Just a quick update for SELinux in etch. With Manoj picking up work on it again (you might have noticed the large influx of new SELinux related packages these days, bringing our toolchain up to date again), and rjc having setup a SELinux development box for me, we're actually making some progress on SELinux for etch now. Uwe Hermann also blogged about SELinux on Debian recently. There are tons of small nuisances with SELinux on Debian left. I've started filing bugs and tagging them with the "selinux" usertag. It's in the details. For example mawk and gawk both try to ioctl any file they read as if it were a serial terminal. Which of course causes SELinux to log an audit error, since the init script or whichever was calling awk didn't have the permissions to ioctl a config file. Then there is /dev/xconsole - it's created by the syslogd init script (shouldn't maybe this be handled by udev), it's barely used by anyone, and SELinux policy upstream wants to keep it in the xserver policy, and claims its main use is to be able to feed it the output from programs started by the window manager (instead of .xsession-errors). Which is a seriously broken design, since it's not multiuser capable. Anyway, our current options are to

• diverge from upstream in policy, putting xconsole into logging policy
• make xserver an mandatory policy module
• convince the syslogd maintainer to disable xconsole by default
• convince upstream to at least split it out from the xserver module into a separate xconsole module and make that mandatory

Of course I was quickly flamed for filing a bug against exim stating that there currently is no SELinux policy for it, and people thus will have to use postfix or sendmail instead. But heck: people trying out SELinux on Debian will run into this problem, you know. I'd certainly prefer people to use exim instead of sendmail (I'm more of a postfix guy), but unless someone writes a policy for exim, people can't use it with SELinux. I have no idea how exim works (where its queues live, expected behaviour and so on), so I can't write a policy. Now to start a real flamewar - how about making postfix the new default MTA for Debian with etch? /me runs and hides.

A lot of people outside Germany, including here in Ghana, can't pronounce my name right (whereas right is what I'm used to...). So I looked through the German wikipedia and tried to figure out how to write my name in the IPA. The result is:If you don't have unicode available, this will probably look strange to you. All these sounds have strange names, here they are:

• j: palatal approximant / Stimmhafter palataler Approximant
• : open-mid back rounded vowel / Gerundeter halboffener Hinterzungenvokal
• a: open front unrounded vowel / Ungerundeter offener Vorderzungenvokal
• : voiceless uvular fricative / Stimmloser uvularer Frikativ
• : near-close near-front unrounded vowel / Ungerundeter zentralisierter fast geschlossener Vorderzungenvokal
• m: bilabial nasal / Stimmhafter bilabialer Nasal

And yes, it is the same letter as in Te , but not the same pronounciation, which is t x. Update: I had to convert my serendipity blog to UTF8 to make this entry right. Did so by mysqladmin dump'ing the whole database and running it through iconv, and then re-inputting it. Sorry to any planets that had a broken entry for a while. Maybe this update paragraph makes these planets update the entry :-)Update 2: As I'm already showing of with unicode characters: The name Joachim is derived from Jehoiakim (Jojakim in German), which is Hebrew and looks like this:

One of the things I value most in my workplace is that, unless I break something, I am barely disturbed. People wave at me and recognize me in the hallway, I even have some corridor chats every now and then - but in my office, quiet. Nobody comes, nobody calls, nobody bothers me. I can mostly work on my stuff.
Today, however, I have had two over-20-minute phone calls (I hate long calls - keep'em short, to the point, end of story!) and at least four short ones, three people from the institute have come to request my help to do different things, even a couple of friends working on some of the Mexican Free Software conferences came to talk with me.
Is this something boolean? How come they all dropped by or called me the same day? There must be a reasonable explanation.

