Today I watched the "An Inconvenient Truth" film which was recommened to us at the foo camp preceeding Euro OSCon. Steve had already blogged about it shortly. While i enjoy the summer evenings at the end of september that I experienced this week, I think we are heading for very serious and even hard times. I would guess that we all will soon have to cut back on many areas of our compfortable lifes: less warm showers, more sweaters in winter, not keeping your computer on 24/7, no more car, no more flights. I have been thinking on where to move, given the delicate position that europe is in with its dependency on the gulf stream.

Incidently i also ran into this cool website today, which makes one consequence of global warming a little bit more realistic. If you are lucky your house in the middle of the city will be beach front property soon.

Yet another example of that positive crisis awareness is needed. Act today and we might just get a major global crisis. Don't act and we might get mass extinction.

Although I like the idea of a tiling and completely keyboard focused window manager, I never fell in love with Ion because the default keybindings weren’t really intuïtive (to me). A few months ago I noticed, that ratpoison is also a tiling and completely keyboard focused window manager, only with much more intuitive usage: If you know screen and it’s keybindings, you also know ratpoison and it’s keybindings: Just exchange Ctrl-A with Ctrl-T. This sounds perfect for usage on my low performance laptops, where I have small screens and usually also no virtual desktops in use. There’s only one thing which annoys me in ratpoison: If I use a mostly mouse driven application like e.g. a webbrowser with ratpoison, I have no problems to click on links, even if the webbrowser is not in the so called “current frame”. But if e.g. click into an input field, I usually notice much too late that while the mouse works fine in the browser, keyboard focus is still in some other window. Currently they all use flwm, the Fast and Lite Window Manager. So what I would need is a tiling and keyboard focused window manager but with “focus follows mouse” politics. And since the laptops on which I intend to use such a window manager, all have a touchpad or thumbstick, the mouse there counts as keyboard focused, too somehow, doesn’t it? :-) I wonder, if an ion3 could be configured to use the same keybindings as ratpoison. That would probably fulfil this desire. On the other hand, there are browsers which are fine without mouse. lynx or links2 for example, so the focus problem I have with ratpoison wouldn’t occur. But what if I need or want a keyboard driven and full blown webbrowser? Ok, Firefox as well as Opera are not that bad in keyboard only use, but they still are focused on the mouse using user. But Gecko wouldn’t be Gecko, if there wasn’t some Gecko based browser with this features: On the ratpoison website I found a link to a very interesting Firefox plugin which makes Firefox a complete new browser, a keyboard driven webbrowser named Conkeror. It has no toolbars at all, no (visible) tabs, no menus, no nothing — it shows only the website in fullscreen, a status line and a multipurpose command line — exactly like the mini-buffer of GNU Emacs. But not only the layout, even the keybindings are very emacsish: C-x C-f opens an URL in a new buffer -eh- tab, C-x 5 C-f opens an URL in a new frame (window), C-x C-v opens a new URL in the current tab (buffer) with the current URL as editable default value, C-x b switches to another tab, C-x k kills -eh- closes a tab, C-x C-b lists all open tabs, l goes back (remember the Emacs info reader, eh?), C-g quits accidently requested dialogs or stops loading a web page, Ctrl-s and Ctrl-r give you forward and backward i-search, C-n, C-p, C-f and C-b scroll, etc. Even M-x works, e.g. will M-x revert-buffer reload the web page. (Unfortunately Esc-x doesn’t work. Yet.) And for vi freaks, there is even M-x use-vi-keys. There’s even one lynxish keybinding: \ lets you view the source. And although it’s one of the strangest webbrowsers I saw yet, I somehow like it and also would like to see it in Debian as package, since it is the perfect companion for ion or ratpoison. Looking through apt’s package cache as well as the wnpp bugs, I haven’t found any hint on somebody already packaging it, so I’ll have a look on it and on how to to package a Firefox extension for Debian. BTW: While looking through the wnpp bugs, I found bug #335459, which is the ITP flock, an also Gecko based browser with a lot of cool features for blogger who like social network tools. Another nice thing I found today in Debian was the xfonts-artwiz package whose small fonts are very suitable for small resolution screens, especially if a tiling window manager is used with a e.g. 800×600 resolution. Unfortunately they aren’t available in a charset with German umlauts. Apropos tiling window managers: Anyone tried pconsole with an automatically tiling and resizing window manager? I wonder if it’s usable. At least on MacOS X with its cascading window positioning algorithm, pconsole is a pain. — But even without cascading windows, MacOS X is a pain for keyboard users. Just think of its default behaviour when using the tab key inside a form mask: It will skip all buttons, all checkboxes, all radio buttons and all select boxes. Argh!

