Bruce Schneier writes about the risks involving children abandoned in cars and cites an article about the tragic deaths of children in hot cars [1]. One unfortunate error that he made was to not cite the following from the end of the last page of the Washington post article he cited [2]:
In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. We are vulnerable, but we don t want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we ll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters. I believe that similar thought processes are used in relation to many other situations, and that such thought processes prevent people from taking appropriate actions to minimise the risk. If someone considers that forgetting a child in the back seat to be an accident that could happen to anyone then they would be inclined to take action to minimise the risk (such as spending some money on a sensor). If however they consider such forgetfulness to be proof of being a bad parent , then as they are a good parent they would have to avoid buying a monitor. I m surprised that Bruce didn t draw an analogy between this and the forgetful losses of laptops and guns by people who work for law enforcement agencies (which he has written about before). I wonder how expensive it would be to make a sensor for heart-rate, breathing, and temperature integrated with a GSM modem and a GPS? If it could be small enough to be attached to clothes then the child could wear it at all times. If such a sensor was to detect a sign of a problem it wouldn t matter whether the child was forgotten in a car, at day-care, or even being actively supervised. The data would be sent to the monitoring agency along with GPS data. The monitoring agency could then phone the parents. If the parents don t answer or don t know where the child is then the police could track down the GPS location. Probably most calls would be due to parents leaving a child too close to an air-conditioner or playing outside in the sun in summer which are unlikely to give a fatal result and a phone call would get a quick fix for what would only be a minor health problem. If the device was marketed as monitoring for sleep apnia then parents could buy it without admitting to the possibility that they might do anything wrong. The causes of SIDS are a topic of ongoing research and parents can admit to being worried about their children suffering from it without admitting any possibility that they might make a mistake.

• [1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/03/leaving_infants.html


• [2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html

When you order good into Switzerland, they will pass the customs office, where VAT and possibly import duties are levied. The customs office does not charge any duties if the total amount to be paid is less than 5 CHF Practically, given 7.6% VAT, this means that you can import 5 CHF / 0.076 = 65.79 CHF for free . As soon as you exceed this amount, it gets complicated. All of a sudden, the carrier charges you for the customs declaration it does in your name. What really blows my mind is that the fee to pay to the carrier (more on that later) actually plays into the whole equation. Let s assume you order goods for 100 CHF, which is well above the free import limit. You also paid 10 CHF for shipping. The carrier charges you 20 CHF to do the customs presentation for you. There, they determine that import duties are 5 CHF, and you end up paying: (100 + 10 + 20 + 5) * 107.6% = 145.26. That s fun, isn t it? I continue to be amazed by all the ways in which the government sucks money from your pockets. What s similarly baffling is how some carries deal with this. The Swiss Post (and their ally TNT) makes you pay taxes, duties, and fees on delivery, and their charges are the lowest when compared to the other carriers. With this approach, you have the option to refuse the package, if you re willing to deal with the vendor to get your money back. DHL is the only other carries I know who does things like the Swiss Post. However, due to their extraordinary crap performance and service, I could never recommend them to anyone. The three letters of DHL, a German company, apparently stand for das heisst langsam this means slow . None of the other carriers give you the option to accept the duties and their services. For instance, GLS delivers your parcel, and some weeks later you get an invoice, asking for the taxes and duties, and charging a fee of 45 CHF for their service, which you ve never really asked for and which you could not refuse. UPS, FedEx, and DPD fall into the same category, but their charges are lower. The one and only time I had used GLS to have something shipped to me, I called them up to complain about their invoice, and replied with an invoice of my own, in which I charged the same amount for opening and reading your letter and giving your call-centre employee the chance to talk to me directly . They got the message and dropped the invoice. The next step should be to play them off against each other: create some pencil art, write an invoice for half a million, and pay UPS to deliver the package to GLS headquarters. Attach a miniature audio transmitter to the invoice for added fun. NP: Goldie: Timeless

Conference This afternoon, I ll be at What s So Social About Social Enterprise? in Bristol. In general, I ll be trying to support the idea that TTLLP and cooperatives in general are necessarily social enterprise. I may ask a few questions about the Social Enterprise Mark which you may have seen me asking elsewhere already. I ll probably be sending a few updates during the event to identi.ca and other sites if I can get it working from the venue. What s your answer? What s social about social enterprise?

