Yesterday I handed out "how to vote" cards for the Greens at the state election. It did seem to be a significant waste to have so much paper produced. Slightly more than half the voters who visited my polling booth took cards from all parties, which was obviously of little use. There is some useful information to be gained from reading the cards from all parties, but nothing that you can analyse during the short period spent waiting in line. I expect that most people decide who to vote for before they get anywhere near the polling booth and just accept the cards because they feel that it may be rude to reject them. While ironically some people who didn't like the Greens refused to accept a card from me and told me that they didn't want it with the impression that they would offend me, I'd rather save the trees and not give cards to people who don't want to use them...

I spoke to a representative of the Family First party who tried to convince me that the Greens should be against homosexuality because the Greens are "against unnatural things", he also claimed that people who choose not to have children (being gay is apparently choosing not to have children) are selfish - unless of course they are a celibate priest. He also managed to offend a supporter of the ALP in two different ways which led to an amusing heated debate and then left before I could have any more fun. For the reference of other Family First people, I've pasted in the dictionary definitions of "homo" and "hetero", when used as prefixes those Greek derived words mean "like attracting like" and "opposites attract". An example of such usage is the term "homo-charged electrets" used in electronics.

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Hetero- \Het"er*o-\ [Gr. "e teros other.]
  A combining form signifying other, other than usual,
  different; as, heteroclite, heterodox, heterogamous.
  [1913 Webster]

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Homo- \Ho"mo-\
 A combining form from Gr. "omo s, one and the same, common,
 joint.
 [1913 Webster]

From Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856) [bouvier]:
HOMO. This Latin word, in its most enlarged sense, includes both man and
woman. 2 Inst. 45. Vide Man.

The ALP (usually known as Labor) supporters had unfortunately believed the lies of their own apparatchiks. They were convinced that the Greens were directing preferences to the Liberal party, even though in most districts the Greens actually directed preferences to the ALP! The only exceptions were a small number of districts with split preferences (favoring neither Liberal nor ALP). It continually amazes me that while helping the ALP they were attacking us! Once I showed the ALP supporters the cards I was distributing they became quite friendly, as the Greens had a very low chance of winning the lower house in the districts for the polling place in question the preferences would go to the ALP.

It was interesting to talk to a Liberal supporter, he supports the workplace reforms implemented by the Federal government (Liberal) because he was hired for his current job because his employer can easily get rid of him if the business has a down-turn. It is hard to argue with someone who has only got a job because of the policy in question, but I did point out that continuity of employment is a major factor when applying for a mortgage. I recently bought a house and had a significant amount of hassle from the banks due to the fact that I work as a contractor. I had previously enquired about borrowing twice as much money while at my last permanent position and had much fewer problems from the banks.

I mentioned some of the other bad things the Liberal government has done (such as invading Iraq for no good cause), but the Liberal supporter was too sensible to comment on any of the issues where he would only lose. This however left him with not very much to say.

Most of the work of handing out the cards was quite boring and very tiring. Fortunately a friend decided to visit and help out so there were three people handing out Greens cards instead of the scheduled two which made it easier work. The ALP apparently had four people which seems to be an optimal number as there were voters arriving from two directions and no matter where they came from at least two ALP supporters would be able to intercept them.

Surprisingly the work was easier at the most busy times. When the queue stretched out into the street I could stoll along the queue and give the cards to the voters. When the queue disappeared later in the day the voters were walking past at high speed and I had to move quickly to get to them.

Now it's time to start planning for the next Federal election.

It was a pretty day in Montreal today, and since I was taking care of Amita today I knew I wasn't going to get any computer stuff done. So I decided to take care of some tasks that needed doing around the house -- cleaning up our storage room, changing some light bulbs, fixing some furniture and putting plastic on the windows for winter. This is one of my least favorite jobs for preparing for winter. Probably the biggest sink of heat for an apartment is the windows and doors, so we do our best to insulate them. Doors get insulated foam around the cracks, and windows get covered in a thin film of clear plastic, which forms a pocket of air and provides an extra insulating barrier from the outside. It sounds crazy, but it's remarkably effective -- it really makes the difference between a cold house and a cozy home. It's extremely labor-intensive, though: it involves putting up lots of double-sided tape, cutting just-right rectangles of gossamer micron-thin plastic sheeting, climbing up and down ladders, hanging, measuring, moving. Probably the silliest part is that you blow on the plastic with a hot hair drier to make it contract tightly over the window so it's easier to see out. That takes like 10 minutes to do. Last year I waited until mid-January to do the job, and we were all walking around the house shivering and wheezing. This year I'm getting it done before winter's really upon us, but that doesn't mean I like it any better. I guess I'll just be happy when it's done. tags: winter montreal insulation plastic

