There is a lot of career advice related to writing CVs in books and floating around the net. Unfortunately almost all of it is tailored to permanent positions. Some advice that I have seen includes researching the company you are applying for and emphasising your experience in related fields. This probably makes some sense if you have targetted a major company to be your employer for the rest of your life. But if you are after contract work (which incidentally tends to pay better than permanent positions) then it’s not going to work. About half the time when applying for contract work you won’t know the name of the company that is receiving your CV until after they have decided whether to grant you an interview. Contractors therefore need to write their CVs to have broad appeal (emphasising common technologies such as C programming and skills such as debugging), and to appeal to a recruiting agent. Some people recommend writing your CV in MS-Word to support agencies and potential employers who are not competent enough to open other file formats (such as PDF and HTML). I strongly disagree with this advice, most contract positions are advertised by multiple recruiting agencies and it would be best for you to be represented by the most competent agency. Therefore having an agency staffed by incompetent people not represent you because they can’t figure out how to read a HTML or PDF file is a good thing! The same applies for employers, while applying for the best paying contracts will often result in some strange and unpleasant working conditions having a manager who can’t open a PDF or HTML file is likely to result in something that is unusually bad - run away! Recruiting agents will often give specific requirements for a CV. Sometimes these requirements are a little odd (such as demanding that references to C programming be removed from a CV when applying for a Unix sys-admin job), but being merely a little odd is no reason to boycot the agency. To solve this I wrote my CV in M4 macros to generate HTML code. When I wanted to apply for a position I would just type make to compile the M4 source into five or more different CVs. Sometimes a recruiting agent would request two versions when applying for one position, it’s a strange request but when five versions were compiled in one pass it was easy to satisfy it. If I liked PDF I could have written M4 macros that generate TeX and have the make process convert TeX to PS and then PS to PDF. Unfortunately I can’t share any macros because the code was not of particularly high quality (which is a little ironic) and because it’s tightly tied in to my CV. The best piece of advice that I can give to anyone trying this is to get columns sorted out as the first issue. If you want to have some lists of programming languages, lists of OSs, and lists of hardware, etc in your CV then it usually works best to have two columns in the page. If the largest list is removed then the other lists need to be shuffled around to get the column lengths to match. Doing this in HTML required some ugly M4 macros. There probably is a better way of doing this in TeX (but I’m really not good at TeX and can’t give advice about it). James has some interesting advice about writing CVs. I think that his most useful points are:

1. Use file names based on your name so that agents can find your CV in the directory full of CVs


2. Include complete contact details. One thing he doesn’t mention is that you should buy a mobile phone for the purpose of getting a job even if you don’t want one for any other reason. A 5% difference in pay for a year’s work would cover the cost of many mobile phones and the difference between a good job and a bad one is likely to be more than 5%. If you are afraid of brain cancer then don’t worry, if you only spend a few minutes a month talking to recruiting agents then you are at no risk.


3. Don’t start a sentence in the career history section with the word worked - everything in that section will be related to where you worked in the past. It seems obvious in retrospect but I realised that I have made this mistake on my CV.

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With the help of open clipart, I made my first webcomic! On a related note, Mika and I will be holding something of a mead market this Saturday to celebrate moving into our new place and the grand opening of the Acetarium 2.0 (and its new Web 2.0 webpage). We'll also be celebrating my finishing up my degree at MIT and the end of Mika's first semester at HSPH. If you know us, are local to Boston/Camberville, and haven't been invited yet, it's probably an oversight. Contact me first and we'll work it out.

For the last few weeks, I've been trying to participate in Project 365. For those that don't know about it, it is the idea of taking one picture a day in order to accomplish.. something. I'm mainly just doing it for fun, and in order to improve my picture-taking skills with my camera phone. I have it walking around everywhere basically, so when I see something interesting, I try to have my phone at the ready. Some times I just take pictures of random stuff, but others are more interesting.

