Firstly, if you haven't the faintest interest in the software I use to write this weblog, please feel free to go and do something more interesting right now. Now I'm in the company of dedicated readers of colophons, I will proceed. Redesign and reimplementation  This weblog, which has now been running for over two and a half years, originally ran on some custom software I'd hacked up in Zope: at that time my web development platform of choice. Today, I've relaunched with another custom content management engine, this time written using Rails. It's been a lot of fun to write, and a good excuse to sharpen my Rails skills further. The design has also been fun. It's a little basic right now, but I hope easy to read. Of course, the font is Lucida Grande, which ensures that I am fully Web 2.0 compliant.
The main new feature is that the tags I give articles are now made public. I used to tag posts for my RSS feed, but not publish them on the site. Now they are public--what few tags I currently have--and it's possible to find RSS and Atom feeds just for certain subsections of my writing. I worry sometimes about spamming the various Planet aggregator sites my blog features in, so this gives me a way to direct content specifically at them. That said, at least for Planet XML I like hearing about everything the community members have to say, not just their on-topic posts. New URLs My blog now has a new location, http://times.usefulinc.com/, and new places for  RSS and Atom feeds:

• RSS 1.0
  
• Atom 1.0

Tools used

• Emacs
• Ruby on Rails
• Firefox
• GIMP
• Bazaar
• TinyMCE

The German science news site Wissenschaft.de is reporting that your music taste is very closely related to your personality and that it’s easier to judge people by the music they hear than by seeing pictures or videos of them. Source is a scientific study by Dr. Samuel Gosling and Peter Rentfrow from The University of Texas at Austin. Man, that would give an interesting quiz meme on the Planets! ;-) I wonder, how my usually negative or decade-based definition of my music taste is that way analysable: I like nearly every music from the ’60s to the ’90s except hip-hop, rap and techno. :-)

Now playing: Jethro Tull — Something’s On The Move

After setting up the Backup Manager’s website, I took the time to install mailman in order to handle mailing lists nicely (congrats to the mailman maintainer, it installs itself like a charme). Everything is now ready for welcoming subscribers to the backup-manager mailing lists. I’m about to release a new version of Backup Manager, featuring a new method for making customized backup: you are now able to enter a command and all the output sent to stdout by this command will be used as the archive content. It can then be compressed with the tool of your choice if needed. Here is an example of the concept:

command=ssh myhost -c 'mysqldump -uuser -ppass database'
filetype=sql
compressor=bzip2

This will be provided to backup-manager through arrays, so we can implement as many archive methods as we like.
I called this method the “pipe” method, I gues you know why. This is already available in the svn repository.

Well, shame on me, this is again a meme I participated in, probably because Axel mentioned that this quizz gives more interesting results. It appears that I should be a Chemistry major, which I actually am (my career in computing began after a PhD in Materials Science and a the french equivalent of a Master in Chemistry).. I should also by graduated in Linguistics, what a surprise...:-) Also scored 75% for Theater which kind of a surprise as I'm sometimes a bit shy in public. Art and Dance scores are very low which is not a surprise at all as well. Quite an accurate quizz indeed.

You scored as Chemistry. You should be a Chemistry major! As if that isnt clear enough, you are deeply passionate about Chemistry, and every single chemical reaction and concept fascinates you. Pursue that! Chemistry 83% Linguistics 75% Theater 75% Engineering 58% English 58% Sociology 58% Biology 50% Journalism 50% Psychology 42% Philosophy 42% Mathematics 42% Anthropology 42% Art 33% Dance 17% What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3) created with QuizFarm.com

I usually try not to blog every meme I take (heay, that’s a line from “I’ll be blogging it”), but Alex’ positive view on this one made me interested. And indeed, this quiz seems to be relatively well done. So here it is:

You scored as Mathematics. You should be a Math major! Like Pythagoras, you are analytical, rational, and when are always ready to tackle the problem head-on! Mathematics 92% Theater 92% Philosophy 92% Engineering 67% Psychology 58% Biology 58% Journalism 50% Linguistics 50% Sociology 50% Dance 42% English 33% Anthropology 33% Chemistry 33% Art 25% What is your Perfect Major? created with QuizFarm.com

Nice result, so far, as I’m currently studying mathematics, and sometimes have a tendency to what we Germans call “Theater machen”. Personally, I’d expect Journalism a bit higher...PS, to the readers of planet.debian.org: I’m sorry for the random pop ups of old and/or German postings. I have no idea what causes them, and I’m glad to hear hints. The posts seem to actually come from the cache of the planet software itself, and something (me?) caused planet to dig them out again.

