Alex Belits

TV upgrade -- HDHomeRun and MythTV 0.22

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:15:24 GMT

After The Great TV Transition To Digital, Comcast for a while kept transmitting everything in analog NTSC, so I was able to use my Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 for cable, and occasionally watched over-the-air ATSC with HVR-950. It was clear that this was not going to last, and recently all but few NTSC channels disappeared. On top of that, when HVR-950 didn't get a sufficiently strong signal or was otherwise confused, a combination of its hardware, driver and MythTV 0.21 ended up in some weird state that prevented all further tuning until full driver reload, so over the air reception was quite far from the painless experience that I remembered from pre-cable, pre-digital days. Upgrade to MythTV 0.22 gave me some improved HDTV output modes, but didn't do anything to reliable ATSC reception, and definitely didn't turn PVR-250 into a digital decoder -- something had to be done. My 40th birthday was an acceptable excuse to buy another device, so after some research I went to Fry's and brought home HDHomeRun -- a networked dual-tuner digital TV receiver.

Not surprisingly, installation and configuration were quite painless -- receiver got its address from DHCP, MythTV detected the receiver and its two tuners, ran a scan on both, and found a bunch of channels. Just as not-surprisingly, SchedulesDirect produced a channels list full of mis-identified channels (apparently radio stations that were recognized as TV), so the list required some tweaking before becoming usable.

The surprising part was playback. For a completely unrelated reason I have recently upgraded my NVIDIA graphics card, and the new card supports VDPAU. Before installing HDHomeRun I have spent some time tweaking MythTV to make HDTV play on a 1680x1050 monitor with my old AMD Athlon XP 3200+ and HVR-950. In the end everything up to 720x576 was set to ffmpeg decoder, Xv output, Yadif deinterlacer, denoise3d filter, everything above -- NVIDIA VDPAU, Temporal deinterlacer. Most channels played smooth, however it seemed like the time spent getting the high-resolution frames from HVR-950 was sufficient to cause some choppiness -- or maybe it only looked like that due to some dropped or corrupt data because I only tested it with over-the-air reception. With HDHomeRun this problem disappeared -- flawless playback on cable channels regardless of resolution, occasional visibly corrupt frames on some over-the-air channels, but no choppiness.

For some reason closed captions (and only closed captions, not other forms of overlays) on some resolutions cause massive slowdown and dropped frames. Low resolution (with all-software decoding and Xv output) is fine, high resolution (hardware decoding and high-resolution overlay) is fine, medium resolution (apparently higher-resolution text overlay on lower-resolution hardware-decoded video) has problems. Other than that, I have a fully-functional TV and DVR that receives cable and over-the-air TV, on a box with Athlon XP 3200+ CPU and a five years old motherboard.

Obviously, the whole thing only works with non-encrypted channels -- if by any chance Comcast will decide that they should DRM the Hell out of their network, everything will be broken again. Hopefully sanity will prevail, and the amount of breakage that it would inflict on all other existing subscribers will keep them from going into that direction. PVR-250 still receives some NTSC channels, and HVR-950 is still connected for its analog video input and may potentially be used as a backup tuner -- if I (or driver developers) will find out how to keep it from getting stuck.

Clarification

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 04:48:41 GMT

For a long time I did not post anything here. I felt that I should provide some clarification about my (usually unflattering) description of Americans and American society, yet any attempt to express it in an entry ended up being too long and barely readable. Without finishing that entry I didn't feel like posting anything else, so I had to finish or abandon it at some point. The following is still too long, however it serves a purpose of clarification by being umm... clear.

First of all, about taking things personally. I thought, it should be obvious that I am not even trying to provide some kind of all-inclusive description, or even a stereotype that is supposed to apply to everyone in US. Plenty of people who live in US do not share typical American ideas, personality traits, goals and fads I describe as American. Not each and every American I have ever seen is an ignorant, arrogant, fanatical self-destructive misanthrope. The problem is, enough Americans are all those things, so those traits prevail and spread through society, everyone is stuck dealing with them, and the society that produces them. This is something that I don't want to play down.

There are ideas that for Americans were the constant background over their whole lives. Just like the idea that your reflection in the mirror swaps right and left but not up and down despite being completely unaffected by gravity. Things that most people never thought of analyzing or questioning, things that no one can expect to be rewarded for analyzing. And things that, as opposed to question about mirror, have direct effect on the way how everyone -- including me -- lives in US.

American ideology is based on "freedom" being valuable, ownership of "property" being a right capable of trumping everything else, yet "fairness" being a domain of some kind of divine force or expected fundamental property of the Universe that people should not meddle with, lest it will affect someone else's "freedom". With "freedom" more often than not being defined as unrestricted ability to control other people through the above mentioned "property" and positions in powerful organizations, and "fairness" including basic things such as survival or not being imposed an obligation for anything a person could not possibly provide.

I see this as a total nonsense, and everyone who actually has this set of priorities as a dangerous idiot. Sure, not everyone in US worships "freedom", has life goals identical to "American Dream", and believes that he should sheepishly accept beatings he receives from the rich and powerful. However the sad truth is, every single time something depends on the popularity of those ideas, the society as a whole supports and promotes them while driving all opposition to them into total irrelevance.

I would have no problem if the majority -- stupid, retarded by worldwide standards American majority -- was so humiliated by intellectually superior minority that it voluntarily removed itself from making decisions it clearly isn't qualified to make, just like all self-recognized stupid or apathetic people do everywhere outside US. I would be slightly less happy if instead of humiliating the stupid, society enforced the progress by directly oppressing intellectually incapable people, though it would be still a very reasonable solution in the absence of healthier relationship with the stupid.

But Americans -- including best, smartest and most qualified to improve their own society -- made no effort to advance their society into that direction. Churches are allowed to indoctrinate little kids with their superstitions, adults that are grown from those infected kids flock to their leaders, they get instructions how to live their lives, what to love and what to hate, whom to vote for, and how to submit their kids to the same process, and the cycle goes on and on without as much as attempt of resistance or subversion. What means, at the scale of the country, at the scale where politicians, businesses, educators -- everyone who affects lives of others -- operate on behalf of the public, it's nothing but self-perpetuating screams coming from stupid people. People who believe that mythological characters will reward them after death, people who believe that tomorrow they will happily join "upper" or "middle" class as a result of some clever scheme, people who value hurting others more than all other emotions they can feel, and other similar kinds of freaks.

Even among those who should have known better, most are infected at some extent -- they are so mesmerized by this idea of "freedom", they believe they shouldn't subject the stupid to any kind of propaganda or humiliation despite the fact that those stupid people are all but swimming in propaganda and encouragement that perpetuates their own stupidity.

Does the magical word "FREEEEEEEDOM!!!!" you have heard since the moment you were born disable your capability to analyze any situation? If so, I guess, you are among those whom I call stupid American majority. If not, I apologize for any possible misunderstanding -- I don't think, I personally went through any process where I had to reject such a significant part of my upbringing, so I can only proclaim my respect for you. However your society is still evil, and you should be ashamed of it.

Individuality, or why every kid should be told to be a good drone

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 10:26:54 GMT

In modern American culture right after two greatest values that are proclaimed to be celebrated the most -- "freedom" (whatever kind of freedom it is supposed to be) and money -- there is "individuality". And just like with first two, overwhelming majority of population lacks everything but the most rudimentary forms of it -- most of people have all their thoughts borrowed from one of the few "camps" ("conservatives", "progressives", "poor me, trying to survive", "technocrats" even), tastes borrowed from one of few popular styles, etc. Genuine interest in anything but few "popular" areas is extremely rare, people rarely diverge from cookbook solutions, fixed aesthetic styles and ritualized social behavior.

Some are quick to blame improvements in mass media and communication. If one has inclination for something popular, he won't have to look past his TV to be presented with multitude of carefully prepared, selected to fall smack in the middle of the range, role models. If he has inclination toward something unpopular, he will likely find a massive crowd of people into the same thing on the Internet, and will follow them, mimicking whatever grown to be popular among the group he joined -- no matter how bizarre or sick.

