I attended this meeting last Saturday, taking up the Cooperatives-SW invitation (we have been invited before, as reported on this blog). It was held, once again, at SCAT in Taunton. First, we had introductions from everyone. The Go! Co-op rail plan for Yeovil-Oxford and beyond got a mention by the chair after I introduced myself I didn t realise it at the time, but C-SW member Co-Cars were next door at an exhibition in the Genesis centre and are preparing to launch in Taunton. Then there was a formal welcome from Christopher Irwin, TravelWatch SouthWest CIC Chair and a keynote presentation from First Great Western s operations director Kevin Gale. Delays on the GW Main Line have returned in the last three months, with performance below targets. The blame was squarely laid at the door of not-for-profit infrastructure company Network Rail, but this area is still better than it used to be. The FGW 30 train fleet (refurbished Sprinters from London Midland and London Overground?) start arriving in about two weeks. There s a new consistent company organisation. In the Q+A, I think we were told:

• passenger information distribution will become a phone tree to cut the load on central control when there s disruption;
• central control with authorise station staff overtime when services are late;
• the current 1960 signalling system will be renewed over the next 7 years;
• The Reading area rebuild may be causing later failures;
• FGW want more new rolling stock, not just the FGW 30;
• network rail is basically good but has been cut back this yr;
• they would like us to keep feeding back through travelwatchsouthwest and keep lobbying politicians.

Then there was a discussion asking: what should be the SW transport priorities in the era of 30% cuts? I suggested co-op-friendly right-to-try measures should be in those priorities. Interestingly, a reply was given by Duncan Hames MP (Chippenham, LD), followed by a talking point from transport portfolio holder Richard Gamble of Wiltshire Council. After lunch came the just a minute speeches on: arctic oil, Devizes-Bath bus mistakes (change of operator, not serving Bath bus station), Local Enterprise Partnerships and bus cuts, a suggestion to require council transport officers to use public transport to get to meetings, the need for better integrated transport info for the Wessex area, senior citizen fares and CTAs (I don t remember what this stands for sorry), the big subsidy of High Speed 1, and the problem of Dorset s main towns having poor westward rail links. There was a quick summary of the report from the CIC board which can be downloaded from the TWSW website and a presentation on integrated smartcard ticketing system from Andrew Seedhouse of GO-SW. The West of England back-office system has been launched, but there is still more to do for the SW and to connect it to operators. The event ended with the second keynote address by TfL Commissioner Peter Hendy which I m sorry to say I don t really understand my notes about and have little recollection of the key points at the end of the day. As before, I felt that the best bits of the event were the morning question-and-answer sessions and the just a minute points immediately after lunch. So, in that line: what do you think are the biggest issues and the priorities for mass transport in the South West?

Another one of these technical reminder posts.
Calendar Server needs extented attributes on the filesystem it uses to store calendars. This fact has been very helpfully documented by the Debian maintainer, but since there are apparently still a couple consistency checks missing in the server, I ve spent the last couple of hours trying to find out why Sunbird (actually Lightning) would simply loop like crazy between PROPFINDs and OPTIONs, going nowhere.
It turns out the first time I started caldavd, the underlying filesystem didn t have xattr support, which meant some files and/or directories in the spool directory tree didn t get the needed attributes and after a restart the server would just gladly run as if nothing were amiss, driving the client slightly bonkers. I honestly wish I had the time right now to debug it a bit better and provide some patches upstream, but for now this post will have to suffice as help for any other poor soul out there facing this issue.

As Roozbeh noted, Unicode 6.0 came out yesterday. Somewhat fittingly (given it having been National Coming Out Day), it adds
U+1F46C TWO MEN HOLDING HANDS and
U+1F46D TWO WOMEN HOLDING HANDS

Unfortunately most people will probably be looking at small boxes with numbers in there for a while yet, which is probably a wonderful metaphor but I'm not quite sure for what.

