I just saw the vote of NOKUBI Takatsugu who posted it by error on debian-vote. The vote ranked “Further discussion” second just after his preferred option. I find such a vote too strong. This vote really means “My option or none”, or in other words: I don’t want any compromise (which is quite strange given that his first option is the “compromise” option). I believe that we should vote with the aim to have a winner in the end and as such we should avoid putting something below “Further discussion”. IMO the only valid reason to put something below is if that option would hurt Debian in one’s own opinion. Just rank the options in your order of preference. I ranked “Further Discussion” last, it’s my way of accepting the diverging opinions within our project. (So there’s nothing personal against Takatsugu, I just took the opportunity of his little mistake to point out something I find important) BTW, if you haven’t voted, please do. Even if you don’t care about the outcome, vote and leave all the fields empty (or rank them equally), that way you’ll express that you’re happy whatever the outcome is and you won’t be part of a silent majority. And the outcome of the vote will be stronger. This leads me to the following question: I wonder if we shouldn’t require DD to vote and if they don’t participate in 2 or 3 consecutive votes, they shall be considered by the MIA team… it would be a kind of implicit “ping of maintainers”. Update: FYI, Takatsugu thanked me by private mail for the explanation and will recast another vote.

It's that time time of the year again when the Debian Project gathers to elect a new leader. This year there are a record seven candidates. I just spent a couple of hours reading their platforms and a lot (not all, my eyes glazed over after a bit) of the discussions on debian-vote and these are my initial impressions. Jeroen Van Wolffelaar: Jeroen seems to have a good grasp of where the bottlenecks in the Debian system are. He supports the project Scud idea which has not really worked well so far (as far as I can see) but claims he knows what is wrong and how to fix it. He is young and still a student which might hamper his ability to travel which is a big part of being DPL. Astutely notes that Debian needs to stand out from the crowd more. Zeke the Cat: Does he have the balls to be an effective leader? Steve McIntyre: Not really high profile within the project as far as I can tell. Will he be able to "herd cats"? His platform is mainly about reforming Debians' social structure so this is a real concern. The idea of imposing some level of performance standard on developers is intriguing but he is rather short of details on how it is supposed to happen. Anthony Towns: Anthony is heavily involved in such roles as ftpmaster and release manager. It would be a shame if being DPL actually meant he would have less time for that sort of thing. He claims to be running mainly to introduce some new ideas. So hopefully he won't mind if we keep him in the boiler room instead of, um, athwart the foc'sle? Andreas Schuldei I like the idea of frequent face to face meetings. Andreas is a good fundraiser so if anyone can make this happen, he can. But in the absence of support from an eccentric billionaire is this really feasible? Also a member of project Scud. Johnathan 'Ted' Walther: Retar-ted. Bill Allombert: Also suffers from being relatively unknown (IMO.) A bit low on ideas and basically wants to maintain the status quo as far as social issues go. I can't consider him a viable contender. At the moment I'm leaning towards voting for Jeroen but Andreas and Anthony are still in the running. The IRC debate should be interesting.

I’m back from Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT) which were really great. The CLT organizers really know how to make an event for the community without forgetting the business people. So, although Murphy hunted me with forgotten laptop power supplies, forgotten laptop power supply power cords (Thanks for the spare, Venty!), missed trains, late trains, unfitting train schedules, defective mobile phones (Hi Sven! :-), heavy snowing, addictive Play Station Portables and no time for attending a single talk except mine (I’m sorry, blindcoder), I held all three talks as planned — maybe except the duration — and had a lot of fun as expected. The slides for my commandline beginner’s talk on Sunday were finished the same day at about 2am and are online since then. It was too long, but except the next presenter (Hi Werner!), nobody told me. I even thought that all those people entering the room were late listeners. I just didn’t notice at all that time was flying by so fast, since there was a lot of interesting discussion with and in the audience, something I didn’t expect from a beginners talk. Thanks to all who already gave feedback to my talks. And thanks to Sven Kühnel and Hendrik Heigl with whom I could drive back to Frankfurt.

I've been playing with putenv/setenv, and wondering how those two differ.setenv looks more convenient indeed.However, setenv seems to allocate memory to construct the environment variable string, whichis not acceptable.It took me a while until I really found out the problem with this code.