In my opinion the root of the problem is much deeper, and it starts in people at much younger age. The problem is the very fact that society promotes "individuality" way too much. So every little kid who has absolutely no idea about anything in the world around himself, is told to "express himself", and he finds nothing else to express but few basic ideas or ways to express his emotions that he managed to pick up -- so he just expresses them in exaggerated way. As he grows up he is told that random variations he has from others are somehow "valuable" and they define him, yet his accomplishments and failures in things that actually matter to others are not (as in "You are not your job..." part of the Tyler Durden speech in Fight Club -- that makes a lot of sense when directed toward a bunch of losers but not otherwise). Later in life society still presents him with a fixed set of goals -- achieve wealth, have sex/create a family, rise in whatever system of social hierarchy that he entered, etc., but tells him that it's important that he should "figure out" how to use his "unique abilities" to accomplish those goals. The result obviously can't be good for the majority of people because whatever "uniqueness" they have developed that way is absolutely useless for anything but ornamental purposes, what is pretty weak as far as life skills are concerned. So despite having such a "friendly" society a person rebels against it because it is asking the impossible -- too bad, the person has no means to express that rebellion in any way other than by anger and hostility.

I think, this happens because "politically correct" society takes a completely unnatural role in this whole "individuality" thing. Individuality is inherent in every human, and society is its natural enemy. Society, if it functions properly, presents a person with things to learn, believe, imitate, achieve and conform to. A young kid is powerless against it, and it's precisely how things are supposed to be -- his weak feelings and ides, individual or not, are not worthy opponents to the society, so they are suppressed, not placed into a positive-feedback loop that will let them grow to extremes. As person absorbs ideas, his mental capacity grows enough to develop critical thinking, and then he can start evaluating the ideas presented to him and imposed on him.

At that point individuality can become truly valuable -- an idea that society accepts, promotes and teaches to kids is usually popular, so rejection of it may be an act of thinking that is different from the mainstream. Of course, more likely it's merely some common form of selfish behavior that society opposed, but a wonderful thing about society is that it's good at oppressing common forms of antisocial behavior and bad at opposing uncommon ones. Unless it's some ridiculously oppressive society such as Europe in Middle Ages or a modern religious cult, it either can't be bothered with shooting down everything unusual, or does it very poorly. So in this "mildly oppressive" society growing kids benefit from both popular ideas they absorb and unpopular but not trivial/antisocial ideas they develop -- and have to exercise critical thinking and communication skills while developing and defending this hard-earned individuality. It may happen that independently developed ideas may not be individual after all, but what is important, they were developed, possibly stood up to society's pressure, and ended up in a form that society can live with -- capability to produce those is an important skill.

A large number of people still won't do anything unusual and will merely select among socially acceptable ideas and goals they were presented with -- but then what did they lose in the process? Someone's tendency to read books aloud at the age of 10 didn't get escalated into becoming a professional actor despite lack of acting skills? I would prefer to see a well-adjusted person who is content with his professional life over either an office drone who believes that his life isn't worth living unless he plays Hamlet, or an actor that should've never shown up on a stage or in front of a camera. That's not greatness or even potential for greatness, that's pathetic -- I don't need that, society does not need this, and most of all those people don't need that.

To develop individuality in kids society has to oppose it. It has to force enough initial knowledge and cultural context upon them so they will have something to think and be curious about (or they will just absorb more entertainment that is hardly a substitute). It has to resist new ideas to provide an example of criticism, especially if the kid is too young to think of it by himself. It should tone down political and religious propaganda in school, it has to support people who found unique ways to produce valuable and impressive things and ideas, and it shouldn't attack every harmless quirk, however it's also has to stop telling everyone that he is a unique snowflake whose only value is in uniqueness. I don't know, what kind of idiot I would become if I grew up in such an environment, as I had plenty of uniqueness but few valuable abilities.

Experience of being and not being poor (oh, and I don't like your society)

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:43:19 GMT

I believe, I have an announcement to make -- as of last week, I am no longer poor.

Of course, such announcement goes against traditions of society, and the very fact of me no longer being poor can be disputed depending on the standards of "poor" -- by some I never was poor in the first place, by some I am still poor. I reject the first -- tradition -- because it obviously exists not for the benefit of those who follow it. It prevents people from learning important details of their friends and neighbors' lives and the condition of society as a whole. That leaves it to media and advertisements to paint a picture of either prosperity where the reader is the last person who still didn't benefit from it, or of doom and gloom where the aforementioned reader should be thankful for his supposedly uncommon position of financial stability among the sea of horror and chaos. Also this event is an important illustration to some points I am trying to express in the following long rant-like text, so it has to be brought up.

The second can be countered by presenting a definition that is superior to all others -- a poor person is someone who has to routinely inflict permanent harm on himself and others that he would avoid if he had sufficient wealth or income. In my case this is demonstrably true -- over the last few years I had to tolerate very constrained living conditions, had to eat food of inferior quality compared to my normal diet, delayed some dental care procedures, kept my car grounded due to disrepair and insurance cost thus wasting mine and other people's time when I had to go anywhere beyond San Francisco, imposed my presence on my friends who would be better off without it, missed many opportunities to learn something interesting and useful, and limited my participation in Free/Open Source software development to bare minimum. Considering that despite my still supposedly youthful looks I am almost 40, I count all those things as permanent harm. From this point all my self-destructive activities are strictly voluntary, therefore I am no longer poor.

In terms of absolute dollar value, my primary bank account briefly overshot $10k, and then returned back to that level as I made payments for my previously maxed out credit cards, returning my total amount of debt to about the same $10k. About $1900 that previously was spent on mortgage and maintenance of my Denver condo is now off my monthly expenses list, thus returning some sanity to the whole situation. Yes, it takes that little (or that much) to make a difference between deciding which bills to skip this month and living somewhat normal human life.

As it is probably obvious by now, the reason for this whole event was very simple -- after almost two years of being unused, the Denver condo was sold, so I no longer have to pay for two apartments, the larger and more expensive of which I couldn't even use. I am renting a relatively small but nice apartment in Emeryville, in a building that survived last major earthquake unharmed, it is a 40-minutes walk to my work, and I find it to be a perfectly acceptable living arrangement. The amounts of "debt", "interest", and supposed "loss" I taken by selling the condo below the initial price are utterly irrelevant -- what is important, I have actually spent $50k of down payment in the end of 2001 buying the condo, paid $1700-$1900 per month in mortgage and maintenance payments, and got back about $8k when it was sold. The rest is for all practical purpose is a bunch of fictional money shuffled between banks and mortgage companies in a process that people are finally starting to call by its true name -- the credit bubble.

I heard, debt and poverty bring the worst in people. If so, I have to be a good person -- my worst was telling my father that his attempts to play boss/parent ruined five years of my life and therefore I want him out of it, moving back to California, annoying my friends while I was living with them and, of course, not writing enough software. Not much by any standard.

And now that I am back to the condition where I can actually live my life instead of struggling with constant stress, I guess, I should explain my motivation and the role of poverty in it.

When I lived in USSR, my aspirations were pretty high. I loved science (especially Physics) and engineering (especially Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), so I wanted to do what I love, excel at it, achieve some breakthroughs and be respected for it. I never specialized in some narrow area, and I thought that no matter what I will end up doing in particular, I will have to study a wide range of topics, and if I will work on those things long enough, I will eventually approach the toughest problem -- making sense of how our brain works. So my top ambition was -- not really even to solve, but to contribute to understanding of that problem. That was it, and it's still true. I didn't care about money or power -- "owning things" was very low on my priorities list, and "ordering people around" was even lower. I loved to think and build stuff, and wanted to think, build stuff and communicate with people thinking about the same problems.

I didn't care about money at all, and I had a reason for it -- actually greatest reason not to care about money of all possible reasons -- I had no use for them beyond the amount that I would be paid no matter what. In USSR there was implied social contract, government was responsible for society's life support, so people could live their lives without expecting themselves to die, get sick, get kicked out of their home, be hounded by someone demanding money they don't have, etc. as long as they did something -- anything -- useful. And life in that condition -- getting salary, paying token rent for an apartment, buying heavily subsidized food -- was anything but stressful, or creating any sense of being deprived of something. Someone who cared about getting more interesting work, getting promoted, or earning more, could -- depending on social position he ended up with -- do various things to achieve his ambitions, but my ambition was clearly in the "more interesting work" direction, something that usually could be easily achieved given some presence of talent, persistence and lack of obviously career-limiting moves such as publishing a poem where Communist Party leader is described as a monster. And sometimes in spite of such career-limiting moves (though some serious-looking people would continuously ask you to stop inciting to overthrow the government while working on nukes for the same government -- they obviously misunderstood something but I can see their logic).