So K. called me a brat, and rightly so. Now I could go on about the bizarre dysfunctional ways A. and M. keep trying to drag me into their extramarital insanity, but that would be overuse of initials. I could tell you about Fatslaps and his plans to splatter Harry with onions, but Harry is whimpering just about the right amount. I'm talking about Harry, not Harry. I could do a Marxist literary criticism of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, but something disturbing happened to me, indirectly leading me to have a flashback. It was another century, though not more than a couple miles away. As with all progress , some things are better now, and some things are worse. Maybe that's just how I see it. It's stereotypically geriatric to reminisce about the past, accentuating the positive, but it's stereotypically me to only comment on the negative. So in the interest of stalling, here comes a m lange of the two. Value judgments are left as an exercise for the reader, assuming the prostitute/lover question isn't still getting top billing. Warren Zevon was still alive. Nouvelle Vague hadn't released any albums yet. I only knew one person who spoke Brazilian Portuguese. I hadn't seen Rent yet. I used to eat a lot more Colombian food. I refused to eat tomatoes. Actually, I ate quite a few things then that I don't now, and quite a few things now that I didn't then. I don't remember what I ate that night, but it wasn't Kraft dinner ; I'm sure of that. I know because I went to see a free concert as performed by the Barenaked Ladies. The concert was free because they were almost completely unknown. I was introduced to them a while before, by a dirty, dirty slut who squealed with delight because the lyrics featured words such as erection . It took me years of recovery to be able to appreciate that song. Years. If she hadn't, I would have found out about them through Minna Bromberg because she does a cover. One of the people I was with shouted out to Steven Page, calling him by the wrong name. If being a starstruck poseur weren't enough cause, I think the error would have made me implode from embarrassment. He took it on the chin. I know this Canadian who keeps telling the same tired old story that the Barenaked Ladies is the only Canadian band to ever become famous outside of Canada. He uses this dubious claim to segue into his bit about how The Tragically Hip is really popular in Canada, but unknown everywhere else. I tell him that I've heard of The Tragically Hip. He doesn't believe me. I try telling him that I've never heard of Moxy Fr vous or Rush, at which point he breaks down and admits that everyone has heard of Rush. Then we repeat the conversation a month later. So BNL did get all famous and mainstream and STUFF. That night, they urged everyone in the audience to promote them so they could GET PAID and sell out to The Man. I must confess not comprehending their earnestness and the gravity of the situation. I also never expected them to be played on Z100. Boycott ClearChannel. They're sellouts now, but they weren't then, and a good time was had by all. At the time, If I Had $1000000 might've been their most popular song. AS SUCH, the more rabid fans in the audience had brought boxes and boxes of macaroni & cheese, as well as a stuffed monkey or two. These items were flung at the stage, at appropriate times, frightening the band. I don't believe that anyone threw a green dress. Now, Canadians are funny people. They like to flap their heads and do medleys and covers and rap gratuitously in the middle of concerts. Well, Rush doesn't, but Moxy Fr vous and BNL do, and that's enough for me to make a sweeping generalization, because Rush can be disqualified purely on the mullet factor. You probably don't know this, but If I Had $1000000 is a song which gets a lot of variation and perhaps improv. For example, the owner of the remains will vary, and they'll vamp the introduction with the lyrics of some other song. You can hear it on the Rock Spectacle album, where they lead in with Grade 9. That night they did Prince's Raspberry Beret. We swooned. We swooned.

While trying to introduce Linux at the SOS Hermann Gmeiner International College in Tema, Ghana, I encounted a very strange problem. Here are the results, I spare you the list of things I tried to find out:The BIOS on the Gateway PCs they use here, with the id bf86510A.15A.0066.P13, will freeze when it encounters a disk with a linux created partition table. It will do so before even deciding what to boot, so you can't boot from CD then. It does not matter if the orignal MBR is on it, or the one created by Window's fixmbr, or lilo -M, or install-mbr, or grub. Changing the partition table using Windows XP (diskpart in the recovery console) will make the BIOS boot nicely. This only happens with the hard model drive that came with the PCs, after replacing it with a different model any partition table is ok.The only way to keep working with the hard drive is to power the computer without the hard drive attached, wait until it is done detecting it (for example wait until the BIOS complais about the lack of harddrives), then plug it in while the computer is running. Of course, the hardware is not meant to be used this way, and it might destroy everything, so don't try this at home (unless you have to). For me it was the only way, since when I know boot from a CD (Windows Installation Disk, Knoppix, FAI-Installation CD, anything that does not rely on BIOS information regarding the hard disks), the hard drive can be used just fine...So how did I get Linux on it in the end? One can say I tricked the BIOS: I made the automatic Linux installation add another, unused and small partition at the end. After the installation is done and I can't boot regulary any more, I use the mentioned power trick to boot the Recovery Console of a Windows XP installation CD, to delete the unused partition with diskpart. This makes Windows write the table, and thus make the BIOS happy. Unfortunately, this kills grub, so I have to boot any Linux boot CD, chroot into my installed system and run grub-install...If anyone has encountered similar problems before and maybe found a nicer solution, which maybe could bring me back the "A" in "Fully Automatic Installation", or at least frees me from the need to make IDE hot-pluggable, I'd be grateful.

