I am pleased to announce that Marco Nenciarini has joined the Dovecot maintainer team. One of his first contributions was converting the package to the 3.0 (quilt) source format which all the cool kids are doing these days. One ongoing problem we have is that Dovecot does not (yet) have a stable ABI for plugins. This affects dovecot-antispam as described in bug #544588 The short term solution is binNMUs but obviously a better long term solution is needed. One idea I've had is to include dovecot-antispam as an additional tarball within the dovecot source package now that 3.0 (quilt) gives us that capability. This way, dovecot-antispam will be rebuilt (with the right dependencies) whenever dovecot is. I have previously experimented with multiple tarballs and it works although at the moment all the debian build tools (devscripts, *-buildpackage etc.) don't fully support it. I expect that will be rectified soon enough but there is a philosophical issue as well. dovecot and dovecot-antispam though related, are two seperate upstream projects with seperate versioning, maintainers etc. Does it make sense to lump them together? I say yes; conceptually they belong together. (dovecot-antispam is useless except as a dovecot plugin.) In fact we have many source packages like this, that only exist as workarounds for a flaw the lack of source dependencies in the packaging system. However when I brought this up on IRC, there was some disagreement. So I put it to this august assembly, should source packages combine related but distinct upstream sources or not?

The LA Times has an interesting article about problems with Toyota and Lexus cars [1]. Basically there are problems where the cars have uncontrolled acceleration (there seems to be some dispute about whether it is due to engine management or the floor mat catching the accelerator pedal). When that happens the brakes don t work (due to the vacuum power-assistance for brakes going away when the engine is at full power) and a terrible crash seems inevitable. There are suggestions that the driver should shift the car to neutral and discussion about how the Toyota gear selection makes that difficult. Some years ago I was driving an automatic car on a freeway at 100Km/h and the engine stalled (due to a problem with the LPG system). I had become used to never touching the gear lever while driving so the possibility of moving the gear lever one notch to neutral didn t occur to me. With a dead engine in gear the car slowed rapidly which is quite dangerous when surrounded by 100Km/h traffic. Fortunately I was able to swerve into the emergency lane (across one lane of active traffic) before the car slowed much. That was in a relatively controlled environment with a gear shift mechanism that is a lot simpler than that which is common in some of the more expensive cars. According to Wikipedia the maximum speed limit in the US is 80M/h [2]. It seems to me that Toyota is being irresponsible by selling cars that can sustain 120M/h, while the probability of surviving a crash at 80M/h is quite low, it seems likely to be a lot greater than the probability of surviving a crash at 120M/h. Also if a car is out of control at 80M/h then the driver will have a lot more time to work out how to put the engine in neutral or turn it off the lower speed will extend the time available by more than 50% because bends in the road can be better handled at 80M/h. It seems to me that it would be a feature for the car owner to have the car limited to a speed that is not much greater than the speed limit. According to Wikipedia the highest speed limit in Australia is 130Km/h (in NT), but it s 110Km/h in all places where I have driven. If my car had a governor to limit the speed to 115Km/h and a switch to change the limit to 135Km/h in case I ever drive to the NT then it would not affect my driving patterns (I rarely drive on roads with a 100Km/h limit and almost never drive on roads with a 110Km/h limit) but it could reduce the probability of things going horribly wrong. Also one thing to note is that last time I checked car tyres sold in Australia were only required to operate safely at speeds below 190Km/h (118M/h), so a Lexus that went out of control at 120M/h in Australia might risk a tyre blow-out which admittedly would only make things marginally worse. A governor for the reverse gear would also be a good feature. Some time ago a granny got her foot stuck on the accelerator in a car park and caused serious damage to her car and a parked car after passing close by where I was standing. I don t think that there is a real need to do more than 5Km/h in reverse, limiting the speed would give pedestrians a better chance of escaping parking accidents. One serious problem with some of the Toyota and Lexus vehicles is that it apparently takes 3 seconds to turn the engine off in an emergency! I ve been driving for almost 20 years and experienced a number of dangerous situations, all of which were essentially resolved (for better or worse) in significantly less than 3 seconds. A 3 second delay is as good as a 1 hour delay for safety critical systems. Also if the accelerator and brake pedals are pressed at the same time then the brake should take precedence. It seems quite obvious that whenever both pedals are pressed hard then the driver would probably prefer hard braking to hard acceleration. If you look at industrial machinery (robots, lathes, etc) you will always see big red buttons (or whatever color is used for emergency stop in your region) that are clearly marked and obvious to the workers and to bystanders. Escalators have less obvious red buttons but they can still be shut down in an emergency. It seems to me that there are potential benefits to having an emergency shutdown button in a car, maybe in a position that is accessible to the front-seat passenger in case the driver is incapacitated. Such a shutdown button wouldn t do anything extreme such as fully activating the brakes (which would be very bad on a road that has high-speed traffic), but would prevent acceleration (with some sort of hardware control to avoid software problems) and maintain power to the brakes and the steering. One thing that needs to be considered is that people tend not to do the most logical things when in an emergency situation. It needs to be possible to do whatever is necessary to save your life without any great deal of thought. Pushing a big red button is easy, holding down the on button for 3 seconds or even navigating a gear shift to an uncommon setting is a lot more difficult. It seems to me that there is also an issue of driver training. If putting an automatic car into neutral and cruising to a stop was part of the test for new drivers then the results of such car problems might not always be so bad. But I don t expect there to be any serious changes to driver training or car design. People are too accepting of road deaths. Don Marti has expressed a plan to never buy a vehicle with an automatic transmission because of this issue [3]. But the number of new vehicles being sold with a manual transmission is steadily reducing. An automatic transmission allows better performance (F1 cars have used them for ages), better fuel efficiency (you could never make a manual Prius), a more comfortable ride (the Hybrid Lexus keeps winning the Australian Luxury Car of the Year award), and allows less skillful drivers. Unless Don wants to ride a moped or drive an old car then I expect that he will be forced to get an automatic transmission. Then of course he will still be at risk of other people having car problems (the LA Times article mentions a third party being killed after an out of control car hit them). Also I expect that the extra safety features that are implemented in luxury vehicles such as the Lexus would save a few lives, they should save enough to outweigh the number that are lost on the rare occasions when the car goes out of control. Other luxury cars such as the Mercedes S class have great safety features and don t have a history of going wrong in a newsworthy way. A second-hand S Class Mercedes was surprisingly cheap in the UK last time I checked, cheap enough to make it worth considering the importation of one to Australia. But my solution to these problems is to try and minimise my driving. A 1.5 ton Lexus driving out of control at the maximum speed possible in urban streets won t do much damage to a 20 ton tram.