My JavaScript workbench So, I've been working on making a Wikiwyg plugin for PmWiki. Wikiwyg is an ingenious Javascript library for doing WYSIWYG editing in the browser, but keeping all communications with the server in wiki syntax. Every wiki engine should be using it, but for some reason it's not well-implemented. I think it's mostly a community-marketing problem, but that's a separate subject. I want to eventually get it working on Wikitravel, which runs MediaWiki, but I wanted to give it a try on an little more deterministic wiki syntax. So I started an extension for PmWiki. I've learned a lot so far; I'm far from done, but if you use darcs you can see my work so far by running:

darcs get http://evan.prodromou.name/darcs/pmwikiwyg/

Since the code's mostly in Javascript, I've been getting my JS workbench back into shape. By "workbench", of course, I mean "loose collection of tools for documentation, debugging, and editing". For documentation, I've been using the excellent JavaScript and DOM docs from Mozilla Developer Center -- itself a wiki. The docs are (almost) complete, well-written, and well organized. And, of course, Free -- it's all under the CC attribution-sharealike. For debugging, I've been using the Venkman JavaScript debugger for Firefox. It's been a while since I've worked with a half-decent debugger, so it's been a pleasure to use. And for editing, I'm sticking to my favorite programmer's editor, JED. I first started using JED because it had the same name as the founder of Spock Mountain Research Labs, but eventually I've grown to like it on its own merits. I was a longtime Emacs addict, and JED has been my editorial methadone. It's got all of Emacs's advantages -- same keyset, different but valuable extensibility -- without the long load times and heavy weight on system resources. I'm at the point where JED is my only editor. One nice thing about JED is that writing language modes is pretty easy, so there are a lot of them out there. I found a half-decent one for JavaScript floating around on the Internet a few years ago, and it seems to still be the best there is. As mentioned above, I've pretty much transitioned fully to Darcs as my version control system for whatever projects I can help it. It's a great piece of software -- all the strengths of GNU arch without the idiosyncratic naming conventions. And that's my workbench. It's no Eclipse, but I'm having fun working with these tools. tags: darcs javascript workbench mdc jed venkman

Get enigma (new version 1.00 beta in incoming, should hit unstable soon) and you won't have time to work for the release anymore. It's a great game, and it has almost 1000 levels now. Please help test the beta, and lets delay etch! :-) This is also the first package I've built with cowbuilder. I don't know if its faster - my new laptop is much faster, and I've been setting up a new development environment. But it works for me.

It is good to see the New York Times critically report on the (ab)use of cocktail psychiatric drugs used for treating children (and see this older New Yorker article The Pediatric Gap on the general lack of saftey testing for drugs given to kids). What is a shame, however, is that the total lack of critical interrogation that there may be actual environmental causes for some of these problems and this, despite the publication of new studies from leading medical journals (such as Lancet) that finally are addressing the possibility that over 200 chemicals are causing havoc on brains, behavior, and thus life… (kinda a no brainer at some level even if we do need more specific studies…) As the article on the chemicals reports, critics of they study say they Lancent authors are verging on scare-mongering, because there is no proof of a pandemic.. Well, we do need more proof but does that mean we should not study what is so understudied (and hard to study because how does one measure the effects of the synergistic combination of x number of chemicals over x many years??) But as the NYTimes piece shows there does seem to be a pandemic in prescribing people and kids psychiatric medications. So possibly there is some connection to be made here?? And what I can’t understand is why it is that those within the medical establishment who are confronting kids with so called behavioral and those that are critics of overprescription are not asking what may be behind some of these problems… While I agree that a percentage of the kids being put on drugs are totally fine and just being kids, I am sure there are many others who are suffering. And while some of these psych drugs may be an acceptable and necessary short term solution, this NY Times article should make us pause, and seriously pause, about the viability of these drugs as a realistic solution, given the horrible side effects they cause (just read the article). Even if some so think these are necessary, these are crude therapies. I think we need another “Silent Spring” with an eye toward possible behavioral effects to shake people not out of an apathy, but from a myopia that seems satisifed with engaging only with symptoms and surfaces. .

Enrico said in live-cd-on-removable-disk: Mostly it boils down to running the xorg-creation script at every boot time. There are various tools to do that. Some are here, but there is surely more. (Enrico’s note: do we have anything in Debian that we can install and just does that?)
Well, Enrico, a tool I really grew fond of, which auto-configures X on Debian systems is xdebconfigurator, it lacks being auto-run on each system start, which I consider a feature on normal systems, but for your proposed usage (i.e. a portable USB-storage based Debian system), it would certainly be the right thing. Essentially, it never failed on me. Except for VMware virtual machines, where all it did wrong was that it proposed too high resolutions which resulted from my dual-screen Windows setup I ran VMware on. You might want to give it a try.

