The FSF's fall members bulletin is out. For it, I spent some time refining the blogpost I recently wrote on antifeatures into an article. I got a whole lot of feedback last time (Thanks!), most of which criticized my choice of examples. I've structured this version around different, and I hope less controversial, examples. Please read the new article and leave comments here, especially if you criticized the old one. The bulletin also includes two pieces introducing a campaign against software patents that the FSF plans to launch early next year and a discussion of the AGPL by Brett Smith. This bulletin hints at what I think are the big issues that the FSF plans to take on next year: software patents, web services, and creative new takes on the free software message that are designed to resonant beyond our historically very technical community of hackers. I'll write more on this in the next week or so. To support this mission, and to receive future copies of the bulletin directly, please consider becoming an associate member today during the FSF's year-end members drive.

Yzah! At last, I am now an official Debian Developer. My account was created this night by James Troup, so now the waiting is over. 2+ years, pfiou. Now let's get back to work! Thanks everyone. 

My birthday is Sunday, December 2nd. To celebrate, my friends in Zagreb have organized a party for me at the club and cafe Kset at 20:00. It should be low-key and lots of fun. Since I don't actually know too many people here, other folks reading this should definitely feel free to drop by if they'd like to meet up. Rumor has it that we'll have another party at the Acetarium after I get back to Cambridge on the evening of Saturday, December 8th. Let us know if you want to drop by for that one.

I think that traveling extensively and working on my new blog Revealing Errors might make me an international errorist. My new life of errorism is, in any case, developing nicely. If you haven't yet, you should check the blog out.

Of all of the problematic qualities and implications of MySpace, I think I might find the fact that it leads to constructions like "His MySpace," "Their MySpace" or even "My MySpace" the most objectionable.

Yesterday I went with Nadezhda to the always interesting teatro/bar el Vicio. as she found that Klezmerson were going to play there. We tried to get some more friends to join, but gave too short notice, and ended up having a great night out just by ourselves. Just as a side rant: I just hate that places I want to refer to, and I want other people to get to know, have Flash-only sites! You can read some more things about Klezmerson at -ugh- their MySpace site, even get some of their music there.Their name give away their basic lines: Klezmer and son. The common line to all of the songs they performed is a strong Klezmer feel. Benjam n Shwartz and Mar a Emilia Jimenez (violin/keyboard and flute respectively) are responsible IMHO for most of that spirit, as their instruments are the most traditional ones, and they carry the melodies. But the rythms they play to are plain crazy and extremely well engineered - Cuban son, Colombian cumbia, jazz, rock, and... Well, I'm not a musician. But I really, really enjoyed them. Of course, bought their CD as well.Congratulations to a very surprising and unexpected band!

I've posted an an article on my website called Free Culture Advanced which I wrote for the last edition of the Free Software Foundation Members' Bulletin which went out several months ago. The bulletin is one of things you get when you become an associate member of the FSF. The article makes the case for free culture and a freedom definition in terms that are directed to and I hope will resonate with folks from the free software community. I've posted versions of the article in HTML, PDF, and LaTeX.

The Free Software Foundation sent out a press release today announcing a new addition to the FSF stable of licenses: the Affero General Public License or AGPL. The FSF has also published a set of answers to anticipated questions in the GPL FAQ. The first paragraph of the release explains what the AGPL is:

This is a new license; it is based on version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv3), but has an additional term to ensure that users who interact with the licensed software over a network can receive the source for that program. By publishing this license, the FSF aims to begin fostering user and development communities around free software web services and other network-oriented software.