Registering “debianadmin.com” will not make me love you. But I’ll turn a blind eye if it means that you’ll stop spamming debianhelp.co.uk everywhere …

---

If nothing else this shows that rel=”nofollow” was worth adding to my sites, even if it is a horrible hack.

I have three machines located under my desk at home:

• rock, an SMP i386 machine on which I'm typing this,
• ska, an MVME167 machine that has a 68040 processor and is supposed to be a Debian/m68k buildd host,
• and newwave, a Macintosh Quadra 700, which does not have enough RAM to be used as a buildd, but which I use to do some m68k-based hacking on.

A few months ago, the last two had died with various problems that had seemed to be disk-related; both gave an error in the firmware—with ska's error obviously being more... detailed... than the 'unhappy mac' error icon that newwave gave me. Today, I powered both on again. newwave didn't even give me a hiccup; it booted right away, even if it needed to do a rather extensive fsck run. ska did take a little more work, unfortunately; it seems to boot, but it does give me SCSI errors, too. At least it's managed to make it to a login prompt, however, so I can have a chance at fixing it. Interestingly, just as I finished the above paragraph, and less than half a minute after it made it to said login prompt, it breaks down rather horribly:

scsi0 channel 0 : resetting for second half of retries.
SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel 0.
scsi0 : DCMD DBC=0x98080000, DNAD=0x2cec6c (virt 0x002cec6c)
         DSA=0x3ad300 (virt 0x003ad300)
         DSPS=0x2060000, TEMP=0x3ad154 (virt 0x003ad154), DMODE=0xe0
         SXFER=0x58, SCNTL3=0x0
         phase=MSGIN, 0 bytes in SCSI FIFO
         SCRATCH=0x3ad300, saved2_dsa=0x3ad300
scsi0 : DSP 0x2cec64 (virt 0x002cec64) ->
0x2cec64 (+1a1) : 0x98080000 0x02060000
0x2cec6c (+1a3) : 0xc0000004 0x002ce5c4 0xfff47010
0x2cec78 (+1a6) : 0x80080000 0x002cfb80
0x2cec80 (+1a8) : 0x98080000 0x00030000
0x2cec88 (+1aa) : 0x50000000 0x002cede0
0x2cec90 (+1ac) : 0x60000200 0x00000000
scsi0 : issue queue
scsi0 : dsa at phys 0x3ab188 (virt 0x003ab188)
        + 64 : dsa_msgout length = 2282225664, data = 0x2ce7d8 (virt 0x002ce7d8)
        + 60 : select_indirect = 0xfff47010
        + 56 : dsa_cmnd = 0x2ce5c4                result = 0x8888, target = 27147, lun = 0, cmd = VENDOR SPECIFIC(0xe5) c4 ff f4 70 10 88 08 00 00
        + 48 : dsa_next = 0x0
scsi0 target 27147 : sxfer_sanity = 0x0, scntl3_sanity = 0x0
                   script : 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 0000004a
Oops: 00000000
PC: [<000bfae2>]
SR: 2700  SP: 01ad9cd8  a2: 01ad8000
d0: 00000001    d1: 00002622    d2: 0000000a    d3: 00000008
d4: 002d2704    d5: 002d14e0    a0: 00000000    a1: 0015aefc
Process ntp_time_as_com (pid: 775, stackpage=01ad9000)
Frame format=7 eff addr=01ad9d5c ssw=0505 faddr=0000004a
wb 1 stat/addr/data: 0005 003ab188 01ad9d60
wb 2 stat/addr/data: 0005 0016f8b5 0000abd6
wb 3 stat/addr/data: 0005 01ad9d40 0000000a
push data: 01ad9d60 0000adec 0015aee0 00000001
Stack from 01ad9d40:
        0000000a 00000008 002d2704 002d14e0 002ce5c4 002ce140 003ab188 0000ac4a
        000bfe68 002ce5c4 0013e781 00000000 00000018 002d2704 00000000 00000000
        0000ac4a 003ab188 002d14e0 002ce000 000bfefc 002d14e0 003ab188 0013e576
        00000000 0000ac4a 002d14e0 003ad300 98080000 000bf586 fff47000 002cec98
        002ce000 000c02d4 002d14e0 003a5200 00000000 000b2704 00000018 00000020
        00000000 00000000 002d14e0 002ce000 000bf912 002d14e0 002d14e0 00000001
Call Trace:
        [<0000ac4a>] [<000bfe68>] [<0013e781>] [<0000ac4a>]
        [<000bfefc>] [<0013e576>] [<0000ac4a>] [<000bf586>]
        [<000c02d4>] [<000b2704>] [<000bf912>] [<000b6c4c>]
        [<000b5f24>] [<000b6a04>] [<000b6c4c>] [<000b6c4c>]
        [<000b65b6>] [<0013d5fe>] [<00002404>] [<000beb82>]
        [<000bd206>] [<000bf022>] [<000bf4d6>] [<000bed46>]
        [<000833fe>] [<00004e52>] [<00003b86>] [<0000c00c>]
Code: 2c68 004a 4878 0180 2f0c 47fa 0c8a 4e93 508f 2a0b
Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler!
In interrupt handler - not syncing

