Fantastic beginning to the weekend - was in Norwich from Thursday, saw the Dave and the Becca on thursday night - many many thanks to them for floor space thurs and fri and for generally just being fantastic people (with tea *and* coffee, no less - and a silly beepy tivo box for even more fun - and for introducing me to the american chopper type show thingummy - and for letting me watch the a-team!) Then, serious amounts of thanks to Noodles and Kathy (who I appear to not be able to find a link for :( ) for inviting me to the wedding and the reception - was fantastic - you're both such absolutely lovely people! Pictures so far appear to be available from Becca and Dave, Burly and Steve McIntyre - hopefully more soon... specially from Dave Noble (can't find him *bah* he needs more google juice the damned slacker ;) which should be cool! Saturday was absolutely brilliant - including talking about atmosperic physics, failing a-levels, and random universities doing questions (hey, I can't entirely remembere - someone bought a half barrel of nero and some port, and lots of red wine... I wasn't *entirely* sober ;). Saturday morning was a bit of a blur - I remember watching the A-Team and then food in the Glass House with Dave and Becca (thanks guys, you rock!) then I wandered to the Fat Cat and met with Eli and Dave Noble, a while later Rob and James and Kaz arrived and we played Munchkin, which was a very very silly game but quite fun (thanks James and Kaz - you're both mildly insane - but it's always fun when you come to the pub!). Went home with Eli, tried to escape because of the annoying giggly evil students from hell, started wandering back towards the train station and a random bench to sleep on, then got emotional black mail and ended up back at Eli's - ho hum. Went to catch train at around 10am Sunday morning - discovered trains from Norwich weren't running - replacement bus service from Norwich to Diss left Norwich at around 10:25am, got to Diss, had a 10 to 15 minute wait there (mmmmm, bacon roll and a coffee!) then straight to Liverpool Street, wandered straight off to the underground and got the circle line to Victoria, got to Victoria around 13:40 ish, wandered to look at the boards and saw a 14:17 from Victoria round half the planet to Brighton - thought to myself "not in any rush" and wandered off and found food and then wandered round the WHSmith in Victoria station.... got out of there, glanced at the board again, Victoria to Brighton train had been cancelled - wondered what to do - announcement over the tannoy that to get to Brighton the best idea was to travel to East Croyden and the train would meet us there. So, grabbed that train, got to East Croyden, jumped on the train (first 8 carriages Brighton, back four Plymouth... so, jumped on somewhere around the 7th carriage from what I thought was the front - turned out to be the back - wasn't entirely sure what was going on so when it stopped at Gatwick wandered further to the front of the train a lot, found an empty pair of seats and sat down. Got to Three Bridges and there was a delay, it was announced on the train as "We're waiting for the conductor, he's missed a train and is currently in a taxi, there's at least a 10 minute delay before he gets here", so a load of us bundled out of the train on the basis that that was very much long enough for a cigarette break - just as we were finishing the conductor turned up, so we all got back on the train for the "scenic" route to Brighton (yay for going round the coast), finally got in to Brighton at 17:05, so wasn't too bad, only about 6 and a half hours for a 3 and a half or 4 hour train journey ;). Grabbed chinese on the way home, watched some Morse - all was well with the world. Lots of beeping this morning around 8.30am, ignored it, finally re-woke up at about 10:30am (ish) - watched some more Morse, grabbed some lunch and then watched more Morse until going to the pub quiz tonight. Charly, Julius and Pieter turned up for a quick drink and then all left me to fend for my self at the quiz - I came in my usual place - very last (by over 20 points, no less ;) - but had fun, so who cares :) Anyways - it's now tuesday morning, so probably time for some good ol' fashioned sleep type stuff... might put on the next episode of Morse for the hell of it (might even manage to stay awake through it!). Tomorrow is probably more Morse, some work on the django packages (just got the first bug report in for those) and possibly applying some of the patches to the scrobbler packages to close some of those bug reports too. It appears that upstream for xmms-scrobbler has disappeared a bit, so might have to look at that a lot closer over the next few months - have some time off work soon - last day this year being the 15th (also happens to be when work are planning the "christmas do"). Wow - that was a ridiculously longer post than I though it was going to be! Night all!