The GPL is designed to ensure that users of software have access to the source code -- source is prerequisite to freedom and to the type of collaboration that has made free software successful. However, the GPL doesn't say "users" when it talks about who gets freedom; instead, it references people to whom the software is distributed. It doesn't say users for two reasons. The first is that, under copyright, "distribution" is a much more meaningful term and a powerful hook than "use" which is not, in most cases, one of the copyright holder's exclusive rights. The second is that, until very recently, having a copy of software was prerequisite to using it; possession was prerequisite to use. Things have changed. A large part of many people's computing experience involves running web applications. These include email clients (e.g., GMail or other webmails), office applications (e.g., Google Docs), social network systems, and others. These applications all run on servers -- i.e., on other people's computers. The providers of these services, the Googles and the FaceBooks, build upon, modify and improve GPL software without giving back to their users or the community that they took their software from. The AGPL was created several years ago by FSF board member Henri Poole as a way to address this issue. The license took the form of the GPLv2 with one extra clause. It was a first stab at a license and was imperfect. The language and methods were clunky and, most problematically, the license was incompatible with software under the GPL. The new AGPL is based on the GPLv3 and the extra clause has been rethought and rewritten. It has been vetted using the GPLv3 comment process and dozens of insightful comments from dozens of lawyers, hackers, and users of free software have been incorporated. The new license fixes the issues that many folks -- including myself -- had with the first version of the license. More importantly it can now be linked to GPLv3 code which makes the license a whole lot more practical. I am quoted in the release being excited about the license and I really am. I've got 2-3 major development projects (including Selectricity) which I've been waiting to distribute so that I could do so under the AGPLv3. The AGPL isn't a complete answer to the problem faced by disempowered users of web services. Without data or the capacity (in terms of servers, money, and expertise) to run web applications, the state and quality of these users' freedom remains far from clear. Thankfully, there are a whole bunch of folks thinking about what freedom for users of services might be -- it's a conversation that I'm going to push the FSF to participate in and pursue moving forward. The AGPLv3 marks a first solid contribution to the process of answering that question. If you'd like to help supporting or assisting the FSF in this effort, please consider becoming an associate member or donating.

I recently mentioned that I would visiting some friends at mi2 in Zagreb and would be traveling around the Balkans a bit to give some talks and workshops. Here's what the current plan includes:

• Novi Sad (November 20, at 20:00): I'll be participating in a discussion of hacker culture at CK13.

• Novi Sad (November 21-22 16:00-21:00): There will be a System.hack() exhibition which I helped prepare some of the text for and which I'll be on-hand for. It will include a narrated history of hacking through six objects. The exhibition will be held in an room of the Mediteraneo Hotel in Novi Sad.

• Belgrade (November 23 20:00): Another discussion on hacker culture, this time at Rex.

• Belgrade (November 23-24 17:00-20:00): System.hack() will be exhibited again in a room of the Kasina Hotel.

• Ljubljana (November 26, Time TBD): I'll be giving a talk on free software project management at Kiberpipa/Cyberpipe

• Zagreb (November 29-December 1): I'll be participating the Open Translation Tools workshop organized by Aspiration.

• Zagreb (December 3): I'll giving a talk in the giving a talk in the g33koscope lecture series. The topic and time are still undecided.

If you're in Novi Sad, Belgrade, Ljubljana, or Zagreb and would like to meet up, please consider coming to the events and exhibitions. If you can, and especially if you can not but would like to meet up anyway, feel free to drop me an email and let's try to organize a meeting. Thanks go to Tomislav Medak and Marcell Mars who organized System.hack(), this whole tour, and who helped do the work to bring me over. I'm looking forward to the next couple weeks.

I just discovered the recently-opened Velouria Espresso in Jamaica Plain via this subscribers-only article in the Atlantic. Velouria marks the latest arrival in the single-origin coffee movement pioneered by George Howell. In a nutshell, the idea of single-origin coffee beans is that if beans are identified with a particular region (or even particular grower), the farmers will have more incentive to distinguish themselves. Ultimately, coffee beans will be known like fine wines, and the best growers will earn premium prices (thus bringing even more money to underdeveloped areas than coffee sold as fair-trade). Flatblack Coffee Company, near my office, operates under similar principles. More details in this episode of On Point with George Howell. Velouria distinguishes itself with its focus on brewed coffee rather than espresso (although they have plenty of that as well). The shop features the “Clover” coffee machine (”Bring out the subtle nuances of all of your coffees through complete, independent control of all of the important brew parameters: grind size, dose, water temperature, and contact time.”) I got a cappucino and a single-origin Kenyan coffee made with the Clover Machine. (Actually, two distinct single-origin Kenyan coffees, which Steve surreptitiously swapped on me while I wasn’t looking). They were all excellent. My cappucino started with a little foam heart in the crema: Amazingly, even when it was finished, the heart was still faintly visible: Steve enjoyed his espresso as well: Velouria has no website that I could find. it’s at 389 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02131. Beware the Yelp page as it has inaccurate hours information — just call them at (617) 522-2400 if you’re wondering if they’re open. Now if we could only get a place like this in one of the vacant storefronts in Roslindale… Technorati Tags: Coffee, espresso, flatblack, single origin, velouria espresso, Boston