After the release of Asus Eee PC and the discovery of the market that was eager to buy cheap and wearable computers every laptop manufacturer has jumped into the hype and released their own versions of netbooks, with different success.
But somehow it was a cloning phase. Vendors were just cloning what Asus did, with more or less changes, but without innovating. Now, it seems that the path has opened again, from the open source and open hardware front, and it has been released AlwaysInnovating s touchbook. It is a netbook with a detachable keyboard (it is even sold separated) and built upon an ARM processor from Texas Instruments, and a 8GB microSD card. Thus they claim the battery last from 10 to 15h with the keyboard, and 3 to 5h in touchscreen mode.
As is said above, the whole machine is open source based. Software is based upon OpenEmbedded, and hardware schematics of the board are released under GPL on Beagleboard project. They say that you can also install Ubuntu, Android or even Windows CE on it. Update: Just discovered that AlwaysInnovating is a Gr goire Gentil startup. Gr gory is a Civil Engineer from cole des ponts et Chauss es. We know how to build things

In case you ve been living under a rock these past years, I shouldn t have to tell you what this is about :). Well, just in case.
The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an international program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Debian has participated since 2006, mentoring dozens of students on Debian projects. The important part of the 2009 edition of the Google Summer of Code is going to start next week with the Organizations application period (March 9th). By that time, we should have listed a reasonable number of ideas on the dedicated wiki page. We will try this year to improve on the performance of the previous years, starting first with more and more dedicated manpower. If you have some time to spare to help manage our Summer of Code bid this year, we can make it a much better experience for the students and for Debian. Help is immediately needed in many areas. Some examples:

• Map out which areas in Debian could benefit from a Summer of Code project and connect the right people with the right projects ideas
• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

By mid-March, we will need:

• Dedicated documentation to present Debian to the prospective student
• Publicity material to promote the Summer of Code at Debian
• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

Further in the spring:

• Mentors, people to review proposals, do interviews
• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

In the summer:

• Mentoring students
• Testing and feedback for projects
• Internal communication with the community

As you can see, there is much work ahead. It s time to pitch out your favorite pet project
Remember! The Summer of Code has become a prominent outreach forum for open source organizations. It puts a spotlight on each of them to provide a well-rounded and deep experience of open source development. Right now, you can help with the Wiki, join us on IRC on #debian-soc on OFTC or join the mailing-list at soc-coordination on alioth. The short flyers-friendly URL for the Summer of Code at Debian is : <http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc>. Publicize it! See you this summer!

