I'm glad to announce that I'll be again in Brussels for this year's FOSDEM. Ivan and I will fly from Zaragoza (!) on Friday, just on time for the beer event, and come back on Monday evening. I know azeem would have not been happy otherwise!

1. Dishwasher, by Pete Jordan
2. Windfalls, by Jean Hegland
3. River of Gods, by Ian McDonald
4. Powers, by Le Guin
5. Real World Haskell, by O'Sullivan, Goerzen, Stewart
6. Matter, by Iain M. Banks
7. Ars Magica, by Tweet & Rein Hagen

Nice set of books. Pity I'm in the middle of all of them. Lately I have a hard time finishing many novels, I think because waiting for the plot to play out gets boring. Although River of Gods has mostly just confused me with too many viewpoint characters. And by this, where each box is a chapter, and that big box I'm just at the start of scares me: Dishwasher is fun light reading. If I'd thought to bring it to its owner, Jay, who misplaced it, I could have picked it up from where I left off months ago and read it on the plane. Double oops. Oh well, there's always my next doctor or dentist appointment. Powers is a probably great book by Le Guin. I hope there are many more to come, but the tendancy is to savor what's available. Also, I have it in dead tree edition, which I tend to save up for when I need them. Windfalls is such a dead tree book, hibernating in the yurt for me to get back to them some day. I may have to start it over, since it's pretty involved, and rather out of my usual comfort zone. Real World Haskell is coming along well, I hope. Matter hasn't pulled me in yet, oddly. Ars Magica I've been flipping through the PDF of idly.

---

Anyway, after all that, turning up a random story generator in 1 kilobyte of code couldn't help but feel like a relief.

I voted early because Sullivan County, TN is phasing in new voting machines this election. On election day, they will use the old touch screen system, while early voters get to test the "new" paper system. The new system is sure to please fans of paper. However, it has two flaws that were obvious to me. I have no way of knowing that my vote will be counted as I filled it out, and I realized half way through that election officials can determine how I voted. Here's why... You have two pieces of paper during the vote. A registration sheet is signed by the voter. A paper ballot has little rectangles that the votor fills in with a ballpoint pen in the privacy of the voting booth. The instructions say to fill in choices completely. Since the voting booths have a hard top, it's difficult to write on them with a ballpoint, let alone fill in little squares completely. The natural thing to do? Slide your second piece of paper under the ballot, so the pen can dig in better. If you don't think about it, you'll probably do this unconciously. Half-way through, I realized that I was leaving imprints on the registration paper, with my name on it, that corresponded to my choices on the ballot. Due to the two-column layout, and the distinctive spacing between different choices, it's possible to look at those imprints and determine exactly how I voted. The registration paper has to be handed in at the end, so the official who sits there all day collecting these has plenty of time to work this out and determine the votes of anyone. (I moved my ballot around and re-filled in squares to try to confuse things.) (Relatedly, one has to carry the paper ballot around the room to take it to the voting machine. It's difficult to keep the ballot obscured while doing this, since you can't fold it, and since they take the registration paper before the ballot, so you can't keep the ballot covered with it either.) The second obvious flaw is that once I fed my ballot into the voting machine, which presumably scanned it and put it in a safe, there was only a confimation that "you've voted!". There was no way to verify that it had counted my vote as I'd marked it.

---

Most voting system work seems to be in the direction of advocating paper ballots for paper ballots' sake. This doesn't seem like the right approach to me. Is no-one working on writing down the characteristics that an ideal voting system would have, and trying to make them all requirements? My take on requirements of an ideal voting system are:

1. Only living people in the set of registered voters may vote.
2. Each votor can only vote once.
3. The votor should be able to verify that his vote was counted correctly.
4. There must be a way for the votor to prove if his vote was not counted.
5. The votor must not be able to prove which way he voted (to avoid payoffs, intimidation, etc).
6. Others must not be able to determine how a votor voted.
7. Individual votes must be retained to allow recounts.
8. The entire vote data should be published so that the results can be verified by third parties.
9. The system must scale to many millions of voters.
10. The correctness of the entire voting system should be formally provable.