I use more than one computer, and quite a bit. I use three regularly, and two or three more on occasion.

But this seems to be a surprise to many programs.

I want to carry certain things with me from machine to machine, access them from anywhere, and have changes propogate across.

Things such as:

• Bookmarks


• newsrc files (to mark which Usenet articles are read)


• mail (solved with my OfflineIMAP program)


• A small set of files


• Contacts


• Calendar/scheduler (appointments)

Now, MacOS X seems to do some of this with their for-pay mac.com service. But I wonder why so few other apps do this out of the box?

The newsrc question is a particularly difficult one to crack, it seems. There are various schemes for synchronizing bookmarks, but none seem to work reliably.

Sigh.

Toyota in the US has released a hybrid Camry which seems to be the larger Prius that many people have wanted. Since it's release the Prius has been greatly desired by people who like technology and the environment. The only down-side to the Prius is that it is a small car and doesn't have as much room for baggage or passengers as you might desire.

The new Camry Hybrid has the Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT) that gives the Prius it's smooth ride, the keyless start (optional), DVD navigation via a large screen, six airbags, and tire pressure monitoring.

The above review states that the test car shuddered when the engine started and made odd mechanical noises. It's not indicated in the article but I suspect that the car may have been an early production test model rather than the type of car you will get if you actually buy one. The Prius I drove did not shudder or make any odd noises (in fact hardly any noise that I could hear). Maybe if I drove a Prius in a country area I would hear some noises, but in the city (which the Prius is designed for) the Prius didn't make any
engine sounds I could here. I expect that the hybrid Camry will perform as well as the Prius in this regard.

The review describes the hybrid Camry as giving 35mpg with a driving pattern that was not the most fuel efficient, that is roughly 6.7 liters per 100Km which is more than the quoted rate for some small cars. The four-door Smart cars are advertised as using 5.8L/100Km and Diesel allows even better efficiency. But if you want the space of a Camry then 7.1L/100Km is fairly good, especially considering that you could reduce that by driving more slowly. Also we have to consider that the primary aim of the Prius design (and presumably the design of the hybrid Camry) is to protect the environment by reducing the poisonous emissions, this may reduce the fuel efficiency slightly (the aim of reducing emissions is not always compatable with the aim of reducing fuel use).

There are apparently 3.785 liters to a US gallon. A US mile has 1760 yards and a yard is apparently 0.9144m, so a US mile would be 1760*0.9144 = 1609 meters or 1.609Km.

3.785*100/1.609/X

To convert MPG (the US measurement of fuel use when based on a US mile and a US gallon) to L/100KM (the Australian way of measuring fuel use) you use the above formula (where X is the MPG rating). I included this information here because I couldn't find it anywhere else.

I was going to post this before but was side-tracked by the flash issue.

Also I've included a beard picture for day 12 (yesterday).

It seems that yet again Microsoft developers are incapable of keeping time correctly. Apparently there's a bloody stupid bug in Exchange Server which means it will get the date of the end of BST (British Summer Time) wrong this year. October is only supposed to have 4 Sundays, not 5. At least, that's the assumption their high-quality software makes. This is far from the first time that I've heard of silly bugs in Windows and Microsoft apps when it comes to handling time and date information. Still, it could be worse. At least they wouldn't try to bury this kind of insanity inside a programming language or inside an international "standard". Oh, wait...

