In last few days I spent some time with travel agenda. Tomorrow morning I am leaving for FOSDEM, so I'm arranging last minutes things like online checking. Whoever wants to meet me just drop me an email or just check things I want to visit and find me there. Meanwhile got open registration for Debconf 10, so when I was in travelling mood, I also filled in that one. Right now it looks like it will be quite tough for me to pay this trip, but there is still some time to sort it out :-).

As part of preparing xulrunner 1.9.2 (which would lead to Iceweasel 3.6), I have gone through all the patches currently applied to the latest xulrunner release, to keep track of what should be upstreamed, what needed feedback, what patches I needed to update in upstream bugzilla, etc. As I have talked about our differences with upstream on a few occasions already, and as I was doing this grunt work anyway, I thought it would be nice to make the results public. First, a few reference numbers (excluding changes to generated configure files):

• Changes between upstream 1.9.0.1 and Debian release 1.9.0.1-1: 85 files changed, 1163 insertions(+), 644 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.0.16 and Debian release 1.9.0.16-1: 86 files changed, 1177 insertions(+), 634 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1 and Debian release 1.9.1-1: 70 files changed, 770 insertions(+), 363 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1.6 and Debian release 1.9.1.6-1: 76 files changed, 796 insertions(+), 380 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1.5 and upstream 1.9.1.6: 165 files changed, 3094 insertions(+), 1387 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1 and upstream 1.9.1.6: 1263 files changed, 64322 insertions(+), 67376 deletions(-) (though more than half of that relates to upstream bump of sqlite3 and the vorbis stack)

A few observations on the above data:

• There are less changes between upstream and Debian than between two consecutive upstream versions.
• Debian changes only account for changes to the xulrunner package, i.e. it excludes changes to Iceweasel itself, or to nspr or nss, but these are far less important in number.
• The number of changes applied decreases when switching to a new upstream branch. This is mostly due to patches getting applied upstream.
• Debian patches on a given branch are pretty stable. In other words, most of the work is done on the first release of the branch.

The latter used to be true, but is not anymore: xulrunner 1.9.1.6-2 added a lot of changes and is now up to: 98 files changed, 1107 insertions(+), 517 deletions(-). What happened ? will you ask me. A lot happened: the test suite, attempts at correctly installing C++ headers and IDL files, bug fixes. Work has also been done such that make clean/distclean doesn t leave stuff around and that xulrunner can be properly built twice in a row. Differences between 1.9.1.6-1 and 1.9.1.6-2 look like this: 31 files changed, 341 insertions(+), 167 deletions(-). Some were stolen from bugzilla (13 files changed, 162 insertions(+), 70 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=458631
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=519468
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=525047

Many others were sent:

• Test suite issues (2 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)):
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543441
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543438
• make clean/distclean issues (10 files changed, 28 insertions(+), 15 deletions(-)):
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541767
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541768
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541769
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541770
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541774
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543464
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543469
• Other issues (8 files changed, 112 insertions(+), 49 deletions(-)):
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=535990
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=538933
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542468
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542789
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542999

A few others were filed without a patch, as I felt a proper upstreamable patch needed discussion (3 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=538929
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542749

A few changes are related to the way we build and how we run the test suite (5 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)):

• Disable python-xpcom tests for now.
• Disable javaxpcom tests at build time when DEB_NO_JAR is unset.
• Synchronize config/rules.mk and js/src/config/rules.mk for check-sync-dirs.py (we used to localize the changes required in each config/rules.mk, but as we now run <core>make check they need to be synchronized)</core>
• Workaround for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455238
  

Finally, a few were related to the Debian changes history (2 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-)):

• Remove enable-system-lcms check, which somehow resisted merges with upstream
• Properly clean xulrunner/installer/*.system.conf

Going through the rest of the changes between upstream and the latest Debian release, we can split in 5 categories of changes:
Those that were picked from upstream, or sent and eventually applied in 1.9.2 or trunk (12 files changed, 68 insertions(+), 41 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331779 (this one was applied on Fennec)
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442196
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444918
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481350
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=491617
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=491646
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501241
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=502369
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=510040
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=514151

Those that were picked from bugzilla or sent there, but are not applied upstream for various reasons (29 files changed, 138 insertions(+), 209 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331776 (the part that remains in Debian needs to be sent in a new bug as this one is closed)
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349985
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356011
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428765
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434190 (we actually don t have a patch for this one, but a workaround is in bz#486681 below)
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435683
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=440908
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444440
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444477
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486681
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501300
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=506224
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=530534

Those that were reported but for which I wanted feedback for a proper fix, yet a patch was applied in Debian because this was necessary (6 files changed, 22 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445128
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501434
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528687

