Two weeks ago I began to use zim, a desktop wiki, written in Perl/GTK2. This is very helpful to manage my TODO list and other stuffs! I love it, it is very tiny, and I can put it in one of my workspace corner. The files are plain text so I can manage them within my home subversion repository.

Given the low participation, it looks like the choice of a DPL is difficult this year. It probably means that the platform of the candidates do no suit everybody… however with DPL teams, there’s more than just the DPL and in theory each member should have their own platform. That’s not the case for me because writing a platform is a big job… which I can avoid since I’m not candidate. However I now do feel the need to tell what I would like to propose (and do) if I’m part of a team so that you know better what to expect if you vote for a team where I’m involved. I’d just like to give a warning, those items are quick notes and are in no way full- and flesched out solutions, they will need to be discussed and refined in all cases, and somes ideas may be dropped of course.

• Discuss with the core teams, ask their opinion on the problems / critics made outside. Make propositions and implement them myself when possible in order to unblock the situation when needed. Communicate the results to the DD.
• Discuss with NM, DAM and ftpmasters how to make the NM process evolve. An example of a possible solution sketched out on the basis of recent discussions could be :
  • Require from candidates entering the NM process to setup a wiki page listing their regular contributions to Debian in the last 6 months.
  • Allow NM who have been successfully sponsored on a package to upload themselves this package (and only this one, no NMU).
  • Implement changes in the LDAP database to differentiate privileges (upload, unix account, vote, email) so that people who are not requesting upload rights can have a simplified NM process
• Ensure that the scripts to help management of keyring-maint have been written.
• Suggest to the press team to work with an associated debian-press mailing list which could review the announces before being sent and which could make proposals of announces as well.
• Make irc.d.o point to OFTC to put an end to the useless split on two networks.
• Discuss with DAM to change the expulsion process: the first step should be a mediation with the DPL (or someone delegated for that task) and not a public call for “seconds”… and if the process goes further, then the message indicating that the procedure continues will be posted by the mediator which should allows for more moderated messages.
• Try to moderate the first message of a new thread on debian-devel in order to redirect misplaced messages to the appropriate list and increase the quality of the list and get back people who unsubscribed because of the noise level.
• Try to document as much as possible from the working of core teams in some wiki pages.
• Ask everyone what decisions they would like the DPL to take (maybe use polls to evaluate suggestions).

This list is neither complete nor definitive. Not all items will be achieved but each of them is a real progress IMO and I’d like to be able to work on them. For people who are concerned by those changes, I’m sorry if you discover my ideas by this post even before I had the opportunity to talk to you… I’m posting those ideas now because they may be considered by people who are currently voting, but it does not mean that I’m not interested to discuss them with you. It’s also true that some of those ideas can be implemented without being part of the DPL team and I’ll certainly try to implement some whatever the outcome of the election, but I really believe that being part of a DPL team helps greatly because you have access to some important informations, and you can effectively discuss with core teams which are otherwise difficult to approach for non-technical discussions when you’re a random DD. And last but not least, the trust of the developers is a big motivation (at least for me) to work effectively on those problems. See this post for my personal vote recommandation and see you in 3 days for the result of the election !

Just to scratch an itch, I tried migrating / side-grading to Ubuntu from Debian Etch. I still haven’t quite succeeded as I am still wrestling with aptitude, but I did find something interesting from my Etch migration discussion on ubuntu-devel. Marco Cabizza says that one of the reasons it is quite hard to migrate is due to the Launchpad integration. This sent alarm bells ringing as Launchpad is proprietary and since I might be developing an Ubuntu derivative, I didn’t want to be necessarily locked to the Launchpad suite. The packages with launchpad integration seem to be a bunch of Gnome centric software which thankfully doesn’t worry me. But what if more and more packages are integrated? I don’t think it will happen as it is too hard to easily manage many divergent patched packages. Ubuntu is probably sensibly catching crashes from the Gnome applications so they can make an even slicker desktop.