The paper ballot system I experienced today fails on at least points #2 [A] , #3 (see above), #4 (I walked away with nothing I can use to prove anything), #5 (I can video my vote), #6 (see above), and #8 [B]. At least it scales well though. The old touch screen system failed most of the same points, though it made at least a small attempt to satisfy #3 (by confirming the vote onscreen) -- and it failed #7, and probably scaled worse. Outside of the American election system, I've participated in voting systems that seem able meet requirements #1 [C], #2, #3, #4, #7, #8, and #10. To me, #10 is the most important point, but it seems to be the one that is neglected most. Some of the points may be worth weakening if they block other points. Is it really worth avoiding giving me something to prove how I've voted, and banning taking cameras into the polling place, in order to meet point #5, if this defeats point #4? I'm curious what requirments I may have left out too. My list is just a rough stab at it. The real point is to analyze voting systems, and reject ones that don't provably meet criteria. Until it becomes accepted practice to do that, our voting systems will not get appreciably less flawed.

---

[A] If you can get two copies of the ballot, you can vote twice ... fairly easy with a friend on the inside to arrange for the two copies to get "stuck together", and another one at the vote scanner to allow you to scan both. [B] The ballots could be published, but there's no way to prove all of them, or the true ballots would be. And in reality, they're either shredded, or locked away, or tossed in a dumpster, or variously all three. [C] Mostly. Perfectly accomplishing #1 is harder than most of the other points, and may be worth leaving out of scope.

It's late notice but Boston area folks should drop by the local Software Freedom Day events today. It goes from 10:00-16:00 and is located in a great space in Chinatown. More information in on the wiki. I'm teaming up with John Sullivan of the FSF to talk about free software on in your pocket on unexecpted platforms. We'll show off CHDK (for cameras), the FreeRunner (a phone), and probably also talk about RockBox, iPodLinux, and more. It should be laid back and fun! The whole point of SFD (and this SFD event in particular) is create a space that's appropriate to folks that don't already know about free and open source software and that aren't necessary technical. If you are a hacker or an advocate, show up and meet some like minded folks and introduce new people to the ideas that inspire you. If you are just curious about this stuff this event is designed for you. If you're not in Boston, check the SFD webpage. There are hundreds of events around the world and may even be one near you!

On Wednesday, OSCon really goes into high gear (and the wifi croaks) at OSCon. The people that aren't going to the tutorials all arrive, and aren't yet sluggish from the late-night vendor parties and BOFs.

The keynotes were OK, and after that, I listened to Keith Packard talk about the future of X. Then it was off to finish the preparation for my own talk on Linux on the corporate desktop. It was the first time I spoke at OSCon, and it seems to have gone well. I keep running into people that were at the talk and thought of some more questions -- and of course I chatted with a number of people right after as well. There are a number of other companies that are planning on doing what we've done, or even started down the implementation path already. It's some effort making something of OSCon quality (Damian Conway suggests something like 10 hours preparing for every 1 hour presenting -- I didn't do that), but I'm glad I did.

The Expo Hall opened Wednesday as well. Met some interesting folks there -- Open Lina, a company that sells Linux hardware, an Open Source groupware product I hadn't heard of before (they are apparently working on Debian Packages too), and some others I can't remember right now...

Tuesday I had dinner at Andina, a Peruvian restaurant, with fellow Haskellers Bryan O'Sullivan and Don Stewart -- the first time the three of us Real World Haskell folks met in one place.

Today brought Nat Torkington's excellent keynote, and also r0ml's great talk this afternoon ("I started this talk in 2003, and it's run a bit long.") Another great time for some networking in the hallways and expo hall. One of the LinuxFest Northwest folks had attended my talk, happened to see me as I was stuffing one of the may free t-shirts that vendors were giving out into my laptop bag (by afternoon, they were getting quite in your face about it), and struck up a conversation.

Went for sushi over lunch with a couple of folks from #oscon on IRC, then dinner with Debian folks.

Been a busy week, but met lots of people. I didn't go to as many talks as I planned because I was so busy talking to people -- guess that means the conference was a hit.

So apparently the Belgian 'government' has failed to meet its deadline; and as a result, the prime minister has handed in the 'government's resignation to the King. I say 'government', because these people have been doing quite a lot of things—all except governing... I must say I can't be surprised. I never liked Leterme; not before the elections, and not after. Now that more than a year has passed since his winning the elections, they have managed to accomplish exactly nothing. Well, that's not exactly true. There's a pattern here:

• June 2007. Leterme wins the election, and starts talking. He accomplishes exactly nothing.
• August 2007. After months of talking, Leterme gives up. The King hands the initiative to some other people, who manage to get basic agreements about things in the course of a few weeks.
• September 2007. Leterme is put at the wheel again.
• December 2007. After months of talking, Leterme gives up a second time. The King asks Verhofstadt to form an interim government. He does so in 2 weeks.
• March 2008. Leterme gets parties to agree on some basic things, and promises "a second package of state reforms by July 15, 2008".
• July 15, 2008. Surprise: Leterme has accomplished exactly nothing, and has to hand in his resignation. A third time.

