Search Results: "ron"

20 November 2006

Ben Armstrong: Towards a Debian Jr. Live CD

Debian Jr. development revived Recently there has been some lively discussion on the Debian Jr. list about how to arrange an account for a child of 1 to 3 years of age. Suggestions included using set-top box software like Freevo, tailoring DEs with panels and large buttons, using simpler WMs like fvwm, or using an “activity centre” app like Gcompris. Now, I respect those parents who hold that a child this young should interact more with the “real world”. While I wouldn’t go so far as to outright prohibit my young ones from computer use, I can see the wisdom in keeping it to a minimum. But, for better or worse, our family is one of several who have some experience helping our youngest members use our Debian systems. We would like to share what we’ve learned through the Debian Jr. project. Getting started with live.debian.net To that end, last week I was inspired to follow the Debian Live ISO Howto to produce my first rough draft of a Debian Jr. live CD built from scratch on Etch. For the final product, we’ll want to use a local partial Debian archive mirror, as it not only optimizes fetching packages for several build iterations, but also can be kept stable, which is important as we near release. But for this draft, I ran into trouble building the complete package list to populate the partial mirror, as cdebootstrap, which make-live uses, has no handy --print-debs switch like debootstrap does. So for now, I rely on approx to cache packages for optimization only. A straightforward process to create a working live CD The rest of the process was straightforward: using live-package, I created a package list1 containing Gnome and the Debian Jr. metapackages, I configured /etc/make-live.conf to point at my proxy, and then I ran the make-live script on the package list. The end result was ./debian-live/binary.iso, which successfully booted under qemu. At this stage, there is not much to show. To be truly useful, the live CD needs to be set up so that children and their guides can immediately find and use the material intended for them. We will need not only one live CD user, but four, varying in age range and role. (More about this in a future article.) However, it is an encouraging start, and shows that we may be able to produce something usable by the time Etch releases.

1 For this exercise, I simply combined /usr/share/make-live/lists/gnome with the junior-* metapackages in Etch, and added mozilla-firefox-gnome-support to satisfy Gnome’s web browser dependency and cut down on redundancy, resulting in the following list. 

junior-art
junior-doc
junior-games-card
junior-games-gl
junior-games-net
junior-games-sim
junior-games-text
junior-gnome
junior-internet
junior-kde
junior-math
junior-programming
junior-puzzle
junior-sound
junior-system
junior-toys
junior-typing
junior-writing
mozilla-firefox-gnome-support
eject sudo
console-common locales
gdm gdm-themes gnome-desktop-environment gnome-cups-manager gnome-screensaver
gnome-themes-extras
rhythmbox synaptic
x-window-system-core

Mario Iseli: ipw3945 & wpa_supplicant

This weekend my boss installed Debian Etch on his notebook and was very happy, he gave it to me because he couldn’t get ipw3945 run. Ok, it was really not as simple as I thought because I had to pick up some packages from unstable, but finally everything worked fine. Thanks to all the people who worked on this! Hmm, then I had a second idea of what I could try, we have a very proprietary network with Cisco Accesspoints which authenticate against an ActiveDirectory. Ok, after some miuntes (with an almost empty configuration) my wpa_supplicant daemon worked, so I tried out wpa_gui and kwlan to configure it. Configured… But it didn’t work and I didn’t get any useful messages about what’s going wrong. :-( Has anyone experience with this wpa_supplicant in a proprietary Cisco network using LEAP? I would be really happy about configuration files, because on the internet I can’t find useful ones.

19 November 2006

Todd Troxell: De-Scheming MIT

I am amazed by MIT's decision to move it's EECS curriculum away from scheme, doubly so at the fact that they're swapping it for Python. It has been part of their definition, at least in my mind. It makes sense to me, but I suppose I have some bias. I see it as a move from a language with deeper cognitive benefits to a language with stronger pragmatic benefits-- a move towards actually building things. Of course, it's just a language, and the same course could be taught with either one.

18 November 2006

Evan Prodromou: 27 Brumaire CCXV

Amita June got her 12-month vaccinations two days ago. She had to get four shots -- two in each chubby little thigh. She's really building up a phobia about going to the doctor's office, screaming her head off each time we go in. Maj thinks it's a bad memory from the time she was sick and Maj took her to the nurse for an emergency checkup, which required getting her temperature taken... from the wrong direction. After her 12-month appointment (earlier last week), Maj bought her the book about Caillou going to visit the doctor, and a little doctor's bag that she waddles around the apartment clutching. We did some practice "shots" with the syringe from the toy doctor's bag, and played with the stethoscope and such. I think it helped a little bit, but still... 4 shots in one day is too much for anybody. Chuck Norris doesn't get 4 shots in one day without a few tears. The worst part, I think, is that the vaccinations give her a little bit of a fever, and she's supposed to get some chicken-pox spots next week sometime. She's been a bit irritable -- easy to understand -- which has made everyone in the house a little tense. When the baby's mad, we're alllllll mad. She's not sleeping well? We're not sleeping well, then. Anyways, hopefully this passes soon. tags:

Web server twiddling for dummies Two fun things I did on my server today. First, I finally got around to installing mod_redir_to_servname, which turns out to be rockingly simple and useful. Thanks to Simon Richter for the good insight. The other thing I did was set up awstats for each of the domains hosted on the server. Much more fantastic than my grungy old Webalizer configuration, that's for sure. Even if it doesn't give me everything I want, it's pretty darn good. tags:

PmWiki upgrade Another thing I did today was move the SonaUiki to my main server, and upgrade it from PmWiki 1.0 to version 2.1. That's something I've been waiting to do for a while -- the site has been really carpet-bombed by spammers, and I haven't been able to add any anti-spam extensions since the version was so old. The upgrade process was pretty painless, and the site is now cookin' with gas. I'd like to go back and update some of the PmWiki Cookbook extensions I wrote a few years ago, like the 404-caching extension and the Dublin Core metadata one. PmWiki's a neato piece of software -- well-crafted, compact, easy to extend and use. If someone bothered to configure Wikiwyg to work with it, I'd give it a serious thumbs-up. tags:

Video interview in The Deal I forgot to mention that there's an interview with me in the The Deal Blogs, the blog network for The Deal magazine. It's a pretty tough crowd at The Deal, so I'm pretty glad I came out looking as good as I did. We'll see how the print article looks, but for now I think I'm pretty OK. tags:

Enrico Zini: pbuilder-tips

pbuilder tips Many thanks to Arnaud Fontaine for providing me with the solutions to all pbuilder problems I had during the last years. This is what happens to me: someone reports a bug in debtags, and it turns out that the bug needs fixing in libwibble. I start by fixing libwibble, then I need to recompile libtagcoll2-dev, then use it to recompile libept-dev, which I can finally use to rebuild debtags. A normal pbuilder setup would only take dependencies from apt sources, so I need to create an APT source with the packages I just built and feed it to pbuilder. Now, thanks to Arnaud's suggestion, I have the easy way to create the APT repository: 
$ cat update-aptsource
#!/bin/sh
cd /var/cache/pbuilder/result
dpkg-scanpackages . /dev/null   gzip -9 > Packages.gz
echo "Running pbuilder update..."
su -c "pbuilder update"
Since pbuilder works in a chroot environment, the easiest way of making it access the repository is via http. First I put the new repository online: 
ln -s /var/cache/pbuilder/result /var/www/debian
Then I add it to /etc/pbuilderrc: 
OTHERMIRROR="deb http://localhost/debian/ ./"
Then I tell pbuilder to update the configuration inside the chroots: 
pbuilder update --override-config
And finally I can build my stack of packages. This is probably not rocket science for many DDs. What I'm really appreciating here is using the minimum amount of pbuilder customization and of lines of code of extra infrastructure to maintain. Now, at every compile round, I just need to run that update-aptsource script to inject into the system the dependencies that I have just built. Update: Josh Triplett sent the configuration options to avoid using an HTTP server and use pbuilder's bind-mount facility: 
OTHERMIRROR="deb file:/var/cache/pbuilder/result/ ./"
BINDMOUNTS="/var/cache/pbuilder/result/"

Ross Burton: Contacts 0.2

Although I'm announcing Contacts 0.2, I hardly did any of the work on it. Brace yourself, Chris and Thomas have been very busy. Updated packages are already in Debian. Have fun!

17 November 2006

MJ Ray: Want a Pint? Give us your prints!

As if the underhand registration of children wasn't bad enough, this NO2ID newsletter describes another way to encourage people to submit to scanning:
"The scheme which is backed by the Home Office was first trialled in Yeovil but plans are afoot to expand the system to Coventry, Hull, Sheffield, Leeds, Gwent, Nottingham, Taunton and possibly Swindon. Drinkers must have their thumbprints scanned and supply their name, address and date of birth to enrol onto the system before they are allowed to enter licensed premises taking part in the scheme." "If you are in any of the towns affected, especially Yeovil, and are willing to do something then send an e-mail to phil@no2id.net (please put "pub fingerprinting" in the Subject).Don't get depressed, don't give in and get a home-brew kit - get angry and do something!" "PS. If anyone knows a pub that would like to take NO2ID beer mats, Newcastle NO2ID has created some with our logo on the front and key counter-arguments on the back, ideal for starting the discussions of the scheme that we need."
Not even our beer is safe from the ID State!