Those that are yet to be sent to bugzilla (15 files changed, 111 insertions(+), 54 deletions(-)):

• xulrunner-config: Give more appropriate cflags and libs
• Install applications in /usr/local/lib instead of /usr/lib
• Unhide release notes link in about: but only if app.releaseNotesURL is defined
• In about:, Don t put an about:blank link when there is no vendorURL defined
• Don t use static strings when setting environment variables
• Exec instead of uselessly forking in xulrunner launcher script
• Disable optimization on alpha for the url-classifier component (this will probably wait for the test suite failures on various architectures to be fixed)
• Build js shell and xpcshell against system libreadline
• Don t export js_SetTraceableNativeFailed, which is only used internally
• Increase stability and performance on mips and mipsel

And finally, the changes that are either Debian specific or not deemed upstreamable (30 files changed, 460 insertions(+), 77 deletions(-) ; this can sound huge, but see the details below):

• Feature changes:
  • Disable APNG support when system libpng doesn t support it (6 files changed, 71 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-) ; mostly #ifdef ing parts of the code related to animation)
  • Use application.ini from where the xulrunner-stub lies (1 files changed, 14 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) ; This one may be dropped and replaced by something totally different, possibly upstreamed)
  • Don t register plugins if the MOZILLA_DISABLE_PLUGINS environment variable is set (1 files changed, 25 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; very useful to isolate plugin-related crashes ; I don t think it s worth upstreaming considering the upcoming plugin-in-separate-process work)
  • Remove (un )registering system (1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 43 deletions(-) ; xulrunner versions that are installed by a package manager don t need to be registered, since the package does it already ; a variant that conditionally removes it may be upstreamable)
• Preferences changes:
  • Set javascript.options.showInConsole (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-))
  • Set DPI to system settings (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
• Cosmetic changes:
  • Install loading_16_grey.gif in classic.jar, and add an override for loading16.png (1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; Since we don t support APNG, we replace the most used one by its (ugly) GIF equivalent)
  • Add links for about:bugs and about:README.Debian in about: (3 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; I d like to make that something living in debian/extra-stuff)
• Integration changes:
  • Add another preferences directory for applications: defaults/syspref (1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-))
  • Add an rpath to libpyloader.so and _xpcom.so (2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; allows python xpcom to work out of the box)
  • Forward-port nsIBadCertListener from 1.8 (4 files changed, 266 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) ; This is necessary for at least galeon and kazehakase, because the new interface is useless for embedding applications)
• Build-related changes:
  • Allow to override the PYTHON_SO variable (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Put the crmf library before the NSS libraries (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Allow to build java jar files in 2 pass (2 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-))
  • Avoid libxpcom being excluded from linked libraries by -Wl, as-needed (1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-))
  • Ignore system libjpeg, libpng and zlib version checking (1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-))
  • Force to not use -fshort-wchar (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Add soversion to libmozjs (2 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) ; useful for couchdb, libjavascript-perl and others)
  • Don t build example component (1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Don t install system profile (1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-))

Note, the numbers in the various diff stats obviously don t add up, since some changes overlap. All that information doesn t account the few additional components added in debian/filemonitor and debian/extra-stuff, that account for nearly 600 lines (excluding licensing boilerplate), but I ll talk about these in another post. This analysis also helped spotting another harmless merge error (the first one was spotted a few weeks ago and just left the enable-system-lcms around, without any effect): a variable replacement in a Makefile that doesn t have any effect, since the 2 variables have the same value. Only a pointless 1 line change.

Last year, I was not able to attend FOSDEM due to last minute problems. However, this year I will be there and even attend the Debian for some periods ([http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/FOSDEM/2010]). I will bring my Openbrick NG with a standard Debian Lenny and probably a Babelbox installation. The Openbrick is a VIA C3 fanless computer. It is not very exotic but it is quite interesting to see this kind of hardware. For years, I have tried to build/use fanless computer. This is not a very popular topic but it introduces problems of heat and noise at a higher level. I am still setting up the Babelbox, which should have been a Debian Lenny RC1. I will try to upgrade it to Debian Lenny 5.0.3. See you at FOSDEM 2010.

