In there, a lot are due to dh_auto_configure not doing the right thing for autoconf 2.13 generated configure files, others are due to make setting MAKEFLAGS to w , which prevents make -s to do what I expected it to do, armel has yet another crasher in the test suite (*sigh*), and I broke mipsel with the mips patch. 1.9.1.8-2 should fix the first two, and allow me to debug the armel issue (I disabled the test suite to be able to have the buildds generate the binaries, as they are much faster than the porterbox). Mipsel will have to wait for 1.9.1.8-3. This also means 1.9.2 is delayed. Again. (and upstream releasing Firefox 3.5.8 one day later than scheduled didn t help either) Update: I stand corrected, the one responsible for MAKEFLAGS setting to w seems to be make itself, not dh.

The recent development of the situation in China or Iran reminds me of the importance AND fragility of the freedom of speech on the Net. As the influence by the Net on the general public grows, attempts by governments to control and tame the Net will be aggravated, in a more sophisticated, crowd-pleasing way (for example, by claiming a need for Internet Driver's Licenses). How can we deal with this? Freenet can be a key to solve this problem. After almost 10 years of continuous development, it seems that it finally became an usable product(I don't say it's perfect -- there are still a lot of things to be done, especially around its UI). Freenet has its own dark side and I don't expect that it will become the standard way of the communication over the Net, but we always need the last resort to enjoy our everyday life. Unfortunately, most of Freenet-related information on the Net, especially about the installation method on GNU/Linux, are severely outdated. Freenet is a Free Software(GPL'd), and Debian did have a .deb package for Freenet long long ago, but it's basically gone and defunct. Since the pace of current development is quite fast and sometimes the backward compatibility is broken, it's not really a good idea to ITP and upload Freenet to the main Debian archive for now. Thus, I cooked up up-to-date .deb packages of the modern Freenet and publish them by myself on people.debian.org. I tried to follow the Debian packaging convention as much as possible, so at least they can be installed & uninstalled cleanly ;-) Also, Build-Deps are carefully set, so you may rebuild it without much hassle if you need. Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/freenet ./
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/freenet ./

Then run "apt-get update" and install "fred" package. This is basically all you need(you might also want jSite or FMS). Then take a look at /usr/share/doc/fred/README.Debian. You might need to copy seednodes.fref into /var/lib/fred if you want to use Freenet's Opennet mode for the first time. After that, access http://localhost:8888 and follow the instructions. Recommended readings on the modern Freenet:

• The Wikipedia entry for Freenet is surprisingly rich and informative(and not so obsoleted).
• The dark side of the internet, a recent featured story on Freenet from The Guardian. As the title indicates, it inclines to emphasisize the negative side of Freenet, but it's a good read anyway.
• The Gurdian writes about Freenet, a quite well-balanced response to The Gurdian article by Ian Clarke, the originator of Freenet.

Enjoy.

Tag this post with del.icio.us!

I previously wrote about how the National Broadband Network (NBN) seems more suited to porn delivery than regular Internet use [1]. It doesn t seem to be of much use really. In a particularly insightful comment John Hughes suggested that the real purpose would be TV delivery. The ABC is currently delivering 640*360 resolution MPEG4 files via iView for it s TV content. To use iView on Linux you need Jeremy Visser s Python-iView program [2] in conjunction with Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton s rtmp program [3]. Note that to get this working on Debian/Lenny you need to install the python-simplejson package as well. For the current ABC service it requires 251652 of data for a 3167.6 second Torchwood episode, that averages to 79.4KB/s of data. In contrast a video of Dan Gilbert from TED.com at high quality was in 640*480 resolution and required 301652KB of data for 1276.5 seconds which averaged out to 236.3KB/s. My ADSL2+ connection is theoretically capable of something over 1MB/s and occasionally gets such speeds for unusual download situations (such as downloading multiple large files at the same time). But generally I can t rely can t rely on sustained transfer rates of more than about 200KB/s. So I could watch streaming TED talks at reasonable quality, but for the best results I have to download them and watch them from disk. Assuming the same ratio of compressed data to raw pixels used for HDTV as used for TED talks a 1920*1080 HDTV resolution MPEG4 with the same quality as a TED talk would take 1600KB/s. It is possible to vary the compression level and possibly the usage of a TV stream would permit better compression than the usage of a TED talk for the number of pixels. But it seems reasonable to assume that something like 1600KB/s is needed for best HDTV, that is more than the vast majority of ADSL2+ installations can be relied on to sustain. But 100Mb/s would allow at least two 1920*1080 HDTV transmissions to be viewed at the same time, and maybe three or four as few homes have only one TV this should be of great interest. Now the question is how much people would pay for this. Currently there are two main pay TV companies in Australia, Foxtel which charges $916 for a 12 month plan [4] and Optus who s web site is so awful that I gave up before discovering what they cost (I will assume that they are competitive with Foxtel). Now I think it s reasonable to assume that $916 is at the high end of what potential customers are prepared to pay, as they are competing with free to air TV, DVD sales, Youtube, and downloads of pirate content. The current bank interest rate on term deposits from the Commonwealth bank is 6.3%, the interest rate on raising the finance would have to be greater than that let s assume 7%. So the $5000 per household will require an interest payment of $350 per annum. If a household signs up to pay TV services at a cost of $1200 per annum that might be enough money to pay slightly more than $350 to the NBN plus make a profit for the pay TV company. So if every household in Australia signed up for pay TV over the NBN it should be profitable. But that seems unlikely. The majority of the Australian population (IE the majority of the city population) is used to paying not much more than $240 per annum for a basic phone service and not much more than $360 per annum for a basic broadband Internet service. A bundled deal of $1600 per annum for phone, Internet and pay TV should allow the pay TV company and the NBN to be barely profitable if everyone accepts the deal (unless of course interest rates rise). If half the population aren t interested then the bundled deal would have to cost $2000 to have the potential for being profitable. If three quarters of the population aren t interested then it would have to cost $2300 or more! The Australian Bureau of Statistics documents that in 2008 the median household disposable income in capital cities was $593 per week [5]. So it seems that the idea of the NBN being profitable is based on plan to have more than three weeks of household disposable income per year being spent on Internet/phone/TV services. But fortunately for the pay TV companies and the content companies there is no requirement for the NBN to be profitable, it s being paid by tax money so if it loses money then we can just pay more tax! It s the ideal public private partnership , the citizens take all the risk and the corporations reap all the profits! James Purser describes how Stephen Conroy gave the TV networks something between $250,000,000 and $500,000,000 a year for the next two years [6]. It was claimed that this huge gift would be conditional on the production of more Australian content but they ended up not putting any conditions on it. In a strange coincidence Stephen Conroy did this a month after having a meeting with Kerry Stokes (head of Channel 7). Based on this I don t believe that there was ever a serious plan to make the NBN profitable. I think that the plan was just to take our tax money and spend it on things that benefit friendly corporations. Really it s better for us if the government just hands out $500,000,000 at a time instead of spending $43,000,000,000 on a project that has the same aim of giving a few hundred million to cronies.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/16/national-broadband-porn-network/
• [2] http://jeremy.visser.name/2009/08/30/python-iview/
• [3] http://lkcl.net/rtmp/
• [4] http://www.foxtel.com.au/
• [5] http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/ABS%40.nsf/0/C5B82D434B4BB5F0CA2573D20010E735?opendocument
• [6] http://jamespurser.com.au/blog/Two_Ministers_and_a_Shadow