And even after that horrible track record, CD&V/N-VA is still not willing to put Leterme aside as a candidate for the prime ministry. Now I'm sure some people will tell me that Leterme did indeed, accomplish something, such as the budget agreement of a few days ago. Well, here's a news flash: if you want to get a government set up, then not accomplishing that is pretty critical; something routine and simple as a budget is hardly noteworthy, then. The one thing I do not understand, have never understood, and will not ever understand, is why the larger parties in Belgium feel so compelled to create "cartels" with small extremist fringe parties. They all fell into that trap; VLD (liberals) with Vivant (economic strangelings); CD&V (catholic democrats) with N-VA (flemish nationalists), and SP.A (socialists) with Spirit (left-wing something). I have no trouble understanding why the fringe parties want to do this (gives them power where occasionally they wouldn't have any), but the large parties? It only causes trouble (as the CD&V/N-VA cartel has now proven beyond any doubt); and I seriously doubt it causes them a net win in votes. I could say that some other things about the past deb cle also puzzle me, such as the insistence of some people to get an unconditional split of BHV, thereby destroying all chances of even remotely reaching a compromise; but given the idiocy explained in the previous paragraph, I should hardly be surprised. Sigh. I wish I had some decent politicians in this country; but the people I voted for lost seriously, and were not part of the negotiations. I guess that should mean I have to say: told you so; but then, that's not very productive either. Here's for hoping they can still find some way out of this mess...

So I am giving a talk this Friday at the University and here is the English introduction to my talk/paper and below is the Portuguese one. It starts at 9 am in Porto Alegre, Brazil and is being streamed.

*O Departamento de P s-Gradua o da Antropologia e a Associa o Software
Livre.org convidam:
*_*
Palestra com a antrop loga Gabriella Coleman*_
professora da New York University (NYU) *Quando:* Sexta-feira, dia 13 de junho, s 9h
*Onde:* Audit rio do ILEA, Campus do Vale - UFRGS
*Entrada:* Gratuita
*Transmiss o web: *tv.softwarelivre.org *
_Revolu es Silenciosas:_*
*O Ir nico Surgimento do Software Livre e de C digo Aberto
**e a Constru o de uma Consci ncia Legal Hacker* A palestra oferece uma an lise antropol gica e hist rica do
surgimento da comunidade de software livre e de c digo aberto,
procurando mostrar como, ao longo de duas d cadas, hackers e
entusiastas do software livre garantiram para si um dom nio de
autonomia legal para a produ o de software. Em uma poca
marcada por profundas transforma es no regime de Propriedade
Intelectual, a comunidade de software e de c digo aberto se
organiza cultivando uma acentuada consci ncia das transforma es
no mbito legal. O objetivo da palestra o de demonstrar como e
quando se cruzaram as trajet rias parcialmente independentes das
transforma es nas leis de propriedade intelectual com a
consolida o do “movimento” de software livre, para se tornarem
hist rias insepar veis voltadas disputa pelo futuro das
tecnologias - especialmente o computador pessoal e a Internet.
Com este foco, ser discutida uma nova pr tica social de
produ o de tecnologia que fornece uma nova vis o de mundo
insurgente e que desafia as justificativas neoliberais que
animam a expans o das leis de propriedade intelectual. Nesta
discuss o, ao inv s de oferecer hist rico abrangente, ser o
apresentados exemplos selecionados da hist ria do movimento de
software livre e da globaliza o das leis de propriedade
intelectual, com vistas caracteriza o da pr tica de produ o,
distribui o e utiliza o de Software Livre e de C digo aberto
nos Estados Unidos.

when I woke up today (after sleeping in for the first time with my new roll-top in front of my bedroom window) I was surprised & confused by a couple of "congratulations!" messages in my irc away-log. it took me a bit of time & coffee (& looking into my mailbox) to begin to realize that my Debian account had indeed been created while I was asleep. — in fact I guess I still haven't completely realized my new status as Debian Developer.

as others I'd like to follow the good tradition of taking the opportunity to thank some of the people who helped me to get there:

• first & foremost Tony Mancill, my advocate, permanent sponsor, & long-time co-maintainer; for all his support in preparing & quickly uploading packages, tracking down bugs, encouraging & advocating me but also for our very pleasant "chats" via email. — we have already agreed to continue co-maintaining each other's packages.
• the friendly & helpful guys from the Debian Perl Group: Gunnar Wolf, for always encouraging me (to join the group, to apply for the New Maintainer Process, ...); Damyan Ivanov, for teaching me so much (even if he called it "nitpicking"); Gunnar, Damyan, Krzysztof Krzyżaniak, Niko Tyni, Roberto C. Sánchez, Stephen Gran, Frank Lichtenheld, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Russ Allbery, Raphaël Hertzog, & some others for uploading packages I've prepared & helping me when I had questions or problems; Martín Ferrari, for all his help, expertise, & especially for the fun & the good times we share on IRC.
• my Application Manager Wouter Verhelst; for guiding me through the New Maintainer process not only fast but also in a very helpful, at the same time demanding & supporting way.
• the Debian Women sub-project; for making Debian a better & friendlier place not only for women but in general.
• finally: the people who used the time while I was asleep to actually create my account tonight :)

some final thoughts about the NM process from my point of view:

• it took me some time to actually apply for NM; what deterred me was not that I knew it would take some time but that I didn't know how long the time would be; & that I knew that the bigger part of the overall time would consist of waiting.
• I applied on 2007-04-03, my account was created on 2008-04-18; 380 days is not bad altogether in my opinion; the actual work with my AM was from 2007-08-12 until 2007-11-28 (i.e. 108 days, or 28% of the whole duration).
• I did enjoy the actual checks; I had to read & think a lot, & I learned a lot in that period.
• Front Desk (i.e. Christoph Berg) was very quick on all necessary steps.
• I was never demotivated about my Debian work because of all the people supporting me & taking the burden of uploading packages I had prepared. but I have to admit that I got a little bored in the last months of waiting after the report had been submitted by my Application Manager.

& now it's time first to celebrate & then to try to fully grasp my new rights & responsibilities.

I am looking for a charity to receive regular donations. I would like to support the environment and wildlife, rather than people directly, and the World Wildlife Fund immediately comes to mind. While I ve been supporting the fund s work for two years now, I feel a bit uneasy about its size. It seems plausible that they can leverage synergies much more effectively, but large organisations also burn through heaps of money just to be able to do what they want to do. In addition, I feel the whole organisation is too professional and anonymous. The same applies to Greenpeace. With none of this do I intend to discredit the work of the WWF or Greenpeace! They re just not what I am looking for. I have previously donated to a charity in China, but the troubles and efforts involved with this were too much. And while China certainly needs a lot of help and support in rethinking their environmental policies, it s not like central Europe or other parts of the world couldn t put money to good use in this sector as well. So what I seek for is a small charity who operates in a niche and to whom regular donations, even if small, make a difference. EuroNatur looks promising. I d love to have more choice though. If you know of any, please let me know. NP: Barclay James Harvest: Eyes of the Universe Update: Micah Anderson pointed me to the Rainforest Action Network and Ron Lee introduced me to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, started by Greenpeace co-founder Paul Watson, who resigned from the Greenpeace Foundation (in 1977) because of disagreements with the emerging bureaucratic structure of the organization . I have contacted both and asked for their annual reports and whether they have experience with tax-deductible donations from Central Europe. Update: Karen O Sullivan suggests the Jane Goodall Institute and the International Fund for Animal Welfare. I ve written to them as well.

Last week I did again some work on nagios-plugins. After the announcement of Dann Frazier to upload NMU to fix a trivial bug, I thought it’s time again to give some extra care to the package. So I prepared 1.4.11-2 fixing the important bugs and uploaded it. I also commited some minor fixes to the svn, so these issues will get fixed by the next upload. Since the development of policyd-weigh stalled and unfortunately maybe get stuck, I was looking for an alternative, which maybe found with postfwd. It’s quite flexible but it also will take more time (and care!) to get a reliable configuration, which maybe effective as policyd-weight (still) is right now. While checking the dependencies for postfwd I noticed that Net::DNS::Async isn’t available in Debian (yet). So I decided to create a package starting with dh-make-perl, join the Debian Perl Group and let it review. Damyan Ivanov was so kind to review and upload it, Gregor Herrmann did also give some much useful hints. Thanks to both! And yes, I also found time to step forward with NM, since I was overloaded the last weeks with usual work and life. Thank to my AM to be so appreciative.

* Laptop running Linux is yet dream for me! ASUS launched Eee laptop and PC and it is perfect for people like me And it can be hacked to do anything. Its fun!