Romain uploaded our first release of RProtoBuf to CRAN yesterday. RProtoBuf provides bindings for GNU R to the Google Protobuf implementation. Google Protobuf is (and I quote) a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format that is used for almost all internal RPC protocols and file formats at Google. RProtoBuf had a funny start. I had blogged about the 12 hour passage from proof of concept to R-Forge project following the ORD session hackfest in October. What happened next was as good. Romain emailed within hours of the blog post and reminded me of a similar project that is part of Saptarshi Guha's RHIPE R/Hadoop implementation. So the three of us--Romain, Saptarshi and I---started emailing and before long it becomes clear that Romain is both rather intrigued by this (whereas Saptarshi has slightly different needs for the inner workings of his Hadoop bindings) and was able to devote some time to it. So the code kept growing and growing at a fairly rapid clip. Til that stopped as we switched to working feverishly on Rcpp to both support the needs of this project, and to implement ideas we had while working on this. That now lead to the point where Rcpp is maturing in terms of features, so we will probably have time come back to more work on RProtoBuf to take advantage of the nice templated autoconversions we now have in Rcpp. Oddly enough, the initial blog post seemed to anticipate changes in Rcpp. Anyway -- RProtoBuf is finally here and it already does a fair amount of magic based of code reflection using the proto files. The Google documentation has a simple example of a 'person' entry in an 'addressbook' which, when translated to R, goes like this:

R> library( RProtoBuf )                      ## load the package
R> readProtoFiles( "addressbook.proto" )     ## acquire protobuf information
R> bob <- new( tutorial.Person,              ## create new object
+   email = "bob@example.com",
+   name = "Bob",
+   id = 123 )
R> writeLines( bob$toString() )              ## serialize to stdout
name: "Bob"
id: 123
email: "bob@example.com"
R> bob$email                                 ## access and/or override
[1] "bob@example.com"
R> bob$id <- 5
R> bob$id
[1] 5
R> serialize( bob, "person.pb" )             ## serialize to compact binary format

There is more information at the RProtoBuf page, and we already have a draft package vignette, a 'quick' overview vignette and a unit test summary vignette. More changes should be forthcoming as Romain and I find time to code them up. Feedback is as always welcome.

So I finally got off my lazy butt and started the paperwork to get a formal recognition of studies equivalence for a undergraduate studies (Licenciatura en ingenier a de software) via CENEVAL's Acuerdo 286 (licenciatura). Part of the paperwork involves filling the form I photographed and attached to this node. This is the utmost example of ber-redundant paperwork... Where it requires my personal data, some of the fields are:

CURP

Clave nica de Registro Poblacional, Unique Populational Registration Key. This is a string composed by:

• WOIG: First letter and first vowel after the first letter of my first family name, first letter of my second family name, first letter of my given name
• 760427: birth date, yymmdd
• H: Sex (H = male, M = female, I guess)
• DF: State or federative entity I was born in
• LSN: First consonant after the first letter of the first and second family name and of the given name
• 03: Deambiguation digits

So far, so good.

Age

Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It has my full birth date!

Sex

Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It is a specific field in it

Birth date

Man, you already have it literally on top of the field!

Nationality

This tramit is only for Mexicans, so... what's the point?

Birth place

The CURP states already the state or federative entity I was born... But I'll accept this one, as not all states have only one city as DF does

Quite a nice catalog of redundancies. As a cherry on top of the cake, the phone number states I should write my long distance phone code (LADA historically, Larga Distancia Autom tica, Automatic Long Distance) only if I am in any of the states. I can only ask myself why... Anyway... Lets continue filling paperwork. Grah. Hopefully I will be able to get my papers... somewhen in the next half century.

I'm starting to notice a pattern here:

• Google executives are on trial because some sorry excuses for human beings picked on a retarded person and posted the video to youtube: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8115572.stm - this one is simply preposterous. Going after the execs of a company who did nothing to aid, abet, condone or in any way facilitate the abuse in question is absurd, and if extended to other industries would mean that you could pretty much attack any company whose products happened to figure in a crime somehow. Kitchen knives, hunting rifles, golf clubs, even automobiles would seem fair game.
• Italy is going after "user generated content" sites like Youtube and wants to force them to register with the government if they wish to operate: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/italy-preparing-to-hold-youtube-others-liable-for-uploads.ars
• And last but not least, this hit piece in the normally respectable Corriere della Sera: http://www.corriere.it/economia/10_gennaio_28/mucchetti_4de4be8a-0be8-11df-bc70-00144f02aabe.shtml
  - it's in Italian, but the gist of it is that Mr Mucchetti really has it in for Google because they operate out of Ireland in the EU, whereas he believes they should be registered in Italy as a publisher, and subject to Italy's myriad rules, regulations, and, of course, taxes regarding publishing. Despite, well, not really publishing much of anything themselves. He mentions "tax evasion" charges that had been considered, because the Italian division of Google is not where the adsense revenue in Europe goes. I suppose he figures that since the ads are bought by residents of Italy, the money should somehow stay in Italy? He also huffs and puffs about Italy's antitrust laws, which, in the same piece, he admits were created with the express purpose of not touching existing companies (the market share limit was set higher than the share of the largest existing company). Perhaps he would do well to reflect on political schemes and carve-ups like that and think about why companies like Google go to Ireland, rather than Italy. He also makes some quick mentions of network neutrality, and rambles on a bit about how it's a battle between the "Obamanian, Californian, search engines" versus the telecommunications industry, in "the rest of the world and above all in Europe". And of course he uses a liberal sprinking of keywords like "globalization", "multinational corporations", and "deregulated" to attempt to paint Google in terms of being a big, evil company throwing its weight around. One wonders if there aren't more pressing problems with the Italian media industry, such as the prime minister owning a large chunk of it?