I love Unicode. I love that it lets me produce correct typography without having to resort to . I love that it allows for hilarity like Zalgo and years of entertainment in searching for the limits of the LCA conference badge rendering. I'm thrilled that a poorly managed introduction of IDNs let me get away with things like www. .net, and that nobody's got around to taking it away from me yet. And U+1F64C PERSON RAISING BOTH HANDS IN CELEBRATION is going to be a core part of my IRC character set the moment I get a compose map that includes compose+\+o+/. But I also love little things like having the typographical freedom to express whatever kind of relationship I choose to.

Well, providing that it's between two adults. Maybe 6.1 should add combining variants?

Today, I launched the contest for prediction of the day Debian bugs #600000 and #1000000 will be reported. Have you bet already?

People start to wonder why the timeouts for the passwords in sudo seem to be so short recently in squeeze. The reason is a change in the defaults that causes it. The following option changed its default:

tty_tickets

If set, users must authenticate on a per-tty basis. Normally, sudo uses a directory in the ticket dir with the same name as the user running it. With this flag enabled, sudo will use a file named for the tty the user is logged in on in that directory. This flag is on by default.

To change it back you can add this line into your sudoers file:

Defaults !tty_tickets

Please be aware that the change in default is done because of security considerations. You might not always have all the ttys you are logged in directly visible and others might be able to access them (like, sudo on a remote SSH session). Use with caution, you though might consider disabling it on local systems with no remote users. Hope that helps! Actually this blog post was triggered by a question on ask.debian.net, a new service in the Debian eco system.

/debian permanent link Comments: 1

Blog Action Day approaches on Friday. The call this year is for clean water and some high profile blogs including the UKFCO and the White House will be joining in. But until then, you can look at the wonderful direct blog action by Lars Wirzenius In defense of Nicole and others after this shocking episode. I hope Lars is wrong in this case and the Davids will join together in their common interest to overthrow the Goliath. There is a far longer prelude than Lars describes, going back to the April 2005 launch of Liblime (announcement here). An independently-authored history of Koha and LibLime and the recent problems can be found at LWN.net (US$7/month if you woud like to subscribe and support LWN). Actually, I m not sure if PTFS is even a Goliath. They seem to stomp around a lot, but how big are they? Biggest credible guess I ve seen is 125 people across all products (not only Koha), which is fewer than the 150ish Koha-Community developers (not all supporters). So there you have it: Koha is bigger than PTFS. Literally.

It's the Monday of the Columbus Day weekend here, so I must have been running a Chicago Marathon yesterday. Indeed -- the 34th annual Chicago Marathon took place yesterday but everything was about its 10/10/10 date. The symmetric set of numbers was in all advertisements, posters, street signs, on our bibs, the medals, the (nice, for once) race shirt. Everywhere, and yes, I will admit that it was also part of the reason I finally registered earlier in the year shortly before the race sold out. This was the sixth time I ran this race (and my 14th marathon overall). And I still can't run this course all that well: never got a Boston qualification here. As I had mentioned when I blogged about my third Boston Marathon earlier in the year and the recent Chicago Half-Marathon, I have had some recurrent issue with a sore achilles which limited my running throughout the year. It had gotten better but a quick summary of the miles in my running log showed that I had been running only about 80% of the training miles I had in prior years. And not a single 20-miler. I knew I'd have to pay for that. Plus, as so often, the weather. Not quite as hot as the record-heat of 2007. But close enough: high 60s at the start and high 70s or even low 80s towards the end. But I have to compliment to the race organisers. The race was very well organised (following the experience of 2007) with extra water stops, extra sponges handed out at several spots (!!) and very good communication when during the race the alert level was raised to yellow given the heat and humidity. The searchable results now show a fair number of non-finishers, but at least nobody seems to have died. But it looked ugly on the course. I think I ran by three or four sets of paramedics assisting runners who were 'down and out'.. So how did I do? Fair, I suppose -- I ran pretty well for sixteen miles, then needed a first short walking break and continued to run well towards and past the 18 mile waterstop where a bunch of friends and fellow Oak Park runners were helping. But not long after that, I crumbled and needed to alternate walking and running for most of the remainder. With that I came in at 3:41:41, or a 8:28 min/mile pace. And which is by two seconds slower than the previous 'worst' from 2007. But heck, at least it's still more than three minutes faster than Dubya in Houston in 1993 ... I also got beat by a few local running friends as well as by Chicago's own marathon juggler. So there. Maybe I'll train a bit more next time.

