Sometimes strange things happen. This tuesday I had been to a simply great concert again: Grossstadtgeflüster. They were wearing nice white jumpsuits with finger-color handprints on them, the playlist was mostly really great, good mix of their first and from the great new album. But what was the most interesting part is that they announced another concert on the following tuesday. I just dropped to the floor because well, yet another of those "coincidences", because well, next tuesday is my birthday. Again. Deja Vu, anyone? On wednesday I had been to the next concert: Mono & Nikitaman. I never have seen the WUK that crowded, the hall was totally packed, people were even standing through the doors into the pre-hall. And even though they are rooted in Reggae it was in no way slow or soft. Greatly carrying along, hard to keep ones feet still. Only drawback when having two great concerts in two subsequent nights: Your neck and back starts to hurt and requests its toll. *ouch*

So I wrote an entry on my tumblelog about what s going on with my life currently. Since Tumblr s feed doesn t get pushed immediately, I showed the post to my co-worker and friend Chris, before it hit the planets: - So, yeah I have my blog since it s syndicated on Planet Debian and other small feed aggregators -I said. - But do they really care about your bike, your chess games or you attending that conference? -he asked-, I mean, I do care, but people? - Well -I replied after a quick thought-, I think that s how personal blogs work. After a deeper thought I just realized that indeed no one cares and deleted the entry before it was pushed to the feed, updating it on FeedBurner, etc. It was a nice awakening.

---

But on a bit more interesting (for people) things, The Perl Foundation is currently requesting comments on the projects they received for grant requests. My proposal is there, Solidifying and Extending the Blog Normalize project . I do think there are some other more deeper projects, of course, but I think B::N is also an interesting one and the amount requested is not as big for other projects, so it d be nice to give it a try. I believe B::N is a good idea that could be enhanced nicely. I proposed the idea to the TextMotion developers yesterday on IRC (since that s one of the CMS there would be a connector for -as of the grant proposal-). After deeper discussion, CMSs will not make translators for a lot of projects into theirs, but B::N would, so maybe we could make some sort of webservice that CMSs could call on their installation phases. That, or the user at the end could actually do the conversion himself locally. Having the proper information, one could be able to get from TextMotion to Wordpress, to Blogger, to Joomla, to Tumblr, to MovableType and to TextMotion again, making a transparent circular transformation. Some of this is currently possible with the few code I ve written for it, currently in CPAN (and a bit deeper proof of concept); if you are interested, please leave your comments on the Perl Foundation blog entry. And review others too. At the end, I might end up doing the project myself, but if some money is granted to do so, why not apply to it, that d just speed it up.

John writes about PDFs and the problem of embedded fonts that are missing due to restrictive licencing. Font designers usually distinguish between "embedding" and "using" a font, prohibiting the former in their licence agreement. The difference is that when a font is "used", all information about the text is lost, and only rendering instructions remain (usually a set of Bezier curves). PDF allows you to annotate a rendered page in various ways, among other things, it allows you to specify that a certain region should be interpreted as a specific text. For example, OCR tools working with PDF files start with a file containing just the image data, and add the textual information, so you end up with a file that looks like the scan, but has selectable text. While that is certainly not legal advice, so far it has been considered acceptable to ship a PDF file with pre-rendered text and an annotation that facilitates copy&paste (which you also need with embedded fonts to allow selections to see ligatures like " " as two distinct characters). These files may be slightly larger than they would be with an embedded font, but have the advantage of looking exactly the same everywhere and at the same time, being trivial to render as the rasterizer does not need to understand anything about text layout. tl;dr: if you have a document that people should be able to see exactly the way you intended it, please include the text curves if you may not embed the font directly, and provide selection hints.

On sid dist-upgrading requires some handholding currently: (SID)root@argenau:/# DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get --purge dist-upgrade
[...]
Calculating upgrade... Failed
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
e2fsprogs: PreDepends: libuuid1 (>= 1.34-1) but it is not going to be installed
mount: PreDepends: libuuid1 but it is not going to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages. The reason is the recently started upgrade to perl 5.10. This makes many packages temporarily uninstallable, (including lintian) but perhaps you need to upgrade to perl-5.10 now nevertheless. apt seems to stumble over debconf-i18n,
apt-get --purge install debconf-english
lets dist-upgrade succeed.