• [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-toyota-recall18-2009oct18,0,2352642,full.story
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_by_country
• [3] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/wiki/mlp/chromium/

My friend Sean from OpenMoko recently gave me one of OM's new WikiReaders. It's essentially a touchscreen-based device dedicated to displaying Wikipedia articles offline. And while I'll never forgive the thing for not having an Edit button, I've got to admit the device is pretty cool. Not only does it make it possible to bring WP to a bunch of places that are otherwise impossible or impractical, the thing is built entirely with free software. One of my colleagues at the Center for Future Civic Media suggested we should put one in every bar to help settle drunken arguments. Think of the lives we might save! I hope the device becomes successful but I'm worried about what success will mean for the already indefensibly large gap between the number of readers and editors on Wikipedia. After all, the ability to change and contribute is the thing that makes Wikipedia interesting, empowering, and successful; cutting this functionality out kind of misses much of the point. I think it is important to start implementing a simple method to allow users of these types of devices to contribute back. Over the last few years, Sj and I have talked repeatedly about a simple method for contributing back from offline devices that would even be possible from devices like the Om Wikireader where editing the articles is probably impractical. Perhaps the device could be extended so that people could write short comments about articles from their reader --- there's an on screen keyboard after all --- which could be saved to a log on the SD card. When the data on the card is updated, messages from this log could be uploaded somewhere --- perhaps the talk pages of the articles in question or some dedicated page or ticketing queue. Editors could help merge these changes back into the articles.

Russell Coker writes about shellscripts. I have a different suggestion. Whenever you think that a shellscript is the right solution to a problem, you are mistaken: do it in a proper scripting language instead. Having access to proper data structures will mean you don't have to contort your code to fit values into scalar strings, or write loads of temporary files, or call cut/awk/sed/grep etc. repeatedly on the same inputs to get at different fields, etc. etc. etc. I reckon nine times out of ten it's the right decision. But when you just have to use a shellscript, use set -e (as Andrew Pollock points out, this is safer than putting it on the hashbang line and set -u too.