As can be already visible from our SourceForge.net devel page or from repository listing, there are already some Git repositories for phpMyAdmin. They are not yet being used for development, they are there just for developers to get used to new workflow. The only exception are scripts and localized_docs repositories, which were made master as of today and will not receive updates from SVN anymore. Anyway the repository should have same content as SVN (as of yesterday) so if you find any problems with that please let me know so that I can fix migration magic.

Dear lazyweb: I am in search of a mailing list for discussion on matters related to digital identity and privacy in the information age. Unfortunately, my (limited) searching has not unveiled results, mostly because many mailing lists have privacy agreements or somesuch, polluting the results with pointers to those. If you know such a list, or you don t but you are interested in the topic, don t hesitate to drop me a line. I will then either let you know when my search was successful, or subscribe you when I have created a list to fill the void. NP: Sola Rosa: Solarized

For some time the film industry has been running an anti-piracy campaign with slogans such as you wouldn t steal a car [1] in an attempt to draw a false analogy between downloading a movie and stealing a significant and valuable object the modern equivalent to being a horse thief . One of the many ways that such poor analogies break down is the fact that downloading a movie is not a crime, it s copyright infringement. The best analogy that I can think of for non-commercial copyright infringement is the practice of short-changing. I expect that almost everyone has at some time received less change than they deserved when buying something at a shop, the cashier aims to collect $1 or $2 from each customer and can easily double the amount of money that they take home at the end of the day. When a customer complains they just pretend to have made a mistake and although short-changing is a crime (unlike copyright infringement) it almost never results in police action. The practice is tolerated to such a degree that some people know the shops where they are likely to be short-changed, they count their change more carefully and demand the full amount but don t bother complaining to the manager! The film industry also tries to portray itself as representing struggling artists who deserve the money, it s described as a moral issue good people pay for movies while bad people download movies and steal cars. But then there s the case of Roman Polanski who is a well known movie director and child rapist [2]. I expect that most store employees would gladly palm some of the change if Roman Polanski was a customer that is of course if they weren t too busy arranging a lynch mob. So instead of you wouldn t steal a car a more reasonable statement would be you would short-change a pedophile if you weren t organising a lynch mob . Please note that murdering a criminal as part of a lynch mob is a crime (unlike making an unauthorised copy of a DVD), so I encourage people not to perform lynchings. Many important people in the movie industry have different ideas, the Wall Street Journal has an article about the petition to free Roman Polanski which demonstrates the difference between Hollywood attitudes and those of the rest of the world [3]. For them, violent crime is no big deal if the criminal is famous and the victim isn t but anything which affects their own wealth is regarded as a serious issue. Indiewire has a copy of the petition to free Roman and a list of the names of 100 people who signed it [4] (I heard that the latest count was nearer 150 but couldn t find a reference). I believe that the matter of morals is not whether someone who rapes children deserves jail time (that issue is really clear) but whether it is morally acceptable to give money to such a criminal or their supporters. I suggest that the list of signatories to the pro-rape petition be black-listed, any movie that involves any of them should not be paid for either don t see the movie or download it without paying at your own whim. If anyone knows of a web site that is being regularly updated with a list of all past and current projects involving people who signed the petition for Roman then please let me know it would be good to have a list of movies that I will never pay for. Anyone who feels morally obliged to pay something for a movie and who has a great desire to watch a movie made by Roman Polanski or his supporters could download it and then make a donation to a charity equivalent to the purchase price rumor has it that women s refuges are always short of funds. As an aside I find Wikipedia a good reference for movies that I don t plan to see, I read the plot summary on the wiki page and then have no curiosity about what happens in the movie if that isn t adequate I ask friends for spoilers or do a Google search on the movie name and spoilers .