In the real world, David does not always win over Goliath. That's sad, but it's true. Particularly in the case of a big corporation using its wealth, influence, and minions to stomp down invividuals, to prevent them from reducing those all-important profits. A corporation must profit, by any means necessary. Profit is more important than people. A corporation has exactly as little ethics, morals, conscience, and good behavior as it can get away with. It all pretty much rests the officers, and their personal balance between greed and being good people. While most CEOs and managers and other decision makers in a corporation aren't going to do big evil, say, have people killed, they might not mind being a little bit nasty occasionally. If you have a large corporation, with a culture of profit-worshipping, you'll have a large number of people willing to be a little bit nasty, and that amounts to a lot of nastiness. That's all a long prelude to this: earlier this year, the PTFS corporation bought Liblime, a competitor. They did this to get a controlling interest on Koha, the free software librarary mangament system. Much to their surprise, you can't buy a healthy free software project like that. The community of users and developers of Koha has resisted PTFS's strongarm tactics. PTFS wants control of the code base, version control systems, mailing lists, domains, web pages, wikis, and decision making, but the community doesn't let them. Right now they are attacking Nicole Engard, the documentation manager for the Koha community, spreading lies about her. Nicole is one of the Koha community members who has spoken against PTFS's actions. She also works for a PTFS competitor, another sin against PTFS. This is an unfortunate situation for Nicole, for Koha, and for free software in general. If corporations like PTFS manage to silence their critics by nastiness, then nastiness is a working strategy and will be used more in the future. We need to squash this every time it happens, so it does not spread. However, for PTFS to lose, Nicole will have to have the courage to stand up against even more aggression. In the old world, before the Internet, this would have been quite hard. She would have had to get newspapers interested in her case. PTFS would almost certainly have been able to prevent that, by using their PR muscle to conduct a smear campaign against her. However, with the Internet, it's easier. Anyone can step up and help defend Nicole. That's what this is. I've never actually met Nicole, but in my brief involvement with the Koha community, she was always helpful and professional. She has, personally, helped Koha and free software spread farther than it would otherwise have. She does good. Like pretty much everyone in the Koha community, she is considerate, polite, and just to a fault, even when dealing with those attacking her. PTFS, on the other hand, has done only one honorable thing that I am aware of: they finally released their version of Koha. Every other action from PTFS seems to be an attempt to gain an upper hand by underhanded stratagems. Luckily, they seem to be failing. Let's see if giving more publicity to the attack on Nicole will make it, too, fail. See Nicole's post about this for more information.

Alexander Wirt was so kind to upload the latest icinga (1.2) release to unstable. This will be the next candidate for lenny-backports-sloppy.
If you can t wait, just grab the package from http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/archive/bpo/icinga/1.2-1~bpo50+1/.
If you are using nagstamon and thinking about upgrading to icinga 1.2, I backported a working version from subversion r151, which you can grab from http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/archive/bpo/nagstamon/0.9.4r151.1~bpo50+1/. P.S. If you like nagios and/or icinga related software, there is a Nagios Maintainers Group and we would like to invite you, if you want to improve or extend the nagios/icinga ecosystem in Debian.