aw. Oh well, at least I've got one more working machine now. Only need to update it from unstable as it was 41 days ago to today's unstable. Going to take a while, I fear.

Last weekend, for the Labor Day long-weekend, we went to Yosemite. We camped at an RV park about 15 minutes drive from the entrance on Highway 120. The National Park was fantastic. Really big, and really well laid out. There were a couple of two-lane one-way ring-roads designed specifically for just rubbernecking, so you could cruise along at your own pace and take it all in. The place also had free shuttle buses. That blew me away. It also had two "villages". These were quite large and really well equipped with food outlets, a supermarket, accommodation etc. There's even a golf course. We managed to run into some random Googlers, and some tourists from Sydney while on top of Sentinel Dome. On the wildlife side, we only saw some deers. On the way to Sentinel Dome, we passed some people in the opposite direction who warned us about there being three bears around, but much to our disappointment, we didn't see them. There were lots of waterfalls. I'd love to see the place in Spring when everything's melting, and also in Winter just to see how much snow is around. I don't doubt we'll be back. Photos are here (with some culling and captioning still required) It's the first time I've remembered to take our tripod with us, so for a change we've managed to actually be in a lot more of the photos.

Recently, a few hosted servers in Germany were taken by the police, some of which were running the TOR anonymizer (see heise.de, golem.de, both German). As I'm running one on my server, this worries me, as I am quite dependent on this server, especially now that I am in Ghana, my server in Munich and my backups behind a DSL line with anachaic little upstream bandwidth.I feel I should stand bold and keep running my TOR server, but in this case I'm a coward, so I disabled it. Sorry.For the uninitiated: TOR is a network of servers you can freely use to conceal the origin of your internet activities. This is invaluable for people with oppressive governments (more oppressive than the German one in this case); think China. Unfortunately, as with all technology, this can be used for bad things. The original reason for the police to seize the servers was, according to the news, child pornography. But they should know that a TOR server never knows both origin and target of a connection, and thus is useless for them!

I managed to get myself to stand in front of the mixing table and got an old radio program playlist redone. Now it sounds great, well mixed and flowing, instead of cracky and jumppy as it did when i first aired it. The name for this mix? “Good stuff (quite good actually)” thanks to Paul Mundt from SuperH fame. Enjoy!

