How do you fight spam? Not through regulation. Spammers will find loopholes and exploit them. You can plug the loophole, but then they'll find another one. And some spammers will just not care, try to avoid the cops. Sure, eventually they'll get caught, but for every spammer caught there's ten more waiting. Not through technology; that's an arms race. Improve your filters, and the spammers will just modify their mails to slip through again. I don't think it is possible to fight spammers. But you can take revenge... Let's look at a typical nigerian scam:

From: foo@bar.baz
To: wouter@grep.be
Subject: PLEASE HELP
Date: some_date_in_the_future
Hi,
My name is <the name of a relative of someone rich who died>.
I have <some problem involving an amount of money that I cannot get
at>.
Could you please <do something which will cost you a lot of money>?
Thanks.
PS: please, reply on my private email address <scammer@scam.com>.

The important phrase is the last one: if you could please be so kind as to reply to their "private" email address. Obviously that email address is a throwaway one; but one would expect that they must read it and hope someone replies to it before the amount of spam on that address gets too high to reasonably be able to read it. Which is the catch. I wonder how those spammers would react if I would start adding their "private" email addresses to some database and, rather than throwing away mails which are so obviously spam, start forwarding them to random addresses from that pool...

This post, (via Ian M) meshed with some things I've been mulling on for a while about how we treat different types of data today. The relevant quote from that post is this:

I'll bet that we will look back of this era of quasi-networking and wince, "How did we ever live that way?" And the idea of wanting to carry all of your content with you will seem both old-fashioned and rather ridiculous.

I was recently very happy to acquire a large quantity of data files (about 15 thousand), each of which would take me hours to days to do anything with. And I have a few hundred CDs and DVDs with a terabytes or so of achived data on them. There is probably more stuff here than I would ever be able to look at in a regular lifetime if that were all I ever did. I'm adding stuff to the collection regularly. All of this is data that is not freely available; some of it is private stuff like email archives, some more is music, and every other sort of digital media known to man. Except oddly, software, which is almost nonexistant from the hoard except for a few bits that slipped in by accident. The chance that I'll ever look at any single one of these files is probably on the order of one in a thousand, although it's certianly possible that a computer might look at them all and search out some that I will be more likely to look at. Even though I know that I will probably never use most of this stuff, I hold onto it as archives mostly because it's easier to do that, than to decide if I really need to keep it. Or to get it back if I mistakenly discard it. That basic tradeoff, plus the fact that it's very easy these days to aquire large quatities of data and hold onto it cheaply, are the main factors behind this hoarding. What I've described might seem extreme, but it's not very uncommon and most of the people reading this probably do it too, to some extent. But the really interesting thing to me is that if this data were the only data I was able to use, I'd be very unhappy and bored and unable to accomplish much. The interesting thing is all the other data that I don't bother hoarding, because it seems so likely that it will be easy to get it if I need it. Some examples of this data -- and there are untold terabytes of it out there -- include: the complete source and binaries for a dozen operating systems; the complete revision control history of a thousand free software projects; tons of archived web sites, concerts, and movies in the internet archive; every usenet post ever made; every mailing list post I've ever read (or ignored); dozens of bug tracking systems with millions of bug reports; probably not very good scans of any artwork of any significance; more ephemeral blog posts than even boing boing can link to, etc. I don't hoard that data. The tradeoffs dont make hoarding it worthwhile; it's easier to just hope that most of it will always be available, and use my limited resources to keep the small parts of it that I'm responsible for backed up and available to others. Which tends to feel like a better use of time and resources than hoarding data, by the way. I suspect that there is more of this sort of data out there that's important to me, than there is for the average person right now. After all, most people don't find old bugs in bug tracking systems and the history of software's modification in revision control systems interesting, and I understand there might even be a few to whom usenet archives from the 80's arn't fascinating. And I know that the amount of data out there that's important to me has gone up over time. So the big question to me is, will I begin to find my hoarded data is useless, will it ever stop being important, and will I stop adding to the hoard? Some technological advances, like faster bandwidth, could tilt the balance that makes some things worth hoarding now. But at least for me, data still seems to be worth hoarding if the cost of accessing it is more than the cost of keeping it on media, or if its future availability can't be guaranteed. There are a lot of services that don't meet these criteria, things like itunes, and bittorrent, and netflix. These things won't stop hoarding; they'll just make hoarding easier, despite themselves. If it were still the 80's I'd be hoarding nearly every freely available thing I listed 5 paragraphs above. Some of it no longer needs to be hoarded thanks to technological change, some of it due to new services, but it seems to me that the really important change that tilts the balance from hoarding data to not is a growth in trust, and a change in what kinds of data are valuable. I trust the Internet Archive. I (sorta kinda) trust Google. And so I trust them to keep their content available, and so I don't try to hoard it. More and more I find freely licensed data, whether it's Free software, CC licensed media, or whatever, to be more valuable than proprietary data. And because it's freely licensed it can be archived online for everyone, by everyone, with network effects, and no need for hoarding.

