Today, I took part in a tour to the Intelligent Sensor-Acuator-Systems (ISAS) department here at the University of Karlsruhe. They work on a project for extended-range telepresence. At first it is like a regular Virtual Realtiy device: Head-mounted display for the 3D view of the world and an acoustic tracking system to record the user’s curret position and orientation. While this is a nice toy by itself, the guys from ISAS have developed a system where you can walk through inifinitely large virtual places, including a virtual museum, a pacman game and our cafeteria, rendered by quake, and still stay in the 5x5m room at the university.This works by bending the space, at least the space you percieve: The computer calculates a path that resembles the path you want to go with regard to length and turns, but bends it a barely noticeable bit, thus guiding you in circles around in that room. This guiding is done by shifting the view on the display, making you counter-act that shift and thus turning. A bit like dizziness, when you think you tip over and you move the other way.This works pretty well, at least for movement at regular speed and not too many unpredictable turns - the less predictable the path you take in the virtual world, the less optimal is the path you will take in the real room, thus having stronger and more noticable bends.To me, this seems to be the first step to a world like the one Tad Williams describes in his “Otherland”-Series. Together with what promising but also threatening advances are made on the neurological front, e.g. retina prothesises, “real” virtual reality for mass comsumption is not so far away. And even more improvements in the human-device-interface field have been made: Remote control of human movement by stimulation of the equilibrium sense was sucessfully tried in Japan (German link).I have more pictures of today’s presentation and check out the video on the Karlsruhe telepresence installation.

I use Gmail to filter my mail. This has been the case since June 2005. I usually have about 1000 SPAMs in the SPAM mailbox. Recently I’m up to almost 1500. Sigh. I noticed alioth was spammed pretty bad. That’s one reason. I get quite a quite a few SPAM in my inbox which I need to manually send to the SPAM folder. That’s getting worse. Thankfully no HAM is found (knock wood) nowadays in Gmail’s SPAM folder. There was a monster thread over at Linux Users Victoria about Microsoft Exchange. For some odd reason the LUG doesn’t want the mailing list archived. Anyway I made a bit a of a tangent on the thread when I recommended people and companies outsource their mail to external hosts. The savings can be incredible. Though if employees send a lot of attachments, it can be quite painful.
Especially as Australia is using “Pay as you Go” style Internet. Setting up mail servers nowadays is too hard. In my (contracting) experience most offices are incapable of running their own mailservers. Currently I have a painful problem with my Debian (unstable) T30 laptop with Debian’s default exim4. Mail seems to get frozen if I don’t find a net connection within a couple of days when writing email offline. Finally here is a cheerful link of computing pictures to ease the pain.

I have a picture of this space on my computer and, for the life of me, I cannot remember the name of it. If anyone can identify it, please email me. p.s., AJ, I thought we all agreed NIv2 would be named NINJA?

There's this artists collective on St-Laurent, across from La Sala Rossa. They call their place Casa Magica, and it's really quite groovy. They've got this cozy living area with an open plan. The kitchen is separated from the living room with a tiled countertop someone built themselves. It's decorated in that way with splashes of paint, splashes of light, and furnishings that look like they grew there. I showed up at this place to meet some people in the Free Software world. I've been in Montr al for about a year and I still don't know very many hackers in the city. So when I got invited to Les 24h SQIL, I decided to show up and meet some people. I went up St-Laurent to a non-descript red door with a poster about SQIL on it. "This must be the place," I thought as I tried the door. Upstairs, I was greeted by a living room full of random people: some sitting in front of computers, some chatting away, and one guy fiddling with a projector. I wandered around in a state of confusion until I was introduced to Robin. Robin Millette seems to do a lot of work for FACIL, which is an organisation for promoting free content in Quebec. He introduced me to a bunch of people, like Simon Raven whom I helped with finger-ldap. I met Fran ois from Quebec City, who was interested in Nitix. There was Nicolas who is a Java developer that writes web-based applications. And other people like Alex, Yan, Marco and Matthieu who seemed nice but I can no longer remember what they do. I returned later in the week to Robin's birthday party where I happened to meet Fabien, who is a consultant that does work on Firefox and Yannick who's a Ph.D. student at McGill. We had a good time talking about quantum computing and how to design a programming language for quantum computers. Good geeky times were had.