Since I came back from Dublin I had pending to release the new ebox-radius module. This new module for eBox Platform 1.2 brings integration of eBox LDAP users with FreeRADIUS allowing the deployment of WPA/WPA2 EAP wireless authentication using eBox. In fact is very simple as seen on the screenshot, you can choose whether all the users are able authenticate or just a group of them and the NAS clients that can query the RADIUS server. This module is still in beta, but packages for Hardy are available from my PPA so you can try it in your eBox 1.2, a version for eBox 1.3 will be released very soon. FreeRADIUS packages where self builded because of #266299, I hope this can be fixed very soon, see Debian, EAP, and the OpenSSL and GPL incompatibility. If you give it a try, please give us feedback on the forum or the mailing lists.

Most librarians probably already know this, but maybe the programmers don t yet. A SirsiDynix Corp lobby paper against Open Source technologies escaped onto the internet. SirsiDynix is a competitor of our co-op with products that compete with Koha. They re also interesting because Sirsi bought another competitor (Dynix), essentially stopped its product line (something near impossible with Free and Open Source Software like Koha) to replace it with its own and has ended up a messy lawsuit with Queens Borough Public Library as a consequence of that all as I understand it. Late last month, someone leaked SirsiDynix s criticism of Free and Open Source Software which is missing references for key evidence and described on WikiLeaks as containing possible libel per se against certain competitors . The comments and links at thesecretmirror and code4lib wiki seem interesting dissections. I feel that this document is taking advantage of an opportunity presented by the biggest promoters of FOSS library management systems not speaking about freedom. As you can see from some comments on thesecretmirror, it s all about freedom. reflections Missing the point: It s time to talk about software freedom develops that point a bit more and gives a few links back to other statements of freedom which I d not seen before. Anyway, one of the points in the leaked document was that the US Department of Defense (DoD) restricts use of FOSS. Unluckily for SirsiDynix, on 16 October, a memo was published by the DoD CIO saying Defense: Open source software is more secure than commercial code. There s some analysis by David Wheeler discussed on LWN. Anyway, who would you believe about FOSS? An under-fire legacy private software competitor, or the Department of Defense? I don t like either that much, but there s not really a contest. DoD are willing to bet lives on it.

Just wanted to share comments on some movies I've watched recently.

• The hurt locker: about the days of a bomb disposal team in the war of Iraq; well done, entertaining, and it didn't trigger my oh-again-the-yanks-saving-the-day response.
• Gran Torino: cannot say much about this one, I loved each minute of it. Clint Eastwood is getting better every day; must see.
• The union: the business behind getting high: a documentary on cannabis, nice but not that interesting.
• Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis: a simple French comedy, nothing deep here. Nevertheless, I found the characters lovable, and now I'd like to visit Nord-pas-de-Calais.
• La m me: another French film, which I really enjoyed. Marion Cotillard is really impressive in her rendition of Edith Piaf.
• Death proof: ah, Tarantino, can't help enjoying, even though there was not much plot here.
• Les poupees russes: more French cinema. The sequel of "L'auberge espagnole" which wasn't that great is quite dull. The director doesn't get tired of trying to show off all these fancy edition effects, and instead of being clever, it looks silly.
• Der Untergang: disturbing, well done, enjoyed.
• Cidade de Deus: quite a surprise this one; dynamic, thrilling, great edition. Based on a real story, but goriest than Tarantino.
• Blade runner: I got a high quality copy, which was enough of an excuse to watch and enjoy it once again. A beautiful film in every sense.
• This is England: didn't know anything about This is England, and surprised me to see a film that touches on the war of the Malvinas (Falklands) from an English perspective, although that is not central to the plot. It revolves around a boy who joins a gang of skinheads, which was another surprise, as I didn't even know that the non-racist skinheads existed.
• Zack and Miri make a porno: funny, edgy, but they had to ruin everything with romance, bleargh.
• Happy together ( ): I think I liked it, but I'll need to see it again with readable subtitles!
• School of rock: I think I will never enjoy north-American comedies...