Thanks to Damyan Ivanov for the upload, svn-buildpackage 0.6.22 is now in experimental. The upload was done to experimental due to the big number of changes affecting it and because I wanted to get a fairly significant amount of testing of the major fixes before propagating the code to unstable.

This release should fix 15 (yes, fifteen) bugs[0], most of which were important bugs or bugs affecting usability.

The major fixes are:

• mkdir -p like functionality in the repo for the tags and other possibly missing directories - this means that even repositories created with older broken versions should be fixed automatically[1]
  
• .svn/deb-layout is no longer a broken cache, but only a real local override for the layout information; .svn/deb-layout is created only on express request via --svn-savecfg; note that although .svn/deb-layout is no longer created automatically, old checkouts should be purged of this cruft (unless the override is wanted)
  
• build dependencies are not required on --svn-export
• automatic creation of the origDir when using origUrl
• some code clean up
  

Installing the package on an etch, lenny or sid system should be straight forward: just get the deb from experimental and install it (no backporting is necessary).


If you usually use svn-buildpackage, please install the experimental version and report any bugs and/or success stories. I am particularly interested in feedback related to the behaviour around .svn/deb-layout and the other methods of specifying layout information.

Please send success stories to me directly eddy.petrisor @ gmail.com. Bugs should be directed to the BTS, but I hope there will be mail just directly to me :-) .


[0] I wonder, does the thickness of the yellow area on these graphs ever decreases?
[1] as soon as the breakage would have been visible in the past

The first serious i18n effort for the Games Team is now bearing fruit. The newer version of the game hex-a-hop is now entering Debian. All the merit goes to Jens Seidel, who has developed the patches for making it work with SDLPango and to support all the spectrum of Unicode characters, instead of the limited ASCII set included in the game, as well as to all the people of Debian i18n who have done the translations (Helge Kreutzmann, Damyan Ivanov, Enrique Mat as S nchez, Bas Wijnen, Piotr Engelking, Yuri Kozlov and Clytie Siddall). The game has already been translated to Bulgarian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Russian and Vietnamese. Thanks Jens, both for taking care of the changes in the code needed to achieve this, and also for coordinating all the t10n and i18n process, as I don’t really have much experience in those areas.

Thanks to Florian Ragwitz, who packaged libpadwalker-perl 1.5-1, there is no blocker anymore that prevents libdevel-repl-perl from entering sid: By the way, the author of Devel::REPL, Matt S Trout, looks pretty happy to see his module entering Debian. I’ve just uploaded libdevel-repl-perl, this upload closes the exciting work session we did during all the weekend with Damyan Ivanov, in order to get the module into debian. All its dependencies are now in the Perl group’s hands. That was fun. Team maintenance rocks!

I decided to play with Devel::REPL which looks to be exactly what I need to enhance my Perl Console. That module is not packaged in Debian, then I started packaging it with the help of the Debian Perl Group (big thanks go to Damyan Ivanov for his help). The day was pretty productive and we’re almost done now, as you can see in this tomboy note: PS MadCoder: I’m sorry dude, I’m still speaking about Perl

Today was a strange day. We are preparing our holiday trip to Sicily but had a full day at home, meant for packing and the like. Indeed, packing was done in a few hours this morning and I ended up....hacking on D-I. For whatever reason, I came back on the plans we have, among the D-I team, to switch to console-setup for console handling. Something already done in Ubuntu and which brings, for instance and if I'm correct, the benefit of having the same keyboard maps for X and the console. So, first, I summarized the floating ideas in a wiki page. Then I worked on a few possible modifications to "localechooser", the D-I component that allows users to choose their language/country/locale and which needs modifications for console-setup. That lead me to produce an experimental image of D-I netboot for i386 and asked translators for some testing. MJ Ray noticed the call for testing and asked Esperanto translators for some testing, which Serge Leblanc did...and reported a nasty bug, later confirmed by Damyan Ivanov, then investigated by Anton Zinoviev, then digged a little more by me again, then advised by Rapha l Hertzog and Julien Cristau on #debian-devel-fr...and lead to an RC bug reported against....perl base. All this, of course, was completely unplanned as of this morning. This is probably one of the reasons that make me enjoy free software development.