Warning: Very long post ahead. You have been warned! What? Tor is a Free Software project (revised BSD license), developed by Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, which creates an infrastructure for anonymous TCP communication. From the project website:

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features. Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves.

Tor also allows you to set up and/or use a so-called Tor hidden service, i.e., a server which offers some service (a website, ssh access, or similar) without revealing its IP to its users. Why? Why would you want to use Tor? Well, because you probably don't want anybody (neither state agencies, nor companies, nor "hackers", nor any other individuals or groups) to be able to record, analyze, and (ab)use information about your web browsing habits, or any other communication habits. For instance, you don't want Google to have a complete search-profile of you, which — even worse — might some day get in the hands of other parties. In the days of massive data retention you don't want all your electronic traces to be recorded, stored for ages, analyzed, and data-mined for dubious reasons and with even more dubious results and false conclusions drawn which might negatively affect you. If you're a human rights activist in China, you want anonymous communication. If you're a whistleblower, you want anonymous communication. The list is endless. For securing your communications, so that nobody is able to sniff your emails, your chat messages, your passwords, your private documents and conversations, you use encryption. For communicating anonymously you can use Tor. Combine both, and you have secure and anonymous communication. In case you're wondering whether criminals might abuse Tor, read the Tor Abuse FAQ. Short answer: yes, but if you're willing to break the law, you already have anonymity (open access points, stolen/prepaid mobile phones, etc.). You don't need Tor to do bad things if you're a criminal. If you're one of those horrible "oh, but I don't have anything to hide" guys, consider this: Say you have a drug/alcohol problem and want to visit an anti-drugs/anti-alcohol website or forum for help. Would you want the whole world, your neighbors, your co-workers, your boss, to know that, or would you rather want to keep that a secret? Say you have AIDS and want to get information on the web? Or, to make the example even more dramatic: Would you want some random guys to be able to watch you while you fuck your wife? No? So you have something to hide after all, right? My point is: Everyone has something to hide, even more, it is a basic human right to have the ability to hide something. It's called privacy. How? Tor implements a form of onion routing to, basically, push encrypted data through multiple Tor nodes (servers), before it reaches the final destination (e.g. a website). The result is that neither the website owner, nor a local eavesdropper, nor any single Tor server knows who requested that specific website, hence you are communicating anonymously. For more technical details, read the Tor overview and the Tor documentation pages. In order to use Tor, you have to install and run a local Tor client/daemon (this is not necessarily a Tor server!). On Debian, type apt-get install tor, on other systems you can get the respective binary packages or download the sources and compile Tor yourself. Usually Tor is used together with Privoxy, a configurable HTTP proxy which sanitizes your web-browsing experience by removing nasty banner ads, pop-ups, JavaScript, webbugs, cookies etc. etc. So: apt-get install privoxy. After installing and starting Tor and Privoxy, you can now configure your webbrowser to use Privoxy as an HTTP proxy (see below), and Privoxy will in turn use Tor to anonymize your communication if you add "forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 ." to your /etc/privoxy/config. Anonymizing various applications Most (but not all) of the following information is also covered in the very useful Torify HOWTO in the Tor wiki (I will add the missing information there, ASAP). As I'm pretty paranoid, I have checked every single of these configurations with Ethereal to ensure that the traffic is really anonymized. However, if you are paranoid, you shouldn't trust me, but rather test this stuff for yourself! Warning: DNS Leaks:
The biggest problem with many applications is that they leak DNS requests. That is, although they use Tor to anonymize the traffic, they first send a DNS request untorified in order to get the IP address of the target system. Then they communicate "anonymously" with that target. The problem: any eavesdropper with more than three brain cells can conclude what website you visited, if they see that you send a DNS request for rsf.org, followed by some "anonymous" Tor traffic. The solution: use Tor together with Privoxy, that prevents DNS leaks. Many non-HTTP-based applications are usually torified using a small tool called torify (e.g. by typing torify fetchmail), but often this approach has DNS leaking problems, see below.