Many moons ago, when I started my project on F/OSS I imagined that it would stay within the purview of anthropology, hacking, science and technology studies to bleed only a little bit into legal studies and only because I was dealing with the fraught politics of intellectual property law. As it turned out, the Law, with a capital L, as on object of analysis and site for the production of cultural value, turned out not to be peripheral but utterly central… And since, I have pretty much stayed within the territory of legal studies, vastly interested in the more invisible cultural and political effects of the law. Recent obsessing on this topic has led to a nascent thesis about law, discrimination, politics , and civil rights that I am looking to substantiate (so if anyone has any citations or helpful hints, do pass along) and it is this: When there are positive changes made in the law, it can come with various political costs. And the one I am interested in, is how, given other conducive conditions, legal changes that look awesome on paper, can work to undermine its potential by breeding a type of complacency of (in)action, largely because it seems as if the worst of the problems have been fixed. So if we look to the American legal context of 1960s and 1970s as a prime example, it is clear there was a heck of a lot of turmoil in the arena of civil rights, much of which, many liberals and progressives would say, led to positive legal transformation. During this period the content of many laws were purged of overt discrimination that, for example, which led a lethal blow to segregation and started to dismantle some of the worst pieces of scaffolding of mental health law (just to cite a few examples). At one level while we may easily recognize these changes as laudable and even perhaps “progressive,” the effects of it may be less so. Once legal content is purged of the ugly, this can breed an ugly form of complacency, in which the problem seems (re)solved, so people no longer feel guilt and attention is diverted away from any number of things, like: 1) new problems not necessarily addressed in the law 2) the rise of new laws or 3) the fact that the law is empty unless actively applied. I have yet to read anything directly related to this theory or apply it myself but it is something that has been on my mind for a couple of years now. But after talking about this topic from a friend, I decided to finally take crack at The Law in Shambles a Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet by Thomas Geogheghan, a labor lawyer from Chicago. While it did not specifically address the issue I am raising (though it got pretty close in a number of places) I got more than I had bargained for; it is truly incisive (though frighteningly depressing) look at the current state of the law, and also, like so many of the PPP’s, much more fun to read than any most academic book or articles. For those who don’t know the PPP publish a series of short pamphlets and it was started by the legendary anthropologist, Marshal Sahlins, who is also known to be a little prickly himself (but it softened by his humor). They are often written by academics on contemporary topics of political interest (read: very biased) in a manner that is a lot looser and free wheeling than any article or book that would come out of an academic journal or publishing house. The PPP allows its authors to unbuckle a few notches off the sometimes uptight, constraining academic belt of writing and the result is often impassioned, funny, and yet remarkably astute essays. If Montaigne were around today, he would surely be proud of his essayistic legacy. The title of the book sums up the the topic at hand. His explanation as to why the (American) law is in disarray has not to do with the law in the abstract but with the total disintegration of a certain class of institutions and a specific class of law (namely unions , the law of trusts etc.). As institutional supports from the New Deal have been thrown out the door, it is the individual, largely through tort law, who has had to wield the fury of the law, in defense of a slew of individual rights and to defend themselves against new forms of attack (the worst being lawsuits brought forth by “charitable institutions” like hospitals). While the law is conceived as something we are all equal under, of course, it is access to the law, which makes all the difference in terms of making it a viable (or not) as social tool. With the demise of the unions, he argues, came the death of certain type of contract law in employment, and the stellar rise of tort law, which conceives of wrongful acts not as breaches of contract (which would apply to all persons under the contract) but as matters of personal injury. Whereas in the past unions would arbitrate contract law, wielding the power of numbers so that individuals were not burdened and burned with the expense (of time and money) of the law, with tort the law becomes formalized, conceived, and imagined in highly individual terms (even when grouped into class actions, it becomes a matter of proving personal injury), the effect of which, he argues is meaner and more complex than contract for four reasons 1) The name of the legal game is to discover motive, which is about as confusing as it can get and thus more arbitrary 2) It is more expensive than old contract law 3) Cases rarely go to trial (didn’t really get the importance of this point) 4) Because its focus is on motive and intense and subjective states, everything is open to scrutiny, so that I can force you to tell me everything what is in your secret heart. Not to mention in your tax returns. The result is torts produced a bitter, dog-eats-dog Hobbesian, legal world, which in turn makes for experiencing the law as an arbitrary force. This individualization of the law through tort also intersects with many other changes such as the demise of regulatory power that add more fire to the disintegration of the law and the subsequent experience of law and life as arbitrary. And it is this chapter (From Administrative Law to No Law, The Rise of the Whistleblower and Trail Lawyer) which got me a little closer to my own point that I brought up above. For example, he writes:

Once, when I filed suite to get the Labor Department to enforce the child labor laws for 16- and 17-year olds, kids whom they do not even pretend to protect, I got nowhere. I met with the Solicitor who told me: Look, suppose I agree with you. How would I ever get the money to enforce it? He was right. If I had won and they had issued regulations, it would have only been worse. In Labor, as in agency after agency, we have a vast complex body of law which would take mandarin to learn that no one enforces.. The law is there. On paper. Indeed, it is a lot of paper. How much paper? Fifty volumes, in paperback in total. I know because I counted. But as to big chunks in these volumes, there is no one there to enforce it. p. 48

Lots of paper I think can make people comfortable in thinking that famous Virginia Slims Slogan, We’ve come a long way, Baby, when it fact, it can often just means what it literally looks like, “Damn, that’s a buttload of paper.” There is a lot more packed into this tiny book, covering the deep gulf between left and right, the stagnation of an old constitution that is impossible to revise, the loss of accountability in all branches of government, the redrawing of districts, and the slight expansion and curbing of of majoritarian voting in the last hundred years. It gets a little shrilly by the end, but you know, it is all pretty upsetting stuff and it is good to shrill from time to time. Though he never refers to neoliberalism, capitalism, or postmodernism, this book is also a great companion to a class of this literature on the rise of fragmentation and instability in social and cultural life brought forth by changes in the economic system (thinking here of David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, etc). In fact, I think it does a much better job than at relaying how it is that vast sectors of society experience fragmentation, instability, and frustration.