Every time something goes wrong there will be someone who tries to take advantage of the situation. The recent bushfires in Australia that have killed hundreds of people (the count is not known yet) are a good example. Pastor Nalliah of Catch the Fire Ministries [1] claims that it is due to legalising abortion. This is astoundingly wrong. In a more extreme example representatives of the Westboro Baptist Church were planning to visit Australia to launch a protest in support of the bushfires [2]. I have not yet found any news reports about whether they actually visited Australia or protested - it s most likely that they decided not to visit due to the Australian laws being very different to US laws regarding the relative importance of freedom of speech and incitement to violence. Apparently the insane Westboro Baptist Church people (who are best known for GodHatesFags.com and GodHatesAmerica.com) believe that God hates Australia and caused the fires (presumably due to Australia not persecuting homosexuals). Danny Nalliah has permanently damaged his own reputation by acting in a similar way to the Westboro Baptist Church. The reputation of Catch The Fire now depends on how quickly they get a new pastor Please note well that the vast majority of Christians have nothing in common with Westboro or Catch The Fire. I don t recall the last time I met an Australian Christian who was strongly opposed to homosexuality or abortion. Now we do have to try and investigate ways of avoiding future tragedies, and the work to do this needs to begin immediately. John Brumby (the Premier of Victoria) has announced that Victoria will get new strict building codes for fire resistant buildings [3]. There have been many anecdotes of people who claim to have been saved by attaching sprinkler systems to their homes, by building concrete bunkers to hide in while the fire passes, and using other techniques to save their home or save themselves. Some more research on the most effective ways of achieving such goals would be worthwhile, an increase in funding for the CSIRO to investigate the related issues would be a good thing. The article also has an interesting quote As the fallout from the disaster widened, the union representing the nation s 13,000 firefighters warned both the federal and state governments to take global warming seriously to prevent a repeat of last weekend s lethal firestorm . However given that traditionally Australia and the US have been the two nations most opposed to any efforts to mitigate global warming it seems unlikely that anything will change in this regard in a hurry. The attempts to link bushfires to abortion and homosexuality are offensive, but can be ignored in any remotely serious debate about politics. However there are some other groups trying to profit from the tragedy that make claims which are not as ridiculous. On the 9th of February the Australian Green party was compelled to release an official statement from Spokesperson Scott Ludlam, Sarah Hanson-Young, Rachel Siewert, Christine Milne, and Bob Brown following some political discussion about Greens policies [4]. There have been attempts to blame the Greens for the tragedy which were politically motivated, some of which came from groups that traditionally oppose the Greens for other reasons (I m not going to provide the detail - anyone who is really interested can do google searches on the people in question). On the 16th of February Bob Brown (the leader of the Green party) felt obliged to make another media release reiterating the fact that the Greens support prescribed burn-offs to limit the scope of wild fires [5], he also decried the hate mongering that has been occurring in the wake of the disaster. One of the strange memes that seems to be spread by opponents to the Greens is that the Greens are all supposedly from the city and know nothing about the country. To avoid being subject to such attack I feel obliged to note that on one of the bad fire days I visited my parents. I spent the morning with my father and some friends at a park that was not far from the fire area, my friends then returned to their home which was not far from the fire area. I then had lunch with my parents and watched the smoke through the dining room window. After that my friends didn t respond to email for a while and I was concerned that they may have lost their house or maybe suffered injury or death. I didn t know them well enough to feel it appropriate to try a dozen different ways of contacting them (I m sure that many other people were doing so), but I was rather concerned until my wife received an email from them. But I don t base my political beliefs on what I personally observe or my connections to people on the edge of the fire zone. I believe in the Green principles of Peace and Non Violence, Grassroots Democracy, Social and Economic Justice, Ecological Sustainability and the use of science and statistics to determine the best ways of achieving those goals.

• [1] http://www.livenews.com.au/articles/2009/02/11/Bushfires_caused_by_abortion_laws_Pastor_claims


• [2] http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25067362-2,00.html


• [3] http://www.theage.com.au/national/never-again-brumby-20090211-84sv.html?page=-1


• [4] http://greensmps.org.au/content/time-heal-our-communities


• [5] http://greens.org.au/node/5229

Last week, I couldn't resist and bought myself an Acer Aspire One (AOA 150Ab) netbook. It has 1G RAM, 120G HDD, unfortunately needs a fan, and is the model without 3G modem. It comes with Linpus Linux pre-installed. Looks quite nice, but is obviously ultimately the wrong OS ... Besides, it's locked down quite a bit, there's not even an easy way to start a terminal :-) I still have kept it, in a dual-boot configuration, to play around or show to people. Installing Lenny went very well, and to make things more fun I'm running quite a few things from experimental: KDE 4.2, xorg 7.4 (1:7.4~5 right now) and Oo.org 3. And, to get DRI2, also the 2.6.28 kernel from the newer-than-sid repository of the kernel team (2.6.28-2~snapshot.12850, but I hear 2.6.28 has now been uploaded.) While the whole thing is fun to use and didn't make any real problems, there are a few remaining issues (yes, this is a Dear Lazyweb posting, feel free to comment. I'll try to add updates to this article as this progresses):