• [1] http://www.bl0g.co.uk/20091217/you-wouldnt-steal-a-car/
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski
• [3] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574448033489885784.html
• [4] http://www.indiewire.com/article/over_100_in_film_community_sign_polanski_petition/P0/

Sorry! I cannot tell you when KDE 4.4 will be uploaded to unstable. I am not working on that. My initial plan was writing about other tasks I am planning to work on and asking for your help. But I realized people would be more interested in knowing about KDE 4.4 packages. Once you know about this, I might trick you into helping in others areas ;) Debian packages for KDE 4.4 are being worked on, just slowly and of course, keeping on with the quality you are used to. There will be also some changes that have been in some people s TODO for long time. The goal is having them in very good shape for Squeeze, that will ship with some point release of 4.4. The doubt is which point release will be: 4.4.2? 4.4.3 ? The schedule for the point releases has not been made yet, so it makes a bit harder trying to predict it. In the same lines, I can not tell you when Squeeze will be released neither, it needs to be frozen first! If you want to know about the reasons of this delay, it is simple math: KDE has been growing a lot of more than the number of people working in Debian packages of KDE. I am not talking about size in lines of code in KDE, it is more the number of new dependencies that the KDE team have to take care now too: soprano, libutempter, Have you wondered why some are under the name of Debian Krap maintainers? :) And there are releases much more often than in the KDE 3 times. You might have notice not only 4.3.5 have been skipped, it also was the case with 4.2.3 or 4.1.4. This is not good or bad, it is just the same number of maintainers (or less) with more work. And what is worse with more bugs open in the Debian BTS! I think reiterated calls for not to file upstream bugs in the Debian BTS and directly in KDE bugzilla (see my blog post about this here) have helped but still we have a large amount of bugs piled through the years. This graph could give you an estimate how we tried in the past fighting against without too much success:
Olivier Vitrat, we miss you :) One of the most heavy (and boring) talks that needs to be done for the KDE 4.4 packages is the copyright checking. I am not sure a total newbie can help with this, but if you have knowledge about licenses and you want to try helping, we are waiting for you. About other areas of the packaging maintenance, if you are interested in start learning and helping with future releases, you are welcome to start lurking in the #debian-qt-kde channel in OFTC and in the mailing lists. Update February 21th: 4.4.0 is for sure not being uploaded into the archive. Probably KDE SC 4.4.1 to be released 2nd March will be uploaded to unstable or experimental.

I spent a few minutes trying out the new support for using the Facebook chat with Jabber/XMPP, which is a great idea, since I hate to chat using the web interface. Sadly, it doesn't support grouping your contacts (you set a group, but it doesn't keep registered, probably they didn't implement that feature), and that make my empathy client look quite untidy... I'll keep my account setup for a while, but I guess it will not be long until I remove it and continue not chatting with Facebook. Maybe some day they can properly implement the protocol... Update: As Tobias Wich and Clifford Hansen had kindly pointed out to me, you can actually group your contacts, but only from the web interface. I've tried it and it works, but it's not really comfortable. Tags: Planet Debian

Seems I managed to loose a month in there. Been working very hard on a project with an improbable deadline which has not left much time for anything else.

Finally brought to a standstill this weekend by something Joshua brought home (I think it was some form of micro biological warfare agent, judging by how I feel) It is incrediably hard to shrug off the lethargy of illness when you realize all you have to go back to is work.

On the plus side the project deadline is in three weeks time so whatever happens It will all be over by then! Whereupon I can take some time off, calm down and then start all over on the next project...

Yay?

As part of some house-keeping I've been checking over my systems and ensuring they're all tickity-boo for the past couple of days. One thing that I'm getting increasingly tempted by is converting my kvm guest to a 64-bit system. I've not quite sold myself on the prospect of what will be a fair amount of downtime, but I'm 90% there. I do think that a lot of my setup needs an overhaul, for example:

• Running all my websites under www-data is beginning to worry me.
• Running services as root is beginning to make me more and more paranoid.

One possible plan is to wipe my system, and then restore data from backups. A perhaps saner approach is divide my guest into two smaller ones, and migrate services over one by one (e.g. website1, website2, .. websiteN, email, etc). For the moment I've taken a complete dump of my existing guest, and I'm running it with an IP in the 10.0.0.0/24 range on my desktop. That's at least given me a clear idea of the amount of work involved. I'm still a little unclear on how best to manage running N websites with the intention they'll each run under their own UID. I guess it comes down to having a few instances of nginx/lighttpd/apache and then proxy from *:80 to the actual back-end. Precisely which mixture of services to use is a little overwhelming. Though at some point soon I need to start enabling IPv6 support, and that changes things a little. (Not least because nginx has no IPv6 support present in the Lenny release - I've got a backported package which I run on the Debian Administration website.) It's possible I could hack mod_vhost_alias to redirect/proxy to a local port based upon the virtual hostname present in the request - that's pretty trivial and I've already done something similar for work purposes. Though something like that should presumably already exist? I would expect a map of some form:

example.org: 127.0.0.1:8080
example.net: 127.0.0.1:9090

That has to be about the minimum necessary information to make the decision; a pair of vhost name & local destination. /me googles some.. Update

OK quick update I've added local users for some of my sites, and now have them running under thttpd.

skx:/etc/thttpd# ls -ltr /home/www/   tail -n 4
drwxr-sr-x  4 s-static   s-static   4096 Jan 15 01:41 static.steve.org.uk
drwxr-sr-x  5 s-openid   s-openid   4096 Feb 16 21:31 openid.steve.org.uk
drwxr-sr-x  6 s-images   s-images   4096 Feb 16 21:52 images.steve.org.uk
drwxr-sr-x  5 s-packages s-packages 4096 Feb 16 22:03 packages.steve.org.uk

That seems to work well, with a small wrapper script to start N instances of thttpd instead of a single one. Minor issues are that I'm using mod_proxy to forward requests to the thtpd instances running upon the loopback - and it was initially logging 127.0.0.1 as the source IP. A quick patch later all is well. I'll leave it running a couple of the simple sites for the next few days and see if it kills children. If it does I'll convert the rest. Probably will aim to have nginx in front of thttpd, instead of Apache, but this way I don't have to worry about mod_rewrite rules just yet.