• Webbrowser: Firefox, Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, ...:
  Most browsers can be torified by using Privoxy as an HTTP(S) proxy, i.e. using 127.0.0.1 as proxy host and 8118 as proxy port.
  For example, to torify Firefox go to Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Connection Settings -> Manual proxy configuration and configure:
  HTTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
SSL Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
FTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
SOCKS v5

  For Konqueror, go to Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Proxy -> Manually Specify the proxy settings -> Setup and configure:
  HTTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
HTTPS Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
FTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118

  Warning: Although Privoxy doesn't support FTP, you should configure the browser to use Tor + Privoxy for FTP. By doing that, you get an error message when you try to access ftp:// URLs, but at least you don't send untorified traffic without noticing.
  Warning: Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" (RSS feeds) are a problem if you switch from a torified to an untorified state sometimes (by switching or enabling/disabling the proxy). Firefox periodically requests all the feeds you're subscribed to. If you turn off Tor + Privoxy usage, they will be requested non-anonymously, and you won't even notice it! Solution: remove all "Live Bookmarks", or never switch to untorified browsing.
• HTTP-based tools: lynx, links, w3m, wget, curl, ...:
  Most other HTTP tools, such as wget, can be torified by setting the respective values for the http_proxy and HTTP_PROXY environment variables. Applications which don't honor http_proxy probably have a configuration option to set the HTTP proxy.
  Add this to your ~/.bashrc or similar config-file:
  http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:8118/
HTTP_PROXY=$http_proxy
export http_proxy HTTP_PROXY

  Warning: links is a notable exception here. It does not honor the http_proxy environment variable! However, you can add http_proxy 127.0.0.1:8118 to your /etc/links.cfg and/or to your ~/.links/links.cfg. Or go to Setup -> Network Options and do the same there. Or use the -http-proxy 127.0.0.1:8118 command line option.
• Instant Messaging: Gaim:
  Go to Preferences -> Network -> Proxy and configure this:
  Proxy type: Socks 5
Host: 127.0.0.1
Port: 9050

  Gaim doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
• Debian: Apt:
  Setting http_proxy is enough, as apt-get honors the http_proxy environment variable. But you can also add this line to your /etc/apt/apt-conf:
  Acquire::http::Proxy "http://127.0.0.1:8118/";

  apt-get doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
  Warning: This will only work for deb/deb-src lines in /etc/apt/sources.list which use HTTP, because Privoxy does not support FTP.
• RSS-Reader: Akregator:
  Which RSS feeds you are reading tells quite a lot about you, and it's probably an information some people or organizations would be very interested in, I imagine. So anonymizing your feed-reader is quite important, IMHO. Akregator (a KDE RSS-reader application) uses Konqueror internally, so if you have set Konqueror to use Tor + Privoxy as HTTP-proxy, Akregator is safe, too.
  Akregator doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
• Podcast Client: iPodder/Juice:
  Got to File -> Preferences -> Network settings and configure this:
  Use a proxy server: enable
Address: http://127.0.0.1
Port: 8118

  iPodder/Juice doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
• Secure login: ssh:
  In order to torify all your ssh communications (ssh, slogin, sftp, etc.), edit your /etc/ssh/ssh_config and/or ~/.ssh/config and add:
  Host *
ProxyCommand socat STDIO SOCKS4A:127.0.0.1:%h:%p,socksport=9050

  This requires socat, so: apt-get install socat.
  ssh doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
  Warning: Simply using torify ssh does not suffice, it leaks DNS requests!
• Email: fetchmail:
  Properly torifying fetchmail is pretty ugly. Basically, torify fetchmail should be enough (one would think), but that leaks DNS requests! All tips offered in the Torify HOWTO suffer from this problem. The ideal solution would be to use tor-resolve (a small utility which resolves DNS requests via the Tor network, and hence anonymously) before fetching the emails, but I haven't found a good and simple solution for that. What I do right now is to hardcode IP addresses in my ~/.fetchmailrc config-file and then use torify fetchmail, which doesn't leak DNS requests. However, it leads to some ugly "fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: foo.bar.com != xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" warnings.
  I always start fetchmail manually, often by clicking an icon in my IceWM toolbar. So I use the following line in my ~/.icewm/toolbar config-file:
  prog Fetchmail fetchmail xterm -e torify fetchmail

  Sometimes I invoke fetchmail from the command-line, too, so I have this alias in my ~/.bashrc:
  alias fetchmail='torify fetchmail'
Warning: Just for the record: torify fetchmail alone (i.e. used with hostnames in ~/.fetchmailrc) does not suffice, it leaks DNS requests!
• IRC: XChat:
  Go to Settings-> Preferences -> Network -> Network setup -> Proxy server and configure:
  Hostname: 127.0.0.1
Port: 9050
Type: Socks5

  Then make sure you check the "Use a proxy server" checkbox in the preferences dialog of the IRC server you want to use.
  XChat doesn't leak DNS requests.

