Frank Hecker over at the Mozilla Foundation has just posted about the Foundation’s new directed giving program, which includes the ability to earmark money for the Bugzilla project when you donate now. This has been a long time coming. Every so often we’ve had people coming into IRC or asking on our mailing lists where they could donate money and we’ve never really had anything to point them at other than our T-shirts in the Mozilla Store, or the Foundation’s donation page, which didn’t provide any way to say you wanted the money to go to Bugzilla. Well, now there’s somewhere to go where the money will actually get back to the Bugzilla project, on the Bugzilla project’s donation page.
Free SIP on Leopard exists after all!
So it’s been a few weeks since Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) came out. One of the major things that immediately hit a lot of people was that every known third-party SIP client stopped working. I work from home. I have an extension number at work that rings on a Polycom phone in my home office, thanks to the magic of VoIP. This same VoIP technology (namely SIP) has allowed me (up until I upgraded to Leopard) to run a “soft phone” program on my laptop to allow me to connect to the same phone system when I was out of my office. With the help of a set of headphones, a laptop actually makes a halfway-decent phone.
The two free (as in beer, not freedom) products previously available that I knew of were SJPhone and X-Lite. Both of these broke on Leopard. SJPhone hasn’t been updated in years, and the material on their website makes it look like the Mac version was an afterthought anyway, so I don’t hold high hopes for them ever updating it. X-Lite is a pared down version of a commercial product called eyeBeam. eyeBeam just got updated for Leopard this last week. An X-Lite update is expected “by the end of the year”. The obvious reason for the delay is to encourage people who are frustrated enough to throw money at it to upgrade to eyeBeam instead of waiting. 🙂
There *are* two free products that have been updated for Leopard which do SIP to a generic PBX of your choosing. Those are SightSpeed and Gizmo Project. Unfortunately, both of these require you to register with their service, and sign in on their service, and your generic-PBX-of-your-choosing account is a secondary login (if you don’t log into their service, your generic one won’t connect either).
The world is in really dire need right now of a good open source solution for SIP on the Mac. Â If any of the above programs were open source, I would bet we would have had patches posted somewhere within days (if not hours) to make them work on Leopard.
UPDATE: I was going to post this hoping to get some discussion going and/or someone to point out something that works that I missed.  But before I could post it, I found one! XMeeting not only works on Leopard (it apparently didn’t break — there hasn’t been a release since July), but it also supports DTMF (touch tones) during the call, which is the one thing that’s been missing from all the other free stuff I’ve tried so far. Touch tones during a call are pretty important for things like entering the password for a conference call. XMeeting supports video, too (and so does Mozilla’s phone system).
stage.m.o, shift-reloaded
Just like ftp.m.o, shift-reloaded, stage.mozilla.org is getting an overhaul as well. If you read through preed’s post that I just linked, you’ll see the plans for stage included in there as well. For various reasons (most of them including LDAP and testing issues) they ended up not happening at the same time, and we ended up doing only the ftp/archive part during that last outage window. We’re finally ready to proceed with the stage.m.o half of this, and the best part is for this chunk of the puzzle, we don’t even need an outage window. We’ll be running the new stage along side of the old one for a little while to let people try it out, make sure their upload scripts still work, and bring issues to our attention before the old one goes away.
The items listed on preed’s earlier post that still have to happen are:
- All files will be virus scanned before becoming available. We currently virus scan all builds, but depending on a number of factors, it was possible for unscanned-builds to appear on the FTP site for a window of time; we’ve removed this window.
- Interactive shell accounts on the FTP farm will be replaced with sftp-only accounts.
Non-interactive Accounts For Uploaders
One of the changes we’re making is that shell accounts are going away. The new server will have you chrooted into the staging area, and you will be limited to scp, sftp, rsync, and a small subset of file management commands (such as mv, cp, chmod, chown, chgrp, etc) invoked via ssh. This is the reason that if you have any scripted uploads, you need to test them on the new server to make sure they still work, and whether you can modify them so they will if they don’t. If you are doing something on stage currently that really needs full shell access, we’ll probably be happy to accomodate you, just on some other machine. Come talk to us or file a bug.
We are also moving from local accounts on the staging server to LDAP-based accounts, to make management of permissions easier. In a few cases, this might mean your username will change (in most cases, the affected people have been contacted already). Accounts that haven’t been used in the last year will not been ported over. If you haven’t connected to stage in the last year you’ll need to file a bug in the FTP: Staging component to get your access back. Accounts will be getting enabled over the course of the next 24 hours. If you want to get in sooner than that, come find me on irc and I’ll manually toggle your account. The new machine is located at stage-new.mozilla.org.
