I was invited MOSS, Medical Free/Open Source Software Council, on last weekend. My speech was about the risk management of Debian. I believe we should more consider risks of FLOSS (at least as same as we choose proprietary commercial software) when we use FLOSS on business scene.

I won. I completed 50,000 words in time. Of course, only about 13,000 words are directly usable if and when I end up editing the story, the rest will have to be removed – they were imposed by the strict timetable and the explicit leave to lower one’s standards. But, bottom line: I WON! Ps. Please don’t ask to see the manuscript. It’s not that good Pps. My mother won, too. Conga rats!

I am about to give a presentation in Tacna, Per , at the VI SIIS, Universidad Nacional Jorge Basadre Grohmann. What is different this time? That I am waiting for the conference to start, sitting in my nice workplace at IIEc-UNAM. Yes, I was supposed to go and talk there (and was quite excited to go to the I ConclaDeb at Arequipa last week). Anyway, why cancel my talk, having the technical means to carry it out?
Less than five minutes from now we will start. There is only one thing I regret: As a complete multimedia neophyte, I could not suggest an application to do this from within Linux - We will be using MSN for the presentation. I have a friend's computer on my desktop, and MSN worked great (and at the first try!) for this - Who can suggest me a free alternative for doing this (specially taking into account that I cannot go to the other end and do much configuration on their side - It must be something speaking a standard format)
Anyway... Time to talk! I'll have my paper (Spanish only, sorry - Analizadores morfol gicos aplicados al lenguaje natural, aplicaciones para la b squeda de informaci n) online. Right now I only have my presentation there, but in a couple of hours, the paper should be there as well.

From CBC News: Harper reopens same-sex marriage debate:

Some observers say the Tory stance against gay weddings cost the party crucial support in urban Ontario and among younger voters. But Harper may have raised the issue to pre-empt his critics, who say he's intolerant and has a secret agenda.

At the beginning of this month we have received the assignment from the local tax office stating that the ffis e.V. is exempted from several tax classes. Apparently we have managed the association in a proper way and are able to continue so in the future. This letter is also an implicit statement that the association may write tax-deductible donation receipts for the next five years which is very good news. In another letter the last modification to our charter of the association has been approved by the legal office. We are now able to plan the next plenum which should take place soon anyway. Our plan is to hold the meeting in December.

I use evilwm as my window manager. I like it; I mainly end up with a whole bunch of xterms and only a handful of graphical apps (Firefox, Psi, xmms and GKrellM). evilwm's minimal decorations mean I can fit everything nicely on my screen without clutter, and the virtual desktops let me have various separated out bits (eg Firefox gets a full desktop to itself). What I would like however is some form of session management. I'd like to be able to shutdown down my machine and when I restart it have my X setup look similar to when it was shut down, rather than having to start up a dozen apps and position them as I like them. I know I can do software suspend, but that doesn't cover kernel/library upgrades. I had a play with xsm, but although it could start up my xterms it didn't place them correctly. And didn't seem to restart Firefox, but I didn't poke that hard once I realised the xterms weren't getting placed. Am I doing something wrong? Do I need some different window manager setup? I think I'd rather live with having to place stuff myself rather than pull in large amounts of GNOME. I've previously used Window Maker and Fluxbox for prolonged periods of time - can either of those do what I want better?

Dear Lamerweb, If you’re going to bitch about a stupid internetism, using another stupid internetism to do so (I refer to the plzdiekthx bit here) does not help matters any. Thank you, please drive through.

And while googling for more information, I happened upon this page. My favorite quote is, “The encryption algorithm used in the TI DST tags is an unpublished, proprietary cipher that uses a 40-bit key.” Ah yes, 2005 and we still haven’t learned what makes for good crypto.

I received a new Debit/ATM card in the mail the other day. I didn’t think anything of it, until I looked at my old card; it wasn’t due to expire for another 2 years. Ok, that’s odd. I looked closely at the new card, and it said “PayPass” on it. I looked closer at the packaging that arrived with it, and discovered what this PayPass thing was. “…Debit MasterCard Card with PayPass has built-in chip and antenna technology, as well as a standard magnetic stripe. The card and specially-equipped PayPass terminals communicate payment card details using very short range radio waves.” At this point (and at the risk of being compared w/ RMS), I started to feel uneasy. So this new card has an RFID chip? That means I don’t actually need to swipe it, I can “pay” by just being in range of a reader? Wait a minute, this is a Debit card; that means I’m not afforded the protections that a normal credit card offers. If someone manages to swipe $200 from me simply by walking close to me, that comes right out of my bank account; I can’t just do a chargeback. That’s money that gets stuck in limbo while I argue w/ the bank about my lost funds. As a matter of fact, I don’t even *need* a Debit card; all I really use this for is an ATM card, I have credit cards for actually paying for things. Some googling turned up the actual range:
“The PayPass card’s embedded tag operates at 13.56 MHz and has a short read range of 2 to 3 centimeters.”
So, it looks like someone would have to be very close to read it, but it certainly seems to be a real possibility. Grr. I doubt there’s any way to turn this off. This is actually kind of scary. I had planned to cancel this bank account soon anyways, but this is simply more motivation to do so. Hopefully my new bank doesn’t consider this a good idea.