A few months ago I finished Play Money by Julian Dibbel and like his My Tiny Life before it, the writing style is simple yet sumptuous, or I guess just simply sumptuous. Like the travel writings that pre-figured anthropological writing, Dibbel takes us to a far-away exotic land (but only a click or two away) that are populated by a motley crew of wizard (or is lizard)? slayers, gold-diggers, money-makers, and virtual-world-builders. For many, these MMOGsare no strange-lands but are becoming weaved firmly and intimately into the fabric of everyday life, whether as entertainment, sociality, and or for a cadre of folks, as a source of income generation. I think the book has gotten enough coverage that I don’t need to rehearse its content in any detail but the basic story is that Julian embarks on a real world quest in the virtual land of quests to try to make enough money (to be specific make a little more than his monthly salary as a freelance writer) from trading and selling a slew of virtual objects and gold. In taking us along, he gives a compelling entry into the imaginative and morally complex world of these games. And better is that whether you know nothing about them or are a seasoned player, the book has much to offer. One of the reasons I respect Julian Dibbel is because he takes his sweeeet time to churn out a book-length manuscript. In a day and age when there is so much pressure to release quick and often, especially when writing about anything in the so-called virtual plane of existence, he waited nearly 8 years from the publication of his last book on gaming, My Tiny Life before publishing on a considerably higher-tech phenomenon. Following him on his most recent adventure, you learn that he threw himself into a variety of gaming environments persistently and consistently and did at least 3 years of research and writing (at one point in the book he confesses how excruciating writing for him, which is hard to believe as the words slip so nicely off the paper but whatever the extent of his writing angst is, he clearly spends a lot of care in crafting his sentences). And I am starting to think that if more people followed this ethic of long-term immersion, coupled with slow-brewed productive sparsity, we would get higher quality products (Yes, kinda like the Debian release cyclce). Like any good ethnographer, he gives an intimate portrait of life in these worlds of copious play where various types of real world economies have mushroomed apace with new technological developments. That is, he gives us a taste of what it is like, as he cleverly puts it to own unreality. Couched within tales of gaming gone real world economic, are hearty reflections on the place of play in social and economic life, the close resemblance and conceptual affinity between computers and games (and not just computer games, and here he does a fantastic job at explaining the Turing Test), self-doubts about writing in general and in particular about this topic, commodity fetishism, and the changing nature of capitalism in a world of ever-greater abstractions. All of this makes for an enjoyable read that if used in the classroom (which like A Tiny Life, I am sure will become standard for courses on Virtual Worlds) allows you to bring in some good supplemental material whether Edward Castranova’s Synthetic Worlds, Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter’s The Laws of Virtual Worlds and or older heavy-hitters like Max Weber and Karl Marx. The only topic I think I would have liked to seen included is that of capitalist finance, because there are, I think, some real affinities, phenomenologically and conceptually, between finance capitalism and gaming the virtual game. Otherwise some of my favorite sections were on hackers and the object of the computer, but of course, I am biased that way. So here I leave you with a tasty morsel of something that was sumptuous to ingest: It is this endlessly repeatable collusion of freedom and determinism-the warp and woof of fixed rules and free play, of running code and variable input that sets both games and computers apart, together from the larger universe of information technologies they inhabit…. But only games share the universal machine’s game’s thoroughgoing commitment to the principle of recursion: the chained repetition of simple operations, each building on both the input of the moment and the outcomes of preceding steps. And only games, therefore, come close to capturing that precise mi of unpredictability and inevitability that makes the computer such a powerful simulator of our lived experience of the world. p. 104

As of yesterday, I have been at my current workplace, Push72, for one year. There have been a few ups and downs along the way and my job has changed somewhat from being strictly a programmer to doing mostly system administration now. The environment reminds me of Stormix where my co-workers became good friends. Here's hoping for another good year!