It's a conference tradition that you get a pile of schwag at registration -- some sort of collection of toys, brochures, and other miscellania to remember the conference by. Or something. LCA is typically characterised by a pretty good schwag haul -- I can't think of an LCA I've been to (all 2 of them up 'til now) where I've been disappointed with the schwag. This year is no exception. The organisers have clearly gone to a lot of effort to dredge up all sorts of geek-friendly gear to dish out. For example, the conference bag -- it's a laptop-friendly backpack-type apparatus. Lots of pockets, shoulder strap, the whole kaboodle. Very tidy. It's a pity I've already got my Targus carry-everything-including-the-kitchen-sink model, because this bag would make a very nice alternative to that. The stuff inside the bag is just as impressive. There's another retractable network cable, like last year (a bit of a pity, perhaps, but this one is Cat-6 rated, for extra... something), as well as a tiny little 1-AAA torch. There's the usual pad/pen, tourist detritus, and conference program. More interestingly, there's a very shiny yo-yo (puppy dogs, beware!) and (possibly most importantly) a keyring-mountable bottle opener. There's also what is possibly the world's smallest frisbee (less than two inches in diameter -- as one of the organisers said, "Throw it at a speaker you don't like, because it sure as hell doesn't fly"), a laser-cut placemat (tres cool), and a chunk of chocolate (because we're about 5 minutes walk from the local cadbury's factory). Finally, there is the T-shirt. Loved ones will be pleased to hear that the T-shirt this year is basic black, meaning that you won't have to worry about being seen in public with a red-clad Matt. (For those of you watching at home, my wife isn't keen on red coloured clothing for some reason, so last year's conference T-shirt was not a big hit). The speakers are going to have to work hard to top the schwag pile. I await their response with baited breath.

Thanks to David Pashley I have discovered workrave, a tool with the aim to help you prevent RSI. I find it really useful, though in the beginning it sometimes feels annoying, for example when you're in the middle of doing something. After two days of using it, I'm slowly changing my habbit of clicking on the "postpone" button in those cases, as this a.) leads to another interrupt soon and b.) means even more finger movements (to click on the button and getting back to work).

Taking the breaks as adviced (I've only changed the defaults slightly) is really relaxing in my experience and even if I'm in the middle of doing something, I don't loose my concentration if I pause for 25 seconds and relax. I do loose more of my concentration if I do use the postpone or skip button :-)

And it's also not only helping preventing RSI but also back pains (which are related in my opinion / experience as one of the core causes for RSI is bad posture which also leads to back pains) and those breaks also help not to forget to eat and drink, which sometimes happens during hacking sessions.

So I'm a happy workrave user now, even though I'm still annoyed by bug 348845 - which I would happily fix myself if the sources for the images were available...

Which brings me to the topic of content being unsuitable for "the" workplace, because it offends people. I am offended, but not really surprised, how many people (and workplaces) seem to be offended by mentioning lesbians, but not for sensible reasons but because of the sexual reference. Heck, even Microsofts CEO seems to happily get along with gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders even though Microsoft as an american company has to fear those (christian) talibans, which is not the case for Debian.