Most of you (Americans) believe that life in USSR was terrible because people complained all the time about it. You fools. People complained because anything that deprived them of this "society's life support" was seen as a direct breach of this social contract. If anyone in USSR in 80's (or 70's, or 60's) built a truly shoddy apartment building, population would be up in arms -- not because of terrible living conditions but because it's unfair to place people in those conditions when clearly there are enough resources for better ones, so someone is obviously messing with things that rightfully belong to the people. It wouldn't matter who can afford what, whose property is what, etc. -- housing is a part of social contract, so it's OK to make people wait for apartments to be built but it's not OK to build them on the cheap or refuse to maintain them. First is poor performance, second is intentional damage, insult to the public. Being able to afford a better apartment with more money is no excuse -- social contract is not conditional on that. Baseline conditions had to be maintained, and their purpose is not to push people into trying to get higher-paying jobs but to live lives not centering on chasing money. Please note that all this was with 100% employment, also guaranteed by the government as the part of that social contract -- it's not "welfare" or "for the poor", it was assumed that a person has to work and has a right to live in conditions that allow him to function. If such (assumed to be honestly working) person finds that it takes days to fix a leaky pipe, he won't even look at his paycheck unless he will try to take things into his own hands -- and building management office will have to say something better than "you don't pay us enough". Since building management offices worldwide are in a habit of doing poor job, people in USSR seen them as breaking social contract while in US it was a perfectly acceptable practice that everyone understood as stemming from the sacred concepts of property and market.

Of course, there is also a matter of "freedom". For a scientist or engineer "freedom" mostly would mean that he can work on a project he likes, the project won't get canceled, and his publications, if any, won't get blocked. After equally great success with tanks/nukes/missiles, and failure with Lysenko, government learned to keep ideologues on a leash, and scientists learned to precede everything they write with "According to directions expressed in resolution of the <number>-th Communist Party Congress, <word> is one of the most important areas of future development". Ideologues would still censor to death anything related to politics or recent history, but that was clearly in their understanding of social contract, the understanding that intelligentsia did not share (and for a good reason). However there is one more important detail. Publishing -- any kind of it -- had to go through the government channels. It meant that anything published not only was allowed to be printed and distributed but that government "heard" it. And by "heard" means that if it calls for government action, government can't ignore it -- it has to make an explicit decision what to do. So if someone through persistence and careful ideological maneuvering managed to get his words out in Izvestiya (legislature's paper) or even Literaturnaya Gazeta (Writers Union's paper), criticizing some particular bureaucrat or policy established by some office, there will be a meeting among that bureaucrat's superiors or people in charge of making that policy, and even though not necessarily there will be direct results, things couldn't be just ignored. So speech with any political meaning had more purpose than informing the population but to trigger such a process. This is why there was so much wrangling around that. And things like leaky pipes and building management offices could safely go to Krokodil (Criticism/satire magazine), usually still causing enough reaction. After political reforms in late 80's one of the first things that surprised people was "We now have freedom of speech, but they have freedom of listening, what was the point of that?!". I obviously wasn't happy with such arrangement (I would prefer to read what people said, not what government listens to), but I liked the fact that government could be forced to listen, even if the procedure was difficult. And, again, no money involved. Ideological maneuvering -- yes, danger to become a pariah at the whim of some powerful figure -- occasionally so, paying shills to push your point of view so everyone is sick of hearing it -- no. In a way, very democratic and almost fair arrangement.

So no, following my dreams, desire for personal comfort or freedom would not require me to amass wealth by somehow extracting it from my fellow humans. There is however another reason why people might want to be rich -- I believe, primary reason for Americans. And that reason is to make others suffer.

Personally I believe, I am not inclined to sadism in any form. Rarely I had opportunity to hurt people, but when long time ago I was in schoolyard fights, I didn't feel any satisfaction from hurting an opponent. Fending off the attacker, getting my stuff back -- yes, but landing blows at the face or gut of someone I hate felt like pointless expression of anger that no one is going to appreciate, not unlike shaking my fist at the Moon, or something. Schadenfreude, of course, is a completely different matter, but that usually applies to things where the very actions that make me care about what happens to some person led to their suffering (or, ideally, to removing the capability to continue those actions). One exception however was with revenge fantasies -- since usually those were caused by something I perceived as extreme injustice, I didn't want to hurt people, I wanted to kill them. One instance involved flying an airplane into a building (YA, RLY -- can a person be honest for a moment? I was 13 or 14 then, for whatever sake!). As my long history of posting here and on various board shows, I often try to humiliate people by exposing their ignorance, stupidity or dishonesty, however again, my whole point is that it's not my "superior firepower" that pwns them, it's their own attempts to pass themselves as authority on some subject while demonstrating something that clearly disqualifies them as such. So despite being angry at plenty of things that I believe, deserve my anger and hostility, I am not eager to hire lawyers and thugs to harass people responsible for it, buy land around their favorite fishing spot, or bribe their employer into making me their boss. But that's me.

In American culture success is supposed to be measured by money, but really it doesn't work that way -- at some point I was formally a millionaire, but without acting like supposedly rich person, I occupied precisely the same position in the society where I am now -- if anyone forgot, with $10k in the bank. It would be closer to reality to say that American culture values power, especially if it's somehow "earned", what usually means, achieved through the use of money. But what is power? Again, an example from USSR. Having the whole industry maintained by Executive branch of the government, USSR had plenty of bureaucrats in positions equivalent to a company or conglomerate manager. How powerful would be a bureaucrat close to the top of, say, Belarus Ministry of Machinery Manufacturing? In theory, a lot considering that it handled large number of factories that apparently were good enough to survive at this end of 90's economic crisis. But in reality his function is very limited -- he has to make decisions, but most of his decisions are predetermined by the set of rules set by his Minister, and on top of him USSR Department of Machinery Manufacturing. Whatever is not determined by the rules, requires some solutions that he has to devise, and be responsible for those decisions' success -- this time to the Minister, some Committee of Communist Party that he undoubtedly belongs to, and maybe some other groups of people. He performs a function, his decisions have a potential to cause great amount of good or harm, but he has very little leeway in making arbitrary decisions. He may fire some factory manager on a whim but he will have to make up some valid-looking justification that has something based on reality, he will be kicked out of his office if replacement manager performed worse, and he will spend many years in prison if it would be found that decision was caused by a bribe. Again, social contract and all -- you may have power but you are not supposed to mess with your responsibilities, the rest of people are doing their jobs and so should you.

So bureaucrat's power may be great, but he certainly can't have any fun exercising it. Compare this to what a powerful person in US, in particular a person who achieved power through owning things, has over other people. The common belief is that, borrowing from some stupid ninja website, rich people can humiliate, harass, sue or fire ANYONE THEY WANT!!! That's what makes them different from the rest. They have power and can have fun with it. And looking at the kind of people who end up as CEOs of large companies, a trail of obviously pointless lawsuits after such pillars of rich people's power as **AA and Church of Scientology, this doesn't seem like too much of a stretch. Now, look at how another side of American society is perceived by most of the population -- criminals. In general, people who commit serious crimes are perceived negatively. "Hi, I am a car thief" does not sound like a good introduction even as a joke. But which criminals are considered "cool"? Murderers are feared, and people may have morbid curiosity toward them, but that's it. Thieves can be appreciated by the level of some unusual skills they may have, but usually seen as low-life nuisance. Burglars are kind of respected when they manage to humiliate their victims while minimizing the harm they cause. Organized crime is seen as "refined", and pimps are adored. Pimps? Sure, pimps, at least ones in popular perception, have unique sense of style, but that's a sense of style that population does not share. The only other thing unique to pimps is... abuse of women. Pimp, no matter how low-life he is, is a "powerful" person. And so is a mob boss. Both share one trait that society supposedly despises -- abuse of people who somehow ended up under their control. Society was forced to promote negative view of abusive husbands because those were successfully targeted by politically active women (and I agree that domestic abuse is horrible), and various kinds of rape couldn't be treated as "cool powerful abuser" type of crime because of religiously-fueled outrage, but the image of a pimp avoided those problems because he abuses whores, women who are seen as undeserving sympathy and protection from the rest of society (another side of the same religiously-fueled outrage). And therefore pimps are cool, they are on top of the world because in their small domain they are unquestionable rulers.