ObFilm: Cruel Intentions

Currently we have a new National Broadband Network under construction in Australia [1]. It is going to cost $43,000,000,000 which is $5,000 per household. It is designed to deliver 100Mb/s speeds to most homes that is the homes that can currently get more than 8Mb/s through ADSL2+ or cable connections. The question is, what can we do with 100Mb/s that we can t do with 8Mb/s? It seems that ADSL2+ works pretty well for VOIP, video-conferencing, online games, and transferring CD/DVD images (with a little patience). It seems to me that the only benefit in having download speeds faster than 8Mb/s is for downloading high resolution images and video files in a small amount of time and porn surfing seems likely to be the only reason for someone being so impatient to get high resolution images! Now there are some potential technical benefits to this, FTTH will allow synchronous upload and download speeds and being able to transmit data at 100Mb/s will be a significant benefit. If the data transfer quota was reasonable then I could run my blog, my web site (including my Debian package repositories), and some other new projects from a server in my own home. Currently Internet access in Australia sucks mostly because of the cost of international bandwidth [2]. Also while Telstra was run by the awful Sol Trujillo it was trying to gain a monopoly on domestic services via it s Fiber To The Node (FTTN) scheme, it seems that one of the biggest benefits of the NBN is to prevent Telstra gaining such a monopoly but as they are going to pay the NBN CEO a $2,000,000 salary [3] it seems that some of the same mistakes are being made. In any case $43,000,000,000 is a lot of money to pay to break a monopoly, there are much cheaper ways of doing this. Now if the money was to be spent intelligently on Internet access the first area would have to be submarine cables, if the capacity of the connections between Australia and the rest of the world could be significantly increased then it would change the way the Internet is used. I have a US-based colleague who transfers more data from his mobile phone than I do through my home ADSL connection and he pays about the same amount of money as me! I think that most serious Internet users would rather have an ADSL2+ connection that is cheaper and has a larger bandwidth quota than a FTTN connection with a high transfer rate but a small quota of data that can be transferred from what I ve read about the NBN it doesn t sound like a service I would want to sign up for. Then there is the issue of servers, currently for most uses Australia is not a viable location for a server due to bandwidth costs. This decreases the job opportunities for Australian system administrators and decreases the Australian IT skills base. The next area that needs attention is wireless net access. The first issue that should be addressed is the minimum cost, the cheapest net access in Australia is via 3G because it avoids all the costs of wiring [4]. It would be good if instead of paying about $150 per annum for 3G net access there were some options for cheaper plans, maybe $60 per annum for 6G of data. In many ways the current Australian lifestyle requires Internet access, and many aspects of interaction with government organisations requires net access, so it seems that the government should make it a priority to provide cheap net access to the entire population. A 3G net access plan of $60 per annum plus a subsidised purchase plan for cheap PCs (maybe taking a Netbook from $350 to $250) should significantly decrease the number of people who can t use the Internet. 3G access (both Internet and telephony) also needs to be available in more areas. Currently Telstra has the widest coverage of any mobile phone company, but it uses a non-standard frequency which limits the availability of suitable phones and it doesn t compete on price [5]. So rural users have to pay through the nose for Telstra mobile telephony and they get a limited choice of phones. It would be really good if we had a NBN for 3G phones that covered the areas surrounding most rural population centers to compete with Telstra. If rural users could pay $60 per annum for 3G Internet access and a reasonable rate for mobile phone access (maybe a combined phone/data plan similar to those offered by Three and Virgin) then it would significantly improve the rural access to services that urban residents take for granted. The NBN plan does include providing wireless and satellite net access to the 10% of the population who will be out of range of FTTH. But I am concerned that it will provide a bare minimum of service and not an integrated voice/data service that permits using the newest features of phone OSs such as Android. In the past I ve had some commercial experience with satellite Internet access and I have not been impressed with it, the response times were very poor and fully interactive services were almost unusable. The government should aim to provide support for interactive services that facilitate business operations (including video-conferencing and remote server access via ssh, VNC, etc) to as much of the population as possible. I expect that a significant portion of the Internet using applications on smart-phones such as those running the Android OS will require fast response times, so even if a satellite version of an Android phone is ever produced it still wouldn t be as useful as the current phones. Finally the government should offer free wireless net access in all major urban areas for the purpose of accessing government services, Australian content, and Australian mirrors of foreign content. This would be a convenience feature for most people and would also be good for emergency access I shouldn t have been denied access to government services when the PSU for my ADSL modem died in the heat last week, I should have been able to take a laptop to the nearest government Wifi access point! In conclusion I think that the government should spend money on lowering the cost of Internet and mobile telephony access for everyone and granting greater access to government services. I am not aware of any evidence to suggest that the current NBN plan will do anything to achieve such aims. But it should be really good for accessing porn sites that use a CDN with an Australian presence. Update: John Hughes pointed out in an insightful comment that 100Mb/s can be used for watching TV. So this could be a ploy to try and convert Internet access into better TVs paid for by our tax money!

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/18/why-internet-access-in-australia-sucks/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/08/19/ceo-pay/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/15/cheap-net-access-australia/
• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/01/choosing-australian-mobile-telco/

We often see the opposite, convert a SVN repository into a Git one and try the breeze of a DVCS, but what if you want to convert a Git repo into a SVN one?

The process is not easy (and you need a "straight" Git repo: no merge, too complex branches and so), and the result is quite raw, but you're still able to convert the main part into SVN. Here are the steps:

1. create an empty SVN repository: svn mkdir svn://path/to/repo/project/ trunk,branches,tags
2. clone it in a Git repo: git svn clone svn://path/to/repo/project --stdlayout . This will create a project directory, empty except for the .git information directory; master is the default Git branch created by git-svn that maps SVN trunk.
   
3. add the original Git repo as a remote: git remote add origin git://uri/to/git/repo/project.git
4. fetch from it: git fetch origin
5. create a local branch for the remote master: git checkout -b old_master origin/master . Note that master branch is already present, so we define another one.
6. being on old_master we rebase this branch onto master: git rebase --onto master --root . Doing this, we have "moved" all our commits from old_master to master
7. and push all the commits into the SVN repo: git svn dcommit

It's not that elegant, but it gets it done. I'd like to know if someone is aware of a better method, also to import tags and branches, that this process doesn't do.