My work permit in Canada expired on December 1 (that's 10 Frimaire for you French Revolutionary Calendar fanatics), so I needed to renew it. It's possible to renew these things by mail, which is worrisome and time-consuming, or even to go into an office in Montreal (near-mythical, crowded, reportedly ineffective). I've never liked doing either, so whenever we have to deal with immigration, our family drives the 50km down to the border with the US. They have a big immigration facility there, and if you drive out of Canada and back in again, they have lots of nice officers in bullet-proof vests to deal with any immigration issues on the spot. It's called "driving around the flagpole" here, but Maj and I try to make a trip out of it when we have to go. So we drove down to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks last Friday morning -- sufficiently distant and different to seem exotic, without being too far away for a weekend trip. Plattsburgh, the nearest American town to us, is, well, kinda boring. We've spent a day in Burlington (Vermont) before, and that was pretty fun, but we wanted to try something different -- so Lake Placid it was. Friday was a crummy day for a drive, though -- there was snow and freezing rain in equal measures, so the roads were a little dangerous. The hood of our car kept building up this several-inches-thick icy-snowy mass that I was afraid would rip off the hood and go careening into the dark, so I kept stopping to chip it off with my handy ice scraper. Once we got down to the Adirondack park, though, the rain was just a regular drizzly non-freezing kind, and we could actually enjoy the scenery. The roads in were remarkably small -- hard to believe that not one but two Winter Olympics were held at this remote location. When we got to town, we took a look around at the main drag -- a single street that fronts onto Mirror Lake and points directly into the Olympic centre. We stopped at the Great Adirondack Brewing Company for a late lunch, and had a nice crabcake and caesar salad with roasted shrimp. Maj is a little squeamish about eating seafood in the mountains -- with good reason, since she's been burnt before -- but we both ate up anyways, and it was real good. Amita June had a grilled-cheese sandwich that came with french fries shaped like little happy faces. Awww. We then went to check into our motel, the Wildwood Inn. I've got a weakness for a certain kind of woodsy mountain motel -- lots of wood paneling and alpine flavor -- and I especially like paying motel prices. The Wildwood was just what I like -- clean, inexpensive ($65/night), and charming, with a nice view from our room out onto Lake Placid proper. It also had a nice big indoor heated pool complex and free WiFi. (On that subject -- why is it that so many motels in North America now have perfectly acceptable free WiFi, but major hotels in big cities charge you $30/night for crummy WiFi with complicated authentication schemes that take half an hour to configure? Is it just because the big hotels charge too much for everything, or is it because they know they can rake business travelers over the coals and it all will go on the expense report? It makes me really mad to pay for WiFi, and it makes me extra-mad that it's usually so complicated and of such poor quality. Anyways.) We took a big nap and went out after dark (4:30PM) to look at the town and get some dinner. Unfortunately, it was still raining big fat cold raindrops all over downtown. The ski season was supposed to start this weekend in the Adirondacks, but with all the rain they canceled opening the runs, and with the bad weather and no skiing the town was pretty empty. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed, and when we eventually got to one, the Black Bear, we were the only people there. The Black Bear turned out to be really nice. They had a good selection of organic vegetables and seafood nicely prepared but not too fancy -- what we Californians call "California cuisine". I dunno what anyone else calls it. Amita liked it because they had a big chalkboard on the wall and she spent most of her time running between our table and the board or drawing big jagged marks on the wall. That night the wind and storm howled outside our motel room -- I dreamed the place was falling down. When we got up in the morning, though, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside -- the first one of the season! Maj and Amita June went outside on the motel lawn to play around -- Amita doesn't remember last winter, I don't think, so snow is new all over again for her -- and I went to clear off the car. Then we went downtown to get some breakfast. We shopped for books (I bought James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder) and winter gear (Maj almost but didn't buy some boots) walking up and down the main street in the light snow, then piled into the Soulshine Bagel shop for some bagel sandwiches and coffee. The food was good -- the bagels were thick and doughy, not like the little Montreal bagels I've grown fond of -- but the place only took cash, and we hadn't gotten out any American money yet. Oops. They were nice enough to take our Canadian cash, which earned them a decent tip, and then the three of us walked back to the car in the snow, Amita trying for the first time to catch snowflakes on her tongue. After our nap, we went out with good intentions to go visit the Olympic Centre and get ourselves a little bit of cultural value from the trip, but the early dark and our darker natures drove us instead to the Lake Placid Pub in a residential area right by Mirror Lake. The Pub was great -- really good beers (I liked the 7% Ubu Ale) and fine pub-grub. There was a table of kids next to our table, and they had a little table barbecue on which they were making s'mores. They kept handing Amita their extra graham crackers, which she noshed contentedly. This morning we went to the Saranac Sourdough deli and bakery for an early breakfast. It was right across highway 86 from our motel, and they had great pancakes. I had a big spinach-crab frittata with sourdough rye toast -- really satisfying. We took the long route back to Montreal -- west through Saranac Lake then north up to Malone (New York), a little town on the Salmon River with a big collapsed mill in the middle of downtown. By the time we got down to Malone, all the snow was gone, and it was back to that bitter snowless winter look all over the place. Malone had some nice architecture, but we ducked into the homey Nancy's Village Diner for some lunch. Then out onto the road again, through Chateaugay and Mooers and back to the border after a brief stop at duty-free. Our immigration issues took about an hour -- that was pretty good turnaround -- and we were on autoroute 15 back home to Montreal pretty quick. Not far from the border, though, the snow started coming down hard, and by the time we got to the St. Laurent river it was sticking to the road, making driving a little hazardous. But we managed to get home OK, glad for a nice little weekender. tags: lake placid montreal new york saranac lake adirondacks immigration snow maj amitajune

WTF IS THIS SHIT? Ok, that above would be what a newly-baptized “FOSS advocate-slash-zealot” would say upon seeing Federico Pascual Jr.’s PostScript regarding the FOSS bill. I suppose I could have said that myself a couple of lifetimes ago. But, there is more than meets the eye. While I would like to think of myself as a “FOSS veteran”–believe me, I have still so much to learn about it–I would like to step into the shoes of such a person when approaching an article as sensational as Mr. Pascual’s. Despite what seems to be a most interesting article on the mechanics of government software usage, it fails to address the one particular bit that is just as important as the proposed bill itself: the real Free and Open Source Software. Let me nitpick this article bit by bit:

FREE RIDE: A bill is being pushed in Congress forbidding all government agencies and state-controlled firms from buying and using any of the computer software sold in the market!

Alas, when I first heard of the FOSS bill sometime before September, I also had a bad impression of it. Perhaps I was just too politically allergic at that time (yeah right,) but I tried to adopt a wait-and-see’ approach first and let the dice roll. Perhaps because this bill was to be introduced by a very visible congressman with alleged leftist ties made me feel uncomfortable, but then, so was (and still is) with the current administration. Or perhaps I just felt it wasn’t damn right to legislate FOSS as an end-all solution, preferring instead of presenting is as a process for reforming the local software industry. Looks like first impressions definitely make a difference.