Oh great, the software patent debate is back. After a long and disgusting campaign where pro-software-patents lobbyists employed all kinds of semi-legal and undemocratic filthy tricks in order to introduce software patents in the EU behind our backs, the European Parliament decided by a large majority to reject the directive "on the patentability of computer implemented inventions" (a.k.a. software patents) in July 2005. Rightly so. It is beyond my imagination how a certain pro-software-patents commissioner (Charlie McCreevy) dares to restart the whole debate after such a clear defeat. Consultation and "public hearing" He has organized a "Consultation and public hearing on future patent policy in Europe" which pretends to collect your views on the software patent issue (which he's trying to introduce through the "Community Patent" backdoor). Alas, the "questionnaire" is inaccessible (it's only available in 5 languages, instead of all 25 (+2) languages of the EU member states), biased towards software patents, very obfuscated and unreadable for the general public. There's no independent working group which conducts or oversees the consultation, no independent studies and reading materials, no mentions of the negative implications of software patents, no public debate, nothing. Now, who would have expected that? The FSF Europe has published a response to the Patent Consultation Questionnaire, which highlights many of the problems. Similarly, the FFII has questioned the validity of the consultation procedure, and gives a very detailed explanation of all the serious flaws of the process. What can I do?

• First things first: the DEADLINE for answering the questionnaire and expressing your views is April 12, 2006!
• Answer the questionnaire! The FFII has prepared a short How to answer guide which you can use as a basis for your answer (per email, snail mail, or fax).
• Raise your concerns about the validity of the consultation process!
• Write your MEPs! Tell them what you think.
• Spread the word! I'm under the impression most people don't even know about this issue, yet!
• Put up banners. I know you all like pretty banners ;-)

Software patents suck (in case you didn't already know) Let me quote Donald Knuth on this:

I strongly believe that the recent trend in patenting algorithms is of benefit only to a very small number of attorneys and inventors, while it is seriously harmful to the vast majority of people who want to do useful things with computers.

(via MJ Ray)

