Memory is really strange. On the one hand, I’m amazed at how fast the last three years of my life has gone by. I remember walking into my hotel room on the day I landed in Stuttgart, a full month before Rebecca would come, and putting down my bags and really wondering what I had gotten myself into. I had decided to take a job in a city I had visited only during my interviews, in a country I had only spent a few days in as a tourist, and here I am sitting down in my hotel room, in need of a shower, exhausted from jet-lag, only then grasping that I had committed myself and Rebecca to living in Stuttgart for at least three years. At that moment I could only hope that we had made the right choice to come. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of our lives.

Remembering specific events, though, and time doesn’t seem to move so quickly. I think about my first weekend in Germany, when a colleague invited me to an Onion Festival in the medieval town of Esslingen, and it seems appropriately placed about three years ago. Then I remember when our friend Laurel visited, our first visitor, I think, and how we went out to a besenwirtschaft (a uniquely south-west Germany gem, in which vineyard-owning families sell their own wine out of their living rooms) and got extremely intoxicated with a super friendly German couple. We ended up getting invited to their home for a few more bottles of wine, and Rebecca got sick in their bathroom just as our taxi pulled up. I remember all of the festivals - the Hamburg Fischmarkt, Karnival, the Weindorf, and of course the Bierfests (Germans love to find a reason, any reason, to have a festival). I remember all our visitors - our families and lots of friends from home - who took advantage of us living in Stuttgart and allowed us to share our newly found love of Germany with them. I think fondly of all the trips we took - the Turin Winter Olympics, Sardinia, the Lake District, Poland, and so many more. The more memories I conjure up and place into a mental timeline, the more it seems like it really has been three, full, years since I stepped into my room at the Millennium Hotel, and I’m both at once happy for the experience and sad that I can no longer call Stuttgart home, even if it means I no longer have to walk up 6 flights of stairs to be home.

We hope to go 2 for 2 on picking cities randomly and moving without any prior connection, and so far Austin has really been a great place. Many great things about German culture are embraced in Austin - love for the outdoors and festivals being the two most obvious. There are even biergartens, and the town of Fredricksburg, located in the center of Texas wine country (another huge similarity to Stuttgart!), was founded by Germans, and I think the German influence on the local culture shows. There’s even a local waterpark called the Schlitterbahn.

I think we’re off to a good start.

I went to Brussels last weekend for FOSDEM 2008, which was held at ULB Campus Solbosh. The free event was a good way to check in with the overall Open Source community and to see all of the interesting things people outside my normal circles are working on.

Friday Night Beer Event

After a few hours of drinking beer and talking about software, we met up with a few more friends to go to dinner at an underwhelming yet wistfully overpriced restaurant in the middle of the tourist trap. I had another beer or two over dinner, and so when we left the restaurant, I was a little toasted.

For some reason (playing with my phone?) I was straggling behind as we walked out when these two guys sidled up to me and started dancing, singing yelling, and doing some weird line dance kick between my legs. In my drunken state, I was a bit confused but thought they were just drunk too and danced along. After a few moments of this silliness, they walked off. I luckily had a moment of clarity and thought it best to check my pockets. Wait, my wallet is missing. Yup, it really is still missing. The two guys hadn’t taken more than 20 steps down the street, so I ran up to the nearest one, forcefully grabbed his shoulder, and demanded, “Give me back my wallet.” He looked a bit surprised and immediately pointed to his accomplice. I turned to him and without a word, he reached into his coat pocket and handed over my wallet. I took it from his hands, and strangely enough, we just parted ways. The entire episode lasted probably 30 seconds or so, and my friends, who were only a few steps ahead, missed it all.

Talks

I was even slower getting up on Sunday morning* and missed the Drupal opening talks by Dries. I did catch Kris Buytaert’s “Drupal and MySQL High Availability”, which was quite good. In addition, I took the opportunity to see a talk on CakePHP and Mozilla’s upcoming Prism.

Thoughts

Some of the speakers were certainly better than others. FOSDEM (and Open Source in general) is a pretty international affair, and because the conference was conducted in English, there were varying levels of English public speaking abilities. Overall, however, I thought the speakers were quite good and spoke to the subject matters well. My only complaint is that FOSDEM seems to be outgrowing its britches. There were lots in attendance, and at times, it was a little bit difficult walking through the masses to get to the talks in time. That probably speaks to the growing popularity of OSS, which is always a good thing.

More photos from FOSDEM 2008.

*I discovered the Grand Casino Brussels on Saturday night and was there until almost 4 in the morning waiting on a seat at the Hold ’em table. Generally casinos in Europe are quite stuck up about dress code and appearances (to the point of making you rent an evening jacket), but I found Brussels casino to be very welcoming. You still won’t find flip-flops and t-shirts like you would at some places in Vegas, but at least you can walk in reasonably dressed. Anyway, at 11PM I was #3 in line for a seat and only got to #1 by 3:30am before I had had enough and just left. They had two tables of €5/€10 NL Texas Hold’em, but apparently they sometimes also have €10/€20 limit as well.