If you re using Debian, you know that this distribution is built entirely by volunteers that form a very diverse community. And you could be part of it. But why should you do that? I can t tell for you but I can share my own experience. It s been 12 years since I joined Debian and I m going to tell you what keeps me on board. 1. Technical excellence When facing a new challenge, Debian will strive to do the right thing. This pays off in the long term. In many cases, it means that we will take more time to implement our solution compared to other distributions out there, but this is also the reason why our packaging infrastructure allows us to offer painless upgrades and consistency across all packages. Debian is committed to quality and builds up on his experience thanks to the Debian Policy. My time is precious, I like to spend it on something useful in the long term. 2. Inspiring goals In its social contract, Debian has set out to create a 100% free as in freedom operating system. The criteria defining what constitutes a free work are listed in the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). While the above is relatively ambitious in itself, it doesn t inspire me much. What makes the difference to me is the emphasis given by the social contract on our users and free software. We don t build a free operating system in the void, we build it for people. Debian s motto the universal operating system can also be interpreted in multiple ways: universal as in for everybody on the world , on all kinds of computers , or for every possible usage . 3. High impact work Knowing that my work is useful to people is important, but it s even better when I know that it will benefit to lots of people. With Ubuntu and the hundreds of other derivatives, there are nowadays literally millions of users impacted by my work. Even an insignificant one second improvement experienced by 10 millions of people represent 115 days of time saved for something else, you get the idea 4. Working with great people Debian has the chance to have lots of smart people on board. There s always someone sharing valuable advice when you read Debian s mailing lists. When I joined in 1998, I was a real newbie and I learned a lot of things by reading and interacting with people more knowledgeable than me. You can still experience the same thing nowadays but there s one caveat: you must cope with various kinds of mailing list contributors including the smart but uncivilized (don t be offended too quickly!) and the occasional troll (best ignore it, don t feed it!). 5. Recognition of work When you contribute to Debian, people get to know you through your contributions. It s very rewarding to be thanked by your peers and by Debian s users. Check out thanks.debian.net to convince you that many people are grateful for the work we put into Debian. So that s it for me. But what about you? What motivates you to contribute year after year, or to start contributing if you re a prospective contributor?

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Let s join gregora and zack (and others, too lazy to search for links/names) and fix some RC bugs in Debian!So what happened last week?

• passenger (# 599024): passenger-doc: Package is empty patch sent on 06.10.2010, lucas has uploaded it on the 07.10.2010 (with my name in Changed-By *g*)
• cpu (#598173): cpu: FTBFS: Unable to locate package cracklib2-dev NMU prepared and uploaded to DELAYED/10 on 06.10.2010 (10 because cpu has 2 important bugs I did not fix)
• update-manager-gnome (#598202): update-manager-gnome: will not start seems to be an issue with lsb_release, but I cannot reproduce it, asked submitter for more info
• ktoon (#599303): ktoon: KToon crashes with Signal 11 cannot reproduce either, asked submitter for more info

What does that mean? Two bugs are (almost) closed, two need more work. And this leads me to a feature I miss from http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi: a comment field as http://bts.turmzimmer.net/ has it. Will ping lucas about this later today.Oh, and on a side-note, I joined http://ask.debian.net let s help our users :)

This essay is a summary of my presentation at the workshop Inlaws and Outlaws, held on August 19-20, 2010 in Split, Croatia. The workshop brought together advocates of piracy with participants in the free culture and free software movements.