The Chronicle recently published a piece that drew a lot of attention on the difficulties that female academics with kids face during the first 4-7 seven years of their job when academics are expected to do nothing but produce, produce, and produce and yet because they have produced children, they can t produce all that much writing. I don t share the author s predicament in that I don t have kids. But I have had to be an (often long-distance) caretaker for the last 8 years, 4 of which I spent considerable time in PR taking over my mom s caretaker s duties. Although when it comes to female academics and kids there is a lot that can (really must) be done to facilitate a career and motherhood, when it comes to taking care of my mom, being an academic has been an odd and mixed blessing, although it did require me to play with the system self-consciously or else it would have been an early academic death. When my mom was first falling pretty ill, I was wrapping up my dissertation. Though I was ready (on paper at least) to go on the market, I did not step foot in it. I knew that if I landed a job it would be the end of seeing my mom and since she only had a few years of capacity left, I decided to 1) apply only for one postdoctoral position (that had no teaching and was in NJ making it very easy to fly home frequently) 2) if I did not land it, I would return home to spend time with her, keep on writing but not graduate. If I had started a job right after my dissertation, I would have killed my chances of churning out articles, and worse, not have seen much of my mom. I was lucky enough to land this postdoctoral fellowship, which was a life savior. I was able to get a heck of a lot of work done that I would never ever would have been able to do my first two years of teaching (kids or no kids) and I spent many months in PR as well. I always encourage graduate students to apply for these positions because the payback is enormous (with the exception of fellowships that require a ton of teaching), even if the applications are really time consuming, more so than applying for jobs. Though rarely stated in such terms, the first few years of an academic position is not unlike medical residency. It takes a brutal amount of time, not only because of the sheer time you have to work but also because there is so much new to learn and so many different responsibilities to juggle. It is exhiliarting but draining, even disorienting. But there is one important difference from our medical school counterparts (aside from the blood and guts and gore :-)): their hell continues throughout the year, while our hell diminishes during the summer when classes end and writing is supposed to dominate your attention. Also since I am not required to be here once classes ended, I am able to leave NYC and spend it back home. I would simply not be able to do this with most any other full time job (unless it involved telecommunting) and for that I am grateful I landed the job I did. Academia, despite its rat race quality, has allowed me to visit my mom throughout the year and summer. Given the importance of summers for writing it seem that departments/universities can do a lot for female faculty simply by sponsoring or helping to pay for summer day care for two years, thus offsetting some of the costs and then providing them with the space needed to write/produce.This can accompany the policy that some, though not enough schools have, which is turning off your tenure clock for the year you are pregnant, and in some cases, even giving you leave. Thankfully at NYU you can stop your clock not just for pregnancy (which they now automatically do because when it was optional some female professors were not taking it!) but also for circumstances like mine. I was given a short tenure extension, which was not easy to ask for but it is important to do so. I am extremely grateful they have this policy. Something else partially unique about caring for a parent is the perspective it affords. Although it would be a lie to say I suffer no anxieties about my job, I find it hard to get embroiled in a lot of the petty politics of academia, a perspective that clings to me, especially after having to take care of someone with Alzheimers, and especially my mom who we nicknamed the Russian Terror for her turbulent (but really fun) personality. Sitting in front of your computer to write and think about some obscure academic topic feels not only easy after those experiences but a scamish sort of privilege. My mom is now in a nursing home and I no longer have to spend time taking care of her. Instead I visit and see her and get overwhelmingly sad when I do. In one month, it will be her 2 year anniversary in a nursing home and I still have not come to grips with the situation. It strikes me as obscene and unreasonably cruel that this illness can afflict a person for years, even a decade or more. Perhaps more than anything it is the sheer massive length and persistence of this illness that makes it so hard to bear. And I am sure my work for better or for worse has acted as an emotional refuge, where I drown myself in work that I love instead of drowning in the sorrow that I often feel, making what is a difficult job far easier.