A little while back, I wrote a blog post called DjVu: Almost Awesome, where I pointed out the strengths of the three DjVu family of formats, but lamented the fact that there was no Free Software to create DjVu files in the most interesting format, DjVu Document.

Well, now there is: pdf2djvu is out and works, and it's been ITP'd to Debian, too.

As a very quick recap, DjVu is a family of raster image codecs that often creates files much smaller than PDFs, PNGs, TIFFs, etc. It has a ton of advanced features for things like partial downloads from websites. It's pretty amazing that a raster format can create smaller files than PDFs, even at 300 or 600dpi resolutions in the output. Of course, for some ultra-high-end press work, PDF would still be needed, but DjVu is quite compelling for quite a few uses. Since it is a raster format, it is simpler to decode and is not subject to local system variations, such as installed fonts, like PDF is.

Which brings me to the scourge of PDF. Recently we got a trouble ticket at work from someone saying there was a bug with our Linux environment because Linux users didn't see the correct results when they opened his PDF file. A quick inspection with some of the xpdf utilities (pdffonts, to be specific) revealed that the correct fonts were not embedded in the file. The user didn't believe me, and still wanted to blame Linux, saying that it worked fine on his PC with Acrobat. So I tried opening the file on a Windows 2003 terminal server, and it looked worse there than it did with any Free Linux viewer -- really quite terribly corrupted. He still wasn't entirely convinced, until he happened to try printing the file in question, and even Acrobat couldn't print it right.

PDF was supposed to be a "read anywhere" format that produces exact results. But it hasn't really lived up to that. Font embedding is one reason; the spec lists a handful of fonts that are allowed to not be embedded, but it is routine for some reason to violate that and fail to embed quite a few more. Then you have to deal with font substitution on the receiving end, which is inexact at best. Then you have all sorts of complex differences between versions, and it becomes quite the mess. (And don't even get me started on broken PDF editors, such as the ones Adobe sells...) Somehow, quite a few people seem to have this idea built up in their heads that PDF is both an exact format, and an editable format, when really it is neither. (Last week, I was asked to convert a PDF file to a Word document. Argh.)

DjVu keeps looking more and more pleasant to my eyes.

May 1st is a holiday in many countries around the world - It is, at least, here in Mexico. So, what's a man to do when faced with really-crappy network connectivity at home?
Yesterday I had dinner with Gigio, and among many other things, we talked about the Ciclot n, which I've only done twice. And on my way back home, I crossed (twice) the path of a group of ~100 cyclist going over Colonia Roma.
Anyway, whatever the reason, I woke up very well in the mood for a nice 20km ride:

Now, lets get the day started!
[update] I was told about a worldwide nudist cycling activity, the World Naked Bike Ride. Their page states their main motivator:

We face automobile traffic with our naked bodies as the best way of defending our dignit and exposing the unique dangers faced by cyclists and pedestrians as well as the negative consequences we all face due to dependence on oil, and other forms of non-renewable energy.

Of course, Mexican groups take part in this interesting activity - Ciclomarcha nudista.
Will I be there? I don't know - Quite probably, yes. I first thought of it as a joke, and as a dangerous activity. But, come think of it, I am a move-by-bicycle-in-the-largest-city-in-the-world activist. I have been knocked over or shit-scared (and fortunately not more than that) by careless drivers, but than won't force me back into driving my car when not needed. And this kind of activities, which do get their good share of exposure, need all the participants - I hope to be there, June 7 12:00PM, at the beginning of Mexico City Ciclopista (FFCC de Cuernavaca esq. Ej rcito nacional, Polanco) Chapultepec's Lions' entrance, at the crossing of Lieja and Reforma.

Share the awareness. There are very good promotional pictures. And collective nudist activities are quite fun, experiences to remember for life.