Tags: Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian

Others are doing it, so I thought I'd join in, too. Though, from a different perspective. Often enough people claim that package maintainers don't seem to care about their packages anymore once they did hit stable because they say it isn't as easy to update packages in stable. While this is partly true it still doesn't send a too good impression to have a high and increasing release-critical bug count for stable. UDD makes it easy. It has a field affects_stable in its bugs table, and the view bugs_rt_affects_stable is even yet better. I fiddled together two short statements that help me to find release-critical bugs for stable:

SELECT b.id FROM bugs_rt_affects_stable bas
   LEFT JOIN bugs b ON bas.id=b.id
   WHERE b.severity IN ('serious', 'critical', 'grave')
   AND b.id NOT IN (select bau.id from bugs_rt_affects_unstable bau)
   ORDER BY b.id;

The second statement is without the AND clause to see all open release-critical bugs. Going through this list isn't too complicated, and I already found a good rush of bugs to mark as not affecting stable because the reason for the bug only appeared after the lenny release. I could list their bugnumbers, but it's currently up to 39 such bugs since yesterday and I don't want to bore you with it, actually it didn't involve any touching of the package but it will definitely make it easier to find the real release-critical bugs that do affect stable and should get addressed in an update to it. Still lots to do, 39 bugs down isn't the world when the barrier is set to about 1500. Though, it's still more than 2% and this is something that makes me a bit happy.

A few weeks ago I've visited my grandma, because she and my grandpa had birthday.
We also did it, because we figured that it might be the last chance to see her alive.
It was a hard time for us. Because she wasn't the person I knew, the person with whom I argued so often when I was a young boy, the person who showed me the beauty of cooking. She were lying in her bed, barely realizing us, not really able to do conversation. As soon as we went away from her bed she was calling for one of us, repeating the name of the person she was calling for every few seconds. Most of the time she called for my grandpa, but another time it was me she was calling. I then stood there, next to her bed, not really able to talk, because she wasn't and I didn't know what to say.
And then I had a talk to my grandpa. Although he looked visibly aged, he still seemed to be in a good constitution. But while talking to him I realized that he was tired. He told me that his woman was asking him eight times a day which day it was and such things. He told me and my cousin that he fears the day when she is gone. It was hard. I mean.. I knew it, I knew that it would break his heart when she's gone, but in my memorization he has never been a guy who would have spoken it out. I know that both had good and bad times together. Their was always that joke about them, that they can't do with each other but not without each other either. But now, the very imagination that this might be true, caused frighten in me.
Yesterday I got a call from my mother, telling me, that it seems that she decided that she will go, so she drove to my grandparents. A few hours later she called me again and said to me that it is over. Slept in, in silence. No pulse anymore. But the first thing I replied was: Can you take care for grandpa? Its not that I don't sorrow, but I knew it were better for her. She had a life with ups and downs, she had a man who loved her more then anything else. But she wasn't able to live or enjoy her last days I think. And now I'm afraid about the living, the one whose heart supposedly just broke. I hope he will be able to enjoy his last years anyway. Because he is a good man, has always been and I think he deserves it.

Grandma, we will miss you. Rest in Peace.