<dilinger> sucker
<Clint> you just wait until you’re infested with mp3s
<dilinger> i wear my mp3 collar
<dilinger> it has my name and phone number engraved on it, too. in case i get lost.
<Clint> have you had your shots?
<dilinger> yes. i’ve been spayed and/or neutered, too. i highly recommend it; it was an enlightening experience
<Clint> you should blog about that There, done!

Several years ago (it seems like more than three) I was a student at Brown University. In addition to studying computer science and mathematics, I also took a bunch of courses in the music program, including three years of piano lessons. When I graduated, I gave a recital for friends and family, plus any members of the public who happened to wander in (not many did). And, this being the 21st century, we recorded it and I got a CD of the recording. I edited it, split it into tracks, and handed some copies out to my friends and professors as a going-away present.

Now I'm no longer a student of any sort, and Brown seems a lifetime away, but the music is still sitting on my hard drive. I've always meant to make it available for download, but I couldn't figure out how to get past technical issues of space or bandwidth. A few days ago, though, I had a rather belated bright idea: maybe the Creative Commons project would have links to places where you can host your music for free. Lo and behold, it turns out that the Internet Archive lets anyone upload audio to their server! Better yet, they're even willing to store lossless encodings -- more than willing, actually; FLAC is the preferred encoding of uploads.

So, to make a long story short, click here to hear my bad piano playing. :-)

Sometimes I use festival as a text-to-speech engine. But it supports only non-Japanese languages. Then I can find a new engine with Japanes support, named GalaTalk. It is a part of production produced by Galatea Project. If I have a spare of time, I'll try to package it.

OMG! I would have never believed this if I hadn't seen the videos with my own eyes: Richard M. Stallman of GNU and Free Software fame singing various songs, and Gilberto Gil, famous musician and currently Brazil's minister of culture, jamming on his guitar. Unbelievable. (via Boing Boing and netzpolitik.org )

The opening of AnimeFest went great - there were few cosplayers and a huge lot of general public. Anime is on the high.
The fest was opened by two cute girls - one of them was speaking in Latvian and the other in Russian. At first they were translating each others lines both then they diverged and even started a small dispute. You had to know both languages to "get" the joke, but I think most of the people in Latvia do know Russian enough for that.
The opening program consisted of "Howl's Moving Castle" - a truly wonderful anime movie from the same director as the "Spirited Away". A great fairy tail as expected from Studio Ghibly.
Also:
I have no idea why, but I would like to check out half of it, please :)

I just uploaded a belpic that compiles on stable to my people.debian.org webspace, so that people using stable will be able to use belpic, too, and might be able to use their digital ID card to sign emails, or use the tax-on-web thingy of the Belgian government. The idea is to get this into backports.org, but I can't reach Norbert Tretkowski ATM, so it'll have to wait 'till he reads his mail. One thing is weird, though. To be able to build belpic for unstable, I had to change some things like (unsigned char **) in the code to (const unsigned char **), or it wouldn't compile. Now that I try to compile it on stable, I apparently have to reverse those changes, or it won't compile. Probably some definitions of one (or more) of the build-dependencies changed. Not that it's a problem, of course, but it is silly. On a slightly related note, Zetes N.V. (belpic's upstream) suggested I go ahead and maintain packages for them to put on the Government's website, too, so that people would be able to install it by downloading from belgium.be. This wouldn't just be the Debian packages, but also packages for other distributions (probably RPMs, then). Sounds like fun. This isn't at all official yet, but it might be some time from now.