One way of seeing things is that politicians and businessmen in Italy noticed Google was actually making quite a bit of money, and even if they don't quite understand this internet thing, they want some of the loot. And while Google certainly is becoming big enough to be cause for worry and discussion, the moves against them in Italy do not seem anything like a rational response calculated to offset severe failures in the market. In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens. Maybe, after China, we'll see Google quit Italy as well?

I was interested to see Adnan Hodzic discuss life without evolution in the GNOME environment recently. I too use GNOME as my desktop environment (I sometimes toy with various tiling window managers before getting annoyed at something or other). My solution to the GNOME problem is to purge the gnome-desktop-environment package and instead my own local package gnome-desktop-minimal. This package is a meta-package which includes a smaller selection of GNOME packages, notably ignoring several that the gnome-core package would pull in such as eog - why install that when I prefer qiv or feh? If I believed we could agree on precisely which packages to include I would submit a bug to the gnome team "Please provide gnome-desktop-minimal" or similar. Still I suspect individual biases/preferences will make such a suggestion contentious at best and impossible to satisfy at worst. ObTitle: L on

At last night s #koha community hand-over meeting, it was felt that the LL/PTFS transfer could easily delay community control of the previous koha website for 3 months, so HLT should register a fan site for community members to put the latest Koha news and information on the web. So welcome to Koha-community.org which will mainly be about updates about new releases, support listings and the manuals until the previous website reflects the community again. Well done to all involved for getting it online so quickly!

Being a chess player (not a very good one), I ve always been intrigued by Swiss Tournaments. They are so practical, and ensure that even a lowsy player like myself, can play the same number of rounds as any other player. That s being inclusive! I ve played some knock-out tournaments (to me it meant being kicked off in the second or third round), and, given their nature, not-so-good players tend not to attend these tournaments (since their fun will, almost surely, end before long). Well, to solve a very similar problem, but not in any game championship, a co-worker suggested we could use a Swiss Tournament system. I liked the idea, but not being sure it could really solve the problem, I had to quickly implement something to test our data with so Ruby to the rescue! In no time we were up and running, and apart from minor issues that were being fixed along the way, I guess it s a pretty good implementation. You can checkout the code to get a feel of it. Of course, it doesn t follow any rules from any Chess or Go association (Wikipedia, after all, was my guide here), but it serves our goal. Being a proof-of-concept code, feel free to improve it (just tell me about it, will you?).

The South Australian government wanted to force bloggers to disclose their name and post-code when commenting on an election [1]. According to Adelaide Now this included posts on Twitter and Facebook [2]. As expected there was a strong public reaction to this and Michael Atkinson (state Attorney General) stated that the law was not going to be enforced and that it would be retrospectively repealed after the election [3]. Which might have been the end of the issue, but he also said All MPs and all parties voted for Electoral law. Hope Libs, Greens, Family First, Independents etc will join us to support repeal which seems to be a clear claim that the Greens supported that legislation. The Greens are pretty good about freedom of speech issues so I immediately enquired as to what was going on. The following is from a Greens media brief issued yesterday by the office of Mark Parnell MLC (the Greens MLC in SA) which was issued before the new law was retracted: Attorney General Michael Atkinson must urgently clarify the scope of new electoral laws covering public comment on the internet, in the wake of concerns that the impact will be much wider than expected.

With only weeks to go before the election kicks off, there is an urgent need for the Attorney General to explain exactly what his laws are
intended to capture, said Greens MLC Mark Parnell.

When this was debated in Parliament last year, we were told that the law change would only affect electronic versions of a journal . Now there is
concern that the laws could extend further, restricting public commentary on media sites like AdelaideNow and ABC Online, he said.

When the Bill was debated in the Lower House, Michael Atkinson originally wanted to include ALL material on the web. However, the Government
backed down on this by the time it got to the Upper House, with Minister Holloway saying:
The intention is to limit the coverage of section 116 as it applies to the internet to electronic versions of a journal rather than any electronic publication on the internet.