The one thing about agreeing to dedicate my time exclusively to Debian for a month is that it means there are loose ends that had to be tied up first -- loose ends that in my case took until October 11th to tie up, leaving me no time to keep up on Debian in the meanwhile... But hey, it only took me until Saturday to get a handle on my email again (more or less), and until Monday to clean up the list of RC bugs so that it pretty accurately represents what we need to finish up for the release. And hey, it's really not too bad, when you consider that of the 299 RC bugs listed on turmzimmer.net as applying to etch, only 104 of them are more than 10 days old, which means we can expect a pretty sharp decline in this count as our maintainers diligently fix the hidden RC bugs that dunc-bank have been helpfully reporting for us. :) And of those 104 older RC bugs, about 10% or so are already fixed in unstable as part of one of two transitions: the Xorg 7.1 transition and the apache 2.2 transition, so that's where I'm focusing my attention right now -- along with tackling the "low-hanging" bugs, the ones on my own packages... There are other transitions we still need to pay attention to, such as ghc6 (fixes wrong code generation problems on alpha), libraw1394 (lib transition that blocks a few other RC bugfixes), and linux-2.6 (newest kernel wanted for best upstream security and hardware support), but other than that, we're pretty darn close to having the right set of packages for release. The freeze is looking closer every day!

After much more work than was necessary, I managed to get Asterisk to blat on the TV the caller ID information of an incoming call. Next I need to see if I can pause the TV, and resume it when the call ends. The MythTV side just needed to be configured to listen on the UDP notify port, the XML templates and whatnot were already there for it (I think installed by MythPhone), so all I had to do was get Asterisk to run this script when a call came in:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Asterisk::AGI;
use IO::Socket;
# Set this to the broadcast address for your network
$netbroadcast = "172.16.0.255";
$AGI = new Asterisk::AGI;
my %input = $AGI->ReadParse();
my $num = $input 'callerid' ;
my $name = $input 'calleridname' ;
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime();
$date = sprintf("%02d/%02d/%4d %d:%02d:%02d",$mday,$mon+1,$year+1900,$hour,$min,$sec);
$sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerPort  => 6948,
                              PeerAddr  => $netbroadcast,
                              Proto     => udp,
                              Broadcast => 1 ) or die "Can't bind : $@\n";
print $sock <<EOT;
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<mythnotify version="1"><container name="notify_cid_info"><textarea name="notify_cid_line"><value>Unused</value></textarea><textarea name="notify_cid_name"><value>NAME: $name</value></textarea><textarea name="notify_cid_num"><value>NUM : $num</value></textarea><textarea name="notify_cid_dt"><value>$date</value></textarea></container></mythnotify>
EOT
close $sock;
exit(0);

That was accomplished by just adding an AGI(mythcid.agi) application call to one my existing extensions that handled incoming calls. Future enhancements will involve displaying who the caller wants to speak to after they've selected the appropriate response from the menu we give most callers. The Asterisk::AGI Perl module was a bit hard to track down. I've made a 2 second (dh-make-perl) Debian package of it, available here. If I get sufficiently motivated, I'll consider cleaning it up and uploading it to Debian.

Writing your first Asterisk AGI script, putting it in /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin because that's where another package has put one, and all of the random documentation on the Internet refers to that location (even though it's in violation of the FHS to go sticking scripts there), and after a marathon debugging session, discovering that Debian's Asterisk package ships with astagidir set to /usr/share/asterisk/agi-bin (which it appears you need to create yourself).

I know, I just ranted about it. However, it would seem that the Xorg driver can do more with the video card in my laptop than would appear at first sight. If I plug a VGA monitor to the mini-DVI output of my PowerBook and start X, then the nv(4) driver seems to detect it. Behold the diff:

--- Xorg.0.log.not-connected	2006-10-19 14:49:07.000000000 +0200
+++ Xorg.0.log.connected	2006-10-19 14:49:51.000000000 +0200
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
 Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
 	(++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational,
 	(WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
-(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Thu Oct 19 14:42:00 2006
+(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Thu Oct 19 14:42:46 2006
 (++) Using config file: "xorg.conf"
 (==) ServerLayout "Default Layout"
 (**)  -->Screen "Default Screen" (0)
@@ -444,7 +444,7 @@
 (II) NV(0): Probing for analog device on output A...
 (--) NV(0):   ...can't find one
 (II) NV(0): Probing for analog device on output B...
-(--) NV(0):   ...can't find one
+(--) NV(0):   ...found one
 (II) NV(0): Probing for EDID on I2C bus A...
 (II) NV(0): I2C device "DDC:ddc2" registered at address 0xA0.
 (II) NV(0): I2C device "DDC:ddc2" removed.
@@ -452,7 +452,46 @@
 (II) NV(0): Probing for EDID on I2C bus B...
 (II) NV(0): I2C device "DDC:ddc2" registered at address 0xA0.
 (II) NV(0): I2C device "DDC:ddc2" removed.
-(II) NV(0):   ... none found
+(--) NV(0): DDC detected a CRT:
+(II) NV(0): Manufacturer: MAX  Model: 178e  Serial#: 2006
+(II) NV(0): Year: 2000  Week: 13
+(II) NV(0): EDID Version: 1.0
+(II) NV(0): Analog Display Input,  Input Voltage Level: 0.714/0.286 V
+(II) NV(0): Sync:  Separate
+(II) NV(0): Max H-Image Size [cm]: horiz.: 36  vert.: 27
+(II) NV(0): Gamma: 2.76
+(II) NV(0): DPMS capabilities: StandBy Suspend Off; RGB/Color Display
+(II) NV(0): redX: 0.632 redY: 0.329   greenX: 0.272 greenY: 0.604
+(II) NV(0): blueX: 0.142 blueY: 0.062   whiteX: 0.280 whiteY: 0.311
+(II) NV(0): Supported VESA Video Modes:
+(II) NV(0): 640x480@60Hz
+(II) NV(0): 640x480@75Hz
+(II) NV(0): 800x600@75Hz
[...more data about the monitor goes here...]

The nv(4) manpage also contains this bit:

       Option "CrtcNumber" "integer"
              Many graphics cards with NVIDIA chips have  two  video  outputs.
              The  driver attempts to autodetect which one the monitor is con 
              nected to.  In the case that autodetection picks the wrong  one,
              this  option  may be used to force usage of a particular output.
              The options are "0" or "1".  Default: autodetected.

... but when I set that to 1 in the Section "Device" of my xorg.conf, it still uses the internal monitor of my laptop. Am I missing something?

Dear friends and teammate,

I'm writing to you from the front of the guerilla, near the bug tracking system. I don't know if you will receive this message, because the cabal is trying to make us silent. It's rough these days. Our autobuilders are overloaded. We already succeeded in delaying the freeze, but it's getting harder and harder. The opponent is now avoiding our attacks by ignoring them. I hope we will still be able to win, but we may need backup.

Yours faithfully,

Julien

Do you run a colocated server somwhere? Do you regularily work on it as root? Do you often have several consoles running? Do you sometimes not pay attention to the host information on the prompt? Do you shut down other computers, as your own? Then I strongly recommend you:

dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 644 /sbin/halt

(To whom it concerns: Sorry for the downtime.)

For some years I've been meaning to learn more German than I remember from my GCSE and the little I've managed to absorb from tea_cantata and others speaking it around me. I am repeatedly embarrassed by my inability to join in conversation when we visit Nattie's relatives in Germany. In fact I've made some attempts to learn from books and tapes, but with little effect. Nattie finally persuaded me to sign up for an evening AS (half an A-Level) German course starting this term. It's tough going with only one lesson (2.5 hours) per week though I believe I'm making some progress. I don't have much of a problem with grammar, and my pronunciation seems to be as good as anyone in the class, but I continue to find myself frustrated in being unable to think of the words to express what I mean to say. I think my vocabulary may be relatively poor, but this is compounded by my difficulty in working around the lack of a word for the concept I mean to express. This also applies to English, but I have a large enough vocabulary that this is much more rarely a problem. In addition, some of the topics of conversation or question are so broad that I would have trouble formulating an intelligent comment in English, let alone one in German. Maybe I should just say something dumb that I don't really believe purely as linguistic practice, but I don't feel comfortable doing that.