You might also want to check out toraliases, a small shell script you can source from your ~/.bashrc file. It defines some functions and aliases which transparently direct the traffic of some (but not all!) programs through Tor. Applications which cannot easily be torified Anything not using TCP usually cannot be torified, as Tor only works for TCP.

• Non-TCP traffic from tools like ping, host, dig, nslookup, nmap, traceroute and lots more: as Tor only supports TCP, you're out of luck. However, you can safely use web-frontends such as dnsstuff.com over Tor + Privoxy (if they don't block Tor users, that is).
• whois: Although torify whois google.com leaks the DNS request for the whois-server (in this case whois.crsnic.net), it doesn't seem to leak the host you wanted to lookup. Can somebody confirm this? The safer method is to use a web-frontend, though.
• FTP: Although torify ncftp works, it leaks DNS requests! I haven't yet found a way to fix this (help is appreciated!). I also tried a few other FTP clients, without luck.
• GnuPG: Using gpg anonymously should work by using a proper http_proxy environment variable and by using a hidden Tor server as keyserver.
  Add this to your ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf:
  keyserver x-hkp://yod73zr3y6wnm2sw.onion
keyserver-options honor-http-proxy broken-http-proxy

  This works in theory. However, I noticed a problem: while gpg --recv-keys seems to work fine, gpg --refresh-keys leaks DNS requests! It seems GnuPG hard-codes the keyserver to keyserver.pgp.com in that case and leaks the DNS request for this domain name.
• Sending email (SMTP): Not sure how to do this with Tor. Many Tor nodes block SMTP per default. A better solution is probably Mixmaster/Mixminion.
• CVS, svn, Bittorrent/Azureus (untested HOWTO), usenet clients (pan, slrn), xmms: TODO. Haven't checked, yet.

Pitfalls to be aware of

• Rule #1: Don't spoil your anonymity by being stupid!
• IRC: Don't use nicks which hint at you, such as your real name, real-life nickname, acronyms which are known to "belong" to you or identify you. Don't use things like DCC which might reveal your real IP or real information about you. Disable all possibly "leaky" features/commands such as CTCP, VERSION requests, automatically accepting files from other IRC users, etc. etc.
• Don't accidentally access Tor hidden server URLs in an untorified browser. For example, if you would try to access the fictitious hidden server abc1234.onion, this request would travel over the net unencrypted and untorified. An eavesdropper could sniff that, enable Tor on his computer, go to abc1234.onion, and would know what you wanted to look at.
• Double-check that all applications you use don't leak DNS requests.
• Do not only configure your ~/.foobarrc config-files but also the config-files in /etc. Otherwise you might eventually use wget, ssh, lynx or other tools as root (instead of your normal, non-privileged user account) resulting in untorified traffic!
• Disable all "check for updates automatically", "notify upon new release" and similar "phoning home" features in all your applications. Most such features are probably not Tor-safe, i.e. will send/receive untorified traffic. Some candidates are Firefox, Adobe Acrobat reader, Gaim, and others.
• Never, never, think that Tor encrypts your traffic! It does not! The person who runs a Tor exit node can easily sniff all plain-text traffic! Tor only anonymizes your traffic, but it can still be sniffed plain-text at the beginning and at the end of the onion route! So don't do any HTTP-auth, or plain-text password sending for e.g. POP3, telnet, and so on. Always use encryption in addition to Tor!
• In general, spread only a minimum of information. Disable referrer sending (e.g. using Privoxy), disable cookies, kill webbugs (Privoxy), and so on.
• Watch your language, especially in public forums or IRC. A linguist can probably easily figure out which country/region you're from if you speak/write broken English or use certain idioms or false friends. This might or might not be a problem for you, but it's something you should bear in mind.
• If you're extra paranoid, you could set up your firewall to block all outgoing DNS traffic and force all applications to use Tor to resolve names. You could probably also block all outgoing non-Tor traffic...
• Another good idea is probably carrying an Anonym.OS LiveCD with you, so you can have a (more) anonymous communication wherever you go.