A journal was narrowly defined as a newspaper, magazine or other periodical . Now I don t have a great objection to a law that demands that journalists identify themselves when commenting on an election, and I think that most people would not care about that. It seems that Michael Atkinson is repeatedly changing his claims to try and match popular sentiment. He has got form for this sort of thing, his past achievements include censoring the censorship debate about an R18+ rating for computer games [4].

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/02/precision-vs-accuracy-in-identifying-people/
• [2] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/in-depth/labor-gags-internet-debate/story-fn2sdwup-1225825708827
• [3] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/victory-atkinson-loosens-gag/story-e6frea6u-1225826104175
• [4] http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/archives//010915.html

Andrew Dowdell and Michael McGuire have an interesting article in the Adelaide Now about censorship in the South Australian election [1]. The South Australian government wants to force everyone who comments on the upcoming SA election to provide their name and postcode. Attorney-General Michael Atkinson said the law was all about honesty . However a law that forces someone to not comment as Anonymous and instead forces them to use a name that sounds like something that might appear on a birth certificate and a postcode is not going to increase honesty at all. I think it s much better to honestly say I m not telling you my name than to lie and claim to be revealing your name. When the government forces people to give precise but totally inaccurate information it seems that it s going to be bad for everyone. It s even bad for the people who want to be identified, if most people who comment on a blog post are anonymous then I d like to be distinguished as the person who uses their real name! In the vast majority of cases the effort of determining who is using their real name will not be worth the effort. If someone comments on my blog under the name John Howard from Bennelong I will be very suspicious that they are using a fake name. But probably the vast majority of the English speaking population of the world wouldn t immediately identify such a name as fake. If someone wants to comment on my blog and they don t have a published phone number then I won t have any good way of identifying their address. If their name and postcode match an entry in a phone book then they still might be faking it they could take a random name from a phone book. If I was to demand that people who enter blog comments provide their phone numbers then I would have to pay the expense of phoning them as well as dealing with cases of people who are away from home, should I delay a blog comment for a month until the author returns from their European vacation? I have had a moderate amount of experience in writing letters to the editors of newspapers, and I have only once had an editor phone me to verify my details. In all other cases I guess I could have fooled them if I wished. I believe that there are already precedents regarding libel, if I approve a blog comment (or fail to unapprove it in a reasonable amount of time if it meats the automatic approval criteria) then I could be sued for libel if the contents of the comment are deemed to be suitably damaging. So if I was to try to get the real names of people who make comments on my blog then it wouldn t make it any easier for an idiot who wants to sue also anyone who wants to sue regarding an Australian political issue will probably find me a better target than most people who comment on my blog (a significant portion of whom are from the US and have much greater legal protections of their freedom of speech). Extending such a law to US based services such as Twitter is just silly. The stockholders and employees of a US based corporation can freely laugh at Australian censorship laws. Also it s pretty stupid to have a global scope on such laws, as a Victorian why should I care about the South Australian state laws? Implementing laws that can be easily broken inadvertently and can never be enforced against anyone who cares is just pitiful and will result in the MPs who vote for such laws being the object of derision. Vote for the small parties and independent candidates. Both Labour and Liberal want to censor us, put them in the second last two spots on your vote card! Now this law doesn t take affect until the writs for the March 20 election are issued. I encourage Australian bloggers to write bad things about the Liberal and Labour parties after the writs are released which are not libelous and which don t include your postcode. If they try to apply the new law then your blog post gets wide attention. If you plan to be a professional blogger then you could consider the $5,000 fine to be an advertising fee. If you don t want to be known then you can use a US based blogging service. I m going to continue to write political blog posts whenever I feel like it and I won t be telling anyone where I live. I will rely on the Streisand effect to save me. Update:
The politicians in SA have surrendered, the law in question won t be enforced and will supposedly be repealed after the election [2]. It will be interesting to see whether they really do repeal that law.

• [1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/labor-gags-internet-debate/story-e6frea6u-1225825708827
• [2] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/victory-atkinson-loosens-gag/story-e6frea6u-1225826104175

• Python 2.6 is now available in unstable and testing . Also, Python 2.6 is now a supported version (while writing these lines only in unstable). It will take at least a couple of weeks until 2.6 is the default version.
• Python 2.7 alpha 2 is available in experimental. It is not expected to be in squeeze.
• Python 3.1.1 also has been uploaded to unstable and it is co-installable with python 2.6. However, Python 3.1 is not a supported version and the Python Policy for handling 3.1 needs to be updated; this means some modules might not be available. You can try Python 3.1 by installing the package python3 and running python3 .