I think there's a certain special sloth that Americans get to experience on the day after Thanksgiving that we don't get on other parts of the year. Something about the combination of gluttony and wholesomeness makes Black Friday a very mellow, enjoyable time. Maybe it's the fact that it's officially now The Holiday Season, but the stressful tasklist of December hasn't started yet. Or maybe just that it's a day off of work for no good reason except it just is. Maybe it's the fridge full of leftovers that still taste kind of good. I dunno. We had a good Thanksgiving dinner yesterday evening. Maj, Amita June and I had planned to go visit family in New Brunswick (New Jersey) for the holiday, which was really nice to do last year. But our visas are running out in December, and although we're (probably) not going to have a problem renewing them, our lawyer said it was a bad time to leave the country. So, we stayed in Montreal for Thanksgiving. Canadians have their own Thanksgiving, of course, on the 2nd Monday of October, but not having grown up with that day as Thanksgiving, and with most of our family celebrating in November, it's hard to get motivated around Canadian Thanksgiving. And it's just not that big a deal in Quebec, anyways. So we had a good dinner here; John Usher, Niko, Jeff Waye, Meg and Patti all came over and had a good time of it. I cooked my first Thanksgiving dinner -- a big salmon, potatoes and sweet potatoes, roasted broccoli and wax beans, a great big salad. Every family has a Thanksgiving dish tradition -- one of the Prodromous' is a big pot of macaroni and cheese. So I made that, too. We all ate pretty well, drank some wine, talked about the future of music and how fun it is to play hockey. Unfortunately, I managed to miss my Blinky Hockey practice last night -- I tried to put the (overtired) baby to bed at 10PM and ended up falling asleep myself. All in all a good TG, even though far from family. tags: thanksgiving family montreal black friday dinner canada

Speaking of home All of Canada is abuzz right now about a recently-proposed bill by the ruling Conservative Party in Parliament to declare the Quebecois to be a nation within Canada. Sovereignty of Quebec has been an extremely contentious issue in Canada over the last 50 years (two sovereignist parties are major players at the federal and provincial level), and this form of recognition is an interesting step. The whole thing began with Michael Ignatieff, a candidate for the leadership of the opposition Liberal Party. He has stated publicly that Quebec is indeed a nation, and his followers are pushing to have that be part of the Liberal Party platform. The sovereignist Bloc Quebecois tried to steal their thunder by introducing a bill in parliament to the same effect. Their thunder was in turn stolen by the Government with the latest bill, which now has the support of all the parties and will almost definitely pass. The wording of the bill is interesting. First, it calls the Quebecois a nation -- the people themselves, not Quebec qua territory or government. Although the government has stated that this includes all people in Quebec, it's still pretty obviously targeted towards recognition of an ethnic group, French-speaking Quebecois, more than everybody who's living inside the borders. Second, it recognizes this group as a nation within Canada -- deflating the suggestion that it may become an independent state. I have to admit that the ambiguous nature of Quebec's status is one of the things I find fascinating about living in Montreal. As far as I can tell, few sovereignists hope for anything like a total split with Canada, but instead are looking for some sort of autonomous status. On the other side, even the staunchest federalists have seemed comfortable with granting Quebec more of an international profile, such as giving Quebec a formal role in UNESCO. My guess is that the nature of Quebec's relationship with Canada will change gradually until it reaches some stable point where everyone's comfortable. I don't know where that stable point is, but I think it'll be interesting to find out. At the turn of the 20th century, if you had told people that the British, Austrian, Turkish and Russian Empires would be dissolved and almost forgotten within 100 years, they would have scoffed. But in that short span of time, the idea of empire, spheres of influence, and Great Powers has passed from the world stage. We simply don't think in terms of Empire any more, but in terms of nation-states. My guess is that the 21st century will see a similar change in the idea of nation-state. With pressure from supranational organizations like the UN, EU, GATT and the International Criminal Court, as well as pressure from unrecognized nations like Quebec and Catalunya and Wales, I think the firm borders of the nation-state are going to loosen up a lot. What it will mean is anyone's guess, but I think if we're lucky we'll have a richer tapestry of nations and people participating in global politics and culture. And I think Quebec will be an important part of those changes. tags: quebec nation autonomy nation-state

Thanks, Biella! I'm glad to see that Biella is going to give us the goods on PR. Our Wikitravel 2007 Get-together is going to be on the island of Puerto Rico, and Biella's from there, so she's going to make up a list of good places to check out. Great news! tags: thanks biella coleman puerto rico wikitravel

Nothing new for you? Well, this is a brand new GNOME session using the artwork (you just can see the wallpaper) that will be into Etch. There's much more in the artwork camp being worked on as we speak. In term of apps, some of what you can't see is:

- Iceweasel and Epiphany: browsers;
- Evolution: mail and stuff;
- GAIM: instant messaging;
- Totem: multimedia even in the browsers, using xine backend;
- Gnomebaker: let it burn;
- OpenOffice: people write a lot;
- and much more (including: synaptic, gdebi, printing and scanning support, ...).

Do you want to help us and enjoy the goodies right now? Download the debian-installer etch release candidate 1 and select 'desktop environment' after base install. After your first login, do as root in a terminal 'aptitude update && aptitude install desktop gnome-desktop' (just to update everything). I recommend you the 1st DVD (everything needed is included), but you can do a net install or use the 1st CD without problems, it will just spend some time downloading more packages during the installation.