Back to more common and realistically perceived things. In a small privately owned company owners are powerful people, but if any employee is asked for example how such a power can be exercised over their particular person, the first thing that comes to mind is usually "they can fire me". I would say "they can move me to another project", but that's because it's easier for me to imagine my work to be a victim of some decision to "shift priorities" rather than me personally being the target of direct hostility, but then I am not American, I don't expect hostility where others would. In a large company employees usually feel safe from the owners or shareholders' personal wrath, however managers are a completely different story. The only plausible explanation for explosive growth of middle management layer in those companies is that each manager's power is measured by the number of people he has under him. Being left in charge of some subsection of the company's pyramid, what can he do to increase this power? He can try to get promoted, but that means, he is supposed to replace his own manager, and that can only happen peacefully if that manager is also promoted. Massive vertical shifts necessary for such a maneuver are unlikely to happen, manager can't cause a new department to be created on top of him to get his manager out of the way, so what is another choice? Build a layer under his feet, of course! He will be in charge of hiring those new managers (exercising his glorious power every time someone is interviewed, and being able to select exact flunkies he wants), then exercising control over them for the rest of his tenure. He can shift responsibility, and instead of making decisions (hard! requires thinking!) he can just yell at them (abuse! fun!). And, of course, if the pyramid is large enough already, there is no one to prevent him from doing it. Flunkies likely will do likewise and hire more flunkies for themselves, and soon you can see massive structures made of managers cracking whips at more managers, all eating into profit margins until the whole thing collapses while they are trying to pass layoffs further away from themselves toward the bottom layer. Please note that none of this has anything to do with any productive activity -- with sufficient number of peasants same could happen in the court of some king in Middle Ages, except there would be actual torture and beheadings involved.

But why would sane people bring themselves to such behavior? I think, the answer is in how Americans are raised. There are two almost inevitable things that every American teenager encounters -- high school cliques and retail or fast food jobs. Both provide endless supply of anger, confusion, disillusionment and desire to get back at people who committed some severe abuse and injustice. It's the source of American Dream -- what I believe, in its true form is, to get extremely rich, achieve position of power over former abusers and commit various acts of physical and mental abuse toward them or their suitable replacements. What in the mind of a teenager may be to become a McDonald's manager, hire his former manager and act toward him in the same way he acted. Personally I probably would prefer dreaming of sniper rifles and crashing a remotely controlled 18-wheeler into that place, but I am not American, and I never actually tried to act on some teenage revenge fantasy. Americans get the chance to do so, and many of them act like abused fast food employees for the rest of their lives.

Now, how I feel while living in such a society? I obviously don't like it, however judging by my experience over the last two decades, I can live pretty much anywhere unless in that place some of my fundamental traits (such being Jewish, speaking English and Russian, having to wear eyeglasses, being over 30) would cause me to be sent for immediate extermination. If I have to maintain my "life support", and if my well-being is a hostage to the crap like your stupid financial crisis, I guess, the best I can do is to acknowledge that. I have things to do, and those unfortunate circumstances aren't nearly enough for me to abandon them. So no, I am not going to leave the country just because I don't like it -- after all, I don't think, I like countries in the first place.

Does recent being/not being poor affect my feeling of self-worth? It does, but only in a way that I regret not being able to live more productive life while being under constant stress and humiliation. I judge myself by my accomplishments and ability to build and understand things, and I still expect myself to advance human knowledge and progress of technology. I don't expect all people to share my abilities or my goals, however if the best you can dream of is to inflict pain and suffering on someone you don't like, please don't be surprised if I'll see you as a lesser being.

Bailout: Who insures the insurance executives -- apparently we all do

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 10:54:21 GMT

If anyone was following the news about massive bailout of American financial companies, he probably heard about AIG and its brilliant decision how to use some of those money -- that is, placing them directly into the executives' pockets. Uncharacteristically for American government, US Treasury insisted on changing that, and apparently AIG will have to bring executives' salaries closer to the sane level, however AIG Chairman insisted that some "bonuses agreed to in 2008, before the firm's problems became known, could not legally be blocked", and therefore tax dollars are still going to line the pockets of those people.

O RLY?

Since apparently everyone involved is either a crook or an idiot, here is a solution that taken me a whole 20 seconds to find: if they won't do it, tax 100% of those bonuses. Yes, government can do that. No, I don't expect it to happen.

Progress report:

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:11:32 GMT

Not electing the worst candidate into the highest
office in the country: .......................... PASSED

Universal healthcare: ........................... Pending

Re-industrialization of economy: ................ Pending

National public school curriculum: .............. Pending

Replacing prison terms for nonviolent
drug-related offenses with medical treatment: ... Pending

Ending Iraq war: ................................ Pending

Ending Afghanistan war: ......................... Pending

Closing Guantanamo prison: ...................... Pending

Patent reform: .................................. Pending

Election campaign finance reform: ............... Pending

Limits on corporate power, oversight over
monopolies and financial companies,
responsibility for fraud, legal harassment and
deception of the public, perpetrated by
companies: ...................................... Pending

==========================================================

OVERALL GRADE: .................. STILL FREAKING RETARDED

Congratulations.

Photo

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:52:36 GMT

I haven't posted anything in a while, so here is another photo of myself.

I finally made Ubuntu properly suspend and resume on XO, so now I don't have to wait for it to boot up when I carry it around.

How do I made fun of civilized peoplez?

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:48:51 GMT

Today a story was posted on Slashdot about a previously uncontacted tribe in Amazon forest, with one of the photos showing archers in war paint shooting arrows at the helicopter while some other tribesman (or maybe woman) standing nearby.

Here is my take on that:

XO laptop again -- with video

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:52:49 GMT

I made a video of my XO running Ubuntu. Nothing really unusual -- booting up, using wireless networking, running Firefox, watching Youtube video, running OpenOffice.org writer simultaneously with Firefox in 256M without swap, rotating the screen and switching backlight on and off:

Part 1

Part 2

As usual, all video capture, adding titles and format conversion was done on my Linux desktop. Camera is previously mentioned Sony DCR-TRV320, titles added in Kino video editor.

Ubuntu installation on XO laptop

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:13:31 GMT

I have posted Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) installation procedure and files on OLPC News forums. Here is how it looks like:

XO Laptop, SD card, USB drive with tarball

SD card installation

Starting terminal, becoming root, stopping hal, disabling auto-suspend, unmounting and erasing SD card's partition table

Starting fdisk, seeing empty partition table

Creating primary partition

Writing partition table

Creating ext3 filesystem

Creating directory, mounting filesystem, finding and extracting tarball

...extracting...

Finished extracting tarball, checking directory contents

Copying security directory, kernel and ramdisk images, modules and firmware. Finishing installation, returning system to its original state

Rebooting...

Booting from SD card

Linux boot-up messages

GDM login screen

Xfce desktop

Connecting to the wireless network

Starting terminal and aptitude

Installing updates

Increasing font size in Firefox

Forum post

I think, we have seen this already

For now, this is the easiest way to install it -- and since it works using XO itself for building the boot filesystem, it can be done by people who don't have other boxes running Linux. I will also post the "from scratch" installation procedure that produced those files I have placed into tarball -- they were installed in chroot environment starting from debootstrap.

Edit: I have posted the update with "from scratch" procedure.

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:44:42 GMT

I was walking in San Francisco Chinatown, and this ad attracted my attention:

I can't say that the message is unclear, or that I see it as wrong or unimportant, but my exposure to recent, and especially not so recent Internet fads and memes made me think of a completely different interpretation:

On the other hand this work of umm... art at the Bay Street mall in Emeryville is so clear, I can't think of altering a single pixel:

Everything I can say about consumerism, all satire and irony even remotely related to that subject, are dead in the face of this gloating piece of board erected over a clean, nearly geometrically perfect, bland and dull street.

OLPC XO-1 laptop

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:39:36 GMT

Some people recently asked me about my impressions about XO-1 laptop that I have mentioned one of my recent posts.