And you really shouldn't blame anybody else except yourself if you visit non-work related URLs during your working hours.

I wish there was a better way to handle conffile renames than the method outlined at dpkg.org. Be nice if there was a way to pressed the checksum, so the conffile handler could just be used naturally, instead of bypassing it with a bit of a hack. Makes me a bit uncomfortable to just accept the users changes without prompting him on upgrade (as would happen with this recipe). If anyone has a better idea, it would really help me with #345112. Reading Jacobo's post makes me wish I had proposed a DebConf talk, BoF, whatnot on Trademarks and Free Software, and maybe promote some better discussion than the last time this was on the mailing lists. ndusart is coming for the weekend! Haven't seen her in two months, so I'm understandably, ridiculously excited. Better lend mricon my earplugs.

I just uploaded firefox 1.5.dfsg-3 to unstable and it should get in to archive today. It should fix issues with plugins not being found and the remaining branding issue with the about dialog box. The Mozilla trademark and branding stuff still bugs me. I understand their desire to not let anyone use their name on some broken all to hell version, but to require anyone who is distributing their software to jump through hoops to actually call it "Firefox", that no one else seems to require, seems fairly arrogant. They also seem to be more interested in the business aspects of things rather than the community that got them where they are.

Call me a grinch if you must. Merry Christmas.

The race has begun

It has happened. Today I had the impression that my display was a bit darker than it used to be; and later it started by slight changes in brightness, then real flickering - and then only darkness remained... I can still somewhat read the display, since I've started using black-on-white two years ago when I noticed the increased readability in pure sunlight. Now I've hooked up a TFT, but it's not yet running optimal, since my laptop had a 1600x1200 TFT, while the 17" display I've attached has a physical resolution of 1280x1024 I guess. I loved my IBM ThinkPad, especially because of it's display. Compared with much more recent displays, it had an excellent viewing angle, next to no reflections on it, and stunning sharpness with it's 135 dpi. I'll miss it. And I'll definitely miss the page-left and page-right keys next to the arrow keys I've gotten addicted to for desktop switching... The laptop is now 3.5 years old, so out of warranty. More stuff had started breaking; just before end of the warranty the harddisk died and I got it replaced, the main battery doesn't charge any more and my secondary battery holds for half an hour. Bluetooth never worked for me, and doesn't show up on USB like in all the Howtos. Heck, even of one of the two USB1 ports (no USB2) falls apart - the plastic part to keep the pins from touching is broken off... So it definitely doesn't pay off to have the display fixed. They would need to fix just about anything there. What sucks most is that I had intended to buy myself a new laptop in 10 months. I'd like to get one with a Core CPU then, but I don't trust the early models... and I'll have to decide which brand to buy. I loved my A31p display, but 15" and 3.5 kg is too large and heavy for my current taste. I'd go for an IBM ThinkPad X* (and I'd love the X50 I guess) if they weren't a bit expensive... maybe I'll get a Samsung now, but I definitely would want to test the display first... can't stand some of the displays I've recently seen on Dell (don't even think of watching a DVD on them unless you are at most 2 people, and they reflect like shit.) Does anyone know if there is a sponsorship program for Linux developers to get new laptops cheaper? ;-) Or at least without having to buy a useless Windows licence? Of course I'd help writing drivers and document the installation process...