Audit your debian uploads My bank is sending me an e-mail every time I log into the home banking system, so that I can spot malicious logins. My credit card is sending me a SMS message every time it gets charged, so that I can spot mailicious charges. Can I get a notification of every Debian upload done with my key, so that I can spot if my key has been stolen? Let's work on that. As a start, thanks to Ganneff, here is how to do a one-off audit:

# go to merkel to access projectb, which is the postgresql database
# with all dak information
$ ssh merkel
merkel$ psql projectb
# look up the database id of my fingerprint
projectb=> select id, fingerprint from fingerprint where fingerprint like '%797EBFAB';
 id                  fingerprint                
    -----+------------------------------------------
     394   66B4DFB68CB24EBBD8650BC4F4B4B0CC797EBFAB
    (1 row)
# get a list of all uploads done with my key, sorted by date
projectb=> select * from source where sig_fpr=394 order by install_date desc;

First you get to do it (done); then you document it (done); then you automate it. It's quite trivial at this point, so enjoy the new Debian upload monitor. It's got search as you type to find your full fingerprint, then you get an HTML page with the log of your uploads in the last 2 months, and the page has an RSS feed that you can use to track your own uploads. Also, generating all this static content is acceptably fast:

merkel$ time ./deb-key-audit 
real    0m7.145s
user    0m4.244s
sys 0m0.384s

If you want to see the code, you can git clone http://merkel.debian.org/~enrico/keylog.git Currently it wrongly encodes UTF-8 characters: I suppose the strings come out of the database as ASCII instead of UTF-8. A patch would be welcome to fix that. I will now contact QA to see what we can do with it; if it ends up fitting in some bigger picture then it may be that the RSS links will change, but I'll post about it in that case.

nion argued about the new Dilbert.com website now using flash instead of GIFs and I responded that it’s not as bad since Dilbert.com now also officially offers RSS feeds — without Flash. It looks as if Scott Adams got more responses from nion type people since he divides the feedback to the new Dilbert.com site into three groups: Those who are angry about flash and bloat (mostly techies and linuxers), those who are fine with the design and features, but angry about the slowness due to overload and those who are fine with the design and features and ignore the speed. I’m in none of these groups. But Scott Adams valued the feedback and responded especially to the first two groups of critics with something for which he couldn’t have found a better URL:

http://dilbert.com/fast With this pure Dilbert, nion should now be happy again. I still prefer the RSS feeds though.

As I just had the need to split up two huge mbox files by date and did not find a tool that does that easily, I thought I share what I used. Careful, it isn’t very clever, so if you use it: It comes with NO WARRANTY at all. If it eats your mail, you lost. Not my fault, you have been warned. The task it should solve reads

• split files of size 1.8Gb and 3.2Gb, all together nearly a million mails in them,
• do not use lots of memory for this,
• no need to interactively do anything,
• split based on Date: header.

There are various ways to do it, one would be to use mutt, with something similar to the following in a muttrc file somewhere

 unset confirmcreate
 set delete=yes
 set folder=/dev/null

and then a lot of lines looking similar to the following, just replacing the dates;

folder-hook . 'push "T~d01/03/2008-31/03/2008\n;s2008-03.mbox\n$%q"'

If you then start mutt using mutt -F theabovemuttrc -f themboxfiletosplit it will go and split it into the YEAR-MONTH based files. I got this way from Gerfried Fuchs, as I am no mutt user and wouldn’t have found the way to do it with mutt myself. Drawback: Mutt needs exact date entries in the push lines. Means you have to write 29/02 if you mean “last day of Februar”, a plain stupid 31/02 will be converted to 02/03. And I was way too lazy to list all the dates for the timeframe those mboxes cover. So, other solution. Ruby to the rescue! The following code does split the mbox into the files I want, based on the date header:

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
# Split a mbox file into $year-$month files
# Copyright (C) 2008 Joerg Jaspert 
# BSD style license, on Debian see /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD
require 'pathname'
require 'rmail'
count = 0
File.open(Pathname.new(ARGV[0]), 'r') do  mbox 
  RMail::Mailbox.parse_mbox(mbox) do  raw 
    count += 1
    print "# count  mails\n"
    begin
      File.open(RMail::Parser.read(raw).header.date.strftime("split/mail-%y%m"), 'a') do  out 
        out.print(raw)
      end
    rescue NoMethodError
      print "Couldn't parse date header, ignoring broken spam mail\n"
    end
  end
end

