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Deep packet inspection could be useful to ISPs who oversell limited bandwidth to (too) many customers. With Deep Packet Inspection, my ISP could inspect the high-bandwith traffic going to and from my neighbor, determine most of it to be peer-2-peer traffic, and then limit exactly that peer-2-peer traffic so that my neighbor doesn’t hog all the bandwidth that we all have to share. On the surface, that sounds like a great idea? Why should my neighbor ruin the internet experience for the rest of us?

But, interestingly, ISPs aren’t going to tell customers exactly what traffic will be limited / throttled, they’ll just go ahead and do it. Today peer-2-peer will be throttled. Tomorrow it’ll be large HTTP downloads and by the way, your ISP might decide that since they also sell their own Voice over IP solution, they’ll throttle Skype so it isn’t usable, and you’ll have to buy their Voice over IP solution. And so on. This is Net Neutrality - we don’t want ISPs selectively throttling certain traffic, because we don’t trust that they’ll have our interests at heart when they do it.

If ISPs do want to do it, they can always do it based on what servers we communicate with. We can’t stop them doing that.

They can also base it on what TCP and UDP ports we use. That is useful, but can be circumvented by using non-standard ports. And some protocols don’t even use standard ports. Deep Packet Inspection would come into play if the ISP wanted to identify even though it was using non-standard ports. They could look at the traffic itself and determine what “it looks like” and base their throttling on that.

And that would work today.

My prediction is, though, that if Deep Packet Inspection were to become common, inevitably people would circumvent that e.g. with encryption. Deep Packet Inspection won’t work on encrypted traffic (because by definition, encrypted traffic can’t be inspected).

So I come to a conclusion:

If Deep Packet Inspection becomese widespread, the consequence will be that encryption becomes equally widespread, making the internet a safer place for all of us!

Deep Packet Inspection leads to Encryption which would also make it impossible for the government to snoop anybody’s emails and have many other benefits. Wonderful. So bring it on!

I need to print text files on Linux. Of course there is the brain-dead:

$ lpr file.txt

And that sorta works. If you don’t want it pretty-printed in any way. But I really want to have it look nice and have lots of output on one printed page.

The only way I’ve found to do that is like this:

$ paps --header --font='Monospace 10' --top-margin=100 file.txt | mpage -P -
or
$ paps --header --font='Monospace 10' --top-margin=100 file.txt | mpage - | ps2pdf - out.pdf

I also tried cedilla for printing UTF-8 files, but had problems with top and bottom margins. It seems some of the input lines were gobbled up.

Unfortunately, a2ps and enscript both look really cool with non-UTF-8 encoded files, (such as encoded with the previously ubiquitous ISO-8859-1 (ISO Latin1)) but neither of them support UTF-8.

If you can live with that, then these settings for a2ps look much better:

$ a2ps -R --columns=2 -C -l80 -o - file.txt | ps2pdf - out.pdf

But slowly, I’m beginning to need to print out UTF-8 encoded text files, and a2ps will never get UTF-8 support, the author says…

I have a dream. I want to write structured documentation and source code together in my text editor and version control both together with git, just like the source code. But have it be searchable, viewable and ideally editable within MediaWiki. Is this possible?
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Yup. Going to be the daddy of a little baby girl in April 2009. We think we’ll call her Mathilde. Oh sweet Mathilde, you are welcome in our little family!

I’m so happy I could explode. Even though I realize I have no idea what implications this will have. So I’m very excited and quite scared too, I must admit.

I have no why I didn’t write about this earlier!

How is it with lactose-free products in Denmark?

Our local Allerød SuperBest has lactose-free milk. But only milk.

Edit on March 5, 2009: This article contains links to arla.dk, but after I contacted them, they’ve removed the forum threads - of course that is easier than answer the questions in the threads, now isn’t it?

An Arla forum post contains a link to Laktoseguiden which has a table of lactose contents in common (Arla) dairy products. Handy. E.g. most cheese and butter contains very little lactose.

A post from 2006 mentions that Arla sells a wider lactose-free product range in Sweden and Norway, and that perhaps this can be ordered via mail, since the products have a long shelf-life. “We’ll get back to you” seems to be the answer. And that was in 2006… So today I’ve written Maja Møller at Arla to ask if there is an update about this. I was told to look at Arla’s Swedish site and “contact a supermarket and hopefully you’ll be able to find a usable solution”.

So all in all, it seems that you can buy only genuinely buy lactose-free milk in Denmark, but that many products are very low in lactose by their very nature.

The search continues for more proper lactose-free products in Denmark ; even if this means they are bought abroad and shipped by mail.

Peter

Isn’t this great?

If you define “church” as an organization that teaches a specific doctrine in a very specific way, and “state” as the institution which is empowered to create and implement the laws which govern your people, it is of benefit for these elements to be separated.

If you define “spirituality” as the sum total of your cultural values and your most sacred beliefs, and “politics” as the process by which you select the people who will write and pass laws, as well as the method by which laws are adopted, then it is not of benefit for these elements to be separated.

It is not the function of the state to promulgate specific religious doctrines. It is therefore not beneficial for a particular church or religion to exert its influence on the mechanisms by which a state governs. No church or religion speaks for the conscience of all of the people, and such influence would thus be unfair to those who do not agree with the doctrines and point of view of the church or religion in question.

Yet it would be beneficial for your cultural values and your most sacred beliefs to influence the process by which you decide who shall propose laws, and how they shall be adopted, because each individual making that choice is presumed to be, and is asked to be, voting his or her conscience.

Tomorrow’s God
Neale Donald Walsch
Pages 246-247

Now, do I want to run Xen? Hmm… I’m using it to host morch.com itself, and I think its great.

Compared to VMware workstation, which is my other favorite, I love that it is open source, and I love that it is detachable. That is, I can start it and don’t have any GUI artifacts hanging around. What I do with VMware workstation is start it under a VNC server, so I don’t have to worry about the GUI, but this isn’t about VMware but about Xen.

I also love Ubuntu, and it seems Xen dom0 is not supported on Ubuntu. As that thread shows, I finally did git Xen running on Ubuntu by following this howto.

But to really get it working, I ran into these problems too:

• no xm console prompt after debootstrap debian or ubuntu (Only for Debian domU-s though)
• And the problem in the howto that file: should have been tap:aio:.
• Xen linux error message: PCI-DMA: Out of SW-IOMMU space. Here I added swiotlb=128 to the xenkopt line in my /boot/grub.menu.list.
• Nvidia graphics drivers don’t work in Xen kernels. (No workaround - live with it)

Other than that, I think my Xen on Ubuntu is running fine.

Now, the way I work is that I’d like to have some virtual machines running all the time, and some for debugging and short term trials. For the former, I’d like to use Xen, but for the latter, I’d like to use VMware workstation (especially because it has multilevel snapshots, and LVM which Xen uses for snapshots, doesn’t support a snapshot of a snapshot.)

But alas, You cannot run VMware products on a xen kernel

So, now, I guess, I have to ask: How much do I really want to run VMware Workstation? Am I prepared to give that up to run Xen instead?

I wish I could have run VMware under a Xen dom0 and use Nvidia graphics drivers! VMware workstation for now…

Just wanted the entire world to know that I love sylvia!

With love,

Peter

Welcome to the new version of my website. I’ve switched to wordpress after my previous hosting company one day stopped my server.

So there are still some things to migrate over.

Bug welcome here!