excitement then too.

Introducing the Command Line at 3 years

Children & Computing, Debian, Family, Hardware, Linux

Jacob is very interested in how things work. He’s 3.5 years old, and into everything. He loves to look at propane tanks, as the pressure meter, and open the lids on top to see the vent underneath. Last night, I showed him our electric meter and the spinning disc inside it.

And, more importantly, last night I introduced him to the Linux command line interface, which I called the “black screen.” Now, Jacob can’t read yet, though he does know his letters. He had a lot of fun sort of exploring the system.

I ran “cat”, which will simply let him bash on the keyboard, and whenever he presses Enter, will echo what he typed back at him. I taught him how to hold Shift and press a number key to get a fun symbol. His favorite is the “hat” above the 6.

Then I ran tr a-z A-Z for him, and he got to watch the computer convert every lowercase letter into an uppercase letter.

Despite the fact that Jacob enjoys watching Youtube videos of trains and even a bit of Railroad Tycoon 3 with me, this was some pure exploration that he loves. Sometimes he’d say, “Dad, what will this key do?” Sometimes I didn’t know; some media keys did nothing, and some other keys caused weird things to appear. My keyboard has back and forward buttons designed to use with a web browser. He almost squealed with delight when he pressed the forward button and noticed it printed lots of ^@^@^@ characters on the screen when he held it down. “DAD! It makes LOTS of little hats! And what is that other thing?” (The at-sign).

I’ve decided it’s time to build a computer for Jacob. I have an old Sempron motherboard lying around, and an old 9″ black-and-white VGA CRT that’s pretty much indestructible, plus an old case or two. So it will cost nothing. This evening, Jacob will help me find the parts, and then he can help me assemble them all. (This should be interesting.)

Then I’ll install Debian while he sleeps, and by tomorrow he should be able to run cat all by himself. I think that, within a few days, he can probably remember how to log himself in and fire up a program or two without help.

I’m looking for suggestions for text-mode games appropriate to a 3-year-old. So far, I’ve found worm from bsdgames that looks good. It doesn’t require him to have quick reflexes or to read anything, and I think he’ll pick up using the arrow keys to move it just fine. I think that tetris is probably still a bit much, but maybe after he’s had enough of worm he would enjoy trying it.

I was asked on Twitter why I’ll be using the command line for him. There are a few reasons. One is that it will actually be usable on the 9″ screen, but another one is that it will expose the computer at a different level than a GUI would. He will inevitably learn about GUIs, but learning about a CLI isn’t inevitable. He won’t have to master coordination with a mouse right away, and there’s pretty much no way he can screw it up. (No, I won’t be giving him root yet!) Finally, it’s new and different to him, so he’s interested in it right now.

My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo) II. Its primary interface, a BASIC interpreter, I guess counts as a command-line interface. I remember learning how to use that, and later DOS on a PC. Some of the games and software back then had no documentation and crashed often. Part of the fun, the challenge, and sometimes the frustration, was figuring out just what a program was supposed to do and how to use it. It will be fun to see what Jacob figures out.