The proposed law to be called “Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Act of 2006″ commands government offices to use only information and communications software that are given away for free and have no restrictions as to their use. The objectives appear to be to save money for the government and to encourage the making of free (non-commercial) software.

So? What’s wrong with these objectives? FWIW, the early FOSS bill draft did seem to have such a Draconian section as forcing the government and allied offices to use, and use only, FOSS. IMHO that by itself ran against the very fundamental ideal of FOSS: the freedom of choice. Not Hobson’s choice, but real choice. The current bill IIRC now allows this true choice; unless there is an extreme case where FOSS cannot be applied without becoming non-self-sustaining (not to mention self-liquidating,) agencies may implement their infrastructure using FOSS as their primary instrument, with the application of open standards (that is, open document formats, open communications protocols, etc) unifying the disparate components. Perhaps right now, this situation may seem kind of far-fetched, but its not really that far-off, considering what other nations and cities have done (or not done) with FOSS. Munich, Extremadura, Beijing… the list is not yet that long, but its bound to go a long way Now, while the government may now adopt open standards and open-everything, does not mean that the openness’ forgoes security, either; the government may opt to use well-known encryption protocols and even base their own security infrastructure on them. In fact, they are free to even look inside the source of these well-known standards, to study them, and to branch off new implementation that may even change the way these standards work. In fact, even without this bill in place, the government can participate in the production and development of FOSS!!! Wait a minute, wasn’t I supposed to defend this bill? Eh, well. I suppose this bill is good and all, but like I said earlier, there are those first impressions made by the parties involved in the making of this bill which unsettles me. IMHO I would rather see applications of this first in key cities (the happy works in Munich and in Extremadura are no accident, believe me) which in turn, would allow both local the national government to see just exactly how this FOSS magic works. Then, when the observations have been made, the papers are in, and the workers get hired, then, maybe, we’ll have a nation where FOSS can be mandated as a very strong preference, but never a forced one. Its all about growing up, really. I’m being reminded of Tom DeMarco’s The Deadline, where a newly-retrenched guy from a telco literally lands into the fantastic job of his life, managing an entire nation of software engineers and architects to develop several killer apps within a year (or so; raid you nearest Book Sale and be lucky Its a great experiment: when it succeeds, you’ll be the first to be present, but when it fails, you’ll be the first to be nowhere.

But I can also hear in the background a call to an unholy war against multinationals whose popular software run virtually all maybe 95 percent? of the computers of the world.

Now this is a low blow. Maybe partly because of the prevailing images of the advocates–geeks and leftists, my, what a c-c-c-combo!–is what drives Mr. Pascual to make this point. But really, multinationals are not the main concern. FWIW, FOSS is multinational in nature: it is even multi-denominational and multidisciplinary. FOSS is one of the things that make anonymous people like you and me Internet superheroes. FOSS connects the Internet’s tubes and keeps away the trucks. FOSS makes the Internet serious business, yet also drives them crazy. The Linux distros that I have worked, am working, and continue to work on, are all multinational: Debian and Ubuntu. People from all over the world, from all 7 continents, participate and work on what would arguably be the biggest software distribution the human world may ever produce, freely, regardless of motivation or goal. I suppose all the folks involved have only one common goal, and that is to see a work created for the benefit of the community by the community. I suppose the background howl comes from somewhere altogether, but its hardly just from FOSS. FOSS is the epitome of what is truly multinational, and one thing that is not truly controlled by any one single person, corporation or not.

I have been really busy until two weeks ago [Shameless plug: If you need a (technical) project manager and/or hands-on Basis person to get your SAP R/3 system upgraded to ECC6, get in touch.]. Which means I've been a bit slack - so slack in fact that Andreas Barth had to resolve an RC bug in one of my packages - mea culpa.

Ridden by guilt I decided to finally do what I've been wanting to for some time: Putting the steps together to do a Debian test upgrade using QEMU. I chose QEMU because it is free and readily comes with Debian. It is slower than VMware, at least without the non-free kernel module, but still usable on somewhat reasonable hardware. The actual upgrade steps given below are independent of the virtualisation technology used, so they will apply to VMware as well.

Without further ado, here goes:

• install the qemu package
• optionally install the kqemu module:
• install the kqemu-source package (from 'non-free')
  
• run 'module-assistant prepare'
• run 'module-assistant auto-build kqemu' (Daniel, in case you read this: This may be easier than running make-kpkg as suggested in the README.)
  
• install built package with 'dpkg -i kqemu-modules-[kernel version]'
• possibly change permisisons/ownership of '/dev/kqemu' to allow non-root users
  
• run 'depmod -a' and 'modprobe kqemu' to load module
  
• create a disk image (Using qcow means we are not using a sparse file, so compressing and decompressing does not inflate the file.): qemu-img create -f qcow hda_40GB_sarge.qcow 40G
• get a sarge install CD, e.g. 31r4 netinst
• install the initial sarge system:
• start qemu e.g. like this: qemu -m 512 -hda ./hda_40GB_sarge.qcow -cdrom ./sarge-31r4-i386-netinst.iso -boot d
• start the installer and go through the normal motions
• restart qemu like this: qemu -m 512 -hda ./hda_40GB_sarge.qcow
• finish the installation:
• select a mirror (Note that DNS is not setup - fix this or use IP addresses for repositories. Also, something like apt-proxy comes in quite handy.)
• choose 'manual package selection' in the installer
• update the packages as suggested by aptitude
• quit aptitude and finish the installation
• now would be a good time to take a copy of the fresh sarge install before continuing:
• halt the (qemu) system
• copy the image file, e.g.: cp hda_40GB_sarge.qcow hda_40GB_sarge_pristine.qcow
• compress the copy (The uncompressed image is ~ 1GB, the bzip'ed one ~ 100MB.)
  
