Due to the comments on my blog post about Divisive Behavior [1] I ve been considering the issue of terms of abuse of minority groups a topic of which racial abuse is only one aspect. It seems that there are many discussions about which terms are offensive and when they are offensive, most of which are very misguided. Solving this problem would be an almost impossible task, but I have some ideas which may help to improve the situation. I would appreciate any pointers to better ideas in comments or in blog posts that are inspired by this one. One common mistake seems to be the idea that there are global objective criteria by which a statement can be proven to not be offensive. In any language that is constantly evolving (IE any language that s not dead) this seems impossible. It is particularly difficult with a language like English which is widely used in different countries and cultures. If a member of a minority group claims that you have just offended them then it seems most reasonable to have the default assumption be that you have said or done something which is actually offensive. In such a situation an immediate apology for the misunderstanding should be well accepted, but a debate about who s cultural standards should be used for determining what is offensive probably won t get a positive reception. It seems extremely difficult (if not impossible) for a member of the majority group to properly understand what members of a minority group experience. So therefore attempts to understand why certain terms are offensive are likely to be doomed to failure. Sometimes if a certain word is used and then a group of people immediately get really angry you just have to accept the fact that it s not a good word to use. One common example of this is words that are associated with violence if someone associates a particular term with a threat of serious injury or death then you won t be able to convince them that it s not a big deal, but there are more subtle things of a similar nature. It s worth trying to understand people and these things can be productively discussed between friends. But a discussion of such things is not viable during the course of a debate. If involved in a debate with someone you really dislike it doesn t seem like a good strategy to start a meta-discussion about whether they should regard one of your statements as being unreasonably offensive (regarding minority group status) as opposed to the level of offense that is acceptable in debate (something like that s the most ridiculous argument I ve ever heard may offend the recipient but is not inherently unreasonable). Words tend to have multiple meanings. Claiming that your intent was significantly different from the way your message was interpreted probably isn t going to work well unless accompanied by an apology. Even I m sorry you were offended (which is not the best apology) will probably do. Finally I m sure that anyone who does Google searches dating back to 2005 (as an arbitrary year that references my previous post) can find examples of me doing things that go against some of these suggestions. I ve learned things since then, it s an ongoing process.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/23/divisive-behavior/

Application Indicators: A Case of Canonical Upstream Involvement and its Problems I always thought Canonical could do a bit more to contribute to the GNOME project, so I was happy to see the work on application indicators proposed to GNOME. Application indicators are based on the (originally KDE-driven, I believe) proposed cross-desktop status notifier spec. The idea (as I understand it) is to have a consistent way of interacting with status notifiers and stop the confusing mix of panel applets and systray indicators. This is a very laudable goal as mentioned by Colin Walters:

"First, +5000 that this change is being driven by designers, and +1000 that new useful code is being written. There are definite problems being solved here."

The discussion that followed was very useful, including the comments by Canonical's usability expert Matthew Paul Thomas. Most of the discussion was about the question how this proposal and spec could be best integrated into GTK, the place where most people seemed to agree this belongs (rather than changing all apps to provide this, this should be a service provided by the platform) However, on the same day, Canonical employee Ted Gould proposed libappindicator as an external dependency. The following thread showed a couple of problems, both technical and otherwise:

• It is proposed as an external dependency, not as a part of GTK
• It is unclear how it will integrate with the GNOME3 Shell
• It requires Canonical's notorious copyright assignment
• It is licensed under the LGPLv2.1 or 3 specifically, not any later one

What I personally disliked is the way the Cody Russel and Ted Gould are papering over the above issues in the thread that followed. For examples, about point one, Ted Gould writes in the proposal:

Q: Shouldn't this be in GTK+?
A: Apparently not.

while he himself said on the same day, on the same mailing list: "Yes, I think GTK/glib is a good place" and nobody was against it (and in fact most people seemed to favor including this in GTK). To the question about why libappindicator is not licensed as usual under the LGPL, version 2.1 or later, Canonical employee Cody Russell even replied:

"Because seriously, everything should be this way. None of us should be saying "LGPL 2.1 or later". Ask a lawyer, even one from the FSF, how much sense it makes to license your software that way."

Not everybody has to love the FSF, but proposing code under mandated copyright assignments which a lot of people have opposed and at the same time insinuating that the FSF was not to be trusted on their next revision of the LGPL license seems rather bold to me. Finally, on the topic of copyright assignments, Ted said:

"Like Clutter for example ;) Seriously though, GNOME already is dependent on projects that require contributor agreements."

It is true that there are (or at least were) GNOME applications which require copyright assignments for contributions (evolution used to be an example, but the requirement was lifted), however, none of the platform modules require this to my knowledge (clutter is an external dependency as well). It seems most people in the GNOME community have the opinion that application indicators should be in GTK at least eventually, so having libappindicator as an external dependency with copyright assignments might work for now but will not be future proof. In summary, Most of the issues could be dealt with by reimplementing it for GTK when the time comes for this spec to be included, but this would mean (i) duplication of effort, (ii) possibly porting all applications twice and (iii) probably no upstream contribution by Canonical. Furthermore, I am amazed at how the Canonical people approach the community for something this delicate (their first major code drop, as far as I am aware). To be fair, neither Ted nor Cody posted the above using their company email addresses, but nevertheless the work is sponsored by Canonical, so their posts to desktop-devel-list could be seen as writing with their Canonical hat on. Canonical does not have an outstanding track record on contributing code to GNOME, and at least to me it seems this case is not doing much to improve things, either.