Evan Prodromou: 26 Brumaire CCXV

I've been pretty interested in making Web sites WebSoftwareFriendly for a while, so I'm pretty psyched to see that Yahoo and Microsoft have embraced the Google Sitemaps format. They've started a site for the format, http://www.sitemaps.org/ , which lists out the protocol, which seems to be unmodified from the original Google version. Sitemaps have been a necessary part of Web sites for years. Netscape -- back when it was a browser -- had an RDF-based sitemap format that had a brief flare of popularity just before Netscape went into its weird late-90s spiral. Then RDF people got really abstract and academic, and decided that sitemaps weren't what RDF was all about, and RDF sitemaps were forgotten. So sitemaps went off the air, and we've had to wait for a standard on the idea until today. Yahoo lets you submit sitemaps today, as does Google; Microsoft Live supposedly will support it sometime in 2007. One thing that's interesting is a new "ping" protocol, for when the site is updated. I'm not sure how well it works or if it's even implemented, but it's interesting to see it working. I think the weak part of this whole thing is that site owners have to submit sitemaps to each search engine; it would be nice if there were some sort of discovery, like an HTML <link> element, so that other types of Web software besides the big search engines would benefit. tags:

Knowing when to hold 'em From O'Reilly's wrapup of the Web 2.0 Summit, I got a good link to some other Evan's Knowing When to Hold Em. It's a little discourse on the growth of Web 2.0 sites after they've been acquired. Evan Williams, the author and the guy who sold Blogger to Google, knows whereof he speaks. He has some graphs that show traffic for various Web 2.0 sites sloping precipitously upwards after their sale to some big company. The implication being, I guess, that the sites would have been more valuable to sell later. He also points out that few of the sites have benefited visibly from being acquired. I'm not sure the argument makes sense. Traffic is a cost centre as well as a potential source of revenue for companies. Keeping servers up, running, and cogent is hard work. Most small Web sites have been throwing labor and cash into their sites for a while, and the ability to keep such a site going into the Alexa top 100 is beyond most small companies. Paying for a lot of servers, developers, designers, sysadmins and bandwidth for another couple of years may make the site bigger and more desirable for acquisition, but it's a big risk to take. My favourite part of the discussion is that my friend Kevin Fox shows up at the end with some good points about when and how to invest. tags:

Free Software Java I've been programming in Java off and on since the first beta versions of the VM and JDK in 1995. The language has always had a certain cachet with the Open Source set -- the free-as-in-beer tools, good documentation, and cross-platform compatibility made it an Open Enough system, roughly equivalent to proprietary C compilers shipped with every Unix variant. Its release was roughly synchronous with the growth of the Web, and Java applet support in Netscape made the first round of rich client applications conceivable, if not exactly elegant. And then Java grew onto the Web server; and into other parts of the network; and then all of a sudden everything had to be Java. The system grew from this nifty little tool to The Enterprise Solution For Your Enterprise. Serious people worked on Java. I worked on Java when I needed to be serious. Java stopped being fun. Early efforts at getting Open Source Java VMs and development kits working were pretty successful, but they just couldn't catch up with the rapid pace of development on Sun's core product. But inclusion of the language in the Gnu Compiler Collection, the great JBoss J2EE system, the growth of Apache's Jakarta project, and the growing Java Community Process made Java less and less a regular product, built in a silo behind a corporate firewall, and more of an Open-Source-y project. So I guess it was inevitable that Sun would either Open Source its codebase, or end up irrelevant. They probably squeezed just about all they could out of it without going Free, so that's pretty impressive. I think Free Software advocates are supposed to be grateful about this; my main reaction is: why did you put everyone through all this crap for so long? You've wasted 12 years that could have gone into making Java really incredible. We'll see what happens. My main interface with the JVM for the last year or so has been through scripting languages like Rhino JavaScript engine (very fun) and Pnuts. Who's got time for Java programming any more? tags:

Biella Coleman: The Politics of (lyme) bacteria

Recently I read an amazing review of patient advocacy and health (counter)movements by Steven Epstein from the STS program at UCSD. It is still a draft but bound to be published in the New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies and when it is, anyone who works in this area will gain so much from reading the review. It was stunningly broad yet highly specific. He is able to synthesize an enormous literature on patient advocacy, a field that has seen a blizzard of activity, especially in the last twenty years. Along with providing points of entry and departure into the field, he also examines who the burgeoning interest in the field of STS. What I found interesting is that there is very little work being done on a topic I happen to know a lot about, lyme disease and whose politics I have been following since at least 1999. I am not sure why the lacuna but it is an odd disease dripping and screaming with controversy and seems to stand apart from many illnesses, in part because of its odd dual existence. On the one hand, it is an illness that the medical establishment totally recognize as real (and thus in some respects is unlike the class of syndromes from MCS to chronic fatigue, which another STS researcher, Joe Dumit provocatively describes as illnesses you have to fight to get ). But that is only half the picture because mainstream medicine tends think that lyme is not only easy to diagnose but also to treat, so much so that if a person thinks they have lyme (even after a round of antibiotics or lacking diagnostic markers), the are either seen as suffering from something else (and usually then told they have one of those highly contested syndromes), or more often just crazy. So it exists dually: at once recognized but only narrowly, so that in another form, that of chronicty, lyme cannot exist. It is this dual quality of lyme that defines and shapes its politics and just recently, new developments have fueled the controversy. Namely it follows from the Infectious Diseases Society of America new guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of lyme, published last month. In a nutshell, they basically re-reduce lyme to a very easily diagnosable and treatable illness, calling for even more strict guidelines for its diagnosis than now exist. They sanction a small range of blood tests and thus totally nullify the role for clinical diagnosis, which even the CDC had acknowledged as vital in times past. Unsurprisingly this has thrown the chronic lyme community in a total tizzy and they have not taken this sitting down. A petition has been launched and protests have been planned. And amid the controversy, politicians have already heard the call to arms. In the state where lyme is a famous entity for it was first discovered there, Connecticut, its Attorney General is calling for an anti-trust investigation into the Infectious Diseases Society of America, in essence for using their clout and prestige to legitimate a gold standard in diagnosis and treatment, when it seems far from obvious that this should be the standard. According to the LDA press release:
The national non-profit Lyme Disease Association (LDA), representing more Lyme disease patients than any organization in the United States, applauds Connecticut State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal for beginning an investigation into the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Lyme disease guidelines development process. In an unprecedented move, the Attorney General’s office filed a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to look into possible anti-trust violations by the IDSA in connection with exclusionary conduct and monopolization in the development of the Lyme guidelines
What I find so interesting is that this latest chapter in the grungy and torrid politics of lyme encapsulates the very nature of the politics of lyme, which really is about the agency of bacteria and in the Latourian sense. If Pasteur had to put a lot of effort into making credible the bacteriological model of disease as Brunto Latour covers in The Pasteurization of France and if there was plenty of future prostelyzing needed to bring credibility to the bacteria to more general publics, as Nancy Tomes illustrates in The Gospel of Germs, well now, I think we are in an era where we think we have such intimacy with the biological ins and outs of bacteria, it is almost impossible for the scientific community to imagine bacteria as such complex organisms that they can be in fact very difficult to diagnose, eradicate and treat. It is just no longer part of the basic conceptual universe of most doctors and medical researchers to think of bacteria in this way. The LDA press release acknowledges this very fact in the following way:
The October 2006 guidelines do not acknowledge that a complex bacterium such as the Lyme disease spirochete could possibly survive in the body and the brain, evading the immune system and short-term courses of antibiotics.
For many lyme researchers and doctors, since lyme is a bacteria and we know how to treat those pesky critters, it is frivolous to even imagine or contemplate otherwise. I would call this a hubris that arises not from the arrogance of doctors and the medical establishment but following the heels of success that medicine has indeed had with conquering the bacteria with antibiotics. Even new forms of poweful and highly resistanant TB are still treatable with a potent cocktail. That is, at a cultural level, I understand the blinders. At a political level, however, because people are suffering and because it is plausible that lyme can exist chronically, it is imperative to unseat this cultural comfort borne from past success to get the ball of research rolling anew. I think bacteria (and parasites for that matter as a recent smattering of articles demonstrate) are a lot more savvy creatures that should be treated as novel, wondorous creatures, once again. I would dare say the medical establishment, by refocusing energies on that which they think they have solved, would find themselves quite surprised. updateHere is an article discussing the issues.

Alexis Sukrieh: Logger::Syslog, my first CPAN-candidate Perl module

I wrote a Perl module a couple of years ago, and got used to it, I just cannot code without that module now. It’s called Logger::Syslog and is a wrapper over Sys::Syslog that lets you deal with syslog in a very simple manner. Use the module and enjoy the easiness of calling info(), warning(), error() or whichever Syslog message level you like, there is a function wrapping it. It also works properly under a mod_perl environment an logs your message with additional information coming from the Perl stack (module, function name, line number, …). I use that module quite everywhere I use Perl : at work but also in my Free Software projects, like Backup Manager. It’s really time to release an “official” version that I can rely on in the future. Next step is submitting the module to the CPAN (it’s pending) and then, debianize it so backup-manager can depend on it. Todo: set up a public SVN repo to handle the sources. Updates