Fred Wilson: “I will not buy music that I cannot remove the DRM from.” I agree wholeheartedly, though the strategy I use is the one Fred dismisses in the first paragraph, namely burning the music to CD and ripping it back, sans DRM, to MP3 format. Yes, it’s a pain, but it beats having to jump through all the digital hoops at some indeterminate point in the future when all I want to do is queue up a song I’ve legitimately purchased and have probably forgotten where I bought the thing, let alone what magic pixie dust I need to decode it. Sure, the MP3 format has issues too, but at least I know my music will play anywhere. (Since I’m on the subject, I’m looking for some sort of a virtual CD burner, which the operating system thinks is a CD burner but which is actually a piece of software that converts the tracks it “burns” to MP3 format. Anyone know if such a beast exists? That would certainly do wonders to curtail my contribution to the world’s coaster supply.) In practice, DRM isn’t as much as a problem for me as it seems to be for other people. Personally speaking, I don’t want to be in the music storage business—I’d much rather stream music on demand from some digital jukebox in the sky, which is why I’ve been a Rhapsody customer since 2003. (Greg Papadopoulos sums up my thinking pretty well exactly here: “I’ll bet that we will look back of this era of quasi-networking and wince, ‘How did we ever live that way?’ And the idea of wanting to carry all of your content with you will seem both old-fashioned and rather ridiculous.”) In my case, DRM is normally a non-issue—I simply route around it. Rhapsody has come a long way since I first started using it in 2003: They added a Rhapsody To Go service, which more or less solves the “disconnected operation” problem (though I still tangle with DRM issues from time to time if I go for too many days untethered), and they finally embraced the web, though the current web offering leaves much to be desired—the Linux plugin still doesn’t support Firefox 1.5 nearly two months after its release, the web interface has huge gaps compared to the jukebox software (you can’t access your music library on the web, among other things?!), and they don’t seem to be taking advantage of the new web platform at all (where, oh where, are the RSS feeds of my favorites, recommendations, etc, so I can mash them up with other stuff?). At the end of the day, I suspect the “economic boycott” James Governor calls for is the right way to fix the DRM problem. For my part, I’m voting with my wallet by supporting the model I want to win out in the end (that your music library will live on the web, not on your PC or in your pocket) and by buying music, in those rare cases when I do want to manage my own music library rather than letting someone else do it for me, from legitimate music services but opting out of the silos the platform providers are trying to build around me as a byproduct. Above all, I resist the temptation to climb into the big, beautiful lockbox Apple is building for us. As Clayton Christensen recently told BusinessWeek, I’m firmly convinced open standards will win out in the end:

Look at any industry — not just computers and MP3 players. You also see it in aircrafts and software, and medical devices, and over and over. During the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn’t yet adequate to meet customer’s needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution — because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way. But once the technology matures and becomes good enough, industry standards emerge. That leads to the standardization of interfaces, which lets companies specialize on pieces of the overall system, and the product becomes modular. At that point, the competitive advantage of the early leader dissipates, and the ability to make money migrates to whoever controls the performance-defining subsystem.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but that day can’t arrive soon enough for me.

So long time I know. For those of you out there who celebrate, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I have been busy last month and a half with work. As many know, I work for UPS and mid-Nov. to Dec. get pretty hairy at that place. Back in school this quarter full time. I am determined to get this over with and get into the field most here in cyberspace know I want to be in. Looks like my days of hacking are going to have to wait tho. This week alone I have spent 6 hours a day in the books, 8 hours at work and the remainder in bed or wasting on tv/ps2. Back to college life again. Least I am not eating ramen again. Sunday I will be in Wellington Ohio for a 20 team paintball tournament. I am hoping to get pictures and video of the event and hope to post those somewhere are the net for all to see. It looks as if our local team has a good chance to win $1000 as long as I carry the team ;) At any rate, will be fun and those who know me know paintball is the only stress relief I have left. GO STEELERS!!!