In Why Software Should Not Have Owners, Richard Stallman explains that, if a friend asks you for a piece of software and the license of the software bars you from sharing, you will have to choose between being a bad friend or violating the license of the software. Stallman suggests that users will have to choose between the lesser of two evils and will choose to violate the license. He emphasizes that it's unfair to ask a user to make such a choice. Over the past few years, pirate parties have grown across much of the developed world. Of course, piracy remains the primary means of distributing media across most of the rest. Advocates of access to information have gathered and organized under the "pirate" banner, representing the choice of sharing with friends over compliance with license terms. The free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) and free culture movements seem to have a confused and conflicted reaction to all this. On one hand, major proponents of several pirate parties are FLOSS and free culture stalwarts and several pirate parties have made FLOSS advocacy a component of their political platforms. Pirate Parties' clear opposition to software patents and DRM resonates with both FLOSS and free culture communities. On the other hand, FLOSS leaders, including Stallman, have warned us about "pirate" anti-copyright policies. Free culture leaders, like Lawrence Lessig, have repeatedly and vociferously denounced piracy, treated even the intimation of an association with piracy as an affront, and systematically distanced themselves and their work from piracy. Should FLOSS and free culture advocates embrace pirates as comrades in arms or condemn them? Must we choose between being either with the pirates or against them? Our communities seem to have no clearly and consistently articulated consensus. I believe that, unintuitively, if you take a strong principled position in favor of information freedom and distinguish between principles and tactics, a more nuanced "middle ground" response to piracy is possible. In light of a principled belief that users should be able to share information, we can conclude there is nothing ethically wrong with piracy. Licenses have the power of the law but they are protected by unjust "intellectual property" laws. That said, principles are not the only reason activists choose to do things. Many political stunts are bad ideas not because they are wrong, but because they won't work and have negative side effects. Tactics matter too. Even though there might not be anything ethically wrong with piracy from the perspective of free software or free culture, it might still be a bad idea. There are at least three such tactical reasons that might motivate free software and culture to not support piracy or participate in pro-piracy movements and politics. First, a systematic disrespect for copyright undermines respect for all licenses which have been of a huge tactical benefit to free software and a increasingly important factor in the success of free culture. Copyleft licenses like the GPL or CC BY-SA have power only because copyright does. As Stallman has suggested, anti-copyright actions are anti-copyleft. That needn't be an argument against attempts to limit copyright. Indeed, I think we must limit and reduce copyright. But we must tread carefully. In the current copyright climate, I believe that copyleft offers a net advantage. Why should others respect our licenses if we don't respect theirs? Looking at the long term, we must weigh the benefits of promoting the systematic violation of proprietary licenses with the benefits of adherence to free software and free culture. Second, piracy is fundamentally reactionary. Part of its resonance as a political symbol comes from the fact that the piracy represents a way that consumers of media can fight back against a set of companies which have attacked them -- with lawsuits, DRM systems, and demonization in propaganda -- for sharing in ways that most consumers think are natural and socially positive. But piracy focuses on reaction rather the fundamental importance of sharing that drives it. As a result, most pirates do not support, or are even familiar with, a principled approach to access to information. As a result, many piracy advocates who speak out against DRM on DVDs will be as happy to use NetFlix to stream DRMed movies for $5 a month as they were to download for free. The best rallying cries do not always translate into be the most robust movements. Third, through its focus on a reaction, a dialog about piracy avoids engagement with the tough questions of what we will replace the current broken copyright system with. A principled position suggests that it is our ethical prerogative to create alternative models. The free software movement has succeeded because it created such a prerogative and then, slowly over time, provided examples of workable alternatives. A principled position on free software did not require that one provide working new systems immediately, but it makes the development of creative, sustainable approaches a priority. Attacking the system without even trying to speak about alternative modes of production is unsustainable. Free software and free culture call for a revolution. Piracy only calls for a riot. Piracy, in these three senses, can be seen as tactically unwise, without necessarily being unethical. By taking a principled position, one can go build on, and go beyond, RMS's comment. On free culture and free software's terms, we can suggest that piracy is not ethically wrong, but that it is an unwise way to try to promote sharing. Without being hypocritical, we can say: "I don't think piracy is unethical. But I also do not support it."

a rather active week, although most of my uploads were (again!) either packages prepared by others or packages where I just applied existing patches from the BTS.

• #524102 libsubtitleeditor0: "libsubtitleeditor0: missing Replaces: subtitleeditor"
  add missing Breaks/Replaces and upload to DELAYED/2
• #591976 src:libjifty-plugin-chart-perl: "libjifty-plugin-chart-perl: does not build swf files from source"
  upload repackaged package prepared by bremner (pkg-perl)
• #593014 src:libpoe-api-peek-perl: "FTBFS: test t/03-event.t fails with libpoe-perl (2:1.2920-1)"
  upload new upstream release prepared by periapt (pkg-perl)
• #593027 src:solr: "solr: FTBFS: lib/lucene-core-2.9.2.jar Missing"
  untag squeeze
• #597180 valgrind: "valgrind: Man page misbuilt on i386"
  add missing build dependency and upload to DELAYED/2
• #598070 src:libdevel-cover-perl: "libdevel-cover-perl: FTBFS (powerpc): Test 37 fails"
  manual versioned close, the new version builds again (pkg-perl)
• #598249 pacemaker: "unable to install pacemaker heartbeat"
  close: affects backports and not reproducible
• #599251 liblatex-driver-perl: "FTBFS: waits for user input at "latex path [/usr/bin/latex]""
  uploaded fixed package prepared by carnil (pkg-perl)

in case you haven't seen it yet: there will be a BSP at the Mini DebConf Paris at the end of october. .