For my hispanohablantes readers: this post is written in english since it’s gonna be syndicated into Planet Debian. Expect a post in spanish later in the day. If you can understand spoken spanish, I recommend you to hear the Free Software talk of M.Sc. Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (Debian Maintainer) which ends noting several benefits of using Debian GNU/Linux. Available here. Update: other posts in spanish are already available in Planeta Linux Venezuela. Yesterday we (SOLVE, a Venezuelan Association of Free Software Users, Developers, Cooperatives and Entrepreneurs) had the opportunity to assist to a Free Software vs. Privative Software forum. This doesn’t sound amazing, indeed. But if you take into account that the Forum was held in the National Assembly (or House of Representatives, anyway I’ll call it AN) it gets better. Now, get this idea: the AN is having a forum to discuss a Law, and it’s listening to the parts involved. Let it sink for a minute. But what if the AN is also bringing this parts to a table to actually write the Law? This is how laws are made in our Country now (Damog always says we are terribly nationalistic. It may be true, indeed.) Anyway, we were there around 10 AM, in the Protocolar Room of the AN. The event was full-house, featuring two thirds of people supporting proprietary software (students between 17 and 20 years from the countryside and big entrepreneurs -and Microsoft, of course-) and one third of people supporting free software, including people working in the Government, students, cooperatives, developers, etc. The session was opened by Representative Luis Tasc n, which once was a great supporter of Free Software (now it seems the same for him, anyway he’s doing a great job changing the law-making roadmap) and the speakers were: Microsoft, the National Center for IT, Cavecom (the association of big software enterprises in Venezuela) in the Dark Side and Felipe P rez Mart (from SOLVE) and Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (Sim n Bol var University) in the White Side. Kudos for IBM, in the Gray Side with Black Spots. The session of talks was incredibly amusing. The speakers started to change their opinions based on the last talk. So, this way, Berrizbeitia (Director, CNTI) tried to discuss Tascon (Representative), the Microsoft Brazilian guy tried to oppose Berrizbeitia, the guy from Cavecom fighted Microsoft (this guy was a complete moron, by the way: when he was told that a group of venezuelan people had developed translations into wayuunaiki he said that was useless since we only have 800 wayuu - native americans) the IBM-boy tried to say they were the best, Felipe Perez (SOLVE) tried to dismantle Berrizbeitia’s talk and finally Ernesto Heranndez-Novich roundkicked them all. The kids from Microsoft (wearing MSDN and VisualStudio shirts) said that Microsoft is a good company which is open-source and gives the code for free. I argued some of them that they were working free for Microsoft. They “hadn’t see it that way”. They also said the plain-ol’-good excuse that “free software was weaker since everyone can see it’s code”. They were changing their strategies and opinions sistematically as the Forum evolved. They argued no compatibility, security problems, and finally they arrived to their real reason to oppose Free Software. Several girls and boys (Daddy’s Boys, as we say to them) were arguing “no free speech” in the Country (which was amusing since this is the first time the National Assembly is writing the laws with the People) and that the Law was going to make them lose their years of University studies. Then, the most accurate of the interventions came, made by Rogmar Marin from Venezuelan Patents and Author Rights Office. He said that this event was all about the people controlling the State, not the State controlling the people. He cited two articles from the draft and the 3390 decree explicitly saying that Free Software was mandatory for Government (in the Decree it says the “National Public Administration” and in the Law it says the “National Public Power”) so he said that they were not going to lose their “bicoca” (a popular form to say “rivers of money”) since they still can program in whatever they want, just that the State has the right to decie the best for their people, and the best for their people was Free Software. This was the whole quid of the event. This is not about Free Software vs. Proprietary Software. This is not about Linux vs. Windows. This is not about IBM vs. Microsoft vs. Venezuelan Companies. This is about the best for the People (which is the maximum interest of the AN) and, in this case, the People was represented not only by the intellectual-closed-circles of Free and Proprietary Software, but by Ana Maria Morillo, from the Cambalache community in Puerto Ordaz, at the southern part of the Country. She said that their Community had absolutely no access to technology. They were poor and humble, and willing to learn. CVG Telecom, a State-based telecom company, installed a Nudetel (no, it’s not an ethic-relaxed phone operator. It stands for Telecommunications Endogen Development Kernel) in their Community, using Free Software. This was their first approach to technology and computers. They didn’t even know how to turn on a computer. Free Software helped them to approach the reality of computers. They felt prepared to use a computer, and proud of themselves. When they used privative software in other places, they needed to adapt to that technology. This demonstrates that Free Software is as easy as any Software. You need to adapt to it. The difference with Free Software is that you are free when you use it. The people from Cambalache appreciate that. Felipe Perez Marti talk was really good. He slapped Microsoft and opposed very roughly to the “technological neutrality” position of the CNTI Director, Jorge Berrizbeitia. Technological neutrality is a neo-liberal, right-wing doctrine which is the technological counterpart to laissez faire, laissez passer. The problem is that (Felipe is an economist, and a great mathematician) technological neutrality isn’t actual neutral. It happens under the conditions where the Smith’s “Invisible Hand” Theorem is valid, so, in a scenary of technological neutrality, the powerful always wins. So, Microsoft wins. He also noted the recent study funded by the United States Homeland Security and carried on by Carnegie Mellon, Coverity and Symantec, which stated that Proprietary Software had between 20 and 30 bugs per TLOC (thousand lines of code) while FOSS had only 0.434 bugs per TLOC. The Microsoft guy seemed astonished by the “discovery” and the students were offended by this. Great. What next? We brought CD’s for people, made Debian evangelization to several “disident” students, made a great cheer to every Free Software supporter, brought signs and SOLVE shirts. While the Microsoft dudes where more than twice times us, we were a coherent group which stayed until 1930 (they left at 1600, you know, it’s a Micro matter of Soft) and held great arguments, sometimes slapping the student’s moral, but definitely making our voice be heard after tenths of years being discriminated by companies, Universities and the Government. As a Debian Project volunteer, what’s your opinion about this? Is the State violating Free Speech taking this decisions? Does it have the right to take it? Is Free Software the best solution for the corporate environments of the Government, taking into account that it handles the citizen information? What are your general comments about this?

