I want Zoe to do one "extra curricular" activity per term this year. Something dance-related, something gymnastics-related and maybe some other form of sport (I'm thinking soccer). My girlfriend and I were wandering through Westfield Carindale on Saturday, and we happened upon a guy from Infinity Martial Arts touting his wares. I thought I'd suss it out, and they had an introductory offer where the sign-up fee and uniform fee were significantly reduced, and they had a pretty flexible timetable. They were just starting up their East Brisbane location, and the close proximity to home along with the reduced price sealed the deal. Long-term, I'd like for Zoe to learn Tae Kwon Do, for self-defense, but BJJ seemed as good as anything to get her introduced to the idea of martial arts. The class for 2-4 year olds was billed as "Fun and Fitness 4 Kids" so it's really a combination of listening to the instructor, some basic gymnastics-style stuff and a little bit of martial arts. We biked over this morning (going up Hawthorne Road is a slog) and got there in about 15 minutes via the direct route. It's in the upstairs of a gym in the middle of an industrial area, but it was pretty easily accessible by bike. They're still waiting on some of the equipment, so the space was a little spartan. It was just Zoe and I and a mother of two not quite 2 year old twin girls taking a trial class. First up, we got her uniform, and she looked so cute. There were pants and a jacket and a belt. I'm going to have to video the instructor tying up the belt next week so I can learn how to do it the right way. The class started with the kids standing on these flat coloured circles ("mushrooms") and effectively playing "Simon Says" ("instructor says") without being caught out. It was a pretty sneaky way of doing a bunch of warm up exercises like rotating the knees and ankles. Zoe did very well, but there were a few that she just point blank refused to do. Next the instructor set up a bunch of "stations" around the room. The first station involved me crouching in a fetal position with a football and Zoe had to try and tip me over to get the football. That was a load of fun. The next station was a few steps and foam-filled vinyl ramp, and Zoe just had to do a somersault down that. The next station was pretty much the same but taller, and Zoe had to do a "sausage roll" on her side down that. The next station was just a small exercise ball and Zoe had to do some "donkey kicks" on it. The final station involved me waving a couple of cut-off pool noodles at arm's length, and Zoe had to run in covering her head and give me a bear hug. We did a few rotations of these stations. It was heaps of fun. Next, the instructor got a whole bunch of ball pit balls of different colours, and scattered them over the floor, and put a basket at each end of the room. The kids were then instructed to retrieve specific colours as fast as possible. Zoe started out trying to get as many as possible in her arms before returning to the basket, but the idea was to do it one ball at a time. A lot of running back and forth. Finally, we did some actual BJJ (I think). It was called the "sleeping crocodile hold" or something like that. I had to lie on my back, and Zoe had to sneak up to me from my side and grapple me with one arm behind my head and the other around my waist and a knee in my side. I have no interest in Zoe learning mixed martial arts, but this class was so much fun. I was feeling a bit tired this morning before we headed out, but by the end of it I was so pumped. It was just the right combination of daddy/daughter rough and tumble, with a bit of gymnastics and following instruction. I'm pretty certain Zoe enjoyed it. I liked that the instructor stopped for a water break between each activity, so the kids were kept well hydrated throughout. We took the "scenic route" home, because we had no particular time constraints. It was more like 25 minutes and involved the Norman Park Greenway. I was so glad we went that way. It was a beautiful ride that I didn't know existed. Very indirect, it involved going through Woolloongabba, Coorparoo and Norman Park, around the back of Coorparoo State High School along the side of Norman Creek. It was semi-wetland conditions.The only part that was a bit annoying was where Norman Avenue met Wynnum Road. It was quite steep and the green light didn't last very long. I had wanted to do story time at Bulimba Library at 10:30am on Fridays, but I'd rather bike home via the Norman Park Greenway instead, because it's a nice ride. I've since decided that I'll just use the story time at the library during wet weather, when we'd be driving to BJJ anyway, and be able to make it to the library in time after class. I've also got to figure out where I'm going to fit doing some Science into the schedule. Fridays are going to be busy I think. I managed to get Zoe down for a nap by a bit after 12:30pm today. She was pretty knackered after the class (as was I from biking home) so I let her watch a bit of TV while I prepared lunch. She was funny, she saw how sweaty I was when we got home, and suggested I take a shower while she watch some TV. I was a bit unprepared for my first Science Friday, though. I'd been considering going to the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium after BJJ, but I discovered it's closed until February 7 for maintenance and an upgrade, so that cunning plan was thwarted. I used her nap time to order 365 Science Experiments and 50 Dangerous Things (you Should Let Your Children Do). I should get plenty of inspiration out of those two. After she woke up, we did the old "vinegar and sodium bicarbonate" trick as our science experiment. I've finally got a use for my Google Labs Founders' Award lab coat. I need to try and find some child-sized safety glasses. The adult ones barely stay on her little nose. After that, we went for a walk to our local toy store to see if they sold child-sized safety glasses (they didn't) and then Zoe watched a little bit of TV and then we walked to the CityCat to go to Teneriffe to catch a bus to Chinatown. I couldn't have timed it better if I tried. Just as we got to Chinatown, they started doing a thing with the Chinese dragons, and I hoisted Zoe up on my shoulders so she could watch. I wasn't sure how she was going to take it, with all the noise from the drums and the dragons themselves, but she was enthralled. We watched other acts and then my girlfriend joined us, and we went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. I bought Zoe these training chopsticks a while ago, and she's taken to them like a duck to water. I brought them with us so she could use them at the restaurant, and she ate the biggest dinner I've ever seen her eat. After dinner, we caught the tail end of a procession and had some ice cream. We were starting to leave, and there was another dragon, and Zoe was brave enough to go and touch it on her own, for good luck. We then made our way back to the bus. By the time the bus arrived and got us back to Teneriffe, and a CityCat finally arrived, it was very late, but Zoe was pretty good the whole time. It was probably the latest night she's ever had with me while we've been out on the go, and she only got a bit ratty once we were home. It didn't help that she'd forgotten that she'd put Cowie in a cupboard this morning and we burned some more time tracking her down. Today was a fantastic (and very full) day. I enjoyed it a lot, and I think Zoe did too. Fortunately, Fridays won't always be this full on.