Bryan O'Sullivan noted over at the Real World Haskell blog that Haskell made quite the impact at OSCon. And I can attest to Simon Peyton-Jones having trouble leaving the building because of all the people that wanted to talk to him about Haskell. It was interesting to think about "why now" for Haskell's popularity. Bryan's post has links to the video of Simon's talks, which are great. (Sample quote: "Oh look, a whiteboard has appeared as if by magic! What joy!")

I followed Bryan's link to the Haskell/OSCon-related blog posts at Technorati. Here's an interesting one by chromatic, who gave some Perl talks at OSCon. Favorite quote:

I sat next to Nat Torkington at the tutorial. He kept rubbing his temples. At one point I leaned over and said, The interesting thing about Haskell is that its functions only take one argument. He turned green.

In all seriousness, well-factored Haskell code resembles well-factored Smalltalk code: if you have functions (or methods) longer than a handful of lines, you re probably doing too much. Lower level languages such as C rarely give the opportunity for composition and abstraction that you can get out of functional languages. The presence of pure functions functions which never change global state and which return the same output for the same input is also immensely important.

It s actually the combination of the two features which give these languages such power. When Haskell forces you to mark impure functions explicitly, it gives you tools to isolate behavior which can change global state in the smallest possible scopes, and prevents you from composing impure and pure code together accidentally. When Haskell lets you compose functions into larger functions, not only does it help you write code more concisely, but it provides well-defined units of behavior which work along well-defined and isolated boundaries.

So what is this business about Haskell functions taking only one argument? Let's look at a quick example. Say I wanted to write a function to multiply two numbers. I'd write:

mul a b = a * b

I could give the type of this function like this:

mul :: Int -> Int -> Int

You could read that as "mul takes two Ints and returns an Int". And you can think of it this way. But you could also write the type this way:

mul :: Int -> (Int -> Int)

It means the exact same thing and is valid to Haskell. To read it, you'd say "mul takes an Int and returns a function that takes an Int and returns an Int." And truly this is what Haskell functions that take multiple parameters are doing. Now, I can say:

fifteen = mul 3 5
mulByThree = mul 3
fifteen' = mulByThree 5
fifteen'' = (mul 3) 5


mulByThree has type Int -> Int; it's a function that we got by simply not applying "mul" to all its arguments. fifteen'' illustrates what is going on internally when you write "mul 3 5". It turns out that being able to call a function with multiple arguments is just some syntactic sugar to Haskell.

This is a tremendously useful feature. For instance:

filter (>= 10) [1..20]

I've applied >= to only one argument here. That's fine; it returns a function that's exactly what filter wants.

I've been watching the video of Simon's Taste of Haskell talk. I could *hear* when the audience grasped the utility of this because there was a collective "Oooooo!" from them.

By the way, Haskell has type inference, so I didn't have to give types at all. Oh, and you can also refer to the function itself by not giving any arguments.

mul = (*)

This is one small reason I like to say "Haskell manipulates functions with the same ease that Perl manipulates strings." Mind-bending, isn't it?

After today's keynote session, I met up with Simon Peyton-Jones and Bryan O'Sullivan. A vibrant discussion with these two Haskellers. We had all noticed that Haskell, and FP languages in general, have been doing really well lately and mused about why. Perhaps it's that people are becoming more used to functional approaches to problem solving because popular languages include some of them these days. Or perhaps it's that FP already has tools to solve problems that are suddenly hot, such as parallelization.

In any case, Simon's Haskell talks have really been highlights this week for many.

I had some time to visit the show floor. Stopped by the Debian booth and met Steve Langasek. A couple of Sun guys dropped by to talk about trademarks with OpenJDK. Bart Massey of Portland State Univ. also dropped by. I've conversed with him in email a few times. We talked about what PSU is doing with Haskell, some of the code I've written, and some of the code they've written. They're doing some fun stuff with rocketry and software-defined radio.

Oh, attended Simon's talk on nested data parallelism, which he is working to add to GHC. That sounds like a very interesting topic. Think list comprehensions, but the compiler automatically parallelizes the task for you.

After the conference's events, went out to dinner with some local (and some conference) Haskellers. That was a lot of fun, and Terah and Jacob got to come along too. People are doing some interesting stuff with Haskell.

Today, Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart, and I are announcing a new book we're working on with O'Reilly: Real-World Haskell. I'm excited about the book and about working with Bryan and Don on this project.

O'Reilly has agreed to publish this book under a Creative Commons license! We plan to post drafts of chapters incrementally at the book's website, seeking feedback from readers and reviewers as we go.

Haskell makes a great practical parsing and scripting language, but this aspect of it has been under-documented. I look forward to helping change that!