In ancient Rome, the Imperial cult was the worship of the Roman emperor as a god. It came to be at roughly the same time as Christianity. In the cult of the emperor, Caesar was revered as a deity. According to Harvey Cox, This was what we might today call a civil religion it had its holidays, processions, and holy sites throughout the empire. Adherence to it was required of all of the emperor s subjects, wherever they lived and whatever other deities they also worshiped. It was the religious and ideological mucilage that held the far-flung empire together. Perhaps you see where this is going. There was a certain group that found the imperial cult, well, repugnant. They felt their own goals bringing their god s peace and justice to the world were incompatible with this sort of devotion to a human institution, and the very institution that had killed their leader at that. Their reaction went like this:

Regarding worship of the emperor, Christians responded with an unequivocal no. They claimed that Jesus Christ was God s kyrios ( anointed one in Greek), but since kyrios was one of the titles attributed to Caesar, they refused to participate in the imperial cult. They were willing to pray for the emperor and for his health, but they stubbornly refused to pray to him or offer ritual tribute. They recognized that one could not be a follower of Jesus while also honoring a rival to the loyalty their faith in him and his Kingdom required; therefore, not even one pinch of incense on the imperial altar. This defiance of the political religion of the empire, which led their critics to brand them subversive, landed many of them in arenas with salivating lions. Harvey Cox in The Future of Faith

Now, you may be wondering, why am I asking if anyone still worships the emperor of a long-extinct empire? I maintain that this practice is still alive and well, just under a different name. I have been interested in some of the debates about American institutions that choose to perform neither the national anthem nor the pledge of allegiance. Many of these institutions are Mennonite, and their reason for not participating in these two particular acts mirrors that of the early Christians refusing to worship Caesar: namely, their goal is to bring about God s peaceful and just kingdom on earth, and no country, no human institution at all, can ever command greater loyalty than that cause. Moreover, the American national anthem is a particularly violent one, celebrating the taking of life right there at the beginning. Not completely compatible with the ethics of a church trying to bring about a more peaceful world, right? It is from that basis that many Mennonites, and our institutions, do not perform the national anthem or say the pledge of allegiance. For myself, when the national anthem is being performed, I will stand out of respect for those around me for whom the moment is important, but I do not sing. I am deeply appreciative that the United States, like many other countries, makes it legal to do this. I am heartened by the fact that I do not risk a confrontation with the lions over my religious stance today. Goshen College, a Mennonite institution, recently decided to go back on a century of history (which goes back farther than the anthem itself, which was only adopted in 1931) and will now be performing the anthem, followed by a prayer, before select sporting events. And by so doing, they fail both to act in accordance with the way of Christ, and to be a patriot. They fail to act for peace and justice by playing an anthem that supports and glorifies war and violence. And they fail to be patriotic. Patriotism and nationalism are different things. It s easy to be nationalistic to get up there and sing a song that everyone wants you to sing. It is far more difficult to be patriotic. Being patriotic in the United States means using the freedoms we have to improve our country. Goshen ought to use its freedom to not observe the national anthem as a way to try to draw a line in the sand against violence, to suggest that our anthem fails to adequately recognize the character of the American people and who we want to be, and to suggest a better alternative. After all, those people who are venerated today as patriots anyone from Martin Luther to Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King stood up to their fallible human governments to seek positive change. Instead of a route both religious and patriotic, Goshen College has chosen one that is neither. I am deeply disappointed that 300 phone calls have apparently cowed their leadership. What have we come to when our ancestors braved the lions, and we give up our principles over the fear of bad publicity? Ah, Goshen, perhaps you are thinking that you could spare a few pinches of incense for Caesar after all?

Note: Please see RC-Bug statistics for Squeeze, calendar week 7 for an explanation of the numbers.

Total:	699	+49
Affecting Squeeze:	559	+41
Squeeze-only:	117	+23
Unfixed bugs remaining in Squeeze:	442	+18

Of these 442 bugs...

... are pending	36	+4
... are patched:	65	+1
... are duplicates:	47	+-0
... are in Non-free or contrib:	10	+10
... are claimed by someone:	14	-3
... are fixed in the delayed queue:	5	-1
... are somehow marked as fixed:	53	+14

Or in other words:
Release critical bugs left in squeeze, when ignoring all these:
262 (+2 compared to previous week). With this release managers views, 472 (+48 compared to previous week) bugs remain to be fixed somehow before we can release. Some notes:

• Lucas Nussbaum did another archive wide rebuild of all packages to detect some FTBFS bugs. Apparently he found some, so the number increased ;)
• Stefano Zack Zacchiroli wrote some very interesting (or should I say inspiring?) notes about his RCBW initiative running under the motto let's fix one Debian RC bug per-day.
• To the best of my knowledge, the problems with the mips* machines haven't been solved yet. So we are still looking for mips* porters. Please see this small problem description as well as the mails on our mips mailing list.