Couple of weeks ago I was in the situation of having to setup up a new laptop. I decided to go with wheezy s DVD installer. So far so good. I didn t expect (somewhere in the lies-I-tell-myself dept.) to have GNOME as the default Debian desktop. However after install I ve figured it was the new GNOME3 everybody was talking about. Before that I ve seen it in Ubuntu systems used by my classmates. I thought yeah, OK GNOME3, I think that s fine for them as a Linux desktop. Turns out that I ve started using the Debian desktop aka GNOME3 and noticed that it was not as bloated as the Ubuntu desktop I ve seen before looked, so I sticked with it, (I thought for a while). Turns out that I did like this new so called GNOME3, the non-window based but an application-based system (that is something that sticks in my head). I liked the way it makes sense as a desktop system, like when you look for applications, documents, connect to networks, use pluggable devices or just configure stuff every time with less and less effort. Good practices and concepts learned from Mac OS X-like environments and for sure taking advantage of the new features the Linux kernel and user-space environment got over the years. So, like one month later I stick with it and it makes sense for me to keep it. I had no chance to try the latest XFCE or KDE, my default choices before this experience. Kudos GNOME team, even after the depictions you guys had on GNOME Shell; as I learned. This whole situation got me into some pondering about the past of the Linux user experience and how we in the community lead people into joining. I remember that when I guy asked: how do I configure this new monitor/VGA card/network card/Etc? the answer was in the lines of: what is the exact chipset model and specific whole product code number that your device has? Putting myself in the shoes of such people or today s people I d say: what are you talking about? what it is a chipset? I mean, like it was too technical that only one guy with more than average knowledge could grasp. From a product perspective this is similar for a car manufacturer tell to a customer to look for the exact layout or design your car s engine has, so that they are able to tell whether is the 82 s model A or 83 s model C. Simplicity on naming and identification was not in the mindset of most of us. This is funny because as technology advances it also becomes more transparent to the customer. So, for instance, today s kids can become really power users of any new technology as if they had, indeed, many pre-set chipsets in their brain. But when going into the details we had to grasp few years ago they have some hard time figuring out the complexity of the product that presents itself on this clean and simple interface. New times, interesting times. Always good to look back. No, I m not getting old.