I've found that it's pretty useful for me. If you see the set, you can almost notice a perceptible increase in quality of the photos. It may just be because I'm taking 2-3 photos per day and choosing the best one, or I may be actually improving in my photo-taking abilities. Hopefully by the end of the year, the set of mine will actually have more than 300 photos in it.

The idea of taking a picture a day is quite interesting to me, if only because if you asked me what I was doing last year this time, I would probably give you a general idea because my life is basically boring - I work in an office, even when I'm at school. This way I might have some idea or get reminded.

I do have a couple of kinks that I would like to work out when I'm doing it though - when I download my photos through Bluetooth using my phone, it sets all of the creation dates to the time that I transfer the photos instead of the time that I took the photos. This means that I need to fiddle with the "taken on" date when I finish uploading the pictures - there's no way to use the Flickr Uploadr to set the date. This, and the horrible VGA camera that I have in the phone make it tempting for me to buy a new phone with a better camera and tools for transferring. Also, some days I just stay in, and don't do anything interesting, so I don't have anything interesting or different to take a picture of. I'm thinking of just taking a self-portrait on those days, but I'm not sure that it would be interesting enough.

At debconf7, I brought my (brand-new) flute, and urged other people to bring their instruments, too; and on tuesday, we had some fun playing together. As we were playing, people started entering, and suddenly we had an audience. What fun. Anyway. Dave Noble had the idea of videotaping most of it, and this ended up being uploaded to the meetings archive along with the other videos. As I checked today, the high-quality version has been uploaded as well. Which is way cool. Thanks, videoteam!

Thanks James. No Tags

Michael Hirschorn in this month’s Atlantic reduces my generation’s entire cultural zeitgeist to a single word: quirk.

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It s easy for David Cross s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the 90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn t mean you should.

Hirschorn makes a fair point which, I think, can be restated that much of the content I enjoy is really just candy. The Atlantic seems to have recently figured out its readership (or at least figured out me). Hard to Swallow (by B.R. Myers, who more typically writes about Korean issues) is a pointed moral critique of modern food lovers (chowhounds?) and food writing (including Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, much read by my contemporaries). If I weren’t already a vegetarian, I might take umbrage. “Insider baseball” pieces on Karl Rove and Michael Gerson are also excellent, and in the case of the former quite timely. To wrap up this encomium, props to the magazine for its clean new website design, which I believe premiered today, and for including an embedded Youtube video in the online version of the quirk article.

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I recently met the wonderful Laura Norris. Inspired by that delightful sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, one of Laura's many worthy endeavors is the creation of a comprehensive list of animals that are also verbs. With help from Daf and a few other folks at Debconf, I've expanded the list considerably and put it into my user space in Wikipedia. You might want to help out with wiki formatting, links to relevant articles or, of course, additions of animals that are also verbs that we have missed. When it's done, I'll make a (foolhardy?) attempt to move it into the article namespace. The list has a temporary wiki-home here:

User:Benjamin Mako Hill/List of animals that are also verbs

It's been fun to see a stream of translations of the The Official Ubuntu Book coming in. I now have copies of El Libro Oficial de Ubuntu and Das Offizielle Ubuntu-Buch on my bookshelf. I'm particularly happy about Ubuntu The Official Ubuntu Book , the Japanese translation. It was coordinated by the Ubuntu Japan community, looks great, and has won me all kinds of brownie points -- and a congratulatory bottle of top shelf sh ch -- from Mika's family members.

Here's what I wrote on other people's sites last week:

Drake.org.uk: Welcome back..

MartynD reboots his blog yet again. This time with added eyetests.

Two Questions for All Serious Free Software Contributors

I answered, as did many others.

ProBlogger Redesign - Bedding Down for the Night

Much easier-to-read, but I still had an enhancement suggestion.

Blowing bubbles niq's soapbox

Comment on house-building and house-owning in England today.

gravityboy: This Is My Good Free Software Experience

I think the GPL is useful for things other than programs and CC is confusing about DRM for everything.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho I am going to rank MJ Ray low from now on

Commented more on my blog, but also directly. The criticism might be fairer if the SPI ballot were secret, but it isn't.