Although the recent Inner European quiz meme is currently much more popular on Planet Debian, the following quiz somehow shows how the result of such a quiz should look like and what the quiz system, which the Inner European quiz used, misses: Having more than only bit-like answers. With answers like this, neither I would have had to change answers to see how close I was to different answer nor would have Christian Perrier had to do the quiz with worst fitting answers.

You scored as Engineering. You should be an Engineering major! Engineering 100% Philosophy 92% Journalism 92% Art 83% Mathematics 75% English 75% Biology 75% Chemistry 75% Theater 75% Psychology 67% Sociology 67% Linguistics 50% Dance 42% Anthropology 25% What is your Perfect Major? created with QuizFarm.com

Since I always saw computer science more as an engineering discipline than a derivative of mathematics (at least the way I studied and like it ;-), I seem to have taken the right major. But also most of the other highscorers aren’t that unfamiliar:

Philosophy

Well, if you see how much philosophy is behind open source or politics, being engaged in open source software and interested in politics doesn’t seem to be that wrong. ;-)

Journalism

I like journalism somehow and I sometimes think about if this could have also been (or even be) a nice profession for me, especially since I managed to combine journalism and computer science in being an editor at Symlink.ch, a Swiss based and German written news and discussion site all around Open Source, IT politics and privacy. Sure, it’s no professional journalism and also not classical journalism, since it’s built on the same ideas (and software) as Slashdot.

Art

If I would have more time and leisure, I probably would also try to draw, paint or sculpture more again as I did during my school time. And since my brother and my mother are both active artists I expect that the results wouldn’t be that bad either. ;-) On the other hand, I also like to design CSS styles which IMHO can also satisfy my artistic bone…

Mathematics

Although I see more the engineering than the mathematics in computer science, mathematics still was one of my two majors in school (the other was physics) and in comparison to many other people I can say that I like maths.

English

That’s the only thing IMHO not fitting in here in such a high position since I’m neither good at foreign languages (see my English in the blog… ;-) nor do I like studying languages. And even if I should see that as “Literature” or “German” (my mother tongue) instead, it just doesn’t seem to fit. (Ok, journalism also has to do with language(s)…)

Biology

Biology was the voluntary science course at school I took until I finished school. At university it became my minor subject. I wonder why it’s that deep down in the statistics?

Chemistry

That was my second voluntary science course at school, but I dropped it before I finished school.

Theater

Well, no, I don’t think that actor would be good idea for me…

Psychology

I’m not sure, if sometimes being glad not to understand how my brain works is a good base for diving into psychology. (On the other hand: Would I write so much text about this quiz, if I’m not at least a little bit interested in psychology? ;-)

Sociology

That’s again more interesting.

Linguistics

If this can include computer linguistics, than it’s definitely something interesting for me, since it usually involves artifical intelligence and I wrote my diploma thesis about an AI subject and our research group did work a lot in the area of computer linguistics.

Dance

No. I’m glad it’s that far down there. Just wonder how it got even 42%.

Anthropology

Well, that’s again an interesting subject, but probably not a subject I would work in. So being that far down is completely ok.

So in general, I think the quiz works mostly fine as well as I probably did choose the right subjects for me. *grin* Only thing I missed in this quiz was Physics as a possible result since I don’t think, it’s impossible (especially compared to the rest of the result) that I haven’t scored for anything typical for physicians.

Now Playing: Falco — Mutter, der Mann mit dem Koks ist da!

Well, sort of. I've now finally signed all the keys from DebConf5. My poor little OpenPGP smartcard is toasty warm. Well, not really, but it's got quite a work out. If haven't signed your key then:

• I don't think I've met you.
• I'm not sure I've seen proper ID that you are who you say you are.
• I lost my piece of paper that would confirm I've met you and have seen id/verified your fingerprint.
• master ate my mail to you, complaining about 8bit headers (this is something I should fix in signkey).
• Your mail server ate my mail, claiming it was spam.
• You use an idiot blacklist that there's no hope of me ever getting off because you're insane.
• You've greylisted me, and it'll get to you eventually.