The controversy over Apple's "photocast" extensions, and the strangeness of their iTunes RSS enhancements, is illustrative of the transition that software companies need to make as they become web-enabled. It's no longer enough to make your applications and hardware pretty and functional, but the guts that other people get to see must look good too. This is one reason that people prefer RELAX NG over XML Schema, for instance. Where markup is concerned, it turns out that the excuse "only computers will read it, and we'll provide tools to generate it" doesn't cut it. The web's had a view-source mentality since it started, and the aesthetics of markup matter a great deal. They matter not only because they're nice for geeks to look at, but also because well-structured and standards-compliant markup is simply more interoperable. The end user experience is ultimately improved. Microsoft now gets this, I think. It's not hard--you just need to have your engineers exposed to the web, not hidden in some blinkered bunker. It's a shame that Apple doesn't yet understand that the aesthetics of markup count. Even their new web tool, iWeb, lacks somewhat in this department. Apple do so well in the rest of the computing experience, these poor web efforts really stand out. It was rather sad to read the disappointment OS X-hugging web developers felt with the iPhoto RSS use. Will Apple "get" the web better someday? I hope so, because we'll all benefit.

It's a month since I was exposed to excessively loud music at a concert and the tinnitus is getting worse. Imagine an infinitely long blackboard, and someone walking along, squeaking the chalk, forever. The sound is in your head when you go to bed, there when it wakes you up at night, and there at every moment of the day, demanding your attention. Damage to the inner ear does not heal. There is no cure. You are told to learn to live with the incessant noise, and to look forward to a life without silence.

I was recently reading a report written in 2004 on the safety of Dutch flood defenses. One of the more interesting sections was a comparison of Dutch flood defense policy with that of other countries, including the United States.

In the Netherlands large sums of money are spent maintaining the dikes. It is not possible to achieve perfect safety; however, it is possible to estimate risks. In the Netherlands it is reasoned that it is justifiable to spend additional money increasing the effective height of dikes up to the point where it costs more to add the next centimeter than that centimeter will "save", where the calculated saving is equal to the reduced economic losses due to flooding. Because the cost of flooding Holland would be large, the policy that emerges from this analysis is that the dikes protecting Holland should be built to withstand water levels that occur once per 125,000 years on average.

In the United States the corresponding figure is typically once per 100 years. That is, the government chooses to accept a frequency of flooding that is one thousand times as high as that considered acceptable for Holland. (The dikes around New Orleans are built to an even lower standard.)[0] This is a deliberate policy which is paired with the view that citizens should be free to make their own choices: someone can build in an area vulnerable to flooding, but then he probably won't be able to get flood insurance and therefore won't be able to get a mortgage.

Recent events have to be considered in this light.

[0]UPDATE: I have discovered that the exact figure for New Orleans is 200 years. That is, once the current programme of levee upgrades is complete, the New Orleans levee system should fail with an annual probability of 0.5%. As yet I have found no hard figures for the failure probability of New Orleans levee system prior to the completion of the upgrade programme.

The project we're talking about here that has failed is an element of the Lake Pontchartrain project, and in its early design stages it was meant to provide protection from a two- or three-hundred-year event that might strike the city; so we were looking at a very low-probability event and we designed with that in mind. -- Lieutenant General Carl A. Strock, Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, at a news conference on 1 September 2005

The point stands that Dutch policy makers have a very different idea of "low probability" when it comes to floods. Dutch water defenses are built to have an annual failure probability of 0.0008%.

I wish there was a better way to handle conffile renames than the method outlined at dpkg.org. Be nice if there was a way to pressed the checksum, so the conffile handler could just be used naturally, instead of bypassing it with a bit of a hack. Makes me a bit uncomfortable to just accept the users changes without prompting him on upgrade (as would happen with this recipe). If anyone has a better idea, it would really help me with #345112. Reading Jacobo's post makes me wish I had proposed a DebConf talk, BoF, whatnot on Trademarks and Free Software, and maybe promote some better discussion than the last time this was on the mailing lists. ndusart is coming for the weekend! Haven't seen her in two months, so I'm understandably, ridiculously excited. Better lend mricon my earplugs.

I just uploaded firefox 1.5.dfsg-3 to unstable and it should get in to archive today. It should fix issues with plugins not being found and the remaining branding issue with the about dialog box. The Mozilla trademark and branding stuff still bugs me. I understand their desire to not let anyone use their name on some broken all to hell version, but to require anyone who is distributing their software to jump through hoops to actually call it "Firefox", that no one else seems to require, seems fairly arrogant. They also seem to be more interested in the business aspects of things rather than the community that got them where they are.