More information More information is available in the Tor documentation, the Tor wiki, and especially in the Tor FAQ. In addition, there's an IRC channel on Freenode (#tor), some slides and a video (torrent) about Tor you might find interesting. If you would like to help, you can run a Tor server, donate some money, or volunteer to do other things (code, debug, document, translate, and more). That's it for now. I'm very grateful for comments and suggestions, especially for hints on how to anonymize more applications. Also, if you notice any dumb mistakes I made, please leave a comment. Update 2006-03-07: Fixed typos, added link to the toraliases project (thanks Benjamin Schieder).

Yesterday I have setup a kfreebsd-amd64 (ie GNU/kFreeBSD on an amd64 CPU) build daemon. Its name is shockley.aurel32.net (all my machines are named related to electronics), and it has Sempron 2600+ CPU. As you can see on the photo, it is still missing a decent case. There are actually two machines on the the photo, the motherboard in the case is maxwell’s one (one of the kfreebsd-i386 build daemon), while the one on the top front is shockley’s one. That’s a bit strange, but the amd64 motherboard needs a power supply with a P4 connector, while the other one only needs a small power supply. Thanks to Ingo Juergensmann, the kfreebsd-amd64 architecture is now listed on http://buildd.net. As you can see on the graph, this machine is very fast (it only runs for 24 hours!).

So it isn't just me, who has noticed that MSN's crawler seems to be going a bit nuts on the downloading front. Chris Siebenmann from the University of Toronto has also got problems. Given that the mirror in question is intended to be benefiting Linux Australia members and Australian Linux users in general, and not some half-baked wannabe search engine that doesn't know when to stop downloading, I might need to take the step of banning MSNBot as well.

FOSDEM 2006 This year, the days before FOSDEM were the stressful ones, as I got to organize accomodation. Initially, we wanted to have similar appartments as last year, but by the time I was less busy at uni to actually look into it, most of them were already booked, so we had to put up with a youth hostel instead. The positive sides of this were the much lower expenses and a location in the city centre, making us actually look at Bruxelles a bit in detail this time. "Us" were the Hurd people, including Martin "earliest Hurd adopter present" Michlmayr. I got to FOSDEM by car again, picking up Marcus Brinkmann, Neal Walfield and Olaf Buddenhagen on the way in Cologne. Finding the youth hostel seemed to be pretty hard as we just had a street address and a map without street names, but we managed to find it pretty quickly to my great surprise (driving around in Bruxelles usually ended up being a complete disaster over the last years). After a strange encounter with a Guillem Jover lookalike in front of the hostel, we met the other guys (Thomas Schwinge, Marco Gerards, Stefan Siegl and Ognyan Kulev) and had a discussion about Neal's and Marcus' plan to move to a persistent system. After dinner, I met the other Debian people in the Roi d'Espagne and hat some longer chats with Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Rob Bradford, Martin Michlmayr and Jordi Mallach, who I finally met for the first time and who did not cop out of FOSDEM this year as usual... The pub is getting more and more crowded each year, all the hackers barely fit even though they opened the balustrade this time as well. It was great to see everybody again and have a few beers. Martin and I then managed to find the way back to the hostel by foot. We had no developer room, and no talks in the Debian room either, so FOSDEM was a pretty relaxed event this year. I met some more familiar faces like Noel Koethe and Andreas Mueller and listened to a couple of talks, most notably Richard Stallman's and Jeff Waugh's keynotes and Hanna Wallach's talk about FLOSSPOLS. Stefan Siegl also managed to get GNU Mach working for both my 3Com PCMCIA NIC and my Orinoco PCMCIA WLAN card, confirming his title as Hurd "hacker of the month". On Saturday evening, we (at this time, Guillem Jover, Gianluca Guida, Bas Wijnen and Jeroen Dekkers had joined) had dinner with the french Hurd guys (Manuel Menal, Marc Dequenes, Richard Braun, Arnaud Fontaine and others) in an italian restaurant. At 10:40 PM, the waiter told us in a rather unfriendly tone that they would close at 11 and presented us with the bill, along with handing out the menu again so that we could look up our share. By the time the bill arrived the french part of the table (at 10:55 PM), the guys were pretty surprised by this whole business and complained loudly that they did not have a dessert yet and insistent on having one. After some more minutes of discussion, the waiter gave in and served their desserts, after which each of them paid his share with his carte bleue. I believe we left the restaurant around 11:30. On Sunday evening, we had dinner again (the french guys had left Bruxelles already) and then drove back to Germany after having desserts and coffee in a bar. We left Bruxelles at around midnight and arrived in Duesseldorf at 2:30 PM, so we were glad that Neal offered us to stay at his place. We had breakfast the next morning with him and Isabel and then I proceeded to drive back to Frankfurt in the early afternoon. FOSDEM rocked, as usual. After being with the Debian crowd for the first three years or so, and mostly sticking with the Hurd crowd last year, I think I managed a pretty good balance between the two this year. This will not have been my last FOSDEM.