WEBlog -- Wouter's Eclectic Blog - Voting tactics

Is this about SPI? How is IRV broken?

Constitutional amendment: reduce the length of DPL election process

Amending the amendment proposal - got enough seconds to reach the ballot, for a change.

Amendment to: reduce the length of DPL election process

This one doesn't look like it will get onto the ballot. Informative subthread on combination of amendments.

Here's some of what I read last week:

talks with Linus Torvalds

He's much ruder than I am, but can get away with it because he's done more.

The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Richard Stallman - Edward O'Connor

He's much ruder than I am, but doesn't get away with it because he's done more.

Mayor wants London to copy Paris bike rentals News This is London

I saw those bikes in Paris. Seemed like a good idea.

Parisian-style hire bicycles to beat London traffic jams - Independent Online Edition > Transport

Slightly inaccurate report.

Hacking gadflies: Open Document Format

It's almost September again.

dgh: Bike power

Interesting idea.

apenwarr's log

quite a funny letter to google

Bristol Climate Protesters En-Route to Camp

My legs hurt after cycling only 6 miles yesterday. Not sure what I did wrong.

The Weston Mercury - Call to 'have a say' on the future of Britain

Pensioners to save country. Or not.

BBC NEWS Technology UN's website breached by hackers

Can't be bothered to check netcraft.

Little's Log: North Norfolk Councillor defects to UKIP

Little's still raging against the media.

James Purser writes about the current plans for Internet filtering in Australia and concentrates on the technical issues (whether it will degrade the ISP service) and the issue of who’s moral standards should be enforced for the entire country. But the fact is that children have never had any problem accessing porn. When I was in grade 4 at primary school (~9yo) a group of boys decided to walk to the local shopping centre at lunch-time and I joined them. At the shopping centre the other boys read Playboy (that was before such magazines were required to be displayed in sealed plastic bays). I didn’t read Playboy because there were some electronics magazines that were more interesting. When in grade 6 (~11yo) a friend told me about his parents video collection which featured fellatio and sodomy. I don’t recall whether he offered to show me the videos but being a good friend I’m sure he would have done so if I had asked. In the early years of high school some boys ran a black-market for second-hand porn magazines (ick), they also sold new magazines that were significantly more expensive. When in year 12 digital porn was just becoming popular and the exchange of porn on floppy disk began. I’m sure that now children use USB sticks to exchange porn that they get from the Internet or other sources. When I was in year 10 a female dancing instructor ceased working for the school after an up-skirt picture of her was stuck on a notice-board (I guess that her resignation was related to the picture but can’t be sure). The evidence that I witnessed while at school is that 15yo boys are prepared to photograph unwilling women and exchange the pictures, and that the exchange and sale of all manner of porn is not uncommon at school (including primary school). I don’t think that the schools I attended were in any way unusual in this regard. When I was at school cameras were large. Unless you had a polaroid camera (which was even larger) the film had to be developed - and the staff at the photo company were potential witnesses. I expect that these factors significantly decreased the amount of such activity. Now a significant portion of children have a mobile phone and it seems that a built-in camera is a standard feature in all new phones now. Digital cameras (which have much better quality than phone-cameras) are becoming quite cheap. It’s widely regarded that giving a teenager a mobile phone is good for their safety (and it certainly makes it easier to discover where children claim to be) and it’s also widely regarded that a digital camera is a good toy (babies as young as 2 are often given the old camera when their parents get a new one). We should expect that the number of children who have digital cameras to rapidly approach 100% of children who desire them. Given these factors it seems to me that it would be a good idea to allow teenage boys access to better quality porn than they are unable to produce (with either willing or unwilling subjects). It has already been shown that increased access to porn reduces the incidence of rape. I expect that the same also applies to the issue of making porn, people who have good access to porn will be less inclined to make their own. There is some nasty porn out there. If they were to try and prevent access to porn that is illegal under Australian law (IE pictures of children, animals, rape, etc) then I don’t think that anyone would object. But preventing access to soft porn such as Playboy (which is so tame that it’s hardly porn by modern standards) is a really bad idea if it will increase the risk of up-skirt photos and the production of child rape movies. Let’s be sensible and accept the fact that children who want to see porn will see it and focus our attention on what type of porn will be seen by children and whether the “actors” are consenting adults. PS I spent several years living in Amsterdam and working as a sys-admin for ISPs there.