Virus Scanning
The ftp file tree was almost a terabyte in size before. Now, with it combined with archive.m.o, it’s 2.2 terabytes. Keeping just one copy of that sitting around is decently expensive. Keeping multiple copies of it live is just cost prohibitive. On the current staging system, for lack of disk space, there’s no way to prevent the files from going to the mirrors before getting virus scanned. The virus scanner would come along and scan the newly-uploaded files and then yank any with viruses found back out. So there is a small window of time when something with a virus in it could make it to the mirrors and then would disappear off the mirrors again the next time they synced.
With the new staging system, we’re making use of a new (to Linux — BSD has apparently had it for years) filesystem technology called unionfs which allows us to layer the filesystem. If it helps to visualize it, think of it like a multi-layer photo in Photoshop, where each layer is transparent by default, and each pixel in the photo is a file on the filesystem. When we make changes to a file, we’re only really changing the pixel in that position in the topmost layer (that pixel is now no longer transparent). From here on out, this post gets a little technical, to explain how it’s set up for those that are curious. If you’re not the technical type, you can feel free to stop reading here. There’s nothing beyond this point that will affect your ability to upload if you have an account.
The main ftp tree (which is NFS-mounted from a huge disk array) gets mounted read-only as the “base layer” of a unionfs mount. We then put another layer on top of that which contains the chroot jail environment (the executables and libraries needed for jailed users to have minimal functionality while connected, but don’t need to be visible to the mirrors). There is another read-only layer on top of that (Layer B on the left) which is used for the virus scanning (more on that in a moment). The top layer (Layer A in the diagram) is the one that the end-users actually write to when they make changes to files. This last layer records all of the additions, deletions, and modifications to files that the users make so that those files appear changed to the unified filesystem view that the users see, but the underlying filesystem that the mirrors rsync off of isn’t touched.
The layers can be reordered and changed from read-write to read-only at any time, so when it comes time to push the files to the mirrors, we move Layer B to the top and make it read/write, change Layer A to read-only. This way, nobody can make changes to it while we’re scanning it. We then virus-scan layer A directly. Once the scan completes, and any infected files have been removed, we then move the changes from this layer down to the real live ftp/archive layer at the bottom which the mirrors can see when they rsync. Layer A is then cleared off so it’s ready to be swapped with Layer B again on the next pass.
New anime for the fall
A couple promising series I’ve started watching from this fall’s lineup of anime are Shugo Chara! and Clannad.
Shugo Chara! is insanely cute. My first impression of it was kind of a Lizzie McGuire with a bit of magic thrown in, and set in late elementary school instead of high school. The main character, Hinamori Amu, doesn’t know how to present her feelings to those around her, and often acts like a tough girl around everyone at school, when inside, she’s really a quiet, delicate girl who likes boys and pink frilly stuff and is just scared to express herself. The first episode starts off with her rescuing a nerdy kid from a couple bullies, just by showing up and stating they were blocking her path. Her reputation as a tough girl precedes her. The bullies, upon realizing who she is, rattle off some stories they’ve heard about how tough she is and run off scared silly. Amu says “Who actually starts these rumors?” The nerdy kid is in awe and asks for an autograph, to which she scoffs at him for also blocking the way, and walks off. But this doesn’t deter him, as he still thinks she’s the coolest girl he’s ever met. The scene at the above right is as she’s walking away from the cutest boy in the school after telling him off for daring to talk to her when she first met him. “Don’t act like we’re buddies or anything” she told him. The little “Chibi Amu” coming out and attacking herself for not being nice to him is where my Lizzie McGuire reference came from (this happens frequently throughout the show, where the “Chibi Amu” will come out and tell the audience what she’s really thinking when she’s too scared to say it). In private, she continually tells us and herself about how she’s really a nice person and just wishes she could drop the tough girl act once in a while, but she worries that no one would believe it was her. The magic part comes in when she finds three eggs in her bed that turn out to be “Guardian Characters” (hence the name of the show – Shugo is Japanese for guard or protect) who, through various magic, help her to act out her real feelings. This is obviously aimed at a pre-teen audience, but it’s sooo cute, and my 6 year old daughter is already begging me to let her watch the next episode.