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I was viewing one of my most favorite speakers today, Lawrence Lessig, talk about copyright, giving a speech that is very similar to one that I have heard a few times online, but Lessig presents it so well that I end up watching it over and over again. This particular speech was given at TED. The nice thing about coming across a TED talk is that it is almost always enlightening in some way. Lessig's speech is enlightening enough, and it reminded me that I should watch something of his since he has switched to fighting corruption instead of copyright.

Another nice thing about the TED talks is that they are all sitting on the same site - so they are all interlinked with similar topics and they also include the new videos which are being posted fairly often. Sometimes I don't have time to watch more than one talk, but today I was blessed with a surfeit of time, so I clicked on another link which interested me. This talk was from Dan Gilbert and was coarsely about happiness, and more importantly synthetic happiness and how our brains work. It started with talk about the foundation of our evolved brains, of which the most important fact was considered the Impact Bias. Gilbert talked about the Impact bias as a primary result of the evolution of the mind from earlier man to modern man - it is the ability of our mind to predict the future without actually trying it. It is the reason why you have an aversion to a food that you haven't even eaten or don't think you will like a movie that isn't even released, or the opposite. I believe that the impact bias is very important to the psychology of human beings - while it may not actually be very important to the state of the world that you eat a pastrami sandwich today instead of a salad, it must mean something to you, or your life will end up seeming meaningless and insignificant. Gilbert focuses on the impact bias in the dual - that choices that we are given to make ourselves will eventually have an effect on our overall happiness. The experiments explained in the video show that, if a choice has been made, the user is more likely to be happy with that choice later, especially if the choice is an irreversible decision. In the talk he talks about simulated happiness and actual happiness, and that the mind is incredible at simulating happiness when placed in a situation where it did not come out for the better - some famous examples include people who are in jail for long times feeling that they are better for their incarceration after being released (or even while incarcerated). One important part which I think wasn't really touched upon by Gilbert was the fact that while the mind can produce synthetic happiness, in the long run the difference between synthetic and "real" happiness is actually rather small - over the long run all the happiness produced tends to even out, and the mind doesn't distinguish about really being happy or not. For a third point, it is a very interesting conclusion (and probably a significant jump) that most people strive to be happy overall, and most people succeed. This means that even though there are people in many different levels of happiness from an outside perspective, it is worthless to look at someone who is rich and happy and someone who is poor and happy and say that one must be happier than the other because they have more of the "real" and less of the synthetic happiness. Happiness is not a zero-sum game - everyone can be happy all of the time, and noone loses out. This may be an interesting ideal to reach for and may seem impossible to achieve considering all of the hate and rage which exists in the world today, but I believe that it is even possible yet - especially considering this "Happiness Bias" which seems to exist within everyone.

I've been procrastinating writing about my Boston trip, for no particular reason. A bunch of us went to the Boston Ubuntu Developer Summit (in Cambridge, actually) for work purposes. We currently derive from the Long Term Support releases, and Hardy Heron is going to be an LTS, so I wanted us to get more involved directly, particularly at this stage of the game, rather than after it's already a done thing. Anyway, the reason I'm writing this in the "Debian" category is I found the whole thing to be totally awesome. Debian should do something similar. Rather than being a conference, this was essentially a week of 1-2 hour small-group meetings to discuss various features for Hardy. I thought it worked pretty well. I'd never seen gobby used before, and it's basically a poor-man's Google Docs (although one could argue it handles real-time collaborative editing better). They had VoIP up the wazoo. You could dial into a conference bridge to just listen in, or you could dial a different bridge to participate. Every room had a Polycom conference phone in it. That seemed to work pretty well. I think the main reason I think Debian could take a leaf out of Ubuntu's book on this was it helps resolve potentially controversial technical decisions very quickly. Rather than having a two week protracted flame war on a mailing list, you can have a 30 minute rational debate in person and move on. So I've no idea how this UDS stacked up to previous ones, but I was very impressed by the whole thing. I'm in total awe of Scott James Remnant and Colin Watson for not having burned out by now. Doing a release every 6 months, with all the associated stuff that goes around it (i.e. running a UDS) has got to take it out of you.