• Power events (power button, battery level critical) are handled by two sets of scripts. Not sure if the blame lies with acpid, acpi-support or KDE for this one. Symptom: when setting up, in KDE, that the power button should bring up the logout dialog, this results in: the power button does indeed show the logout dialog, but then immediately the system is shut down. Adding an exit 0 in /etc/acpi/powerbtn-acpi-support.sh before the final shutdown command in that file fixes this, though. Similarly, the battery critical event brings up a warning that the system will soon be forcibly suspended and then immediately suspends to RAM. (I'll have to investigate if there's already a bug about this in the bts.)
• The X server has quite a few issues. It sometimes blanks the display without any reason. Causing any of the fancy full screen effects (like present windows ) to happen sometimes fixes this, sometimes a quick suspend to RAM and wakeup cycle fixes it. Sometimes it does not and I need to reboot (and I have yet to set up a hotkey for log out without questions.) Also, the screen stays black after a switch back from a text console, and after logout. Oh, well, I guess I'll just wait a few Intel driver and perhaps kernel releases (not sure: do I already have kernel modesetting, btw?)
• KDE sometimes complains that X compositing is too slow and disables it. I immediately re-enable it, because while some of the effects do indeed demonstrate the limits of the graphics hardware, I've become used to things like present windows and, especially on the small screen, the screen magnifier.
• Also a feature of the new X server is HAL powered handling of input devices, which left me without my desired keyboard layout in X. After some hunting around at places like #447666 I found a very simple x11-input.fdi file somewhere I can't remember and installed that:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <deviceinfo version="0.2">
    <device>
      <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keys">
        <merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">ch</merge>
        <merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string">de</merge>
      </match>
    </device>
  </deviceinfo>
  

  I now realize that just installing hal-info from squeeze or sid might also fix the issue.
• Also related to the new input hotplugging: how do I pass options to the synaptic driver? Probably another XML file for HAL, haven't hunted for this yet. As it is, the touchpad works but tapping won't click, and there's no scrolling on the edges of the pad. Update: Mark points me to the correct HAL invocation, thanks.. Now I only need to find the right values for all the options...(at least tapping doesn't work yet when I use the same values as the Linpus installation uses.)
• The various Fn key keyboard functions situation is very inconsistent. Some of the keys just work (Num-lock, the completely useless Scroll-lock, Home, End, volume up, down; Even brings up a graphical notification, blank screen). Mute/unmute is caught by userspace but doesn't work correctly: it just displays the current volume instead of muting/unmuting audio (it also shows HalPower::slotButtonPressed: Unknown button type in .xsession-errors. Same message but no effect whatsoever for the Zz sleep button.) The deactivate touchpad key works but gets unknown key pressed/released kernel messages, as does the (off-keyboard) WiFi power switch. Switch video output only shows the unknown key pressed/released messages but doesn't do anything. Finally, some work but are also mapped to keycodes where they shouldn't be (dim screen is also mapped to ^@ , it appears, while increase screen brightness is mapped to .)
• WLAN only works with the options acer_wmi wireless=1 option, and without the LED, as described on the Debian Acer Aspire One wiki page. This is with the ath5k driver, haven't tried the MadWifi one yet.
• Powertop claims that the camera is always on, unloading all related modules () seems to solve this (at least, powertop doesn't complain anymore, and power is down by 0.5W.) Powertop also claims that USB autosuspend is off, but it's just set to 2 instead of 1 which if I read this correctly is the timeout to use for USB devices.
• KDE4 doesn't have a network manager applet frontend in Debian. I guess this is an upstream problem. (Although I note that the OpenSUSE people already have an applet ;-) Update: Sune tells me it's in NEW already, thanks.
• While network-manager (lenny version) does work properly and switches between wired and wireless as needed, it strangely keeps sending out DHCP requests on eth0 even though no cable is attached (and mii-tool correctly reports no link.)