Catching up on blogs, emails and Debian mailing lists I see that nothing really important has happened while I was off-line: the dunc-tank caboodle escalated and died down when the majority voted that it was not worth the commotion, some people got upset at some other people and decided stop working on Debian because of that, Mozilla went even more bonkers about its trademarks. The dunk-tank scandal ended just like I thought it would. As one could imply from my eternal unstable concept, I do not see making releases as a the main thing that Debian contributes to the society - it is more about the integration and cross-empowerment of all the packages that Debian has. In that context, making a release is a not the most important job in Debian, but it need to be done from time to time. Release management combines technical and social challenges - there is not much of novelty in it (I imagine). So, from this perspective, there is nothing bad in money being paid to do this mundane and hard work, if we really, really need to release in a specific time frame (IMHO the only reason to release Debian in 2006, as opposed to 2008, is the Lars tattoo bet). If we return to “release when its ready” paradigm and aim for about one release every 2-3 years (and I see nothing really wrong with that) then paying release manager will not be needed. Money is about getting things done on a schedule. It does not make things good (or bad). It does not make thing important (or not). It make things go by the schedule (unless you pay by the hour). It is the obvious solution to releasing Debian in December. Now two questions need to be answered - will it work? and do we really want to release in December? The second thing - in any group of 1000 people anyone can easily find a lot of people that he would not love/not respect/disagree with/disregard/hate and be unable to work with. It is no reason to stop working on Debian, unless one does it only to be universally loved. It is inevitable that we will need to learn to do what we like to do without paying attention to the irritations. And about the trademarks - in Debconf 5 in Helsinki I was giving a talk at the Debian Day, just after I helped to win the first big fight against software patents in EU, and Branden (who was GPL at the time) asked me what do I think Debian should do about its trademarks. Both then and now I strongly think that trademarks and any other litigation inducing concepts (except enforcement of GPL) have no place whatsoever in free software. I think Debian should lead the way and give up the “Debian” trademark. And Mozilla should follow the lead. So what if there is a pron site “Debian chicks”? You will not solve that with litigation anyway (at least not in a year or two) and why should we really care? So what if some one make a distro and calls it SuperDebian? If someone will really think that it is related to Debian but better (especially despite warnings to the contrary), then that someone will really deserve to get the trojan planted in that distro. And again, against a well prepared criminal, litigation will not help much. So, did I miss anything?

There is currently a big debate in progress in Debian. I am not going to mention any specifics because too much of it has already been blogged (maybe in the same syndication in which you read my blog).

I think that the way things are going is more an illustration of the failings of mailing list culture than of failings of Debian. Maybe another mechanism would be more productive in leading towards a solution.

One option that occurred to me is debate via wiki. If each side had a wiki page that they could modify then in a small amount of time we should get a set of two main consensus opinions which would each be explained clearly and summarised well. Then with two options clearly expressed the people who have less strong opinions could decide which option they favor. For this to be a quick solution honorable behaviour would be required from all people involved, if people start trying to sabotage the other group's wiki entries then it would significantly increase the time taken to achieve things.

Another possibility that occurred to me is debate via blog. The quality of blog postings is expected to be a lot higher than that of mailing list discussions as all posts are tied to the author's public image. Writing content-free messages on a mailing list is easy, but every blog entry needs to stand on it's own to a certain extent and anyone who writes flames in most of their blog entries will probably find that the readers like it less than the readers of a typical mailing list.

Maybe when an issue is recognised as highly contentious a few people could blog about it and then form groups to develop wikis to promote their views. A debate might start out with five or more different competing views, some of them would merge until there were only two main opinions being pushed. Then once the two remaining groups had sorted out their positions a vote would be easier to arrange.

What do you think?

(For the non-french readers, yes, there is an obvious grammatical error in the title of this post. This is a reference to a news story that happened years ago. Bubulle is Christian Perrier’s nickname, btw.) So, here it is, I am rethinking my involvement in the Debian Project. And it’s all Bubulle’s fault. I am not leaving the Project, because Debian is far more important to me than some rude bashing from Bubulle. It is a fact that Bubulle and me have agreed to disagree on a number of topics, it’s also a fact that we are both committed to Debian. In the past few weeks, a number of things happened, and we both said things we probably regret (at least I do). I do not like this paternalistic tone he sometimes demonstrate in mailing-list postings. I totally hate that, to be frank. But I can pretty much deal with it as long as it’s not aimed at me. He tagged one of his debconf-notes-are-evil-and-useless-crap-please-remove-it filed against one of my packages as “not-fixed” even when I explained that it is not a bug and the note really is what I want. It implies that I am not fixing bugs, which is something I cannot accept. Debian bug reports tend to have the very first priority in my todo list. So far, I can deal with that. But what I cannot deal with, is this mail from Christian to Paul Rouget (the moron who first posted the photos of the Firefox/Iceweasel posters from the JDLL last saturday, vomitting on us, and the comments were even worse). Sorry, the mail is in french, I don’t know how well Google Translate performs on this one but you should give it a try. This is purely insulting. Christian did not even contact me, he did not even try to get the facts straight, and it looks like my last post, in which I explain what happened during the JDLL, was totally useless. So, congratulations Christian. I’m perhaps not the most active DD, but I’m quite active nonetheless. Well, that is, I was quite active and reactive. This is likely to change starting today. I’m not going to drop any packages. I’m not going to disappear. I’m not going to let Debian France down. I’m not going to let my packages rot in the archive. But I’m going to be noticeably less active and reactive. Next time you talk to me, it’d better be to apologize for this mail you sent to Paul Rouget. I /quit from both Freenode and OFTC on monday evening. I probably won’t come back. I feel way better already without being on these two networks, without reading Rapha l Hertzog blatantly lie about dunc-tank, without reading a whole lot of other crap. I’m taking a much-needed break. Fuck you. Pierre Habouzit, Josselin Mouette, Denis Barbier, Sam Hocevar, and others (you all know who you are): thank you, you guys rock. And GO GO GO dunc-bank !