I noted the new WikiOhana wiki yesterday, but I forgot to mention the great new project for making a wiki-text "interlanguage" -- an Esperanto for Wiki markup. The WikiCreole project aims to establish a lowest-common-denominator text formatting languages that can be implemented as "everybody's second language" in different Wiki engines. The hope is that users from one wiki can edit pages on another wiki relatively easily, given their familiarity with the interlang. I think it's a great idea (another one of Ward Cunningham's good ideas, or at least partly his), and I hope it gets some traction. This is one of the areas that has really hurt wiki uptake -- TooManyWikiEngines that don't work well together. tags: wiki wikicreole creole ward cunningham

Y’all remember Wil Wheaton? He was Gordie in Stand By Me, Wesley in The Next Generation, then disappeared, then started blogging, wrote some books, … Now he’s reviewing Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes (contains spoilers). The first is now available. Wil’s resentment of how the writers treated his character on TNG has been known for a long time. Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of the review is Wil discussing the lines he was given:

[….] I also got to say lines like, “So you mean I’m drunk? I feel strange, but also good!” In fact, John D.F. Black — who I didn’t realize at the time hated me — also wrote Justice, where he gave me the awesome line, “We’re from Starfleet! We don’t lie!” Thanks for that one, too, Mr. Black.

But the review is not just snarking agains former bosses, it is a real review. It contains a synopsis (spoilers, beware!), a personal behind-the-scenes memory, a (very!) memorable quote, and an interesting take on the “bottom line”. I’ve always liked Wil’s writing. This one is not an exception.

Tenho aqui comigo um o in cio de um texto antigo, que comecei a escrever h uns dois anos atr s, sobre porque eu uso Debian. Nunca consegui finaliz -lo direito, mas achei que n o seria justo deix -lo aqui jogado em um diret rio empoeirado de meu HD (meu ~/txt tem muita coisa iniciada e n o finalizada). Um dia ainda vou termin -lo e acrescentar mais conte do, s preciso estar num dia inspirado para tirar todas as id ias da cabe a e coloc -las na forma de palavras. De qualquer forma, mesmo inacabado, espero que gostem. E lembrem-se : meu blog aceita coment rios