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I've let my talks page fall badly out of date in the last year. As a first stab toward updating it, I've uploaded all of the notes for all of talks I've given calling for a free culture movement built around a standard of freedom and for adoption of the Definition of Free Cultural Works. There are notes posted for talks at the following conferences and meetings:

• Wikimania 2007 (2007-08-03) in Taipei, Taiwan. Notes: HTML, ReST
• iCommons iSummit (2007-06-16) in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Notes: HTML, Rest
• Freeculture.org Annual Conference (2007-05-26) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notes: HTML, ReST
• FSF Associate Members Meeting (2007-03-24) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notes: HTML, ReST
• Wikimania 2006 (2006-08-04) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notes: HTML, ReST; Slides: PDF, ODP

The talks and notes are not the same, but they are often very similar and they share a lot of text. The only recording I have is the one from the FSF Members meeting which I posted here before. It's still available online here:

• Talk (OGG Vorbis or MP3)
• Q&A (OGG Vorbis or MP3)

Perhaps a couple other recordings will surface. The good news is that I think that those of us involved with the definition have begun to make real progress in getting the message out and I think that, in several real ways, we've changed the nature of the conversation around free culture. I hope so, because I think that, looking at the list above, it's probably time to move on and to think about helping the definition and the movement in new innovative ways and with new compelling arguments.

A few weeks ago, Lisa and I were in Barnes&Noble, and I decided to buy a few photography books: The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby: This book is, as advertised, not a book about concepts and theories but rather about practical advice and tips. If you already know some of the theory, it’s pretty easy to see how it plays out in practice in this book. Composition Photo Workshop by Blue Fier: I love the name “Blue Fier”, even though I’m probably pronouncing “Fier” wrong (”Fire”). Anyway, this book started off a little slow for me because he covers things like aperture and depth of field and focus, and shutter speed and ISO and other things I’m already fairly familiar with. When he started getting into framing and rule-of-thirds type stuff it got more interesting. He also covered several different styles of photography (landscape, macro, portrait, etc.) and so it was a pretty good introductory book. Digital Portrait Photography and Lighting by Catherine Jamieson and Sean McCormick: I’m only half way through this book so far, and already it’s prompted me to spend hundreds of dollars on a new flash, and gotten me thinking about getting lights and umbrellas and reflectors and setting up my own miniature studio. I’ve spent the past few days trying to take portraits of Pixel and Lisa and myself, and haven’t had much success, mainly due to poor lighting (hence the flash and the dreams of better lighting equipment). When taking self portraits I’ve had such trouble getting the camera placement and focus and lighting right that I haven’t even gotten to really working on posing much. Which is fine, since I haven’t gotten to that chapter yet anyway. There’s a portrait workshop being held in Los Gatos at the end of September that I think I’m going to enroll in, but I’m worried based on the description that I’ll have already heard most of it from the portrait book I bought. In the spring I may enroll for a photography class at the local community college as well.