So much for this week. Let's see, how the numbers evolve in the coming seven days...

Everyone knows that exercise can heal the body. But why only a few people who routinely perform the activity? Ask yourself. The answer is, maybe you less motivated to do so. A survey ever conducted to find out why people rarely do sports. The survey involving 15,000 women from 25 countries showed that although nearly half of them know that exercise is very important for health, but less than 25 percent of it done. Why? More than two-thirds of respondents said that they would exercise more often if the gym was fun. So far, they consider it as a routine or demand to stay healthy so feel burdened. Although the facts say so, but it is unfortunate if people take sport as a less desirable activity. If you are not motivated to do the morning run, bike or fitness, try these few tips that may improve your mood for a workout without having to feel it as a demand or load. 1. Participate In A Club
Come in a club full of adventure and can arrange your sporting activity each week. Find information from friends or open the website that provides these facilities. 2. Involve Friends
If you are interested in joining a club, you can do sports with your friends or beloved. Sport activities together can evoke passion and spirit to not realize that you are really doing is exercise, not just recreation. 3. Try New Types
Trying something new will make you feel to have new experiences and unexpected. Make your muscles work with the new type of sport and do not usually very good for your body. 4. Make A Game
You would be very interested in an adventure or a game. Making sport like games is a good idea. Make activities as the game ran find treasure limited time, and you will feel more happy and challenged. 5. Back to Boyhood
Do you remember when as a child running around all day without feeling tired and bored? It feels good right? That s what you should do now. Create a day where you can be reunited with friends and do sports or play activities you usually do in childhood. Rollerblading in the park to play or jump rope can be very enjoyable. 6. Give Credits For Yourself
If you ve managed to do sports, try giving a gift to yourself. Watching the film series, enjoying a plate of spaghetti or relax at the spa can be temoat rewards you deserve for successfully achieving exercise goals. Most people who do not enjoy the sport has a very dense activity and also because they are not used to doing. But if once you find that it is a routine exercise that is enjoyable, you will begin to enjoy it. Without realizing it, you also have to do two things at once is fun, physical exercise and psychological. Good luck.