Sometimes computers fail. If you run enough computers then you encounter failures regularly. If the computers are important then you need to plan for the failure. An ideal situation is to have redundant servers. Misconfigured clusters can cause more downtime than they can prevent and it requires more expensive hardware to properly implement a cluster (you need at least two servers and hardware to allow a good node to kill a bad node) as well as more time (from people who may charge higher rates). Most companies don t have redundant servers. So if you have some non-redundant servers there seem to be two reasonable options. The first one is to use more expensive hardware on a support contract. If a server is really important to you then get a 24*7 support contract it only takes an extra mouse click (and a couple of thousand dollars) when ordering a Dell server. I am not going to debate the relative merits of Dell vs IBM vs HP at this time, but I think that most people will agree that Dell offers significant advantages over a white-box server, both in terms of quality (the low incidence of failure) and support (including 24*7 part replacement). The second option is to have a cheap server that can be easily replaced. This IS appropriate for some tasks. For example I have installed many cheap desktop systems with two IDE disks in a RAID-1 array that run as Internet gateway systems for small businesses. The requirements were that they be quiet, use little power (due to poorly ventilated server rooms / cupboards), be relatively reliable, and be reasonably cheap. If one of those systems suddenly fails and no replacement hardware is available then someone s desktop PC can be taken as a replacement, having one person unable to work due to a lack of a PC is better than having everyone s work impeded by lack of Internet access! This ability to swap hardware is dependent on the new hardware being reasonably similar. Finding a desktop PC in an office today which can support two IDE disks and which has an Ethernet port on the motherboard and a spare PCI slot is not too difficult. I expect that in the near future such machines will start to disappear which will be an incentive for using systems with SATA disks and USB keyboards as routers. This evening I had to advise someone who was dealing with a broken server. The system in question is mission critical, was based on white-box hardware, and had four SATA disks in a LVM volume group for the root filesystem. This gave a 600G filesystem with less than 10G in use. If the person who installed it had chosen to use only a single disk (or even better two disks in a RAID-1 array) then there would have been a wide range of systems that could take the disks and be used to keep the company running for business tomorrow. But finding a computer that can handle four SATA disks is a little more tricky. Of course running a mission critical server that doesn t use RAID is obviously very wrong. But using four disks in an LVM volume group both increases the probability of a data destroying disk failure and makes it more difficult to replace the computer itself. Some server installations are fractally wrong.

gPDFText is a text editor for GTK+ that opens PDF documents for ebook readers, converts the text contents into plain ASCII text, restores the original paragraphs and removes unwanted line breaks to allow easier zooming on the reader. gPDFText is now in Debian unstable and on a mirror near you. There are no obvious hindrances to a simple, clean migration into Squeeze and Ubuntu, once the necessary time has elapsed.

The current release is v0.0.2 and adds support for undo/redo as well as a few more translations, giving me six in all: Czech, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish, for both the program and the Help Manual. Many many thanks to the translators concerned. (New translations are always welcome - the notable exception to the current list is French IMHO. Both POT files are included in the Debian source package via the upstream tarball. Just do apt-get source gpdftext, you'll find gpdftext-0.0.2/po/gpdftext.pot and gpdftext-0.0.2/help/gpdftext-help.pot. File wishlist bugs against gpdftext in the Debian BTS as normal, once your translation is complete, one bug for each PO file.) There's also the upstream bug tracker if you want to use that - you need to be logged into SourceForge - SF does support OpenID, not sure if you need an SF account or just the OpenID.

Just started adding PDF write support, so that the typical A4 PDF file can be rewritten as an A5 PDF as well as plain text. Initially, I thought I'd use libpoppler-glib directly but that's only for reading PDF. It can work with PS, so I tried that and libgs8 from ghostscript. Turned out that I should have been looking at cairo and pango all along. (Check out the buffer_to_ps function.) That said, I haven't actually got the full interface working yet, so I've yet to see just what kind of PDF I get.

This is part of the roadmap to go into version 0.1.0 along with some other interface additions, so the Manual will be getting some new content and the program a few new translatable strings. I'll make the usual string freeze announcements and call for updates when the time comes. I don't expect to be changing the existing strings much for 0.1.0.

I'm happy to add new translations based on 0.0.2 and then request an update once I know that 0.1.0 actually works.

Why vote?

World leaders are set to discuss new ways to deal with climate change at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, 7-18 December 2009. This new deal will replace the Kyoto Protocol and set new standards for reducing harmful emissions and global warming.

The difficulty with living on the Joey sleep schedule as the year wanes is finding enough daylight to have a satisfying day. The plan was to hike in the mountains, but my inbox said otherwise. Ugly new debhelper bugs. Looking at the hard one, I felt as if someone from 30 years ago was trying to take my day away. Why does make(1) not provide a way to discover which targets exist in a makefile? My hack to workaround that historical oversight was breaking, and make was nearly fork-bombing the system in the process. This seemed likely to eat my weekend -- I was very glad to find a quick, ugly workaround. By then it was 2:00. I'd not get to the mountain pass til after 3:00, which was pushing it. Almost stayed home, but it was such a nice sunny day, perfect weather. So I headed out. Spent half an hour along the way talking with an old woman about a well (long story), but reached the Roan with nearly two hours of daylight. And it was sublime. I realized I'd never stayed up there for sunset, so I hunkered down on a rock, finished checking my email (left over from the earlier hurry), and then spent half an hour chatting on the phone with my dad, as the sun inched down a finger at a time. When it went behind the other peak, and mist crept up the valleys below, it got cold and I hurried down. Reached the car in deep dusk, and coasted down the mountian while listening to a BBS nostalgia piece on the radio. On the way home, pulled in at the Ridgewood BBQ, and am sitting on the porch in the cold with about 50 other people, waiting for a seat (hopefully before it closes), and blogging. I accomplished everything I wanted to today, including getting something significant done, hiking, and spending quiet time on top of the world. Though only just, and feeling I was running late the whole time. Nice thing about the Joey schedule though, is I will have seven more hours of quiet time before sleep.