With a lot of help from Far and James Y Knight we have now the incredible disappearing common-lisp-controller v7. We went from 617 to 267 lines which in fact are only 193 lines excluding comments and empty lines...

Using the new features of cl-asdf version 1.500 and higher the implementation of CLC is now merely setting a few variables and putting a few files into place. As an added bonus I added clbuild integration, so now people can download and update libraries with ease.

Still todo:

• there is an bug (#567912) that the first call to (clc:clc-require :<foo>) will fail with clisp due to a loop where there is no looping...
• We still need to find a way to precompile libraries
• Because asdf is now taking care of placing the fasl file in the correct place, we cannot remove fasls for a specific implementation or library, so we nuke them all. Not optimal.

.

Still a nice improvement, I hope to find some time at fosdem to work on the other issues...

There is a *very important* patent case being deliberated tomorrow in NYC. I am SO tempted to ditch some important work to go. We will see Whatever case, I will be following it closely. Does anyone know if you are allowed to bring a laptop into federal court?

ACLU attorneys Chris Hansen and Sandra Park will argue the case before Judge Robert W. Sweet of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Court. Other co-counsel in the lawsuit, including Daniel B. Ravicher, Executive Director of PUBPAT, as well as some plaintiffs and expert witnesses will also attend the hearing. WHEN:
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
10:00 a.m. EST WHERE:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse
Judge Robert Sweet s Courtroom 18C
500 Pearl Street
New York, NY 10007

There is a *very important* patent case being deliberated tomorrow in NYC. I am SO tempted to ditch some important work to go. We will see Whatever case, I will be following it closely. Does anyone know if you are allowed to bring a laptop into federal court?

ACLU attorneys Chris Hansen and Sandra Park will argue the case before Judge Robert W. Sweet of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Court. Other co-counsel in the lawsuit, including Daniel B. Ravicher, Executive Director of PUBPAT, as well as some plaintiffs and expert witnesses will also attend the hearing. WHEN:
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
10:00 a.m. EST WHERE:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse
Judge Robert Sweet s Courtroom 18C
500 Pearl Street
New York, NY 10007

Well, I'd not call it a Mashup - it's actually backed by a custom database, a Xapian index for full text search and so on. To me, a true mashup would work without own server side code.Anyway, what it does is this:

• It gathers data from two dozen Google Calendars for the next few weeks
• Geocodes them and does full-text indexing (including the Geo information, so you can search for that, too.)
• Applies some magic formatting to the calendar data (making links clickable, allowing some basic styling)
• Pushes them as KML feed to a Google Maps application
• Markers on the map are aggregated and "clustered" (which is a simple proximity merging, which I wouldn't call clustering)
• The map is pre-centered and panned using Google geo-location information on the visitor to show the best region with hits. So if you are in a city I have data for, it show you your city. If you are in the US, it should try the whole US next, then fall back to the whole world.

It's using the Maps V3 API, currently in public testing, which seems to give quite some extra speed compared to earlier versions. I've also added two extra controls, a search box at the top center, and a "Go to" menu on the left, which uses the visitor position from Google.The data is coming from swing dancing calendars, so it's real world data, and you should get different results every day. Most of the data is from Germany, so that is where you can see the marker aggregation and these things in effect.Here's the prototype.There is still lots of things to do, but this is just my free time project, when I'm not at work, dancing or with my friends.

• Timezones need to be handled right. So I don't give you any guarantee that any event has the correct time shown. I believe it only works right for events in CET and visitors in CET right now. It's okay: I havn't though of how to handle time zone differences yet, and the JavaScript Date API is worthless anyway, so that requires quite some effort.
• Events in info windows aren't sorted by time yet
• Info window UI is bad, need to do pages there
• There is no way of choosing a different time query window except the next week. The backend does this already, it's just not in the UI.
• There is no "temporal navigation" tool
• No list view (well, actually there is one, but that is the old version)

I don't know yet if this will remain online, it's more of a toy project for me. Still it's cool to see where there are swing dancing events, and it's cool to be able to just zoom to another city and see where you could "hop by" for a dancing event while you're there. But there are just a lot of UI issues to solve to get this really usable, and I'm not much of an UI guy...P.S. if it doesn't work, that probably means I'm currently working on it. There is no staging, and no "production system".