Improvements to the Debtags web editor The Debtags web editor can now give random tips. It's a simple addition, but it now makes many things possible:

• it gives us a way to communicate to the occasional taggers;
• it does not leave us helpless in front of common mistakes, and now we can give suggestions on how to avoid them;
• it gives us a better place than the list archives to collect tagging tips.

If you do a lot of tagging work and happen to conceive some useful tip, please send it to the mailing list and I'll add it to the tips page. I also tried to tidy up the interface of the web editor as much as I could, but I have mixed feelings about it. Help us out: make a draft HTML-only prototype of how the interface could be improved, and send it to me or the list.

The Debian desktop development page, debian-desktop mailing list and debian-desktop alioth project that were three disconnected things are now being used, maintained and in some ways managed by some members of: pkg-gnome, pkg-kde and pkg-xfce.

What will be waiting for you in Etch:
- Three tasks, one for each desktop environment project cited above that can be installed using d-i or your favorite package manager (eg.: aptitude) after a base system install. I'll publish detailed information about the package selection soon

What's still being worked out:
- Common artwork! pkg-gnome, pkg-kde and pkg-xfce are working very hard to point their artwork stuff (login screens, splash and wallpapers) to the desktop-base source package already being maintained in debian-desktop svn repository (it was in pkg-gnome svn repo). GNOME is already using the artwork, the GDM theme needs some last minute fix, KDE and XFCE will be done soon
- I've asked Joey Hess input on the possibility of build 'desktop cd sets' (3 cds) containing: gnome-desktop, kde-desktop and xfce-desktop tasks and its dependencies each. This is needed because to install GNOME or KDE desktop from d-i you will need the 1st DVD or netinst or 1st CD with broadband connection
- Debian Live CD project hopefully will join us soon, but i've sent a patch to their live-package that will turn the GNOME, KDE and XFCE images use the same set of packages that tasksel. With that in place, we can generate official Live CD images with the same set of packages that the 'desktop cd sets' proposed above

When I started firefox 2.0 for the first time, well, my reaction was "woah, it's amazingly fast", meaning that it took it really less than 10seconds to launch, like its predecessor. But my joy ended way too soon. After many releases, firefox is still completely unable to be a decent application in many trivial points, that separately are completely insignificant, but put together make me freak out:

• When I launch [edit->preferences] that dumb browser launches its configuration window on THE OTHER SCREEN, yeah I run a dual head setup (who doesn't nowadays ?) and that stupid browser opens the window on the screen when I don't have the focus. My WM is obviously set up to launch applications to the screen that has the mouse in it, every single other application I tested do the same, only firefox manages to start that screen elsewhere, unbelieveable.
• After years, firefox is still completely unable to have decent configuration of key bindings, so that a decent Unix-like configuration could be set up. For example, in every Unix application I use:
  • ^K/^U kills the current edit like to the end/the start. in firefox it goes to the google search/shows the source. Note that "show the source" when you have a newly opened tab, that you are in the location bar, with the empty page underneath, showing the source is completely stupid anyway.
  • ^Q does not quits, it just does nothing, to quit firefox you need to ^W the last opened tab. Okay, I got used to that, except that I use mouse gestures on my desktop, I use down, then left to quit an application, and down, then right to just close a children window of an application. Guess what, I always get confused with firefox, whereas it works great with ANY other application I use (daily or not).
• When I click e.g. on get new extensions, whereas my browser is configured to open new pages in a new tab, it always insists to fork a brand new window. gosh, how stupid is that ?
• After years, it's still unable to respect the usual unix X DPI settings, and insists to think my monitor is under 96DPI, whereas for some personnal reasons I've forced it to be 75DPI. Result is, fonts in web pages are incredibly small and unreadable. In firefox 1.5 there was an obscure way to force it to use the system default (WTF is that not the default setting ?!) now it's gone, and I just can't find the setting in the crazy about:config page.
• In the same vein, when I open a new tab, it resets the font adjustment I did to my own displeasure, instead of opening a new tab with the same Text size. Hey guys, if I zoomed in once already, do you think opening the tab with liliputian fonts again is a great idea ?
• After years when you do back and that you just posted a form, you still go back to an empty form. Konqueror returns to the form like you submitted it, which allow you to fix a typo in a form and avoid to fill it from scratch again for crappy sites that forgot what you typed when just one of the fields was wrong.
• Konqueror has a very nice way to deal with accesskeys: when you hit Control it shows tooltips near links that do have accesskeys, to let you know which are available (and you just need to type the letter to activate it), and moreover it automatically assigns accesskeys (trying to use letters from the link if available) to links in their apparition order in the page, so that even non accessible pages, can be browsed without touching the mouse. Instead of that, firefox still use the braindead alt+accesskey logic that totally conflicts with the menu et al shortcuts. People, god, what are you thinking ? do you sometimes look the good ideas that float around ?