The Chronicle recently published a piece that drew a lot of attention on the difficulties that female academics with kids face during the first 4-7 seven years of their job when academics are expected to do nothing but produce, produce, and produce and yet because they have produced children, they can t produce all that much writing. I don t share the author s predicament in that I don t have kids. But I have had to be an (often long-distance) caretaker for the last 8 years, 4 of which I spent considerable time in PR taking over my mom s caretaker s duties. Although when it comes to female academics and kids there is a lot that can (really must) be done to facilitate a career and motherhood, when it comes to taking care of my mom, being an academic has been an odd and mixed blessing, although it did require me to play with the system self-consciously or else it would have been an early academic death. When my mom was first falling pretty ill, I was wrapping up my dissertation. Though I was ready (on paper at least) to go on the market, I did not step foot in it. I knew that if I landed a job it would be the end of seeing my mom and since she only had a few years of capacity left, I decided to 1) apply only for one postdoctoral position (that had no teaching and was in NJ making it very easy to fly home frequently) 2) if I did not land it, I would return home to spend time with her, keep on writing but not graduate. If I had started a job right after my dissertation, I would have killed my chances of churning out articles, and worse, not have seen much of my mom. I was lucky enough to land this postdoctoral fellowship, which was a life savior. I was able to get a heck of a lot of work done that I would never ever would have been able to do my first two years of teaching (kids or no kids) and I spent many months in PR as well. I always encourage graduate students to apply for these positions because the payback is enormous (with the exception of fellowships that require a ton of teaching), even if the applications are really time consuming, more so than applying for jobs. Though rarely stated in such terms, the first few years of an academic position is not unlike medical residency. It takes a brutal amount of time, not only because of the sheer time you have to work but also because there is so much new to learn and so many different responsibilities to juggle. It is exhiliarting but draining, even disorienting. But there is one important difference from our medical school counterparts (aside from the blood and guts and gore :-)): their hell continues throughout the year, while our hell diminishes during the summer when classes end and writing is supposed to dominate your attention. Also since I am not required to be here once classes ended, I am able to leave NYC and spend it back home. I would simply not be able to do this with most any other full time job (unless it involved telecommunting) and for that I am grateful I landed the job I did. Academia, despite its rat race quality, has allowed me to visit my mom throughout the year and summer. Given the importance of summers for writing it seem that departments/universities can do a lot for female faculty simply by sponsoring or helping to pay for summer day care for two years, thus offsetting some of the costs and then providing them with the space needed to write/produce.This can accompany the policy that some, though not enough schools have, which is turning off your tenure clock for the year you are pregnant, and in some cases, even giving you leave. Thankfully at NYU you can stop your clock not just for pregnancy (which they now automatically do because when it was optional some female professors were not taking it!) but also for circumstances like mine. I was given a short tenure extension, which was not easy to ask for but it is important to do so. I am extremely grateful they have this policy. Something else partially unique about caring for a parent is the perspective it affords. Although it would be a lie to say I suffer no anxieties about my job, I find it hard to get embroiled in a lot of the petty politics of academia, a perspective that clings to me, especially after having to take care of someone with Alzheimers, and especially my mom who we nicknamed the Russian Terror for her turbulent (but really fun) personality. Sitting in front of your computer to write and think about some obscure academic topic feels not only easy after those experiences but a scamish sort of privilege. My mom is now in a nursing home and I no longer have to spend time taking care of her. Instead I visit and see her and get overwhelmingly sad when I do. In one month, it will be her 2 year anniversary in a nursing home and I still have not come to grips with the situation. It strikes me as obscene and unreasonably cruel that this illness can afflict a person for years, even a decade or more. Perhaps more than anything it is the sheer massive length and persistence of this illness that makes it so hard to bear. And I am sure my work for better or for worse has acted as an emotional refuge, where I drown myself in work that I love instead of drowning in the sorrow that I often feel, making what is a difficult job far easier.

Popular Mechanics has a good article about 911 [1]. Experts in all the relevant fields were consulted to debunk popular myths. It s an old article but I hadn t read it before and learned a lot. Former CIA analyst Raw McGovern and former FBI attorney/special agent Coleen Rowley, a colleague in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity wrote an interesting article titled Why Counter-Terrorism Is in Shambles [2]. Such sanity from people who are associated with the intelligence industry is unusual. Gizmodo has an amusing and informative poster about the true risks of airline travel post 911 [3]. Reuters has an interesting article about drug smugglers using Gulfstream and 727 aircraft to smuggle cocaine from South America to Africa [4]. They claim a link to al Quaeda, but such a link seems tenuous from the evidence provided, it does seem reasonable to claim that groups who claim affiliation to al Quaeda are involved in smuggling anyone can claim anything really. An 8yo boy is on the TSA terrorism watch list , he regularly gets frisked when traveling by air [5]. His mother had a security clearance to fly on Air Force 2 when Al Gore was the Vice President, any sane security system would look at the parents rather than an 8yo child children of that age aren t going to independently become terrorists. The Dallas Observer has an interesting article by Kimberly Thorpe about how to beat debt collectors [6]. Apparently most debt collectors break the law in some way and can be sued for damages with a typical settlement of $3,500. Some debtors are suing multiple debt collectors, after one debt collector is successfully sued the debt is passed to another collector who also breaks the law. What I really like about this is that the community of people who sue debt collectors keep the industry honest and protect the majority of the population who don t have the time or interest for engaging in law suits. Read Write Web has an informative article about SourceForge being forced to deny access to people in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria [7]. A problem for free software developers is that we often don t know the location of the people we collaborate with so it s best to be as open as possible. This means that the US is not a good place to host servers, probably some part of the EU would be better. Also this sort of thing makes the field of free software development less welcoming to US citizens. Did the congress people learn nothing in high-school? They should know that someone who starts a campaign of ostracism may end up being in the small group. Google is developing a new Native Client (NaCl) system that seems to be like Microsoft ActiveX [8]. I can t imagine this doing anything that couldn t be done with Java, it seems most likely to just marginalise the less popular platforms which isn t in the best interests of Google. Kevin Kelly of the Technium wrote an interesting post about 1000 true fans [9]. The concept is that if you are doing creative work you only need 1000 dedicated fans who buy everything you sell to make a living. If you make $20 per year from each of the 1000 fans and you will earn enough to live. Make $100 per year from each of the 1000 fans and you will be earning more money than most people. The updates show that artists who try this aren t having much success yet, but the Internet population is still increasing dramatically PaxStreamline offers an innovation in commercial air-conditioning, apparently a significant amount of electricity is wasted on heating the air after chilling it excessively to remove moisture [10]. So instead of cooling it they use a liquid dessicant to extract the moisture. Ben Schwartz explains why you should never create files in H.264 or MPEG formats, unless you have a special commercial license then you (and your viewers) will all be liable for patent infringement for any type of commercial use [11]. Note that storing the data on a web site with Google adverts counts as commercial use. I wonder if all those digital cameras and mobile phones that create MPEG videos have appropriate licenses, maybe uploading a file created on your phone breaches the patent. J. K. Rowling (author of Harry Potter) gave an inspiring speech for Harvard graduates [12]. I particularly liked the following reference to her work for Amnesty International Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid . Peter Eigen gave an interesting TED talk about the formation of Transparency International and the economic problems that are caused by corruption [13]. The Monthly Review has an interesting article about the failure of the US justice system [14]. The prison industrial complex has captured part of the US government, neo-liberalism is to blame. 59% of Americans agree that homosexuals ought to be able to serve in the U.S. military. But 70 percent believe that gays and lesbians ought to be able to serve in the military [15]. Apparently 11% of Americans think that gays and lesbians are better than homosexuals .