Today was our first expedition to the local Playgroup at the Bulimba Senior Citizen's Centre, an easy 5 minute bike ride from our place. I told Zoe we were going to Playgroup when Sarah dropped her around this morning, and she got very excited and jumped up and down. When Sarah asked her if she knew what Playgroup was, she said "no!" while continuing to jump up and down excitedly. We all laughed. I must have put this on my calendar when I was in Sydney last week, because I had it down for 8:30am, and we rocked up and there wasn't anyone there. A lady arrived to set up for a music class, and she said that the Playgroup didn't usually start until much later, so I figured I'd had a timezone fail and we went for a little bike ride around Bulimba while we waited. The lady who was running the Playgroup arrived at about 9:15am, and so we helped with the set up. Basically lots of toys, a couple of slides and some basic craft stuff. Heaps of the little IKEA round plastic stools. Parents (almost exclusively mothers) started trickling in from 9:30am. I've got a total name overload. We need name tags. Most of the girls seemed to be about 2 and a half, and a lot of the mothers had very young second children. Apparently a mother's group had joined en masse because they all had second children who were crawling, and so meeting in a park wasn't practical any more. Structurally, the first hour or so was just a free for all, and the last half an hour was some songs, a story and some playing under and on a parachute. All in all it was a good morning's activity, and at $20 for the term, nice and cheap. Apparently you're supposed to join Playgroup Queensland as well, for $40, but that takes care of liability insurance and whatnot. If only their website used SSL. Zoe mostly just wanted to play with me. We did a lot of role playing with some dolls, and she checked out the various toys. She loved that there was a stage, and took it upon herself to give an impromptu dance performance for a bit. We also did a little craft activity. She seemed more interested in helping flap the parachute than going under it, but enjoyed having a ride on it when the time came. I've just finished reading How Not to F*** Them Up by Oliver James. It was quite an interesting read, although not particularly applicable for my situation, as it more dealt with the first three years. It was interesting observing a whole bunch of different mothering techniques in action, both in dealing with their toddler children, and how they responded to their second infants. After Playgroup, we biked over to the local toy shop around the corner from home, and grabbed some birthday presents for the birthday party on Saturday and came home for lunch. Chicken quesadillas and some mango (I hadn't realised how much I've missed Queensland mangoes until we moved back, and I'm glad Zoe loves them as well). I got her down for a nap earlier today, and after she woke up, I asked Zoe if she wanted to write on the birthday cards we'd bought for the twins' birthday presents. She said she didn't know how to write her name (which isn't true) and wanted to paint them instead, so we compromised and used some sponge letters to stamp "Z O E" on the cards in paint. Zoe said that Eva's favourite colour was purple and Layla's was pink (or it may have been the other way around), so we stamped one with purple paint and mixed red and white to make something that looked more orange than pink and stamped the other one. Then Zoe wanted to glue the two paper plates together that we'd been using to hold the paint, so we did that, and then she wanted to "hand paint" a cardboard tube, which seemed to involve me directly squirting various colours into her hands and then her "painting" the tube with what was in her hands. The tube quickly ended up a brown/grey colour. All in all, it was a fabulous mess, and fortunately no walls or doors copped any paint on the way to the bathroom to clean up. After that, we cleaned up Zoe's room a bit, which resulted in her going off and playing with her Magna Doodle with Smudge for a bit, and then we played Doctor with her doctor set and then we did some baking. It was a good afternoon, and she only asked to watch TV once, when she first woke up from her nap, and we managed to successfully divert to other much more fun stuff.