Today I was reminded about a thought I was having earlier this year by a twitter from Garrick Van Buren about the new ultra-thin MacBooks. It seems altogether likely that the next laptop computer that I buy will have no moving parts. Currently the only moving parts in the MacBook that I have now are in the optical drive, the fan, and the hard drive. This is of course not counting the moving parts which I move myself - the buttons to actually interact with it and the lid. Apparently the optical drive in the laptop is going the way of the floppy drive in laptops, so there is only the fan for the CPU and the hard drive. Hard drives are also heading toward the realm of non-moving parts with solid state drives gaining acceptance and size. You can now get a 32GB solid state flash drive for pretty cheap, and they are sure to go in the direction all storage goes - faster, larger, and cheaper. That only leaves the fan which cools the CPU. It is not impossible to run a high-end computer without a fan nowadays, but unfortunately the heatsinks required in order to keep the most crucial part of the computer without burning up. The OLPC hardware is already in some ways the wave of the future - there are no moving parts at all. Unfortunately it is also completely underpowered and it's not possible to run a ton of programs on it. I'm not sure that a solid-state laptop for the general public will ever be possible with the general increase in computing power, but if it happens, I would bet it happens in the next 5 years.

People will be pointing out that the optical drive being missing is a new and novel concept and that Apple is pushing the boundaries of laptops, but they are hardly the first ones to ship a laptop without a optical drive. The world of sub notebooks have been taking out the optical drive in their smaller models for a while now. One model that I've seen around quite a bit is the Sony PictureBook which got quite a lot of press because it featured the Transmeta Crusoe chip. There are also a number of other sub notebooks which don't have a drive. However, I don't believe that the drives will be replaced by flash drives or network installs - there will always be a need for boot media for completely broken computers. The common solution in the sub notebook world is to just have a drive which attaches when it's needed, in the mode of the first drives. The solution which uses flash drives is not likely to happen anytime soon - software isn't getting any smaller, and the cost of flash media isn't falling quickly enough to catch up with the cost-effectiveness of pressing CDs.

Yesterday, when I posted the list of talks that I'll be giving this week, I forgot to mention that I will be giving a Cluedump at MIT tonight organized by SIPB. It will be in the form of a simple hands-on workshop to teach folks how make Debian or Ubuntu packages. The session is not aimed at teaching folks to make policy compliant packages or how to pass Debian's NM process but rather to be more of an, "Everything a Sysadmin Needs to Know about Debian and Ubuntu Packages," style introduction. The talk is tonight, November 12, 2007, at 20:30 at MIT in room 56-114. Feel free to read the longer description and to show up if you're interested.

The Ubuntu Code of Conduct is probably the most widely read document I've written. Agreement to it is prerequisite to participation in the Ubuntu community in all official and many unofficial capacities. It is has successfully set a positive tone and helped turn Ubuntu into what is probably the most friendly and civil free software project I've worked in. Over time, quite a few free software projects have copied or adapted the CoC. Tired of giving folks permission, the project went ahead and licensed the CoC under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license to explicitly allow reuse as long as attribution to the Ubuntu project is given and derivatives are similarly modifiable. In a recent development, it was adapted by the Fort Erie, Ontario town council for use government interactions of their business improvement areas! It's amazing to see the document gain so much traction! Unfortunately, the person who repurposed the CoC did not attribute the document correctly and was publicly accused of plagiarism by another council member! Ubuntu is happy to have Fort Erie, and anyone else, use or adapt the CoC. Folks should just take care to be honest about where it came from and maintain the BY-SA license.

I'll be in New York State for the second half of this coming week. On Thursday, I'll be in New York City giving a talk as part of a interdisciplinary colloquium discussing free software and structured around Decoding Liberation, the recent book by Brooklyn College professors Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter. The talk will be Thursday, November 15, 2007 between 10:50 and 13:30 in the Glenwood Lounge in the Brooklyn College student center. See this flier for details. I'll be heading straight to Ithaca where I'll give a talk the next day at Cornell for the Code Review student group. My talk will try to introduce and discuss free software issues in the context of the OLPC project. The talk will be on Friday November 16th at 17:00 in Rockefeller 115. There's some more details on the Code Review website. Folks should feel free to attend either event. I'll be leaving soon after on a bit of a Balkan tour being organized by some of my friends from mi2 and will be spending a couple weeks in or based out of Zagreb. The details are still being ironed out but I'll be sure to post them here once I know dates, places, and times.