• install X:
• start aptitude, select 'x-window-system-core' and install
• leave all X config settings standard, except:
• mouse device: /dev/psaux
• mouse type: PS/2
• screen size: 1024x768 (or similar)
• install Gnome (That's just what I use, KDE or others are equally fine.):
• start aptitude and select the following packages and install:
  
• 'gnome-desktop-environment'
• 'xscreensaver'
• 'gdm'
• 'gdm-thmes'
• 'synaptic'
• 'menu'
• 'menu-xdg'
• quit aptitude
• restart gdm: invoke-rc.d gdm restart
• now might be a good time to take another copy of the sarge install before continuing:
• halt the (qemu) system
• copy the image file, e.g.: cp hda_40GB_sarge.qcow hda_40GB_sarge_gnome.qcow
• compress the new copy (The uncompressed image is now ~ 2GB, the bzip'ed one ~ 540MB.)
  
• install other software as desired that you want test the upgrade with, e.g.:
• 'mondo'
• 'mondo-doc'
• perform the upgrade (following the preliminary Release Notes):
• get to the command line in the qemu system, e.g. by running 'invoke-rc.d gdm stop' in a gnome-terminal
• change apt source from sarge to etch
• run 'apt-get update'
• upgrade the kernel by running 'aptitude install linux-image-2.6-486' (This is not what the Release Notes say but it works for me.) (Say 'Yes' to removing the running kernel.)
• upgrade aptitude by running 'aptitude update aptitude'
• upgrade the system by running 'aptitude -f --with-recommends dist-upgrade'
• if applicable, rerun and keep rejecting offerings to resolve conflicts until the one upgrading mondo is offered (I'll have to look into this.)
• run 'aptitude -f --with-recommends install gnome-desktop-environment' to reinstall Gnome

All in all, things seem to work ok. However, this is far from hitting the friendly green upgrade button and it just happens. So, I thought I try the next best thing to the friendly green upgrade button which is synaptic. Doing an upgrade with synaptic does actually work quite smoothly. It needs to be restarted a few times, leaves some cruft in terms of obsolete and orphan packages and the reboot doesn't really work from within Gnome, but other than that it is ok. Most notably, it didn't leave me with an unusable system in the middle of it all.

Robert Collins made some interesting remarks about the challenges of upgrades last week when we had dinner with Martin Krafft and a number of other great people. It looks like the Ubuntu folks are working on improving update-manager but also the underlying infrastructure to smooth out the upgrade process. Maybe there could be an opportunity to work together on this and achieve a situation where upgrades become as smooth as installs are now due to the fantastic work of the d-i people.

I was very happily surprised today. Some weeks ago, walking in downtown Mexico City, I found the Interactive Economy Museum (Museo Interactivo de Econom a - MIDE, for which I had seen some posters at my workplace (of course, as some of you know, I work at UNAM's Institute for Economics Research (Instituto de Investigaciones Econ micas)). MIDE is one Mexico's youngest museums (opened about two months ago), and it is... Frankly impressive and well done.
When I first heard about an interactive economy museum, I could only think about entering a room with buttons that would cause economic or politic crisis in different Asian or African countries, so we could watch the outcome. Of course, it was not so (or at least, I hope so - I pressed quite a number of buttons!) The museum is multimedia rich, and will attract children (I'd suggest going with 10 year old kids and older) and grown-ups. It is quite well balanced, having many things that are just fun to do (i.e. for the scarcity topic, recording a video saying what do you want but don't have so other people see you, and see other people's videos, or "designing" -of course, quite simplisticly, but still- your own banknote, with your own photo), that give you a better insight of the full economic process (how money changes hands: A story told by six different animations, each explaining a different part of the process, about the relations between a family, the bank, the factory owner and the supermarket; a stock exchange simulator; comparisons between different indicators on the living standards over the world).
But even more than the exhibit itself, just being at the Bethlehemit ex-convent and ex-hospital is very well worth a visit. Even if the XVIII-century building endured very rough times and got severely deteriorated, it has been completely rescued - and unlike most colonial palaces we have, it was rescued mixing modern elements with the old architecture with a very good balance and taste.
...Very well worth a visit. Really. If you happen to be in the Mexico City center, go to Tacuba street, just by Metro Allende, in front of Caf Tacuba. Oh, and don't go without having lunch first: We entered at 2PM, and had to fast-track over half of the museum because we were too hungry to pay attention. Of course, we plan to return with the family, so it's not lost. Besides, maybe next time I'll have time for a nice chat with Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who are seen walking around the museum. I talked a bit with one of the Bethlehemit monks.
Who runs the museum? It is never obvious, and I want to know. The building was, accodring to their web site, acquired in 1989 and remodeled since then by the Bank of Mexico, which would make perfect sense. Besides, it's quite clear that the Bank helped for some of the exhibits, such as the numismatics collection or the banknote printing technology room.

Debtags made quite some progress the last months. Many thanks to Enrico Zini, who did most of the work. We now have a new database (on alioth), a new editing frontend (using Ajax, and accessing this database) and a couple of nice utils around it. Go Tagging is a page listing untagged packages - by popularity contest score. Just go there, click a package you are somewhat familiar with (sorry, the really popular ones are already gone :-) but there are still some well-known ones in there such as "rails") and edit the tags. Enrico also did some kind of AI to suggest tags. This is not based on the Google Summer of Code project, but something Enrico did using the Xapian search engine index he's been using for the main search function. A couple of good features have been proposed, but are not yet implemented. For example, a "similar packages" overview, so that when you've been tagging one package you could easily switch over to another similar package. Or a per-maintainer view. It was suggested that it should be added to the packages.qa.debian.org per-maintainer view page; this would be great, but will require some more work to be done. On a related base, it would be interesting to make a tag cloud (like this Debian package cloud) on one maintainers packages only. This would then be a view of one maintainers interests in Debian... Anyway, thanks to everybody who has been tagging packages and helping with the backend databases and applications.