Ok, this has become rather a long list. But at least, as you can see, it's mostly minor issues, and hopefully a few where it's just missing configuration. One other issue is battery life: I see that there should be a large battery available for this thing. If it doesn't cost me as much as the whole netbook again, I'll seriously have to think about this... The 3-cell battery does last about 2.5h (and has, right now, uncovered a little bug where the battery monitoring applet tells me No AC adaptor plugged in, battery capacity: 50%, charging . Whee! I have a perpetuum mobile! I'm gonna be RICH!)

I just finished packing up the signature collection for dedication-5.0.txt. Hopefully I didn't miss any signatures, saving about 400 attachments is tedious. Fortunately most people got the filenames right. On the down side, there were about 80 signatures that I couldn't verify because the corresponding key could not be found on the key servers. I've mailed the owners, and about 20 have uploaded their key until now. There are 355 valid signatures. Thanks to all for such a huge participation, that's about twice the number (185) we got for dedicating Potato to Espy in 2000. (These were DD-only, though.) Comparing to the various Debian keyrings, 207 active DDs participated, 3 former DDs, 12 Debian maintainers, and 133 other contributors. Let's hope Lenny will be as great as Thiemo would have liked it.

Since several month, awesome users have reported a bug with OpenOffice.org. When using OOo and clicking on a menu, or using the mouse wheel to read a document, the currently selected tag (desktop) will change automagically to another one. I've digged into awesome and found that awesome received a _NET_CURRENT_DESKTOP request. As defined by EWMH, this kind of request are sent by a pager to change the active desktop. That was weird. Nobody is using a pager here. So, I just kicked my gdb out, attached it to OOo, breaking on XSendEvent call. And I got it:

Breakpoint 1, XSendEvent (dpy=0x1a00080, w=483, propagate=0, event_mask=1572864, event=0x7fff1fd70d70)
   at ../../src/SendEvent.c:46
(gdb) bt
#0  XSendEvent (dpy=0x1a00080, w=483, propagate=0, event_mask=1572864, event=0x7fff1fd70d70)
   at ../../src/SendEvent.c:46
#1  0x00007f8c0ab4193f in vcl_sal::WMAdaptor::switchToWorkArea ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#2  0x00007f8c0aafdbd8 in X11SalFrame::Show ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#3  0x00007f8c1378623c in Window::Show ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#4  0x00007f8c13785f40 in Window::Show ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#5  0x00007f8c1372cb54 in FloatingWindow::StartPopupMode ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#6  0x00007f8c1373c877 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#7  0x00007f8c1373ccf2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#8  0x00007f8c1373ce84 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#9  0x00007f8c13795e7f in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#10 0x00007f8c13797e74 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#11 0x00007f8c13796748 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#12 0x00007f8c0aafe6f8 in X11SalFrame::HandleMouseEvent ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#13 0x00007f8c0ab040c2 in X11SalFrame::Dispatch ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#14 0x00007f8c0ab31625 in SalX11Display::Yield ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#15 0x00007f8c0ab356f3 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#16 0x00007f8c0ab2df1f in SalXLib::Yield () from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#17 0x00007f8c135b050e in Application::Yield ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#18 0x00007f8c135b0587 in Application::Execute ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#19 0x00007f8c17517e80 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libsofficeapp.so
#20 0x00007f8c135b4b24 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#21 0x00007f8c135b4bc5 in SVMain () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#22 0x00007f8c1754ca6c in soffice_main ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libsofficeapp.so
#23 0x000000000040105b in main ()

I started digging more into the code, and this is what I finally found in salframe.cxx:

       // #i45160# switch to desktop where a dialog with parent will appear 
       if( mpParent && mpParent->m_nWorkArea != m_nWorkArea ) 
           GetDisplay()->getWMAdaptor()->switchToWorkArea( mpParent->m_nWorkArea );

Beautiful! It even has a comment with a IssueZilla bug number. Let's go and see where it comes from. After 10 minutes of research to find that fucking IZ, I finally found the link to the issue #45160. The bug is IMHO not related to OOo but to a window manager doing poor job. I've found that an awesome user already reported an bug err, wait, I mean an issue as issue #96684 (remember there's no bug in OOo, only issues) and I commented about it. UPDATE: It seems OOo developers have agreed to fix that bug eventually.