This is an updated translation into English of the one-question interview with pjorge (based on Darren Rowse’s one-question interviews idea) in which Javier Candeira (Barrapunto co-founder and editor among many other things, and a good, loved friend of mine) comments about an interesting game of his creation that’s being exhibited in Barcelona and that deals with the fears many parents have towards the Internet and the new enterntainment technologies and videogames. The game code will be released as GPL, even though the game data will have a non-free Creative Commons (with a non-commercial clause). The game has a really interesting approach, and mixes the concept of pinball games with that of graphics generated with “paper dolls” techniques, to try to make people think about the ideas mainstream media are pushing, and the way they try to tell everybody how to raise their kids. You might like it or not, but it will probably won’t leave you indifferent. That’s what art is about, in fact, isn’t it? What is ‘El rei de la casa’? ‘El rei de la casa‘ (an expression that in Catalan and Spanish means “the precious child”) is an exhibition and a videogame. The exhibition deals with the cultural construction of the idea of childhood, and can be visited until September 24 in the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona. From there. Among other works, in the exhibition there are photos by Loretta Lux and Bego a Egurbide, paintings by Marc Ryden, Kiki Smith and James Reilly… it’s really worth a visit. The videogame is a commission from Andr s Hispano and Marc Roig, curators of the exhibition. They wanted to portray Internet and videogame arcades (or cybercafes, which are their modern equivalent) as one of the “new forests”, these places where parents don’t dare allow their children go alone for fear of the dangers (real or imagined) that may lie in ambush. The Internet has entered into the collective imagination, and one of the memetic niches that it has crept into is that of the bogeyman, the scapegoat that bears the brunt of all the evil that happens in society. It is enough to look at the news programmes from right-wing TV stations with their adversative Internet coverage: “it’s good, but…”. All over the media you see headlines like “gang of pedophiles arrested who sold child pornography *on the internet*”. They conveniently skip that pedophiles filmed those poor kids *in a flat*, and that they did it *on a bed* and used *videocameras* just like those used by the reporters now sounding the alarm. But no, what’s bad is *the Internet*.
The other theme that we wanted to touch on with the pinball game is how videogames are presumed to corrupt childhood. When pinball games were introduced, the North American authorities laid down the law: it was an infernal machine that incited gambling and even lust. From the religious right to the secular left, every moral guardian has denounced the supposed harmful effects of videogames on childhood: because of them children and teenagers engage in murder, robbery, truancy, bad school grades and even untidy bedrooms and doubtful personal hygiene. For this reason, the “new forest” of the Internet and videogames had to be a videogame, proving once more that games are cultural vectors, a form of artistic, political or commercial expression like any other. It also had to be a videogame about the a triangle: on one side the children, on the second one the children minders (parents and society at large), and finally the Great Scapegoat: the Internet. After many abandoned and reworked proposals we arrived at the present design for the game: an emulated pinball game presented on a panoramic TV screen, and having two levels: one set in the real world and named after the exhibition, and a second one set in a more or less conventional cyberspace. This second level is called “Prey of the Net”, and portrays the vision of the Internet that a Fox viewer may have: you have Spam, game-playing killers, kids making more money than their parents, S&M gear, dildos… in short, everything that is scary and nothing that is comforting, at least to some. All the illustrations for this pinball, both on the gameplay field and on the scoreboard, are by Mauro Entrialgo. For the scoreboard I asked him to prepare a set of drawings similar to KISS dolls (like the cut-up dolls that kids still played with in the last century). Thanks to these dress-up dolls the scoreboard shows more than the score (which grows randomly anyway); it also portrays the state of the boy or girl protagonist of the game. I say “boy” or “girl” because in the game, just like in real life, you have a 50/50 chance of starting the game of life with either sex. The fist level, ‘El rei de la casa’, portrays the stress that families feel when facing children’s media consumption. The targets trigger lines from the parents: “All day in front of the Idiot Box!” when you hit the tv, or “without a degree, you are nothing” when you hit the school. There are four targets on the right, which can be reached shooting the ball with the left flipper (the one representing the parents): school, museum, church and reading. On the left, and reachable from the right flipper, representing the kids’ id, are the TV, the kid’s peers and the videogame console; at the top of the playing field, towering above it, the internet-enabled computer. As the ball hits the different targets, the scoreboard dresses the kids in a housecoat, a leather jacket, and gives them a mortarboard or a saint’s halo. They are the pride of their parents, kids still not perverted by the Internet. It is cheap symbolism, I confess, two-dimensional sociology, but that was also something we aimed for. After all, pinballs have always been complicated allegories rather than complex ones. In a first design I planned to make computer accessible only under certain conditions, but that is not something that would have work in this exhibition: some people just play and play (which gives me an immense joy), but other people can’t or won’t give it much effort. It’s best to make it easier for everyone, so they can send the ball into the next level even without meaning to. The second level, “Prey of the Net”, is accessed when the player puts the ball through the PC’s screen. Here the character on the scoreboard keeps smiling while the game dresses them in a straightjacket, S&M headgear, or leaves them in their underwear, with their hands full of money, playing cards, bloody knives and sex toys… to their parents’ horror. The player has no fixed goal here, only to make the ball go through the pachinko and the spinning spider. These elements work as an atrocity generator and a rebuke distributor. Parents’ voices scold the player, faced with the horrors of the Internet. But the star is the scoreboard. Mauro rocks. Right now the code and content for downloadable game are done, and the people responsible for the ISO are giving it the final touches. It will be a bootable liveCD with some Debian variant that (hopefully) will run on any PC bought in the last two or three years. We will treat the computer as a games console, which may or may not be symbolic (if you want it symbolic, we can make it symbolic!). The game itself is under the GPL license (the pinball part is based on Henrik Enkvist’s Emilia, which is packaged in Debian), and only the graphic resources will be under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. The music is also under a non-free Creative Commons license because of the status of the original samples, but I recommend you download it and play it because its author is none other than man, the Barrapunto founder and sometimes editor.