On Wednesday I got DAM approval and since Saturday late evening I m officially a Debian Developer. Yay! :-) My thanks go to

• Christoph Berg (Myon) whom I know for more than a decade since we studied together, and who s career in Debian was way faster than mine, but who on the other hand probably knows me better than nobody else in Debian which made him the perfect advocate;
• Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) whom I know from my times at DaLUG and who was the friendliest Application Manager I could imagine he s probably also one of the fastest (8 days from application to AM report :-);
• Luca Capello (gismo), who was the most demanding but also most inspiring sponsor I ever had and who became a very good friend after we found each other over my package conkeror.
• Arne Wichmann (Y_Plentyn) for being my first drop-in center for Debian questions (like can I directly dist-upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0? :-);
• Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) who was always encouraging me to continue exploring new sides of Debian;
• Gerfried Fuchs (Rhonda) just for being there (and for being a package maintainer with good relations to upstream ;-);
• my coworkers at the IT Services Group of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, who always found new challenges in Debian for me to solve;
• and all those others who offered to also advocate me (e.g. Otavio Salvador) or sponsored my packages so far (or at least offered to do so), e.g. Alexander Wirt (formorer), Martin F. Krafft (madduck), Robert J rdens (jordens),

As Bernd cited in his AM report, my earliest activity within the Debian community I can remember was organising the Debian booth at LinuxDay.lu 2003, where I installed Debian 3.0 Woody on my Hamilton Hamstation hy (a Sun SparcStation 4 clone). I wrote my first bugreport in November 2004 (#283365), probably during the Sarge BSP in Frankfurt. And my first Debian package was wikipedia2text, starting to package it August 2005 (ITP #325417). My only earlier documented interest in the Debian community is subscribing to the lists debian-apache@l.d.o and debian-emacsen@l.d.o in June 2002. I though remember that I started playing around with Debian 2.0 Hamm, skipping 2.1 (for whatever reasons, I can t remember), using 2.2 quite regularily and started to dive into with Woody which also ran on my first ThinkPad bijou . I installed it over WLAN with just a boot floppy at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. :-) Anyway, this has led to what it had to lead to a new Debian Developer. :-) The first package I uploaded with my newly granted rights was a new conkeror snapshot. This version should work out of the box on Ubuntu again, so that conkeror in Ubuntu should not lag that much behind Debian Sid anymore. In other News Since Wednesday I own a Nokia N900 and use it as my primary mobile phone now. Although it s not as free as the OpenMoko (see two other recent posts by Lucas Nussbaum and by Tollef Fog Heen on Planet Debian) it s definitely what I hoped the OpenMoko will once become. And even if I can t run Debian natively on the N900 (yet), it at least has a Debian chroot on it. :-) A few weeks ago, I took over the organisation of this year s Debian booth at FOSDEM from Wouter Verhelst who s busy enough with FOSDEM organisation itself. Last Monday the organiser of the BSD DevRoom at FOSDEM asked on #mirbsd for talk suggestions and they somehow talked me into giving a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The slides should show up during the next days on my Debian GNU/kFreeBSD talks page. I hope, I ll survive that talk despite giving more or less a talk saying Jehova! . ;-) What a week.

Today, I was glad to attend the biggest demonstration ever in favour of the Cabanyal neighbourhood of Val ncia, a traditional district populated by the sea people of the city. After decades of oblivion, the Valencian right-wing government is trying to execute an old plan to open Valencia to the sea , which means demolishing around 450 traditional houses, many of them under protection for their cultural and architectural value, to extend a big avenue until the beach. Patrimonial loss aside, neighbours would be forced to other areas in the city (sadly, this has been happening for a decade already), making Cabanyal-Canyamelar the new posh neighbourhood for the richer class, destroying its identity and replacing it with a new set of skyscrapers.

The local government of PP, led by the infamous Rita Barber , knows that getting the anti-riot police in the neighbourhood and forcing very old men and women out of the houses where they were born isn't what many people like to see in the evening news. They also know time is their ally; this plan is many decades old, and there's no need to hurry now, so it's better to apply silent mafia tactics on the problem. It's very easy. First, stop investing a single euro in the area and monitor the slow but effective results of the degradation. Have a bit of patience, and after quite a few years, start promoting the illegal occupation of the increasing number of empty houses by marginal collectives which will bring the associated introduction of drug dealing in the area. This will surely make even more people leave or accelerate their decease. Keep repeating this process, until the Cabanyal is really fucked up. Now, start promoting the rehabilitation plan , which unavoidably includes splitting the neighbourhood in two pieces, and destroying a substantial part of it. Hopefully, many of the neighbours not directly affected by the demolitions will back the plan, they can't be blamed for being really fed up after all. Do all you can to confront those in favour to those against. In the meanwhile, start harrassing owners, make them end up selling their property at ridiculous prices and as soon as this happens, demolish it very quickly. Don't even bother with cleaning up the rubble: an increasing number of sites like this all over the place may be what makes a few more families give up and leave. In the end, you either have an empty neighbourhood, or you've managed to demolish all the annoying houses that block your shiny avenue. However, if a Supreme Court argues that the remaining houses still have some cultural value, you might want to consider changing your local law to unprotect those architectural elements. Today, many thousands of Valencians marched around Cabanyal to say enough! . From the street, I saw several old women out on the balconies of their beautiful houses, their eyes wet with tears, while they observed in silence all that many people who were fighting for them. There's still a long way to go in the courts until this is all over, but at least these people have a little more hope today than those in el Carme or La Punta, who ended up losing similar battles, years ago.