Biella asks if I can read novels from a screen. Yes, I've read what has to be getting close to a thousand novels that way, over the past 8+ years. I was thinking about this just the other day as I read The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age. That article does a good job arguing against many of the common complaints about ebooks, such as "I can't read an ebook in the bathtub".

my pile of paper

Right now, I have a pile of paper books I want to read or am in the middle of reading. But if I want something new to read, I don't reach for that pile, but for my (much larger) directory of ebooks. The pile of paper is reserved for special occasions: plane trips, camping, etc. I started reading ebooks in circumstances where it was too hard to get access to paper ones. Traveling in the third world, hauling along a lot of paper books wasn't practical. Living rural, where every book had to be backpacked in. I've stuck with it because it works for me and because I've enjoyed stretching my muscles of concentration on the screen. To me, the focus required to read an ebook from the screen is similar to the focus required to work on a program. And completly different than skimming through a web page. The best example of this that I have right now is Real World Haskell, which I've almost finished (hurrah!) reading in a combination of paper and web editions. I was only able to stick with reading this book when I got the paper version. I use the web version for reference, or for looking for help on a challenging part of the book. For reading, it's just too much a web page; too easy to skim, or be distracted by the comments that can be attached to every paragraph, or jump off to Wikipedia.

screenshot of my ebook reader

Just as most programmers tune their development environment so that it uniquely suites them, I've put a lot of thought, trial, and error into tuning my ebook reading environment. The most important thing seemed to be getting rid of anything that interfered with focusing on the text. Since I wasn't (easily) able to use that environment for reading Real World Haskell, I wasn't able to read it from the screen.

Arthur Liu is doing a great series of posts following up on the results of Google Summer of Code '08 projects in Debian. (post 1 post 2) Most of them failed to produce code that's actually used in Debian, though there were some very successful projects, too. My experience with ikiwiki in '07 parallels that: latex Patrick Winnertz produced a working teximg (latex -> image) plugin that's in ikiwiki. The initial proposal also included doing latex -> html and wiki page -> latex conversions; that work never happened. file upload and image gallery Ben Coffey had an ambitious proposal to add file upload support to ikiwiki and also write an image gallery plugin using that. Ben did produce a working file upload interface, but that code never got into ikiwiki. This was due to a combination of at least three things:

1. The only outside communication with the ikiwiki community was doing a design proposal at the beginning, and a code dump toward the end of the project.
2. There was an existing complex spec for how to limit who could upload what files, but Ben didn't choose to implement those access controls.
3. The code dump was not even noticed until much later, when I was putting the finishing touches on my own implementation of an attachments plugin.

By the way, since I happened to do that attachments plugin as a paid consultant, I have an interesting data point: It took me 19 hours total to implement it, vs roughly a summer of work for the GSoC project. I don't mean this to reflect poorly on Ben, it just shows that someone who is familar with a code base and has thought a lot about a problem can work on it much more efficiently than a newcomer. AFAICS, Ben never did get to the gallery part. His involvement in SoC was cut short for personal reasons. Wiki WYSIWYG Editor Taylor Killian produced a working interface to Wikiwyg, but it tragically never made it into ikiwiki. This seemed to be going swimmingly -- Taylor set up a subversion repository for his work and produced several revisions of the wikiwyg plugin in response to feedback. At the end of the summer, it was close to ready to be included in ikiwiki. Then we lost contact with Taylor, and his site fell off the net. Subversion repo: Gone. Tarballs: Gone. The final tragic part of this story is that I had a local copy of all of Taylor's work. And when I moved ikiwiki over from subversion to git, I set up a wikiwyg branch, and put his work into it, and happily deleted my other copies of his work. But I made some kind of newbie mistake pushing that branch, and so his work never made it onto my git server, and at this point seems completly lost. (I still hope to hear from Taylor..) gallery Arpit Jain produced a working gallery plugin for ikiwiki. But that code never made it into ikiwiki. The main stumbling block seems to be that it used the lightbox javascript library, which, at least at the time was licensed under a non-free CC license. The code is present in a branch in ikiwiki's git repo, but at this point there is still no image gallery plugin in ikiwiki, though others are now working on other implementations. Conclusions I learned some important things from participating in the '07 SoC:

• There needs to be a well-defined place where students check in their code regularly, and where it is regularly reviewed. Either give them each accounts and branches in the project's main subversion repository, or better use distributed VCS. Ikiwiki switched to git as a direct result of the problems I saw with students publishing their code in the ad-hoc ways that resulted from not having that. And I keep backups of every ikiwiki git repo I am aware of, because any could fall off the net at any time.
• If your goal is to have a student develop something that is included in your project, that needs to be one of up-front success criteria for the SoC project. Otherwise, most of them will fail to get all the way there. Students need an incentive to deal with licensing issues, to respond to maintainers' feedback, and to keep following up until their code is merged. I suspect that requiring students leap over this sometimes very tall bar will scare a lot of them away though. You have to decide whether your goal is indeed to get working code in production, or if it's more to mentor a student for the summer.
• Just because one is very familiar with a code base and very productive in working on it, and has had lots of success getting others to contribute to it in the usual free software manner, does not mean that one will be a good mentor for a student working on that code base. In fact, it probably means you won't be, unless you have some prior experience teaching students. Which is why I've not participated in SoC since. :-/

It's been a somewhat long day... I got up at 6:30am for a 7am ankle physical therapy session. I went to the hospital after that. When I got there, a sonographer was doing the echocardiogram on her heart to check the valves. I missed the doctors. Sarah didn't feel any more knowledgeable about her condition even though they'd been through. The patient Sarah was sharing with had a bad night, caused her to have a bad night's sleep also, and she always deals with all of this crap much worse when she's got a sleep debt. Dinner stayed down, but breakfast did not. The sonographer seemed fairly confident about her heart condition. Usually they don't make any comments on what they're seeing and leave that to the doctors, so we took some comfort from that. I managed to corner the physician's assistant who had been following Sarah in her office, and quizzed her on what was going on. It turns out a PICC line had been ordered, and they get installed by specalised PICC nurses and that's all they do all day. The PA implied that it might not happen until tomorrow. The gall stones were definitely unrelated, and something to follow up with her primary care physician. Incidentally, Wikipedia has some wicked pictures of gall stones. Talk about freaky. I think I hung around until 10am, and then headed into the office to try and get some work done, with the intent to come back after work. Not long after, Sarah called me up all beside herself about the PICC line (she doesn't deal well with the idea of getting jabbed at the best of times, and being tired put her over the edge), so I scrapped work, and went back to the hospital for the remainder of the day. I decided to hunt down her cardiologist to see if the PICC line was absolutely necessary, and I managed to get the exact low down on her condition.

• the infection is staphylococcus aureus, not one of the other staph strains that I can't remember, which are considered less serious. The one Sarah has/had is the "bad enough" one, a.k.a. "golden staph". Fortunately it's sensitive to antibiotics, unlike MRSA, which is the really bad news one to have. So my heart skipped a beat when he said it was aureus, but I recovered when he said it was sensitive. I could have sworn the staph infection she had last year wasn't aureus, but he seemed to think that it was.
• when she presented at the ER on I guess Sunday morning, this staph was found in the blood sample they took. What is unclear is whether this is because of contamination from the skin when they took the sample (staph is present on the skin, it's only a problem when it gets internal), or it was indeed in her blood, whereas with the infection she had last year, it was never present in her blood.
• because of her aortic root replacement/graft and the risk of endocarditis destroying her heart valves, they didn't want to take any chances. Hence the PICC line and the two weeks of intravenous antibiotics. Two weeks is really a compromise. He said if they'd wanted to get all paranoid on her, it'd be a six week course, and they'd have done a transesophageal echocardiogram to boot.