This essay is part of my Finnish criminal justice series. See the introductory essay for more information and an overview of the Finnish criminal court system. In this essay I will be presenting an overview of the Finnish penal code – the principles, and the measurement of punishments. I will write separate essays on the actual crimes recognized by the penal code. As always: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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I think I agree with Ian Holsman's analysis of this article on "How to make money from open source" - actually I would go a bit further. Ian says that you don't need to be a committer to make money from open source. Indeed, in some ways the big question in terms of "open source economics" has been how to more tightly couple the people doing the valuable work with some percentage of the rewards - at least enough to let them keep hacking. While it's evident that open source works, and that there are big economic benefits involved, it's a tough nut to crack in terms of renumeration for people working on stuff. Selling software is, if nothing else, a really simple mental model that is very easy to grasp - you write software, you sell it. If it's good, people buy it and you can either reinvest that money, or take it as profit. Open source software that scratches an itch has immediate benefits to the author, especially if the author manages to get other people on board to help out. But the category that's not really covered is the group of people writing something "out of the blue" because they think it's a cool idea. If it is, and it takes off, they really aren't guaranteed anything at all for their troubles. I don't see too many ways around this while still playing by the rules of the game. There are some clever ideas like dual licensing, but they aren't applicable everywhere. I suppose you could declare software a public good and get the government involved in its production, but I'm not very enthusiastic about that... In any case, it's an interesting topic, and perhaps some day clever entrepreneurs will find better ways of financing the production of open source software.

Repeat with me: I HATE HARDWARE! My laptop's hard disk drive (iBook G4, purchased last year before going to Debconf4) has 369K+ load cycles completed, which means it has a very good chance of starting to fail some time soon. Great. Specially not because of loosing data or anything, but because changing a disk on one of this bastards is like finding a needle on a hayloft. Harry Potter's books are getting insane as a movie source. The Goblet of Fire is quite lengthy, but when turned into a movie it becomes a complete piece of craziness. During the whole movie you feel like someone is talking behind your ear: "run, run, cut this, run, not time for elves, no time for tournaments, forget about this, does not fit (mao, anyone?), run,... Arf arf arf, YES! We made it 2.5h !!!" It leaves me wondering how on earth they are going to turn the 5th "most boring HP book in the saga" book into a movie, and how they will manage to turn the 6th one into a 2.5h movie again, without dropping half of the superinteresting things happening there. Oh, well, I guess I have to read the books again.

John Ringo is known for writing military science fiction. I therefore was a little surprised to find out about Ghost, which, according to what I knew at the time, is a James Bond story, set roughly in the real world. Well, I’ve always liked “special agent” stories, so I read this book. First impressions: Interesting stories; it was more a collection of connected novellas than a novel. Certainly not for everyone: there is a lot of explicit BDSM (read: very rough but consensual sex) and even an explicit aggravated rape scene. Single agent overpowering multiple terrorists. Nuclear explosions (I’ve said it before, a book which depicts a nuclear explosion, cannot be all bad). More than one miracle recovery. A protagonist who certainly is not a good person. An overall first impression was of a former military guy writing out a fantasy, sort of literary self-satisfaction. I didn’t think much good of this book at that time. I later found out that this book was intended to start a new series. Now, I had actually heard of a follow-up book, but I had figured it was more of the same, and I wasn’t interested. Instead, the tone shifts a lot. The Ghost becomes a significant part of the main character’s backstory, but that’s all that it is: backstory. I have now read a part of the sequel, and it has changed my prespective on Ghost. As a standalone book, Ghost is a horrible book, and I would not recommend it, because the brutality in it has no meaning. But as the prequel to a different series, it gets meaning; it becomes a sort of character study of a man who has vicious demons inside him and is barely able to control them, and channel them for doing good (and once loses control of them). So, Mike Harmon is an ex-SEAL, discharged on medical grounds, who is a conservative jerk according to his fellow history undergrads. He likes to stalk young coeds, and one day, as he is doing so, he accidentally witnesses a kidnapping. He follows, and discovers a terrorist plot. He kills the bad guys (most of them, anyway), and follows up on the trail of other, already kidnapped women. He hitches a ride on a plane and ends up … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. I’ll rate this book 8/10, with the warning that the book contains explicit descriptions of extreme sex and even rape, in addition to the usual jamesbondesque explosions and stuff.