Today I tried to cancel my phone line from KPN, the national phone company. First, their website has this text:

Misschien ben je teleurgesteld of vind je een dienst te duur. Dat vindt KPN erg jammer, maar vooral vervelend voor jouw.

Apart from the blatant spelling error, it says that "KPN regrets this, but especially feels sorry for you." The pretense that their services are so great, they need to feel sorry for me canceling... Next up I call the mentioned number. After selecting the right option, the voice tells me: "An error has occurred." (in English!) and the connection is terminated. This is a reproducible problem. As a telephone company, they cannot make their own voice response system work. I'm not sure who they should be feeling sorry for...

I've been offline, but I think I've caught up now. Email if you think I missed you. Here's some of what I did before I went offline:

robmyers Seller's Remorse

Social Contract ten years on July 5 -- celebration?

Advertising Free Software Projects etbe

A Cambridge Co-operator: Great News

Michael

Cooperative? My Arse Web design and development techniques by Steve Tucker

Anti-DRM campaign, Apple Store, London.

Place Your Blog on a 'Busy Intersection'

Should Links from Your Blog Open in a New Window? Reader Opinions

Back

Co-opNet :: View topic - What Crisis

LWN: Totally "free" Ubuntu? That's the plan for Gobuntu (Linux.com)

The Problem with RSS

Property of a Lady Answers to Love Is Strange Trivia

Fairtrade Beer niq's soapbox

Co-opNet :: View topic - The Cooperative Tour de France

ITV response to Coverage Question... - Page 3 - ITV Message Boards

Why doesn't Online Main Stream Media link?

Property of a Lady Tuesday Trivia: Dance

Humor for Bond 22? Ultimate James Bond Fan Blog

lamby :: blog :: Graduation

itv and Other Tours Coverage: Vuelta, ToB

Holidays-London-and-rain

Reflowd - Recentlog

Reflowd - Source code

Aaargh! niq's soapbox

I'm in Taipei this week whole week for Wikimania 2007. I'm here for two days for a retreat of the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors and advisory board. I'm also going to be giving two and a half talks in the conference itself, attending a Debian birthday party, and perhaps giving a talk on Ubuntu at ITRI. Here are the overviews of my talks at Wikimania:

• Freedom's Standard Advanced (2007/08/03 10:30): Mostly a reprise of a couple talks I've given recently that make the case for a definition of freedom and for the Free Cultural Works Definition in particular.
• Supporting Collaboration in Branched Articles (2007/08/05 13:15): I'll be unveiling my thesis work: a wiki that allows for branching and merging. It is built on distributed revision control concepts and tools (i.e., Bazaar) and includes a text-specific merge/conflict resolution system designed for writers. The tool has important potential for offline wiki work, stable versions, and collaboration among forked articles within and between wikis. Think ikiwiki but with distributed revision control and all the branching and merging that goes along with it. I'll be posting lots more information and source here in the coming month.
• Election Committee (2007/08/04 14:30): I'll be joining the rest of the Wikimedia Election Committee and talking a bit about the last board elections and about how we might handle things like election methods in the next election.