We will not make it and have Debian bug #600000 reported on 10/10/10. Debian is really not able to do anything on time..:-) (are others?) Whatever the moment this bug is reported (in 2-3 days, I would say), Ren Mayorga is the winner of the Debian bug #600000 contest. Of course, I'll send a nice blog post so that it makes it into Debian News. And then, we'll open the bets for Debian bug #700000!

I've finally started writing my first real program in Haskell. I've been learning Haskell since 2007. That is to say, I've been reading about it, over and over. Progress learning has been annoyingly slow because I have not been able to commit to using it in a real program. Because when I'm writing a real program I want the program now, and I can code in other languages ten to one hundred times faster than I can currently code in Haskell. Nasty viscious cycle. Probably best to avoid getting really good at specific programming languages to avoid it, in hindsight. Writing a real program in Haskell is important because I mostly learn by doing real things. Exercises don't work well for me. Up till now the only real thing I did in Haskell was write a 250 line xmonad config file in it. Which really helped a lot, but mostly only with beating some of its syntax into my head. I have a few hundred lines of git-annex done. I don't need this urgently so I am willing to spend a week writing it instead of dashing off a perl version tonight. I seem to have had bad luck on the parts I tackled first, and run into some swampier parts of the Haskell platform. I hope these problems are behind me, they sure made the first 8 hours fun. time First thing I needed was a data structure with a time stamp. There are multiple modules to handle time, mostly seemingly incompatible, deprecated, and/or possibly broken. Data.DateTime seems to be the current choice, but I don't entirely trust it. Check this weird thing out, it thinks that 0 seconds and 1 second after the Unix epoch are the same second.

Data.DateTime> map (toSeconds . fromSeconds) [-1,0,1,2,100,1000,100000,100000,1000000,100000000,100000000,1000000000,10000000000]
[-2,0,0,1,99,999,99999,99999,999999,99999999,99999999,1000000000,10000000000]

Rounding error? (Now it's not all bad... it does support dates right up until the heat death of the universe, on 32 bit even. No Y2038 bug here.) locking Huh, I read RealWorld_Haskell_ twice and never noticed that it seems to omit POSIX file locking. Which in my Real World is a necessity. Probably because it's so hard in Haskell, with multiple gotchas. First there's the lazy IO problem, which means that if you explicitly close a file, code that read from it may not have really run yet. I ended up needing this scariness from System.IO.Strict, which is sadly not packaged in Debian or part of the Haskell Platform:

hGetContentsStrict h  = hGetContents h >>= \s -> length s  seq  return s

Then there's the Haskell's interface for fcntl locking, which exposes rather more of fcntl locking than I like to think about, being spoiled by perl's 2-parameter interface to it.

waitToSetLock lockfd (ReadLock, AbsoluteSeek, 0, 0)

And then there's that lockfd, which is not a regalar file handle, but a fd number, which has to be obtained by calling handleToFd. And then there's the crazy interface that has handleToFd close the input handle! Which is problimatic if you were going to use the file after you locked it..

Next week will be quiet busy. I will travel a lot. Of course, I am talking about OCaml Meeting and FOSDEM. The OCaml Meeting subscription is over and we reach a quiet good number of attendees: 45. This is the approximate number of people who come last year. There is now some details to finish (dinner for the previous day, schedule for talks...) but enough time left. The only thing I hope for the meeting is that it generates the same effect as last year: another impulse in the OCaml community. Many people are working continuously on OCaml but last year event has generated a lot of post-event discussion and many people started different project. Some of these projects are still alive, some are not as vivid as they deserve. I enjoy being at FOSDEM last year, but I only stay 1 day and it was not enough. I will be able to stay during the 2 days and attend more Debian conference than last year. I will visit Brussels and Ghent just after. Belgium is a really nice country and it has been a long time I haven't take a break.