This will go through the whole mbox and store them in split/mail-$year$ month files. It has a few things you should keep in mind, if you really want to use it:

• Spam mails often have a very broken Date header. Sometimes broken enough that it can’t be parsed. I discard the “can’t be parsed” ones, as I havent seen a valid mail with that. You might want to store it in a different file, so change the part within rescue.
• Again, Spam mails often have a very broken Date header. So you will get files for years way in the past or future. In my case I could simply delete all of them, as all of those had been spam, and I knew in which timeframe the good mails got into the mbox.

The above script took, niced down with nice -15 on an otherwise used server, about 25 minutes to split around one million mails from the above mentioned large files, with no noticable memory usage (only one mail at a time in memory). Comments: 5

There are situations where you might want to redirect some audio you're playing on your local computer to another computer's speakers, potentially in a different room, or even anywhere on the Internet. One of many possibilities to do that is to use the Enlightened Sound Daemon (EsoundD, or esd). It ships with a program called esddsp (apt-get install esound-clients) which can redirect various audio sources. First, you have to start the esd daemon on a console on the remote host (the one which should output the audio on some speaker, for example 192.168.0.xxx) e.g. like this:

  $ esd -public -nobeeps -tcp

You can do this as regular user (no need to be root) if you have the proper permissions. You also need to allow connections on port 16001 in your firewall settings. Then you can redirect audio to that daemon from another computer. In this example I'm redirecting some music using various players:

  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 mpg321 -o esd foo.mp3
  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 mplayer -ao esd foo.mp3
  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 ogg123 -d esd foo.ogg

This also works fine for videos, in which case you can redirect the audio (but not video):

  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 mplayer -ao esd foo.mp4

For the video player Miro, I've recently documented this in the Debian package's README.Debian file. Basically you have to edit ~/.xine/config and enable audio.driver:esd there, then start Miro with

  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 miro

Audio will be emitted on the remote host, video remains on your local PC. Some programs may also support esd natively, in which case esddsp is not required, e.g.

  $ ogg123 -d esd -o host:192.168.0.14:16001 foo.ogg

Some of the more powerful tools combine data banks of information with robust technological features. One such tool is the Cause Caller developed by Fred Benenson, an ITP graduate student who developed it for his thesis project. Here is some more information and make sure to check out the blog for even more:

The promise of a truly participatory democracy has never been clearer than digital media has made it today. The unique distributive nature of the Internet provides a platform that has the potential to deliver on this promise by facilitating better group action at lower cost,thereby encouraging actual participation in democracy. There have been many meaningful developments in bringing better information and actions to citizens looking to use digital networks to serve their political needs, but many useful tools and databases remain proprietary and costly while others remain too general or ineffective for political action. Cause Caller uses open source technology to deliver on the promise of a participatory democracy by taking the hassle and difficulty out of organizing phone banks. Users of Cause Caller can create individual causes and associate new politicians to those causes.

Boston offers slim pickings for vegetarian fine-dining options in the financial district. Most nice places have some sort of pasta dish and not much else. I have forgotten several times, but now write this blog entry to permanently remember, that Radius at 8 High Street is an excellent choice for vegetarians. Although almost nothing vegetarian appears on the menu, you can just tell the waiter that you are vegetarian (along with any other restrictions), and the chef will prepare a plate of three unique fancy concoctions. I’ve had lunch with other vegetarians, and each of us got three entirely different creative and delicious dishes. They were complex enough that I won’t attempt to describe them here. I’m not sure how they chose who got what, but we were all pleased. Of course, dessert is always vegetarian: Excuse the quality; this is a low-light low-resolution image taken by cell phone. It was called “Butter Cake” but went well beyond the humble title. Those specks around the outside are dried grapefruit. Technorati Tags: Vegetarian, Boston, Restaurants, Radius