The Telegraph has a silly article titled Aliens are likely to look and behave like us [1]. It s based on the ideas of Professor Simon Conway Morris [2] who is a big fan of evolutionary convergence. He seems to believe that humans evolved in a way that is close to optimal and that aliens would have to evolve in a similar manner. The article s claim that aliens will look and behave like us has three flaws, one is assuming that humans are the ideal form for space travel, another is the significant possibilities for vast objective differences between species, and the final one is the human tendency to regard small differences as being really significant. The Arrogance of Assuming that Humans are Ideal. It seems extremely arrogant to assume that humans have the ideal form for performing tasks that we have not yet performed such as traveling to another star system. To assume that it is certain that humans will colonise the stars is also extremely arrogant and foolish as well, I think that a significant amount of money should be devoted to existential risks that we face. People who believe that humans will inevitably colonise the stars (probably because God told them there s no other reason for such certainty) will tend to oppose taking prudent measures to reduce the probability of failure. We should also consider the possibility that a human society that colonises another star system at some future time might be so different from us that we regard them as alien. How Might Aliens be Different? It seems to me that one problem with the theory of convergent evolution (as applied to different planets) is that evolution doesn t seem to work in big steps. It seems to me that for an increasing portion of the jobs in our technological society there would be a benefit in having four arms and two legs, and maybe having more than four fingers on two of the hands. But evolving a bone structure that makes four arms useful is not a minor tweak so it seems unlikely to happen naturally we might be able to genetically modify humans to have four arms and two legs with some future technology. I can t believe that four limbs is the optimal number for every mammal, amphibian and reptile (apart from the legless ones), that two legs plus two wings is the optimal number for every bird, and that six legs is the optimal number for every insect. I also can t believe that two arms and two legs is the optimum number for every primate with the only significant difference in limbs being the primates that possess a prehensile tail. Evolution doesn t produce perfect creatures, what it does is to produce creatures that tend to be slightly fitter than their ancestors. So even if there was an optimal form for a species that develops interstellar-craft, there would be no reason to assume that humans have such a form even if we had developed interstellar travel. I think it s relatively safe to assume that aliens would have two eyes (stereoscopic vision is a significant advantage), but apart from that I don t think we can assume much about their appearance. For example I don t think that there s any inherent reason why creatures as intelligent as current humans could not evolve from octopuses 8 arms would be quite useful for operating machines. Aliens that spread beyond their own home planet don t have to be optimal for such tasks, they only need to become the dominant species on their planet, develop decent technology, and then want to leave their planet. A species that took 100,000 years to achieve what humans have achieved in the past 100 years might not be considered optimal but it might still be able to eventually launch interstellar craft. I don t think it s reasonable to assume that aliens would have to be as intelligent as humans to do that. But it does seem most likely that any aliens who manage to get here would be more intelligent than us. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond has a really interesting analysis of how human history was determined by geography and the availability of plants and animals suitable for domestication. Part of the explanation for the apparent lack of intelligent aliens could be planets where the dominant species was stuck in a situation like that of the people of New Guinea, the lack of plants and animals suitable for domestication prevented their society from developing. A stone-age human civilisation could potentially be stable for millions of years. The article says Extra-terrestrials might not only resemble us but have our foibles, such as greed, violence and a tendency to exploit others resources . Well for starters a species that can displace all other contenders to become the dominant species in their planet would have to be capable of greed and violence. So that is probably correct but is not really going out on a limb. Physorg.com has a short article describing the benefits of sexual reproduction in terms of the rate of accumulation of harmful mutations [3]. So it seems that sexual reproduction is most likely among intelligent aliens. But I don t think that there is any reason to assume that aliens couldn t be hermaphrodites. The Telegraph article claims that Star Wars and Star Trek could be more accurate than they ever imagined in depicting alien life , but given that Star Trek has avoided homosexuality even when demanded by the plot it seems that whatever aliens do in the bedroom would be way outside the range of activities alluded to in Star Trek. It seems that almost all sci-fi has aliens that are less alien than a significant portion of the human population. I think it s safe to predict that if we should meet aliens they will not look like humans wearing cheap make-up or rubber suits that has more to do with the budgets assigned to movie studios than any claim to potential realism. It seems most likely that a society capable of developing space travel would need a great deal of training for it s young before they become self-sufficient. Species of animal that abandon their eggs and hope for the best seem unlikely to succeed in doing that. I think that this implies that a pair-bonded species that spends an extended amount of time raising their young is most likely to succeed. Perceptions of Aliens Vulcans are widely regarded as being on the Autism spectrum. So it seems that having some similarities in personality to about 1% of the human population is enough to convince most human viewers that the character in question is an alien. A Google search for such things just turns up many references to people on the Autism spectrum who feel like aliens which incidentally is the source of the alias ETBE [4] that I used for more than 10 years before being diagnosed as an Aspie. Star Trek aliens aren t actually very alien by human standards! Given the repeated demonstrations of the general human inability to recognise the psychological similarities in people from different countries or racial/ethnic/religious backgrounds it seems likely that few people would recognise aliens as being at all similar to us. As so many people are unable to recognise the fundamental similarities in people who happen to have a different skin color I can t imagine many people immediately regarding beings that look like octopuses as having human traits. Could an eusocial organism (such as bees or ants) develop space travel? It seems to me that most people wouldn t regard humans who act in a manner that resembles ants (such as the Borg Collective) as being like us . The possibility of an eusocial race evolved from humans is explored in Coalescent: A Novel (Destiny s Children, Bk. 1) by Stephen Baxter (and more briefly in the sequels). Probability The universe is a large place. Making a specific prediction about the first alien species that we might encounter might make some sense. But given the potentially billions of species that might be out there we should assume that some of the more improbable forms are represented. Claiming that anything in particular is impossible seems very rash. Also anyone who makes claims about what evolution should do seems to have missed the point. What evolution does is to give rise to species that tend to be a better fit for the environment. Different environments result in different creatures. We can try and predict what creatures might evolve, but we don t get to say that things should happen.

• [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7071013/Aliens-are-likely-to-look-and-behave-like-us.html
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Conway_Morris
• [3] http://www.physorg.com/news183318256.html
• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_Biological_Entity

If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:

Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.

These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts Trickster Makes this World. Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:

I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on p. 9

At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain no. The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster. I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short. For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED). But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men. But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story. For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:

Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.

These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts Trickster Makes this World. Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:

I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on p. 9

At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain no. The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster. I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short. For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED). But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men. But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story. For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

Yesterday, I arrived in Bruxelles, coming from the Issy/Paris FusionForge meeting which will be described more later by Roland on Pl net Forge. Please tell Ohlol if you use it, for more visibility. My employer will also provide hosting for FOSS projects, but we'll need to formalise the hosting conditions first, plus Evolvis currently runs FusionForge 4.5 (aka "Debian GForge") but we're in the process of upgrading to a 4.8-plus-backports-and-patches, then 5.0 soon. There is a new inter-forge mailing list as well, see the info page. People from Coclico and the various *forges may want to subscribe there (forge developers, not so much users (hosters) or end-users (hosted project developers/users) though). At FOSDEM, Benny and I (and maybe gecko2) will be running the MirBSD booth, so no Debian staffing for me, sorry. But I will be there. Also please do ask me about mksh the MirBSD Korn Shell etc. There are flyers in German (not updated), English and French too! (One of the *forge guys did install mksh(1) after reading it, in fact.) Don't you people dare miss the two talks: from Benny about how to package with autotools and libtool correctly and from XTaran explaining Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Benny's also famous for his talk about Painless Perl Ports with cpan2port; XTaran's famous for a whole bunch of other things. I still have some catching up (wlog entries, keysigning, webpages, etc.) to do, please bear with me. I don't really have a proper work environment with me. There's a chance I will not be attending the Beer Event in the Delirium Tremens caf (last year's still remembered). Benny will certainly be there, though. Could someone please order nice weather? I still need to eat some lunch and find a supermarket to shop for the weekend!