As promised yesterday in my report about the Munich BSP, I'd like to talk some more about LiMux, the project being run within the City of Munich to replace all of their desktop Windows systems with Linux. The team kindly offered us the use of their offices in central Munich as a base for the BSP last weekend, and on Sunday afternoon they gave us a demonstration and answered lots of our questions. The following is from my (known-faulty) memory...

Jan-Marek and Florian talked us through their setup. They're using FAI to automate installation of systems, along with LDAP to store lots of configuration information and GOsa as a user-friendly front-end to that configuration. They've integrated these to enable some very clever management features so that all aspects of the city-wide system can be maintained from one central point. As new machines are introduced onto the network, they can be configured into one class or another: simple desktop clients up to so-called "depot" servers, used as seeds for further clients. Individual user profiles can be tweaked, giving users access to new applications as they are needed. Shared resources like network storage and printers are set up automatically from the LDAP database. Access to USB storage devices can be controlled on a per-device, per-user basis for security. That's quite an impressive feature list. Most of the work has been in configuration and systems work rather than custom packages on the clients themselves - the vast majority of the packages installed come straight from the standard Debian archive, with some backports (like a newer version of KDE). Building on top of standard packages means that they have access to a huge amount of Free Software without having to do all of the work themselves. A small team (10-ish at the moment, growing to 100 or so in the future) can effectively deploy and manage desktops and associated servers for a huge number of users - they're expecting to be supporting on the order of 30,000 systems 2 years from now. The team have just recently made their first stable release and are starting to roll it out across the city, one department at a time. There are the familiar issues involved in the deployment, of course. For example, users don't want to help test pre-release versions to help nail bugs, but then complain loudly when they find bugs in the first release. And in such a large project to migrate from predominantly Windows (NT4!) desktops to KDE on Linux, a major part of the effort needed is in user training. There is quite a bit of support and custom work needed to convert people's MS Office macros over to working on top of OpenOffice. And there are still quite a number of users who will remain using Windows for specific applications that still don't have Linux equivalents yet. Apparently the "Wine Cellar" group will help on that front. *grin* In terms of collaborating with Debian, the LiMux team are expecting to help in a few ways. As bug reports are filed against their applications (apparently very few so far), they'll be pushed upstream along with (hopefully) fixes for them. They will also be devoting some full-time developer effort to security work; it would be good for both sides if this effort can be shared.

It was quite striking to see Tux, the Linux penguin, as a visible logo in local government offices! The team have clearly made some excellent progress on this exciting project, and I'm sure that I can speak for all of Debian in wishing them the best of luck in the future. I'll be watching with interest...

There has been a lot of discussion recently about how to take laptops on planes following the supposed terror threat in the UK which has been debunked by The Register and other organizations. There is an interesting eWeek article about this that contains the interesting quote "The built-in locks don't yet meet TSA specifications because they cannot be opened using the TSA master key" when reviewing a laptop case. Creating a master key is not that difficult and is explained in this PDF file. Theft by baggage handlers is quite a common occurance (see this google search for details).

So baggage handlers can easily reverse-engineer the TSA master key, steal laptops from baggage, smuggle drugs, and put bombs in baggage if they are so inclined.

There have been a number of cases of laptops containing sensitive financial, medical, and military data being stolen. Now someone who wants to steal data merely needs to work as a baggage handler and copy the hard drives of laptops before loading them. Data is more valuable if no-one knows that it has been stolen.

It would be ironic if an airline employee had their laptop hard drive copied and sensitive information about airport security was lost because of this.

I'm currently working for a company that in the past has not embraced new technology. One of my colleagues recently installed a wiki which did a lot of good in terms of organizing the internal documentation.

The next step is to install some blogging software. What I want is to have every sys-admin run a blog of what they are doing and have an aggregation of all the team's blogs for when anyone wants to see a complete list of what's been done recently. The security does not have to be particularly high as it's an internal service (probably everyone will use the same account). The ability to store draft posts would be really handy, but apart from that none of the advanced features are really needed.