Kudos to grep.be, progsoc.org, aurel32.net and linux.it, who all managed to have IPv6 MXes. Quite a low count for several hundreds mails to geeks I thought.

When I loaded Planet Debian today, the first story was «Pardon my French…ness?» by Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho. There seems to be a new meme going on, trying to find out «Who’s Your Inner European?» Antti-Juhani’s Inner European is French: «Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.» Well, since I’m quite francophile in many ways (cars, food, laissez-faire, etc.), I expected to get a similar result, but it was quite different:

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous! You drink everyone under the table. Who’s Your Inner European?

Well, I like what I read or saw of the Irish countryside in books or on tv, but drinking? Alcohol? Sorry, that’s just plain wrong. Doesn’t choosing the cute classic Citroën (They wrote it without diaeresis! Philistines!) suffice? Well, maybe I shouldn’t have chosen «Those damn British - they really get under your skin», but the newest idea of the British government to sponsor voyeurs with access to public surveillance cameras to enforce their Respect Action Plan (German written Telepolis article about — BTW: Has Telepolis no more english translations?) really really goes under my skin. (Although stories about implanted RFID chips even go deeper under my skin…) One annotator of the Symlink article (German, too) about that British government programme associated their ideas with the concept of the Blockwart (“block warden” or “wonk” in English according to the dict.leo.org forum, Wikipedia also mentions “block leader” and “block attendant”) during the Nazi régime in Germany: They were the lowest officials in the NSDAP and the local contact persons to SS and Gestapo. I wouldn’t wonder if the British government gets a Big Brother Award for giving this “respect” to privacy and human rights. But back to the quiz: Well, let’s see with which of the questions I wasn’t sure what to answer. If I change Tiramisu (yeah, I know, that there is alcohol in it, and I only like it with nearly no alcohol in) to Apple pie, nothing changed. Same after switching Pasta to Seafood and vegetables. Hmmm, well let’s try one of the obvious but not really wrong answers: Mousse au chocolat instead of Tiramisu. Et voilá! La France! :-) Oh, and yes, the ideas of the French government to make open source software, the web and other cultural achievements illegal aren’t my French favourites either… Update, 21:03: Christian Perrier suggested that the quiz could also be used to find out, which Inner European you’re definitely not. Well, somehow I hoped, it would tell me, I’m not German (I also marked Mercedes in that round ;-), but it told me, I’m not Russian, which is also fine since the quiz seems to focus the prejudices about Russians on alcohol consumption.