Por qu Debian ? Eu tamb m ou o esta pergunta quase diariamente. Para que eu n o tenha que respond -la novamente a toda vez que me perguntem, resolvi sentar e escrever uma resposta padr o para a mesma. Assim, toda vez que algu m me faz esta mesma pergunta novamente, eu simplesmente pe o para a pessoa ler este texto. Aspectos t cnicos Qualidade. Sim, qualidade. Erroneamente, a maioria das pessoas que n o utilizam Debian ou que n o o conhecem pensam que o grande motivo pelo qual o Debian se diferencia das outras distribui es GNU/Linux puramente pela exist ncia da ferramenta APT, a qual auxilia na resolu o autom tica de depend ncias, facilitando enormente o gerenciamento de softwares. Realmente, trata-se de uma ferramenta extremamente til. Por m, atualmente, diversas distribui es GNU/Linu baseadas em pacotes no formato RPM (Red Hat, Fedora, Mandriva, etc) utilizam por padr o ou suportam, mesmo que n o oficialmente, mecanismos de resolu o autom tica de depend ncias e gerenciamento de softwares similares ao APT. Algumas at mesmo utilizam um porte do pr prio APT, adaptado para funcionamento com pacotes no formato
RPM. O que diferencia o Debian das demais distribui es GNU/Linux a qualidade. O apt-get a parte vis vel qual o usu rio tem acesso e que parece fazer toda a m gica. Por m, por atr s dele, existe um componente fundamental, frequentemente esquecido pelos usu rios : a pol tica de empacotamento de softwares Debian. O projeto Debian possui um documento extenso e altamente detalhado, que descreve, em cada m nimo detalhe, ao que um pacote de software precisa estar atento para poder ser considerado um pacote oficial e fazer parte da distribui o. A pol tica de empacotamento de softwares o que faz com que o Debian seja altamente superior s outras distribui es. Ela bem definida, clara e aplicada rigorosamente. Ferramentas de apoio aos desenvolvedores auxiliam a refor ar a aplica o das regras ditadas pela pol tica e qualquer pacote de software que n o siga fielmente o que dita o Manual de Pol ticas Debian n o inclu do em uma vers o oficial da distribui o, n o importando o qu o importante seja o componente de software fornecido pelo pacote. Isso, somado s diversas equipes internas existentes dentro do projeto Debian, garante a qualidade da distribui o. Equipes de QA (Quality Assurance), de seguran a, de ger ncia de release, ger ncia de relatos de erros e diversas outras equipes garantem que um sistema operacional funcional e altamente integrado seja criado, em oposi o a mera corre o de problemas em pacotes de softwares isolados. Adicionalmente, cada software passa por um intenso processo de avalia o antes que possa ser aceito oficialmente e adicionado a distribui o. Al m dos in meros detalhes t cnicos, tamb m existe uma equipe de especialistas legais que analisam as licen as de distribui o dos softwares antes de aceit -los como parte da distribui o. O fato do Debian ser atualmente a distribui o GNU/Linux que suporta a maior quantidade de arquiteturas de hardware que o kernel Linux suporta tamb m adiciona qualidade distribui o, uma vez que, como parte do processo de porte das aplica es para uma arquitetura de hardware suportada pelo Debian, in meras falhas s o descobertas e corrigidas, o que contribui
para a qualidade final do software. Logicamente, some a isso tudo o fato do projeto Debian possuir o maior acervo de softwares livres empacotados e prontos para uso existente da atualidade, deixando para tr s todas as outras distribui es GNU/Linux, inclusive as distribui es comerciais. Atualmente, s o mais de 15.000 pacotes de softwares prontos para uso e facilmente instal veis. Aspectos estrat gicos (ou independ ncia tecn logica) Uma das grandes vantagens estrat gicas que se ganha ao utilizar Debian a independ ncia tecnol gica. L gico, a grande maioria das distribui es GNU/Linux atuais s o livres, mas nada garante que continuar o a ser livres por toda sua exist ncia. Claro, sempre existir o grupos de pessoas dispostos a iniciar uma nova distribui o com base em uma vers o livre existente de uma distribui o comercial caso algo aconte a com a empresa que a desenvolveu e que impossibilite a continuidade da distribui o. Mas criar uma comunidade e manter um projeto grande como o de uma distribui o GNU/Linux, com toda a infraestrutura j fornecida pelo projeto Debian, leva tempo, anos. E consome anos de trabalho de milhares de volunt rios. O projeto Debian j tem tudo isso funcionando e uma experi ncia de 13 anos nessa rea. Exemplos de problemas com o envolvimento de interesses privados de empresas no desenvolvimento de distribui es GNU/Linux n o s o somente te ricos e recentemente tivemos provas da exist ncia dos mesmos, com empresas privadas terminando a continuidade do acesso a atualiza es de seguran as para suas distribui es de uso livre e sem custo e, em
muitos casos, praticamente obrigando seus usu rios a migrarem para vers es comerciais de suas distribui es. O projeto Debian criou o Contrato Social Debian. O item n mero 1 desse contrato social diz que o Debian ir sempre permanecer composto de 100% software livre. De igual import ncia, o item n mero 4 desse mesmo documento diz que a prioridade do projeto Debian ser sempre seus usu rios e o software livre, o que, na pr tica, garante que interesses comerciais n o ser o colocados em primeiro plano e que os usu rios n o ser o for ados a migrarem para vers es comerciais da distribui o em momento algum. A Defini o Debian de Software Livre, mais um documento produzido pelo projeto Debian, possui grande import ncia na comunidade de software livre, tendo sido utilizado como base para a cria o do Defini o de C digo Aberto (Open Sorce), a qual individuais e empresas aderentes ao modelo de desenvolvimento aberto de software usam como base para cria o de licen as de softwares que os qualifiquem como software aberto (Open Source).

Ok, isso por enquanto. Um dia ainda termino e acrescento mais conte do. Quem quiser comentar e dar novas id ias, esteja a vontade, nos coment rios ou por e-mail.