Also it would be handy to be able to tag posts. For example if userA did some work on the mail server they would tag it with SMTP and then at some future time it would be possible to view all posts with the SMTP tag.

I've done a search on google for this topic and there are many pages comparing blog software. But all the comparisons seem based on Internet use, they talk about what versions of RSS are supported etc. But I don't need much of that. An ancient version of RSS will do as long as there is a single syndication program that can support it. Performance doesn't have to be great either, I'm looking at less than a dozen people posting and reading and a fairly big Opteron server with a decent RAID array.

For the minimal requirements I could probably write blog and syndication programs as CGI-BIN scripts in a couple of days. They wouldn't support RSS or XML but that's no big deal. But I expect that if I use some existing software that someone recommends in a blog comment it will be faster to install and have some possibility of future upgrades.

There are many people claiming that nuclear power will solve all the ills of the world. However this does not seem to be possible. Firstly you have to consider the hidden costs of nuclear power such as deaths from the mining industry (ingesting uranium ore is a really bad thing) and the difficulty in disposing of radioactive waste. But rather than concentrating on the bad aspects of nuclear power (which are well documented) I will concentrate on some of the viable alternatives.

Wind power is a really good option, particularly for countries such as Australia that have a low population density and a large land area. The Chinese government is investing heavily in wind power, I think it's safe to assume that it's not because they are great environmentalists but because they simply need more energy than they can get from other sources and that they have strategic reasons for not wanting to rely on Australian coal and uranium or Arabian oil. Most energy sources have some drawbacks, but wind power has no side effects and isn't going to kill birds either (birds have evolved the ability to detect and avoid predatory birds, they can easily avoid large fixed objects such as fans from wind farms).

Two other good options are wave and tidal power. These are better than river based hydro-electricity because there is no need to create dams that remove forests. Wave and tidal power are both very predictable which is an advantage when compared to wind power which is less predictable. One solution to the unpredictability of wind power is to couple it with a river based hydro-electric system which can provide electricity when there is less wind. A hydro-electric system to compensate for days that are less windy would need a much smaller dam than one that is designed to provide the main power source.

The next issue is how to power vehicles (on air, land, and sea). Advocates of nuclear power often talk about hydrogen powered cars. However while hydrogen has a good ratio of energy to weight it is not very dense, so the energy density for volume is much less than petrol. Combining Prius technology with
hydrogen in an internal combustion engine still won't give the distance per tank of fuel as petrol does. Hydrogen with fuel cells in an all electric vehicle might allow you to drive the same distance as a non-hybrid car on petrol, but probably won't compare to the range of a hybrid Diesel vehicle.

Bio-Diesel is a good option for fuelling cars. Diesel engines give greater efficiency than Otto cycle (the most common car engine) or Atkinson cycle (as used in the Prius) engines. Not only is bio-Diesel renewable but it also produces exhaust that is less toxic than that which is produced from fossil fuels. See the VeggieVan site for more details on bio-Diesel. The toxic fossil fuels are linked to health problems in airline hostesses, AFAIK there has been no research on the impact of car exhaust on pedestrians.

One thing to note about bie-Diesel is that you can do it right now. According to a British TV documentary all you have to do is filter oil that was used for frying food (they used oil from a Mexican restaurant) and mix it with a small amount of ethanol and it's ready to use in your car. As restaurants currently have to pay to dispose of old frying oil this should be good for everyone!

Bio-Diesel could work for powering planes, there is already research in progress on this issue, but there are problems related to the viscosity of bio-Diesel at low temperatures. Maybe a blend of bio-Diesel and bio-Ethanol would work. Ethanol freezes at -114.3C and should lower the freeze temperature of bio-Diesel.

Bio-Diesel would of course work really well for ships. Supplying the amount of fuel that current ships need would be difficult. Some analysis shows that the deck area of a ship can collect enough sunlight to supply ~10% of the power needs of the ship. The Orcelle is a design for a totally clean ship that runs on solar, wind, and wave power. However with the proposed design the solar panels will not be angled effectively for collecting sunlight as they will be on sails. I think that there is a lot of potential in having a design based around sails, wave and solar power for generating electricity, and also a Diesel engine running on bio-Diesel fuel for supplying extra power when required (EG when sailing at night in calm weather). Building a ship that uses only wind, solar, and wave power would probably be significantly more expensive than the current Diesel design. Building a ship that uses 10% Diesel and 90% wind, solar, and wave power might be a lot cheaper.

There are lots of ways of producing the energy we need to maintain our current standard of living. If our government was to spend as much money researching them as it does protecting petroleum reserves then the problem would be solved.