Call me a grinch if you must. Merry Christmas.

For the first time in more that 10 days, I slept like a baby last night. It might hurt the xlibs-dev transition, but I hope it actually helps in the long run, I will make less mistakes, bug vorlon and dato a bit less, be more aware and awake. Now I just need to keep a balanced sleeping schedule again. I think have good allies.

I have started a small experiment that is against all rules but might spread some package love. So far, I have been successfully working with Victor Seva, Justin Pryzby, Thomas Viehmann and Nico Golde. Join us if you care about this transition!

On the other hand, I find recent threads in debian-devel, debian-private and several posts in debian-devel-announce very distracting. Although I am strongly opinionated on the subjects being discussed, I'd rather remain semi-silent and work in my "NMU love".

Don t you love it when it looks simple and then it is actually simple, but you are not up to the task?

I am loving the xlibs-dev transition, really, I mean it! Two of my packages, fkiss and xdigger got bit by this issue, and I immediately fixed the bugs with a little help from a script provided by Moritz Muehlenhoff. really cool.

So I follow instructions in The Debian Wiki, run the script, check with pbuilder, upload and profit! Fun! End of world hunger! Err, almost. So I get all excited and decide to look at the bugs. And I find a nice one: #346347. Not bad, gpsim FTBFS, Luk also took a look at it and didn t really like what he saw, it neede no xlibs-dev or substitute for them and sitll FTBFS.

But wait! Just by looking at gpsim s bugs page, I find out that there s a New Upstream Version(tm) (#248931) available since 1 year and 241 day ago. Also, NMUs that have not been acknowledged for as long as almost two years... Not nice. And there s even a patch (#345215) for building it on, GNU/kFreeBSD... how sexy!

So I get all obsessive about it. But newer upstream needs a newer libgtkextra-dev version (#347397), which of course was not packaged (don't we all love Murphy?) and that s where I am stuck at. I loathe libraries. But still I gave it a try. And failed. Several times.

Fun? Yes! Profit? Nope! Do you want to take a look at it? Easy. It s all here.

Amaya also FTBFS. And I want to NMU amaya. Badly. Since I first heard about amaya, and realized that I am named after a web browser (sucky as it might be) and after getting many IRC highlights (every time that amaya FTBFS is mentioned on IRC), I have been wanting to use/adopt/NMU it. Amaya NMUs amaya, how recursive can it get?

I will go to bed now, and try not to keep thinking about it, not because I want to become an early riser, Gunnar, no need to worry! But reading about it I thought it would be healthier for me to wake up everyday at the same hour, so that s all I am aiming for. If you know me, you might be rolling on the floor laughing as you read this. So am I! But, if you know me, keep in mind that I have been drinking coffee with no sugar since August... Hey! You are not laughing anymore?

Vi and Emacs are doing fine. Emacs was not pregnant after all, or so the vet told me. It was hard to see her slowly become herself after surgery. Vi was perfectly OK all along, but she looked terrible. Anyway, she felt better by 6am the next day and came to bed, perfectly groomed, and purring like nothing had happened. A week has passed and she has started doing the gory part today... she s biting away the scar tissue, and it bleeds a bit. Oh my Spaghetti Monster!

My vet has written two books on cats, is nominated for Intervet's Vet of the year and is also a very interesting person to talk with: Santiago G. Caraballo.

Ugly pics of scars and post-surgery cats to be uploaded later.

I just came back from the vet. I left Vi and Emacs there and will pick them up after work, as today they will be spayed and neutered (450 EUR total). I am all shaky inside.
My little cats! (Well, not so little, as Emacs started acting like if she was in heat only a few hours before I had to take a plane for my Holidays, so I guess she is not so little anymore, nor is Vi, who seemed completely fascinated by her new behavior. Anyway, my vet knew this would happen one month in advance, when we were arranging an appointment for the surgery that will be performed today).

Good luck, my babies!