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A few weeks ago, NYU hosted an interesting event about the future of the Internet, appropriately tittled The Futures of the Internet, the video of which is now available here. One of the panelists was Jonathan Zittrain (who recently wrote an important new book bearing the same name as the event) and during the talk he provided a few ideas about how geeks and developers can help secure the Future of the Internet. While I agree with a lot in fact most of his assessments about the state and fate of the Internet as he lays out in his book and his talks, his characterization of geek/hacker/developer politics is not one of them. Basically, one of Zittrain’s claims is that developers are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet and it is their rampant, Atlas-like libertarianism, which is, in part, to blame (first made 37:20 minutes into the video for those who want to listen to the actual comments). They have little-to-no political consciousness, are too cool to care about the fine print and they don’t care about the broader politics of the the Internet because they assume that they can just hack around any sort of barrier and impediment. While we can, without a doubt, identify a strain of libertarianism among hackers, it is by no means representative of all of geekdom and in fact, is becoming more and more a worn out 1990s stereotype/clich as time passes than an accurate representation of what is a far more variegated set of ethics and practices among hackers (and I will soon publish an article on this topic). It also completely fails to capture the ethical spirit as well as sociological, and political workings of one of the most important strains of hacking free and open source software which not only powers most of our (open) Internet but which in fact has provided a pretty hefty ethical backbone by which to conceptualize one of the ways we should think about the fight for the future of the Internet. Ok, time for a rant now Geeks not only designed the Internet, an indisputably revolutionary medium, but also implemented, and continue to maintain it, and then in their copious spare time, also engage in fighting back the political, legal and corporate encroachment which threatens to limit the very revolutionary nature of the Internet (as Chris Kelty’s new book on Free Software argues). If these acts by geeks are not enough political action, then maybe the development of not just one, but multiple entirely open and free alternatives to the only two proprietary operating systems that exist today might be a political act that would satisfy? Many would agree that even simply using a free operating system is a political act. It would be better to claim that individuals, lawyers and other political actors are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet, rather than imploring the already overtaxed geeks to set aside everything that they are already doing to do something even more. (end rant) It also seems that when it comes to political questions related to the Internet, net neutrality being the hot topic now, or fighting restrictive and problematic laws like the DMCA, one of the only groups of people (outside of lawyers and librarians) to actually understand and dissect the fine print (and geeks actually are pretty attuned to and like to dissect the fine legal print), to protest these unsavory laws, and to support the organizations who are doing something about it (like the EFF), are geeks and hackers. While many geeks are not necessarily keen on conceptualizing their labor in traditional political terms, or aligning their technical projects with a political affiliation, and yes would rather just be writing good code, they do fight for their productive freedom and this productive freedom just happens to relate to most questions and concerns related to an open, accessible, and tweakable Internet, built by the geeks, lest we forget What was perhaps most surprising was that he also seemed to think that geeks and developers have not turned to “apprenticeship,” nor policies and procedure to coordinate their development projects, unlike Wikipedia, which he considers a shining example that geeks should look towards as a beacon of policy that geeks should consider emulating in their projects (comments made answering my question). He clearly has not been hanging out with any Debian developers in the last 10 years nor has he gone through their New Maintainer Process In other words, he seems to think they are allergic to regulation due to their accentuated libertarianism, or are against structure because of their anarchism, neither which is remotely true. I think I found this characterization most ironic and problematic for before Wikipedia was even an entry on a Wiki, projects like Debian (and most other F/OSS projects) were transforming and changing to integrate normative procedures and policies that allowed a group of people to work together, scale, grow and deal with crises’. No, they don’t have the Wikipedia badge system, but that system is emblematic of Wikipedia’s own transformation into integrating its own normative procedures and policies for working together, not an example of an idealized policy system that other projects are too primitive to have evolved into yet. About one hour into the talk when questions opened up, I objected to his characterization, but given his answer back to me, I did not make much of a dent in his thinking. Another lawyer Tim Wu (who also wrote a wonderful book on the Internet) chimed in to give me some props and also made a good point that even if geeks are the only groups of people who would storm AT&T and know intimately about the importance of net neutrality, there is a lot of room for thinking about how to strengthen and improve the tactics and politics among geeks and developers so that we can ensure the type of open and generative Internet and set of technologies we value. As part of thinking and rethinking new strategies, it is as key to acknowledge and honor the past. In this regard, free software development has been pivotal both in terms of providing software (and making it is an important political act as is choosing to use free software over propriety software) and a set of important set of ideas that a lot of lawyers like Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig have run with to make some important political claims of their own. So despite my rant above, which was a rant and thus exaggerates things to some degree, I do think there is much more that geeks and non-geeks can do, such as help translate these uber-geeky issues into less geeky terms (and actually this is already being done by some geeks as the work of Jelena Karanovic has shown, or translate the technical issues into new domains as the uber-geek Karl Fogel is doing with question copyright but first lets give credit where credit it due and recognize that labor is political