Romain uploaded our first release of RProtoBuf to CRAN yesterday. RProtoBuf provides bindings for GNU R to the Google Protobuf implementation. Google Protobuf is (and I quote) a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format that is used for almost all internal RPC protocols and file formats at Google. RProtoBuf had a funny start. I had blogged about the 12 hour passage from proof of concept to R-Forge project following the ORD session hackfest in October. What happened next was as good. Romain emailed within hours of the blog post and reminded me of a similar project that is part of Saptarshi Guha's RHIPE R/Hadoop implementation. So the three of us--Romain, Saptarshi and I---started emailing and before long it becomes clear that Romain is both rather intrigued by this (whereas Saptarshi has slightly different needs for the inner workings of his Hadoop bindings) and was able to devote some time to it. So the code kept growing and growing at a fairly rapid clip. Til that stopped as we switched to working feverishly on Rcpp to both support the needs of this project, and to implement ideas we had while working on this. That now lead to the point where Rcpp is maturing in terms of features, so we will probably have time come back to more work on RProtoBuf to take advantage of the nice templated autoconversions we now have in Rcpp. Oddly enough, the initial blog post seemed to anticipate changes in Rcpp. Anyway -- RProtoBuf is finally here and it already does a fair amount of magic based of code reflection using the proto files. The Google documentation has a simple example of a 'person' entry in an 'addressbook' which, when translated to R, goes like this:

R> library( RProtoBuf )                      ## load the package
R> readProtoFiles( "addressbook.proto" )     ## acquire protobuf information
R> bob <- new( tutorial.Person,              ## create new object
+   email = "bob@example.com",
+   name = "Bob",
+   id = 123 )
R> writeLines( bob$toString() )              ## serialize to stdout
name: "Bob"
id: 123
email: "bob@example.com"
R> bob$email                                 ## access and/or override
[1] "bob@example.com"
R> bob$id <- 5
R> bob$id
[1] 5
R> serialize( bob, "person.pb" )             ## serialize to compact binary format

There is more information at the RProtoBuf page, and we already have a draft package vignette, a 'quick' overview vignette and a unit test summary vignette. More changes should be forthcoming as Romain and I find time to code them up. Feedback is as always welcome.

I was interested to see Adnan Hodzic discuss life without evolution in the GNOME environment recently. I too use GNOME as my desktop environment (I sometimes toy with various tiling window managers before getting annoyed at something or other). My solution to the GNOME problem is to purge the gnome-desktop-environment package and instead my own local package gnome-desktop-minimal. This package is a meta-package which includes a smaller selection of GNOME packages, notably ignoring several that the gnome-core package would pull in such as eog - why install that when I prefer qiv or feh? If I believed we could agree on precisely which packages to include I would submit a bug to the gnome team "Please provide gnome-desktop-minimal" or similar. Still I suspect individual biases/preferences will make such a suggestion contentious at best and impossible to satisfy at worst. ObTitle: L on

Agile Business Analysts? I have recently been fleshing out my thoughts on the role of business analysts in an Agile team. This is something I have historically addressed on a case-by-case basis with clients, but when thinking about it last week at a client site, I realized that I do have a general take on how the role and responsibilities of a business analyst change when a group moves to using an Agile process. Per the usual, I ll be using Scrum as the example process where needed. The Classical Roles Historically the business analyst has had two primary roles. In a process where cross-functional communication and collaboration are minimized, these roles are essential. What little communication that takes place between the business and the software development teams purporting to serve them passes almost exclusively through one or more business analysts. I view the business analyst in a phased development approach as having two roles; Translator and Gatekeeper. The Translator The business analyst is primarily tasked with taking the needs of the business and translating them into a written document that is then handed to the software developers and testers. This role s necessity is based upon some fundamental assumptions. First, programmers and testers are on the whole, too socially retarded to actually talk to the business persons and find out what they want. Second, the business is primarily viewed as being unable to focus its thought long enough to tell the programmers and testers what they need. Since a key value of an Agile approach to software development is to have individuals and their interactions be the driving force rather than processes an tools (see The Agile Manifesto), the obliteration of this role is a primary objective. The Gatekeeper Business analysts are also viewed the gatekeepers for requirements in classical, phased software process approaches. This is a somewhat unfair role, since they rarely have the authority to prevent business or technology changes, like a meter maid trying to stop an armed terrorist. It s even more unnatural since change always happens, so it s like the meter maid being assigned to an anti-terrorist unit with no additional training, authority, or weapons. The Agile Roles Some of the more extreme practitioners of Agile methodologies say that business analysts have no role in an Agile team. I disagree, provided the role of the business analyst is allowed to evolve. The roles I ve seen them take on as valuable members of an Agile team are Facilitator, Historian, and Journalist. The Facilitator A high degree of collaboration and interaction take place between business and technology in Agile Software Development. The business analyst can serve a critical need in these interactions, facilitating communication between business and technology and making sure that critical areas are being covered in an interaction. This can be a more fulfilling experience for an analyst, since they often talk to one side, then go to other to pass on the information, all the while thinking, Man, this would be simpler if you were both in the room with me at the same time. The Historian The business analyst s documentation skill is excellent for capturing significant information that often gets lost in a team of purely technical people. I have seen some great uses of business analysts in this area. One is to document the system that the team actually builds (not the big, up-front imagined system that is covered in a phased design stage). Another is capturing key technological and architectural decisions and the context in which they were made, so that when a group revisits certain items asking, Why in the world did we decide to do that? , they have the means to be reminded or informed why a particular path was chosen. The Journalist The business analyst can also be the team s journalist, making sure the latest information makes it out to all interested parties. One creative approach I ve seen at a client site is a business analyst who has a project blog. He posts entries after each meeting between the business and technology, documenting what new user stories were created (even scans in the story cards!), a summary of the discussions held, and documents any key decisions that might have been made. Oh, and he provides an excellent executive summary at the top that s suitable for anyone s review, right up to the CEO. Tell me you wouldn t love to have that guy in your Agile team.