What am I doing with it in the first place

I am trying to do development work on it, with a goal of improving its networking, and replacing the last piece of proprietary software that it needs. If anyone did not notice yet, I am rather fond of free/open source software, and even though I would not go as far as Richard Stallman (see quote in the linked article), I would rather bring it into a "Stallman-approved" condition because a laptop with all user-modifiable software being distributed under open source licenses would be a great achievement in itself. I have found that the configuration I use for development makes it useful as a general-purpose mobile device, so this is what I did/think about it:

Laptop's original purpose vs. development vs. mobile device for adults

For my purpose laptop's native Sugar environment designed for kids in school is rather inadequate. Sugar provides strictly uniform interface over multiple applications, and keeps kids from losing their applications running on the machine. This was made at a terrible price from a developer/general-purpose user's point of view -- applications run in a fullscreen mode, popup windows are eliminated, menus are very large and clear, filesystem's hierarchy is mostly hidden from the user. There is no "Setup" of any kind -- user is presented with views of the current application, computer itself (with applications running) networked "group" and a "wireless networks" view, and that's it. I am sure, this will greatly reduce "where is my window?" and "Why my computer has all user interface in purple, and menus are in a font from those lolcats images?" problems that plague beginner computer users now, however for someone who is accustomed to windows that have borders, virtual desktops (spaces for you OSX users), and software that can edit source code, diagrams and technical drawings, this is not enough.

Educational use

To be honest, not being a teacher I am not really qualified to write a review for this laptop (or any other device) as an educational tool. I have an excuse for mentioning surprisingly GOOD decisions specific to a school environment only because despite Nicholas Negroponte proclaiming that "It's an education project, not a laptop project", no one really bothered to present a consistent curriculum that this laptop is supposed to be used with, so apparently people who run this program know less about education than I do.

I hope, missing pieces will be added as the project goes along, but development of tools in any way other than in parallel with curriculum is a terrible idea that I would only expect from a backwards, primitive education system such as one practiced in US, and I hope, this project will not crash and burn before someone realizes that educational applications come from curriculum and not the other way around. There are a lot of applications developed already, some perform general-purpose functions (text editor, browser, etc.), some range from a simple musical instrument to Python IDE and an oscilloscope with spectrum analyzer, however they don't fall into anything that even resembles a school curriculum.

Even if we take the lists of applications with general educational value that allow user to look up information (such as kalzium and celestia), or perform calculations/simulation (wims), I am sure, porting them to Sugar would provide a better initial set of applications than what exists now -- we know that they fit into existing curricula because this is what they are built for, even though they cover very little of what has to be done. For something as new and unusual as a programming course for kids, the existing Python IDE lacks graphics output while Turtle Art has graphics output paired with monstrously cumbersome representation of a language that confuses kids and adults alike (as opposed to Logo that is clear, simple and almost forty (!) years old).

In contrast to this poorly thought out set of applications (and don't tell me that Windows, MacOS or anything else general-purpose has a better one, they barely scratch the surface and provide atrociously inconsistent interface), the environment itself is a shining beacon of forethought applied to complex devices in the hands of kids. Seriously, I am impressed.

And, of course, taking this into account, stuffing Windows on it would completely negate educational use of its environment and turn all courses involving it into yet another "learn how to use Microsoft Word to write awesome reports with MS Comic Sans font and Microsoft Excel to make 3D graphics". I realize that people who want this laptop for general-purpose computing may demand Windows on it (though I don't see a point -- it can't run games, 3D CADs, EDA or other classes of software where Windows-specific applications may be more desirable for some users), but for learning? What are they going to put on it, free Matlab?

Development and general-purpose use

While Sugar includes terminal application, text editor and allows to install a compiler, it's not exactly an environment for a developer. And while it includes a fully-functional web browser, it's not for a general-purpose use either. Fortunately laptop's hardware is now widely supported by all Linux distributions, and laptop can boot from a USB drive or SD card. It's also possible to replace the environment in its main flash (laptop doesn't have a hard drive, everything runs from 1G flash), but then I wouldn't be able to run its original environment to check how my network stuff is doing in it, so I decided to upgrade main environment to the latest development version, and add a 2G SD card with Ubuntu. To be exact, originally I have installed Ubuntu on a 1G USB key, however key had a disadvantage that I had to remove it before packing the laptop -- when the laptop is closed, USB ports are covered by antenna "ears" that also perform a function of case locks. SD card simply sits inside its slot (also covered when the laptop is closed), and bootloader will boot from any media that has a valid development key file (keys are specific for a particular computer) on it.

Installing Ubuntu was very easy for a Linux user -- instructions here and here pretty much cover all initial installation. For everyone who would want to repeat this, please don't forget to replace the initially installed X driver and configuration file with AMD Geode ones, for some reason stuffed into "Rotating the screen" section of the second guide. Graphics output in un-accelerated mode is extremely slow, and screen runs with reduced brightness. I have taken photos of the screen instead of usual screenshots -- as expected, camera severely loses resolution and adds "moir" artifacts, but those pictures should be sufficient to show that things are clear and readable at the screen resolution. Every photo links to a larger version.

The configuration in the guides sets Xfce as the desktop environment. It's not as resource-hungry as GNOME or KDE, and its user interface less often assumes that controls should be draggable, what is helpful when using a touchpad.

Once Ubuntu is installed, I have configured traditional gdm login, set less screen-real-estate-wasting configuration for Xfce, and ended up with more or less typical Linux configuration:

Here is a closer look at the screen when panel and menu are activated:

Laptop has only 256M of RAM, so I wanted to check if massive fatasses of "general purpose" applications are usable. I don't know if the greatest fatass of all fatasses, Eclipse will work on it because I had only 2G SD card and had more important applications to spend its space on, but the second greatest fatass, OpenOffice.org didn't encounter any problems:

It can be seen that the font in its user interface is unusually large -- this is actually after it was set to 80% of its size in configuration. OLPC screen is treated as low-resolution by some applications and as high-resolution by others, so I had to separately "explain" to GTK and Qt applications that I want small font. Probably setting DPI to something other than default value will fix this problem, but for now this configuration is sufficient. Larger font DOES help considering loss of resolution that happens on this screen, but the configuration I have ended up with looks pretty clear to me.

I was afraid, applications that depend on high resolution will look poorly, however QCad seems to have no problems other than tendency to expand its status line into two due to a larger than expected font (it's disabled in the following screenshot) -- drawing is perfectly readable:

Laptop's peripherals

I have already mentioned the screen. It's described in more detail here, and my subjective impression is that a "real" 1200x900 screen would look much better, but it is more than sufficient for practical use, especially considering how small the device is -- I think, I would rather use it than smaller but more traditionally designed screens of other small laptops.

Networking is solely represented by wireless adapter that works with traditional and "mesh" modes. I haven't tested the mesh mode, but it behaves just like any other adapter when talking to regular access points. A large amount of networking-related functionality is offloaded to an ARM-based processor in the adapter, and the proprietary firmware that this adapter needs is the only user-modifiable piece of proprietary code that this laptop needs. Sugar's user interface for choosing a network would be more convenient if it didn't require the user to hover over every icon to see what it is, but I guess, this is the result of its original purpose not intended for environment stuffed with various access points belonging to various people organizations. In Linux it's only a matter of using Network Manager that provides a reasonably simple interface with a list of networks and strength of signal for each of them. It should be possible to plug a USB Ethernet adapter in one of three USB ports, but having two WRT54G access points in front of me I never had a reason to do that.

Input devices -- keyboard, touchpad and stylus pad -- are designed to be cheap and difficult to break. I can't say anything about stylus input because I never used it, but touchpad acts like a typical small touchpad -- requires high precision of movement. I can use the laptop with it, but prefer to attach a small optical mouse that acts exactly like I expect a mouse to work. I assume, same will be discovered in use in schools, and kids will be given USB mice for work in class. Keyboard has soft, squishy keys, what goes completely against my taste in keyboards. Nevertheless, I was able to use it, and it wasn't significantly more difficult to use than other keyboards that are simply small. Obviously, it's possible to attach a USB keyboard, or even my Model M with a USB adapter, but having a keyboard larger than a laptop would look too ridiculous for words. So here is a picture:

And yes, it works.

For use with a mobile phone it should be possible to attach a bluetooth adapter or a cable -- I use my Verizon phone in 1X mode with a bluetooth connection to my other laptop that also runs Ubuntu Linux, and it should work with this one as well. Same applies to less common things like serial to USB adapter for using this laptop as a console in a data center. To think of it, low power consumption and small size makes it a perfect device for this purpose -- one can go to a data center with this thing fully charged, and carry it between servers without worrying about finding a free power outlet for it.