Whoever came up with that name, he really made me think that Windows box had some trojan on it. But the "PRONoMgr.exe" doesn't handle P0rn, but is for managing the Intel gigabit e1000 adapter. I don't think it matters if you kill it, it probably only displays that icon in your system tray.

[Note: this article was mostly written some weeks ago; I left it in my "to be edited" box and then promptly forgot about it. So any and all temporal references are way out of whack. Since originally writing this article, I have commenced an incremental rewrite of an in-house business management application from crazy-PHP (a common -- some may say overwhelmingly so -- dialect of the language noted for it's complete lack of any sort of good software development practices, such as the creation and use of functions (!)) into Rails. Articles on this effort will be appearing presently.] Almost immediately after I'd finished writing my previous discussion on why rewriting software is evil, I decided to make a little experiment. What I did was take a fairly well factored PHP application, and rewite (a portion of) it in Rails. My intent in this was not to produce a production-quality rewrite. I have no interest in proliferating yet more functionally equivalent clones on the world. Instead, I undertook the work simply to get a feel for (a) writing a whole, traditional, Rails app in a short space of time, (b) how quick Rails really was to produce an application, and (c) whether wholesale rewrites really are as boring and life-sucking as I imagined them to be. My methodology was this: with a small amount of knowledge of the target application (SysCP), the existing database schema and templates, and a weekend, rewrite as much of SysCP as I could in a close-as-possible reproduction of critical SysCP functionality. My summary results are: rewrites are as boring as I thought they would be, Rails is powerful but fairly complex and slightly buggy when you get down into it (especially if you're working from an existing -- possibly suboptimal -- database schema), but overall, Rails is Way Good Stuff. On the boredom aspect -- I had two days to write code. I had some domestic duties to attend to (walk the dog, visit the hardware store, help my wife with attaching a new bag rack to her bike, mow the lawn, etc) but on the whole, it was dedicated to programming. I've spent whole days (hell, 40 hour marathon stretches) cutting code before. I knew this wasn't a six-month deathmarch, but only a weekend experiment. Despite that, I feel that my motivation levels were lower than they normally are when coding. I can only imagine what it must feel like, two weeks into several months of hard core coding, knowing that you'll end up with what you had before, functionally speaking. If you are going to do the rewrite thing (and may the Flying Spaghetti Monster have mercy on your soul if you do), then pick the right project. SysCP is large masses of tangled PHP (is there any other kind?) but it has a fair amount of local and global structure once you get down to it -- for instance, it's quite well factored into business logic and display, and the code is broken down fairly logically by action handler, so you get entire source files that look like this:

  if ($action == 'edit')
   
    // 150 lines of twisty passage PHP
   
  else if ($action == 'new')
   