Do you remember the very vocal people who, a decade ago, would endlessly argue that udev was broken and that they would never use it? Sometimes you can either embrace change or be dragged along by it. We are beyond the inflection point, and the systemd haters should choose their place.

I don't know how Debian planet deals with MathJax (it seems to become illegible), but I will try to post this, anyway.
Fact: Since the harmonic numbers can be approximated by the natural logarithm, that is, !!mathjaxbegin-i!! SF9uIFxzaW1lcSBcbG4gbg== !!mathjaxend-i!!, we can clearly see that !!mathjaxbegin-d!! CiBcZnJhY3sxfXtpKzF9ICsgXGNkb3RzICsgXGZyYWN7MX17bn0gPSBIX24gLSBIX2kgXHNpbWVx IFxsbiBuIC0gXGxuIGkgPSBcbG4gXGZyYWN7bn17aX0sCg== !!mathjaxend-d!! which is a trivial approximation that may be handy sometimes. If you spot any errors on this, please let me know.

Phandroid has one of many articles about a man being detained for wearing Google Glass in a cinema [1]. The article states as a fact that it s probably not smart to bring a recording device into a movie theater which is totally bogus. I ve visited a government office where recording devices were prohibited, they provided a locker for me to store everything that could be used for electronic storage outside their main security zone, that s what you do when you ban recording devices. Any place that doesn t have such facilities really isn t banning recording. The Gadgeteer has the original story with more detail with an update showing that the Department of Homeland Security were responsible for detaining the victim [2]. There are lots of issues here with DHS continuing to do nothing good and more bad things than most people suspect and with the music and film industry organisations attacking innocent people. But one thing that seems to be ignored is that movies are a recreational activity, so it s an experience that they are selling not just a movie. Any organisation that wants to make money out of movies really should be trying to make movies fun. The movie experience has always involved queuing, paying a lot of money for tickets ($20 per seat seems common), buying expensive drinks/snacks, and having to waste time on anti-piracy adverts. Now they are adding the risk of assault, false-arrest, and harassment under color of law to the down-sides of watching a movie. Downloading a movie via Bittorrent takes between 20 minutes and a few hours (depending on size and internet connectivity). Sometimes it can be quicker to download a movie than to drive to a cinema and if you are organising a group to watch a movie it will definitely be easier to download it. When you watch a movie at home you can pause it for a toilet break and consume alcoholic drinks while watching (I miss the Dutch cinemas where an intermission and a bar were standard features). It s just a better experience to download a movie via Bittorrent. I ve previously written about the way that downloading movies is better than buying a DVD [3], now they are making the cinema a worse experience too. I sometimes wonder if groups like the MPAA are actually trying to make money from movies or whether they just want to oppress their audiences for fun or psychological research. I could imagine someone like the young Phillip Zimbardo working for the MPAA and doing experiments to determine how badly movie industry employees can treat their customers before the customers revolt. Anyone who watches a Jack Ryan movie (or any movie with a Marty-Stu/Gary-Stu character) obviously doesn t even want to experience the stress of an unhappy ending to a movie. It seems obvious that such people won t want the stress of potentially being assaulted in the cinema. In terms of economics it seems a bad idea to do anything about recording in the cinema. When I was 11 I was offered the opportunity to watch a movie that had been recorded by a video camera in the US before it was released in Australia, I wasn t interested because watching a low quality recording wouldn t be fun. It seems to me that if The Pirate Bay (the main site for Bittorrent downloads of movies) [4] was filled with awful camera recordings of movies then it would discourage people from using it. A quick search shows some camera recordings on The Pirate Bay, it seems that if you want to download a movie of reasonable quality then you have to read the Wikipedia page about Pirated Movie Release Types [5] to make sure that you get a good quality download. But if you buy a DVD in a store or visit a cinema then you are assured of image and sound quality. If the movie industry were smarter they would start uploading camera recordings of movies described as Blue-Ray rips to mess with Bittorrent users and put newbies off downloading movies.