Clannad is aimed at a much older audience (late teens to adult probably). It’s a high school drama based on a manga that’s been out for a while and is really popular, apparently (I’ve heard about it all over the place even before the anime was announced). I’ve never read the manga, and have no idea what the storyline is about other than what’s on the short descriptions on the various anime sites, so I have no idea what I’m in for. The story description on Wikipedia makes me wonder if I’ll really like it (it doesn’t sound like something I would normally watch from that description), but having seen the first two episodes, it’s certainly intriguing enough to draw me in and make me want to continue watching. We’ll see how it goes. So far it’s really good. Hopefully it’ll turn out better than School Days did (which had a very good story until the last two episodes when everything sort of went crazy and it had a very freaky ending).
What I’m watching these days
I’ve been watching a fair bit of anime the last year or so, and people always seem surprised to find out (and I, likewise, have been surprised to find out which friends of mine have already been watching a lot of it as well).
Maybe I’ve been poisoned by the mainstream TV networks in the US, and admittedly, I don’t get out much beyond what’s on TV, but the cartoons we have in the US just don’t seem hold a candle to the stuff they’re putting out over in Japan (and this includes most of the imports from Japan that have made it to the US, which the US networks that are carrying them have usually done a good job of butchering up either the plot lines or the music, or otherwise making unnecessary changes to “westernize” them). There are many Japanese shows (even the stuff aimed at kids) which impress me with the depth of the characters and the detail they include in the stories. You just have to live with reading subtitles, unless you know Japanese.
One of the most-detailed and heart-tugging of these (that I’ve seen) is the original Futari wa Pretty Cure series, and its followup series Pretty Cure Max Heart. This show is aimed at kids, and it’s definitely a kids’ show, but even with that in mind, we get to explore the entire community that the main characters live in. The other students in their class at school actually exist, and aren’t just there to fill the extra seats in the classroom. We get to hear almost every student’s name at some point in the series. A large number of them have important roles in at least one or two episodes. The main characters have a family life outside of school, and we learn a great deal about their siblings, parents, and grandparents. And every episode is a heart-tugging demonstration of learning to always trust in each other and never give up, a moral that they almost go overboard with, but you can’t help loving it anyway. Yeah, it’s magical girl genre, and they fight bad guys, but out of each 25 minute episode, they usually spend about 5 or 10 minutes on fighting bad guys, and the rest of the show is all about their relationships. I’ve never seen anything like it broadcast in the US.
Lots of people when they hear “anime” automatically think of “mecha”. Transformers came out of that genre after all, as did Voltron, and the various Gundam stuff (and although it’s not exactly anime, you can’t leave out the Power Rangers and their Zords). The Japanese seem to love their giant robots. 🙂 But there’s a lot more to anime than giant robots, and I’m not that much into the robot stuff, personally. My watch list tends to have more magical girl and drama type stuff in it.
Stuff I’m currently watching:
- Chocotto Sister (drama/romance)
- Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai (mystery/suspense/thriller)
- Lucky Star (high school comedy)
- Nanoha StrikerS (scifi/magical girl)
- Ojamajo Doremi Sharp (comedy/magical girl)
- Potemayo (comedy)
- Powerpuff Girls Z (magical girl)
- Pretty Cure Max Heart (magical girl)
- Pretty Cure Splash Star (magical girl)
- School Days (high school drama/romance)
- Sky Girls (mecha/drama)
- Sugar Sugar Rune (magical girl/fantasy/drama)
- Umisho (high school drama/comedy)
- Yes! Pretty Cure 5 (magical girl)
Other stuff I’ve watched in the past:
- Fairy Musketeer Akazukin (fantasy/adventure)
- Futari wa Pretty Cure (magical girl)
- Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight (high school drama)
- Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (scifi/high school drama)
- Nanoha (magical girl)
- Nanoha A’s (magical girl/scifi)
- Ojamajo Doremi (magical girl)
- Ojamajo Doremi Naisho (magical girl)
- Rocket Girls (scifi/adventure)
- Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko (scifi/adventure)
- Tokemeki Memorial (high school drama/romance)
- Venus Versus Virus (scifi/thriller)
And yes, I have actually bought DVDs with English dubs. This is fantastic and entertaining art, and well worth supporting the artists and producers when given the opportunity, and a good way to encourage them to continue to allow worldwide distribution of the subtitled versions (it’s the best form of advertising after all).
So hopefully that’s a little insight into my artistic likes these days.