Venkatesh Hariharan recently wrote an article on Indias traditions of knowledge and how Open Source meshes with them. Now having met him at foss.in and knowing of his work, I am 100% convinced he is on the side of the angels and their is no malice in what he wrote. However, his interpretation (really not his, but the conventional wisdom amongst the Indian elite.) of Indian history and culture is so monumentally wrong it bears correction. While I admit my hackles were raised by the cultural and theological mistakes made, there are implications for Open Source advocacy in India and the world at large too. He starts by giving the example of Nalanda, supposedly "the first university in the world." but more accurately a Buddhist vihara (monastery.) Its' very name indicated sharing. I use the past tense because Nalanda doesn't exist anymore. In fact except in a few border areas influenced by Tibet or Burma, Buddhism itself is so thoroughly extinct in the land of its birth, the place where it flourished for over 1500 years, that the only reason people like Hariharan or myself only know that there ever was such a thing due to the work of 19th century Western Indologists. How could this be? One theory is that a resurgent Hinduism coopted or persecuted the Buddhists into oblivion. However this is unsatisfactory. It does not explain why Jainism (a religion as old as Buddhism and equally heretical for exactly the same reasons from the Hindu point of view) still survives to this day and it doesn't explain how it could have happened for even the most advanced genocidal regimes of the 20th century have been unable to "disappear" undesirables to the extent which Buddhism disappeared. A more plausible explanation revolves around the fact that, as I mentioned before, places like Nalanda were Viharas. This doesn't mean that they can't have university-like properties too; after all the great academic institutions of Europe also had religious foundations but the monastic nature of a vihara is salient. A monastery is not a place you go to engage the world, its a place you go to escape it. To mix metaphors a bit, the viharas were cathedrals not bazaars. While there may have been a lively intellectual life within its walls, there is no evidence that Nalanda and its denizens interacted much with the surrounding culture. An economically unproductive institution of such vast size (15,000 monks at its peak) could only survive by the patronage of kings and other rich people. When that patronage dried up as for example when the medieval Muslim invasions swept away the old royalty, Nalanda and its sisters couldn't survive. Just as when a proprietary software company dies, its "intellectual property" often dies with it, when centralized Buddhism died, Buddhist ideas died with it. (Luckily Buddhism had spread to other countries by then and developed new, less monolithic forms so it was not lost to the world altogether.) In contrast Hinduism (and for that matter Jainism) while having all due respect for monks were and are primarily lay movements. The pursuit of morality (Dharma), wealth (artha) and pleasure (kama) in this world are equally valid human goals alongside liberation from the world (moksha.) and this manifested as the much maligned institution of caste. Hariharan quotes the conventional view probably familiar to Westerners from Anthropology 101, a lock-step hierarchy of four classes (varna is the Sanskrt word) with fixed occupations, with knowledge and privilege on top and ignorance and oppression at the bottom. The thing is, this view bears no relationship whatsoever with social reality in India now or historically. There is another Sanskrit word, jati, which can be translated as caste. There are thousands of these jatis and while Indian thinkers have periodically attempted to try and shoehorn them into the varna framework, they have had little success and varna is for all practical purposes just a theory. And this is not just a fall from some putative golden age (Like the canard that once caste was flexible and merit based and only later became rigid.) but the state of affairs throughout recorded history.