Now playing: Europe — The Final Countdown

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

Via Ihan kiva el m

Je reposte sur mon blog une r ponse que j'ai faite sur le blog de Ma tre Eolas vu sa longueur : Le probl me des transmissions de donn es est r elle. Vous parlez des 45tours ou VHS que vous ne savez sans doute plus lire, ou des livres trop vieux pour qu'ils vous int ressent. Vous avez raison, il y a des 100aines de gens comme vous (moi le premier). Mais il y a aussi des "geeks" du patrimoine qui ont tout le mat riel pour faire la conversion des VHS vieillisantes vers des divx (avec tous les filtres pour nettoyer les bandes), ou des gens qui ont fait l'acquisition num rique de leurs vieux vinyls, etc... Et on se retrouve avec une migration d'anciens contenus vers de nouveaux stockages. Le patrimoine est sauv . Surtout avec les outils comme google qui permettent de trouver tout m me s'il n'y en a qu'un seul exemplaire. Dans le cas de DRM comme ceux envisag s par DAVDSI, les seuls propri taires des versions originales non prot g es seraient les majors dans le cas de la musique par exemple. M me pas forc ment les artistes eux m me (certes, eux peuvent rejouer les morceaux -- et encore, pour une impro jazz a ne sera plus la m me par d finition -- mais leur vie est par d finition limit e). Du coup, pour que ces oeuvres perdurent, il faut faire confiance au majors pour avoir les protections n cessaires pour ne pas perdre les oeuvres. M me apr s un d p t de bilan (si si, m me Sony peut mourir un jour. Agfa l'a bien fait !). Il faut aussi leur faire confiance pour mettre dans le domaine public les oeuvres qui sont plus vieilles que la dur e l gale de la protections des droits d'auteurs (quoique gr ce Disney cette dur e tende vers l'infini ;p). Personnellement, je trouve que c'est mettre tous ses oeufs dans le m me panier, et dans un bien mauvais panier. Les majors sont dirig es par le besoin de gain imm diat, pas humanistes (et je ne dis pas ca m chament, c'est dans leur nature, c'est inscrit dans la loi du march , c'est juste un fait). Bien sur, je crois que les gens ne prennent pas trop au s rieux la perte d'un morceau de musique. Mais quid d'un film d'auteur ? ou pire ... d'un livre ! Oui un livre peut tre un contenu num rique : PDF, ebooks, ... existent depuis des ann es. Les livres de science fiction o il y a un objet electronique avec des pages (parce que il n'y a pas dire l'ergonomie d'un livre, ca ne peut que se copier, difficilement s'am liorer) dont le contenu est lu sur une puce lectronique et affich sur des pages cran souple (ca commence exister, et je crois vraiment que notre g n ration conna tra ces outils). Ca veut dire que si ces livres ont des DRM, apr s l'avoir lu, pouf, fini. Et l encore ce seront les maisons d' dition qui auront les originaux. M me les biblioth ques ne l'auront pas. elles auront juste une licence avec les diff rents diteurs avec des "ebooks readers" sp ciaux qui auront acc s tout ou partie du catalogue, moyennant license, bien sur renouveler. Et l encore, ca serait se reposer sur la bonne sant de ces diteurs et leur honn tet pour ne pas perdre tout le patrimoine culturel qu'ils ont entre les mains. etc... OUI je comprends vos arguments. Mais mon avis, un des r les de l' tat est d'assurer la transmission du patrimoine culturel (et de tout autre patrimoine en fait) de la nation (voir m me des autres en fait) qu'il gouverne. Une telle loi, si ca n'est sans doute pas la seule n cessaire pour arriver l'enfer que je d cris (quoi que ...) est un pas non n gligeable au del d'un point de non retour o la transmission du patrimoine ne POURRA PLUS tre control e par l' tat, parce que le patrimoine appartiendra des multinationales apatrides, qui ne seront plus du tout sur le sol Fran ais et ne r pondront donc plus de la juridiction de la France. Personnellement, je pense que DAVDSI a un vice bien plus profond que ce que les gens lui reprochent le plus souvent : c'est l'amorce d'un d sengagement in luctable de l' tat de taches qui lui incombent en propre. Il y a sans doute un parall le faire avec le service public... Si le service public est obligatoire, c'est parce que le tout priv am nerait les gens de la Creuse ne pas avoir le t l phone (ou bien des prix d mesur s) peine l' lectricit ou l'eau courante. Si l' tat privatise certains tablissement (EDF tant sans doute le prochain candidat) il ne renonce pas passer des contrats avec ces entreprises leur obligeant de respecter un service minimum. Ceci est possible parce que ces entreprises sont fran aises, et vivent parce que l' tat le permet. Et de toute facon, c'est sans doute l' tat qui financera le manque gagner d'EDF ou d'autres exemples (FT, la Poste, ...) sur les zones non rentables. Peut on faire la m me chose pour le patrimoine ? je pr tends que non. Je vois mal quels seraient les arguments de la France face la RIAA, Sony, Universal, ... Bien sur IANAL, et je dis sans doute un tas de b tises que vous corrigerez sans doute (ou peut- tre pas si il y en a trop). Mais tant informaticien, et voyant le mal que font les DRM notre profession (je ne fais allusion qu' des DRM sur des document PDF, et qu'on ne peut lire que sur un seul poste Windows -- DRM oblige -- et que nous ne pouvons pas imprimer. autant dire que dans ce cas on prie pour que l'ordinateur n'aie pas tre r install !!! parce que au prix du PDF en question, une start-up ne pourrait pas se permettre de le racheter ind finiment) je ne peux pas rester sans rien dire.