• [1] http://phandroid.com/2014/01/20/fbi-google-glass-movie/
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/qf8hebh
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/06/which-is-better-original-dvd-or-pirate-mp4/
• [4] http://thepiratebay.se/ (this site is NSFW adverts for adult services)
• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirated_movie_release_types

My friend Aaron Swartz died a little more than a year ago. This time last year, I was spending much of my time speaking with journalists and reading what they were writing about Aaron. Since the anniversary of his death, I have tried to take time to remember Aaron. I ve returned to the things I wrote and the things I said including this short article published last year in Red Pepper that SJ Klein and I wrote together but that I forgot to mention on my blog. I m also excited to see that a documentary film about Aaron premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last week. I was interviewed for the film but am not in it. As I said last year at a memorial for Aaron, I think about Aaron frequently and often think about my own decisions in terms of what Aaron would have done. I continued to be optimistic about the potential for Aaron-inspired action.

Software Engineering distinguishes between software features and software bugs. It is usually understood that features are positive, expected characteristics of a computer program. Features make users happy by allowing them to do something useful, interesting, or fun. Something good, anyways. Bugs are instead undesirable and annoying. You're sitting there at your computer writing a long email and the software crashes right before your email is sent. Bad stuff. Features are generally implemented by programmers on purpose, whereas bugs are purely unintentional. They are mistakes. You don't make a mistake on purpose. We might at this point be inclined to think that: i) what is good for users is done on purpose by software manufacturers; ii) what is bad for users was not meant to be. It happened by mistake. Here is a handy table to visualize this idea:

	On purpose	By mistake
Good	Feature
Bad		Bug

It seems to make a lot of sense. But you might have noticed that two cells of the table are empty. Right! In a great talk titled When Free Software isn't better, Benjamin Mako Hill mentions the concept of antifeatures, and how they relate to Free Software. Antifeatures are features that make the software do something users will hate. Something they will hate so much they would pay to have those features removed, if that's an option. Microsoft Windows 7 is used in the talk to provide some examples of software antifeatures: the Starter Edition does not allow users to change their background image. Also, it limits the amount of usable memory on the computer to 2GBs, regardless of how much memory the system actually has. Two antifeatures engineered to afflict users to the point that they will purchase a more expensive version of the software, if they have the means to do that. I have another nice example. The Spotify music streaming service plays advertisements between songs every now and then. To make sure users are annoyed as much as possible, Spotify automatically pauses an advertisement if it detects that the volume is being lowered. A poor Spotify user even tried to report the bug on The Spotify Community forum, only to find out that what she naively considered as a software error was "intentional behavior". A spectacular antifeature indeed. Whenever a piece of technology does something you most definitely do not want it to do, such as allowing the NSA to take complete control of your Apple iPhone, including turning on its microphone and camera against your will, that's an antifeature.

	On purpose	By mistake
Good	Feature
Bad	Antifeature	Bug

Both bugs and antifeatures are bad for users. The difference between them is that antifeatures are engineered. Time and money are spent to make sure the goal is reached. A testing methodology is followed. "Are we really sure customers cannot change their wallpaper even if they try very very hard?" Engineering processes, of course, can fail. If the poor devils at Microsoft who implemented those harassments would have made a mistake that allows users to somehow change their wallpaper on Windows Starter... Well, I would call that a glorious antibug.

	On purpose	By mistake
Good	Feature	Antibug
Bad	Antifeature	Bug

There is no place for antifeatures in Free and Open Source Software. Free Software gives users control over what their software does. Imagine Mozilla adding a feature to Firefox that sets your speakers volume to 11 and starts playing a random song from the black metal artist Burzum every time you add a bookmark, unless you pay for Mozilla Firefox Premium Edition. The source code for Firefox is available under a free license. People who are not into Burzum's music would immediately remove this neat antifeature. I have spent many years of my life advocating Free and Open Source Software, perhaps using the wrong arguments. Mako's talk made me think about all this (thanks mate!). All these years I've been preaching about the technical superiority of Free Software, despite evidence of thousands of bugs and usability issues in the very programs I am using, and contributing to develop. Free Software is not better than Proprietary Software per se. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. But it gives you control, and freedom. When it annoys you, when it doesn't do what you expect and want, you can be sure it's not on purpose. And we can fix it together.

Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any central control. It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth. At least I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the details of every transaction are kept forever. This point is investigated in USENIX ;login: from December 2013, in the article "A Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. They analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the money end up. This is how they wrap up their article:

"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on Silk Road or simply stealing someone else s bitcoins. We followed the flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road). As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example, subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the stolen bitcoins were deposited. Because such exchanges seem to serve as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at present) seem to be particularly attractive."

These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin transaction log. The 2011 paper "An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is summarized like this:

"Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and public-keys and associate information external to the system with the users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."

I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin is anonymous. It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites. Use cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :) As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I was a member of the credativ family for almost 10 years. It was a great and and demanding time where I did things I never imagined I would have to do them :). I started as an apprentice and finished as a technical lead. In the last summer one of my best friends - if not my best - and I developed the idea of me joining his company hs42 as their new Head of IT. The whole concept is interesting, most time I ll do home-office and for ~ 1 week in a month I ll join the company in Oldenburg. After a lot of thinking I accepted that offer. That means that I left credativ in December. Being an open source consultant is interesting on the one hand, but somewhat annoying on the other hand. You will always do new things, but often you are not in the position of designing, deciding or even running them. I was always something that is nowadays known as a devop - a long time before this was getting hip . Now I have the opportunity to design, develop and run my own systems. That also means a little bit windows, but opsi exists :). Running systems on your own is different from the usual consultant work. Being a consultant often means that you design and implement something and after it works you have to give your baby into the hands of someone else. Running them on your own also means you can do constant improvement to something, not only when its broken. The job should give me more time for open source and my family, which is a good thing. It is still a little bit odd to work from home, but being together with your family most of the time is a great thing - and I don t want to miss it. The new job also allows me to work as consultant on my own, so if you need a Debian, E-Mail, Linux or whatever guy that helps you in doing things - get in touch with me. The time at credativ was a great one and I look back with a smile to all the good things. If you need Open Source Support they are the people you should ask. I will stay connected with credativ in many ways.

On political correctness I am reading "Four ways to forgiveness" by Ursula Le Guin. This is how the book begins:

On the planet 0 there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war. She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly, not gobble words down in chunks the way Tikuli gulped his food. There has never been a war : in her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief.

That made me realise that several times I perceived political correctness as "only a denial that the war is going on". Last night I watched this video, which I felt was very relevant to this. Indeed, I have more respect for someone who listens to me and makes a good effort to understand what I said, then rudely disagrees, than for someone who is very politely ignoring everything I am trying to say. This is how I feel like this experience can be distilled into an actionable item:

Replying to an email is probably going to be useless, unless I am willing to make an effort to understand what the other person is trying to say, from their own point of view.

remctl is the middleware system that we use everywhere at Stanford. It's a very simple way to run commands, constrained by ACLs, over a GSS-API-authenticated with good encryption. This release doesn't have a lot of obvious user-visible changes. Rather, it's an internal refactoring and cleanup release that will make further changes easier. The major change is that the process event loop, which runs the command and sends its output back over the wire to the client, now uses libevent. This makes the code cleaner and fixes various problems previously caused by portability, such as the lack of proper handling of SIGCHLD forcing a short poll interval to see if the child had exited. While working on that, I also found and cleaned up several other minor issues: the maximum output per remctl token now matches the protocol maximum, rather than the arbitrary and strange choice of 65,000 octets, and I fixed a few minor memory leaks in the server and client that no one probably would have noticed. The server also now writes its PID file atomically. You can get the latest release from the remctl distribution page.