But you know what's the worse ? I've had a SINGLE firefox instance to type that blog post. a top revealed me that this instance ended up with:

• 268m of virtual memory ;
• 191m of mapped pages ;
• 76m of "RES" memory ;
• 14m of code segment ;
• 134m of data;
• 22m of shared memory.

Guys, what are you writing ? I remember days when a browser could run in less than 16megabytes of RAM. Oh yeah, I do use firefox a lot for web developpement, it has a lot of very nice and full featured extensions (like the web developper one). But please, with the years, none of the itchy and frustrating problems of firefox have been fixed, making it completely unsuited for my daily use. Firefox is completely poorly integrated in the standard Unix environment, and its memory consumption is a real shame^[1]. Well, at least firefox is now vista-ready I presume. EDIT: just for the sake of it: children, close your firefox when you go to sleep, else it makes your computer explode. I've let a firefox run for more than 10minutes now, at least it's what my kernel pretends, and I dare to belive it. firefox now is the most greedy application on my system, it eats no less than 10.8% of my 1Go of RAM. with that incredible result:

3  PID %MEM  VIRT SWAP  RES CODE DATA  SHR nFLT nDRT COMMAND
 12524 10.8  309m 209m 108m  14m 180m  23m  287    0 firefox-bin

So my recomendation of the day: children, don't do this at home!!!

In something very reminiscent of this: http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/102936.aspx I just got some instructions today on how to interact with with a web service, complete with WSDL, SOAP, and some other acronyms. The goal of all this? To send a comma,separated,value file to the recipient. Ooooo-kkkk.

At the start of this week, one of the mailservers I run came heavily under attack. As well as the continuing surge in the sheer volume of spam - which has been reported widely in articles like Spam up by 59 per cent [Spannerworks Search Marketing News] - there were dozens of clients opening connections and then just sitting there idle. Very strange. To bring things back under control, I added a mixture of new anti-spam methods, but some things will always be attractive enough for bad people to attack manually and defeat whatever anti-spam you put in place. The only anti-spam which can't be defeated is one that will defeat all real people - and that helps spammers to pollute the network, IMO, making everyone else waste yet more time as a result of their spamming. My main anti-spam at the moment is a mix of:

• throttling and limit simultaneous connections - make them speak slowly and clearly;
• greylisting but be careful not to put the block time too high, else yahoo's mail relay farms will give up;
• tarpitting triggered by a DNSBL match - this is often enough to make spammers give up (too expensive) or violate the SMTP protocol;
• moderate list mails by Content-Type - most lists prefer text/plain;
• moderate by content string matching - rather fiddly to do this.

I always argue against doing a hard reject for a dnsbl match. In general, dnsbls are way too trigger-happy and too prone to false positives, especially for things like new mailservers coming online. Just this month, one of my ISP mailservers ended up in sbl-xbl and I couldn't find out why. Once I had added the extra anti-spam, the spam volume dropped significantly. Total message volume reduced by about 20%. I can't tell reliably how many of the 20% (or the remaining 80%) are spam, of course. But then the network connection failed, which may have been the cause of the idle connections that turned this into a crisis in the first place.

I'll be hacking on my hpodder program this weekend. hpodder is a full-featured podcast aggregator that runs on the command line, and has many features over other command-line podcatchers like bashpodder, and even over GUI tools like iPodder.

I originally envisioned hpodder to be something that I'd cron up and run in the background. But I have tended to run it in the foreground more than in the background. Some others have too, and the #1 requested hpodder feature is parallel downloads.

So I am working on that. I already have code working, in fact, that will parallelize both the hpodder update (downloading the feeds) and the hpodder download (downloading the actual episodes) commands.

Unlike ipodder, my code will make sure that no more than 1 thread will ever be downloading from a given server at a given time. ipodder had the terribly annoying habit of pointing all of its threads at a single server, thus pounding it while also providing little benefit for someone with a pipe fatter than the server's.

Before all this multithreaded stuff could be written, I needed to write my own status bar code instead of just letting curl display its own status bar. (That wouldn't work when there are 5 curls running at once)

I decided that I would write some generic status bar code, rather than something specific to hpodder. I took the apt-get status bar as an example, and whipped one up in Haskell and added it to my MissingH Haskell library.