I can't simply put up any longer with all the shit thrown on the face being unable to do punish such bad behavior. There are just so many other things that increase my anger (like, for example, "WTH is python2.6 still not in unstable?!") that I don't need another one.

For sure, I don't advocate or encourage anyone to join the MIA team, and I'm speaking with a lot of experience... There is a proposal, from zack, to restructure how MIA works (another bright example of collaboration...): when will it be implemented? nobody knows. will it help? I don't think so (much).

My work (MIA work in general) was almost invisible, like invisible were all the harsh and aggressive replies I got. The nice part is that those replies came from people with the worst situation. Something like:

• me: "this package has no uploads since 2005", reply: "this package has no upstream release since 1983" - 1. probably is to remove? 2. what about all the bugs filed against the *Debian* package? 3. what about the gazillion of lintian errors and warnings on that package? 4. MIA doesn't contact about only 1 package (so maybe there's something more?)...
• me: "one of your packages has 4 RC bugs", reply: "it's team maintainer!!" - yeah, so let's pretend that since it's team-maintained 'someone else' (that's never you) will work on it.
  

and several other non-sense replies doesn't leave anything but a huge frustration in you.

And when you got really pissed off, and want to see some sort of reaction on such bad and unmotivated attacks and ask the "People with Powers", what do you got? "sorry, we can't do anything to help you, it's your problem". Something should be done to protect people from fuckheads, make them behave, or else kick them out of the project as far away as we can. But what we got is nothing (and nothing seems to be changing on this side).

Well, now it's not my problem anymore, it's someone else: in perfect Debian-style.

Yesterday was the last day of presidential campaign, the most poisonous campaign since 1989, when the communist rule has fallen ... or so says history.

This campaign period was one of firsts of all kinds, mostly bad.

This is the first presidential campaign:

• when, as a voter, one could clearly see polls were doctored massively as a means to influence the voters
• when the internet was crucial and almost the only means of spreading ideas for the campaign of a candidate, Remus Cernea
• in which an important internet news site, hotnews.ro, decided not to publish polls anymore
• when the public television didn't perform its duty to organise a debate with all the candidates at the same time
• when candidates were separated in two groups: "insignificant candidates" and "important candidates"
• when some candidates refused to participate in public debates, except on their own terms, as if it was a service done by them to others
• when candidates accused each other of being afraid to participate in face to face debates, while it was clear that this was true for many
  
• when a candidate, Remus Cernea, was kicked out of a debate where he was previously invited, without being given a reason
• when journalists' investigations found that all major parties had during the last year donations from at least 100 politicians with a declared income lower or identical to the donated sums totalling up to 91 millions of new lei (RON) (approximately 22 million euros)
• when we have proof directly from frauders that all major parties prepared to fraud the elections via electoral tourism, electoral bribes and vote purchase
• when a referendum was used as a electoral means by one of the candidates
• when opponents twisted and re-twisted others' electoral message
• when an illegitimate organisation organised a debate with only the first three candidates
• when it was announced that special polling stations were made to target people voting away from home, not allowing such voting on special lists in regular polling stations; also the special polling stations will be, for the first time, monitored via webcams which will record the voters when they insert the bulletin
• when some candidates clearly stole ideas from others mid-campaign
  
• when I decided I am going to vote out of conviction and cast a positive vote for Remus Cernea

This is the first time I realise how important it is for everybody to go and cast a vote for the candidate they prefer to dilute the effects of the frauds.

Go and vote for the candidate you agree the most!