Yet another thread on keyring updates in Debian has gotten me thinking about key signatures, what they really represent, and other associated topics. For those of you who might not know what I'm talking about, a brief primer. Before someone can be admitted as a Debian Developer, they have to have an OpenPGP key (practically, a GPG key) signed by a current Debian Developer. That is, someone who is currently a DD has looked at a photo ID, compared the photo to the face offering a key fingerprint, and compared the name on the ID to the name on the key. If they all match, we have a signature. The other qualification for becoming a Developer is going through a process designed to determine whether you have the required competencies. Since this testing process is conducted electronically, not face-to-face, the primary means of identifying the person behind the answers is via the OpenPGP key they used throughout the process. So, what do we have out of this process? Two things, that I can determine:

• The signature says that someone who Debian already trusts (the current Developer) affirms that the name on the key belongs to someone who has the same name.
• The holder of the relevant key has passed the necessary competence checks. Effectively, the New Maintainer process certifies that a particular key is competent, to all intents and purposes. This is important, because it's that key that gives you all of the "privileges" associated with being a DD -- voting, package upload, etc. Your identity is effectively that key.

So, the problem at issue is this -- what do you do when you lose control of that key? You lose it, or it gets compromised, or it expires (whoops!), or whatever. For all intents and purposes, when you lose control of your key, you no longer have an identity, in Debian terms. Generating a new key (and hence identity) is straightforward -- a quick invocation of gpg and you're away. Unfortunately, all that gets you is a pile of bits. There's nothing that intrinsically links you to that key. That's what other people's signatures on your key is for. Then, it comes time to get Debian to accept your new key as belonging to you. This is a lot harder than trying to convince the RTA (DMV.en_AU('New South Wales')) to give you a replacement drivers' licence. Why should it be? You're doing effectively the same thing -- "I am $FIRSTNAME $LASTNAME, give me my (licence upload privileges)". The difference is that, in the Debian case, all of our identity is effectively tied up in the key we use to go through NM. The person behind the key is somehow secondary to that whole process. So when the key completes NM, we record it in the "people who can upload" keyring. When a new key (which is prima facie completely untrusted) should be put into the keyring, we need to ensure that it is qualified. How can that key prove qualification? Well, we can send the new key through NM (dear ghods, no!) or refer to the source document (as it were) -- the human being. We're looking for consistency between the person between the two keys. That's trickier than it looks at first glance. Why? The big one is the non-uniqueness of $FIRSTNAME $LASTNAME (or even $FIRSTNAME $INITIAL $LASTNAME, for those so blessed). Google for yourself one day, and you'll see what I'm talking about. Anyone who has the same name as you could, at first instance, pretend to be "you" (for some values of, anyway). It might seem fairly unlikely, but there are two DDs with easily-mistakable names, out of a pool of 1,000 or so. The probabilities are not in our favour on this one. Then, of course, there's fake IDs, which are a whole other ballgame. How does the government get around the problem of name clashes and identity-theft-by-ID? By using other metadata about you to more uniquely identify you. Your date of birth, street address, perhaps even a general physical description -- all of these can help to disambiguate all of the identically named people out there. Debian can't use that, though, since that metadata isn't initially collected, and so it can't be rechecked later. This does suggest a bit of a solution, though. I said that Debian doesn't collect that info, but that's not entirely true. There is an optional repository of Developer contact details stored for other DDs to access, so we've got something to work from. The Developer updates their own details (whatever they feel comfortable entering). But, of course, people signing your key need to know about all that before they sign the key, so they can check (for example) your residential address and date of birth on your photo ID. You might ask "but how is the info the developer themselves entered accurate?", and that's a good question. The answer is that the legitimate developer entered that info, so if someone with the same name matches that data, then it's reasonable that it's still the same physical person. It's not a real good solution, though. Not all developers enter full metadata (and I can understand why they don't want to). People also often forget to update their details, too, which could quickly cause all sorts of problems. What is a good solution, then? We could always go with a bit of biometrics -- if there was any solution that was sufficiently cheap, reliable, and distributed enough to be used to identify 1,000 developers distributed across the globe to a reasonable standard of reliability. I'll wait for a minute while you finish laughing and wipe your eyes dry. I have to say, I'm stumped. I'd hoped, while writing this, that by the time I was finished I would have worked something out. But nope, it's a problem that's way beyond me. But I think I've got a much clearer handle on the problem space, so with a bit of luck, my subconscious (or someone else's) will eventually produce a sensible answer.