There is a built-in camera and a sound card -- I have found nothing unusual about them except that small size of the screen and side-mounted camera prevent a forced "Myspace angle" that happens in the pictures taken by top-mounted cameras. Lack of hard drive and a low-power CPU make the laptop completely quiet, and it doesn't have any vents. There are more detailed specification on the OLPC Wiki.

Bicycle parking

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:12:43 GMT

How you park a bicycle in Berkeley, a world-famous college town:

How you park a bicycle in Emeryville, a yuppie enclave surrounding the IKEA store on I-80:

How you park a bicycle in Oakland, directly in front of the gates of MacArthur BART station, the largest subway transfer point in the whole San Francisco Bay Area:

User Interface

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:17:43 GMT

When visiting a Borders store I have encountered a UI deficiency of the kind that I have never seen before:

Desk

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:01:15 GMT

From left to right, bottom to top:

Playstation 2, controller, unrelated assorted remote controls (under the desk)
Western Electric Model 500 phone (made in 1952).
X-10 CP290 control panel with RS-232 interface.
Desktop computer (Athlon XP, Gentoo Linux). Among other things, runs Asterisk PBX and MythTV.
Rabbit ears TV antenna (used to receive HDTV channels with Hauppauge WinTV HVR-950 USB tuner and grabber attached to the desktop computer).
Linksys SPA2102 dual analog phone adapter (connected to the phone with LPT300 pulse to tone converter)
Two Linksys WRT54G wireless routers (top one running DD-WRT, bottom one running customized build of OpenWRT with the usual networking software plus Asterisk PBX, acting as a proxy/redirector for phone adapter and another Asterisk on the desktop computer).
Averatec 2150 laptop computer running Ubuntu Linux. Two mini-dongles (receiver for Logitech VX Nano wireless mouse and Kensington Bluetooth USB Micro adapter) can be seen in its USB ports on the right side of the case.
Dual gooseneck desk lamps. Bought in 2000 with bakelite lamp sockets and external cords -- since then old sockets crumbled and were replaced with stamped brass sockets, and cords pulled inside the goosenecks. Controlled by X-10 switch.
Sony DCR-TRV320 DV camera (attached to the desktop computer with firewire, records DV on 8mm tapes).
Porcelain mug and a teaspoon.
IBM Model M keyboard (42H1292, a relatively late version with blue logo, built in 1999 in UK).
Hauppauge remote control that came with Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 (behind the keyboard, used to control MythTV).
Infrared receiver for the remotes attached to the bottom of the screen.
LG L226W widescreen monitor.
Mechanical alarm clock.
Logitech V450 laser mouse (wheel tilt is supported and mapped to Alt-Reft and Alt-Right to be used as "back"/"forward", this mouse and the Model M keyboard are shared between all three computers using synergy).
OLPC XO-1 laptop, running Ubuntu Linux from an additional SD card.
Macally iOptiJr mouse connected to XO laptop.
Altec Lansing VS-2121 speaker (left speaker is behind the Averatec laptop, subwoofer is under the desk).
AC adapter for LG VX8300 phone that I have mentioned before.

Phone

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:30:53 GMT

After moving to Emeryville I got a local phone number and installed a phone. That would be way too ordinary thing to mention if not this:

The service I have is AT&T DSL line, with no phone service. It doesn't even have a dialtone.
The phone itself is an old rotary phone made by Western Electric (then a part of AT&T).
The phone service is Voicepulse Connect VoIP service.
Asterisk PBX on my home desktop, Linksys SPA2102 dual FXS networked adapter and LPT300 pulse to tone converter (SPA2102, just like all other adapters of this kind, does not understand pulse dialing, produced by rotary phone).

So I have AT&T line, AT&T phone, but not AT&T phone service in any form.

Since SPA2102 is a dual adapter, I have another phone connected to it -- I can even call my own number from it, and it will ring on another phone because Voicepulse Connect allows four simultaneous calls. If neither phone is picked up, Asterisk forwards call to my celphone.

And yes, that's my phone number on it. My old Denver phone number works, too.

CPU time for pretty pictures

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:07:46 GMT

I have just noticed that my computers made 150 frames:

for Electric Sheep screensaver, that looks like this:

Brrraaaiiins! Phoones!

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 10:20:40 GMT

For at least four months I carry a celphone that looks like this:

(yes, the first image is a composite, -- I still have not unpacked my lamps, so I had to take separate photos of LCD and the whole phone to compensate for poor light).

No one notices anything wrong with it.

Photos

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:51:00 GMT

Today it was raining in San Francisco -- I went for a walk and taken some photos of myself:

Migration to Exim 4, greylisting and bogofilter.

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 04:12:30 GMT

My mail server in Denver was running Exim 3 for at least five years. Spam filtering was done with a simple setup with Bogofilter called by a delivery agent wrapper that I wrote to avoid using large monstrosities in perl on a resources-starved server. Mail delivery agent wrapper also performed another function -- fixed non-ASCII headers before passing mail for delivery, so Cyrus won't complain about them. Filtering was done by running bogofilter on the message, checking its result and passing "-m spam" to Cyrus delivery agent if the message is supposed to go into spam mailbox. If user had "spam" mail folder under "INBOX", spam ended up there, otherwise Cyrus will put it into INBOX, but the message will still have identifying headers that mail reader can use to mark it as spam.

Bogofilter is a bayesian filter, and it requires training on sample spam and non-spam messages to maintain wordlists used for spam recognition. For most of the server's lifetime I prepared sample sets of messages, used them to update the wordlists, and it was sufficient to keep most of the spam away. When I left Denver in May I stopped doing those updates, and a week ago when I finally got back to it I was faced with an enormous set -- 400000 spam messages (some recognized by bogofilter, some manually filtered) and tens of thousands non-spam messages. Update was long overdue -- though I couldn't find any false positives (erroneously marked as spam), mailboxes were flooded with spam that passed bogofilter unscathed. However even the update didn't bring recognition to a usable level -- apparently spammers' attempts to dilute spam with large chunks of unrelated text weren't enough to make filters useless or to create false positives, but worked sufficiently well to irritate me and other users on that server.

I have decided to try adding greylisting -- a method that relies on the fact that most of spammers skimp on supporting proper handling of errors, and legitimate servers don't. The idea is simple -- server keeps a list of verified combinations of origination address, destination address and IP address of the server that sent email between them. Originally the list is empty. When mail server is trying to send a mail between addresses it was not verified for, mail is temporarily rejected until some time t passes since the first attempt of its delivery. If mail server retries delivery after this initial period of time, mail is passed, and new combination of addresses is added to the list. Proper handling of temporary errors is an important part of mail protocols' reliability, so it can be expected that legitimate email will pass through this process with delay between t and a few hours (more likely shorter than longer) while most spammers' mail servers will treat first error as fatal, or will re-send message generated on the fly, with non-matching source address. The whitepaper I have linked above explains it in more details, but the basic idea is this simple.

To implement this I had to upgrade Exim to version 4, however the problem is, there were significant configuration format changes between Exim 3 and Exim 4, so I had to reproduce all features of existing configuration in Exim 4 compatible way before switching. This ended up being less straightforward than I expected. Quick look at the differences between default Exim 3 configuration file supplied by Debian package and my custom configuration confirmed that there are two main differences, both sadly not implemented in example configuration files for either Exim 3 or 4:

Mail delivery was done by Cyrus, in this case with my wrapper, though the presence of wrapper only affects the name of the file to run. By default Exim 4 configuration procedure produced either mailbox format (old-style giant text files in /var/mail ) or maildir (a file per message, just like Cyrus but not indexed and tied to local users). Exim 4 comes with configuration file for maildrop, what is close enough -- I only had to change the command line and add a line "group = mail" to reproduce the original configuration for transport "fwrapper_pipe":
```
fwrapper_pipe:
  debug_print = "T: fwrapper_pipe for $local_part@$domain"
  driver = pipe
  path = "/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin"
  command = "/usr/sbin/fwrapper -a cyrus ${local_part}"
  return_path_add
  delivery_date_add
  envelope_to_add
  log_output
  return_output
  group = mail
```
However that was not the end of my problems. Exim 4, as opposed to Exim 3, passes the first "envelope" line ("From", space, envelope address) to the mail delivery agent, in the same way how that line is added to the message in the mailbox file. When wrapper passes that to Cyrus mail delivery agent, the envelope line remains in the chunk of text it sends through LMTP protocol to Cyrus server, what is not a valid LMTP. I have changed fwrapper source to remove envelope line from the header, and everything worked.