A jati consists of people who share a common (or fictive) kinship, who have particular food and ritual choices, and marry endogamously. While many jatis are associated with a particular occupation, many others are not. This is what caste means to a typical Indian (it is also the social organization prevalent amongst Jains, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians even if they don't accept its theological basis.) Yes, hierarchy and concommitantly oppression, are in some cases a byproduct of casteist thinking but they are hardly its raison d'etre. A comparison can be made to the Western nuclear family system. Some people think it is superior to any other form of social organization. Most people wouldn't go that far but go along with it as "the way it is." Some of those of a liberal persuasion might want tweaks of certain aspects of it. A very small fringe think it is nothing more than a nefarious plot to spread patriarchy, subjugation and racism etc. They are mostly considered kooks by the other groups. (Unfortunately when India and caste are concerned, the kooks are ruling the roost.) The diversity of jatis like the diversity of open source creates a certain resistence to disruption that a monoculture cannot. Thus though Hinduism also suffered grievously from invasions, it was able to hold on where Indian Buddhism could not. Brahmin (sic. That's an English mispronounciation.) is also misinterpreted as one who knows Brahma (masculine noun. The Creator God.) instead of Brahman (neuter noun. The supreme spirit pervading the Universe.) though even then it would be wrong because Brahmin, Brahma, and Brahman all come from a common root word brhati (feminine noun. Sacred speech.) as any Sanskrit dictionary will attest. Hariharan cites the example of the sacred scriptures (Sic. He means the Vedas) and the notorious statement of the Manusmrti saying that an unqualified person who hears them should have molten lead poured into their ears as examples of the proprietarization of knowledge. Now the long-suffering untouchables may have been afraid of many things but having lead earplugs was not one of them. There is no historical evidence that any such action was ever attempted. You can criticize the Manusmrti for even saying such a thing but that is a far cry from using it as evidence of historical attitudes. You see, the Manusmrti is not even in the most orthodox conception Hindu Sharia and the Vedas are not "Sacred Scriptures" in the sense that the Bible or Koran are. Rather they are part of a wide range of significant literary works respected in Hinduism of which other important examples are the two Epics the Mahabharata (which includes the Bhagavadgita), and the Ramayana, and the vast compendia of geneologies, philosophy, lore and legend called the Puranas. Hariharan actually missed a good chance to make his point here because while the Vedas are indeed "proprietary" the other works I mentioned are not and have in fact permeated all over India and even beyond its borders. Many Indian languages owe their literary existence to translation of the epics or Puranas. For instance one of the earliest monuments of Hindi literature is the Ramacharitamanasa, Saint Tulsidas's translation of the Ramayana. When he wrote it in the 16th century, he did face some opposition from those who didn't think such an august work should be rendered into a "vulgar" tongue, he also received encouragement from equally orthodox people (including those who believed the Vedas should be restricted to Brahmins) Today it is by many accounts the most popular Hindu holy book in existence. So really the whole idea that the Hindu canon shows a fall from open grace to rigidly controlled private property is just bogus. To those who have slogged their way though all this verbiage wondering what it has do with Linux and Open Source, let me assure you I am getting to the point :-) It's bad enough from my point of view as a devout Hindu that my religion would be misrepresented this way but from my point of view as a supporter of Free Software ideals, it is catastrophic. Linux and Open Source in India has spread, as in most parts of the world, primararily as a hobby amongst computer enthusiasts and for a hobby it's doing ok. However if you think of it as more than that, as a tool to enhance society and empower peoples lives, that is not nearly good enough. But how can one serve a society if one apparently has no clue about that societies history and mores? The developing world is littered with failed projects that were carried out with the purest of motives but no regard to what the putative clients actually wanted. Do we want Linux and Open Source deployments to go the same way? For a couple of years now I've been trying to get Indian and NRI programmers to get involved in localization in debian-installer and elsewhere but even with the small minority that are sympathetic to Open Source (a scandal in itself.) it is like pulling teeth. To their credit, Red Hat India pays people to work on such things but volunteerism is the heart of the Open Source movement as we all know so the apathy of Indian IT professionals is deeply troubling. Hariharan is trying to increase interest by appealing to the Indians' sense of cultural pride which is a good tactic--it has been successfuly applied by many non-western or minority cultures--but he is not going to be very successful if the vision of Indian culture he is presenting is as alien as Eskimo culture to the vast majority of the people. Western Open Source advocates also run into difficulties due to being tone-deaf in their understanding of how third-world cultures actually operate. When India declined to participate in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, some commentators on places like Slashdot were perplexed. Wouldn't a poor country want an inexpensive yet efficient pc using free software instead of high-priced imports? The thing they missed is that while people in India may be poor, thanks to a more-or-less democratic polity and more-or-less open communications, their frame of reference is no longer their village. Their trends are increasingly set in Mumbai, New York, Paris, and London. The forward-thinking amongst them know that computers are the key to the future. They also know Bill Gates is the richest man in the world thanks to something called "Windows" knowing which can get you a green card and your own chance of becoming rich. So if Linux comes along, presented as a cheap alternative which is "just as good", the fake Gucci handbag of IT if you will, it is not going to impress. Thinkpads and Dells appeal to the upwardly-mobile persons vanity, a third-world hand-cranked laptop does not. (This incidently is what is behind the "Nalanda university" meme too. Monasteries are yesterday. Universities are the in thing so we have to have some in our past and not just any but by golly, the first university in the world.) When they venture from pure technology into the realm of culture, Open Source advocates need to be a lot more sophisticated, not to mention accurate, in their arguments lest they fall on deaf ears. Platitudes and sentimentality about "spiritual" versus "material" culture aren't enough. There must be concrete demonstrations of the benefits of why the Open Source approach to knowledge is better. They must be more sensitive in their presentation to avoid needlessly antagonizing people who might otherwise be natural allies. I believe the Open Source ideal is good for India and the whole world, not just in software but for society at large and I wish Venkatesh Hariharan and all the others on the frontlines of the fight for openness the best of luck. But good intentions cannot excuse sloppy thinking.

In response to Home video hub on a shoestring, Justin asked, “Why not just stream the media over cifs/nfs/sshfs?” Why indeed? Well, as my fellow amateur Internet broadcaster Justin Zeigler (coincidentally of the same first name) observed, “some people mistake the unix way as doing things the oldest way possible.” There are niceties streaming video solutions provide that are much better suited to solving my particular problem. Streaming puts the burden of handling different codecs and providing material at a bitrate the client systems can handle on the server. Remember, I said my client system is underpowered and the network I’m delivering across is wireless B. These constraints make streaming video the ideal solution. Now, if I only wanted to stream the music videos and other material designed to deliver over the Internet, I’d be fine with a remote filesystem. But DVDs and mythtv recordings are too demanding on my little laptop’s resources to work at all. But, just to make sure, I tried both sshfs and nfs today. Sure enough, I could stream a Quicktime music video from sshfs just fine. However, neither sshfs nor nfs could deliver the material from a mythtv recording fast enough for the client to keep up. I tried both vlc and mplayer, and both were so stuttery they were unplayable. I gave mplayer a larger buffer (32K) which cleaned up the first few seconds of play while the player read from the buffer, but after that, it started stuttering again. And this was with only one floor of separation between the WAP and the laptop, to make sure I had a solid connection. Clearly, Videolan’s ability to transcode on the fly and stream over the network is a great convenience to me. I suppose I could do a file-to-file transcode and then read the resulting file from sshfs, but I don’t find that nearly as handy as the streaming solution. So I’m sticking with Videolan, as I find it the easiest to use, most elegant solution to delivering a broad range of video material from our powerful hub system to our less powerful client system.