• [1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html
• [2] http://consortiumnews.com/2010/010510c.html
• [3] http://fearoflanding.com/misc/odds-of-airborne-terror-gizmodo/
• [4] http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60C3E820100113
• [5] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/nyregion/14watchlist.html
• [6] http://www.dallasobserver.com/content/printVersion/1653972
• [7] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/no_access_for_the_axis.php
• [8] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/24/google_chrome_os_and_native_clent/
• [9] http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php
• [10] http://www.paxstreamline.com/innovativehvac.html
• [11] http://bemasc.net/wordpress/2010/02/02/no-you-cant-do-that-with-h264/
• [12] http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_eigen_how_to_expose_the_corrupt.html
• [14] http://www.monthlyreview.org/090601holleman-mcchesney-foster-jonna.php
• [15] http://politics.theatlantic.com/2010/02/want_to_serve_be_gay_or_lesbian_dont_be_a_homosexual.php

I ve been looking at instant messaging and chat software lately. Briefly stated, I connect to Jabber and IRC networks from at least three different computers. I don t like having to sign in and out on different machines. One of the nice features about Jabber (XMPP) is that I can have clients signing in from all over the place and it will automatically route messages to the active one. If the clients are smart enough, that is. Gajim I have been using Gajim as my primary chat client for some time now. It has a good feature set, but has had a history of being a bit buggy for me. It used to have issues when starting up: sometimes it would try to fire up two copies of itself. It still has a bug when being fired up from a terminal: if you run gajim & exit, it will simply die. You have to wait a few seconds to close the terminal you launched it from. It has also had issues with failing to reconnect properly after a dropped network connection and generating spurious resource already in use errors. Upgrades sometimes fix bugs, and sometimes introduce them. The latest one I ve been dealing with is its auto-idle support. Sometimes it will fail to recognize that I am back at the machine. Even weirder, sometimes it will set one of my accounts to available status, but not the other. So much for my complaints about Gajim; it also has some good sides. It has excellent multi-account support. You can have it present your multiple accounts as separate sections in the roster, or you can have them merged. Then, say, all your contacts in a group called Friends will be listed together, regardless of which account you use to contact them. The Jabber protocol (XMPP) permits you to connect from multiple clients. Each client specifies a numeric priority for its connection. When someone sends you a message, it will be sent to the connection with the highest priority. The obvious feature, then, is to lower your priority when you are away (or auto-away due to being idle), so that you always get IMs at the device you are actively using. Gajim supports this via letting you specify timeouts that get you into different away states, and using the advanced configuration editor, you can also set the priority that each state goes to. So, if Gajim actually recognized your idleness correctly, this would be great. I do also have AIM and MSN accounts which I use rarely. I run Jabber gateways to each of these on my server, so there is no need for me to use a multiprotocol client. That also is nice because then I can use a simple Jabber client on my phone, laptop, whatever and see all my contacts. Gajim does not support voice or video calls. Due to an apparent bug in Facebook, the latest Gajim release won t connect to Facebook servers, but there is a patch that claims to fix it. Psi Psi is another single-protocol Jabber client, and like Gajim, it runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Psi has a nicer GUI than Gajim, and is more stable. It is not quite as featureful, and one huge omission is that it doesn t support dropping priority on auto-away (though it, weirdly, does support a dropped priority when you manually set yourself away). Psi doesn t support account merging, so it always shows my contacts from one account separately from those from another. I like having the option in Gajim. There is a fork of Psi known variously as psi-dev or psi-plus or Psi+. It adds that missing priority feature and some others. Unfortunately, I ve had it crash on me several times. Not only that, but the documentation, wiki, bug tracker, everything is available only in Russian. That is not very helpful to me, unfortunately. Psi+ still doesn t support account merging. Both branches of Psi support media calling. Kopete Kopete is a KDE multiprotocol instant messenger client. I gave it only about 10 minutes of time because it is far from meeting my needs. It doesn t support adjustable priorities that I can tell. It also doesn t support XMPP service discovery, which is used to do things like establish links to other chat networks using a Jabber gateway. It also has no way to access ejabberd s send message to all online users feature (which can be accessed via service discovery), which I need in emergencies at work. It does offer multimedia calls, but that s about it. Update: A comment pointed out that Kopete can do service discovery, though it is in a very non-obvious place. However, it still can t adjust priority when auto-away, so I still can t use it. Pidgin Pidgin is a multiprotocol chat client. I have been avoiding it for years, with the legitimate fear that it was jack of all trades, master of none. Last I looked at it, it had the same limitations that Kopete does. But these days, it is more capable. It supports all those XMPP features. It supports priority dropping by default, and with a plugin, you can even configure all the priority levels just like with Gajim. It also has decent, though not excellent, IRC protocol support. Pidgin supports account merging and in fact, it doesn t support any other mode. You can, for instance, tell it that a given person on IRC is the same as a given Jabber ID. That works, but it s annoying because you have to manually do it on every machine you re running Pidgin on. Worse, they used to support a view without merged accounts, but don t anymore, and they think that s a feature. Pidgin does still miss some nifty features that Gajim and Psi both have. Both of those clients will not only tell you that someone is away, but if you hover over their name, tell you how long someone has been away. (Gajim says away since , while Pidgin shows last status at . Same data either way.) Pidgin has the data to show this, but doesn t. You can manually find it in the system log if you like, but unhelpfully, it s not on the log for an individual person. Also, the Jabber protocol supports notifications while in a chat: The contact is typing , paying attention to a conversation, or closed the chat window. Psi and Gajim have configurable support for these; you can send whatever notifications your privacy preferences say. Pidgin, alas, removed that option, and again they see this as a feature. Pidgin, as a result, makes me rather nervous. They keep removing useful features. What will they remove next? It is difficult to change colors in Pidgin. It follows the Gtk theme, and there is a special plugin that will override some, but not all, Gtk options. Empathy Empathy supports neither priority dropping when away nor service discovery, so it s not usable for me. Its feature set appears sparse in general, although it has a unique desktop sharing option. Update: this section added in response to a comment. On IRC I also use IRC, and have been using Xchat for that for quite some time now. I tried IRC in Pidgin. It has OK IRC support, but not great. It can automatically identify to nickserv, but it is under-documented and doesn t support multiple IRC servers for a given network. I ve started using xchat with the bip IRC proxy, which makes connecting from multiple machines easier.