One of the interesting topics that came up during this last summer at various conferences -- dare I call it the Summer of Wiki? -- was the idea that experienced wiki community members need to share our cultural values and community-building experience with new wiki sites and developers. Christoph Sauer coined a term for this effort: Wiki Ohana, based on the Hawaiian concept of wp:ohana, or extended family. I was glad to see that the tireless Mark Dilley has started a new wiki at http://wikiohana.net/ to organize the Ohana effort. I plan on taking some time to work on this site; I think it's going to be crucial for riding the publicity wave that wiki is on right now. tags: wiki ohana mark dilley

Wikitorial triumphant Last summer, the Los Angeles Times tried an extremely interesting experiment in creating a wikitorial, or wiki-based editorial. The experiment was a notorious disaster: due to excessive abuse and fighting, the Times cancelled the experiment before publishing the results. The entire experience stained wiki's reputation for an entire year. Fast forward to 2006: oh, how times have changed. Ryan Singel of W I R E D magazine put up a 1000-word article about wikis on a wiki at SocialText. He invited the general public to edit the article. The result, which is a reasonably cohesive article on wikis, was published in wired under the title Veni, Vidi, Wiki. It's not the best article in the entire world on wiki, but it's not half bad. Some people have been down on the project -- mostly wiki businesses who felt they didn't get prominent enough coverage -- but I think that the bar was set so low by the LA Times that it's hard not to call getting to publication a success. Looking back, what were the possible factors that made the WIRED article work when the LA Times one didn't?

• Point of view. The LA Times article was an editorial, while the WIRED article was ostensibly a news story. Editorials are intrinsically opinion-oriented. Wiki can work for expressing personal opinions, but it's not easy, and the result usually isn't a very good read. It's much better as a means for expressing agreed-upon consensus information.
• Topic. The LA Times decided to use the extremely divisive issue of the war in Iraq as the subject of its editorial. How they expected to have a collaborative editing success with this topic is hard to understand. By concentrating on the wiki method itself, on the other hand, the WIRED article covered a much cooler topic that lent itself better to dispassionate discussion and consensus.
• Shared goals. The Times tried to reach out to a mass-market audience that was extremely passionate and divided on the topic at hand. The discussion of the Iraq war had already largely degenerated to name-calling and demonization at that point; the people who were participating had more to gain from keeping the other side from getting a say than from getting their own opinion across. For the WIRED article, the audience was experienced wiki community members -- people who know and understand the technology and culture. They had a shared goal with WIRED and with each other -- to spread the word about wiki in a way that's easy to understand. Although Angela Beesley's point and Mike Cannon-Brookes's article correctly note that the increasing commercial interest in wikis did bring some baggage along, I think there was some common ground that participants could reach.
• Organizational commitment. This, I think, was the key success factor. The LA Times posted their wikitorial as an experiment -- they dipped their toe in the water and pulled back as soon as the going got tough. As far as I know, they had no community management or leadership, and no seasoned wiki community members participating. On the other hand, Ryan Singel's article was hosted on SocialText, and SocialText has made a good business out of teaching companies and organizations the Wiki Way. They've got some of the best wiki minds around on their payroll, and it shows in their ability to manage a wiki project.

Although I think that these experiments are interesting, I don't think they make a very good measurement of whether wiki can work. Obviously, we have thousands of examples that wiki works (see WikiIndex if you need more convincing). I think that people's engagement with a wiki is proportional to their belief in the importance of their own work. If wikis are relegated to a tiny part of a Web site or publication, participants pick up on this de-emphasis and don't put much effort into the project; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think that to be healthy, a wiki needs to be a major part of its parent project, if not the whole thing. That's why, I guess, WikiNews is going to continue to be more relevant and important than one-off wiki article stunts. tags: wiki wikitorial W I R E D latimes ryan singel socialtext