Steve Langasek: On setting and meeting goals, and statistical fun

While NMUing plays an important part in getting us to a release, as shown by the thousand or so fixed-in-NMU RC bugs that we recently cleaned up the BTS state on, it's evident after doing this whole release-managing thing for a while that there is a very high (non-linear) correlation between the age of an open RC bug and the likelihood that a release manager is going to have to touch it at some point in order to get it fixed. By and large, maintainers really do a good job of fixing their own packages, which is probably something we don't say enough - maybe 75% of all RC bugs, I'd guess, will (or would) get fixed by maintainers in the first week without anyone needing to poke them about it, and of the remainder, probably another 80-90% get taken care of by BSPers and serial-NMUers like bug-a-day mascot Steinar Gunderson. That's why I'm not bothered overly much by the idea of full-archive searches for hidden RC bugs, like Lucas's piuparts tests, affecting the release timeline, because I know that 95-98% of those bugs are going to be gone two weeks after they're filed anyway, especially when they're no-brainer fixes to maintainer scripts or dependencies. But then that leaves the other 2-5%, which are the ones nobody else has fixed. And why hasn't anyone fixed them? Because they're the hard ones, of course... So although I follow the debian-bugs-rc list and occasionally swat a few non-bugs closed to save the maintainers time, and also provide some nudges when it looks like a package is causing RC bugs to be filed on other packages, my goal for the last full week of my Dunc-Tank contract was to get the count of etch RC bugs unfixed in unstable that are 20 days old or older down from around 50 to under 30. This seemed a reasonable goal, since it had been at 80 the week before, and it would go a long way towards helping the real blockers on the release. Initially I was aiming to bring down the count of RC bugs unfixed in testing that are 20 days old or older to this number, but quickly realized that this wasn't going to be realistic because it depended too much on the autobuilders all operating optimally and there wasn't time to both help fix 20 of the hardest RC bugs and handhold 60 RC bugfixes into testing in one week. In the end, we did miss this lesser target by a day or two. Still not a bad week's work, given that I'm pretty sure I fixed about 20 of these bugs myself in that time period (through NMUs, removals, and analysis+downgrades) and they seem to average 3 hours of work for a fix. And we've been holding at or below 30 on this list of bugs since then, so we're successfully keeping up with new bugs aging past the 20-day mark, which is also a good sign. Unfortunately, I seem to have left myself to fix the alpha Xorg 7.1 bugs on my own time. :) By now the announcement has made the rounds that the release team doesn't think we can hit the Dec. 4 target date because more time is needed for a final release candidate of the installer. Does that mean that RC bugs were the wrong thing to be focusing on for the past weeks? Well, no; if you want one place in Debian where Brooks' Law holds, I think you'll find that getting a d-i release out is it, and we still have a hard road ahead to make sure we do get our other RC issues sorted out in the same time frame. The installer just happens to put a lower limit on a release date, we still have an opportunity to screw it up from there. ;) At least the statistics suggest that we're going in the right direction. Only 13% of RC bugs fall into the "20 days or older and unfixed" category. Half of all RC bugs over 10 days old have a fix of some kind in unstable, and 64% of all reported RC bugs are less than 10 days old. We'll see whether this graph backs me up on this in a couple more days.

16 November 2006

David Moreno Garza: On Jordi s arrival to DebConf7

I simply loved this; on the ways of arriving and reaching Edinburgh, to get to DebConf7 :D
Swimming
Jordi, please tell us when you’ll arrive at Leith, and we can arrange for someone to come and pick you up with a towel and some whisky.
Heh, that’s our ironman. ;-)


Jordi working out to get to DebConf7.

Gon ri Le Bouder: Debian Lenny?!

Like a lot of people who read Of Mice and Men. ‘’Lenny'’ call me up the famous character of the book: “Lennie Small”. This is his description from Wikipedia :
Lennie Small Travels with George. He is a giant of a man who is unaware of his own strength. His mental deficiency culminates in an obsession to stroke ’soft’ materials: this can be understood to represent his need for human contact, which is shown in his obsession with rabbits. George and Lennie are the only characters with both first and last names. There is irony in his last name, as it is “Small” while he is a very big man physically. Lennie is killed by George with a gun.
Please don’t call the next Debian, Lenny! This sux!

Peter Van Eynde: on blobs

I notice that the binary blob discussion is again on lwns front page. Recently I got a new portable from work and this gave me some new insight. In short: binary-only drivers are so bad people will buy other hardware.
The machine (a Lenovo Z61m) uses a X1400 ATI chip, so I have to use the ATI binary-only driver. Well. I'm trying to use it.
The amount of grief I'm getting from it would convince even billg himself that opensource drivers are mandatory in an opensource system. Strange errors pop up and you're just lost, googling only gives you forums where other poor users are trying to make it all work. Due to the dynamic nature of xorg and kernel development the driver will never 'catch up' and problems will keep popping up. And there is little I can do except complain to the responsible person and urge him to buy the Intel only portable next time.
If this keeps on Intel will just sweep the Linux hacker's market, and with it the heart and minds of a lot of people. My next machine will be an Intel, the first one in years, because I cannot get an AMD with a open graphics card, and I think I won't be alone in this.

Mario Iseli: Microsoft and Novell - Support for opensource projects?

Right now I sit in my office and read the magazine “InfoWeek”. This is a magazine for IT professionals and IT companies, almost everbody in Switzerland who works as a sysadmin or programmer read it. Generally I really like this magazine, because you find stories about almost everything, opensource, closedsource, new technologies, routers, databases etc. Sometimes there are also good tutorials about how to exchange something in a company with an opensource pendant. Today I found this bad article, the title is “Microsoft unterst tzt Linux” (means in english something like “MS supports Linux”). There’s a picture with Steve Ballmer and Ron Hovsepian shaking their hands. Hmmm, for me the title is just completely wrong. Because this would mean “Linux ==Novell” and nothing more. There’s written that they got a lot of money from Microsoft which is dedicated for opensource projects. Now a question to everyone: Did someone of you got money from Microsoft/Novell for your free software project? I think not really, otherwise I would be very confused. Dear reporters of IT magazines: Linux is a free operating kernel and not “a desktop system developed by Novell”. And by buying money _FOR_ Linux you would have to give this money to the community or whatever because opensource products in general are not developed by companies as Microsoft. Sorry in a way for this article, I hope that the !Free-Software-People reading my blog will learn anything, I really hate this “Linux == Novell product”, because Novell is in my eyes a very proprietary company which destroys parts of the community. :-(

Benjamin Mako Hill: Dare to DReaM?