With Hans Reiser convicted for murder, some seem to feel that reiserfs is more or less dead. Jason Perlow writes a very strange article on ZDNet to which I'm replying to it mainly because he alludes that Debian so far has failed to react. First, default installations of Debian create ext3 and not reiserfs filesystems (Please correct me if I'm wrong. I've just recently installed a fresh etch, but I didn't specifically look at the fs.) And even if it were reiserfs (v3), I don't see why a reaction would be called for now. The stability of reiserfs has come up every once, before the whole murderer story begun, and that the interaction between the reiserfs developers (including, of course, Hans Reiser) and the kernel team were always difficult has also been known for a long time. This is the kind of reason where I think it's appropriate for Debian to take steps (i.e. switching to a different filesystem), not a single event, where it is not even clear yet how the reiserfs (v3 and v4) efforts will move on. On to the technical stuff: Perlow tries, but doesn't really arrive at understanding the issues he's writing about. Reiser 4 is discounted without a single remark on its technical merits (I can't comment either as I have not looked at it so far.) Why he discounts ext4 is not clear to me (because it is not ripe for production use yet — but that's even more true of ZFS and this Linux-NTFS thingy he rambles about further down...) He discounts JFS2 because it hasn't got a new release for several years (is that bad in a filesystem?) but then touts ZFS as a great idea with minor licensing problems, without speaking of patents which is where the real problems lie (not to mention the fact that the Linux ZFS port probably is much less tested than ext4 or JFS.) And in a final jump into fantasy-land he mentions that NTFS might just be ideal for Linux, and Microsoft is said to have started cooperating nicely with the Free Software world, so all licensing and patent issues are certainly going away Real Soon Now™. At least for Novell, these issues shouldn't be a problem, I guess. Not mentioned by Jason are btrfs (which has a quite tightly coupled network filesystem brother, crfs and is in a very early state of development), and hammer, which comes from the BSD world and currently lacks a Linux port. Both efforts are probably more likely to replace ext3 or reiser on Linux than both ZFS and NTFS: no patent issues, no license issues, and the development is actually done by a community and not a single company. Update: Julien Blanche ha a much more succinct response to Jason Perlow. More intersting to read than mine, too.

Do you want know what is really stored in your gpg keyring? Or do you want to store your keyring into a VCS? Or you you want to be able to delete signatures or other data from a keyring without having to use gpg's absurd interface? If you do, then you might want to look into a little program I started for this purpose. It's still quite alpha, but for some uses should already work. And if you test now and give some feedback, it might develop more in a direction you need. To give it a test:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/gpg2txt checkout gpg2txt
cd gpg2txt
./autogen.sh --configure
make
less README
man -l gpg2txt.1
./gpg2txt -o test ~/.gnupg/pubring.gpg
less test
./gpg2txt --recreate -o pubring.gpg test

Here's a nice toy I added to mpdtoys this evening. vipl allows editing mpd's playlist in a standard text editor. Reorder or delete songs, etc. Enter ">" in front of the song you want to play. Type in partial song, album, or artist names and it will expand them to any matches. :wq to start the music playing.