Hyperscope I'm psyched to see that Hyperscope has achieved its 1.0 milestone. Hyperscope is the extension of wp:Doug Engelbart's ideas about hypertext and human intelligence augmentation into the technologies of today's World Wide Web. Eugene Eric Kim has been working hard on the project and gave a great demo of the tool at Wikisym in August. Congratulations to EEK and the entire Hyperscope team! tags: hyperscope hypertext doug engelbart eek

ipx12345:~ # time rug install screen
Resolving Dependencies... The following packages will be installed:
  screen 4.0.2-60 (http://mirror/ftp.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source/suse/) Transaction...
                                                                                             100% Transaction Finished real    3m32.491s
user    0m5.116s
sys     0m0.144s

We got back from Europe 36 hours ago, and I've spent most of the time sleeping. We'd had a pretty rough flight across the Atlantic -- although of the three of us the baby was the least grumpy. I'm a terrible jet-lag victim, though, and just a few hours of time change really messes with my wp:biorhythms. Yesterday was Amita June's first birthday, and although we were all tired we had a good time just the three of us. My parents, Maj's parents and our siblings all called, and we picked up a few presents that had been shipped here while we were gone. Amita got a trip to the toy store (net haul: 1 rubber ball, one Caillou book, one crapload of block toys) and a special breakfast. Sadly, she and her papa fell asleep together before she got her birthday dinner. We're having a birthday party at our house on Saturday, "from 3PM to bathtime". It should be a little more lively than our quiet day at home. tags: europe jetlag amitajune birthday

Malm I don't think I've posted anything in a little while, since before we went to wt:Malm . We had a really nice time while we were there. I had corresponded with Sean Finney, another Debian developer who lives in Malm , before we left for Europe, and he'd offered a meetup. We had a free day in wt:Copenhagen so I figured I'd take him up on the offer. Malm is only about 40 minutes from Copenhagen by train, so we were able to take a trip over quite easily. There's a beautiful bridge between wt:Zealand and wt:Scania which we crossed by train -- the water was beautiful. We managed to miss Sean at the train station -- I'd given some pretty tenuous instructions on how to meet us -- but we managed to get out and see the town a bit for ourselves. The old city has two squares -- the Stortorget or Big Square and Lille torg or Little Square -- right next to each other. The Lille torg is circled by restaurants and we had a decent lunch at a place called the Moose Bar -- Scandinavian staples like salmon with a Thai presentation. A good idea. Sean managed to catch us as we were walking around, so we had a nice coffee together at a caf on the main drag. He's been in Malm for more than a year, and is taking classes at nearby wt:Lund. We managed to exchange GPG key signature preliminaries (what Maj calls the "Debian butt-sniffing ceremony") and had a good time talking about the state of Debian and Free Software. We split up at the train station and Maj and I went off to explore the towns small castle. It has a number of museums, but it was late in the day on a Sunday, so we opted instead for a walk to the beach, looking out to the bridge and ultimately the skyline and wind turbines of Copenhagen. After a long walk circumnavigating Malm 's distinctive Twisted Tower, the tallest building in Sweden, we headed back to Copenhagen for a dinner at Tivoli Gardens (probably my favorite spot in Copenhagen). tags: copenhagen malm travel sean finney debian

Z rich We made a special stop on the way home to Montreal through wt:Zurich. We flew on Swiss Air, which has a hub in Zurich, and they gave us a free 24-hour layover in town. Fortunately for us, we got to spend some time with our good friends Mark Jaroski and Allegra Biava. They're friends of ours from SF who moved to Switzerland around the time Maj moved there, and they now live in wt:Lausanne. Both are extremely funny, intelligent and clued-in people. They were passing through Zurich on their way back to the US for a family visit there. I'm glad we got to see them, since I got to meet No ma, their 2-year-old daughter. No was born about 8 months after we last saw Mark and Allegra -- they weren't even telling people they were pregnant at the time. She's a barrel of laughs -- a real fun little person. She and Amita June got along great. We spent most of our time walking around central Zurich, seeing some of the sights and taking it easy. There's only so much tourism you can do with one toddler, and two toddlers raises the requirements considerably. I think the big downer for Zurich for me was how many people we didn't see. I'd hoped to connect with Alex Schroeder, founder of CommunityWiki, and also Martin Krafft, another fellow Debianista. Most disappointing, we missed Marco Prestipino, who's doing work at the University of Zurich in information transfer in online communities. tags: zurich mark allegra no ma