I hope some people from the OCaml community will enjoy this changelog, extracted from llvm 2.6-7, which has just been uploaded:

  [ Arthur Loiret ]
   
  [...]
  [ Sylvain Le Gall ]
  * Build a libllvm-ocaml-dev package, which contains the OCaml binding:
    Closes: #568556.
    - debian/debhelper.in/libllvm-ocaml-dev. dirs,doc-base,install,META : Add.
    - debian/control.in/source: Build-Depends on ocaml-nox (>= 3.11.2),
      ocaml-best-compilers   ocaml-nox, dh-ocaml (>= 0.9.1).
    - debian/packages.d/llvm.mk:
      + (llvm_packages): Add libllvm-ocaml-dev.
      + (libllvm-ocaml-dev_extra_binary): Define, install META file.
    - debian/rules.d/binary.mk: Add dh_installdirs and dh_ocaml.
    - debian/rules.d/vars.mk:
      + include /usr/share/ocaml/ocamlvars.mk.
      + Configure with --with-ocaml-libdir=$(OCAML_STDLIB_DIR)/llvm.
  * debian/rules.d/build.mk: Fix symlinks pointing to the $DESTDIR.

In other words: LLVM is now built with its OCaml bindings and a META file for findlib. It will take some days before reaching every architectures, but hopefully it will be in Squeeze (next Debian stable release). Thanks to Arthur Loiret for the quick upload.

During one of my project I need to interact with Java cryptographic extension. Some data has been encrypted using PBEWithMD5AndDES. I need to access it from OCaml. I take a look at available cryptographic extension in the Debian project for OCaml: cryptgps and cryptokit. I choose cryptokit, because its author is well known: Xavier Leroy. This article was my starting point. Of course, I keep in mind that the reference is there and that there is a good article covering it. Here is the result in OCaml:

 let decrypt passphrase salt ?(iterationCount=41) str =
   let key, iv =
     let rec hash_aux iter str =
       if iter > 0 then
         (* Rehash string *)
         hash_aux
           (iter - 1)
           (hash_string
              (Hash.md5 ())
              str)
       else
         (* Key = first 8 bytes of the MD5 hash *)
         String.sub str 0 8,
         (* IV = last 8 bytes of the MD5 hash *)
         String.sub str 8 8
     in
       (* Hash n times combination of passphrase and salt,
           return key and iv 
         *)
       hash_aux
         iterationCount
         (passphrase ^ salt)
   in
     transform_string
        (Cipher.des
           ~pad:Padding.length
           ~iv:iv
           key
           Cipher.Decrypt)
       str

The only missing information was the pad algorithm to use (Padding.length). For this piece of information, I need to browse the RSA documentation and test a little bit. Rewriting PBEWithMD5andDES is quite straightforward with cryptokit and OCaml. It takes 25 lines with C# and OCaml (only counting LoC, no comment, no empty constructor or declaration in C#). I was thinking that this task will require 2 or 3 days, but it has been done in 4 hours... Many thanks to cryptokit ;-)

So, now, here it is. As of tomorrow, all of our three "kids" will have their own apartment. Indeed, Magali will now live (during weeks) in her own (10 square meters) room in Paris (close to Pigalle, oh la la) to make her life easier and save her from 4 hours commuting every day. Another page is turning...

Web Video and Global Innovation Chris Anderson (the curator of TED) gave an insightful TED talk about Web Video and Global Innovation [1]. Probably most people who have used the Internet seriously have an intuitive knowledge of the basic points of this talk, Chris had the insight to package it together in a clear manner. He describes how the printing press decreased the importance of verbal communication skills and services such as Youtube have caused a resurgence in the popularity and importance of speeches. He has some interesting theories on how this can be leveraged to improve education and society. Lectures for Developers vs Users Now how can we use these principles to advance the development of Free Software? It seems to me that a good lecture about Free Software achieve will achieve some of the following goals:

1. Promoting projects to new developers.
2. Teaching developers some new aspects of software development related to the system.
3. Promoting projects to new users.
4. Teaching users (and prospective users) how to use the software.