Although I'm not a "gamer", I enjoy playing computer games from time to time. First-person shooters are especially well-suited for relaxing after a long and exhausting day ;-) IMHO a very good choice, if you're looking for a fun Free Software first-person shooter running on Linux, is Nexuiz. Nexuiz

• is GPL'd (and not only the code, but also the data!)
• is based on the Darkplaces engine, which in turn is based on the Quake engine
• should be packaged for Debian sooner or later
• has an unpronouncable name, which is always a bonus ;-)

Nexuiz version 1.5 has recently been released, which features new maps, new characters, better AI and lots more. Check it out!

So, I just wrote some code that had a subtle bug in it: if you hit ^C at the wrong time, it would run kill(-1, SIGTERM), which kills every process you're running. I discovered this, recovered the damage, and started my session anew. Once I'd done this, I checked my email, where there was a new email awaiting me, entitled 'Competence Development News'. HR are taunting me.

It's strange, but ever since I have been a Debian Developer, people start assuming I'll be interested in any random study. They'll put up a web page (which often doesn't even validate), and then start asking strange questions that have no link with reality whatsoever. On the one hand, I have better things to do than to cooperate with random studies from people I've never heard of before and probably never will hear of again. On the other hand, only by understanding will people see the light, and only by cooperating with such studies will one help people understand. But seeing the same mistakes over and over again is annoying me. So, here's Wouter's HOWTO perform a study on Open Source or Free Software (and get away with it without annoying people)

• Make sure you tell people up-front how much time your questionnaire will take. It's annoying as hell to see that after pressing 'submit', there's a second page which is at least as long as the previous one. And a third. And a fourth. Especially if you didn't plan for that, and have to leave soonishly.
The best way to do this is to either have all questions on one giant page, or (if that makes it too long) test-drive your questionnaire with a chronometer nearby.
• If your questionnaire contains multiple pages, don't break the back button. One questionnaire I participated in did this, resulting in me going back to change the answer to a question, and then suddenly finding that I couldn't go to the final page anymore, because the system thought I was submitting that page.
• If you have multiple choice questions, make sure the answers make sense. Having a question like Where do you use Linux? with possible answers at home, at work and at school is nice, but not if you can not choose more than one of them at the same time.
• Additionally for those of you doing multiple choice: make sure you have at least one open question, so that people can leave feedback about things they consider you left out. You're free to ignore that feedback in the final results of your study, but it may help you in better understanding the FLOSS movement.
• If English is not your native language, find someone who is very fluent in English and have them check it out. This is important because if your question is unclear, I might give you the wrong answer—which will make the results of your study rather worthless.
• Test your questionnaire on someone else before you ask hordes and hordes of FLOSS developers to fill it out, especially if you're not too familiar with the FLOSS movement yourself. FLOSS is very popular these days, it must be possible to find someone in your vicinity who's working with it, or who at least has a feel for how the community works. Their feedback may help in avoiding questions that are based on incorrect assumptions, and/or get out little things you didn't see yourself first.
• Do not mail people in private, but instead ask people in public about filling out the questionnaire. Remember the "Open" in "Open Source".
• Finally, be sure to explain what the study is trying to discover, what is going to happen with its findings, and where I can read the results when they're there. Not that I want to see the results of any possible study I participate in, but one never knows—I might be interested.