But a status bar just begged for another feature: a generalized progress tracker. Something that could keep track of where a task (and its sub-tasks) are, calculate ETA, estimated time remaining, speed, etc. So I wrote that and made the status bar use it.

AND, a status bar begged for a generalized numeric formatter: something that could render 512 as 512, 2048 as 2K, 1048576 as 1M, etc. So I wrote that, and it's general enough that it can render into both SI and "binary" units by default (and others that users may want).

Finally, I wrote a function to take a number of seconds and render it in something friendly like 23m5s like apt uses, and shoved that in MissingH as well.

So now hpodder will have a status bar, and any other Haskell program can use the same status bar code in minutes because it's all generic. Or if someone just needs to render a number in megabytes, they can do that.

I really enjoy it when a program needs a solution that is generic enough to put in a larger library. I try to put as much of my Haskell code in MissingH as I can, so as to make it useful to others (and my other programs).

Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, was (quoting from Wikipedia) the god of the night, the north, temptation, sorcery, beauty and war. He was known by other descriptive names, such as Titlacauan (We His Slaves), Ipalnemoani (He by whom we live), Necocyaotl (Sower of Discord on Both Sides) and Tloque Nahuaque (Lord of the Near and Nigh) and Yohualli ecatl (Night, Wind). And today, I strongly feel as being born his servant. Why? Because today I took courage and started working on the integration of our ~20 print servers into a single, smarter scheme, with user control and printer assignment done by a central server. I cannot, of course, say that in the course of a day my troubles are over - No, no, quite far from it... But at least, I managed to grasp how to send the CUPS generic Postscript driver as the default driver for W2K/XP clients (no, I haven't worked on older ones yet - and yes, we still have many W98 machines around). I'm quite used to the fact that things in a Unix system are just easy to understand. Yes, sometimes it takes some time, sometimes you have to dig into the manuals, but all in all things can be finally understood. Today, after a couple of hours sticking my nose into the extremely extensive Official Samba HOWTO and Reference guide (chapters 21 and 22) and having my attention drift over the quite interesting Implementing CIFS book in a vain attempt to fully understand what goes on behind the curtains, after trying to debug my Windows-Linux communication issues by grokking what Wireshark finds over the wire... I can only understand that CUPS is pure black magic, although quite well documented. Samba is elegant and feels nice and easy, but really begs to be debugged with the Malleus Maleficarum at hand. CIFS (also here) is the subtle utterance of a dark spell pronounced by a stuttering sorcerer. And the way Windows integrates with it all is... Bah.

There has been a lot of interest recently in the VFX VoIP service launched by WorldXchange (WXC), no doubt partly driven by the fact that there is no monthly charge until April 2007. I had a spare Linksys PAP2T so I thought I would try the service out to see how it performed. The signup process didn’t go anywhere near as smoothly as it did when I signed up for my WXC DSL connection. The online signup form tried to force me to select a new WXC DSL Plan (I don’t want to do that, I want to keep my old plan with free National traffic). Despite trying several times and making sure that the only checkbox ticked was VFX each time, it refused to let me go any further. Giving up on the web form, I rang the WXC helpdesk who answered promptly. It is easy to see why WXC won the 2006 award for best call centre. Every time I deal with them over the phone it is a pleasant experience. This time was no exception. The CSR I was talking to explained that the webform was dying because I tried to use a VFX username that differed from my WXC DSL username. There was no mention of this restriction on the website! Anyway, 15 minutes later, with my MAC address taken down and my voice recording completed, I was told we were all done and that I would receive my welcome email and account details with 2 working days! 24 hours later I received the email with the details, followed promptly by a phone call from WXC CSR who was ready to talk me through the process of setting up my PAP2. Configuring the PAP2 was a simple procedure, I had to copy and paste a URL into the Provisioning Rule field of the web interface and reboot the device. It then downloads configuration information directly from WXC (based off the device MAC adddress) and configures itself. I was up and running with dial-tone about 2 minutes after receiving the email. Very smooth. I understand that the process is even easier if you purchase a pre-configured PAP2. The downside to the whole scheme is that in trying to make the process as simple as possible WXC has locked the entire system down very tightly and remove a lot of the flexibility that I would desire. In particular my PAP is now completely locked, I can’t access any of the web interfaces, and even the dial-in prompt on the PAP2 replies with a curt “cancelled” before hanging up. There is no way for me to configure the second line of the device to talk to a second SIP provider. Apparently WXC will create a custom configuration for me so that I can still use the second line, but I imagine this requires giving them all my account details for my second SIP provider, which I’m not sure I’m comfortable doing. It also appears that WXC has an arrangement with Linksys such that every PAP2 now sold in New Zealand comes pre-configured to be used with WXC. I haven’t had a chance to look at one of these PAP2s yet, but if it were to turn out that I had to contact WXC to remove the locking on my PAP2 before I was able to use it with another VoIP provider I would be fairly annoyed. The MyVFX portal is very underwhelming. It insists on opening itself in a new browser window, and isn’t integrated with the rest of the WXC/VFX website. From what I can make out it’s just a branded frontend on to the management system that WXC has purchased. The user interface is reminiscent of the design of the 1990s. I think there is a lot of potential for WXC to improve the experience in this area and I doubt that the average user would be comfortable updating settings via MyVFX in its present state. On the technical side of things the VFX service seems to be fairly well designed and secured. The devices are provisioned and configured using the Linksys/Sipura provisioning tools, which appear to encrypt all conversations with the device. The setup process downloaded two configuration files and a firmware file (v 3.1.10) to my PAP2. Both of the configuration files were binary and appear to be encrypted. Interestingly it appears that WXC downgraded the firmware from 5.1.1 to 3.1.1 during the provisioning process. The MyVFX portal and SIP server appear to be using some sort of BroadWorks device. The device fetches it’s configuration file from the WXC server every time it is powered on, so it will be easy for WXC to push out updates and configuration changes as they desire. The VoIP side of things is performed using SIP, which appears to be using standard HTTP Digest authentication. The username and passsword for this being hidden inside the encrypted configuration files which are downloaded to the device. The voice data uses the G.729 codec inside an RTP stream, and from a few short calls seems to be relatively good quality. Conclusion
Overall, VFX seems like a very easy to use and simple service. Simple being the keyword. By locking down the devices so securely and preventing people from using softphones and devices other than Linksys equipment I imagine many people like myself are excluded from the potential market. I can’t see myself keeping the service after I have to start paying money for it. But I would definitely recommend it to friends and family who are looking for a simple, easy to use VoIP system.