The talks aimed at developers need to be given by technical experts, but talks aimed at users don t need to be given by experts on the technology and someone who has less knowledge of the software but better public speaking skills could probably do a better job when speaking to users. Would it do some good to encourage people to join Free Software projects for the purpose of teaching users? It seems that there are already some people doing such work, but there seems little evidence of people being actively recruited for such work which is a stark contrast to the effort that is sometimes put in to recruiting developers. One problem in regard to separating the user-training and developer-training parts of Free Software advocacy and education is that most conferences seem to appeal to developers and the more Geeky users. Talks for such conferences tend to be given by developers but the audience is a mix of developers and users. Would it be better to have streams in conferences for developers and users with different requirements for getting a talk accepted for each stream? Publishing Videos It has become a standard feature of Free Software related conferences to release videos of all the talks so anyone anywhere in the world can watch them, but it seems that this isn t used as much as we would like. The incidence of Free Software developers citing TED talks in blog posts appears to exceed the incidence of them citing lectures by their peers, while TED talks are world leading in terms of presentation quality the talks by peers are more relevant to the typical Free Software developer who blogs. This seems to be an indication that there is a problem in getting the videos of talks to the audience. Would it help this to make it a standard feature to allow comments (and comments that are rated by other readers) on every video? Would having a central repository (or multiple repositories) of links to Free Software related talks help? Would it help to have a service such as Youtube or Blip.tv used as a separate repository for such talks? Instead of having each conference just use it s own servers if multiple conferences uploaded talks to Youtube (or one of it s competitors) then users could search for relevant talks (including conference content and videos made by individuals not associated with conferences). What about video replies ? What if after each conference there was an RSS feed of links to videos that had one video featured per day in a similar manner to the way TED dribbles the talks out. If you publish 40 videos of 45 minute lectures in one week you can be sure that almost no-one will watch them all and very few people will watch even half of them. But if you had an RSS feed that gave a summary of one talk per day for 6 weeks then maybe many people would watch half of them. Defining Success Chris cites as an example of the success of online video the competition by amateur dancers to create videos of their work and the way that this was used in selecting dancers for The LXD (Legion of eXtraordinary Dancers) [2]. I think that we need a similar culture in our community. Apart from people who give lectures at conferences and some of the larger user group meetings there are very few people giving public video talks related to Free Software. There is also a great lack of instructional videos. This is something that anyone could start doing at home, the basic video mixing that you need can be done with ffmpeg (it s not very good for that purpose, but for short videos it s probably adequate) and Istanbul is good for making videos of X sessions. If we had hundreds of Free Software users making videos of what they were doing then I m sure that the quality would increase rapidly. I expect that some people who made such videos would find themselves invited to speak at major conferences even if they hadn t previously considered themself capable of doing so (the major conferences can be a bit intimidating). How do we Start? Publishing videos requires some significant bandwidth, a cheap VPS has a bandwidth quota of 200GB per month, if short videos are used with an average size of 30MB (which seems about typical for Youtube videos) then that allows more than 6000 video views per month which is OK but as my blog averages about 2000 visits per day (according to Webalizer) it seems that 6000 views per month isn t enough for any serious vlogging. Not to mention the fact that videos in higher resolution or a sudden spike in popularity can drive the usage a lot higher. It seems that a site like Youtube or blip.tv is necessary, which one is best? There are lots of things that can be changed along the way, but a hosting service is difficult to change when people link to it. Conclusion I don t claim to have many answers to these questions. I m planning to start vlogging soon so I will probably learn along the way. I would appreciate any suggestions. Also if anyone has a long suggestion then a blog post will be best (I ll link to any posts that reference this one). If anyone has a long suggestion that is worthy of a blog post but they don t have a blog then I would be happy to post it on my blog.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html
• [2] http://thelxd.com/