Details on Debian's birthday party are online too which will have talks, food, beer, and more. As always, get in contact if you want to meet up or just find me at the conference.

Thanks to Centauri Dreams for the pointer to the ESA DARWIN proposal now here (high-resolution version also here). DARWIN is a space mission to detect the presence of life on other planets by spectroscopy: looking for biomarkers such as the presence of Ozone, water and methane together on terrestrial-sized planets. These are groups of gases that collectively would imply the presence of life. Unfortunately it appears that DARWIN is slipping: its not currently hardware-funded, and has a planned launch-date of 2020, having slipped from 2012. This is when NASAs alternative Terrestrial Planet Finder and Space Interferometry Mission have been defunded indefinitely. At the same time, the French COROT mission has just announced its first month-long series light-curves. COROT hunts for Earth-sized planets: it's a small space telescope that stares at the same patch of sky for long periods, looking for changes in the amount of light from stars that indicate a planet passing in front of a star. It has been much more successful than expected, having already announced its first exoplanet detection in April. NASA is also launching a similar mission, Kepler, in 2008. So we face the prospect that any day now we may know of Earth-sized planets in a Habitable zone, and yet be over a decade from determining if they could contain life. So do we have any other tricks up our sleeves? Other possibilities include the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble. With a launch planned in 2013, it would be able to determine some atmospheric features found in COROT detections, but would be too expensive to do the planet-hunting Darwin could do. Perhaps this could be imroved with occulters such as UMBRAS (thanks to enzo). Other novel detection missions include the Voyager Interstellar Mission (via), reusing exisiting 'end-of-life' spacecraft as telescopes. And finally, could ground-based telescopes do it? tests have just started on a new 10M telescope in the Canaries that could help; in terms of larger scopes, colleagues of mine in NUI Galway have been collaborating on the design of Euro50,a proposed 50 M telescope. Together with new techniques such as spectral deconvolution (via via) may help. Tags astronomy, exoplanets

Fudge Update

Yesterday I blogged about the guy handing out fudge. He saw my post and explained why he was doing it. Today he was around handing out fudge, and I thanked him for his comment. He gave me two pieces of fudge for blogging about it.

Pineapple

At most of the breaks, they have this truly wonderful real (non-canned) pineapple. I think I have eaten more pineapple this week than any other week, ever. Very insidious, O'Reilly.

Conference materials

Slides of talks are available. Apparently keynotes are being posted on Youtube and Google Video, though they haven't provided a specific link AFAICT.

Philip Rosedale, Founder/CEO of Linden Lab

Second Life and the XPrize are two examples of escapism: you can escape to virtual earth, or escape the planet entirely.

In order for Second Life to grow, it has to become profoundly open. It has to be a standardized protocol. They are working on code to let people run their own servers. They are trying to make the server trusted and make it able to be open sourced as well. They see openness as the key way for it to grow.

If you are writing a web app that depends on the network effect -- such as Facebook -- you should open source everything right from the beginning. Not because it's best for humanity, but because you will win.

Jimmy Wales

He's trying to do open source search. Nice idea, could have been summarized in 45 seconds, I think.

Simon Wardli

Was going to talk about Zimki, which was going to open sourced, but they decided not to.

Funny and interesting talk, I sorta forgot to take notes while listening...

Nat Torkington

OSCon program chair.