I m using Gnome as my default DE after my KDE4 dissapointment, however what s bothering me for some time now is that I have to live with applications that I don t even use or like for that matter. So why live with those? Well if I try to remove some of those applications it ll want to pull down my whole DE along with them, however I couldn t believe solution was so simple. Applications I don t want to live with are: evolution, epiphany, empathy, ekiga, liferea, gnome-accessibility and couple of others. Step 1 might seem as it wants to remove whole DE, but it all it wants is gnome-desktop-environment which is meta/dummy package so don t worry. Step 1:

sudo apt-get remove epiphany epiphany-browser-data epiphany-data empathy
empathy-doc libempathy30 libempathy-common libempathy-gtk28 liferea
liferea-data evolution ekiga gok dasher orca gnome-accessibility
openoffice.org-evolution evolution-common evolution-data-server
evolution-webcal

Step 2:

sudo aptitude keep-all

Step 3: After you re done, you can use sudo apt-get autoremove or sudo aptitude -f install just so you can see it won t force you later on to remove any other deps. Yea, that was it

I have lately been reading Homer s epic poems: first The Iliad, and now I am nearly done with The Odyssey. I figure there isn t anyone alive today that believes that Zeus literally caused thunder in answer to a prayer, or that Athene really transformed Ulysses between having a youthful and an aged physical appearance at a whim. Despite our understanding that these poems don t reflect a literal truth, we still find meaning and truth in them. It is for this reason that they are read by high school and college students all over the world. This same reason drives our reading of more modern plays and novels everything from King Lear to Catcher in the Rye. We learn something of the author s world, something about our world, and if we are truly lucky, a deeper understanding of the universal truths of human life. And it is with that preface that I suggest that the Old Testament or parts of it, at least ought to be read in the same manner. Modern Christianity speaks of a loving, caring God, one who is deeply concerned for the wellbeing of all. Under this understanding, forgiveness is more desired than retribution, and helping the week is better than enslaving them. How then can one square that with a literal reading of the Old Testament? This was a key question I asked over a span of perhaps 15 years. I was perplexed that the God of Love ought to turn someone into a pillar of salt for turning her head the right way, that almost all life on earth might be extinguished by a flood, that slavery is condoned and regulated, and all sorts of people being stoned to death, animals killed for no reason. In short, the God of the Torah, at least, didn t seem to me to be even the same person as the God the Church talks about. I raised this question with many people, and there was even a seminar on it at a convention I went to in 2001. The answers I got usually were of one of two types: 1) God is beyond our comprehension, and this is one of the mysteries we will never understand because that s just the way it is; or 2) the arrival of Jesus changed things, and it s impossible for a modern person to fully appreciate the laws as they existed prior to that. These are really two sides of the same stick: they re both saying, Yep, that s odd. But we have to believe that the Bible is inerrant and literally true, so we just have to accept the mystery and move on. Except I m not so good at accepting mysteries and moving on. It strikes me as odd that nobody even mentioned the third option: that some of the stuff in the Old Testament is, to be blunt, made up. This even though I have come to learn later that some of those people probably believed this to be the most correct explanation. Now, that doesn t mean it has no value or that is doesn t show us truth. Romeo & Juliet was made up, but we learn from it. A typical example of this is the creation myth. There are some that are very defensive about it, perhaps thinking that it weakens their religion to admit it might not be literally true. To me, I find that insisting upon its literal truth weakens the religion; can we not see how a piece of literature speaks to us today and leave it at that? Need we say that Shakespeare s Julius Caesar is an inferior play because it is a work of historical fiction? The position I suggest here is not some crazy nutjob position. Wikipedia has a concise overview of some of the scholarship surrounding these ideas. I now count myself as somewhat inspired by Homer to read the Old Testament in the same way that I read Homer: as a story that can speak to us today, one that inspired a nation in captivity and after, and launched perhaps the most amazing religious movement in history. I only wish that more people would admit the possibility of a non-literal reading of the Bible. This return to an earlier era of Christianity is, in my mind, the only way that Christianity can maintain its relevance in this age. Update: A note I received suggests I ought to make a bit of a clarification. I am not bothered by the fact that people have differing opinions about the historicity of Genesis. I m all for putting all the opinions out there for sure. I think that really the concern over whether Genesis is literally true or not is mostly irrelevant. I have no problem with Christians that find Genesis to be literally true. What I m lamenting is the attitude that you re not Christian if you re not sure that Genesis is literally true or saying anything else about Genesis undermines Christianity. I believe neither of those statements, and would really rather that we collectively got past the creationism vs. evolution debate already. Update 2: It appears that my use of a bit of technical language has caused some confusion. A creation myth can be defined as a supernatural story or explanation that describes the beginnings of humanity, earth, life, and the universe (cosmogony), often as a deliberate act by one or more deities. It is a category of explanations. Simply calling the Genesis story a creation myth is an act of categorization only, and doesn t imply anything about its accuracy or value.