I went to a talk today by Sun scientist Susan Landau on Sun's DReaM/Open Media Commons DRM system that I've mentioned in the past. Landau used a variant of these slides to do a rough overview of the Sun system and the problems that it is trying to solve. Halfway through her talk, Landau showed a slide titled, "Users Matter: Creative Commons." Elaborating, Landau mentioned that she had been talking to a number of people -- both at CC and outside -- about the possibility of using DReaM to enforce the terms of CC licenses. I interrupted Landau to point out that CC licenses had an anti-DRM clause that, as far I knew, would make her system unusable on CC content. The CC anti-DRM clause, plus the resistance of the CC and iCommons community to accept parallel distribution language, are why it's impossible to play CC-licensed works on an unmodified PlayStation or XBox (these systems only play signed disks) -- even if you include an unencumbered copy alongside! Landau reassured me that I must be mistaken and that she had talked about DReaM in depth with CC leadership, lawyers, and technical advisory board members and she was sure her system was at least possible. Puzzled, I shut up. For most of the rest of her talk, Landau talked about fair use and how a DRM system might go about respecting it. In his qualified endorsement of the DRM system, Lessig mentioned that DReaM, "would be implemented to allow individuals to assert 'fair use,' and unlock DRM'd content, with a tag to trace misuse." At the time, I had a hard time imagining how fair use could be built into such a system -- separating fair from unfair use is remarkably resistant to technical solutions. Even bright light cases like verbatim copies every page of the Encyclopedia Britannica might be fair use if I were to make them into a paper m ch bust of Johann Gutenburg or use them to wallpaper a gallery wall. Landau's acknowledged the trickiness around fair use and suggested a compromise:
By default, works might be encumbered in the ways and to the degrees that the copyright holder wish. However, users could petition for an unencumbered "fair use copy" by identifying themselves and then checking some boxes and explaining (briefly) why they think their use for the work qualifies as fair. Once they've done this, the system would present the user with an unencumbered, watermarked, and fully traceable piece of media.
Conceivably, requests would be subject to some sort of review (at the very least to prevent automated requests) and non-fair uses of watermarked goods would be strictly tracked. If a "fair use" copy is found in the wild, the watermark would be traced and the originator would be held liable. Of course, anonymous fair use becomes impossible but, as Simson Garfinkel pointed out at Landau's talk, users may have a right to anonymous speech and to fair use but not to anonymous fair use. "Fair" enough. It is perhaps important to point out that DReaM does not currently implement this "fair use" system and that, one can only assume, the vast majority of DReaM users (e.g., Hollywood movie studios and their ilk) would have no little interest in giving their users a blanket ability to make "fair use copies" and would in most cases choose not to enable such an option. But let's return to the issue of DRM enforcement of CC license terms. While I was initially quite confused by the idea of DRM enforcement of CC license terms, it made much more sense when I looked at the CC anti-DRM clause itself:
You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement.
The emphasis (mine) points to the crux of the issue. The CC anti-DRM clause only blocks technological measures that overstep the boundaries set in the rest of the licensee. For the free licenses, that's a wide boundary that leaves little room for DRM. But as I've pointed out before, CC is a lot more than just free licenses. Landau mentioned that her group was primarily interested in using the DReaM system to enforce attribution and non-derivative work clauses in CC licenses -- a wise choice as non-commercial use is hard enough for humans to discern. As a result, the DReaM system might be used to make it impossible to remove attribution from CC works or might block modification to works marked as "ND." The catch that led me to believe that CC license blocked all DRM was the fact that I didn't think it would be possible for a DRM system to respect fair use. After all, each CC license includes an explicit affirmation that, "nothing in this license is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any rights arising from fair use." The question that the possibility of a CC DRM scheme like DReaM hangs on is: to what degree does Landau's suggestion live up to the fair use legal bargain? Landau pointed out that a number of lawyers including Pam Samuelson and CC's technical advisory board and legal staff have been generally positive about her fair use permission-asking compromise. Honestly and on CC's own terms, it's hard to see why they wouldn't be. The loss of anonymous fair use was only ever a right we enjoyed by a fortunate accident. Watermarks are only there to "keep honest people honest." If you are not doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide? But DReaM enforcement of CC licenses is a bad thing and the bad taste that it inevitably leaves in many commoners mouths is not hard to explain:
  • Many commoners are not comfortable with the idea of DRM because it shifts power over users' computing devices away from the users and makes computers obey the will of a copyright holder. That's true of DReaM just as much as as it is of Apple iTunes or Microsoft DRM.
  • Many commoners are not completely comfortable with all CC licenses, so the idea of technical protection measures enforcing these terms, even those allowing for fair use lines and in line with the will of the author, is seen as dangerous.
To solve the first issue, CC needs a more strongly worded anti-DRM clause -- ideally one tied to a parallel distribution clause. To solve the second, we will ultimately need a new banner under which only truly free cultural works will reside. Susan Landau doesn't have it easy but she does seem to have the genuine best interest of consumers and users at heart. That's more than I can say about the vast majority of people in the DRM business. She's trying to walk a fine line and she's almost certainly being abused and heckled by folks in the industry who call her "communist" and by folks like me who feel that she's sacrificing essential principles in an attempt to compromise. The one thing we all agree on is that the ground she's treading is mine field. Yet while I sympathize with her, I must speak out against both her and DReaM. A DRM compromise at this stage would be insanity. This is a fight we have to win.