So armed with the facts, I headed back to tell Sarah the news that she really should have the PICC line installed, and that she was getting off fairly lightly, relatively speaking. The PICC nurse had a cancellation, so she was able to do the installation today. It was totally less traumatic than I think either of us were expecting. It took about 45 minutes to install, and it was done at her bedside. Sarah was very brave and I don't think it really hurt her all that much. I watched the whole thing, and it was very interesting. It was particularly interesting because there was another nurse observing, so the PICC nurse was explaining everything as she went. She was also really nice and good at what she did (she'd been doing it for 14 years) so I think all of that helped. So Sarah's now got two IV ports strapped to the inside of her upper left arm (attached to the PICC line), and no other IV lines in. She should get discharged tomorrow after they sort out whether she's going to receive IV antibiotics on a 4 or 8 hourly schedule at home, and exactly how all of that's going to work. I think they send someone out to our place to give us some training, and someone comes out once a week to do a bit of maintenance on the PICC line itself. I presume I'll be her personal nurse again. All it involves is a bit of plumbing. Her cardiologist seems to think she should be able to still do her CNA clinical training with the PICC line in. She may just have some problems with lifting duties. I guess we'll just see how all of that pans out. So that was the excitement for today. Sarah had her appetite back at dinner time, and was generally in much better spirits when I left her this evening than she was this morning. I could go into much more detail about the ins and outs of the PICC line installation, but I don't really have the energy.

The changes to whitehouse.gov are being used as an example of ephemeral digital content.

At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House website, replaced by images of and speeches by his successor. Attached to the website had been a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration - they may never know them now. When the website changed, the link was broken and the booklet became unavailable.

At the same time, the Obama administration is chafing under rules that don't allow them to use Facebook, gmail, Blackberries, and Twitter. Because of this pesky Presidential Records Act.

Suddenly, they have to relearn how to communicate, because the law has not caught up with the way people live. They are being forced to return to older technologies (or they will once those technologies start working properly), and abandon or become more guarded in their use of newer technologies.

Anyone else find the dissonance am(az us)ing? Seems that anyone who really wants a copy of that missing booklet will be able to access it via FOIA in a few years (unless it got wiped with all of Cheney's files). Meanwhile, if the new guys find a way to stop being hobbled by the law, their digital content will likely be truely ephemeral, since they have become addicted to "newer technologies" that eliminate all expectations about data's preservation and privacy. I think this is one case of the law not keeping up with technology that I can support. It might be more fair to describe it though, as technology not keeping up with the law.

Time to Report After a good start, I ve hit a bump in the road getting all the various TTLLP annual reports filed with the various offices on time. Well, less a bump in the road, more of a gaping chasm. Well, less a gaping chasm, more of a black hole with the potential to consume as many resources as you can throw at it. As usual, it s the financial reports and rax return which are the problem. After making a good start by closing the 2007-8 books in plenty of time, we ve had some small problems which we ve overcome, but the blocking problem now is that HMRC are using an obsolete address for the company. I only just found out that was the problem yesterday. That s doubly odd because I changed my address at the same time (which they re using) and we ve submitted two tax returns since then with the correct address. Once I got through to the telephone helpline, they told me to go to the tax office (in the nearest town just now, but scheduled for closure) to change the address. At the tax office, they told me to use a telephone in the corner and I had no need to have gone in person. HMRC s left hand doesn t seem to know what its right one is doing! The guy on the end of the phone confused me with jargon, but the upshot is that it will take up to 3 working days to correct our address, then we can request new access to our accounts which will take up to 7 days which means we ll miss the filing deadline. I think it s time to complain about the broken address. I ll dent my progress. Anyone else finding the changed tax filing process bloody taxing this year? Finally, anyone got free and open source software for online filing of partnership tax returns? There s a 10 shareware Excel spreadsheet tool out there, but I guess I ll have to borrow someone s Excel to run it (it won t work in OpenOffice, will it?). Is there a better way? If not, I ll tell parliament.uk about HMRC driving Windows sales (slowly chipping away at the monopoly).