Bruce Everiss who is famous for being threatened with legal action by Evony has been writing about the supposed losses from game piracy, in his latest missive he copies the text from a number of blog comments without citing the original authors [1]. He copied my text without citing me as the author (which is at best shoddy journalism and by a fundamentalist attitude such as his could be considered as piracy). He also copied my text in with a bunch of other comments which he attributes to The thieves . It s unfortunate that Bruce doesn t seem capable of understanding irony, he wrote There is no doubt whatsoever that downloading and playing a game that should have been paid for is theft and then copied part of the text of my comment where I provided a dictionary definition of theft that directly contradicts his claim. If he was at all interested in quality writing he would cite his references and then when a dictionary is cited which disagrees with his opinion he would at least try to find a dictionary with a more agreeable definition. It shouldn t be THAT difficult to find a dictionary that has multiple definitions of theft of which one is agreeable to the MAFIAA [2]. Now if Bruce had properly read my comment he would have seen I ve started watching content from sites such as blip.tv (in the little time I have for such things) and I only play games that are part of the Debian distribution of Linux (free software) which makes it very clear to any reasonable interpretation that I am not a game pirate and probably not even a movie pirate. I did mention in a comment on Bruce s blog that the DVD experience of being forced to sit through a whinge about piracy was a factor that made buying a DVD a worse experience than downloading it, a concept that I expanded into a blog post on the relative technical merits of DVDs and pirate MP4 files [3]. That post received a number of interesting comments including one from Josselin Mouette which had some useful technical detail about subtitles and audio track storage. I had believed that there were some real technical advantages of DVDs but Josselin corrected me on this matter. Also one thing that is noteworthy is that Bruce seems to use a copyright picture in almost every post but he doesn t attribute any of them. It does seem unusual for someone to use commercial artwork without any copyright or trademark notices attached. This usually isn t a big deal for a blogger, a liberal interpretation of copyright and trademark law is usually expected in terms of blogging corporations will tend to be hesitant to invoke the Streisand effect by suing a blogger (EG Bruce blog came to fame when he was sued by Evony). But when a blogger is writing about the importance of not pirating anything it would seem sensible to go to the effort of citing trademark and copyright references and also mentioning the licence agreements under which the IP was used. I believe that any loss of customers and revenue by the MAFIAA and the gaming industry is due to the actions of the companies involved. They should just try to make their customers happy, otherwise they lose the customers. The same goes for bloggers. I read blogs written by people who disagree with me, and sometimes by people who offend me on occasion. But Bruce is making baseless claims while deliberately ignoring evidence. He is calling for strong anti-piracy measures while doing what could be considered as pirating my work. He uses words in ways that conflict with dictionary definitions, and he calls for an end to our current legal system by demanding punishment based on three accusations rather than any legal process. I even pointed out to Bruce that if there was a three strikes law regarding accusations of copyright infringement then his blog would be offline after three accusations by Evony. Sorry Bruce, if I was looking for irrational rants about copyright then I would look at what the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) are doing [4]. The SFWA people demonstrate as much knowledge of computers and the Internet as Bruce does, but they are at least really good writers. If it was just me unsubscribing from Bruce s RSS feed then it wouldn t matter (I m one of tens of thousands of readers). But I expect that a large portion of the new readers Bruce acquired after being attacked by Evony will disappear when they see Bruce as the attacker and everyone who uses the Internet as a potential victim of the Three Strikes law.