Another release of my general collection of utility libraries, Autoconf probes, general test cases, and similar things. The major change in this release is the addition of Autoconf probes and portability wrappers for libevent. Now included are Autoconf macros to probe for libevent (mandatory or optional) either via pkg-config or not, following the pattern of other probes in rra-c-util. Also included is a portability wrapper, probes, and some additional glue code that allows programs to be written against the libevent 2.x API and work (mostly) with the libevent 1.4 API, albeit with some missing functionality. This release fixes the systemd unit directory probe to not produce shell errors if pkg-config isn't available on the local system. It also fixes a syntax error when building portable/krb5.h with a C++ compiler. There are multiple improvements to the Kerberos and process TAP add-ons: memory is properly freed in all processes, making exhaustive memory allocation analysis easier; process output is flushed after stopping the process instead of before; the method used to stop processes is cleaner; a memory leak when running via fakeroot has been fixed; and full use is made of the new test_cleanup_register API in C TAP Harness. This release also adds a new message_handlers_reset function that restores all message handlers to their defaults and frees any memory allocated to set different handlers. This again is mostly useful when doing exhaustive memory allocation testing. You can get the latest release from the rra-c-util distribution page.

This is my test harness and C and shell library for writing test suites using the Test Anything Protocol (also used by Perl). The changes in this release aren't that major, but I changed one API in a non-backward-compatible way, so I bumped the major revision. That change is to test_cleanup_register, whose callback functions now take two arguments instead of one. The first, as before, indicates whether the test case succeeded or failed. The second is now true if the callback is running in the primary process (the one in which plan or plan_lazy was called), and false otherwise. Callback functions are now called for all processes, not just the primary one. This allows cleanup of per-process resources, like memory, in the child processes, which allows for easier valgrind analysis. Also in this release, the test harness was modified to reopen standard input to /dev/null when running a set of tests from a list, rather than inheriting standard input from the test driver. The test harness also now cleans up all extraneous copies of open file descriptors used during the setup of standard input, output, and error to avoid leaking harmless but noticeable file descriptors to tests. You can get the latest release from the C TAP Harness distribution page.

I'm actually doing other things right now, but this was just too much fun to ignore: I've been promoted!. Woot. Off to do other things, now.

Debian System Administrators working in conjunction with pkg-voip team member Daniel Pocock have set up a SIP proxy and TURN server for debian.org. Specifically, the SIP proxy provides a way for Debian Developers to use their Debian email ID as a SIP address for making calls to other project members and exchanging calls with any other domain that is enabled for SIP. The repro SIP proxy from reSIProcate has been chosen for this project. The TURN server provides a mechanism for users of SIP or XMPP (Jabber) to relay audio and video streams through a public IP address when necessary, eliminating many of the quality issues that arise when NAT devices block the media streams in one or both directions. The service allows the users to connect directly with the SIP device or softphone of their choosing, including many of those packaged in Debian such as Jitsi and Empathy or third party solutions like Lumicall or CSipSimple on Android. The SIP proxy also includes a WebRTC interface, allowing Debian Developers to immediately try WebRTC voice and video calls without installing or configuring any software of their own other than a web browser. A second stage of the project involves providing an XMPP (Jabber) server with similar capabilities for federated communications between debian.org users and other domains. Further details will be announced in the weeks ahead. It is a significant feature of the Debian Project philosophy that we can operate the entire project using free software, specifically, using software available in Debian packages running on our own infrastructure and without a dependency on third party cloud solutions.These new services for project members fulfill those expectations. It is particularly relevant for situations where real-time communication (voice or video) collaboration takes place with third parties such as applicants for Google Summer of Code, Outreach Program for Women, sponsors, media and other free software projects. Project specific details and a user guide are available now on the Debian Wiki at http://wiki.debian.org/UnifiedCommunications/DebianDevelopers