Some domains served by this server were configured with "smart user" (an equivalent of "smart host", not in any way related to intellectual capabilities of those, or other users) -- all mail sent to some domain, regardless of user name, is sent to one user who is supposed to sort it out (manually, automatically or not at all) just like "smart host" in a typical mail configuration sorts out all outgoing mail, so other servers just send it all to him. Router "smartuser" ended up looking like this:
```
smartuser:
  debug_print = "R: smartuser for $local_part@$domain"
  driver = redirect
  allow_fail
  allow_defer
  domains = lsearch;/etc/exim/virtual
  data = ${lookup{$domain}lsearch{/etc/exim/virtual}{$value}fail}
```

Of course, there was also a matter of actually configuring Exim 4. Server runs Debian Linux, so it is supposed to be a good idea to let Debian packages manage the upgrade and configuration. When I installed exim4 package, installer asked to move the current queue to the new location (didn't really matter for me because queue consisted entirely of error responses to spam), and to create configuration as either multiple files or single monolithic file. I have chosen the monolithic option, though I have immediately found out that it only meant that Exim is presented with a monolithic configuration file, assembled on startup from multiple pieces that contained the real persistent configuration.

Even though installer was aware of Exim 3 mail queue, it made no attempt of copying any configuration options, and asked me to re-enter local and relayed domains, system name, etc. For delivery methods it only presented options of using mailbox files and maildir (see above). I have chosen mailbox, so I can later replace it with my wrapper. Elaborate system of configuration files was not in any way reflected in initial configuration process, either -- it only substituted few mandatory parameters, generated the template file used to produce the ephemeral monolithic configuration file, and left it at that.

I have manually edited the template file and placed the above mentioned definitions into new files to make them compatible with this Debian-ish configuration system, re-ran configuration generation procedure and ended up with a close equivalent with the original Exim 3 configuration. While routing for domains was added by the virtue of a file being present in /etc/exim4/conf.d/router directory (the order of the rules is determined by the prefix, I have chosen 550, so the file became /etc/exim4/conf.d/routers/550_exim4-config_smartuser, delivery method has to be placed into template configuration file /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf (sic). The entry looks like this:

dc_localdelivery='fwrapper_pipe'

After editing all this, I ran update-exim4.conf.template -r, and started exim: /etc/init.d/exim4 start

The last step was to install greylistd, that is available as a Debian package specifically made for Exim 4, so its installation procedure properly attached it to Exim configuration. After seeing it working I had to add mailing lists' servers to a whitelist because they happen to use unique envelope origination addresses for every email instead of setting it to the mailing list address. I didn't want to see all mailing list messages delayed, so I had to whitelist their IP addresses.

I am running this configuration for almost a week now. The amount of spam went down at least ten times when counted before bogofilter, and spam now mostly consists of short messages containing a random phrase and a URL. Apparently long messages are all sent by botnets, viruses, and spam-specific software while short ones are usually passed through regular mail servers -- I have found what looks like signatures of Microsoft Exchange, Sendmail, Qmail and Exim in them. Bogofilter still filters most of them out, however their short size and legitimate headers make them the most difficult to filter, and I still get tens of them per day in my regular mailbox. I will see if more spammers will switch to this mode that may prompt me to add another kind of filtering specifically against that style of spam.

Permaban

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:01:31 GMT

I see, Dr.Fred finally found an excuse to permaban me for repeatedly insulting his great masters.

Good job -- now go back to Microsoft cheerleading, and try to provide Windows support on the forums that will be anywhere close to my contributions to Linux and software development-related threads. I have heard, Vista SP1 is going to be released soon, so don't forget to pretend that it will make Vista into the best OS ever.

Microsoft employees on the forums are counting on you.

New camera

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 08:03:57 GMT

I have replaced the last device that the robbers taken on July 3 -- a digital camera. I wanted a cheap (up to $200) camera that would be a reasonable improvement over the stolen one, so I have bough Fujifilm FinePix A900, choosing it mostly for its image quality in low light. Even though this camera is firmly in the "consumer" range and is supposed to be simple, there was one important detail -- I had to adjust my postprocessing/cleanup technique for it. The camera seems to produce very little color noise in poor light conditions, and the noise is mostly high frequency, so it disappears when image is scaled down. However this negates the advantage of high resolution, so I had to find a way to reduce the visible noise, and eventually succeeded. The problem is, my efforts to reduce the noise at high resolution make high-resolution images look much better but increase the amount of noise if they are scaled down because filtering produces its own artifacts. Fortunately at the point when it happens, just scaling down the original image gives better results:

Original image:
Full resolution 3488x2616
Scaled to 1744x1308
Scaled to 1024x768
Scaled to 800x600
Scaled to 640x480:

Same image after despeckle, slight increase of black level and color correction:
Full resolution 3488x2616
Scaled to 1744x1308
Scaled to 1024x768
Scaled to 800x600
Scaled to 640x480:

Two upper resolutions seem to be better in the second group, the rest is the other way around.

In any case I like it better than low-frequency color noise that appears on the photos taken by other cameras I have tested.

Help me find an apartment in Berkeley

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 11:04:24 GMT

Update: I have found an apartment in Emeryville, within a reasonable walking/cycling distance from work.

Almost two months ago I have got a job in Berkeley. I still own a large condo in Denver, and pay about $1900/mo in mortgage and maintenance for it, however I can't rent it out with all my furniture in it. I now live with a friend in Walnut Creek, and for two months I walked to BART train and from BART to work, covering almost 7 miles per day. Two months of it had shown that this is NOT a proper exercise schedule for me -- my legs ache when I wake up, I am tired when I arrive at work, and my productivity takes a massive nosedive. Last two days I had to drive, however I have this car loaned by a friend, and drive takes unreasonable amount of time because I have to pass Caldecott Tunnel. The traffic at the Eastern side of it resembles a glacier both by shape and by linear speed. The accommodations in Walnut Creek home are the best its owners can provide for me, however it really isn't what I consider acceptable -- I have a very small room, a desk that barely fits my laptop, ventlation system collects two inches of icy cold air on the floor, keeping my feet cold, etc. Plus it's very far from anything that is not another house. I need to get the hell out of Walnut Creek, and get an apartment in Berkeley.

After replying to numerous ads on Craigslist I have found a more or less decent two-bedroom apartment in Central Berkeley. I had to spend a day trying to reach an agent of the rental company, submitted the application (walking to their office because apparently it was the only way to deliver the documents with any certainty), then got no response for a few days. When I called them, they have finally told me that they did not like my credit score that one of three companies reported as 570 (apparently it's the lowest figure, I got 607 from other source). My current low-six-figure salary, willingness to pay outrageous deposits, condo in Denver that is orders of magnitude better than their apartment, and lack of anything negative anyone would say about me are apparently insufficient to consider me worthy of a slightly-above-slum-quality apartment because I have kept my credit cards at maximum when I was nearly broke (last three years) or totally broke (last three months).

Now I have just received another application for an apartment at Dwight/San Pablo in Berkeley. Behold the stuff they insist on knowing:

Here is the rental appication. Since you told me that
you don't have a good credit score, I will need your
last three months pay stud and bank statement inorder
for me to consider your appication since you had a bad
credit. There is a $25 credit check fee because I
still need to run a credit check, and it will include
some other thing else. Feel free to call if you have
any question. thanks

Sally

And the application itself. Something tells me, I am wasting my time with this.

Someone offered me to rent his condo in San Francisco -- closer to BART than the place in Walnut Creek where I live now. If there will be no other alternatives, I would have to accept that offer, even though it will only be available at the end of December. I still don't know if it will even fit the furniture from Denver. And the rent is still high -- until the moment I will start receiving rent for Denver condo I will have barely enough money to pay for food and credit cards, even if I will continue paying minimum for them.

