Jon Åslund

I, for one, welcome our new evil overlords. Stargate, now in its ninth season (it seems like it will never end) has a new super villain. They call themselves The Ori and they are somehow related to The Ancients, but I can’t figure out how. Both The Ancients and The Ori are ascended beings. The policy of The Ancients is to not interfer with beings in the lower planes of existance. They will not stop people from ascending, nor will they help anyone. The Ori on the other hand want to help people ascend, so much in fact, that if you stray from their path of enlightenment, they will set you on fire. In the latest episode, there was a nice reference to fire, which is the central icon of The Ori. Daniel Jackson wondered if The Ancients had something to do with the fact that on earth, fire is associated with evil, hell not heaven. It’s also fun to note that The Ori only refer to The Ancients as “evil”. With eight seasons, full of many bad episodes, it feels like it can’t hold much longer, but if they make something good out of this storyline, it can probably be quite fun.

Revolutionary Girl Utena is one of my favorite anime series. The characters are great and the story is really powerful. It has drama that will bring you to tears, comedy that will bring you more tears, and action together with really cool music that won’t let you relax. I always thought Utena would make a great rock musical. If someone on Broadway picked it up, I would without a doubt book a flight to New York, just to go and see it.

Yesterday I found out that someone had made a live action (what anime fans call things that are not animated) musical of it, starring only girls. I found a 20 minute clip which basically retells the story of the first episode of the anime series. They don’t have much of a budget, the actors could be better, and the quality of the recording is awful, but still, I really want to see the whole thing. If someone has it or more info about it, other than what can be found on the wikipedia page, please tell me!

Some images from the clip:

I finally put up some photos from Debconf. My favorites:

I wrote a script (create_square.pl) to create those square thumbnails. It might come in handy to someone.

Even though I said I would update my blog during the conference, I only managed to write one entry. Around 300 people came from all around the world to Helsinki. I met people from Brazil, Mexico, United States, New Zealand, Japan, Russia and from many European countries. Even though other people managed to write insane amounts of mail to the debconf mailing list and fill planet debian, I never found enough time to sit down and write something. There was always someone to listen to, someone to talk to, some beer to drink, some waffles to eat. Apart from issues with the wireless net, which the organizers were not allowed to solve, the whole event was very well organized.

The talks were great. Some speakers spoke a bit too soft or were a bit too unsure of their English skills, but they were all interesting. I didn’t go to all of them though. I missed the talks in the beginning of the week, and almost all talks that were too early for me. Some talks were scheduled at the same time as others, so you had to choose which sounded best.

The most interesting talk for me was given by Mark Shuttleworth. As expected, he talked a bit about himself, why he became the person he is today and what he wanted to do for Debian and free software in general, and for Ubuntu in particular. I have read about him but it wasn’t until I met him that I could get a real picture of him. Is he evil or not? As he himself admitted, money is the root of all evil and his plan (with Ubuntu, Bazaar and Launchpad) is world domination, so yeah, he is evil. He is very charming and easy to talk with. Very unlike the image I have of people with lots of money and power. He really cares about free software, not just in the business sense, that he thinks it is far superior than proprietary software. I think I will welcome our new evil overlord.

The whole event took place at Helsinki University, which actually is in Espoo, a bit outside Helsinki. Most people stayed at the dorms. I was very surprised that they had managed to empty an entire house just for us, but it turned out this building was recently built. Apparently the Para World/European Championship which will take place there in August.

There was a sauna close by the dorms, which at least over hundred people tried on Wednesday evening, the day we arrived. There were two rooms. One small, where only about 6-7 people could squeeze in. I didn’t notice this until I was about to leave. I stayed in the big one, which had room for maybe 40-50 people. Even though it was so big and people went in and out, it kept the heat very well.

The people I talked with most were the Swedes, Per and Erik who were staying in the same room as I and Kalle, and Jonas and Yann who stayed in a room above. Per was the only real Debian developer among us. Erik was a debconf video team volunteer, which meant he went to bed late, the same time as all others, but got up before everyone else, especially me, and spent much time in the video room. Some days we barely saw him. Jonas and Yann also took the same ferry home as we did. We all watched Starship Troopers 2, a really crappy follow up to the first one which I actually liked (I seem to be the only one). As far as bad action movies go, it was quite entertaining.

To be continued…

We arrived in Helsinki around 11 today. Yesterday we managed to miss the ferry. We were waiting in the wrong place, among the wrong group of travelers and when the sign finally came up telling what ferry was leaving from that gate, ours had already left. We were not alone however. A guy from Uruguay and a group of Chinese travelers had made the same mistake. We had to take a later ferry to Turku/Åbo and then the bus to Helsinki. The guy from Uruguay was called Alfredo and we stayed together all the way to Helsinki.

There was no way to get a cabin, so we had to stay somewhere else. Somewhere else, however, was where everyone else were sleeping. I eventually found a corridor outside the sauna club where we spent the last hours of the night.