The 3D-printing technology has gained quite a big momentum in recent times. Its use is spreading widely even among hobbyists and many sources report daily several (sometimes weird) examples of its usage. The thing I like most, as a Free Software activist, is that several 3D-printing-related free and open source software are already available and quite good, and some printers are even released as free hardware. Unfortunately, Debian is quite lagged behind with regard to the availability of such software in our archive, especially compared to other distributions who already ship much of it. Hopefully this situation will change drastically thanks to the brand new Debian 3D-Printing team, whose purpose is to make Debian a rocking platform to do some serious 3D-printing. The team is bootstrapping right now, and we are looking for volunteers who are willing to help us. Packagers are greatly welcomed, but also triagers, users and passionate people with some experience in the field are extremely valuable. People willing to join the team can take a look at our (in-progress) wiki page and apply on the team page on Alioth. As with any good packaging team, a mailing list is available to share ideas, feel free to subscribe it, and feel free to join #debian-3dprinting on OFTC if you want to hang out with other team members.

Yesterday was the first day of my new routine, except I haven't really established the new routine yet. I think that's going to take a few weeks. It was, however, the first day of Zoe's new routine, she started Kindergarten. "Kindergarten" is a bit of an ambiguous term, even within Australia, it seems. Back when I went to school, there was "pre-school", which was, as best I can determine, what "Kindergarten" is now, except a year later. It was optional, half a week, and the year preceding the start of primary ("elementary") school. I think every other state was already doing an extra year of school (which I think they called "Kindergarten", "Kinder", or something starting with "K") so Queensland blew up "pre-school", created "Prep" and now that's the first year of primary school. Zoe will start "Prep" next year. Then the Queensland education boffins realised that kids were missing out on the stuff that "pre-school" used to offer, so they reintroduced it in the form of "Kindergarten" (by Queensland standards). It's supposed to be play-based, and isn't really "long day care". Zoe does Monday, Tuesday and every other Wednesday, from 8:30am until 2:20pm. I'd only heard about C&K from a friend after moving back to Brisbane, so we were very fortunate to secure a place without having camped out on a waiting list from birth. We got very lucky, and ended up getting multiple offers, but we're pretty thrilled with the one that Zoe got into. It's a relatively new facility, right next to a state school and some bushland. They take the kids on excursions into the bushland, and up to the state school where there's some chickens. The Kindergarten facility itself is really lovely. Anyway, yesterday was Zoe's first day. I biked there yesterday morning (without Zoe) and it took me about 11 minutes. It took me more like 15 minutes to pick her up with the bike trailer. It's uphill on the way there, but not too much of a slog. It's been really great that Zoe's BFF from day care, Megan, also scored a place in the same Kindergarten, as I think this will help the transition for both girls greatly. I was able to stay for an extended period of time to help settle Zoe in, and I was able to leave without her being particularly distressed. I then biked home, running a few errands along the way. I then got stuck into a woodworking project (I'm trying to make a little wooden clothesline for Zoe). It turns out trying to cut a halved joint with a hand saw and chisel is a lot of work. I've managed to aggravate an old rotator cuff injury and the two pieces are a tad too tight, so I'm thinking I'll redo it and cut the joint out with an electric router instead. I probably spent at least a couple of hours faffing around with that. So I banged away with a hammer and chisel for a bit, got a haircut, had a late lunch and next thing I knew it was 2pm and time to head back on the bike to pick up Zoe. She was still asleep on her stretcher when I arrived to pick her up, which wasn't that surprising, since she tends to sleep later and longer at day care. I got a good opportunity to chat with her teacher about her first day and then gently woke her up with a kiss, and we headed home. I introduced Zoe to one of our new neighbours, and after a snack, we drove into Fortitude Valley where I had to pick up some mail from my post office box. When we got back home, I started on dinner while Zoe watched a little bit of TV. I spontaneously invited my cousin over to join us for dinner, and we walked down to the Hawthorne Garage for a babyccino after dinner. It was a good day. I realised that I'm going to have to be super regimented with my time on the days Zoe is in Kindergarten, because 2pm is going to roll around very quickly. "Scarcity brings clarity", as Sergey says...