15 November 2006

Steve Kemp: I could kill, but I don t care about it

I’ve significantly updated the code behind the Debian Administration website over the past few days. Now: I still need to decide whether to open up the inter-user messaging system, and implement a few more tweaks and fixups. But these are pretty trivial to do, it is more a matter of deciding whether they are appropriate things than actually writing the code. All of this work combined with travelling a fair amount recently has left me behind on several fronts though. I’m going to dedicate tomorrow to catching up on the biggest outstanding issues, but I’m not sure how far I’ll get. Being behind on things actually makes me feel pretty good, I’m no longer on as many critic paths as I was a few months ago, so whilst getting behind is frustrating and annoying it doesn’t affect quite so many people/projects/packages/things. Either way better to be happy and behind than the reverse .. ObXen: The xen-hosting setup managed to reach an uptime of 100 days. I’m obviously not geeky enough; powers of ten remain much more significant to me than powers of two! Actually I take that back: I can recite powers of two to rediculous degrees and disassemble x86 and z80 hex dumps into opcodes with a fair degree of accuracy .. About time I got more practised at patching binaries; although its hard to find GNU/Linux software which requires serial numbers ;)

Per Olofsson: What's the deal with hermeneutics?

Dear Lazyweb,

Today I had a philosophy class and we discussed hermeneutics. But I didn't understand a thing. Not that I ever understand much of what my philosophy teacher says, but I just don't get hermeneutics.

Yes, I've looked it up on Wikipedia, and I've read about it in a book. But I still don't understand. The language used to describe hermeneutics is complicated and weird, and just doesn't make any sense to me.

What I've grasped so far is this: Hermeneutics is a methodology and/or epistemology used in the humanities and, to some extent, the social sciences. Hermeneutics is about interpreting texts. A text can be a literary text or something else (like a film, painting, or perhaps even reality). When you read a text, you need to read it several times and perform "close reading" of the parts. A text consists of the parts and the whole, and somehow they relate to each other, and you need to understand the parts to understand the whole and vice versa (I have no idea what this means). Hermeneutics is also some kind of way of describing reality (epistemology) which differs from the natural science in that it seeks to understand things rather than explain them. In the natural sciences, or the logical positivist tradition, knowledge is sought by explaining cause and effect (at least that's what my teacher says). Proponents of hermeneutics argue that this method does not apply to the humanities. Hermeneutics also employ something called the "hermeneutic circle", which means that you understand a text better the more you read it.

But I don't understand this method. What's so special about reading a text several times? What's the deal with close reading, why is it that good? What kind of knowledge is gained by this method? How does it differ from simply reading a text any number of times and then write an essay about what you think and feel about it? The parts I understand about hermeneutics are only trivialities. Also, there seems to be some kind of rules when you read the text. Like, you need to observe the characters one time, and the plot the second time, etc. Who decided that? Why is it necessary to follow these particular rules, if they exist?

Most importantly, exactly why is hermeneutics a scientific method? To me it looks merely as a practice of reading texts and writing essays about them. These essays are of course subjective; they don't generate any objective knowledge in the natural scientific sense. I'm not saying that it's wrong to write about literature, I just don't understand why a certain method of doing it is considered more scientific than any arbitrary method. In the natural sciences, there are criteria of intersubjectivity, independent testability, verifiability, falsifiability, etc. I see nothing of the like in hermeneutics; I don't know any of its scientific criteria. Apparently you need to refer to specific parts of the text in order to justify your statements (opinions? theories?), but it is a rather vague criterion, and I don't understand the rationale for it.

Another thing is the epistemological side of it. Somehow, hermeneutics is a general theory of knowledge. How that could be I don't know. Why would, for example, a close reading of a text give us the answer to questions like the distance to a particular star or human effect on global warming? Maybe that's not what hermeneutics is intended for. But if it is claimed to be a general theory of knowledge, it should be able to answer those questions in some way.