    // Another 150 lines
   
  // repeat for another few actions

and so on. The nice thing about this is that, if you have to look for how something works, you can almost certainly find it in one place in the source. Deciphering it might be another matter, but at least you've got something to start from. As I mentioned, the display in SysCP is pretty nicely split off from the logic -- a large number of templates, with common header/footer files, with some small parts in common templatettes. Some HTML is still generated within the actions, but due to the above action-based structure, it's usually fairly easy to identify all of the HTML that will be associated with a particular action and turn it into a coherent Rails template. I would dread doing a rewrite of the presentation layer of, say, IRM. It's idea of well-factored presentation is to separate print statements from logic by a blank line. To my great shame, I've had the reins of IRM for a year, and it's still this bad. I claim it's because I hate HTML coding with a vengeance, but I think I'm actually just scared to try and tame that particular monster. (Update: Martin Stevens has been doing some good work turning IRM's HTML into Savant templates. The only downside is that I can hear his manic laughter -- caused by IRM's insanity slowly infecting him -- all the way from England, and it's keeping me awake at night). I also had to re-learn that most hated but most important of lessons -- that, no matter how much reading you may have done, until you've cut chunks of code in a language or environment, you have no idea how it actually behaves in your brain. Specifically, I spent a fair amount of my alloted rewrite time learning a few little lessons in how Rails actually behaves, and all of it's cool little features. Of course, everyone is going to have this pain, and I've suffered it in every language that I've done any appreciable amount of programming in, but it's always a shock to the system that -- after all this time programming -- a new language still makes my brane tingle curiously for a while. Luckily, I'd read and digested all of both the Pickaxe (Programming Ruby) and AWDWR (Agile Web Development with Rails) so I knew what was possible, I just usually wasn't sure how exactly, so I spent a lot of time with my head in the books. Rails' little foibles also bit me in the bum more than once. For example, I spent over an hour (a no foolin' hour) trying to hunt down what I was doing stupid in my code to make Rails completely forget about the value of a couple of my fields. The answer turned out to be to restart Webrick (Rails' internal webserver for development testing), and the problem cleared right up. You could hear my screams of anguish from the moon (even through the vacuum of space -- it was a lot of anguish). Rails isn't the Final And Ultimate Solution To The Webapp Problem, but it's a good start. There is near-zero administrative bumf when you're writing a Rails app. Rails is fairly intelligent about working out what you want done from the world around it. Code generators (which produces sensible, minimalist templates -- not the ugly, unmaintainable behemoths produced by Visigoth Studio, which has given the whole code generation world a bad name) handle a lot of the low-level "oh bugger, I have to add a new file" feeling. It's very, very anal about project structure, but (in contrast to many other bondage-and-discipline frameworks I've looked at in the past) this structure seems almost comforting (maybe I'm just getting old and turning into a satisficer). What all this means is that you (a) don't write much code unless it moves you toward your goal, and (b) Common structure means that any Rails app will be fairly familiar to an incoming programmer. Unfortunately it also means that cunning wankers will, sooner or later, work out a whole pile of ugly tricks and contortions to get themselves out of Rails' comfortable-but-no-doubt-incompatible-with-many-people's-ways-of-thinking straitjacket, which I will (sooner or later) end up maintaining. Like many of Rails' (and Ruby's) features, though, I don't see them being any more abusable than most features of any programming language or environment -- and at least they're powerful and useful (unlike, say, register_globals, magic_quotes_gpc, magic single-character variables, mandatory indenting, or banning tabs as indent characters -- I thought I'd spread the slagging amongst lots of languages). Productivity-wise, although I was only just kicking off my Rails webapp knowledge, I felt I was doing fairly well. From experience, what I produced in my weekend was roughly on par with what I could produce in PHP in the same amount of time, had the situation been reversed. Considering that I have about 3 weeks of Ruby/Rails knowledge, and about 5 years of PHP experience, I think that's a big win. (Update: I've since produced a DNS management applet for work in about 6 hours billable time, and a virtual mail account application in about 12 hours, both using Rails. There isn't a hope in hell that I could have performed a similar feat in PHP, especially with the same amount of inherent flexibility that the Rails solutions contain). Overall, my impression of wholesale rewrites as being soul-sucking experiences stands. I suggest they be approached with the greatest of care, and only be permitted after an appropriate period of psychological counselling. There is plenty of code that needs rewriting (but why do I always have to find it?) but replacing it by doing an rm -rf on the source tree and starting again is not the answer.