That's the most important bits, I guess. I'll probably add more in the future, if I see more things that annoy me. But for the time being, if you break three or more of the above rules, don't expect me to participate—I have better things to do with my time than to help every undergraduate on this planet with his or her study

Fortune magazine's written an interesting article on the birth of the Prius. There were some interesting quotes in the article, like this one from Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan:

"Some of our competitors say they are doing things for the benefit of humanity," he says. "Well, we are in business, and we have a mission of creating value."

That just smacks of capitalist greed if ever I heard it. I mean, what this guy's effectively saying is "Fuck the planet at all costs, shareholder value reigns supreme". I wonder how the shareholders might feel about that when the next hurricane Katrina wipes them off the map? Anyway, why did we by a Prius? Well, originally, a Prius in the US looked cheaper than one in Australia, however after we were forced to buy one with the more higher-priced options (with a lot of options we didn't particularly want) just to get the options we wanted, and on-road costs, I think it works out much of a muchness, price-wise, when you take into account the exchange rate. So cost (compared to Australia) wasn't a big part of the decision in the end. The main reasons (for me) were:

• an environmentally conscious purchase in a country that likes to guzzle gas like it's going out of fashion
• a US Federal Government tax credit
• the ability to drive in commuter lanes with only the driver in the car (normally you're required to have 2 or more in the car)
• a bonus from Google (to help defray the premium of buying a hybrid over a conventional gas guzzler)

In California at least, these things are selling like hotcakes for the above reasons. The Prius is the iPod of cars at the moment. The fact that we get reduced fuel consumption/better fuel efficiency is a really just a bonus. Petrol prices in the US are already a lot cheaper than in Australia. We filled up the (11 gallon/41 litre) tank today at $2.439/gallon (or about AUD $0.85/litre), and we're getting around 45 miles per gallon at the moment. Petrol in Australia is up around the AUD $1.20/litre at the moment, I'm told. The other thing that makes the Prius cool is that it really is a geek's car. It has an engine management system that doesn't try to hide itself. It's got a very obvious computer in the middle of the dash with a touch screen. It screams hack me!. Third-party mods already exist (if only I could get the temperature to display in Celsius). Sarah was initially fairly apprehensive about getting the car because of the initial cost, given the timing of it with all the other expenses of moving. It was pretty tight, but she really loves the car too, and we managed to scrape by. She was concerned about its fuel efficiency for highway driving, because reports had said that it was more efficient in start/stop city driving than on the highway, but as we discovered from our trip to Phoenix, the car did really well. I think we spent about $60 in fuel for the entire trip. The fact that the cost saving in fuel doesn't necessarily recoup the extra premium paid for getting a hybrid is a total non-issue (to me). The fact that a hybrid isn't insanely more expensive than a conventional car makes it a justifiable expense on the grounds of environmental sensitivity. These cars are only going to get more affordable and more mainstream if people buy them.

I'm angry with Kanaal 2. They've broadcasted Star Trek series since they were founded approximately a decade ago, which was nice; not that I'm a fanatic who would never miss an episode, but I do appreciate a bit of science fiction now and then—and in my opinion, Star Trek is some nice SF. Well—most of it, anyway. This year, they've started the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise as well... at 8 AM, on saturday morning. Morons.

I'm so glad I finally decided to attend FOSDEM this year, as last weekend in Bruxelles was so cool it reminded me of the unforgettable week in Helsinki for DebConf 5 last summer. I travelled early on Friday with Ivan Vilata, the dude who dragged me into the Catalan translations world, and about 12:30 we were finding our way through Bruxelles airport. We had barely no problems getting to Ra l's place in Boulevard Louis Schmidt, thanks to the detailed HOWTO he provided a few days before. We dropped our bags in his appartment and went out with him and Virginia after a well deserved mini-nap. On our way to the Grand' Place, where we'd hook up with the Softcatal crowd and the rest of FOSDEM people, we stopped in A la Morte Subite, where we Ivan and I started our personal training on Belgian beers. The Roy d'Espagne is an excellent name for a place where to meet our friends from Catalunya. I didn't know that was a formal meeting point that kickstarts FOSDEM, so I was really impressed when I got to the second floor and found the place was packed with Free Software people, many of them I already knew in person. Reaching Softcatala's table near the window took about 15 minutes, and after saying hi to most people, we decided we could use a quieter place to have dinner, and then go back.