Don't cast a "useful vote", otherwise you will disservice your prefered candidate in three ways:

• you're strentghning one of the adversaries
• your prefered candidate will be in a worse position to negotiate with others the implementation of some of the points on his platform in case he doesn't win
• you're canceling one of the votes somebody did vote for the one you prefer

Don't forget, tomorrow, the 22nd of November spare some 15-30 minutes and vote for the person that represents you most! Don't follow the flock, vote sincerely!


Vote, because your vote counts! Otherwise why would they bother to convince you to vote for them?

During the month of October I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the past, present, and future of F/OSS. This was due in part to participation in a Berkman Center event on Free Culture, where we discussed the historical arc of Free Software to Free Culture, the relationships between them (and their differences), and also the content and meaning each. Over the years, what I have found so interesting about Free Software is how it left its enclave to inspire countless groups into rethinking the politics and ethics of production and access and yet, as I raised in this pod-cast interview (due to the prompting of my interviewer, Elizabeth Stark), Free Software and/or Free Culture is still pretty bounded and contained phenomenon especially when compared to something like the existing consciousness over the environmental movement, which many folks know about and understand even when and if they are not involved in doing anything for the movement. I always ask my first year students whether they know what Free Software or Free Culture is and 9 out 10 stare at me with those blank eyes that basically speak in silence: no. Now, there are a group of activists, many located in Europe, a number of them with deep roots in the social justice movement who are taking Free Culture down a different path, trying to expand its meaning and conjoin it to social justice issues, build a broad set of coalitions across the political spectrum so as to override the fragmentation that is so characteristic to contemporary political moment, and use FC as an opportunity to critique the market fundamentalism of the last few decades. If you are interested in these issues, take a look at their charter: they are looking for comments (critical and constructive) as well as endorsements (here is the long version). I myself have a few comments, for example, I think it is worth noting something like the limits of what FC can do, that even if in many ways it can be activated to do good in the world, it is also best to highlight in the same swoop that FC is not some political panacea and has limits. For example some groups in the world, notably some indigenous communities abide by a different logic of access and culture, whereby full access is not culturally or ethically desirable, as the work of Kim Christen has illuminated. I also wonder in what ways issues of labor might be addressed more forcefully, and though they briefly raise the question of environmental sustainability, it is worth expanding these more directly and deeplyas this article by Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell make clear. There is more to say but I will leave it here for now and just say it is really great to see Free Culture taken down another political path that is rooted in coalition building.

During the month of October I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the past, present, and future of F/OSS. This was due in part to participation in a Berkman Center event on Free Culture, where we discussed the historical arc of Free Software to Free Culture, the relationships between them (and their differences), and also the content and meaning each. Over the years, what I have found so interesting about Free Software is how it left its enclave to inspire countless groups into rethinking the politics and ethics of production and access and yet, as I raised in this pod-cast interview (due to the prompting of my interviewer, Elizabeth Stark), Free Software and/or Free Culture is still pretty bounded and contained phenomenon especially when compared to something like the existing consciousness over the environmental movement, which many folks know about and understand even when and if they are not involved in doing anything for the movement. I always ask my first year students whether they know what Free Software or Free Culture is and 9 out 10 stare at me with those blank eyes that basically speak in silence: no. Now, there are a group of activists, many located in Europe, a number of them with deep roots in the social justice movement who are taking Free Culture down a different path, trying to expand its meaning and conjoin it to social justice issues, build a broad set of coalitions across the political spectrum so as to override the fragmentation that is so characteristic to contemporary political moment, and use FC as an opportunity to critique the market fundamentalism of the last few decades. If you are interested in these issues, take a look at their charter: they are looking for comments (critical and constructive) as well as endorsements (here is the long version). I myself have a few comments, for example, I think it is worth noting something like the limits of what FC can do, that even if in many ways it can be activated to do good in the world, it is also best to highlight in the same swoop that FC is not some political panacea and has limits. For example some groups in the world, notably some indigenous communities abide by a different logic of access and culture, whereby full access is not culturally or ethically desirable, as the work of Kim Christen has illuminated. I also wonder in what ways issues of labor might be addressed more forcefully, and though they briefly raise the question of environmental sustainability, it is worth expanding these more directly and deeplyas this article by Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell make clear. There is more to say but I will leave it here for now and just say it is really great to see Free Culture taken down another political path that is rooted in coalition building.