After three years, a new version of ocaml-gettext is out. I know that the delay is quite long... Been too busy to do anything regarding this. This new version is mainly a bug fix release:

• UTF-8 is better handled when merging PO/POT
• multi-lines, special and continuation comments of PO file are supported
• camomile implementation is now safer (less chance to fail if something goes wrong)
• improve overall build system

However, the major event of this release is the fact that it is now compatible with OCaml 3.10.0. This is a big news, because string extraction heavily rely on camlp4, which has changed a lot. I have also uploaded a debian package of ocaml-gettext. Plans for next release:

• website has not been updated because generating it is too much complicated, i should switch to something more simple layout and generation scheme
• my home-made build system is not good at all (fail to detect changes and do incremental rebuild...), next release should move to ocamlbuild
• PDF generation has been disabled, because it makes fop produce a lot of errorrs, it should be re-enable
• finish the patch to xgettext to allow OCaml string been extracted

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In the last week, Nicholas Negroponte gave this unfortunate interview decrying "open source fundamentalism" and hinting the possibility of a warmer relationship with Microsoft. Predictably, this has elicited an ongoing response by OLPC News and on the OLPC development mailing lists. Just a few days before Negroponte's statements hit the press, I gave a talk at Penguicon called Laptop Liberation where I talked about why I thought that OLPC's use of a free software operating system and embrace of free software principles was essential for the initiative's success and its own goals of education reform and empowerment. I've been saying similar things for some time. My main point boiled down to something that, appropriately enough, Nicholas Negroponte was fond of saying back when the project was still called the $100 laptop: an extremely cheap laptop is not a matter of if, but of when and how. This technology will define the terms on which students communicate, collaborate, create, and learn. These terms are dictated by those with the ability to change the software -- by those with access to computers, the source necessary to make changes, and the freedom to share and collaborate. Constructionism -- OLPC's educational philosophy -- is about putting powerful tools and control over those tools into the hands of learners. It is about learning through exploration and creation -- about shaping one's own educational environment. Constructionist principles bear no small similarity to free software principles. Indeed, OLPC's stated commitment to free software did not happen by accident. OLPC convincingly argued that a free system was essential for creating a learning environment that could be used, tweaked, reinvented, and reapplied by its young users. Through these processes, the XO becomes a force for learning about computation and an environment through which children and their communities can use technology on their terms and in ways that are appropriate and self-directed. We know that laptop recipients will benefit from being able to fix, improve, and translate the software on their laptops into their own languages and contexts. Much more importantly, however, are all of the uses for the laptops that OLPC has not -- and can not -- think up. OLPC is a powerful tool for learning, but ultimate power is only in the hands of those that can freely use, change, and collaborate in defining the terms of their learning environments. In its commitment to software freedom, OLPC chose not to be arrogant by assuming that it knows how its users will use their laptops. Flexible environments designed for constructionist learning and a free software platform protect against this arrogance. Constructionism and free software, implemented and taught in a classroom, offer a profound potential for exploration, creation, and learning. If you don't like something, change it. If something doesn't work right, fix it. Free software and constructionism put learners in charge of their educational environment in the most explicit and important way possible. They create a culture of empowerment. Creation, collaboration, and critical engagement becomes the norm. OLPC does not get to choose if educational technology happens. If we work hard at it though we might get to influence the "how" and the "who." Proprietary software vendors like Microsoft want the "who" to be them. With free software, users can be in power. What's at stake is nothing less than autonomy. We can help foster a world where technology is under the control of its users, and where learning is under the terms of its students -- a world where every laptop owner has freedom through control over the technology they use to communicate, collaborate, create, and learn. This, to me, is the promise of OLPC and its mission. It is the reason I've been involved and in support of the project since nearly day one. It is the reason I left Canonical and Ubuntu to come back to school at MIT to be closer to the then nascent unincorporated project. It is the reason that OLPC's embrace of constructionist philosophy is so deeply important to its mission and the reason that its mission needs to continue to be executed with free and open source software. It is why OLPC needs to be uncompromising about software freedom. As an adviser and sometimes contractor to OLPC, OLPC does not need to listen to me. But I hope, for all our sake, that they do.

Update: Richard Stallman and the FSF have published another essay on the same topic focused more on pure free software (i.e., less education specific) objections.