Since this entry is public, and people have short attention span, let me re-iterate:

1. I need an apartment as soon as possible.

2. I don't need a room, hostel or some other temporary accommodation to live in. I would still have to pay $1900/mo for a dumpster if I lived behind a dumpster, because condo in Denver is now nothing but a dead weight. I have to move a massive amount of furniture out of the Denver condo, bring that furniture into a decent apartment, rent out the condo, all the while not exceeding $1700/mo for the new apartment. Even then I would have to borrow money for deposit for the apartment, if any. I can't move furniture anywhere else because it's a two-bedroom apartment with all rooms plus enclosed balcony decently furnished. I can't rent it out furnished because no sane person would want it that way -- places like that don't get rented for a short term.

3. I don't need an advice about improving my credit score. If I won't ask for loans or anything that would require a credit report, and will pay off $5K in a half a year, it will be nice and shiny again. If I will do anything else, it will be worse than that. In a shorter term nothing really matters.

4. What I need is an apartment in Berkeley or reasonably close to BART. 40-minute walk to Pleasant Hill station, combined with inevitable 20 minutes from Ashby BART station is not reasonable. Just 20 minutes in the morning and in the evening along the worse part of Ashby Ave. come close enough to the safety limit considering that I usually come from work late, but 2x40 minutes of absolutely safe and nearly empty suburbs eat both into my legs and into my soul.

5. Don't suggest me to look for a roommate unless you are the prospective roommate. And even then please re-read this LJ and my posts on Something Awful before subjecting yourself to years of sharing your living space with me. I consider myself a nice but not social person, and this is probably at the top of the range of opinions. There is also a matter of four bookcases, very large bed and dresser, two computers, desk, two large chairs, small sofa and a kitchen table with two more chairs for it that I will bring from Denver. I have a strong suspicion that it will be better for both me and the rest of mankind if I won't have to impose my presence on other people.

6. If anyone has an idea, what should I do in this situation, be it hiring some kind of an agency (if they exist, they without any doubt spend 100% of their work time on Craigslist, however they might know some procedure for getting an apartment while having high salary and low credit score), dragging a lawyer with myself (at one place I was told "we are required by law to do a credit check", what I am sure, they would love thinking of repeating in court), or trying to find someone who rents out an apartment without a company (and not for a reason of apartment being outside of all imaginable and unimaginable sanitary norms), I would be grateful hearing that. Just please no idle speculation. I may be myself the king of idle speculation, but now I need something that describes a reasonable way of getting an apartment in Berkeley, not a way of finding a great apartment in alternative-universe Berkeley where I am an anthropomorphic bear and George Bush is a Royalist.

Oh noes, goons mspainted me

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:55:35 GMT

I have no idea what kind of introduction should I place before this, so I will just say that some people have unique kind of humor and a lot of anger toward fellow humans.

So here it is:
Something Awful Forums thread
Original picture posted by someone named Crumbunist:

Response from Thoogsby is more offensive than creative, but included for completeness:

Faust thinks, I am a giant broccoli:

Cavenagh expressed feelings of Windows fanboys, Social Conservatives and Bush administration fans when I post in their threads:

Cecotroph thinks, I clog pipes:

Computer Jones seems to see this as an improvement:

Finally, Bad Ass Boutique made an image that counts as a meaningful criticism of my posts on the forums:

Worst summer of my life, Part 2 -- Robbery.

abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 04:40:11 GMT

On July 3 I have returned to San Francisco from an interview in Palo Alto, and before going back to Dmitry's (dk379) home where I was living at the time, I went to Sugarlump cafe, and was working there on something while drinking coffee until closing at 10pm. The place is on a busy 24th street in a safer part of Mission, so I didn't expect any problems. After 10pm I was on my way home -- west on 24th, then north on Harrison. 24th is full of stores, bars, cafes and other places that close late, so there were still people everywhere on 24th, however Harrison was rather empty. I didn't see it as a problem, Harrison crosses plenty of streets with a lot of traffic, cyclists and pedestrians everywhere. I was walking on the Eastern side of Harrison somewhere near the intersection with 23rd or 22nd, talking with Dmitry on a celphone.

Suddenly someone jumped at me from behind, pushed me, and started stabbing my right leg with a knife. I fell on the ground, attacker was on top of me, trying to get my laptop bag. Despite the fact that I obviously couldn't offer much resistance, and laptop bag can be easily unlatched from the strap, someone was still continuing stabbing me in the arm. I think, there were two attackers, however I didn't see their faces -- after getting laptop, camera, celphone and Zaurus PDA (celphone and Zaurus were attached to my belt, camera hanging on the laptop strap) they ran off while I was still on the ground holding my wounded arm while searching for my glasses.

Some woman was cycling nearby, noticed me and called 911. I managed to stand up, still holding my arm, trying to reduce bleeding abd keep wounds closed. There were six shallow but large wounds in my right arm, later I came to conclusion that they were made by a box cutter -- too shallow for any kind of regular knife, however most of them had exactly the same length, but way too long for a sharpened screwdriver, some longer as if the attacker stabbed the same place multiple times or moved the knife while it was in.

Ambulance and police arrived, and taken me to San Francisco General Hospital on Potrero. In emergency room they have cleaned the wounds, put stitches on the wounds on my arm, bandages on all wounds, gave me tetanus shot and a prescription for antibiotics to prevent infection. They checked my arms and legs, and found no serious damage -- large blood vessels, nerves and ligaments were all in place. Dmitry arrived at the hospital, and while I was waiting to be released, I was talking to him, explaining that I am ok, and I am mostly pissed at robbers for being unbelievable dumbasses, who chosen the least effective way to perform their, already not exactly intelligent actions.

Of all things they took, only camera was in any way usable for anyone but myself. Camera was an old 3.1MP Kodak DX3900 that I used to take pictures I have posted before. Zaurus SL-5500 PDA had custom firmware and needed a 5V power to remain usable after the battery will run out. Celphone was LG VX8100, locked to Verizon. Laptop, the only expensive part of their loot, had Ubuntu 6.04 (Feisty) installed on it, with Russian set as the default language and my picture by iskra_chan (same as my userpic) on the login screen. Its expensiveness was also pretty dubious considering that I have bought it scratched to Hell, and had to completely re-paint it. Robbers could snatch more expensive cameras from tourists with much less of a risk.

Dmitry taken his car to drive me home, next day went to the pharmacy to get bandages, ointment and antibiotics, and I taken over his Mac Mini to remove the laptop's keys from my servers, so laptop will not be able to get back on VPN. Igor gave me replacement phone and Zaurus (SL-6000L, two generations after the stolen one), Jon (j_b) sent me a new laptop -- everyone was very helpful in minimizing the time it taken for me to get back to my attempts to achieve something useful.

Then Dmitry got a phone call. Some woman wanted to return the laptop. The only place she could get Dmitry's phone number was my celphone, it was the last call in the history. The phone was already disabled, and my account was moved to the phone Igor gave to me, however that does not prevent call history from being seen, it's stored on the phone. She claimed that she found it, however it was pretty obvious that robbers sold or gave her the laptop and phone. And a laptop that on boot shows a single word "ubuntu" with a growing progress bar, then displays a login screen in Russian, with the above mentioned userpic for the only user in the list apparently looked extremely uninviting.

Dmitry arranged a meeting in a coffee shop, I went there, too, sitting in the back, with Zaurus connected to the Internet, ssh'ed to my server, running alpine with Igor's address filled in "To:" field, and address of the place in the body of the message, just in case something will go wrong. Someone more paranoid would probably call Igor, or schedule email about all things going horribly wrong to be sent unless cancelled, however I thought that no matter what kind of evil scheme it can possibly be, it would be reasonable to expect that I will have enough time to press Ctrl-X Y before starting to hurl chairs at people. The woman arrived outside of the shop, and to my amazement returned the laptop and a bag. Some documents including my social security card were missing from the bag, fabric was soaked with blood, plastic was turn and scratched, however laptop was just fine.

Being a sysadmin, I can't just go and login to my laptop that was in obviously hostile hands, and was returned under suspicious circumstances. I have booted the laptop from Ubuntu live CD, looked for possible changes but found no signs of tampering. I have copied the home directory to Mac Mini and new laptop, removed everything executable and did not reuse any dot files. I have found backups of my address books from my phone and Zaurus, and after installing them, I have returned all my personal devices back to the state before the robbery. Except the camera, I am going to buy a better one soon.