Joey Hess blogs about possible dangerous ways to exploit the daylight savings time. Well, for the tenth year in a row (if I am not mistaken), we central-Mexicans can proudly announce we are GMT-5. When I was a kid, we were always told that daylight savings are a very important way to save energy in non-tropical areas, such as the North-Western states, USA, Canada and Europe. We understood that, as tropical beings, we didn't have to worry about that, as it would have neglegible effects for us.
Ten years (eleven?) ago, this changed, and we became first-class world citizens, together with the emotion of shifting the clock's hands twice a year. Of course, we all did stupid things once or thrice - The first time we got back to GMT-6, I moved to GMT-4 instead. We were laughing at the fools who forgot to move the watch. I went to the movies with Nadezhda, and was confronted by a less-than-amused clerk that had to explain the same to too many people along the day. At least he smiled when he noticed we were stupider than most.
Well, today I am a big fan of daylight savings. I simply like having sunlight up to 20:00, sometimes even 21:00 - But I have reversed the old logic I was taught at school. We Mexicans have very little variation in our clocks - We go from maybe 11 to maybe 13 hours of daylight comparing Summer and Winter. Ok, make it 10 and 14, to make it sound more dramatic. Having the sun raise at 6AM makes sense, no matter what time of year it is. Most electricity is spent in the early night (8-10PM)... So it makes a lot of sense. Even for the people in the USA, maybe even Canada, and most of Europe. But...
Why do Nordic countries adhere to daylight savings? I mean... You vary from 4 to 20 hours of sunlight a day - What difference does one hour make anyway? Why follow the hassle we all regular humans have to go through? I can't imagine people in Narvik and Rovaniemi trying to squeeze that little glimpse of sun they have during the winter, and trying to align their sleeping time to the exact the sun is only half-visible in Summer.

Sound Juicer "It's Not Very Pretty I Tell Thee" 2.14.1 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Lots of bug fixes here:

• Change CD lookup query to allow MB to proxy requests to FreeDB
• Ship a copy of taglibid3mux and tell people to use id3mux when creating the MP3 profile
• Remove SjProfileChooser, use gnome-media's widget
• Preferences dialog isn't modal
• Don't show the main window if there is an error
• Handle NULL profiles without crashing the Preferences dialog
• The duration and track number column are not resizable (Wouter Bolsterlee)
• Don't hardcode compiler options, use GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS
• Volumn should not display stock_volume-0 for volume > 0 (Dennis Cranston)
• Handle sortnames being NULL
• Don't leak the GnomeProgram reference
• Ensure the Play/Pause button stays the same size (Christian Neumair)
• Don't progress change notifications from the pipeline (Christian Neumair)
• Handle all paranoia modes (Marinus Schraal)
• Check iterator access to shut up GCC
• Fix the program name not being translated
• Add MAINTAINERS
• Install icons mode 0644 instead of 0755

Translators: Ales Nyakhaychyk (be), Clytie Siddall (vi), Daniel Nylander (sv), Ivar Smolin (et), Kostas Papadimas (el), Petr Tome (cs), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th), Vladimer Sichinava (ka).

Well, since I haven't found any sane way to pay for the flight, it seems as I won't be at this year's DebConf. But perhaps I can manage LugRadio live.