• [1] http://www.bruceongames.com/2010/01/22/what-game-thieves-have-to-say-for-themselves/
• [2] http://mafiaa.org/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/06/which-is-better-original-dvd-or-pirate-mp4/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/09/23/dmca-and-sci-fi/

I recently came across the Transitive Grace Period Public License (alternate link) by Zooko Wilcox-O Hearn. I fonud it interesting because it s very similar almost identical to something I had first starting floating about ten years ago. I called it the Temporary Proprietary License (TPL). I m sure this is a case of great minds think alike . One things that I like about my write up is that I gave some of the rationale behind why this approach is a fruitful one:

A while ago, I was talking to Jim Gettys at the IETF meeting in Orlando, and the subject of software licensing issues came up, and he had a very interesting perspective to share about the X Consortium License, and what he viewed as bugs in the GPL. His basic observation was this: Many companies made various improvements to the X code, which they would keep as proprietary and give them a temporary edge in the marketplace. However, since the X code base was continually evolving, over time it became less attractive to maintain these code forks, since it would mean that they would have to be continually merging their enhancements into the evolving code base. Also, in general, the advantage in having the proprietary new feature or speed enhancement typically degraded over time. After all, most companies are quite happy if it takes 18-24 months for their competitor to match a feature in their release. So sometime later, the companies would very often donate their previously proprietary enhancement to the X consortium, which would then fold it into the public release of X. Jim Gettys complaint about the GPL was that by removing this ability for companies to recoup the investment needed to make major developmental improvements to Open Source code bases, companies might not have the incentive do this type of infrastructural improvements to GPL ed projects. Upon reflection, I think this is a very valid model. When Open Vision distributed the Kerberos Administration daemon to MIT, they wanted an 18 month sunset clause in the license which would prevent commercial competitors from turning around and bidding their work against them. My contract with Powerquest for doing the ext2 partition resizer had a similar clause which kept the resizing code proprietary until a suitable timeout period had occurred, at which point it would be released under the GPL. (Note that by releasing under the GPL, it prevents any of Partition Magic s commercial competitors from including it in their proprietary products!)

For more, read the full proposal. No related posts.

RC squashing news In the last two weeks I didn't progress as usual with RC bug squashing, even if I've some squashes to share:

• bug #545235, bug #560502 - k3d - add missing #include for gcc 4.4 (patch from Ubuntu)
• bug #552791 - acorn-fdisk - fix debian/copyright (sponsored NMU for my NM Thorsten Glaser)
• bug #527371 - qemu-kvm - remove extra stuff (fix FTBFS when built twice in a row)

The reason for my under-activity are that for a week I'd relatively scarce network connectivity, which is a badly needed good for RCBW. Then, this week, I got swamped by various tasks at the university (including co-authoring a paper with Lucas, more on this (hopefully) in the future). My residual RCBW time has been devoted to write a page about RCBW where I've tried to summarize my initial motivations and the main points of the initiative, which I consider established by the first 18 weeks of activity. Starting from next week I'll be back with daily squashes. In the week-end ... drum roll ... I'll be attending the BSP in M nchengladbach, hosted by Credativ; I'll personally be kindly hosted by bzed which I thank already for that and for the BSP organization. See you there (!?)

News is slow this month on the FusionForge development front. We're all busy gathering all the things that we want to go into the next release, but there's no big news from the code. However, there is something of interest. You may have heard about the Coclico project, which is an initiative aiming at collaboration and convergence between several forge engines, most notably FusionForge, Codendi and Novaforge. That project was started last October, and it holds regular meetings with its members. The next meeting is scheduled for the 2nd of February in Paris, and we thought we could host an open meeting on the 3rd for non-Coclico members, a bit like the forge meeting we had last year (which is when FusionForge was officially born), but with an emphasis on what Coclico did so far. Since most of the FusionForge hackers are in Western Europe, and several are in Paris (especially if we add those who go to Paris for the Coclico meeting), we thought it would also be a good opportunity to gather for a technical and social meeting. It seems the Coclico open session didn't generate much interest this time (at least, it hasn't so far), so I proposed to hijack the room for this FusionForge meeting, and I didn't hear any objections. I have several themes I'd like to discuss with people, and possibly start implementing during that day:

• database maintenance and schema: unification of the upgrade scripts (including for plugins), cleanup of obsolete stuff, addition of missing constraints, and so on;
• configuration system: my initial prototype didn't raise many objections (at least in its scope), now what to do with the next steps?
• packaging and installation system: what needs to be done to keep the three ways of installation (manual, *.deb, *.rpm) in sync with as little work as possible?
• permissions system: clarification of what happens currently, ideas for evolution;
• plugins and interaction with external software: do we lack stuff that would make this easier?
• roadmap, long-term plans, this sort of things;
• other things that users may want to discuss with hackers?
• possibly drink a beer or two;

and so on. These are in no way specific to FusionForge, and in fact I think it would be great if hackers/users of other forges were present, because we could benefit a great deal from their experience and plans. But if we find ourselves amongst FF people only, I think these would be good to discuss, possibly write some code for, and go home with a clearer picture of where our efforts should focus in the near future. I'd therefore like to invite interested people to mark the 3rd of February on their agendas. The meeting will take place in Issy-les-Moulineaux (near Paris, within reach of the tube). If you're interested, please get in touch with us (#FusionForge on the FreeNode IRC network, or the fusionforge-general mailing-list), so we can have a rough estimate of how many people to expect. The meeting room is provided by France T l com, and they're probably going to need numbers if not names. Further details will be announced when known.