Hecl is a weakly typed programming language, which, for a scripting language is often an advantage. Instead of cluttering your code with lots of (casts) or performing.to_s all the time, things "just work" depending on the context (and assuming that you've verified your data or have error handling for when things go wrong). I've been pondering a weakness of this model that Tcl doesn't adequately solve, discussed here: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=37354848 The summary is that if anything can and will be converted to a string at some point in its lifetime, GC'ing "complex objects" (things that can't be represented by a string) gets difficult. In order to be able to go back to an object from a string, you have to maintain a hash table with string handles that point at the actual objects in whatever language you are using, and that in turn requires that you somehow keep track of the lifetime of those objects. Doing GC in Hecl itself is something I'd hoped to avoid - up until now, we have managed to get by ok with Java's GC. The 'best' solution seems to be Salvatore's, discussed here: http://wiki.tcl.tk/13847 But even that is relatively complex, and at least initially, involves a couple of tours through the entire string-space of the running program. Unfortunately, I don't think there's really a clever way around the problem, though... what the weak typing giveth, the weak typing taketh away (or something along those lines). I am not sure what this means for Hecl at this point, whether we simply say "clean up after your own objects", introduce some sort of string typing, or something else entirely...

Piero Manzoni should be canonised as the patron saint of modern computing. "Who the hell is Piero Manzoni?" I hear you all say. Well, he was an Italian artist whose work included the act of producing and selling cans of "Merda d'Artista". The Tate gallery bought one of the cans a few years ago, for more than the cost of the same weight of 24 carat gold. According to the above article, "At least 45 of the original 90 cans have exploded, however. This is exactly what Manzoni intended.". As Bill Harzia puts it (in a forum which will not be named), "He was the first to sell overpriced shit, of no practical value, that could fail at any moment, to unsuspecting suckers." That really sums it up, doesn't it?

Yesterday marked the last day of my contract with Orange and Bronze Software Labs. I have been previously doing some work with an up-and-coming messaging platform in C++, and at the end, it was a fun and worthy learning experience. Through them, I’ve seen the other’ side of software engineering, the side where it is done right. Calen, Dean, Chelle, Rose, and the rest of the gang: thanks for the fish (and Z’s, Rocklets, countless bottles of iced tea and Pepsi, and KFC dinners.) Hope to do bigger catches with you guys in the next lifetime.

During my cruise through release critical bugs, one sometimes wonder how often "team" should be translated with "toll, ein anderer macht's" (great, someone else will do it). Looking at bugs like e.g. #399589 - asterisk-oh323: Asterisk OH-323 crashes latest asterisk package, it doesn't seem to demanding to expect also in a team-maintained environment that any of the maintainers recheck (or at least send mail) to the person reporting the bug within a week. However, the bug was reported on November 20th (that's a Monday), and nothing happend up to now from their side - means: Nothing within 11 days. Unfortunatly, there are more so buggy packages from the VoIP-Team - most can just be moved out from Etch, but it is always unsatisfactory to remove packages.

I don t have a TV here in Ghana (and I don t miss it at all), but some audio-visual content consumption from time to time is nice. Therefore, I started to subscribe to various Podcasts, using the comfortable Democracy Player. Here are my regulars , also see my list of German podcasts.BrickfilmsSome like lego. Some like stop motion animation. I like both. Therefore, I am a big fan of lego movies, and the brickfilms blogcast delivers the best ones directly to me. Unfortunately, does not get posted to very often.Olde EnglishMy sense of humer is not every one else s. Therefore, I guess not everyone will enjoy the sketches of the Olde English comedy group. I could try to list some of my favorites episodes, like One picture every day , but discover that for yourself.BSODInteresting, highly technical hour-long podcast covering interesting topics such as how the telefone system works (and what funny things you can do with it), bulding a infra-red remote control gun that will control your (or anyone s) TV from quite a distance and similar topics. It could cover a bit more software topics, and less Windows based things and personally, I think the Bastard Sons of Dial-Up put slightly too much emphasize on bad language and underground-activists-like appearance. But that might be genuine, and the content is of good quality, so it is worth watching.The Tech JunkiesOnly three episodes so far, but these two guy are doing great and funny things with electronics (such as testing what happens when you plug a speaker into the power outlet). They also have covered lock picking, and I especially enjoyed seeing a bump key in action, as so far I only read about that technique.Player 1 vs. Player 2A two-guy talk show about computer games. Slightly oriented towards old and console games, but still interesting for most gamers, I d say. They have not released a new episode for almost a year now, I hope that they will start sending again some day.

I don t have a TV here in Ghana (and I don t miss it at all), but some audio-visual content consumption from time to time is nice. Therefore, I started to subscribe to various Videocasts, using the comfortable Democracy Player. Here are my regulars , also see my list of German podcasts.BrickfilmsSome like lego. Some like stop motion animation. I like both. Therefore, I am a big fan of lego movies, and the brickfilms bodcast delivers the best ones directly to me. Unfortunately, does not get posted to very often.Olde EnglishMy sense of humer is not every one else s. Therefore, I guess not everyone will enjoy the sketches of the Olde English comedy group. I could try to list some of my favorites episodes, like One picture every day , but discover that for yourself.BSODInteresting, highly technical hour-long videocast covering interesting topics such as how the telefone system works (and what funny things you can do with it), bulding a infra-red remote control gun that will control your (or anyone s) TV from quite a distance and similar topics. It could cover a bit more software topics, and less Windows based things and personally, I think the Bastard Sons of Dial-Up put slightly too much emphasize on bad language and underground-activists-like appearance. But that might be genuine, and the content is of good quality, so it is worth watching.The Tech JunkiesOnly three episodes so far, but these two guy are doing great and funny things with electronics (such as testing what happens when you plug a speaker into the power outlet). They also have covered lock picking, and I especially enjoyed seeing a bump key in action, as so far I only read about that technique.Player 1 vs. Player 2A two-guy talk show about computer games. Slightly oriented towards old and console games, but still interesting for most gamers, I d say. They have not released a new episode for almost a year now, I hope that they will start sending again some day.