After arriving in Turku we took the express bus to Helsinki. Yep, we were on the “Highway to HEL”.

Alexander Schmehl mentioned how fun a party was with people just named Alex. For some reason I decided to play with GraphViz, to illustrate the problem when people have the same name. I tried many different graphs, to see what it looked like when both Alexandra and Alexander are just called Alex, with or without unique nodes, with or without unique labels etc. but this was the best looking one. The source for the graph above has a very simple syntax. I have always wanted to write a simple Kwiki plugin for Graphviz. I am very uncertain about security, though. Just pasting the input directly into GraphViz feels risky, as I don’t know enough about all of its “special features” yet.

Superman is an asshole.

When I was young, there was a genre of games called platform games. The one I liked the most was called Great Giana Sisters, which was of course a big Super Mario Bros rip off. In most of the games you could stand at the end of a ledge with just the last pixel of your toe, and still not fall down. Some days ago I had a flashback of this when I saw a Pucko (Swedish milk chocolate drink) in a vending machine. You have probably been there yourself, you buy something, but it gets stuck and won’t fall down. The Pucko I saw however, was defying gravity, claiming “I am standing with at least one pixel on the ledge”. Maybe it was afraid it was going to be crushed because of the high fall.

I want to serve files with bittorrent, just as easily as I serve files with a web server. Just upload the files to a directory on a server somewhere. A torrent file is automatically generated after the file is completely uploaded to the directory, and a bittorrent client running on the server starts to seed the torrent.

There should be an easy way to browse the files, just like you can browse files in index lists of many web servers. Nothing fancy is needed, but could of course be built. When users wants to download a file, they will get the torrent file instead.

A tracker is not needed if everyone are using the latest bittorrent client (as of 4.1.0). You just need to point to your own client, and/or a routing client, like router.bittorrent.com. However, if you can run a bittorrent client on the same host that runs a web server, it is quite easy to setup a tracker as well. This will also be compatible with other bittorrent clients, and older versions of bittorrent.

Now comes my main point. Bandwidth is unfortunately expensive. You usually don’t want to serve big files like you normally serve with bittorrent on a host where you have a web server.

Therefore, there should be an option for your seeding client to be as conservative with bandwidth as possible, since most hosting companies have limits on bandwidth usage. This can be done by doing something similar to “superseeding”, when the server is the only one that has the complete torrent, where you try to never upload the same piece twice, unless it is needed, and stop seeding when the file is fully distributed among the other peers.

The conservative mode, does have some problems though. You can’t know for sure if a file is fully distributed or not. If someone wants to stop you from distributing a file, they would just have to start seeding that file, without actually giving out any pieces, or just giving out junk pieces. Then it would look like the file is fully distributed, even though it is not, and your seeding client in conservative mode would stop. Eventually, when enough good peers have left, the file is not distributed any longer and will never be available anymore. You could try to fix that by checking for distribution speed. If no peers are getting any new pieces, they will never report new pieces and then it would look like distribution has stopped, but this is easy to fake as well of course, so it would be a pretty pointless check.

What probably would be better is to hope peers are well behaved, serve at full speed when you are the only seed and slow down the more distributed it looks like a file gets.

A log of all the traffic should be made, so you could see which files you have seeded, how much of them, and how much in total of course. To be able to check at any moment what is currently being uploaded, how many peers are connected, etc. would of course also be interesting to see. Total amount (and their ip addresses) of peers connected to you maybe an interesting stat to log as well, but bandwidth per file and total is what is most important to me.

ilka died yesterday. I had her locked up in a closet. Friends tell me that was the reason; I didn’t give her enough air. ilka was one of my computers, named after a Miss Sweden pageant from 2001. Even though she seemed like an incredibly cool person, I seriously doubt that the real Ilka would feel honored.

It started with a few lost packets. Grrr, that stupid ISP, I thought. Before calling them, I checked the hardware. Don’t want to complain to tech support and feel like an idiot just because a network card had gone bad or something like that. I connected my laptop. No packet loss. It was when I tried to replace the network cable, to see if it was faulty, that I felt something weird. A tingling sensation, not unlike foot orgasm (eh, yeah, I should probably explain that later), but instead through the hand that was fumbling around the back, trying to pull out the cable. Electrical current. Not good. Although it took a while to realize how serious it was. I think I had a bath, a banana and read some blogs, before starting to panic and taking a new backup of important things. I came halfway through the backup before ilka died. No smoke or explosion with cool special effects, she just stopped.

I feared the worst, quickly mounted the hard drives in another computer, because I somehow felt I needed to hurry. No data lost. Yay! Not that I had anything terribly important, that wasn’t backed up elsewhere, but still it’s annoying. It is short term solution though. My desktop computer now has 4 hard drives, and is very noisy, especially with the addition of ilka’s older drives. The rest of ilka is now lying on the floor in pieces, totally silent and motionless.