Since playing with the IBM Seer augmented reality software [1] I ve been lusting after a new mobile phone which can do such things. While the implementation of Seer that I tried was not of great practical use to me (not being a tennis fan I was only there to learn about computers) it was a demonstration of an exciting concept. It will surely be implemented by IBM in other venues that are of more immediate interest, and we can probably expect other vendors to write similar systems to compete with IBM. So the question is how to get a phone that will run such things well. The answer is probably not to rely on a contract plan for this, currently Vodaphone [2] is currently the only Australian telco that sells a phone that can run Seer, it is offering a HTC Magic (which was released in April 2009) on a $29 per month plan. A phone that is 9 months old isn t necessarily a bad thing, but the has been out for more than 6 months and has some significant benefits (such as a 5MP camera).

• My current provider is Three [3] and their cheapest plan is $29 per month (with or without a phone) which allows 200 minutes ($160) of free calls to other Three phones every month as well as up to $150 of other calls per month and 1GB of data. Calls cost 40c per 30 seconds plus 35c connection fee. Currently I m on a plan that gives me the same thing for the same price without data transfer but which includes a free phone. So it seems that the 1GB of data per month has an equal cost to a mobile handset (such as an LG Viewty).
• Virgin [6] has a $25 per month plan that gives $60 worth of calls and 300MB of Internet data with unlimited talk and text between members with the added bonus of unused talk and text credit being rolled over to the next month. The cost for calls is 90c per minute plus 40c connection fee, video calls are the same cost as voice calls!
• Vodaphone [2] has a $20 per month phone plan that allows up to $150 of calls per month with the option of either free calls to a single specified Vodaphone number or free calls in the evenings and weekends. They have a $4.95 special offer for 200MB of Internet data per month. Calls cost 44c per 30 seconds plus 35c connection fee.
• Telstra [4] has a $20 per month plan that only includes $20 worth of calls and which has call fees of 47c per 30 seconds plus 27c connection fee. They clearly don t compete on price, I think that there is no reason for using Telstra unless you live in some of the rural regions where they are the only provider to offer good service.
• Savvytel [7] charges $3.07 for GPRS Internet data so they can t be considered for an Internet enabled phone. But they do seem very economical for basic phone service.
• Optus [5] has a hopelessly broken web site that wouldn t give me any information on mobile phone pricing. My previous experience with Optus Internet makes me unlikely to do business with them again anyway.

So it seems that Three (my current provider) is probably the best option at this time. Virgin would save my $4 per month, but would only give me 300M of Internet data per month, and the Virgin limit of $60 per month of calls might not be enough for me. Vodaphone offers a deal for $25 that only includes 200MB of data, that might be enough for just phone use, but wouldn t be enough for tethering for laptop net access. I wonder how well tethering works on an Android phone, can you make a phone call while transmitting data from a tethered laptop? I find that with my Viewty when I receive an SMS or phone call it stops the net access. That makes a tethered Viewty impractical for some support tasks as it s fairly common that I need to talk to someone while logging in to their server I m sure that most people who use mobile Internet services regularly need to phone someone while using them. My current Three bill is $29 per month for the phone plan and $15 per month for Internet access. If I m going to buy phones outright instead of getting them with the plan then I want to reduce the overall amount of money I spend on phone plans and using tethering instead of a 3G USB dongle would allow this. I think that I can get something that comes close to my ideal mobile phone [8] (apart from being able to connect a keyboard, mouse, and monitor) if I import it from overseas. We really need more competition in the Australian mobile phone market. We have only two phone companies offering Android phones, Three is sold out of the obsolete model that they offer while Vodaphone has stock of an obsolete model.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/27/australian-open-android-seer/
• [2] http://www.vodafone.com.au/
• [3] http://www.three.com.au/
• [4] http://www.telstra.com.au/
• [5] http://www.optus.com.au/
• [6] http://www.virginmobile.com.au/
• [7] https://www.savvytel.com.au/
• [8] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/31/my-ideal-mobile-phone/