I bought this book by Daniel Silva last week at SFO, faced with a long wait for the red eye back home, since I recalled hearing about it on NPR, and reading a review in Time magazine, or was it the New Yorker? Anyway, the review said he is his generation s finest writer of international intrigue, one of America s most gifted spy novelists ever. I guess Graham Greene and John le Carre belong to an older generation. Anyway, everything I read or heard about it was very positive. Daniel Silva is far less cynical than Le Carre, and his world does not gel quite as well, to my ears, as Smiley s circus did. The hero, Gabriel Allon, does have some super human traits, but, thank the lord, is not James bond. I was impressed by Silva s geo-politics, though - paragraphs from the book seem to appear almost verbatim in current event reports in the International Herald Tribune and BBC stories. I like this books (to the extent of ordering another 7 from this author from Amazon today), and appreciate the influx of new blood in the international espionage market. Lately, the genre has been treated by lack luster, mediocre knock offs of the Bourne Identity and the engaging pace of the original has never been successfully replicated in the sequels. And Silva s writing is better than Ludlum s.

My parents, both physicians, have frequently talked about running a bed and breakfast when they retire. Perhaps on the off-season, they will be doctors without boarders.

Although I have no idea what necessitated the use of Ideal caution tape on the revolving door at the Hotel @ MIT, I'm quite sure it wasn't.

On Sept 30th 1997, alternated traffic regulation was decided in Paris for the day, because of a pollution peak. As of now, this has been the one and only time this decision was applied and it won't probably happen again because of many (stupid) limitations:

• cars with a "green" sign are not concerned and about 90% of cars now used in France have it
• it is limited to Paris and not its suburbs
• the pollution level that triggers it is stupidely high

Anyway, when this happened, I was, like dozens of millions of moron^W people in the Paris area, driving from my home to my work place (the same home and workplace than now): 30km one way, between 30 and 120 minutes (most of the time 45-60). I then decided to try using public transportation for one full month and then see if I can survive it (as many people who seldom use public transportation, I had horror stories in mind, such as full trains, no respect of schedules and of course, the horrific FRENCH STRIKES). This was 10 years ago and I never stopped. Since then, my daily trip is:

• 7 minutes walk to the bus stop
• 16 minutes ride to the train station
• 10 minutes ride in a first train
• 20 minutes ride in a second train
• 15 minutes ride in a bus
• 6 minutes walk to Onera

So, about 75 minutes from my home to my work place. 30-60 minutes "lost" per day? Not really. In the train, I can read, sleep (funnily an internal system always wakes me up at the right moment) and of course, hack on my laptop (which is my most common activity there). This, quite comfortably with enough room for my arms, feet. The same goes for the bus rides (I don't suffer from car sickness). I still haven't found a way to hack while walking (but I found some free Wifi spots at some bus stops). So, in my opinion, I *won* 90 minutes a day. And, indeed, Debian benefits it a lot as this moment is my privileged moment to work on my packages, or write stupid things in my blog, or just hack around and look for things to improve in our favourite distribution. In 10 years, I of course have a few "horror stories" about crazy schedules, missed busses and of course the awful FRENCH STRIKES. About the latter, the reality is that I just have to look at the special schedules on strike days...and spot the few trains that are schedules (either 1 every 30 minutes or, at worst, 1 every hour....when the usual schedule is 1 every 15 minutes)...and then I reach my home/work pretty safely, while many moron^W other peopl suffer from awful traffic jams on highways. So, in short, here am I, ready for 10 more years of public transportation use and being seen as an ET in my neighbourhood because I leave home by WALKING even if I am not a high school teenager. Strange person, indeed? Not to forget: from my records, I saved about EUR41,700 by doing this, assuming a cost of 0.4EUR/km, 60km/day, 200days/year for the car trips....and EUR623/year for my transportation card. I should buy a brand new SUV..:-)