So, what’s with all the broken laptop hard disks?! I have two laptops running almost all day (one as a cheap simple server with built-in UPS) and one as workstation. But in the last, say, 2 years I had to replace the 2.5” (laptop) hard disk drives 4 times! Since laptop HDDs cost a lot more per megabyte than normal 3.5” drives, this was becoming an expensive issue for me. So, I geared up S.M.A.R.T on both machines and did some investigating. The major issue seems to be the load/unload system that is integrated into more and more of these drives nowadays. The heads will automatically be retracted (parked) after some idle time to decrease the risk of shock damage and reduce power consumption. However, this seems to be a bad combination with Linux. I have not done any research into the specific implementation of the journaled file systems that I use (ext3, XFS), but it can something to do with it. It seems the heads of almost all laptop disks I encounter are continuously unloaded and loaded instead of around 5 times per hour. It seems a hard disk drive is made to allow for 300.000 load/unload cycles, after that the mechanism wears of so that inaccurate moving can occur and the platters can be damaged because of a small miss. Now, my drives had 650.000, 1.2000.000 and 900.000 before bad sectors and completely erratic behaviour start to occur, but this was within a year. My most recent broken drive had about 3 load cycles per minute, this means 180 per hour. With things going bad at 600.000, the disk thus had a lifetime of 3333 hours (138 days). This is ridiculously short. So I’ve turned APM of all my drives off (hdparm -B254). Better a small risk of bad sectors when dropping my laptop than having to replace my disk within the year. Also note that my brand new Western Digital disk has spent 14.000 of its load cycles within the first 15 hours that I was busy with installing Debian and recovering backups! If someone has more information about this, please let me know.

SableVM SDK for Java is back with 1.13-pre1 ! Guess what---a new shiny prerelease of SableVM SDK suite for Java is out for you to have some serious fun with it! The main point of this release is getting new GNU Classpath 0.19 integrated. Tests show that with the updated class library Swing apps look waaaay better. Kudos to the GNU Classpath hackers and contributors! Installation of SableVM SDK is as simple as it can be. As usual you need recent GTK and a few other libraries and tools available as packages for most distributions. The non-commonly used elements (like libffi, libpopt) are included in SableVM SDK to cut the hassle of installing it to minimum. Basically all you need to do is to fetch the SableVM SDK 1.13-pre1 tar archive, unpack it, run ./configure && make and su; make install. With the default settings in /usr/local/lib/sablevm you'll find a fairly complete JAVA_HOME like environment. Enjoy! And please let us know of your successes and problems by sending as an email to sablevm-user@sablevm.org. This will ensure future SableVM SDK releases work better for you! In other news SableVM Project team has been silently working since many months on new JVM features that will start showing up in upcoming releases after 1.13. Stay tuned!

The Fahrplan (yes, that's German — it means "schedule") of the 22C3 (the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress) is online now. Joi Ito will deliver the keynote speech titled "Private Investigations". Here's a small (really!) selection out of the plethora of great lectures:

• Understanding buffer overflow exploitation
• Hacking CCTV
• Peer-to-peer under the hood
• The intelligent web searcher
• RFID - overview of protocols, librfid implementation and passive sniffing
• VoIPhreaking
• European politics concerning digital rights
• Biometrics in Science Fiction
• Software Patenting
• A way to fuzzy democracy
• Military intelligence for terrorists(tm)
• Black Ops Of TCP/IP 2005.5
• Robots for fun and research
• Search Engines - Oracles of the Information Society
• Secure Code
• Literarisches Code-Quartett
• Attacking the IPv6 Protocol Suite
• Towards the first Free Software GSM Phone
• Esperanto, die internationale Sprache
• "Xbox" and "Xbox 360" Hacking
• How to construct Utopia
• The truth about Nanotechnology
• Free Software and Anarchism
• Hacker Jeopardy
• Breaking Down the Web of Trust
• Access to Knowledge
• Bluetooth Hacking - The State of The Art
• The very early Computer Game History
• Security Nightmares 2006

Four days, four rooms, lectures from 12:00 am to 12:00 pm every day. Need I say more?