This morning I came across Michael Berube’s response to Jodi Dean’s critique of Berube’s book What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and Bias in Higher Education… It is a fascinating interchange worthy of a close read or two but without first-hand knowledge of the book, I hesitate to pledge my allegiance on either side. But I will hopefully to do so. The only thing that surprised me was that there was no mention of the grand master of the critique of liberalism, Stanely Fish… Not sure why but he seems like an obvious place to start. These ppst happened to really captured my attention this morening given I found them after reading the Chronicle of Higher Education piece Input or Intrusion? which examines the recent attacks against scholars deemed as “anti-Israel/pro-Palestine,” including against Nadia Abu El-Haj who happened to be on my dissertation committee… It will be very interesting to see how this all pans out and I am sure many of us are watching closely. And as an added bonus, here is a student’s thoughtful perspective on the Berube book.

So I am housed in University of Alberta Department of Philosophy as my supervisor is a philosopher and there is no seperate STS department. And this “academic housing” certainly has its advantages, like for example, learning about probably one of the most audacious (and frankly amusing) statments on religion ever… by Bertrand Russell:

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a diseaese born of fear and and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilizaion. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknoweldge, but I do not know of any others. Bertand Russel. “Why I am not a Christian” p. 24

I am sure he turned over in his grave when his daughter said:

“He was the most fascinating man I have ever known, the only man I ever loved, the greatest man I shall ever meet, the wittiest, the gayest, the most charming. It was a privilege to know him, and I thank God he was my father.” Katharine Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p. 202.

My friend Jonah has written a provocative post that asks how the example of free software can be applied to the environmental politics as to create a free energy movement. His suggestion is a good one and it centers on the clear and accessible provision of information of labeling so as to create the conditions for meaningful choice and action. There is a line of critique launched against free software and the free culture movement accusing it of being myopic, privileged and limited. It is composed of a lot of well educated, white (many boys), honing in on liberating a set of artifacts software, music, movies etc, that are seen not to have all that much consequence in the world, compared to other more pressing matters, like famine, genocide, global warming, disease etc. I think this is somewhat of a negative critique that actually misses the point about why so many folks are attracted to the free culture movement in the first place and why it should be considered in a more positive light as a model for other forms of politics not because of its content but because of its form (and this is what Jonah basically says). In a world in which the mere thought about how to change the world is utterly paralyzing, seemingly futile, and just completely depressing, open source and free culture, by providing a set of tools along with a political message, has broken through the armour of apathy many of us are strangled by. It provided an opening to practically engage in politics, and thus allow many to taste the fruit of political action. And it is the taste, which keep people coming back to try to change the conditions of life. So the lesson to draw from free software is less whether its politics are radical or important enought, but that it provided an avenue and framework for alternative action. And it is this abililty to build the capacity for empowerment, which is one of its greatest virtues.