Pretty scary stuff, even if you trust all of your users:

victor@mercury ~ $ ./exploit
-----------------------------------
 Linux vmsplice Local Root Exploit
 By qaaz
-----------------------------------
[+] mmap: 0x100000000000 .. 0x100000001000
[+] page: 0x100000000000
[+] page: 0x100000000038
[+] mmap: 0x4000 .. 0x5000
[+] page: 0x4000
[+] page: 0x4038
[+] mmap: 0x1000 .. 0x2000
[+] page: 0x1000
[+] mmap: 0x2ac3dee3c000 .. 0x2ac3dee6e000
[+] root
mercury ~ # whoami
root

What's really amazing is that news of this vulnerability didn't really hit the mainstream web until today, but yet on Friday there was already a kernel patch. There's even an in-memory hotfix that you can use (I tried that too - it works) if you prefer to wait until an official kernel makes it downstream. Open source is amazing.

Had this been proprietary software, no one would have known about it except for the all the people exploiting it. Servers all over the world would get owned, and the software company wouldn't even discover it for a few more weeks. Or worse, they would know about it, but would hope to keep it hush-hush until the next Patch Tuesday.

For the last few years I’ve been using Gmail exclusively and have been forwarding emails to @victortrac.com to my Gmail account. Google’s spam filters are the best I’ve ever seen, and the interface is elegant and fast, and combined with loads of storage and IMAP access, Gmail is nearly the perfect email application. The XMPP integration is just icing on the cake.

Because of these features, I voluntarily gave up having a customized email address on my personal domain to take advantage of Google’s infrastructure and technology. The decision was fairly easy - I was deluged in spam and GMail’s web client was better than any other thin or thick client available. By forwarding my domain’s email to my Gmail account, I was letting Google’s wonderful anti-spam technology work its magic. This allowed me to retain some use of my previous email address, but as I started to use XMPP (aka Jabber or as Google calls it - Google Talk) I became more and more dependent on my Gmail identity. Sure, I had other Jabber IDs, but it was just too convenient having a unified email address and Jabber ID provided by Gmail.

However, let’s say that in five years Google shuts down or, more likely, another company comes along and provides a better service or product. By this time your Gmail identity has evolved into a unified presence, communications, and identification address where anyone can reach you at any time and is also your OpenID login to the majority of sites on the internet. If you’ve spent 10 years building this identity around a Gmail address, you’re not in a great position to easily transition. By using Google Apps on a domain that you own and control, you’ve at least separated the address from the services and would be able to move around as you want. It’s like being able to live all over the world, moving to where the grass is always greener, yet still always having a constant mailing address.

Getting it all to work

For XMPP, however, the documentation isn’t very complete. According to this page, you need to add the following SRV records to your DNS server (replace gmail.com with your own domain):

_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

The _xmpp-server._tcp and _jabber._tcp SRV records tell the requesting server to look at Google’s XMPP servers when there’s an XMPP request. There are two minor problems here:

• Both _xmpp-server._tcp and _jabber._tcp records serve the same purpose (_jabber._tcp was even deprecated earlier this year)
• There's no _xmpp-client._tcp record

In order to get a third party client to connect to Google’s XMPP servers, you’ll have to manually configure a “Connect to server” to go directly to talk.google.com. The better solution, however, is to add another set of SRV records (again, replace gmail.com with your own domain):

_xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5222 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5222 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5222 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5222 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5222 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

With these additional records, when XMPP clients try to log into your domain.com, your DNS server responds down the list and tells it to check on port 5222 on one of Google’s servers.

OpenID next?

There’s been a bunch of press lately about Google Reader’s new features, most notably the “Friends’ shared items” section and Profiles. A handful of people were instantly complaining about the lack of privacy and control, but I don’t really see Google’s implementation as a problem. It seems pretty simple to go to “Manage friends” and hide the contacts you don’t want looking at your shared items, but this really kind of defeats the purpose of using your shared items to begin with. If anything, I think Google’s decision to automatically include your GTalk contacts just makes it that much likelier that I’ll read and see my contacts’ shared items. I wouldn’t spend the time to go through my contacts to subscribe, but having them there automatically is great. It’s giving me the benefits of filtered reading list through a social network I wouldn’t have bothered to use otherwise.

However, I can see this causing some annoyance in the form of repeated posts. If a lot of my contacts are subscribed to the same stuff I’m subscribed to and decide to share it, I’ll see it twice - once on my own feeds and again when I go through their shared items. This has been annoying me on my Techmeme feed enough to want to consider unsubscribing from techmeme, and so I can see this becoming a bigger problem as I get more contacts who read the same stuff I read.

Whenever Google gets around to fixing the duplicate feed problem (and I really hope they do soon), they should also add an “Undo” button in Google Reader. In GMail, anytime you archive, delete, flag as spam, or otherwise move an email from one view to another, GMail gives you the option to undo the operation. This is great because Archive, Report as Spam, and Delete are all right next to each other and easily mis-clicked. Even if Undo wasn’t an option, it would still be possible to manually reverse the change.

What really annoys me with Google Reader is that there is no undo option when you click on “Mark all as read.” “Refresh” is stupidly directly next to “Mark all as read,” so I regularly end up clicking on the wrong button. The best you can do is switch over to the “All items” view and hope that you could skim through to see what you might have missed. Maybe I should take this as a blessing so that I can get through my feeds faster.

I’m a bit baffled why the smart guys at Google haven’t fixed these problems. Surely I’m not the only Google Reader annoyed by duplicate posts and the inability to undo a “Mark all as read” mis-click.