So, today, I've just arrived back from Sydney with a few of my fellow LCA 2006 organisers where we'd been attending the annual LCA Ghosts meeting. Next year, as you all know, LCA will be held at UNSW in Sydney, Australia. The venue looks great, and a lot of the ideas the Seven team have in the pipeline sound fantastic. If they pull a couple of them off, then this is going to be a fairly significant turning point in LCA growth. All things considered, this will make LCA 2007 even better than LCA 2006.. if that's even possible :). Raewyn also came along on this little trip, so that she could have a little holiday, and go shopping - also to add some stamps to her passport, she'd never been outside of New Zealand before.. One of her memorable comments was something like "That's really the Sydney Opera House, not just a postcard". She spent some of her time with the wife of one of the other 2006 organisers, who was there just for the shopping. This may not have been a good thing. We didn't get to do a whole lot together, since I was tied up for most of the weekend at Jeff and Pia's place. We did however manage to slip in a visit to see a good friend (bod, for those that know him), a BridgeClimb, a diamond ring, and a wander around the city on Sunday evening. I'd highly recommend the bridge climb, if you can manage to go around dusk, it's fantastic to watch the sunset in the west over the Blue Mountains. We also had a lovely dinner after the climb on Saturday with everyone else at James Squire Brewery down on the King St Wharf. I had the kangaroo - there's something pleasing about eating a national icon :) Yeah, for those of you that read that last paragraph and went "diamond ring?!? Wha?!".. I finally gave in, and proposed to Raewyn on the top of the Sydney harbour bridge. I'm still coming to terms with having a fianc , rather than just a girlfriend :). For those that are wondering, how do you take the ring up on the bridge, when you can't carry loose items? Well, it turns out it's not uncommon for guys to propose on the bridge.. So the BridgeClimb folk have this thing called an ERD - an Engagement Ring Device. Basically an elastic armband with a ribbon attached. The ring is placed over one side of the ribbon, and the two ends are placed through a small plastic toggle - like the one you have on your sleeping bag cover. When you are up on the bridge, you loosen the toggle, and place the ring on the appropriate finger, hold hands together, and slide the elastic from you to your (now) fianc . It's a bit hard to describe, but it works quite well. Anyway, This happened underneath what the Aussies call 'Blinky Bill' - the flashing red light on the top of the bridge used as a bit of a warning/navigation aid to aircraft. Our climb group were on the western arch of the bridge awaiting the descent, and the group behind were on the eastern arch after just arriving. Both erupted into applause, and cheering when I went down on one knee... quite an experience! The amusing anecdote of the whole thing was about 3-4 minutes later, as we were descending, Raewyn said "Oh my god, I'm engaged" - it had just sunk in.. At that dinner afterwards? We walked up to join the others, and they erupted into more applause and cheering, in front of the all the other diners.. Bastards. Right, now back to the real topic... The Seven crew really do have this LCA job all sorted out, and Sydney in January 2007 is the place to be.. Hell, even I'm tempted to put in a paper submission this time around - normally I'd try and avoid it! (I need to get back into this blogging thing again, it's so easy to just fall out of the habit when you get busy with other things.. I promise to try harder from now on!)

I went for a nice hike today up near Mt Hamilton with Matt and Val. We were fortunate that the rain did not start coming down until we got back to google after shopping at REI and enjoying some In-N-Out. When we finished the hike Val said that I set a good pace. Which was the same thing Ben said to me after we ran for the first time.

Other fun stuff this weekend included a BBQ at Joel & Rhoda's which included watching the horrible MST3K movie "Pod People". Friday, Jeff, Katelyn, Monkey and I went to see Shana Morrison (Van's daughter) up in Berkeley. The show was mediocre, oh well, it was good to get out.

Skype (that shady VoIP application which may eventually turn your computer into a "supernode" and use it for forwarding dozens of calls, that is packed with tons of anti-debugging techiques and tries to be very very shifty) seems to be incompatible with my Gnome. With the gnome session-manager, to be precise. Because I can run skype, if I launch it using

SESSION_MANAGER= /usr/bin/skype

Anyway, if you want to use VoIP, please use a standard protocol such as SIP. German DSL providers will currently give you DSL modems for free when you sign up with them that have SIP built-in, and where you can attach your regular phone (even ISDN) and do least-cost-routing. Some even give you a flatrate to landlines with their DSL service. And Freemail providers such as Web.de, Freenet.de and SIP specialists such as SipGate offer you a true phone number for use with SIP for free. There is tons of SIP software available. Linux users might want to try kphone (for KDE), linphone (GTK) or ekiga (former GnomeMeeting, Gnome). All of which should be included in your favourite Linux distribution (okay, maybe except for ekiga which has licensing issues with the OPAL library) Windows users might want to check out (I havn't tried it myself) Gizmo. I bet there is OSX software, too. Tons.