Maybe all this is just me being stupid or zealous. Or maybe I'm not thinking clearly -- I'm suspecting that I've not been thinking clearly lately. Perhaps I'm refusing to understand out of mere distaste or frustration. My classmates suggested something in the line of that. Perhaps it's because I've read physicist Alan Sokal's brilliant satirical article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", and I am now allergic to the language used by academics in the humanities.

If someone could enlighten me on these issues, that would be much appreciated.

Jonathan McDowell: MPEG2 straight to the brane

I received a Freecom DVB-T stick last week (early wedding present). I've not actually played with DVB-T before, so I wasn't sure how much of a hassle it would be. My first act was to plug it into my laptop, with the aim of finding out the USB ID and thus which driver I'd need to compile up (I have a tendancy to build my own kernels with only drivers I think I'm likely to need). I did so and was greeted with: 
dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
dvb-usb: did not find the firmware file. (dvb-usb-wt220u-02.fw) Please see linux/Documentation/dvb/ for more details on firmware-problems. (-2)
usbcore: registered new driver dvb_usb_dtt200u
Interesting, think I. I'm more organised than I thought and have already compiled up all the various v4l bits I thought I might end up using. So I go looking for the firmware file, find a copy, dump it in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/. Replug the device. And get: 
dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-wt220u-02.fw'
usb 1-4: USB disconnect, address 15
dvb-usb: generic DVB-USB module successfully deinitialized and disconnected.
usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 16
usb 1-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)' in warm state.
dvb-usb: will use the device's hardware PID filter (table count: 15).
DVB: registering new adapter (WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)).
DVB: registering frontend 0 (WideView USB DVB-T)...
Rockin'. Now I need to tune it. I find Adam's DVB page which has the initial tuning file for the Tacolneston transmitter in Norfolk. I type scan uk-Tacolneston. It fails to find anything. I wonder if I'm using the wrong transmitter. I decide the supplied antenna is probably to blame and go to see about sorting out the one in the attic. I try again. I get a channels.conf containing 91 channels. Wooo. Copy this into ~/.mplayer/ and fire up mplayer dvb://. And have Freeview on my laptop. Nice. Unfortunately this requires me to have the loft aerial plugged into my laptop, which isn't very portable. Paddy tell me this will get better when the analogue transmitters get turned off and the digital power ramped up, so I look forward to that. Until then it should still prove useful to have a portable DVB-T stick - I intend to see if I can pick up BBC HD next time I'm staying in London, and check if Freeview coverage has made it to my parents' yet. Writing this all down makes it seem quite convoluted, but actually the process was a lot smoother than I expected; plug in stick, copy firmware, replug stick, scan for channels, watch tv. The issue that took most time to sort was the aerial. It's really quite cool to think about how easily you can get yourself an MPEG2 stream of TV to play with.

Uwe Hermann: Google sponsors the LinuxBIOS project [Update]

Mainboard As announced yesterday, Google has sponsored some work on the LinuxBIOS project, a Free Software (GPL) BIOS/firmware implementation for various architectures (x86, PowerPC, Alpha, and others). LinuxBIOS currently supports more than 100 different mainboards from various vendors. A list of supported chipsets, CPUs, and Super I/O chips is also available, so you can easily estimate how hard it will be to add support for a new mainboard. Most of the mainboards currently supported are high-end server-type mainboards (e.g. from Tyan) and embedded boards. There are not too many cheap, mainstream motherboards supported, yet, but that is about to change soonish. I've been contributing for a while now to the LinuxBIOS project in various areas (e.g. adding support for a bunch of Super I/O chips, which are required if you want to get LinuxBIOS debug output over the serial port). But one of my personal main goals for the project is to support a reasonably high number of cheap, standard desktop mainboards, and I'll concentrate my efforts in this area in the future. Any help from further developers with experience in the hardware, embedded, or low-level firmware area is very appreciated! If you're interested, checkout the website and say hi on the mailling list. But I digress. The Google funding was used to create an automated, distributed test infrastructure, which will help...
...to significantly improve the project's Quality Assurance process by creating a completely automated and distributed testing environment. Every single commit results in BIOS images being built for all mainboards, and tested on real hardware located all over the world. So whenever you want to download a LinuxBIOS image, you can now know that it works on a reference machine before flashing it to your system. A per-revision overview is available, as are test results for specific revisions, and you can even get detailed reports that include extensive logs for each motherboard. Developers can also use the build and test system without checking their code into the LinuxBIOS repository. The automatic build client has an option to submit BIOS images to the test system manually; you can see an overview of manually triggered builds. Anyone with a spare board supported by LinuxBIOS is welcome to put it into the automated test system, thus helping the LinuxBIOS project increase their quality on your hardware.
LinuxBIOS QA 1
LinuxBIOS QA 2
This is a great thing, and something which not many projects out there can claim to have. Automated test-suites in the software development "scene" are used seldomly enough (which is bad), but in the low-level hardware/embedded area you're usually stuck... (See also Golem and Heise if you speak German) Update 2006-11-15: Ok, the site is slashdotted right now. Maybe you can try archive.org or the Google cache...

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