Somehow John Ringo’s latest, Princess of Wands, reminds me of another book he’s written recently. Both have the overtones of some sort of literary self-congratulation. In Ghost’s case, I counted that as a fault. In Princess of Wands‘ case, I count it as a strength. Both books are also episodic rather than regular novels, but the similarities end here. One problem in reviewing this book is that one cannot really discuss much of the setup without writing major spoilers. The cover blurb takes one approach: describe what the reader learns within the first five pages, who cares that the picture that gives one of the book is completely wrong. Unfortunately, the cover blurb is so misleading that it can make people ignore this book even though they should have picked it up. The genre is urban fantasy. The main character is a devout Christian soccer mom who finds herself in an adventure. The magic system and the ontology are quite interesting. There are battles with evil. There is a con. The publishing house itself, Pier… erm… Baen Books, as well as some of its authors, make an appearance onstage. (In fact, if you aren’t a barfly, you’re going to miss some of the fun like I probably missed a lot of it, never having visited a con where Baen people gather.) I found it a satisfying read, especially the middle episode. The final episode was so short that it didn’t feel well balanced, but it’s a minor issue. However, I would probably hesitate to recommend this book to a certain kind of Christans: if you think Harry Potter is evil, don’t come near this book. Overall, I’ll rate this book 4/5.

I managed to close 23 of my Debian bugs this weekend (including 5 RC ones), which is not bad at all. But I really need better organisation, I lack the ability to sort my bugs by personal priority, annotate them and keep a record of what I did about them, because the information is not always worth going into the BTS. What I currently do is pick up a package that has an RC or important bug, decide to work on it, and try fix its less important bugs while I am at it. Which means that I sometimes spend much time on an upstream bug or a feature request that are not that important. And no tool ever tells me hey, bug #XXX is easy and affects more users, you should fix it before you work on that obscure m68k FTBFS. I have very strict requirements, and so far no tool has convinced me that it would do a better job than my plain ~/TODO file. And I really tried many of them, the console lover s tool, the awesome new paradigm, the sticky notes, the complex GUI, and many, many more. In fact I have a very good idea of what would be good for me, but implementing that has a lower priority than most of my other work. Being text-based or at least having a human-editable file format is an absolute requirement. I do not want to go through a GUI to do minor modifications. So far I have found hnb to be the most interesting tool for me. I will try to get used to it.

ralsina: Nautilus doesn't really link with Mozilla, AFAIK it embeds a Bonobo component which is itself linked with Mozilla using gtkmozembed. As for other Gnome/Gtk apps linking with Mozilla, such as Galeon or SkipStone, they both have an additional distribution clause allowing linking with Mozilla. Regarding what Debian did, I won't argue whether it was right or wrong (though I believe it was the right thing [tm]), but I'm certain Qt wouldn't be GPL now if Debian had included KDE at the beginning. You may call this being anal about licenses, but IMHO it's the only way to show licenses still mean something.

So it looks like we’re finally getting a vote to issue the long-awaited GFDL Position Statement, and explain why Debian does not consider this license suitable for its main section (gr proposal, latest version). After asking around in -private, I proposed an amendment to allow GFDL-licensed documents with no invariant sections to remain in main; as of now, this amendment has received exactly zero seconds. (In case this needs mentioning, an amendment needs at least 5 seconds to appear in the ballot. And if someone wants to point me the legal flaws of my amendment, please read this first.) I’ve surprisingly found myself getting quite upset and enraged (quite political?) about the whole GFDL story. I have very clear feelings about the whole situation, and they’re best explained in this post. But well, I’m finally starting to digest that most likely Anthony’s text will pass, and managing to not get tragic about it. I guess it’ll go away, and that I’ll then continue with my Debian tasks as usual. Heck, if I one manages to be friends with people that vote conservative (and, heh, they manage to be friends with me), I guess this is about the same. NP: The Cranberries, Dreams

"Through its Science and Technology Directorate, the [US] Homeland Security Department has given $1.24 million in funding to Stanford University, Coverity and Symantec to hunt for security bugs in open-source software and to improve Coverity's commercial tool for source code analysis."

Link

"The United States Patent and Trademark Office plans to announce today that it will cooperate with open-source software developers on three initiatives that it says will improve the quality of software patents."

Link

Two optimistic things in US Gov't.... (It's not April 1 yet, right?)