The Grand' Place was bombed by seb128 in 1695 Ra l and Virginia, our official guides during the weekend, chose a Vietnamese restaurant in the Stock Exchange area they frequent, and for little money we got an enormous meal. Back at the Roy d'Espagne, I tried to say hello to most Debian people I saw around, while at the same time I tried to be with my hosts and the Catalan people. A while after, I spotted tbm and azeem downstairs, who I finally met. I talked to Michael for a long while, and at some point we left as we didn't want to miss the last tram. Ivan, luckily, only snores rarely, so we slept for a while, and then took the tram to the Universit Libre du Bruxelles. The main room was already packed for RMS's keynote, which was pretty good. After that, we went to several talks here and there, while I kept meeting some people around the place. Ivan and I left when the show ended and we met with Virginia and Ra l at the centre. This time, we hooked up with Xevi and Jes s Corrius from Softcatal , as Toni Hermoso had abandoned us for a cheap dinner with the Mozilla.org people. We were taken to a packed bar/restaurant (don't remember the name right now), which had a few interesting features: they wouldn't sell any Coca-Cola, would not accept credit cards in protest for the high fees Visa charges on small businesses, and something I wouldn't expect to see in 2006, their chart of prices hadn't been rounded up when they switched to the Euro. So some plate would be 9.72, others 12.43, etc. After dinner we had a few beers at the Th atre de Toone, located in some tiny alley in the centre and being pretty tired, we went back home at 23:30 or so. Sunday was a busy days, due to the number of interesting Debian and GNOME talks going on. I'd highlight liw's talk on Piuparts, Enrico's on debtags and fjp's on Debian Installer in the Debian room, and kris' on the future of GTK+. There was also a cool demo of Novell's XGL. During a dead slot, I approached Little Daniel and keithp to see if he could point me at some mapping between UTF-8 and XKB symbol names. But Daniel was cool enough to solve a problem a lot simpler than expected. :) jdub's closing talk was just fantastic, and telling him "See you in Vilanova, we left the University, for our last dinner around Bruxelles.

jdub clues the audience about some basic acronyms We managed to rescue madduck from the Debian UK beer trap and went to an Italian for dinner, this time with Josep and Mia, from Softcatal , making a nice mix of German, Valencian/Catalan, and Swedish at our table.

Mia, Josep, Ra l, Ivan, Martin and Jordi after pizza Ra l took us around the city centre and told us about the underground river, the remaining city wall's tower, and the church that leaned against it. That night's beer lesson happened in the "2000 beer bar". We all had a 7 Trappist Westvleteren Bleu 8, apparently "the best beer of the world". It was pretty good, actually. Our weekend in Bruxelles was about to end. After not that much sleep, Ivan and I took a tram and a bus to the Airport, arriving in Val ncia around 10AM, and after seeing the best view of the Pyrenees ever, which were absolutely covered with snow, as well as many other places in the Pa s Valenci and Teruel due to massive snows during the two days we were out. FOSDEM is probably a "can't miss" yearly event now. Thanks to all the organisers for their hard work to make it happen. You rock.

The webserver I've been running for the past year or two, my own creation, had been acting strangely lately. It got stuck at times and refused to serve requests. I knew of the problem for some time, but due to time constraints, I haven't touched the code in a very long while. Therefore, the problem never got fixed - and as it stands, it never will be, as I've given up working on Thy (and pretty much everything else), until I finally finish my studies. Originally, thy was written because the machine that powered my domain was not strong enough to run apache. The hardware got replaced about two times since then, and the current one is adequate enough, and the switch was made: I'm now running Apache 2.0. A few rough edges still remain - like SSL is not configured yet at all, but other than that, I think everything else that used to work, still works.

I've noticed a bit of whinging about Howard in the blogosphere of late. I'm not a strongly political person, but I have to say, so if not Howard, who? Not Beazley. Not any other serious contender that has led the Australia Labor Party since Keating. I'm not even that convinced that Costello makes a fantastic successor to Howard. I was fairly okay with Howard until the Iraq war, then I got seriously pissed off with him. Aside from that, and refusing to sign on the Kyoto agreement, and his general tendency to follow Bush around like a sheep, I think he (and his Government) have done a reasonably good job of running the country in the last 10 years. Look at the economy.