Ok so, I was there, trying to assemble pictures taken at my sister's birthday. I have my pictures, her boyfriend's pictures, both have more or less the same date sor pictures have the same timestamp. Then comes another friend, which camera isn't at all at the same time. It's +/- 6:43 hour lead. And there is the mess, because I want all those pictures sorted by time, so people looking at them doesn't have to sort them himself. He just clic "next" and the next photo appears, whoever has taken it.

Now, I want my pictures sorted by time and gallery knows how to extract the time for EXIF tags, so I don't have to set the modification time of the files accordingly. But what to do when even EXIF tags are wrong ? I just discovered exiv2 adjust option, which does exactly what I want. From the manpage:



So a simple loop accros those files:



and the work is done. Simple. Powerful. I love it.

Scripting a gui tester for Tuxpaint with xautomation was fun and quite useful too, but really only appeals to developers. Today I found use for xautomation that will appeal to sys admins and users: hacking around a user interface that refuses to work the way it ought to. I wanted to add another mythgame player, this time for the pcsx-df Playstation emulator. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pass it a CD image from the command line. It seems to know only how to do two things: run a game file, or run a real CD. My best guess is that it doesn’t know its plugins until the GUI starts, so it is unaware that it ought to be able to use the cdrmooby plugin to load the specified image when it is parsing the command line. After a brief and fruitless grep through the source, it dawned on me that I could put xautomation to work for me to do the job in much less time. Here is the resulting startpcsx script, which sucessfully operates as my pcsx mythgame player.

#!/bin/bash
slowtype ()  
   echo "$@"   sed -re 's/(.)/\"str \1\"\n\"usleep 15\"\n/g'
 
pcsx &
xte "sleep 2" "keydown Control_R" "key o" "keyup Control_R" "sleep 1" 
slowtype "$@"   xargs xte
xte "key Return" 

The hard part was that pcsx is afflicted by one of my pet peeves, a typeahead find that cannot be disabled. As a result, if you make xte type at full speed into the open file dialog, the filepath comes out all jumbled up. This happens because the filepath is constantly being redrawn as xte types characters, so the cursor isn’t always at the end of the line. The usleep 15 allows the cursor to reach the end of the line before typing the next character. Of course, this is truly a hack, subject to variations in timing between systems, so if you use it, you may have to tweak the sleep and usleep values. But it works well enough as a workaround until pcsx-df is fixed to accept a CD image on the command line.

Generally, I find the idea of applying cryptography to the field of licensing media works a good one, the problem with DRM is that it took off in the wrong direction by not modeling the actual legal status of the works correctly, but instead tries to assert that they have a different status. However, there was no (at least reasonably visible) counterproposal from the various communities around free licensing, and I believe one would be needed. I think the way to in would be license signatures that basically just provide a machine readable form of the licence text. The actual data would still be unencrypted, so the licence information is not necessary for functionality, but it allows me to quickly filter my collection with specific criteria, such as whether it is okay to play this piece in a club, or if they allow sampling. I'd also like to have additional metadata, such as a link to a machine readable tour schedule. If I like a band, I could then simply place them on a watchlist, which helps them sell tickets.

According to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle Hans Reiser pled "not guilty" to the charge of murdering his wife. This isn't particularly exciting news as all previous indications were that he was going to do so.

However one noteworthy fact from the article is that they are setting up an education fund for his children. Regardless of whether Hans is convicted or not, his children will still be in a bad situation and in need of assistance. While there are plenty of other worthy charities needing donations, if you are considering donating towards a Linux related cause then you might want to consider the children of a kernel coder.

Generally, I find the idea of applying cryptography to the field of licensing media works a good one, the problem with DRM is that it took off in the wrong direction by not modeling the actual legal status of the works correctly, but instead tries to assert that they have a different status. However, there was no (at least reasonably visible) counterproposal from the various communities around free licensing, and I believe one would be needed. I think the way to in would be license signatures that basically just provide a machine readable form of the licence text. The actual data would still be unencrypted, so the licence information is not necessary for functionality, but it allows me to quickly filter my collection with specific criteria, such as whether it is okay to play this piece in a club, or if they allow sampling. I'd also like to have additional metadata, such as a link to a machine readable tour schedule. If I like a band, I could then simply place them on a watchlist, which helps them sell tickets.

Generally, I find the idea of applying cryptography to the field of licensing media works a good one, the problem with DRM is that it took off in the wrong direction by not modeling the actual legal status of the works correctly, but instead tries to assert that they have a different status. However, there was no (at least reasonably visible) counterproposal from the various communities around free licensing, and I believe one would be needed. I think the way to in would be license signatures that basically just provide a machine readable form of the licence text. The actual data would still be unencrypted, so the licence information is not necessary for functionality, but it allows me to quickly filter my collection with specific criteria, such as whether it is okay to play this piece in a club, or if they allow sampling. I'd also like to have additional metadata, such as a link to a machine readable tour schedule. If I like a band, I could then simply place them on a watchlist, which helps them sell tickets.