Funny talk about Linux, an adolescent at 16 years old. Thinking about different languages and how they're doing. How the Linux community is organized: are we fighting battles, and do we need to?

James Larsson

This guy takes old hardware and makes insane devices out of it. 15,000 volts running over a coat hanger used as a "game controller", for instance.

In all, awesome keynotes today.

In a discussion with Bdale, he suggested that DM is seen as forking NM. And some people do not like forks. They are not opposed to DM in principle but do not want it outside of the current NM team. Obviously DM tries to respond to cases that NM is not prepared to handle. Furthermore, the DM discussion has been active for quite some time and the various members of the NM team (Frontdesk, DAM) have not participated much in the public discussion. Only when it comes to a vote do we hear some more (negative) opinions. I don’t see that as a sign of willingness to integrate DM or something similar in the current NM structure. So people who are requesting DM to be integrated in NM, please take it up with the frontdesk/DAM… and don’t oppose the principle just because of organizational matters. Internal organization always change and adapt themselves to the situation. Joey is right when he compares this to the introduction of the sponsorship process. I was one of the main actor in that process. I introduced the concept without the consent of the NM team (James Troup, Martin “Joey” Schulze) at that time. It was a fork, a new way to proceed and it became mainstream with the creation of the current NM process. It’s the natural way of doing things in a free software project. That said, I’m not opposed to improving our NM process. It really needs to be reworked in a “Membership Process” and be open to various kinds of contributors. That’s why I created a dedicated wiki page: http://wiki.debian.org/Projects/ReformedMembershipProcess Let’s see if we’re ready to really fix that! I hope to have comments from all the people who look to be so eager to fix the NM process.

Nat Torkington, program chair, started off the day. He commented that one of the most interesting trends these days is the expansion of the Open Source ideals beyond software.

Tim O'Reilly commented about the FSF's four freedoms, and asked how we maintain them. We have to think about preserving freedoms -- questions such as Free Software that relies on proprietary services, data, or business processes. It's important to remember to pay attention to freedom and not just to the success of businesses. But businesses matter and have enormous power and will always be related.

Tim really pushed expanding the boundaries of Open Source and thinking ahead: wikipedia, OpenID, etc. He also asked: does Congress need a version control system?

He suggested there are four open source success factors: frictionless software distribution, collaborative development, freedom to build/adapt/extend, freedom to fork.

Hadoop is an interesting FLOSS project to build some infrastructure like Google has. Apparently Yahoo is very interested.

Back to Nat... hardware is cheap and everyone keeps buying more of it.

James Reinders from Intel talking about multi-core parallelism. Saying that parallelism is going to be more and more important. Intel released threading building blocks, a series of templates for C++, as GPL'd software at the conference this week. I'm not all that excited about a C++ project, though, since I think languages like Haskell have more promise here anyway.

The other Intel guy mentioned Intel's open source involvement: intellinuxgraphics.org, intellinuxwireless.org, linuxpowertop.org, kernel,org, moblin.org. Linux laptops have the longest runtimes compared to other laptops.

"It's amazing how many people you can make paranoid by showing up with a tie and a suit to do a keynote at OSCON." -- James Reinders

Simon Peyton-Jones is up now, and Nat says he will "stretch your brain until only tiny bits are left."

State of the art in parallelism is really 30 years old with locks and condition variables -- like building a skyscraper out of bananas.

Locks are difficult to do right and have "diabolical error recovery".

Let's do transactions against memory instead of against a database. Implementation can even be similar to databases. The idea is transactional memory, and it sounds very, very slick.

Mark Shuttleworth and Tim for an interview...

Mark was fine, but I wish Tim had more interesting questions for him.

I went up to the front a few minutes after the event to talk to Simon PJ. He was talking to someone, who saw my nametag, and said, "Hi John, nice to meet you." He looked familiar but I couldn't quite place him, so I asked who he was. "Mark Shuttleworth." Yep, I was sitting just far enough back from the stage that I wasn't behind one of the large TV screens and couldn't make out faces real well, and I didn't recognize him. Erg..