I wonder how these people will react to this. At least it's going to be somewhat more open, I guess. Which is good.

Today, Nokia and Intel announced the merge of Maemo and Moblin into the MeeGo project. This is sad, because it will end the era of the Debian-based mobile operating system Maemo and replace it with a system using RPM and probably some other evil stuff as well. In fact, dpkg & apt-get where two of my main reasons to buy the N900. And another question is why yet another name. Moblin was already a well-known name and they shouldn t have changed the name just because they switch the servers and add some Nokia developers. Furthermore, does this all mean that there will be no Maemo 6? What will happen to the Maemo users on the N900, will it be possible for them to use MeeGo? Maybe this is the time to start a new project, Debian Mobile. Debian Mobile would take the MeeGo experience and apply it to a Debian system. This would probably the best mobile operating system ever, being backed by Debian s large repositories with thousands of software packages. Filed under: Debian

Want a healthy diet, but difficulty determining diet have much less heart disease and diabetes, now do not need to be confused. The problem currently existing software can determine which food or menu with us. This tool was created Muhammad Burhanuddin SI students majoring in the College information systems Information Management and Computer Engineering (STIKOM). Pemuda Surabaya original was inspired by his desire to want to get the ideal body weight. He then sought a reference from a variety of books on diet and sehata the ideal body shape. From the book, he then designed a program for determining menu diet with computerized systems. Yes at first it was because I found it difficult to lose weight and see the number of experts in determining the diet for patients with certain diseases, he said on the red building STIKOM Surabaya, Jalan Kedung Baruk, Thursday (15/10/2009). During the decisive finishing diet program, she had difficulty in the verification phase of the rule which took one month of a total of four months of completion of the program is the final project. This 21 year young man said this program can ciptaanya to help digunakanahli nutrition diet suitable for the patient. At first nutritionist to determine the menu of resus a patient s blood type that has gone through laboratory tests. Then determine the disease
patients suffered until finally obtained the results of a diet, he said.

It s hard to do a healthy diet outside the home? Whereas many of the activities carried out. Try some tips refer to following a healthy diet that you can do outside. re Dieting to reduce consumption of fats, carbohydrates or sugar? That does not mean you can not eat well. With a few tricks and cunning look of food, you can even a good meal in a restaurant also order food from fast-food restaurant. Try it voyeur tips from DASH, Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. With these healthy tips you can still eat well and avoid high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels. Well, try telling refer to the following tips: 1. Avoid foods with saturated fats and cholesterol High
But avoid foods that contain saturated fatty acids and also high yan foods contain cholesterol. You can avoid these foods but still give priority to taste, a variety of menus to choose from, even a favorite. If you re eating out make sure the following things:
- Make sure your food is cooked using olive oil instead of butter or
fat if the dish was a stir-fried or something.
- Ask for salad dressing or salad dressings are low in fat.
- If mkan meat or chicken, remove the parts that contain fat such as chicken skin.
- Choose foods with dimaska burned, boiled, or baked. In addition to not using oil, usually healthier. 2. Watchful Against Salt
Another thing to note that this works DASH diet is salt. Because salt can raise your blood pressure, while salt is often used in a variety of restaurants to make food more delicious. You still can control the salt in your food when eating out by doing:
- Ask the waiter to not put salt or MSG in your food.
- Beware of any food that a high salt content such as pickles, soy sauce, broth, bacon, and others.
- Keep the salt from your desk, because usually you will reflexively add salt to the food.
- Reduce the use of mustard, ketchup, pickles, and other Condiment a high salt content.
- Choose fruits or vegetables as the opening menu. 3. Avoid foods with a portion of
But avoid foods with large portions. In addition you will feel
unfortunately if the foods are not consumed, you will feel sick if you eat too much excess. We recommend that you order enough food. Or if that portion is too big, shared with friends is much better. 4. Always Instill Healthy Living Patterns in the Mind
More and more people realize how important a healthy life, making a lot of restaurants started to state that low-fat or rich in antioxidants to the food they sell. Actually do not stop until the food alone, you
also have to think about drinks or dessert healthy what happens to the balance. For example:
- Choose a drink that does not cause side effects, such as mineral water, fruit juice, or herbal tea.
- Expand vegetables and fruits as well as the opening menu to avoid overeating at the main menu.
- If you decide to eat a salad, choose low-fat sauce or put the sauce on the plate edge so that its use is not excessive.
- Avoid mouthwashes that contain high fat like cheese cake. We recommend that you choose desserts such as fruit, sorbet, or fruit jelly. 5. Order careful in Resto Fast Food
Fast-food restaurant is the most dangerous enemy to your diet. But if you are careful, you can still enjoy fast food without the fear of cholesterol or high blood pressure soared and certainly does not ruin your diet program. Here are some tips if your food in the restaurant inginmemesan fast food:
- Take your time choosing foods, read the content carefully to what
contained in one serving. And do not be shy to ask the waiter about
Andapesan food.
- Combine your foods such as grilled chicken with whole wheat and yogurt drinks or low-fat milk.
- Do not order more servings.
- Be aware of and avoid salad dressings containing Condiment bleak high salt soy sauce, ketchup, and pickles.
- To drink mineral water should choose, even if others want to order to avoid fizzy drinks.