(Hmm, it's time for my bi-yearly DST rant. Here goes.) One of the many lame excuses given for daylight savings time is that it cuts down on crime, since more crime occurs after dark. This might be true of violent crime, since fewer people will be out after dark, but what about other crimes? It's interesting to think about ways that criminals could exploit possible confusion, broken data-keeping, etc around the discontinuity caused by daylight saving time changes. Q: Where were you on the night of October 30th 2005 between 1 and 2 am?
A: Well, I was at this bar with my friends that whole hour, I have an alibi. Ok, that's a bit easy to catch (although there's a real life story of a similar trick being used to avoid manslaughter charges), but what about more subtle cheats? All-night workers last night could pretty easily cheat their employer out of an hour's pay, for 2 am to 3 am. Conversely, if they're not careful, their employer might cheat them next fall. The only people I've ever heard discuss this are all-night radio jockies, but those guys love to hear themselves talk enough that an extra hour to do it in is not a problem to them. I'll bet that a fry cook would rather get some extra sleep. But this is still small, er, potatoes. For really nice exploits you have to take advantage of explicit failures of technology. One such failure is in the way Windows manages daylight savings changes. Unlike Unix, which elegantly flips between two time zones, such as EST and EDT, but still keeps counting each second from Jan 1st 1970, Windows actually changes the clock. Despite a brainwashed nation that has been taught that moving the hands back or forward is the right thing to do, in the world of computers, it's bloody stupid. A google for "daylight savings windows bug" turns up a million or so hits caused by this behavior, describing problems like this:

Windows reports erroneous file modification times, which change according to daylight savings.

And this:

When Windows NT automatically adjusts for daylight savings time, the times on files on Windows NT file system (NTFS) partitions and the events in the event logs are retroactively shifted by one hour, even though the files and event records were created before the daylight savings time change.

Now, I think there's all kinds of potential for criminal fun in file modification timestamps being wrong, and log files having innaccurate times. Throw in the odd backup that fails to run due to being scheduled to run at a time that never exists, and the time slip begins to seem like an ideal time for shady activities. (And a very poor time to be in a hospital hooked up to windows-controlled life-support equipment. Double-dose of morphine, anyone?) True story: A year ago I was at a fancy hotel, which was burgalarised. This hotel had electronic locks on the doors, which logged when the doors were opened, and by whom. The techies whose possessions were stolen were able to use this information, plus what they knew about when the theft must to have occurred, to narrow down the suspects to one or two hotel employees who opened the door at the right time. If those logs went to a machine running windows and the theft occurred during England's change to DST, it's quite possible the logs would have been useless. It's not too far from this kind of scenario to something suitable as an entry in Schneier's movie-plot terrorist threats contest. Although it's worth noting that the airline industry deals with timezone changes all the time, so if they have any sense, the DST change is not an exceptional event for them. One of the interesting things about plane travel to me is the way a plane in flight between timezones is a space in which no defined time zone exists. But I digress.. I suspect that the real source of fetile bugs related to DST is in the interstices between operating systems where programs have to deal with the peculuarities of multiple OSes to behave correctly. Such as this unison/linux/windows bug. Put different systems together and they fail in myriad ways, and there's room in the cracks for criminal activity. Thing is, I don't have a very good criminal mind, at all, so if any of the slightly weak approaches I've detailed above is feasable, it seems to me there must be some terrific scams, techniques, etc, that people who are good at thinking that way, and have the right motivation can use.

Just finished a checkpoint of my current development project at work. There are only six developers, and we only have about 18 dependencies on 3rd-party libraries. Even on something that simple, getting the bugs and unresolved issues (after developers had performed their final check-ins of code) cleared up in order to get a 100% pass on the suite of unit tests ended up taking 14 hours over two days. Coordinating changes to the persistence, business, and presentation layers and being able to see the big picture in order to isolate bugs requires intense concentration on my part. On my way out of the office at 20:35, I was thinking about the some 10,000 source packages in Debian and the coordination and effort required to get a release out the door. I am awed. Debian Release Team, you rock. Thanks for Sarge, and I look forward to the Etch release.