Since some days we keep packages of Architecture: all in the archive as long as they are needed. You can find some details about that in my former post:
dak dominate will dodadoda the Debian archive soon.

The package that could currently profit most from that change is rpm! But the package dependencies are actually not strong enough. The source package rpm builds some arch all packages like rpm-common and several arch any packages and some of them (rpm, librpm0) have an unversioned field
Depends: rpm-common.
This dependency can be improved to
Depends: rpm-common (= $ source:Version )
to avoid nasty bugs after upgrading.

I fear that we have more of such packages in Debian.

I normally don't relay security announces for GForge or FusionForge on this blog, but I will make an exception this time: Alain Peyrat found several places in the code with insufficient input sanitizing, which can cause cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (CVE-2009-3303). It's been fixed in the 4.7 and 4.8 branches as well as the trunk of FusionForge (and in Debian Sid and Squeeze), and updated Debian packages for GForge 4.5 and 4.7rc2 have been released for users of the Etch and Lenny distributions. The reason I make an exception for announcing this here is to remind people that I appear to be the only one maintaining code for GForge 4.5. I do that for two reasons: first, because I'm the maintainer of the package in Debian, and Debian Etch has GForge 4.5, and Etch is supported for security fixes; second, because I also admin/maintain an instance for a client of mine, so I need to backport the fixes anyway, and making them public is no bother. Both of these reasons are going to vanish sometime in the not too distant future: security support for Etch will end in February, 2010, and I hope to have migrated my client's forge to FusionForge 4.8 by then too. A direct consequence is that I will probably stop maintenance for GForge 4.5 in the coming months (at least I'll stop doing it in my free time). So if you're still using GForge 4.5, you should really consider upgrading to something supported, either GForge AS (free download from the GForge Group) or FusionForge (free as in Free Software). Both have an upgrade path. Obviously I think FusionForge is a better choice, but my position is probably biased.

Many moons ago while doing fieldwork I went to a radical tech activist camp sponsored by The Ruckus Society to give a presentation on Free Software (which I actually still have online in the gaudy orange I so loved. I could only stay 2 days as I had to go to Debconf2 in Toronto for fieldwork but it forever changed my life in pretty significant ways. One remarkable thing about Ruckus was that for the first time I meet a particular kind of geek I had yet to come across: the crunchy and chewy granola/environmentalist/hippie hacker a type of hacker that can be found world over but is likely to be (unsurprisingly) living, sometimes in the trees (literally) in the Pacific Northwest. They are one of my favorite kind of people as I can talk endlessly to them about 2 of my great passions: Free Software and environmental justice. Comfrey, pictured above, was one such hacker from Portland who I met at the Ruckus event and now routinely shows up, usually unannounced to our house at least 1-2x a year. I woke up this morning to find him on our couch, got a bunch of knot-weed to chew on compliments of his foraging, and took the afternoon off to share some food. Among many stories, he told me of a new transportational pursuit of his, Roller-Hitching, which he uses to get around the country. He uses old school roller skates to skate along the road, even highways, until he gets picked up and get where he needs to go. Naturally, these old school states are not just functional in the sense that they are faster than two feet in motion, but since they signify a particular spirit of the 1970s you know, the groovy, dynamite, free love spirit of things, they draw positive attention and apparently when he roller-hitches, he gets picked up frequently (and made it from Minneapolis to Portland in 2 hours and 2 days: not shabby). In California while on the 101 north of Arcata, California, Comfrey got stopped by the highway patrol and basically the cop wanted to kick him off on the grounds the he was a pedestrian (apparently prohibited on this patch of the 101). Comfrey, being a bright fellow, basically noted that roller skating is not really a pedestrian activity, that he was using, much a like a biker, a transportation device of sorts, so that he was in a grey zone between bikes and walking. At the time, the cop was convinced enough but did tell Comfrey to look up the law in the library cuz the next time he would give him a ticket and the next time after that throw him in jail. Comfrey has yet sourced the law but soon will. When he does, since I like to report on geeks and the law, I too will report on whether one can roller skate down or up the highway for those that might want to give Roller-Hitching a try.